I felt OK today. I went into work and even had to answer a bunch of questions since a lot of people are out. It was probably the busiest I’ve been so I wasn’t tired at all. I woke up in a cold sweat last night but (beware of corny joke here) I don’t have a girlfriend who told me she was pregnant so I must have been running a fever.

I even felt good enough to go to the gym today. Nathan (the head honcho, aka Doodiehead) was talking about other Crossfit gyms in town. He kind of considers them fellow travelers rather than outright competition, but it made me think of the following quote:

… crush your enemies, drive them before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.

And I was reminded that since I pay by the month, the same amount whether I show up or not, showing up does not take food out of the mouth of the trainer’s kid. It just makes for a more peaceful workout since I’m not rambling on about things. Tonight, besides the Conan quote, I was thinking about old cheesy music. Undercover Angel? Island Girl or Don’t Go Breaking my Heart? It’s really their fault for playing the Partridge Family during our workout.

My sister asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I can’t think of anything. Hmm, how about a Nike Sumo driver? Or a Sand Wedge? Or maybe even better weather so I can actually go and play golf?

It’s kind of a weird name for a school, but my cousin’s kid Kota graduated with his Masters Degree from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. My mom and my aunt can’t understand what he’s talking about most of the time, so they usually just call him the 宇宙人 or the outer-space alien. He said that if he’s an alien, then what about Hisashi? (me)

He’s got a job with Yahoo! Japan, which I think is owned by Sofbank and is probably safe from all the Yahoo! stuff going on in the US. But what do I know?

Well, I’ve almost been watching Lord of the Rings for 12 hours now. I should get some sleep but I can’t stop now.

I still have a cold. 12 hours sleep on Friday night, 10 hours sleep on Saturday night. The best part is that I don’t have to feel guilty about my lack of gumption (or vocabulary right now). All I did yesterday was watch the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament and then Constantine when it came on cable.

So I have a new plan: to get an Argentinian girlfriend. It will annoy my Peruvian friends and when she finds out I have Peruvian friends, she’ll be annoyed too.

I didn’t say it was a good plan.

This means that I won’t be able to maximize the number of times I go to the gym, thereby taking food out of the mouth of the gym-owner’s kid. It’s probably for the best. I got home from work a couple of hours early and took a short nap. A short 3-hour nap. Then I went to sleep around 11 and got up around 11. I can tell that there’s still something wrong because drinking hot tea is making me break out into a cold sweat.

The worst part is that I got an invitation to a party JUST LAST NIGHT (Friday) for today (Saturday)! I may feel better by then, but I figure I’ll really have to play it by ear.

Now it’s time to get myself healthy enough to watch two basketball games. 🙂

So last night I woke up a few times feeling like I had to sneeze. And at work I was sneezing as well. It definitely felt like hay fever. Turns out I wasn’t the only one. A co-worker told me his symptoms started up today and so did my sister. Ah, springtime.

I dragged myself down to the gym. There’s usually 3 phases to the workout: warm up, skills (learning things we do during the main workouts), and the Workout Of the Day (WOD). I really wanted it to be:

• Warm up: walk to the gym
• Skills: talk to the trainer
• WOD: walk home from the gym

Fortunately, I felt better after moving a bit, and didn’t have much trouble with my hay fever until I started walking home. I remember the past few springs, having to go to my old gym to do my cardio because there was too much pollen outside. If I was lucky, they’d leave the big doors closed and we wouldn’t get any crosswind bringing in the allergens. I guess I’m just lucky that it comes and goes as the seasons change.

And with that I can’t think of what else I was doing. Time to try to get to bed early (hah!).

Funny how I hear weird Eurodisco and I can’t even buy it over here in ‘merika. I just have to find it somehow. Some of my favorite is the Mash-Up mixes. The best one that I bought was Alcazar’s mix of “Upside Down” by Diana Ross and “This is the World We Live In” by Genesis. But the best stuff is probably just underground. How would you get the rights to mix “Smack My Bitch Up” by Prodigy and “Orinoco Flow” by Enya? I just wish I could get more of that. My iPod usually sounds like a gay disco anyway.

I don’t think I did anything spectacular at the gym today besides coming in last in the timed portion again. Dumbbell cleans to split press just kind of sucks. But I did get a personal best on a 500m row. Even after I was sucking serious wind towards the end. I wonder how I would have done after eating a cheeseburger for lunch?

The problem is I had Phở for lunch. They always sell me a large (“It’s only $0.50 more!”) and I can’t be trusted to keep from drinking all the broth. That just overfills my stomach and makes me feel bad. You’re probably thinking, “Aren’t you an adult and responsible for your own actions?” and I would have to answer, “No.” I cannot be trusted with Phở. I also can’t be trusted at a buffet, nor can I be trusted to keep from eating everything on my plate. Everyone has issues, right?

The closest to a prank I saw was just pictures of me making funny faces at the gym. I was told that I could use this one where I’m not making a horrible face. I think it was suggested that I put in in a “Personals” ad, but we all know how well that usually turns out for me.

I survived my 6AM phone meeting only to have to get out and scrape the ice off my car for the commute. I got to work and I was trying to figure out what I’m doing, trying to hide the fact that I’m a big fraud. That’s my big worry, that I’ll get found out. But really, I’m actually learning enough to be of some help.

It was a nice afternoon and a small turnout at the gym. I guess people were busy doing other things in the nice weather. It was a fun workout and I only caught the medicine ball with my face once. I think they missed taking a picture of that.

A friend at Apple has me beat. He was talking about a 2AM meeting he might have to attend. I got an work email asking if 8AM was OK for a meeting, and then the guy scheduled it for 6AM. I guess Outlook sucks whether you’re here or there. Either way, it’s late in the day for the guy on the other end. At least it’s not midnight for him, like the last meeting we had.

You may have noticed a little outage yesterday. I fixed things here so I could get OUT from here, but I forgot to check to see if people could get IN from the outside. So I could send email, but I couldn’t get it.

I’m being banned from using the word “Eggamuffin” at the gym. Even worse, I’m not supposed to have a cheeseburger tomorrow. Today we went to Dairy Queen and the three of us who went decided to be a bit “healthier” and had grilled chicken sandwiches. They were awful. So now we know: don’t try to be healthy at the DQ. The hamburgers are great and they’re cheaper than the chicken, so we should eat them.

The guy who runs our local gym told me to stay away from the main crossfit web site because it’s a bit frightening. Those guys are a little intense and the gym I go to doesn’t go as far as a lot of the other crossfit gyms. I mean, there’s even a New York Times Magazine article calling crossfit a cult. I’m guessing we’re the exception. Come once a week; the trainers are always happy to see you. Everyone gets along and it’s fun to see how well you do, not how often you get to see your lunch.

But on the other hand, I have to go to the web site and see how to so a muscle-up. It’s one of the exercises we work up to and I want to keep working towards it.

Other than that, did you expect I did anything today? It’s March Madness and I watch almost anything when it gets to the playoffs. Baseball, soccer, football (though I watch that the whole season), and probably some other things I can’t remember. Curling maybe. I don’t know.

I can’t talk so much about work, since I know some of my co-workers actually read this thing. Heck, I just found out that someone in New Zealand reads this thing. I’m not quite sure why, but on the flip side people are probably wondering why I’m writing this thing.

I like my new job so far, even though it’s customer related and my job is to annoy everyone. The customer reports a problem, I ask people about it (annoying them), ask them to fix it (annoying them), and get the answer back to the customer who is annoyed that I didn’t give them the exact answer that they wanted. But it’s fun so far. The most silly and consistently annoying thing is that the guy in the next cube is a very loud typer and I have to use my iPod to drown it out. Fortunately, I remembered to reload the Eurodisco on my iPod tonight, so work will once again be harmonious. That and they finally fixed my “Voice Mail” light so it’s not stuck on all the time even though no one ever calls me.

So at the gym I found out two things. One is that I’m old and I’m not supposed to be working so hard so often (or so I’m told). The other is that no one remembers the National Lampoon recording of “The Jazz Musician” where “Mr. Rogers” is interviewing a jazz musician who calls the Egg McMuffin an “eggamuffin.” The guy who invented the Egg McMuffin just died and I told them I was in mourning. Fortunately, there’s someone else there who is my age and she remembered eggamuffins so I didn’t have to go running to Google to prove to everyone that my neurons weren’t randomly firing again.

R.I.P. Herb Peterson, Egg McMuffin inventor.

So I went to the gym and was doing today’s “easy” workout.It was kind of hard, but instead of being yelled at to go faster, Nathan just kind of looked at me and said, “Hey, slow down. Today is your easy day.” Yeah, but I knew the faster I went the quicker it would all be over. Besides, I was standing next to the young guy and he was going twice as fast as I was. Ah, youth.

Today was backsliding day at lunch. I suppose yesterday was as well. But man that cheeseburger at Dairy Queen tasted good. I only had a single patty. One guy had the double hamburger, another had the “Hillsburger” monstrosity, and yet another had a double-cheeseburger with ham. I think I still outweigh two of them. Life isn’t fair.

Yesterday at the gym we did a modified version of the “Helen” workout. That means running around the block (about 450m), 21 kettlebell swings, and 12 pullups. Three times. Today we did the “Cindy” workout which is 20 minutes of as many rounds as you can do of 5 pullups, 10 pushups, and 15 squats. I did 13 rounds and by the end I thought my arm was going to pull out. Well, I suppose that’s only 36 pullups yesterday and that’s only 70 pullups today (I did five extra at the end for some insane reason). Those pullups were looking pretty ugly towards the end, but I’m counting them.

There are ways to make things easier (like band pullups or jumping pullups) so I’d tell anyone to come on in to the gym. Especially since the head honcho Nathan said he’d buy me a cheeseburger if I got anyone reading my blog to come in. Besides, if I can do it, you can do it and no one’s yelling at you at this gym. Encouragement, of course, but no yelling.

And then you, too, can be faster than a rolling “o”, stronger than silent “e”, and able to leap capital “T” in a single bound.