I live in Portland across the river from the North American headquarters of Adidas, walking distance to the headquarters of Keen Footwear, not too far the headquarters of Nike. I should know SOMEONE who can get me a discount on shoes or, barring that, I should be able to find a factory outlet store nearby. In fact, Adidas and Nike both have outlet stores across the river, probably less than four miles away. I even started looking at the Sunday ads for the big sporting goods outlets like Gart and Big Five. But I’m so lazy I bought my new shoes for the gym online. I do feel bad about it, but I needed new shoes. I’ll see what happens to my quest for a new belt.
I went to the acupuncturist today and fell asleep on the table again. He put some pins in my neck ’cause I told him it was stiff. I think he made everything hurt more, but it feels better now, several hours later. Go pins!
Today would have been my dad’s 91st birthday. My sister says I’m too sentimental so I’ll quit talking about that.
Well, honestly, I have very little else to talk about. I go to work, I try to get people to talk about this whole Clemens going back to the Yankees thing, but no one wants to talk about baseball. I went to the gym and while there were more people there than I was expecting, the good weather kept most people away. I did talk barbecue with one of the women there.
I’m not sure my writing is up to snuff lately, not that it was all that special to begin with. I can’t even follow what I wrote last week. I suppose it could be worse. The spelling appears to be correct.
I think I scheduled my flight for my San Francisco trip. I’m using the “free” ticket I got for getting bumped off of a flight last year and I was planning to use it for something interesting like maybe a trip back to Boston. But I’m taking this trip to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference and the ticket’s about to expire. I went through various phone mazes with United and stood in line to get an envelope postmarked today and I don’t want to do that again.
I went through more of my dad’s stuff today and took a bunch of coins to the Coinstar machine. I had to drive around and find one that didn’t take out the 8.9 cent handling fee and got an Amazon gift certificate instead. This frugality is in contrast to the $200 Il and I spent on Friday at Ringside at my birthday dinner (and that’s with a 15% discount!). Once in a while you have to splurge and Kobe beef tenderloin is a good way to do it.
It’s been three weeks since my dad died and it’s no surprise that I miss the guy. I still haven’t made a dent into going through his stuff. Today we got all his clothes out of his closet and it’s still half-full of “stuff.” The guy liked to collect lots of different things and one of the things was empty boxes. Candy tins, cookie boxes, etc. That’s the easiest of all his stuff, though, because it goes into two recycling piles: metal and paper. I don’t even have to think about it, just sort it.
I spent the weekend noodling around. I think I watched three movies on DVD: Black Sunday, Cronos, and most of The Replacements. Today I also watched Vin Diesel shoot up some stuff, Arnie shoot up some stuff, and read more of the sandy book my sister gave me. I just seem to have found ways to do nothing. I don’t know if it’s any different than any other weekend, it just seems to be to me.
I was looking at two attractive women at the gym and I thought, “Man I wish I was as buff as her,” and, “Man, I wish I had her abs,” when the sane thing would have just been to say, “Woo, she’s hot.” But really the buff one just won in the fitness category at the Emerald Cup up in Washington, so I guess I wasn’t that far off. Dana the trainer told me I need to watch my diet if I want my muscles to be that well defined. I don’t think I’m willing to give up the cheeseburgers and fried chicken. Dave did the monthly measurement of my fat ass and at least I’m not that far off of previous months.
Really, the only other things that happened today was my wanting to walk out of work and never go back (a common occurrence) and having the attractive acupuncture student at the gym actually talk to me and tell me that Us Magazine was filling my head full of eye candy. Well, yeah, I think that was the point. Everyone was catching me check her out and I had to look at something else.
I’m beginning to wonder if my back pain is from my pants and belt that I’m finally admitting are too small for my waist. Megan was giving me grief months ago and she was right. My belt is too tight. I was loath to admit it, and besides, all of the 36″ belts looked like doodie. So for now I’m going to wear my 34″ belt at the end hole.
Recently I’ve been in places with no clocks and without my cell phone so I decided I should start wearing a watch. I stopped wearing a watch after I started carrying my cell phone all the time since the cell phone has a clock in it that is synchronized to Cingular standard time. As I went through my dad’s stuff, I found a watch that was given to him a few years ago. He never wore it and I was going to ask him for it back then. Now it’s mine.
The battery was already dead and my mom took it in to the mall jeweler who scratched it trying to get the back off. Sheesh. I went to Harbor Freight and bought a watch case opener because I’ve needed one to replace the batteries in all the cheap watches I seem to have collected. Two watches had dead batteries and I was able to get the backs off without scratching the watches.I wonder if I can get a job replacing watch batteries?
My back started to hurt on Sunday and today, Tuesday, it got really bad. I wasn’t able to walk without a limp so I called the acupuncturist. The acupuncturist moved my leg around and nothing hurt until he did one thing that told him that it was a tight piriformis muscle, whatever that is. Whatever it is it hurts like hell. He did the whole acupuncture thing and I’m not sure if it’s any better but it made my opposite shoulder hurt where stuck a needle.
So instead of exercising I ate dinner and tried to read a book. I stress the “tried” because I fell asleep instead.
Other than that, there isn’t much new. More and more people at work are asking why I haven’t found a new job yet, but that never is easy for me. I just have to keep looking and keeping my fingers crossed.
I do love TV, but I might do other things if I didn’t have it. Maybe I should just cut back to the network channels. I live in a neighborhood where we can’t get TV without cable and when I was a kid we just had the local networks on our cable TV. I suppose there are worse things I could do with my time and I’d rather not find out what those things are. For example, there’s a new ham radio I want, but the last time I was on the radio trying to talk any distance was 2003? It’s been so long that I’ve forgotten most of my Morse code.
I keep thinking of all the junk my dad has and some people tell me I should keep it to remember him by. But do I really need a thousand keychains to remember my dad by? I think I’m going to put a bunch of them on ebay or something. Better than just trying to melt them to create one giant key chain.
It was a beautiful spring day in Portland. Couples were walking in the sunshine, eating at outdoor cafés. Every time I saw my next-door-neighbor, he was taking his kids to the park. So what was I doing? Reading comic books? Watching The Bourne Identity? Watching people burn their houses down? Drinking moonshine and shooting guns? You can probably guess.
I probably should have seen The Bourne Supremacy sooner. I read all the Bourne-this, and the Bourne-that books by Robert Ludlum when I was in Japan. Either way, I kind of liked how the movie wasn’t as grim as the book. I also watched the orginal version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and I didn’t like it as much as the remake. Even with Doris Day, I liked the newer one better.
So last night I was at the Lucky Lab brewpub for the second night in a row. The first night was a going-away party for a friend who has a 3-year job in Germany. The second night was to hear a neighbor’s band play. He’s in all sorts of bands and I never saw this group, but he’s been playing with them for 25 years! I feel kind of bad about it, since I’m on his email list for his shows and I haven’t gone for a long time. Don’t people know I’m boring and like watching TV?
Today I was going to either get to work late, or maybe just work from home. My mom had a call from SSA and I had to be around to translate. Unfortunately, that led to some questions about her green card and we had to go see la migra. It’s always a nice way to spend a day, panicked about having to go see INS. Even better, we also had to go through a metal detector and have our bags put through an x-ray machine. Twice, since we also had to go to the Social Security office.
The federales also have a new way of scheduling appointments. Instead of just having the numbered pull tabs and a sign that says, “Now serving number 78,” they have weird computerized gizmos I couldn’t understand. My degree is in Computer Science, not the oddities of bureaucracies.
Oh, and Bank of America gets thumbs up for letting us do our banking the way we wanted to do it. Wells Fargo, not so much. When the primary account holder of a Wells Fargo bank account dies, he can’t be taken off the account. You just have to close the account and start a new one. It wouldn’t sound so bad if the other bank had the same policy, but Bank of America was much easier to deal with (even though they took so long to fix the account).
So I went to the dentist today with my teeth feeling fine. Of course they didn’t like that and they started picking at my teeth with a metal pick until I started feeling a pain that’s so odd that that I can still feel it. Ow ow ow ow ow. For some reason I also keep signing up for these 7AM appointments so I can get to work at a decent time and I’m not even sure I want to be there.
We have yet another person bailing out of the group. Hooray. I really hope I’m not the last one left.
Oh, and I think I have one month left to use my free United ticket. Who’s taking bets on whether I let it lapse or not?
Traffic was kind of heavy on the way to work, and oddly quiet on the way home. The way to work can be explained by my own tardiness in leaving but I’m not sure how to explain the trip home. The gym was oddly empty as well.
So I’m thinking of attending the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June. I want to pretend that I’m still a programmer or something even though at work I’m a glorified tech writer. I take that back. Tech writing would be better than this. Anyway, I’m also thinking of taking a beginner’s golf class. It’s $525, but you get clubs. My mom thinks it’ll just be more junk I have laying around, and she’s probably right. Oh, well.
Somehow I was bright enough to schedule a 7AM dentist appointment so I better get to sleep.
