I’ve spent the last two days in bed with a backache. I’m finally able to shuffle around the house like an old man but it’ll take some time to get back to normal. Good thing I have a massage scheduled for next Sunday.

I didn’t get all that much done while in bed. I read another book by Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead which I would recommend to mystery readers, watched Afterlife and North by Northwest and found out that Vicodin doesn’t do that much for me. I wasn’t expecting to do cartwheels, but being able to get up to go to the bathroom would have been nice. It might have made me a bit too maudlin to watch Afterlife which was a sweet movie but about dying. Worth seeing, but I think for now I’m going to stick to comedies and things like watching Matt Damon kick a lot of ass.

Before:

After:

The tree was too big and it was blocking the front of the house. I kind of think that’s why we weren’t getting the paper reliably. My preference was to just cut the top of the tree, but the branches were all in the top of the tree. The tree had pretty flowers in the springtime, but it was a little unkempt.

The tree fought back, though.

Not only does my back hurt so bad that I can’t pick anything up off the floor, but I have big gouge on my palm and a scrape on my neck. My shins are also banged up. (It hurts more than it looks.)

I was going to run some errands today but the tree took up all my time. And I’m not even finished. I clogged up the wood chipper and had to stop. Oh, well, there’s always tomorrow, if my back is better.

Oh, and hey, it’s my sister’s birthday. Happy Birthday you stoopy.

My mom and my brother-in-law had dinner tonight. My sister is off running somewhere. He showed us the progress he’s making on his house remodeling project. He’s a high school teacher after all, so he has a whole summer to not go to work.

I worked from home today because I really just have some programming to do. I can honestly say I’m not a big fan of Ruby on Rails. I did have a chance to sleep in and even get a haircut during lunch.

The sleeping in was probably the best part. I even had a dream where I was setting up a computer in a classroom at MIT and they started the class. The first guy was analyzing some sort of electromagnetics with a Jacobian matrix. I don’t even remember what a Jacobian matrix is and I’m dreaming about it? What happened to dreaming about attractive women I can’t go out with?

So she’s complaining of getting seasick from being in the pool and she has no sympathy for my stomach problems. At least it’s not as bad as other people at the gym. I heard there was some sort of stomach ‘flu going around. As it is I had to head home early and be close to the bathroom. At least I could do some work in between.

So that meant I missed going to the gym. Dave also wanted to go to the driving range afterwards, and what’s wrong with that? I missed it all because of my silly stomach ache. Oh, well.

I had to chase off some kids last night. I closed the window, I put in earplugs, and still they woke me up hooting and hollering. And this was at 12:30AM! As I was out there talking to one group, another a newer black Volvo station wagon pulled up. I told them I was writing down their license plate as well, and the kid started yelling at me. “Hey Mr. Asian man! I have a tight asshole! I have a tight asshole! I have a tight asshole!”

I mean, really, to me he was just a rich kid who happened to be African-American, but doesn’t he know that people get SHOT for DWB in Portland? Maybe not so much recently, but our police department has some unfortunate incidents in their past. He might think twice about drawing attention to himself like that.

Still I feel better because my golf swing was better at the driving range. Still not perfect, but a lot more of them were going straight. Thank goodness! I don’t care if it doesn’t go far, just as long as I can find the ball!

I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping lately. Why, I don’t know. Possibly the weather, possibly my poor diet, possibly the caffeine I shouldn’t drink too late in the afternoon. I dunno. In any case, I haven’t been helping myself much either. Yesterday I was scanning my dad’s ice cream cone cut-out and it takes forever with the Frankenstein setup I have. My brand new MacBook Pro is running a very new copy of Mac OS X and my scanner is probably 10 years old. So, right now, I have to run Windows on the Mac to get the scanner to work. Then the blogging software I have is acting up I often have to start up several different browsers to upload pictures. Sheesh.

And tonight my sister told me her blog looked funny. It took me a long time to get it looking OK in Firefox and Safari and it still looks funny in Internet Explorer. Well phooey, I’m going to bed. Tomorrow I have to go to work and play my least favorite game of making web pages look pretty. Yay.

Sometimes I think I’m going to go home and find my dad puttering around the house, ready to do something that will drive me nuts. We’re going to have houseguests soon and while they’re relatives who’ll put up with the nonsense of the house, we do have to clear out a path to my dad’s bed so someone can sleep in there. We find all sorts of junk in there, like hundreds of wheat pennies and another Hello, Kitty clock. He collected all sorts of metal candy tins that went into the metal recycling. Today we even found a picture he cut out of a Qwest ad.

The ad is fairly recent, since the backside is advertising DirectTV and broadband DSL from Qwest. I thought he was just watching TV and eating but his old packrat/artsy-craftsy nature was still with him until the end.

Oh, and I still suck at golf. 

Today was our annual block party which was a little less attended than most years. Well, it is summer time and people do have other obligations. A couple of the neighbors were going downtown to attend the Hiroshima Day memorial peace rally. A Nichiren Buddhist priest gave a prayer and my neighbors asked me what I thought about it. Well, I was reminded of a joke I heard on Prairie Home Companion:

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, 
about to jump off. So I ran over and said, "Stop! Don't do it!"

	"Why shouldn't I?" he said.

I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"

	He said, "Like what?"

I said, "Well, are you religious or atheist?"

	He said, "Religious."

I said, "Me too! Are your Christian or Buddhist?"

	He said, "Christian."

I said, "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?"

	He said, "Protestant."

I said, Me too! Are your Episcopalian or Baptist?

	He said, "Baptist!"

I said, "Wow! Me too! Are your Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?

	He said, Baptist Church of God!"

I said, "Me too! Are your Original Baptist Church of God or are you Reformed 
Baptist Church of God?"

	He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God!"

I said, "Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or 
Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?"

	He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!"

I said, "Die, heretic scum!" and pushed him off.

Yesterday (meaning Friday) I got home after work and fell asleep. I ate dinner and I fell asleep again. Even after all this, my friends wanted to get a drink. Well, after the two short naps I was feeling OK but my friends were falling asleep. Which leads to today (Saturday) when I got up and went downtown to help some people in a HUD facility with computer skills, and then then spent the rest of the day installing and re-installing a beta OS on my Mac. It was a joy to behold.

I guess I can describe my day by my dinner at McDonalds. In other words, not much going on.

12:49  jasonc> reminds me of the old "what's the difference between a slut and a bitch?" joke
12:49  singingarc> punch line?
12:50  jasonc> singingarc: slut is someone who'll sleep with anyone, a bitch is someone who'll sleep with anyone but you
12:50  singingarc> ah
12:51  singingarc> so what do you call a woman who only sleeps with you?
12:51  jgw> a woman of low standards
12:51  htodd> imaginary, in my case

The only exciting thing today was seeing a woman at the gym who kind of looked like the last woman I went on a date with. She was much younger, though, and was wearing a t-shirt that said, “Dirty Weekends.” The typeface was hard to read and I thought it said, “Dirty Hedgehog,” which of course made no sense. I don’t get the reference, “Dirty Weekends,” either.

I went out and hit a bucket of balls at the driving range. That meant standing out in the 90°F sun, with no shade, hitting golf ball after golf ball. You’d figure a couple would go straight, just by chance but I think I’ve used up all my beginner’s luck and I’m deep into sucking now.

I’ve also spent the past several days trying to download a non-corrupt beta copy of MacOS X. FIVE TIMES I’ve tried and failed. Keep in mind that it’s big enough that it takes me 13+ hours to download it once and find out that something failed near the end. It’s like hitting my head against the wall again and again hoping something will change this next time. Wait, that’s a valid description of my golf game, of my new job search at Megacorp, and even of my life in general lately.

So I think I’ll try to get a little more than my usual 5+ hours of sleep tonight. Maybe I’ll even have a dream where I’m an astronaut or something. Nothing too good, though, because I hate waking up and finding myself back where I was the night before.

I ran off some kids a little while ago. They were parked across the street and playing loud music. At least the bass was penetrating through the walls. Anyway, I went out and said, “This is where I ask you to move on, and if you don’t I write down your license plate numbers and call the cops.” I didn’t think it was too mean. They did ask what they were doing wrong and I said, “Well, you are being loud and it is a neighborhood.” I think they left pretty soon afterwards, 3 cars with about a dozen kids. I kind of wonder if they weren’t planning to get even more kids there because cars keep pulling up and leaving.

Whatever. My rule is: don’t wake me up.

Dave the Trainer has weird schedule issues just like I have weird schedule issues. He called today and asked if I could make it in by 4PM. I had about 45 minutes to make it there, but I bailed out of work early and went. That’s the most excitement I had today. Woo-hoo.