I only had a couple things on my to-do list for Sunday. Snake the bathroom sink that was flowing slowly and wasn’t fixed by the plunger. Sand and finish the part of the railing that gave me splinters. Well, I suppose I never did get around to varnishing the railing, but I did snake the sink. And I bought one of those laptop stands with the fans in it. The fan works a lot better than I thought it would on my MacBook Pro. Oh, I suppose I also moved a lot of stuff around on my computer because that’s what I do.
Today I played golf and got a great score by doing two things. One was playing a little better. The other was CHEATING LIKE CRAZY. OK, so that’s not the point of golf, but it was funny, I felt like I was getting away with something, and it was fun. So why not? Unfortunately the big boss came by as I was trying to leave and wanted to give me some work to do. The job sounds like a good way to cheese off marketing, but at least it’s work.
So the first thing I had to do this morning was help some little old ladies set up their email. I hope it helps them because it all seems a little confusing. Hell, gmail is confusing to me and I use computers all the time. Most of the time I was trying to get a woman to double-click without moving the mouse at the same time. Ah, well.
When I got home I noticed my neighbor was trimming the weeds in the gutter. He was doing it by hand and tried to guilt me into doing my “half” of the block. We’re the only two who cut the weeds across the street in the gutter by the school yard and I had done most of my half a few weeks ago. It was “community school cleaning day” so I decided I should probably make the minimal effort of getting the gas-powered weed whacker out. My neighbor was doing his half by hand. I did my bit for the neighborhood and even trimmed some blackberry bushes. I even met the new school principal.
The rest of the day was spent fighting my computers, like always. Didn’t have all that much trouble and everything worked after the requisite frustration. I guess it’s time for plumbing and painting tomorrow.
So somewhere around 12:30AM this morning, I was holding a razor blade in my left hand trying to figure out if I should cut into my right thumb. Keep in mind that I’m right-handed. I got a 3/8″ sliver in my thumb and at first I convinced myself it was just the blood after I pulled out most of the wood with my teeth. While I was lying in bed I finally decided that it hurt too much and it must be a sliver. So I got whatever cheap magnifying glasses, tweezers, and pins I could find and went to town. I’ll spare any more details, but it’s gone now. I’m planning on varnishing the basement railing to avoid this from happening again (it’s not the first time this has happened).
I have a cough now, and it’s pretty much the kind of cough I can deal with. It’s not waking me up at night and it’s not that often. This morning, however, I was coughing stuff up. Why is it that doctors always want to know what color the stuff was? My usual doc wants to know if it’s green, and the TB researcher up the street wanted to know if it was red. It was neither, fortunately.
I’ve spent much too much time trying to get IPV6 working at home. I doubt I’ll stop any time soon. Oh, well.
There are a lot of reasons I ate at McDonalds but the main ones are that the cafeteria frightens me and Mickey D’s is the closest cheap thing I could walk to. I also found a way to avoid a bit more exercise by walking AROUND the hill to the light rail rather than OVER the hill. The stop was a little closer, too. So, two strikes.
Oh, and Dave the Trainer blew me off and I didn’t make it to the gym.
Might sound ideal for me, but it’s my aunt, my aunt’s sister-in-law, and another friend from Japan. I’m off my routine, not that I have a routine. So far I’ve only had to be around for dinner, and I have no problems eating. I’ve had to skip the gym one night and cut short my awful performance at the driving range another night.
I mean, honestly, my golf swing is getting worse. I think it’s time to see an instructor. I mean, I want SOMETHING in my life to go right.
I should hit the hay, too. I may run into the same woman from Yahoo! on the train. She swears it’s the best job she’s ever had, and much better than what we’re doing across the parking lot from her at Megacorp. I wonder if she’s telling the truth or if she’s just deluded.
OK, so I exaggerate. The most exciting thing I did today was to go to the Ethiopian restaurant for lunch with a co-worker. She’s from Peru, and I didn’t realize that the food in Peru isn’t that spicy. Anyway, I ordered chicken, which was supposed to be medium spicy. They came back to tell me that they’d run out of chicken breast, but had chicken thighs, and I said that was OK. But they didn’t tell me that the dish with thighs was much spicier than the dish made with chicken breast. My first mouthful made me drink my glass of water.
I’m also in big trouble with some co-workers. I asked if we had to be physically present at our 7AM meeting and the boss said yes. If I had just kept my mouth shut, the boss could have been disappointed with us later when we were more awake. Oh, well.
I was moving things around in preparation for my aunt, her sister-in-law, and a family friend to come from Japan. I had to clear some stuff off of the bed in my “office” which really is another flat surface for me to pile up my clean laundry. I think I have way too many t-shirts. Fortunately, we’ve been taking a lot of my dad’s old stuff to Goodwill lately and my old clothes have been going too. My pants, which mysteriously shrunk, are among the things going. Oddly enough I bought a pair of shorts for golf from Target earlier this summer and what they call 32 is what I call a hell of a lot bigger.
In the middle of all of my “cleaning,” my sister called and wanted some information from the Parade Magazine in the Sunday paper. Of course it’s garbage day and I had to go out with a flashlight to dig it out of the recycle bin. I think she’d already recycled hers the day before. I should tell her my back hurts from all the stooping over the recycle bin. Not that she’d care.
when it’s been too long since you’ve had a girlfriend. This and posters of Natalie Gulbis.
Old picture for comparison:
Of course my back hurt and I used that as an excuse to watch golf, but the presentation wasn’t that great. Basically, they showed lots of gabbing and little golfing. I decided to trim back one of the rhododendrons in front of the house, and then decided that it should all go in the wood chipper with the stuff I hadn’t finished last week. Basically, I was either trying to prove that my back was OK or I was being a masochist. In any case, my back doesn’t feel so bad tonight. Rhododendrons aren’t nearly as hard to deal with as flowering plum trees.
I just moved offices at Megacorp and there’s good things and bad things about it. The good thing is that it’s right by public transit. Bad things include it’s dark, it’s sticky, it’s loud, and the cafeteria is awful. I walked around and finally went with the default cheeseburger with onion rings and somehow they got both to taste like cleanser. They could have used that cleanser on my desk, because that thing is still sticky after repeated spritzes with desk cleaner and wipedowns with Clorox wipes.
Also, I have to figure out what I’m going to do with that 45 minutes I’m on the trolley. I figure I can read magazines, but what happens after I run out of those? I don’t really like reading books on public transportation because I get too nervous about missing my stop. Ah, well. I can figure something out. Also, I have to figure out what days I should drive so I can have my golf clubs with me. Heh.
I was told to stay out of the office I’m moving from and out of the office I’m moving to, so I checked my work email from home all day. I walked downtown to run some errands and my feet felt great. I guess those $100 shoes were worth it.
The bad news is that Good Dog, Bad Dog closed their original downtown store and now it’s an inkjet cartridge refilling store. Come on. How is an inkjet cartridge refilling store a suitable replacement for a place that sold homemade sausages? I really had a hankering for hot dogs, not fancy sausages. After I left to the Apple store (to buy iWork and iLife) I walked to the other end of downtown to Superdog and had a Nathan’s Famous. Fortunately I also went to GNC to get some nutritional supplements.
Good thing my next door neighbor knows I’m a big geek. He reminded me to go out and see the Space Shuttle/Space Station go overhead tonight. It was just a bright speck that crossed the sky, but it was fun to see.
As much as my iPod denies it (I heard Swing Out Sister and Scritti Politti on the way to REI to buy my shoes), I am a dude and I’m not used to spending a lot of money on a pair of shoes that are probably going to wear out in six months. At least that’s how long it used to take.
I used to walk about 2.2 miles to and from work, which took me about 45 minutes each way. I figure that’s about 2.25 miles. My shoes would wear out in about six months, so that’s:
So it makes sense that my shoes wore out in 6 months, but another new pair of shoes in 6 months is bad when you pay $100 for a pair of shoes.
I suppose it beats the wear and tear on the car and it also means I get some more exercise.
I suppose I’m happy to see that more of my back hurts from all of my exertion on Saturday. My lower back pain is mainly on the left side, but there are cramps higher up on the right side. This makes me think that a proper massage will be just the ticket, and I even have one scheduled for Sunday afternoon.
In any case, I figured two days in bed were all I should be allowed, and several sites on teh intarweb told me the same thing. After two days, get up and walk around. I don’t think I was supposed to get up and pack my office for the move this week, but I didn’t have much choice there. Fortunately, it got better as the day went on. Now if only other things would go so well.
