I’m spending money like a crazy man. I’m not sure if it’s to fill an empty hole in my life or if I’m just trying to jump start the economy on my own. In any case, my old boss, my buddy John, my buddy Greg, and my sister all have fancy espresso machines so I thought it was time to get one for myself.

It was on sale at Costco. I know it’s an extravagance and I owe a boatload of money to Jay the Contractor and his crew, but I’m in Portland where we’re known for our beer, coffee, and strip clubs. I suppose we’re also known for our rain and Nike and other things, but coffee is certainly in our top five and there are even three fairly large coffee roasters in my neighborhood. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a coffee shop by my house and they’re not all Starbucks, either. I’m really not sure why you’d be treating a dead cat in that manner, but you shouldn’t have two Starbucks on the same block either.

In any case, at the gym today I was unable to do any kettlebell clean and presses. NONE AT ALL. Actually, it was because they changed the workout to do more leg work and less of the kettlebell clean and presses, but what fun is it to admit to that? We rowed until our legs felt like they were going to fall off and then did leg circuits until we were certain they were going to fall off. Good times were had by all and I wonder if I’m going to be able to walk tomorrow. We’ll see.

I had yet another secret competition going on: doing as many pullups as the women’s record in the gym, but it was not to be. I was having a rough time with the pullups today and I can’t just blame that on the crick I’ve had in my neck since last Friday. I was only able to do 16. I tried to break the women’s record the last time we did max pull-ups and I was only able to match the record of the time which was 24. Devon got on the bar right after me and raised the record to 26. In any case, the women’s record is now 30 thanks to Courtney. I have some catching up to do.

Oh, and it sounds like nobody wrote down my personal record of 24 pull-ups, so since I have no other witnesses, I’m still “officially” at 20 kipping pull-ups and 12 dead-hang pull-ups. I’ve been stuck at 12 dead hang pull-ups for a long time and I’m afraid that even if I replace my ass with some sort of helium-filled ass, it wouldn’t make a big difference according to my previous calculations.

Oh, and the reason I don’t try to match the men’s record is because Ben has it at 43 or something similarly ridiculous.

In other news, THMFIC was in a mood tonight and was scowling a lot at the start of the workout. I was worried that he had a toothache or something, but he lightened up after he was finished with work and realized he could go home. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t scowling at anyone else, but I pay extra for that sort of treatment.

In better news, the tiling appears to be done! The grout still needs to go in, but look at how nice it looks!

It’ll look even nicer when the tile saw is out of there and the new toilet and the washlet are installed. And the cabinets. And the lighting. And the flooring. It’s still a ways from being finished but I’m pretty psyched about the progress.

So today at the gym we did more count-y exercises. Not geographical county, but exercises where you do a bunch of stuff and you have to count how many you do. You’re not supposed to be competitive about it all, but if I wasn’t a little competitive then I wouldn’t be going to the gym, I’d be at home watching FoodTV (it’s Monday after all).

Or maybe Chuck. There’s this blonde woman at the gym who I can pretend is Sarah because the TV show is only going to work if the two never actually get together so the metaphor works, somehow, at least in my twisty-turny thoughts. I’m only like Chuck in that I’m probably heading for a job fixing computers at some big electronics store, not in the spy part.

But back to the count-y thing, we did 12 minutes of:

• 5 Burpees
• 10 kettlebell snatches (5 per arm)
• 15 mountain climbers
• 20 2-handed kettlebell swing

and counted the number of rounds we got. I almost did six rounds but time was called when I was at 19 kettlebell swings. Since I’ve taken almost all the science and engineering classes a person can take as an undergraduate, I know about counting. You have to set the rules and stick by them or counting is arbitrary and capricious. Whole numbers are a good thing and they’re even better for people like most gym rats who probably wouldn’t know a fraction if it hit them in the head. So I know I only did five rounds. Still, I feel like the ref cheated me somehow. I blame society.

Anyway, I should get on with my evening and start with my counting of sheep. Or maybe just thinking of beautiful women in sundresses with bushels of peaches, a thought triggered by the song Peaches by The Presidents of the USA that is stuck in my head. OK, so maybe I’ll watch some music videos on YouTube and then start counting sheep. Maybe some Duran Duran…

You know there’s something fishy when your sister’s dinner came to $10 and yours came to $91. She only had a salad (at Ringside! the horror!) and I had a steak, two glasses of wine, and cheesecake. I figure the only thing healthy about it was the grapes in the wine and the blueberries in the cheesecake. All that working out for naught! It was a friend’s birthday party and we only get together twice a year, usually, at the Ringside and it’s another group where we could talk all night. In fact, I quit going to their get-togethers a while ago because I’d be the first one to leave at 3AM. We’d all just sit around and talk that long and we weren’t even drinking. I enjoyed it, but I’m old and I also enjoy my sleep.

Speaking of sleep, something kept me up late last night. I wasn’t able to sleep really well and it was one of those nights where you could swear you were up tossing and turning the whole time. It just seems odd to me when I’m usually doing the opposite and sleeping all day long. I wish I could just get the hang of not sleeping while I’m at work.

It’s Thanksgiving weekend and I can’t believe how much I’ve actually eaten. I know “’tis the season” but really, steak from Costco on Wednesday, too much delicious turkey at my sister’s on Thursday, leftovers from my sister’s on Friday, an outing to 50 Plates on Saturday, and tomorrow (or later today depending on what time this gets posted) I’m going to a birthday party at Ringside. I lost a bunch of weight when I got back from Japan because my mom was out of town but I’m making up for it now. There’s a 850 lb limit on what I’m supposed to carry in my Civic and I may hit that limit if I’m not careful.

Of course i usually get sick during long weekends instead of during the work week. I mean, my job has a fairly liberal sick leave policy so I should get sick during the week, right? I suppose I’m busy enough at work that being sick during the weekend is just as well. I don’t have to go back and clean up after the mess I’ve made by being away.

I even had to leave the gym early because I got a crick in my neck during the workout and then my lower back started to hurt. So I sat around watching movies today. I think I’ve known that I don’t like breakup movies and now I can remember why. My last breakup was years ago, but nothing good has happened because of it. I don’t need a movie to remind me of how miserable that can make you feel and I have no idea whether I’m ever going to have a new relationship like the one that ends those movies.

Well, off to take more ibuprofen and hope that my back feels better soon. I think the last time I hurt my back I was sick as well, and that time I was out for an entire month. At least the expensive bits of my tile are in now, and the thing I have to look forward to — my bathroom — is getting closer to completion.

What a sleepy day. I got up and went to the gym way too early for me and then sort of stumbled around until I took a nap. I don’t know if it’s because it’s early or because of the weather, but I could have slept all day. It was a good thing that I didn’t because I would have missed dinner at my sister’s which included turkey with all the trimmings including two types of cranberry sauce. One was even from Parade Magazine.

Not much going on, but that’s a holiday for you.

It’s the start of a long weekend, so I left work a little early. One of the labs I need support from told me that I should expect help on Tuesday at the earliest, so I thought that was a sign that I should just go home at lunchtime. I had lunch with my mom at a Korean restaurant that’s in a gas station and that’s where I found out that you shouldn’t eat the spicy noodles using standard noodle-eating techniques. Eating noodles with chopsticks usually involves a lot of slurping and that means the pepper flakes go straight into your throat and immediately trigger a cough. My mom had the curry and didn’t have the same problems I did.

So, I decided to make good use of my time off and watch a lot of the TV shows I had missed this season. NCIS was fine, but watching too many episodes of CSI was kind of gloomy. Too many episodes of The Office is kind of sad. It’s a good thing I had Bones and Chuck on the list as well.

So there you go. I finally had some time to be a couch potato. It was nice.

I don’t think I can blame a cold on my lack of motivation at the gym. I never did get sick. This week, however, I’ve been having trouble getting to sleep and maybe I could use that as an excuse. I haven’t been able to beat any of the yoots in weeks.

While I can say, so far, that I haven’t come down with anything, THMFIC seems to have come down with a cold. I’ve only known him for about a year, but I’m guessing he’s not one of the odd people who can be sick and non-demanding at the same time. So here’s hoping that the brains behind the gym (his wife Tina) survives this ordeal.

I’m very glad this is a short week at work. I’m too beat right now to think of anything clever. Not even about the last thing I asked my mom to buy me in Japan, AN ELECTRIC NOSE HAIR TRIMMER. Yeah, you get old and you worry about this sort of stuff, or about somehow poking yourself in the nostril with sharp scissors. So, instead of worrying, you want some contraption built by the Japanese or maybe the Swiss to trim your nose hairs. Nice and sharp and non-dangerous. I wouldn’t suggest any American gadgets made by Wahl or sold at Brookstone, nor any other half-assed trimmers from the land of the Flowbee. Other than that I think she got me some thermal undershirts from Uniqlo. Basically, it’s better that I go shopping for myself.

I bought a brand new huge hard drive and I was going to put it into one of the hard drive cases I already have. I broke a warranty seal on one and the plastic side of another and it turns out the hard drive has a different cable than either of the cases. Now I have to buy another case (and tape together the broken case) and it’s going to be more expensive than if I just bought a huge hard drive already in the case. Hooray.

I did, however, get my fancy toilet seat today — a Toto SW554-01 Elongated Front Washlet S300 in Cotton White — but without the rest of the bathroom it’s kind of useless. Just another thing I have to look forward to, I guess. At least I have something to look forward to.

Where’s that Todd guy been? Did something exciting happen in his life? Or did he just get so boring that he didn’t have anything to complain about?

Well, I didn’t destroy my computer with the beta Macintosh OS and I haven’t been sent on any impossible quests by my sister. (Check out her blog to see the pens I got for her in action.) Friday night I stayed up too late reading the translated Japanese Old Boy graphic novels that were the inspiration for the Korean movie Old Boy. They’re both messed up in their individual ways, but different. I can’t remember what I was doing Saturday besides helping my mom slowly move things back into her room. All in all, quite boring and fortunately much calmer than the frantic moving out that we did to begin with.

Today was my day for raking leaves and cleaning out the gutters. The leaves haven’t completely fallen out of the trees, but it wasn’t raining so I had to do as much as I could. Of course, it ended up being pretty dark by the time I finished, and I just remembered that I left a wheelbarrow full of leaves sitting in the backyard.

In the morning, before I could get out and grab my rake I got a call from Staff Sgt. Evan Smith who was getting up some of my extra computer equipment including a brand-new printer/scanner and an LCD monitor. It was stuff I’d been hoarding in case I needed it, and I figured he needed it more than I did. Plus, it got more stuff out of the house. In exchange, he helped me move the heaviest piece of my mom’s furniture, a display case, back into her room. It was lighter than I remember, but I couldn’t have done it on my own. He also bought me lunch at the Super Burrito Express, where I haven’t been for nine years. Plus, he’s a complete crack-up and it’s fun hearing stories from a witty 24-year-old military adventurer.

When I got home from lunch, I was ready to pick up the rake but had to help my mom put the shelves back into her display case. About the time the rake started calling to me once again, we had another visitor: my dad’s goofy friend Ben. Ben wrote a well-known book, The Tao of Pooh, and more people know him by his full name, Benjamin Hoff. I don’t think I’d seen him since my dad’s funeral. I showed him the mess that the contractors made, and we discussed the difficulties of clearing out our parents’ belongings.

So finally, onto the raking. My next door neighbor, who is doing an addition to his house, was out raking as well, so we had to show each other how the contractors have been hard at work at our respective houses. I don’t think I’ve seen him since the summer, and he lives right next door. In any case, I finally got to raking around 2PM and I finally got to the gutters after 4PM. What a mess that was. Fortunately, I didn’t fall off the ladder, though I had plenty of chances.

So if reading about moving rooms into boxes was too exciting, you now have the ability to read about raking leaves. It’s spectacular, isn’t it?

My co-worker was talking about how he plays “Rock Band” on his Wii all the time and I countered with what I’ve been doing for the past couple of days: moving gigabytes of data around several hard drives in preparation for loading a beta copy of Mac OS X onto my laptop. He called me a big loser. I suppose he’s right and this is just a case of upgrade fever gone amok but whatever. It’s what I do for fun.

Now that we’ve established that I’m a big fat loser with no life, I must admit I haven’t figured out why people will read what I write and then expect me to change. These must be the same people who yell at the TV during Wheel of Fortune and expect to change the outcome of the game. The intarweb is full of things besides my blog and pr0n so I figure anyone who is disappointed by the lack of good news in my life should probably find something else to look at. Google for “shiba inu puppy webcam” or something. Sheesh.

My mom arrived home safely, but the painters don’t appear to have done anything to finish her bedroom besides leaving the door open to let the paint fumes dissipate. Hooray for progress.