You really didn’t want to hear about, “I ran test case x against library y and then entered the data into tabular format,” so I didn’t post. Really. But there is worse stuff I could have posted. Like how you can do whatever the hell you want if you’re 89 years old but it’s only common courtesy to tell the guy doing the laundry if you’ve pooped on stuff. (The guy doing the laundry is also doing a poor job of cleaning up and needs his sister’s help for most of it.)

Or I could tell you that I went on the dating sites again and got absolutely nowhere.

Or that I spent THREE HOURS trying to get a new wireless router working after the old one stopped talking to my megacorp-issued company laptop.

All very uninteresting.

And when I ventured out it wasn’t much better. My dad has been complaining about the food I get him; he tells me to get him whatever I’m having and even says my ideas sound good, but later he complains unless I somehow guessed what he really wanted. So today I went driving around looking for Japanese take-out. The first place I went is usually empty, but was packed tonight and the owner apologized and told me that he was working alone and it would take a while. So I went to the other place I knew to be open on Sunday and ordered. This took an HOUR. The whole ordeal took an hour-and-forty minutes, but I think my dad liked the food. Later I went and got myself a hamburger.

Well, I’ve worked on Saturday lots of times, so it’s not that unique an event. I didn’t quite finish my day’s tasks and I think an extra day will just about do it.

The gym appears to be back to normal. A couple of times tonight there were only two of us in the place. The whole “busy on Friday” thing was kind of freaking me out. It is a bit boring just moving the weights around without having the women shoot me dirty looks but, eh, what can you do? 

Hey, my post of the fake myspace.com email is getting lots of traffic. Guess I must have gotten indexed by google or something.

So people at the gym were telling me that the balancing exercises I do at the gym weren’t just to make me look foolish. In fact EVERYONE looks foolish doing them and I wasn’t special.

Hey, they have their view of the world, and I have mine. In my world-view, EVERYTHING is meant to make me look foolish.

Well, it’s my own fault. Earl the plumber (brother of Keeley, wife of my best friend Greg) came by to look at some rusted drain pipes we had. As long as he was here, he looked at the drain pipes that are clogging up from the bathtub. I think he figured it would be about $500 to fix the rusted pipes as well as the ones that are clogging every three years or so. Being as tribal as I am, I trust him and told him whenever he had the time, fix the pipes. Well, I know he does good work, too. Anyway, I couldn’t hustle him out, it’s Earl, after all. (Aapple Plumbing in Hillsboro if you need anyone in West Portland.)

Anyway, I got to the gym late, and Dave the trainer was telling me about breaking up with his girlfriend. He’s 11 years her junior, and her biological clock was ticking quite loudly, I think. (This is just what I infer.) Her best friend was in the slot after me, so it was all kind of stressful for him, I’m sure.

So, I left my contact info with a woman from the gym. After a year and a half, I finally have some sort of communication outside of the gym. She looks like my ex, but her arms are bigger than mine, and it looks like pure muscle. Guess why? (I’ll wait.)

(Still waiting.)

SO I CAN TEACH LOW-INCOME ELDERLY RESIDENTS ABOUT COMPUTERS! She said she could pay me, but I figure this is a volunteer thing. I’m kind of excited to see what they want help with. Email, ebay, wikipedia? Who knows? Just as long as they don’t fall for any spam scammers…

Well, it wasn’t so bad, actually. I was planning on watching the football game tonight and she wanted me to take my dad out to dinner. He didn’t want to go (though he hasn’t been out of the house for a week) so my sister and I just headed up to Skyline Hamburgers. I spent the rest of the night taking care of banking for the radio club and for myself.

The good news today is that I got a call back from the contractor looking at the front of the house. He said repairing the facade would be AT LEAST $30,000US. I figured I needed to enjoy some real debt so I told him to come and give me a more accurate bid. Hooray.

Yesterday, after I went out to my weekly breakfast with my buddy Greg, I got a doozy of a stomach ache. Fortunately, it was after I started the laundry, so I did get SOMETHING done, but every time I stood up I’d start getting shooting pains in my stomach. I really was expecting my knee to hurt, not my stomach. I basically spent the day sleeping.

Today wasn’t much better. Sunday during football season – you get the idea. I went to Joe’s Cellar for the Sunday special but they no longer have chicken and dumplings! It was Yankee pot roast that I enjoyed but my dad did not. It certainly was a disappointment after anticipating chicken and dumplings.

So today at megacorp, we had our forced frivolity today including ice skating and broomball. Against my better judgement, I participated in all the activities. I say it was against my better judgement because I DON’T LIKE ICE. It’s hard and slippery. The ice skating went very well, but the broomball showed me that I really have no sense. At first I was playing a zone but when the other team scored on us twice, I started running around like a madman. I even took the ball away from the VP of our division. I was so tired that I couldn’t eat the dessert they provided afterwards and sweated through my shirt and sweatshirt. I also fell on my right knee THREE TIMES. So now I’m limping around.

I also won a drawing for a $100 gift certificate, but I’m not sure the knee pain was worth it. Probably, though.

I thought I fixed comments, but IF NO ONE IS READING THEN NO ONE WILL COMMENT. I’m about to break it again, and no one will care.

So I had my much anticipated meeting with my manager at megacorp today. I was afraid it was another, “Pile on the work,” meeting that everyone has seemed to get this week. But he was really tired from a transglobal business trip and I came prepared with a non-trivial list of tasks I’d accomplished lately and a tentative schedule for the rest of the year. (This is why they pay me money, to do the odd-seeming things. If it were all playing with computers, I’d have to pay them, I’m sure.) Oddly enough, I’m still enjoying my job.

The first thing I broke is this blog. The next thing I “broke” is my alarm clock. I set it for 4:45AM so I could drive my mom to the airport . Well, I forgot to set the time back to PST. So at 3:45AM I was swatting at all the clocks I have in the room, trying to remember where I was and what I was supposed to be doing. I decided NOT to reset the clock since I was sure I’d wake up in an hour (HAH).

I woke up this morning with my sister standing over me saying, “You going or what?” Fortunately she had no troubles with her alarm clock and she drove over as well. I was kinda loopy all day until I had both my morning coffee and my afternoon Diet Coke at around 3:00PM.

Oh, and I got my $2500 window installed today! It wasn’t raining today, even though we’ve been getting flood-like rain the past week. I think we get a couple of inches of rain a month here (it’s constant but not a lot of water) but recently we’ve had an inch per day or so. Pretty weird.

This is the trip I had to cancel out on to take my job with megacorp (where they just asked me for a projection of measurable accomplishments on a weekly basis from now until the end of the year) and it would have been my first trip back in 14 years. I left a fiancee and an engineering job because my dad was ailing and what do I have to show for it now? A quick trip to a crashing high tech company, dozens of rejection letters from medical school, never finding another full-time engineering job, several jobs at startups that meant long hours with little pay, and lots of other things I won’t actually list.

I was finally going back to visit friends and relatives for three weeks including a trip to the Japan Sea town of Toyama and a ham radio convention, but I had to cancel it all. Ah, well, that’s life.

I better hit the hay. I had to make a trip to a couple of grocery stores before I found a box of Ho-Ho’s. Dr. Kawasaki, the son of Dr. Kawasaki, and the brother of Dr. Kawasaki, liked Ho-Ho’s when he was a kid here in Portland, so we take him some as a gift. We just got an email asking for a second box, so I had to drive around and find some. I have to get up before 5AM to drive my ma to the airport so I better call it quits.

First let me tell you that I had SEVENTY-FIVE little terrorists come and demand candy. Not too bad, actually. They interrupted my viewing of the Steelers vs. the Ravens, but it’s kinda fun and annoying at the same time to wait for the bell to ring.

Well, I had to post this late because I was busy looking busy. I was told by my boss that he wants to know what I’m doing and what I’m going to be doing, WEEK BY WEEK for the rest of the year. Geez, I barely know what I’m doing for the next couple of weeks.

P.S. I forgot to push the “Save” button.

I sat around and watched football today and yesterday I did even less. I did get even more emails from fake women and I don’t know what else. Sometimes it’s good to just sit around. I better not make a habit of it, though.