I’ve been sneezing since I left the gym and I wonder if I’m coming down with a cold. That, some more body aches than normal, and my total lack of motivation make me wonder. A lack of motivation at work is one thing, but I can usually get going after a warmup at the gym. And I came in DFL today. I’m not sure how, either. Oh, well, maybe it’s just seasonal.

My mom should be back tomorrow and I was hoping that her room would be closer to done than it is right now. Some more is supposed to be done tomorrow, but right now there’s no place for her to go. Her bedroom is being painted, the living room where she watches videos is full of my bedroom, and the kitchen where she does her puzzles is blocked by her desk from the bedroom. I hope we can move most of the bigger stuff back tomorrow so she’ll have some sort of useable space.

Now if only I can shake off this cold, if it is a cold. I can’t avoid going to work because I have a long planning meeting and then I’m going to a memorial service for a ham radio acquaintance. Life just keeps moving apace.

I was almost late to the gym today because Jay the Contractor was here checking up on his subcontractors and delivering the bathroom cabinets. They look pretty good. My pre-workout was helping him carry the cabinets up the stairs.

We had a quick sprint workout today and for some reason we were all pretty iffy in class today. We only went 3 rounds, but I assed out on the final run to the corner and just walked. I still wasn’t DFL because my row and ball slams were pretty quick but I felt like my lunch had formed a tight knot in my stomach and it just didn’t feel right. I never push myself to the point of throwing up because I’m old and I don’t care enough and I wasn’t about to start pushing myself that hard at this point. I mean, really, so I can beat someone to the corner and back. How is that in line with my goals? I remember I used to have three criteria for almost everything I did:

1. Is it going to kill me?
2. Is it going to get me chicks?
3. Is it going to make me money?

That list was really just for show, because I hardly do anything that could even hurt me, let alone kill me; I am not doing anything to attract the opposite sex (check out my hobbies like ham radio); and I’m more likely to tell my employer to place a large sum of money in one of his excretory orifices than to put it in my bank account in the form of a raise. I’m really bad at being a cutthroat capitalist success story. I’m more likely to torpedo my own boat, so to speak.

Lazy and self-destructive. Maybe I should rewrite my 3 criteria:

1. Does it require me to leave the house? (The nice warm house with internet and cable TV?)
2. Can I take a nap instead?
3. Are you going to eat that?

Much better.

Turns out THMFIC at the gym is really sensitive about what I write about him, so I’m going to blithely ignore his objections and keep saying whatever the hell I feel like saying. Depressing things that don’t exaggerate his complaining ONE IOTA. Hah.

One of the songs heard at the gym is the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The simple philosophy appeals to many, including THMFIC. I can list the things I couldn’t get tonight.

• I went out to look for a cheap furnace air filter. Turns out the only ones I could find that fit are at Home Depot and cost $31. With all the dust generated by the construction, I figured I get some cheaper ones, but I can’t find any.
• The bathroom sink doesn’t drain very well, so I took it all apart again and snaked the drain. I got nasty wastewater all over me, and the improvement is minimal.
• I wanted to come home to less of a mess than the contractors made.

The other part of the song says, “You find sometimes, you get what you need.” All I really got today was dinner at Popeye’s Fried Chicken. I’m not sure I needed that and I’m fairly sure that my arteries didn’t need it at all. I also need to iron some shirts, but that conflicts with a need to get some sleep before I go to work tomorrow. I also needed to get the garbage out to the curb, and I got that, so I guess sometimes I do get what I need. I declare victory: time for sleep.

My mom’s room is pretty much the neatest room in the house, but it turned out that it was crammed chock full of crap. She probably had as many books as my dad had, but we didn’t notice because Japanese paperback books are about a quarter of the size of American paperbacks. I think I packed six or seven boxes full of tiny books. We want the painters to be done with her room before she gets back, but I doubt that we’ll have the room back by then. Her desk is in the kitchen, the weird sofa is in the living room and basement, and most everything else is also in the basement. What a mess.

In other news, well, there’s really no other news other than I decided to have a nice greasy breakfast to see if that agreed with my stomach and it surely did. Unfortunately, I forgot my credit card there. They were nice enough to call me and I’m ready to go back to have corned beef hash out of a can. I’m really no gourmet.

I have been accused (by the HMFIC at the gym, who doesn’t seem to get it) that my blog is self indulgent crap. I’m afraid that he’s forgotten that that’s the definition of blog:

blog (n), \ˈblȯg, ˈbläg\
Definition: self-indulgent crap; an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page; also called Weblog, Web log

See? And what else would I write about? Even if I was making $1,000,000 per episode of Friends like Jennifer Aniston, I’d probably still write about myself. Hell, she can’t seem to get enough of herself so why should I be any different? Of course I might pay someone else to do it, but how would you know? This may actually be outsourced to someone in a some obscure country, say Vanuatu. Perhaps they have apples there.

So if you’re tired of reading about how everything seems to be going in the toilet for me lately, or how apples seem to be causing me great intestinal distress, I can think of better things to be doing than reading my blog. Playing Tumblebugs would be my choice on the computer, if it wasn’t broken on Leopard. Or reading a mystery. I have a stack that I still have to finish. Or maybe even something non-computer-related. I’d tell you that was a bad idea. No computers means no intarweb. No intarweb means no network. No network means no job for me. That would be bad.

My sister worked on the movie Come See the Paradise back in 1990. She was in the office and even made it into the film. One of the set designers asked her if they could use our family name on one of the signs, which ended up on a giant neon sign that said “Fujinaka Drugs.” She was supposed to get the sign after the movie but it was sold with all the other neon to Habromania. I went to see it a few times and they wanted $5000 for the sign. I didn’t have any space for it and didn’t feel like paying that much for a sign she was supposed to get for free. I know Habromania moved and downsized and hadn’t thought of the sign since.

The sign’s turned up again. It’s on the wall of the Suicide Girls office. (A friend found the image online and sent us the link.) My sister is pretty pissed off about the whole thing, but what are you going to do? Sometimes circumstances just put your name in weird places. It could be worse. She could have intestinal difficulties like I do.

I got home and found the keybox open (a lockbox like real estate agents use but used by the contractors) and the key nowhere to be found. I called Jason and found out that the painters had no idea how to put the key back in the box so they just took it with them. It made me laugh and reminded me of a buddy in Japan. His dad was a painter and I was told that the dad worked with too many solvents and was kind of nutty. Once when I went in he said his helmet was too tight so he wanted Mr. Maeda (owner of the motorcycle store) to split the helmet in two and glue it back together. In any case, Jason told me that the painters locally weren’t much different.

I had an urgent need to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and I’m guessing I might have some sort of stomach thing. My digestion is suspect and I’ve been lightheaded all day. I stayed home in the morning but I went into work in the afternoon. I had to get yelled at in person, after all. In any case, that’s about the most exciting thing that happened to me all day and possibly the most interesting. Not much of a day after all.

It was one of those days at work. I thought I was doing everything right but apparently there are sides being taken on a particular issue and I picked the side that got me yelled at. I know the customer needs to come first, but they also need to know that we’re not going to wipe their ass for them. I guess I’m wrong there, though and I am going to do whatever they want. Or something close. I’m really foolishly stubborn about avoiding work that I think is stupid.

Well, I suppose there is a bright spot to the day. I did end up paying my property tax bill. It only took 3 calls to the credit union and five guesses at my username and password at the tax web site. My life is so exciting. I bet everyone is jealous.

Why is my credit union such a pain in the ass? They only answer the phone 8-5, the web page always seems semi-broken, and they certainly don’t have that many branches. No wonder I do most of my business with the evil behemoth banks. If the bank has “America” in it’s name, I’m using it.

In any case, I have to figure out how to pay my property taxes. To do that I think I need to figure out how much money is scattered around all my bank accounts. I would say I should sell my company stock to pay for the tax but at this rate the stock is down so far that I don’t think the proceeds would cover the tax bill. Oh, the agony.

Other than that I’m ready to hit the hay and see some more interesting dreams. With my luck I’ll have nightmares this time and not the interesting ones like I had last night. Like the one where I was in an intimate location with a woman (who I will not identify because while I knew who she was, she didn’t look like that person at all) she said, “If we’re going to keep going out, you’re really going to have to listen to what I have to say: <mumble, mumble, mumble>. I woke up in a sweat, wondering what the hell she said.

Ah well, the imaginary girlfriends are much more amusing than my real life.

Usually I’m thinking that at night as I’m screwing around on my computer, perhaps writing this crap down. Last night I thought I’d get to bed “early” and did OK since I almost got 7 hours of sleep and tried to avoid screwing around on my computer too long. I did, however, watch some football since I’ve been away from American TV for weeks and I’ve missed it.

In any case, I thought I’d see if I was just as random in the morning and I think I’m too time-pressed to find out. Oddly enough I had a bunch of dreams last night and I actually remember parts of one (which I can’t repeat here). I’m wondering if I remember them because I kept waking up when I rolled over because my shoulders are sore from the kettlebell certification. Ah well. It’ll be a short week at the gym because I took Monday off and it sounds like I may have to take yet another trip to a panicky customer in the Bay Area on Wednesday or Thursday. The incessant pace of work kind of gets to me when I get really tired, and this week is probably not going to be the best.

Time to get ready for work.

So I thought I’d be done moving crap out of my old bedroom by about midnight. I was only off by an hour. Not bad, really.

I was pretty stressed out this morning, mainly because there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything I need to do. The saga of my home renovations continues and when I got home from Japan on Wednesday I noticed they left the back door unlocked but I didn’t see them at all. Thursday was the same thing. Friday, however, the house looked like a war zone because the drywallers had started up. Turns out that if I really wanted to get the upstairs all looking “modern,” I needed to clear everything out. I opted for the “do what we can” approach of just having my old bedroom done. That meant I had to have everything cleared out after the drywallers were out on Saturday afternoon and before they got here on Monday morning.

Unfortunately I had also signed up for a kettlebell certification by Steve Maxwell (which turned out to be well worth the time and money) and I only had the evenings to do all this crapola. Plus, most days after I sit down after dinner, I end up falling asleep and drooling on myself. Ah, well, I finally decided that this was just another thing I needed to get through and figured I’d be done by about midnight. Here I am at 1:30AM waiting for my laundry to finish, something else I forgot to do. I don’t think I’m going to be to work on time tomorrow.

One of the things they talked about at the certification was “realistic goals” and unfortunately my goal is to have the upstairs looking good and that interferes with my goal of getting a decent amount of sleep. Good thing there’s coffee.

I was babbling incoherently at work today, which is similar to what I usually do, but instead of just talking about random things I was forgetting what I was doing. Was I actually talking before? What was I doing standing there next to my boss?

I was about to fall asleep all day but after work I went to the gym for the first time in two weeks. As you can imagine, things didn’t go nearly as well as they would have if didn’t take such a long break and it’s probably not nearly as bad as it might be tomorrow. We’ll see how sore I am then.

Later I had a fine dinner from Jack-in-the-Box and was going to watch some TV. Instead of staring at the TV, I found myself asleep in my chair, drooling on myself. I should have gone straight to bed after that, but now I’m watching some shows from last week. So far, no more drooling, but it is a little later than I should be up. I don’t want to do any of this drooling at work.