My sister is coming to town and she found the cheapest flights using cheaptickets.com. I tried to pay for her ticket, but I didn’t have her frequent flier number, and she wasn’t answering the phone because she was busy watching the stupid TV. “Oh, I had to watch Lost and West Wing.” Well, in the time between 8PM and 10PM when her stupid shows were over, the web site has deteriorated. First, it wouldn’t let me pay for the ticket, then it wouldn’t render. It’s slowly coming back to life.

So I started looking up cheaptickets.com on the internet. Searching google, I found that as recently as July of 2001, cheaptickets.com was being called an “INTERNET AIRFARE SWINDLE!!!” on misc.consumers on the usenet. Most recently, they sold email addresses to “affiliates” leading to more unwanted commercial email (UCE, or spam in simpler terms).

Anyway, I have to pay for her frigging ticket, so I figure I get to complain. We’ll see if cheaptickets.com will let me buy the tickets.

Little Johnny was in his 4th grade class when the teacher asked what their fathers did for a living. All the typical answers came up: fireman, cop, salesman. Johnny was being rather quiet so the teacher asked him about his father.

“My father is an exotic dancer in a gay cabaret and takes off all his clothes in front of other men. Sometimes, if there’s a really good offer, he’ll go out to the alley with some guy and make love for money.”

The teacher hurriedly set the other children to work on some coloring, and took Little Johnny aside to ask, “Is that really true about your father?

“No,” said Johnny, “He plays for the New York Yankees, but I was too embarassed to say so.”

Go Red Sox.

So my sister got me a birthday present and it’s STILL backordered. I don’t really know if the Griffin RadioShark even exists! It’s like a TiVo for the radio and I’m waiting for it for months, obviously, since my birthday was in April.

I wonder if it will arrive before the latest gadget I bought myself. I spent three $25 Amazon reward certificates on a silly voice recorder and cheesy camera combo. Nothing like baseball, football, and toys to keep my mind off of politics.

So yesterday I went to a wedding reception that was a great party put on by Ruth and Brad. Brad cleaned out his huge barn-sized shop and set up tables, and then had O’Connors cater a huge barbecue with roast beef, caesar salad, grilled salmon, and lot of other ways to eat yourself silly. I stayed around after all the other ham radio folks took off, but made it back to Portland in time to get to my friend Dan’s birthday party.

So, of course, that meant I spent a lot of time carousing and drinking more than a couple of beers. More than a couple of beers meant I wanted to take a lot of naps today. But I did make it to the gym.

In reality, nothing much interesting happened other than I got to see the Cowboys lose today. That’s always fun.

That just means that I’m either over 65 or that I have a chronic illness, and I’m not over 65. My doc’s office called to change my appointment for next month, so I asked if I qualified for a ‘flu shot. They told me to come in to get since they had six left. Now I’m just worried how my parents can get their ‘flu shots. (They’re over 65, by the way.)

My blood pressure was high today; it’s usually a little high, about 120-130/90, but today it was like 130/100. I’d just had a cup of coffee, I was stressed about the whole ‘flu shot thing, and I had to drive through rush hour traffic to make it to the doctor’s office in under 30 minutes. So I guess there was a reason for my blood pressure to be high, but maybe I need to start taking yoga. Exercising, even marathon preparation, didn’t lower my blood pressure before.

Also, I need to start eating healthier. The only enjoyable thing I can do, and it’s gone, too.

I spend all day at work on the computer, and I come home and spend time on my own computer. This evening, I tried to move around some things to get spam filtering working better. I think I just spent a lot of time doing nothing, making things more complicated. Ah, well. This is what you get when you have too much time on your hands, and when you’re used to doing things while watching TV. In high school, I’d have the TV on, the radio on, and I’d read a magazine. Perhaps that’s why I often skim things and not read them in detail.

But very often, there’s no reason to read magazines in detail. Like Runner’s World repeating the same things month after month. I guess they’re not repeating things, since they often contradict themselves, but the topics were the same. Bicycling is the same way.

Maybe I need to read more Dostoyevsky.

So I was just in the bathroom looking at my ass. According to a friend of mine, a very hot tall blonde, women do this all the time looking for jiggles and cellulite. (OK, so I’m overstating things: I haven’t talked to her since 1995 so we’re not really friends.) Heck, I would have have been honored, nay, grateful, to get that kind of inspecting job and I would have done a lot to keep it.

Anyway, back, to my ass, I was looking at it because I had an itch and thought it could have been where they’d shoved the needle through my skin (and through my bone) to get the rather painful bone marrow samples, some of which were lost by those geniuses at OHSU. On closer inspection, there were scars there and one of them was what was itching. And as for my ass, it wasn’t all that impressive. Like most guys, I figure it’s back there, it’s not going anywhere, and it’s the only ass I have – so why look at it and critique it? It’s too late, though, I looked at it and it’s kind of disappointing.

It’s not like my ass matters. I was comparing notes with my friend Il about the gym, and he said he feels self-conscious there, like everyone is looking at him. I don’t think anyone is looking at me. Quite the opposite. I mean, the 22-year-old gave me a dirty look the other day, but I think she gives most everyone a dirty look except the dude with the head like a melon. (She came in tonight looking younger than usual because of a bad, almost goth-like job of applying makeup. It’s Halloween season. But she did seem to be enjoying her conversation with the dude with the head like a melon who I hadn’t seen for weeks.)

Anyway, I think if you took a survey of the people at the gym, only the two or three guys I say hello to even would have a chance of knowing I show up. Maybe also my neighbors I see there. Plus, I have a list of reasons why women don’t want to go out with me. They’re on my blog somewhere. I’m not giving anyone any more help figuring out why women shouldn’t go out with me. An Asian hipster friend of mine who always went out with hot chicks at school even wanted women to wear a button indicating whether they’d go out with Asian guys. (OK, so he refused to talk to me the last year we were both at school together, so he’s not really a friend either.)

Anyway, I think I’ll watch some science fiction and look at some pr0n like any good 40-year-old Asian guy living with his parents should do.

Oh, and this morning when I got up and went to the bathroom, I could tell that I had asparagus last night. I recognized that smell, though: the smell of my pee after I take Gleevec. So maybe it’s all a conspiracy and they’re just poking me with needles and charging me $80 per pill for ASPARAGUS TABLETS.

Yeah, I know. I should stay away from medicine and stick with my sci-fi and pr0n.

There used to be free parking near our local REI, underneath the freeway. They just installed solar-powered parking meters there.

Notice I said, “under the freeway.” Apparently the geniuses at the City of Portland who replaced all the old parking meters with the new, solar powered “SmartMeters,” also have to pull out the batteries and recharge them on a regular schedule. Somehow I don’t think they’re ever going to make back the money they spent on the meters, but that’s progress, I guess.

I just checked out several volumes of Proust in graphic novel form from the library. My friend Brandon (not a guy) works for the library, and one of her co-workers told me about it. Brandon told me that her co-worker, who we know to be a lesbitarian, has a crush on me. So all the talk about Proust and the time she spent reading it in the original French is just to impress me. Even so, maybe I’ll figure out a little more of what Proust is talking about.

Continuing on the non-breeder front, I was about to head to the gym yesterday when I decided to do some yardwork first. My neighbor was also doing some yardwork and was headed to his gym, but be both decided it would be a nice day for a walk instead. It was a beautiful afternoon, so we went on a walk from our block at about 150′ above sea level to the Pittock Mansion at about 850′. It’s kind of neat to look down on the bridges and downtown buildings.

We talked about the gym he was about to join and how he didn’t like my gym because of the number of young women there, standing around talking instead of exercising. As long as they’re not trying to use the equipment I’m trying to use, I certainly don’t mind watching the young women if they don’t give me dirty looks.

I think I found the ideal job. My friend Greg and I went to the open house for NOAA’s Portland office. I saw weather geeks and river geeks in their native environment, working with loads of measured data and complex software used for visualization and analysis. It was GREAT. I asked one of the guys about river and stream levels and admitted I liked watching the levels even though I never get out fishing. I told him I was a geek. He said, “We’re all geeks here.”

The reason we got there was because I had Greg drive to Best Buy in Beaverton so I could get some cheap CDs (Fatboy Slim and Cake). He saw a $999 Samsung HDTV with an HD tuner he wanted to buy, but they didn’t have one. So it was off to the Best Buy near the Portland airport to see if they had one. Luckily, we took a random route thanks to my directions and went by the NOAA office, and they had a big “OPEN HOUSE,” sign out front. We set it all up at Greg’s house and, unfortunately, we didn’t get a good HD signal.

Sure the heck beats finding white supremacist hate literature on your front lawn (which I also did today.)

I was talking to my sister on my cell phone when I hit a dead spot. So I dialled the technical assistance number to tell them it was foolish to have a dead spot in the middle of town. The first number I called put me through a phone maze and then told me to call a different number. So I called the second number and tried the usual trick of hitting “0” to get an operator. No dice. It told me to listen to all the choices before I could make that selection.

I finally got to an operator and at the end she asked if there was anything else. I told her I wanted to complain about the two phone numbers and the phone maze. She told me to call “611,” which was the first number I tried, the one that made me dial the second number. Then she told me I should have hit “0,” the number that gave me the recording telling me to listen to everything before hitting “0.” And then she told me she couldn’t take complaints about the phone maze. I said, fine, then I’d like to complain that she couldn’t take my complaint. She quickly read her closing script and hung up on me.

And that’s what I get for using a cell phone.

So, lately some of my female friends have been telling me how much they love firemen and Joaquin Phoenix. I must admit that I’m not that keen on either. I mean, I do respect firemen and the job they do, but there’s a lot of swaggering going on there and with that swagger comes a huge dose of Male Answer Syndrome. Like most guys, I don’t like to be told “the answers” or what to do. Especially by guys who think they’re god’s gift to, well, everything, when their main qualification is that they have testosterone poisoning clouding their judgement making them too foolish to run away from a fire. And that they can grow a decent moustache.

And what’s up with Joaquin? Personally, I don’t find him attractive at all. He just creeps me out. Oh, well, there’s no chance I’ll be the poster boy for the hot and sexy, so I should just shut up. The 22-year-old at the gym even gave me the dirtiest look today, and not the good kind of dirty, either. But Joaquin is someone who really needs to grow a fireman’s moustache. Plus, he’s got nothing on my favorite gay actor, Tom Cruise.