I’m still trying to learn Mac OS X programming, but I figure the small slivers of time I get during the week aren’t going to be enough. I should just take that time and do something frivolous with it, like reading mysteries. Really, though, I spend a whole log of money reading mysteries. Or playing Peggle. My mom, sister, and I are all hooked on Peggle.

I saw some pretty incredible times in the workouts today and Jorgen and I didn’t do all that poorly. Our time wasn’t one of the fastest, but we did the high box jump and each of us almost fell off of it once. We also used the twenty five pound D-ball. Going from twenty to twenty five pounds doesn’t sound like a big deal until you start doing a lot of repetitions; it’s a 25% increase, after all. Pretty good for an old dude.

My big celebration should be because I survived another Monday. I’m not sure why, but that three-day weekend just made it all the harder to come back to work. It’s like I need a vacation.

The worst part about Sunday is that it’s almost Monday and especially after a long weekend. I don’t want to go back to work. I suppose it could be worse.

It really didn’t feel that much like the 4th of July because I was much too sober. I went to two picnics with my mom around, so it made more sense to limit myself to fewer beers than I usually drink. I did, however, drink a whole lot of Perrier.

And I didn’t watch the fireworks. The big Fort Vancouver fireworks (supposedly the largest fireworks west of the Mississippi or something else that the marketing folks keep repeating) were canceled this year due to lack of funding and that’s the one you can see on the horizon from the hill in front of our house. People bought plenty of illegal fireworks and were setting them off in the schoolyard, but I didn’t really care. I was busy trying to get further in this book on how to program Mac OS X, a book that I usually get a few chapters into before I finally have to do something else. This weekend, I didn’t have to do that much else, and some of the stuff in the book is starting to stick. It should, I’ve tried getting through versions 1, 2 and 3 of this book before. This is my second pass through version 3.

So there you go. You knew I was a nerd and I’m busy trying to live up to my nerd reputation.

When I take a day off, I don’t do all that much. I know people who have errands lined up but I’m more likely to sit around and fool around with my computer or read a book. Today I did both, and really didn’t get all that much done. I did, however, finish a John Rain novel by Barry Eisler, The Last Assassin, and a Myron Bolitar mystery by Harlen Coben, Long Lost. Both were pretty good, though both are getting a bit predictable. Sitting inside on a 90+°F day reading books is my idea of a day off.

This book habit is always a bit expensive and my sister told me I should read a real book that she swears she lent me, The Woods by Tara French. I think she took it back and I can’t find it, but I did find a copy of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X which is disappointing because those books cost $50 each. Ah, well. That’s life.

It’s a good thing I’m bad at computers, too. I’m going to spend this 3-day weekend inside with Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X and also trying to get my NAS working with TimeMachine backup for the Mac. I may just give up and buy a NEW NAS because the one I have is kind of ghetto. It “fell off a truck”, after all. I should probably try to get it running anyway, since I’ve spent so much money on my computer stuff lately. Besides, buying a Netgear NAS isn’t going to help pay Steve Jobs’ medical bills.

I have to admit that I wasn’t just looking for The Style Councils’ My Ever Changing Moods but I was watching this video that I thought was pretty funny. I thought these guys were Sprockets gone wrong, but they’re from San Francisco rather than Germany. The music is kind of silly, but it’s the kind of music I seem to have filled my iPhone with. I also should admit I heard Richard Marx along with Reminiscing by the Little River Band when I had it on shuffle. It’s not all European dance music on there, I also like my cheese.

So here I am, listening to an interview with the guys from Ejector and I should be asleep. Just like every day. Yeesh. I proved that I wasn’t too asleep at the gym when I climbed the rope four times without using my legs on the way up. I’m sure I’ll pay for it tomorrow; I already seem to have a crick in my neck.

I felt so great this morning I even got to work a little early. It was for naught, though, since I wasn’t able to leave early. I’ve somehow grown a bunch of new 4PM meetings. Not only that, but I started feeling rather sleepy in the middle of the day. Somehow my early morning energy ran out by mid-day.

So I was going to watch some more sessions from the Apple WWDC, but after I got through just a little bit I realized I wasn’t going to retain much of it. I think I may actually get to sleep early today! I’ll believe it when I see it.

Starting last year, I think, Apple posts videos from the sessions at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference to iTunes. It took all summer to get things up last year and I was kind of hoping it would be quicker this year. Geez, it only took them a couple of weeks. I downloaded several sessions, including a couple I missed, and started watching one tonight. It was a session I attended late in the week, when my attention span was reduced by the lack of sleep and surplus of alcohol. At least it started to make sense now that I’m watching it again.

I was really thinking I should get to sleep, but I’m watching a video, and it’s even an educational video about the innards of the Mac OS. Yeesh.

Today at the gym we did another partner sprint: row 200, swing (24k) 20 times, and run around 2/3 of the building and then rest while your partner does it. We did it for five rounds, I think. The last time we did it, I was partnered with a 19YO girl (yeah, give me a break, I’m old enough to be her father) and today I was partnered with a 25YO guy (and I’m old enough to be his father, too, really). One of these days I’ll say, “I felt great coming into the workout and I did great,” but this isn’t the day. I did do pretty well thanks to Jorgen the 25YO, but I felt like throwing up during the skills part of the workout. My hay fever came back with a vengeance yesterday and I took some Claratin last night, which meant that I was dopey all day.

OK, to be clearer, I felt DOPIER THAN USUAL all day and sleepier as well. That plus my brother-in-law going to the ER in the middle of the night and had me on edge. My genius sister decided to abstractly twitter about the ER visit this morning and then they turned off their phones to get some sleep and this just panicked everyone. I figured they were sleeping so I wasn’t too worried (just left a couple of phone messages around) but I even got a call from her friend in Chicago. Anyone who has been in an ER knows how you get prioritized when you’re not bleeding out or not breathing, especially in the middle of the night. I figure the longer it took him, the more likely it was for him to be OK, and I think it took them 4 hours from 2AM to 6AM. I still haven’t heard WHY they had to go in at 2AM, but whatever. I’ll ask them after they have a couple of days to rest up. Speaking of which, I should quit typing and hit the hay myself. But I’m not all that bright when it comes to time management in the evening.

I should, however, quit iTunes before I start watching another session video. “Managing Kernel Extensions” is sounding awfully good…

I have been sneezing all day. I wonder what plant species decided to have sex today? I thought I’d get my revenge, however, and hacked the heck out of the rhododendrons and nandinas in the front yard. I had to give up when I filled up two garbage cans (and when things started to look like hell). I don’t have the skills my dad had, and he called my style, “Chop chop.” I suppose you could also say that the soul of the gardener comes out in his work and my soul is filled with hack and slash, at least when it comes to plantlife.

I finished another Harlen Coben novel today and I’m well on my way with another Barry Eisler novel. I should probably get out and DO something, but books keep me away from the sharp objects that the plants are dreading. You know how it is.

I’ve been gaining weight lately. I looked at myself in the mirror a couple of weeks back and looked kind of pudgy. So I eventually got on the scale and I think I’m up five pounds. If you’re not a dude, you may wonder how I can have a brand-new medicine cabinet with a mirror behind the shelves, one on the front of the door, and one on the back of the door without actually looking myself in the mirror. But if you’re asking yourself that you’re not a dude. I look particularly at where I’m shaving without seeing my face. I look at if my hair standing straight up or whether I need a haircut but I don’t look at how much grey is there. I can look at various specifics without seeing the overall fat old greying guy who is standing there because, well, I’m a dude. That’s just sort of the way it goes.

Back to the weight gain, I sort of had a cheeseburger on Friday, but I’m not counting it because of several accounting tricks I’m employing. One is that it was blue cheese and not cheddar or swiss. I’m not counting crumbly cheeses. The second reason is that it was paid for by work, so I’m pretending it was forced on me. Don’t go telling me I could have had a salad instead, because that would assume that waving a tasty not-quite-a-cheeseburger under my nose wasn’t a cruel trick by an employer who knows how to manipulate his employees. What I’m saying is that I’m blaming others for my fallibility. It’s more fun that way.

Tonight my sister and I went to the Harris’s house for dinner because their eldest daughter Alice, her husband Clint, and their kids Meredith and Owen were in town. Clint is an Assistant Professor of Russian Liberal Arts at the University of Montana and we started talking about Russian literature. I told him I wanted to read more Dostoyevsky but was unsure of the best translation and he told me to look for Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I mainly mention this because if I don’t write it down I’ll never remember it. In any case, he suggested several books, and I’m hoping that they’re not as long as I remember Russian novels being, but I’m sure they are. Now I have a list of Russian novels to add to my lengthening list of books I need to read, and he reminded me that I need to read more Cormac McCarthy as well.

I thought I’d get to sleep early, but I didn’t get home until late and now I”m searching Amazon for Russian literature. I can’t say mine is an especially interesting life, but sometimes I wish it was a bit more boring. At least so I can get some more sleep.

It’s kind of anti-climactic, really, that my new computer is set up. It’s prettier, the external monitor is bigger, and I have a new wireless keyboard, but other than that it’s all about the same. I suppose it’s a little faster as well, but when you think about it, the things that have changed are fairly minor. That being said, I’m still glad I got a new computer and the little differences should make themselves apparent as I use it. It’s just sitting here, typing, I can’t see a big difference. But really, I could be typing at almost any Mac keyboard and it would all be the same.

I’m taking a day off from the gym tomorrow because my sister’s friend Alice, who we’ve known much longer than most of the people in the gym have been alive, is coming to town from Montana. It’s probably a good thing that I’m taking a day off; I’m so tired this week that I can’t even remember how many times we’re supposed to be doing a particular exercise. Today I thought we were doing several rounds, and I wasn’t paying attention to the time. SImple addition would have told me that one round was taking 27 minutes, so multiple rounds were out of the question. I suppose simple addition eludes me on a normal day. For some reason, college calculus displaced all the arithmetic that I learned in grade school. Fortunately, I’ve forgotten the calculus and I’m relearning the simple math. It’s much more useful except when I’m golfing. Then I need really big numbers.

So I got my new laptop today and I’ve already tried to kill it. I can’t be content with letting the Mac do it’s thing, I have to have two boot partitions (the latest released OS and the beta OS) and a data partition. I have a lot of data to copy from the old laptop and there have been a couple of instances already where I thought I broke my brand new toy. But, for now, it seems to be working and copying data back and forth.

I go to the gym and I get a good workout, and that’s all that should matter, but sometimes I like to see if I can finish faster than the others. Today, however, I did something that made me happier than finishing faster than other people. The thing that made me happy was our group — a triple of Jorgen the new kid, Sprint-to-the-death-Sean, and me — finished in 21:12. I think you have to be a rocker from the late 70’s to get that reference and it also just reinforces how much older I am that most everyone else in the gym. I’m afraid this either means I’m a big geek with questionable musical preferences (which I am) or that I’m suffering from a lack of oxygen to my brain because my feeble musculature is taking it all.

The worst part is that I have part of a song from 2112 stuck in my head, “We are the priests of the Temple of Syrinx.” Oh yeah, Geddy Lee, Take off to the Great White North.