I have some stories from today but they’re not really mine. Like how I got an angry phone call from a friend who happened to be a little lost in Olympia, WA. He’s moving to Hawaii, and was driving his car to Seattle where they were going to ship it to Maui for him. I guess they don’t allow cars with cracked windshields into Hawaii so he had to get it fixed before he left, and then driving up to Seattle a truck threw a rock into his brand new windshield. He got off the freeway in the first big town he found (Olympia) and called his dad for directions. Well, his dad is a physician and directions aren’t his strong point. Fortunately for me, I went out with someone from Olympia YEARS ago and I remember the three blocks that make up the town. That, and I can read a map off the intarweb and give semi-coherent directions.

I also heard that Chicago has the most expensive gas in the country, which makes some sense because it also has the highest paid person that I actually know. If I actually thought about it, I probably know some highly paid surgeons or something but I don’t think of them very often and I can’t even think of who they’d be right now. Come to think of it, my friend who is moving to Hawaii has a dad who probably makes a boatload of money, so I take it back, it’s not fair that Chicago has the most expensive gas in the country. Lake Oswego, Oregon should have the most expensive gas in the country. Actually, we should just force them to secede from the Union and put a fence around them. (I have issues with rich people.)

So I have been going to the gym and this week I was called a weirdo by one guy, and another guy kind of implied I’m a geek. Geez, and with all the fancy gym clothes I wear, like the Jelly Belly World Tour shirt I wore on Tuesday or the Intel vPro/Microsoft Management Conference shirt I wore today, how would anyone think I was a geek?

When I think of the word “eco-turrist” I think of someone committing turrist acts on nature. I’ve been accused of such acts because I cut down two Japanese pear trees in the backyard. They were convicted of the crime of dropping uneaten fruit all over the place. I suppose I could have harvested the fruit and taken them to the shelter, but I’m not sure that the woody fruit would have been very nutritious. Anyway, it’s too late.

It’s springtime and my fantasies are interfering with my work. What fantasies, you might think, and are they going to be TMI? Are they about the young woman at work with the big backyard who keeps giving you the stink-eye? Are they about golf? Today I kept imagining going home and digging up the remnants of the awful crabapple tree that’s in the middle of the backyard, shooting up suckers square in the middle of everything. And I thought about digging up my prized (and ignored) rosebush that had the graft die and went back to being a wild rose.

But it wasn’t to be. When I finally changed into my work clothes, it started to rain and I watched TV instead. So much for fulfilling my fantasies.

One of the reasons I really shouldn’t be a doctor (besides never getting in to medical school) is because I hate doctors. Smug bastards. I oversimplify, though, because there are a lot of pleasant doctors at the gym and just one kind of snarky one. The snarky doctor is the one who the trainers were trying to get me to ask out but I could kind of tell she wasn’t the most pleasant person and, besides, she’s an Asian woman so she’s not going to want to go out with an Asian guy.

Snarkzilla was also mad because everyone was saying she’s a doctor. Well, sheesh, if you wear scrubs to my gym, there’s an 90% chance you’re a doctor, a 9% chance you’re medical staff, and a 1% chance you’re just a freak show. And seriously, I talk to EVERYONE at the gym except for the people who just look incredibly stuck up or scary. And it turns out a lot of the scary guys are pretty sweet and a lot of the stuck up women are pretty nice. And salary.com says the average pay for a cardiologist is $263,722. If you make that much money, just join the damn Multnomah AryanAthletic Club. (Yeah, I have issues with that place, too.)

Anyway, it wasn’t so bad, really. I just thought I’d complain.

I spent most of the day waiting for the two-hour season finale of 24 and I was unsurprisingly disappointed. This whole season was kind of weak and tonight’s plot was kind of obvious. Ah, well. That’s all that happened today.

Well at least with the TV season ending, I should have time to read more books. Or to go out and work on the yard. I need to tear out a lot of plants to make my putting green. Actually, I’m just doing major weeding and getting rid of random overgrown plants that were neglected by my dad. He never would let me do much cutting and I think I’m going to try to get rid of the dark forest look my dad liked. We’ll see how successful I am.

We finally got around to helping my buddy with the expensive yacht fix his antenna. We probably didn’t need three of us there, but we got things working. Oddly enough, we had a very basic problem (the brass power bus turned out to not be very good at being a bus) but we have enough experience to figure out the simple problems, thank goodness. We made sure the antenna worked as an antenna and declared victory.

After that I went out to a co-worker’s open house. While I don’t envy his commute, his house is in a beautiful location and well-maintained. There tall evergreens all around and views of wooded hills. I think I’d end up filling the place full of crap and letting the yard get overgrown, but it’s a good fit for him. My ultimate house would either be a whole apartment building with separate apartments full of different crap, or a house attached to a warehouse. The heating bills on the warehouse would be awful, I bet.

A lot of my injuries aren’t very manly, like carpal tunnel and paper cuts. Last Thursday, for example, I got my finger stuck under a weight at the gym and injured a finger. Today I have a couple of cuts on my left hand from a machine gun and from cutting down a tree. It sounds manly, though.

I was supposed to help my rich, but cheap, friend John work on his yacht that’s worth more than the house I live in. Instead I had to drive a bunch of guys an hour down I-5 to a machine gun shoot. I was going to spend all the cash I had in my pocket to shoot some interesting things I never see, like a Lewis gun (off of a pre-WWII biplane) or some huge 50-caliber, or a full-auto pistol, but I didn’t.

What I did do was get back to town too late to dog-sit for my sister. I hope Dede did OK.

I spent this Friday evening catching up on TV shows from the last two weeks. I could have sworn there were more, but I had enough season ending cliffhangers to gag a goat. Exciting, eh?

There’s so much stuff to do around the house that I kind of feel overwhelmed. I need to take care of my dad’s “stuff” and then I need to do all the maintenance on the house that hasn’t been done. Last weekend, for example, I finally fixed the shower. This weekend I may pull up some of the old, nasty carpet. It’s enough to make a guy sit around and read a book instead, which is what I did when I first got home. That and take a nap. But then I went out to the garage to find a chainsaw and cut down a tree.

My dad has a bunch of trees he planted and then just left to grow to a monstrous size thanks to the Oregon climate. A couple of the trees are fruit trees and they leave a mess every fall. One fruit tree was planted in the neighbors yard, so that’s going to drop apples on our garage forever. The two Japanese pears trees, however, are going. They’re the old-school Japanese pears that aren’t as sweet and it’s harder to give those away than zucchini. Perhaps I’m not trying hard enough. Anyway, I get to pretend I know what I’m doing and run the chainsaw for a while. Chainsaws make Oregon men feel more manly. Heh.

Oh, and I should mention that my stomach HURTS, especially when I sneeze. Too many sit ups. Darn that Dave.

I’m not sure what I was doing until now but I did go to the acupuncturist and then had dinner with my ma, sis, and brother-in-law. I paid some bills, rebuilt an OS, crashed the computer, sent in the crash log, and now it’s tomorrow and I’m going to be up in less than six hours. I am a moron.

I’m uncertain why there are so many people extolling the virtues of Burgerville. If they’d ever gone to the one near the convention center, they’d know what kind of inedible pucks they’re capable of putting out. And the one by Megacorp in Hillsburrito isn’t all that good, either. I still haven’t had a bad burger at In-N-Out. So there. I have to admit I still remember liking Big Macs, but they make my stomach hurt.

It’s good to know I’m not the only silly person at the gym. I was getting cheered on by two women who I know and who are definitely on the silly side. It’s hard enough to do leg raises or squats without getting yelled at (or trying to do then while laughing).

I guess my sister took Megan to Burgerville, the spotty local burger chain. The one on 82nd near her house is one of the better ones, but surely wasn’t as good as the Kobe beef hamburger we had at the Rogue Ale House yesterday. Staying out too late on a school night has kind of fried my brain as well. I’m not really sure what happened today. I did check out a little early to take a nap. I probably shouldn’t admit that. It doesn’t sound nearly as good as my buddy Greg’s health problem yesterday, on his birthday. He told them he had an eye problem: he just couldn’t see going in to work. (Yeah, it sounds like an old dad saying and he pretty much fits that description now.) Happy birthday to him anyway.

I don’t have much to say because my friend Megan from the Bay area (yeah, THAT Megan) was in town and we had a few beers. A couple at a place that had Kobe beef hamburgers, and a couple at the pub her brother should own by now. I also got my golf clubs today for my beginner’s class, and Megan wants her brother to show me how to use them.

OK, time to stumble off to bed.

I finally got around to fixing the shower today and once again it was easy — after I knew what I was doing. Buying the pieces at the plumbing supply was like going to the dollar store, except everything was closer to $30. I needed two diverters and a shower head. The first diverter makes the water come out of the shower rather than the tub spout, and the second diverter switches water between a regular shower head and a handheld shower head. The old shower head had a massager thing inside of it and that was going bad. Anyway, all the parts cost $144, two trips to the neighborhood plumbing supply, and an eight-mile trip to another plumbing supply. I’ll get to see if it all works tomorrow morning.

I didn’t get to read all that much today. That’s been taking a lot of my time this past few days. I finished a book full of sand that my sister gave me (Case Histories

by Kate Atkinson) and a Japanese mystery from my sister about pyrokinesis. I haven’t had to buy too many books lately and there are others that were given to me years ago that I still haven’t started reading.

I saw my next-door neighbor with his kids today and helped him glue a chair back together. He told me that there was a woman walking around the house, in the yard, taking pictures. I’m not sure what that’s about but it’s enough to make a guy nervous.

My golf-crazy co-workers insist that I would be better off golfing than going to the gym. Perhaps they’re right. I get winded carrying heavy things around and perhaps golf is more aerobic than the gym. I am, however, a creature of habit and, besides, I have a standing appointment with Dave the Trainer. I spent much of the time discussing food with a woman at the gym and now I’m craving barbecue. Not a bad way to spend the evening.