I was at my friend Sylvia’s party last night, drinking too much and acting like an idiot. Especially since I was out until 4AM. I’m way to old for this kind of crap. Fortunately, I had just checked out a mystery from the library so I got to sleep in, finish the book, and then take another nap before I went out to dinner with friends.

Get this, I avoided the cheeseburger at dinner. I’m fairly sure the pulled pork sandwich wasn’t much better for me, but I also avoided the fries and got a salad instead. But I did have crème brûlée for dessert so it’s still slow progress on my part. For those in Portland, the restaurant was Cava on 54th and Foster and it was excellent. There are several things on the menu I want to try there.

The gym is not a competition, so I’m only cheating myself. HAH. Of course it’s a little competitive, and I’m telling on myself just so I can work up with some flimsy excuses before I get called on it.

• I wasn’t doing box jumps today.

  I’m an old man and I was using the tallest box for box jumps. It was the one that was left. So I did some jumps for a while until I decided I could either just stand there sucking wind or just step up onto the box. OK, so we were counting how many we were doing and I should have stopped counting the number I did, but did I mention that I’m an old man? At least compared to the guys who are either in their 20’s or just barely in their 30’s? Besides, I just saw a blog posting of what happens when you screw up on a box jump. Also I saw a dude limping out of the earlier class. So instead of calling me a cheater, you can also call me a chicken shit.

• I do less weight than the other guys.

  I do less weight than the 20-something dudes (and I’m including the 32-year-old dude in the 20-somethng category) because, honestly, I’m not as strong in the shoulders as those guys. Or anywhere else (except maybe in the mouse arm.) Maybe my big Asian thighs can handle more air squats (squats with no weight) but really, they’re 20-something and they’re not carrying around all this IT weight that I had to develop for my career. (Ka-rear, get it? Hahaha. I’m so funny.) Sometimes I feel like it’s cheating because going up or down just 5 pounds in a shoulder-press makes a big difference for me. So if I’m doing 5 pounds less, I’m getting off a lot easier.

• I eat too many cheeseburgers.

  Wait, this was about cheating. I think I’ve lost my train of thought.

In other news, Mark got his muscle-up today and it should be posted on the Recreate Fitness blog soon. This means I could go off my cheeseburger boycott, but maybe I should keep that up until I can get my own muscle-up. Now I have to figure out if the other things I eat are worse for me than cheeseburgers.

I’ve been drinking and so I’ll just list the things I shouldn’t have eaten today. I did have another grilled chicken salad at Buffalo Wild Wings today but I had my birthday dinner at RingSide.

• A half of a small bottle of wine.
• Half of the seared scallop appetizer plate.
• A mixed green salad.
• The Kobe beef tenderloin (rare) with garlic mashed potatoes.
• A shot of single malt Scotch (Oban).
• Some large fraction of a hot fudge sundae.

But I did lose weight in my wallet again.

There’s a warm-up exercise we do at the gym where we throw a medicine ball to each other around the block. If you have the ball, you can’t move. The other person runs ahead and you throw it to them, then they have to stop and you run ahead. I thought I was going to have to go home and take a nap after I did that, but for some reason I was able to finish the workout of the day a lot stronger than I expected. I kind of doubt it was because I had a salad for lunch today. It cost $12 and for that price you’d figure it would be gold plated or at some chi-chi place in the Pearl, not at Red Robin in Hillsboro.

So there’s a big sign at the gym: Todd held Hostage – Day 1. I wonder if this no cheeseburger/salad idea is actually going to improve my workouts. It never seems to work when I have the awful taco salad at work. I was kind of convinced that following the “zone” diet was just superstition, but maybe it actually works.

Somehow I don’t think Get Smart is going to be as funny without Don Adams but I’ll probably see it anyway. And Speed Racer. But in any case, The Head Honcho at the gym told me he’d buy me another cheeseburger if I beat 1min 40sec for 500m on my row tonight. I could hear Tina, (The Brains Behind the Gym) saying, “Oh no. Not this again.” Well, my row time was 1min 41.9sec. So I missed it by 1.9 seconds. And a guy who should have been rowing faster than me for the last month or so has finally passed me and I’m probably not going to catch up. He’s 12 years younger than me and I’m too lazy to score any steroids. I mean, really, what’s the point? If I get too strong then I could just RIP that mouse right out of its USB socket and then where would I be?

I’ve decided to give up cheese burgers until Mark (the guy whose diet I really should be emulating) gets a “muscle up.” I only say this because I KNOW HE’S READING THIS and I KNOW HE CAN DO IT. This probably just means I’ll eat something worse for me, but cheeseburgers are kind of my thing right now. I may actually like fried chicken more than cheeseburgers, now that I think of it. In any case, here it is in print, no cheeseburgers for me until Mark gets a muscle up.

In all honesty, I’ve been trying to work up to a muscle up for a while and I’m not even close to doing it. All this googling and research isn’t getting much closer to lifting my big ass over the “sticking point.”

Maybe it’ll be easier now that my wallet is $350 lighter. I bought tickets (or at least put my name in for the lottery) for NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball 1st & 2nd Round. Maybe I’ll be there. Maybe I’ll watch it on TV. We’ll see.

My friend Megan is coming to town this weekend and we’re all going out to dinner somewhere. I’m sure I won’t be able to follow the guideline, “What Would Mark Eat?” I’m also going out to my yearly (now like 4-times yearly) trip with my buddy Il to RingSide because it’s my birthday. I just stepped on my ultra-accurate bathroom scale and noticed I’d lost a few pounds (like 3 or 4) but I’m sure I’ll erase any of those gains this weekend. My mom’s buying me doughnuts, too. Some help she is.

Il’s mom passed away a year ago on the 13th and my dad passed away a year ago on the 15th. They both missed my birthday, which also happens to be Il’s brother’s birthday, and my dad died on an already inauspicious tax day. So I figure we have reason to at least mark their passing and, if nothing else, that’s a reason for us to go to Ringside.

I should apologize to my friend Mr. Slab the photographer for stealing this picture of my dad and posting it without permission. The Slabs went out to lunch with him at Wan Q in Beaverton. My dad always wanted to eat what someone else ordered, so very often he’d finish what my mom was eating so I wonder if that big bowl of noodles was what he actually ordered. It’s hard to know.

I’m not religious and I don’t really believe in the afterlife, but sometimes it makes me happy to think of my dad still doing the things he liked to do. Maybe not in his last few years where he just seemed to sleep a lot and watch re-runs of M*A*S*H all day and night, but maybe more like when he would do bonsai and make model boats and airplanes and actually putter around trimming the trees outside. Or the guy who filled up his room with toy cars and “Hello, Kitty” crap. Maybe I’m wrong and he’s somewhere finally figuring out how to run a video camera or computer he just bought. I guess I’ll never know.

So it turns out my sister’s flikr site wasn’t as secret as I had thought and I stole some pictures. Here’s a picture of the cake, which is also on my sister’s blog today. I successfully blew out the candles, but I can’t remember what I wished for.

As long as I was stealing pictures, here’s one of me and my birthday beer. This is what I look like all hopped up on pollen and Benadryl.

I was pretty tired today but made it to the gym anyway. I think I’m too tired to remember what we did besides slamball and rowing, alternating each minute for ten minutes. There’s a couple of hardcore crossfitters at our gym now, I think they’re going to find out pretty quickly that no one at this gym wants to work out so hard that we see our last meal again. There’s a clear line between working out and overdoing it and I probably would have given up bicycling and running and going to the gym for all these years if I was throwing up all the time. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have to do all that exercise if I quit training with a steady diet of Popeye’s fried chicken.

I ate way too much tonight. Funny thing, I didn’t feel so bad after the big German dinner last night, but we were finishing up some of my birthday cake and now I feel like someone set concrete in my stomach. My sister made the cake and it was so good. My sister made a birthday cake for her friend Wendy once that had five pounds of Hershey’s chocolate in it. At least that’s the way I remember it and I’ll deny any corrections to it.

Oh, and I’d show you a picture but my sister has some secret Flickr account and I don’t know how to get to it.

My sister gave me a Nike driver and I went to Golfsmith today to check out the one that’s the larger version of the one she gave me. The guy there warned me that the bigger was easier to hit, but it was a lot louder, too. He let me try them both out. I cranked the big one back (it looks like a lunchbox on a long stick) and WHAM! Holy hell, I though my ears wouldn’t stop ringing. I figure I didn’t want to carry hearing protection with me to the golf course and that I’m not good enough to be making that kind of noise. I kept the smaller driver, which made a lot less noise.

Other than that I spent a lot of time realizing that my 1990’s computer is a lot slower than my newer computer. I think it may be time to upgrade some of them, including the one that runs my blog and SuperEggplant.

It was hideously nice today, probably 82°F. I went to the gym where Tina (the actual brains behind the gym) had made me a CD of “oldies” which are from when I was young so I deny the songs are old at all. Nathan, The Head Honcho, had joked earlier in the week that I should bring in my box of birthday candy and share it. I certainly don’t eat that much candy in general, so I did just that. Dana the Trainer said, “What are you thinking, bringing candy to a gym?” I suppose I should have taken it all to a dentist’s office instead.

After I got home I mowed the lawn. I could hear lawn mowers running all over the neighborhood, but I ran out of gasoline and had to use manual methods. Good thing we have two push mowers as well as a gas mower. In any case, none of this was good for my hay fever. I decided to try a Benadryl and I was surprised it didn’t make me sleepy. Until later, when I passed out watching the Masters.

I went out to dinner with my mom, sister, and brother-in-law, and my brother-in-law’s friend Dave. I guess it’s actually his buddy’s dad. We went to the Berlin Inn, a German restaurant I’ve sent people to in the past, but I’d never actually made it until tonight. It was great!

Oh, and I didn’t really expect anything from my sister, but she and my mom got me a Nike Sumo driver! I may have to go to Golfsmith to ask them if I should swap it for the big square one that’s supposed to be easier to hit, but what a great present! Now to get some wedges…

I’m an Asian dude, and fairly hairless, but I think I have more hair in my nose than on the rest of my body. My old boss insisted that you should pluck the hairs out, thereby warning the remaining follicles to keep in line, but I’m afraid it’s a lost cause in there. I’m also never going to be able to grow a decent moustache, but maybe I can just have a combover of nose hair. My eyebrows are out-of-control as well but I can’t think of a use for that.

So I’m intolerant at times, especially for a liberal. I think I’ve decided I have no use for humorless people. I’m not sure why but they sure do annoy me. It’s too bad that we can’t make them all get jobs as accountants and then ship them off to some sort of “Accountant Island” or something. I’m sure some accountant will take umbrage at some imagined slight in my plan, but that would clearly indicate their humorlessness. Ain’t nothing worse than a humorless person who thinks they have a sense of humor.

THH bought me my cheeseburger today. I was supposed to look into the best places for cheeseburgers but I was so buried at work that I had to go with the general consensus that Widmer was the place to go. I think I’ve confirmed that the food there is generally great, but the burgers are kind of dry. But dry or not, I still like my cheeseburgers.

So I got my first (and possibly only) birthday present from my buddy Sun. A box of 70’s candy! My sister told me how much tax she owes and let’s just say it’s more than I thought it would be. I didn’t expect anything anyway. Maybe a bag or Ricola or something.

And just in case you can’t read what’s in it, here’s the text from the lid.

I think there’s a lot more eating in store for this birthday, too.

DoodieheadThe Head Honcho at the gym said he was expecting to read about the workout today which was kind of hard. I’m sure normal crossfit guys would scoff at it, but we did dumbbell clean and split jerks interspersed with runs around the blocks. It started out as 20-run-20-run-20-run, but we looked tired enough after the first round so it was cut down to 20-run-15-run-9-run.

I wasn’t quite last today because someone else cramped up. Most days I’m almost certain to be DFL. (Dead effing last.) But I consider that to be a lot better than DNF (did not finish). I keep telling THH that I should be lifting a lot less weight, but he doesn’t buy it. Saturday we may have my birthday workout. It’s number 44. He’s threatening 44 pullups, etc, but Dave the Trainer (yeah, my old trainer) said it’s more likely that I’d do 44% of that. Hahahaha. Dave still has my back.

So THH told me he’d buy me a cheeseburger if I beat my rowing time last Wednesday and I did that quite handily. Well, by several seconds anyway. I sort of lucked out, too, since I did the row before some of the rest of the exercises. Now I’m supposed to find a non-divey place for a cheeseburger tomorrow. I think the consensus was the Widmer Gasthaus, but I’m supposed to come up with some options. I think THH thinks I spend most of my day at work dinking around surfing for hamburger places on the web. That used to be the case but since so many people are out, I’m actually working. Oh, the humanity!