Well, I think I hit another personal best with Fran, but I better write down the time (7:52 with 2 40lb dumbbells) because every time I do Fran I end up a little shaky and the picture I take of the workout board is just plain fuzzy. Last time I know I was DFL with the 40lb dumbbells and I’m pretty sure that meant I took more than 13 minutes. My best time is 8 or 9 minutes, as far as I remember, so 7:42 isn’t so bad.

And look at that, I’m up late again. I’m not too worried about being up late on a Thursday night, because my Friday nights are usually about watching TV and being tired anyway. I’m expecting a long day at work setting up servers, so I don’t have to be completely awake, either. Or at least that’s my current plan.

So I really should put down the Kindle 2 now that I have the software on my Mac updated again, but when have I had any sense? I’ve given up dating so I’m now I can watch more TV. Especially this show Warehouse 13 where they keep talking about cookies. What can beat cookies?

HAH. HAH, I say. I was about to head to bed VERY EARLY with a book, but I helped a friend move his computer across the neighborhood. Really, moving a computer a couple of blocks is something you can do without a car, but moving it a few miles is not.

But it’s still not too late for me to head to bed not quite as early, but with the book nevertheless. I may just do that.

Just one game of Peggle first…

One thing that makes a workout hard is eating too much at lunch. Like a giant bratwurst and an equally large hamburger, potato salad, and baked beans. Plus a couple of beers. I was presented with two choices today, either go out to an off-site with my old group at work and submit to alcoholic and culinary peer pressure, or stay at work. There really wasn’t much of a choice to be made, and most of it had worn off by the time I made it to the gym.

I got a new NAS today (a network connected set of hard drives) and I’m up late setting it up. It’s meant to be very simple and the instructions are abysmally short. The problem is that I was using hard disks that already had data on them from a completely different system, and that confused the NAS. So now, hours later, after crashing several unrelated computers, I finally figured out what I was doing and I think I have it working now. I wonder if I need a new hobby.

I’m still trying to learn Mac OS X programming, but I figure the small slivers of time I get during the week aren’t going to be enough. I should just take that time and do something frivolous with it, like reading mysteries. Really, though, I spend a whole log of money reading mysteries. Or playing Peggle. My mom, sister, and I are all hooked on Peggle.

I saw some pretty incredible times in the workouts today and Jorgen and I didn’t do all that poorly. Our time wasn’t one of the fastest, but we did the high box jump and each of us almost fell off of it once. We also used the twenty five pound D-ball. Going from twenty to twenty five pounds doesn’t sound like a big deal until you start doing a lot of repetitions; it’s a 25% increase, after all. Pretty good for an old dude.

My big celebration should be because I survived another Monday. I’m not sure why, but that three-day weekend just made it all the harder to come back to work. It’s like I need a vacation.

The worst part about Sunday is that it’s almost Monday and especially after a long weekend. I don’t want to go back to work. I suppose it could be worse.

It really didn’t feel that much like the 4th of July because I was much too sober. I went to two picnics with my mom around, so it made more sense to limit myself to fewer beers than I usually drink. I did, however, drink a whole lot of Perrier.

And I didn’t watch the fireworks. The big Fort Vancouver fireworks (supposedly the largest fireworks west of the Mississippi or something else that the marketing folks keep repeating) were canceled this year due to lack of funding and that’s the one you can see on the horizon from the hill in front of our house. People bought plenty of illegal fireworks and were setting them off in the schoolyard, but I didn’t really care. I was busy trying to get further in this book on how to program Mac OS X, a book that I usually get a few chapters into before I finally have to do something else. This weekend, I didn’t have to do that much else, and some of the stuff in the book is starting to stick. It should, I’ve tried getting through versions 1, 2 and 3 of this book before. This is my second pass through version 3.

So there you go. You knew I was a nerd and I’m busy trying to live up to my nerd reputation.

When I take a day off, I don’t do all that much. I know people who have errands lined up but I’m more likely to sit around and fool around with my computer or read a book. Today I did both, and really didn’t get all that much done. I did, however, finish a John Rain novel by Barry Eisler, The Last Assassin, and a Myron Bolitar mystery by Harlen Coben, Long Lost. Both were pretty good, though both are getting a bit predictable. Sitting inside on a 90+°F day reading books is my idea of a day off.

This book habit is always a bit expensive and my sister told me I should read a real book that she swears she lent me, The Woods by Tara French. I think she took it back and I can’t find it, but I did find a copy of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X which is disappointing because those books cost $50 each. Ah, well. That’s life.

It’s a good thing I’m bad at computers, too. I’m going to spend this 3-day weekend inside with Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X and also trying to get my NAS working with TimeMachine backup for the Mac. I may just give up and buy a NEW NAS because the one I have is kind of ghetto. It “fell off a truck”, after all. I should probably try to get it running anyway, since I’ve spent so much money on my computer stuff lately. Besides, buying a Netgear NAS isn’t going to help pay Steve Jobs’ medical bills.

I have to admit that I wasn’t just looking for The Style Councils’ My Ever Changing Moods but I was watching this video that I thought was pretty funny. I thought these guys were Sprockets gone wrong, but they’re from San Francisco rather than Germany. The music is kind of silly, but it’s the kind of music I seem to have filled my iPhone with. I also should admit I heard Richard Marx along with Reminiscing by the Little River Band when I had it on shuffle. It’s not all European dance music on there, I also like my cheese.

So here I am, listening to an interview with the guys from Ejector and I should be asleep. Just like every day. Yeesh. I proved that I wasn’t too asleep at the gym when I climbed the rope four times without using my legs on the way up. I’m sure I’ll pay for it tomorrow; I already seem to have a crick in my neck.

I felt so great this morning I even got to work a little early. It was for naught, though, since I wasn’t able to leave early. I’ve somehow grown a bunch of new 4PM meetings. Not only that, but I started feeling rather sleepy in the middle of the day. Somehow my early morning energy ran out by mid-day.

So I was going to watch some more sessions from the Apple WWDC, but after I got through just a little bit I realized I wasn’t going to retain much of it. I think I may actually get to sleep early today! I’ll believe it when I see it.

Starting last year, I think, Apple posts videos from the sessions at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference to iTunes. It took all summer to get things up last year and I was kind of hoping it would be quicker this year. Geez, it only took them a couple of weeks. I downloaded several sessions, including a couple I missed, and started watching one tonight. It was a session I attended late in the week, when my attention span was reduced by the lack of sleep and surplus of alcohol. At least it started to make sense now that I’m watching it again.

I was really thinking I should get to sleep, but I’m watching a video, and it’s even an educational video about the innards of the Mac OS. Yeesh.

Today at the gym we did another partner sprint: row 200, swing (24k) 20 times, and run around 2/3 of the building and then rest while your partner does it. We did it for five rounds, I think. The last time we did it, I was partnered with a 19YO girl (yeah, give me a break, I’m old enough to be her father) and today I was partnered with a 25YO guy (and I’m old enough to be his father, too, really). One of these days I’ll say, “I felt great coming into the workout and I did great,” but this isn’t the day. I did do pretty well thanks to Jorgen the 25YO, but I felt like throwing up during the skills part of the workout. My hay fever came back with a vengeance yesterday and I took some Claratin last night, which meant that I was dopey all day.

OK, to be clearer, I felt DOPIER THAN USUAL all day and sleepier as well. That plus my brother-in-law going to the ER in the middle of the night and had me on edge. My genius sister decided to abstractly twitter about the ER visit this morning and then they turned off their phones to get some sleep and this just panicked everyone. I figured they were sleeping so I wasn’t too worried (just left a couple of phone messages around) but I even got a call from her friend in Chicago. Anyone who has been in an ER knows how you get prioritized when you’re not bleeding out or not breathing, especially in the middle of the night. I figure the longer it took him, the more likely it was for him to be OK, and I think it took them 4 hours from 2AM to 6AM. I still haven’t heard WHY they had to go in at 2AM, but whatever. I’ll ask them after they have a couple of days to rest up. Speaking of which, I should quit typing and hit the hay myself. But I’m not all that bright when it comes to time management in the evening.

I should, however, quit iTunes before I start watching another session video. “Managing Kernel Extensions” is sounding awfully good…

I have been sneezing all day. I wonder what plant species decided to have sex today? I thought I’d get my revenge, however, and hacked the heck out of the rhododendrons and nandinas in the front yard. I had to give up when I filled up two garbage cans (and when things started to look like hell). I don’t have the skills my dad had, and he called my style, “Chop chop.” I suppose you could also say that the soul of the gardener comes out in his work and my soul is filled with hack and slash, at least when it comes to plantlife.

I finished another Harlen Coben novel today and I’m well on my way with another Barry Eisler novel. I should probably get out and DO something, but books keep me away from the sharp objects that the plants are dreading. You know how it is.

I’ve been gaining weight lately. I looked at myself in the mirror a couple of weeks back and looked kind of pudgy. So I eventually got on the scale and I think I’m up five pounds. If you’re not a dude, you may wonder how I can have a brand-new medicine cabinet with a mirror behind the shelves, one on the front of the door, and one on the back of the door without actually looking myself in the mirror. But if you’re asking yourself that you’re not a dude. I look particularly at where I’m shaving without seeing my face. I look at if my hair standing straight up or whether I need a haircut but I don’t look at how much grey is there. I can look at various specifics without seeing the overall fat old greying guy who is standing there because, well, I’m a dude. That’s just sort of the way it goes.

Back to the weight gain, I sort of had a cheeseburger on Friday, but I’m not counting it because of several accounting tricks I’m employing. One is that it was blue cheese and not cheddar or swiss. I’m not counting crumbly cheeses. The second reason is that it was paid for by work, so I’m pretending it was forced on me. Don’t go telling me I could have had a salad instead, because that would assume that waving a tasty not-quite-a-cheeseburger under my nose wasn’t a cruel trick by an employer who knows how to manipulate his employees. What I’m saying is that I’m blaming others for my fallibility. It’s more fun that way.