Well not exciting is ordering a $1300 ham radio. For that much you’d figure you’d get a bit better service. But I got an email about six hours after the credit card was declined. I called the store and asked, “Why was my card declined?” They didn’t know. Now, I worked at a mail order chocolate store for about three weeks one Christmas break. A fancy chocolate mail-order store. I know what kinds of things the credit card machine spits out. Bad number. Bad expiration date. Bad check digits. Bad address. Etc, etc. Part of the benefits of packing fudge for three weeks.

But the store didn’t know what was wrong with my order. They were kind of confused about it, too. “Uh, we don’t know.” Did you see any error codes? “Uh, we don’t know.” Does the machine give you error codes? “Uh, we don’t know.”

So I called the credit card company and they told me that it was an unusual purchase, so they disapproved it. I didn’t find out that they disapproved it until I got home, found the message on my answering machine, and called them back. Now why do they call my home phone? If I’m using my credit card, I’m most likely not there.

Anyway, the store charged my card on Friday because we weren’t going to risk another credit card company screw-up. The radio is going to ship some time after the company gets through counting their inventory.

OK, so last night didn’t go so well. Let me summarize:

1. I had to work late again, and we were at work until 10:40PM.
2. I had to drop my car off at the Honda dealer, and was going to get a ride back from my mom. She followed me for about a mile, then she decided she was going to be clever and took her own route. Unfortunately, she went to the body shop instead of the Honda dealer (probably 15 miles apart). She waited for half an hour before going home and calling my cell phone. So I stood around in downtown Beaverton from 11:15PM until 12:15AM.
3. I got a letter from my insurance company denying some payments. They had two different accounts for me with two different social security numbers.
4. Loud kids at 1AM. I had to chase them off to get any sleep.
5. Louder kids (about a dozen in 3 SUVs) at 2AM waking me up. I had to chase them off as well.

That’s it, really. If the kids would just be quiet about their business, I wouldn’t chase them off. But they’re kids with their dope and loud stereos. I don’t know why they don’t just go to a parking lot in the industrial area where there’s no one to wake up.

I actually told a guy at REI, “If I wanted to sleep with a stick up my ass, I’d shove the stick up my ass and sleep in a bed.” When I was a kid, I was in Boy Scouts and we went hiking every month. We met mainly during the school year and that meant the rainy season in Portland. Lots of sleeping out where it was wet, cold, and miserable. When it was nice, we had mosquitoes. I haven’t been camping in years. The closest thing is probably Cycle Oregon in 1995. I’m not sure I’ve been in my sleeping bag since that time.

I did talk to the woman who caught my eye the first time I went to the gym. I asked her about her iPod mini. That’s it. Pretty exciting, eh?

In any case, it beats staying at work until 10PM.

Oh, and I guess it’s the time of year that the pre-meds start looking at my page of medical school rejections. As always, my favorite is from the University of Washington.

My sister and my friend Megan are always accusing me of being gay. Joining a gym didn’t help my image all that much (I was feeling like a blob so I had to do something.)

Imagine my surprise when I got a message from a guy at the gym telling me, “I cannot forget you! your big love, ;-)” Of course it was a virus (there was a program attached) but it was pretty funny.

And, in case you’re wondering, I’m just not that good at finding women interested in me.

I just got home from work at 12:00AM and I started out the day at 8:30AM so it’s time to hit the hay. Hooray for small software companies!

The fun was mostly because of the wedding of Jason and Cami Wilcox. I don’t know what you do for fun in Hermiston, so I spent a few hours in my motel room watching cable TV. I did see some incredible snow blowers (the kind they push in front of locomotives to clear the tracks) and made my first trip to WalMart. I tried to avoid WalMart, but when I asked at the wedding/flowers/tuxedo store where I could buy a card, they told me that my only choice was WalMart. I was fairly unimpressed with the selection of cards, but you could get a poor selection of just about everything there.

The blowers were much more exciting. I saw them on my way into town. I had some spare time on Saturday (things didn’t start until 3PM) so I went to have a closer look and, luckily, the guys maintaining the “museum” were there to show me the coal-tar fired plow and the electric plow.

I had a fun meeting both the families who were friendly and welcoming. Of course, it was pretty calm: the most exciting thing that didn’t happen during the bachelor party was when I tried to get them to cut a cake but everyone else was full. But I certainly wasn’t disappointed. And whenever I get the instructions to the horseshoe-ish game that they were playing, I’ll post them here.

The only thing close to a hitch was the trip back. On the first 10 miles from Umatilla to I-84, I got so many bugs on my windshield that I could hardly see when there were approaching headlights. That left 173 miles or so on I-84 with a buggy windshield. I had to wash them all off today and it was quite a chore.

It’s 80°F inside right now at 9:30PM. Today it got up to the mid 90’s, officially 91°F, but the official temperature is measured out at the airport, at the end of the gorge, by the Columbia river, and it cooler there than in town. Tomorrow I drive out to Eastern Oregon, where it’s even hotter. I’ll be standing in the heat in a tuxedo. Woo. Continue reading OK, who left the heat on? →

For the past couple of years some dumb car race has come to town. I like car races as much as the next redneck, but these yokels get a police escort and rumble their tractor-trailer billboards through the center of downtown. It would be one thing if you could see the race cars, but all you could see is the damn trucks and the advertising plastered on the sides. And there are so many of them that it blocks traffic for 15 minutes. If you try to sneak across the street between trucks, the cops yell at you. Not in a kind manner, either. One woman was told, “You take one more step and I’m giving you a ticket. Don’t try me!”

So I mounted my one-man protest. Every time they honked, I rated what I thought of them on a scale of one to five (using my center finger to rate them as “one”). Then I got across the street from where I was trying to go and saw the long chain of trucks that still had to come through. I started shouting at the trucks that were honking. Nothing kind, unfortunately.

Then I got in an argument with a businessman who told me I was representing the city and that I was an asshole. Heh. Well, we argued a bit and my co-worker was smirking at me the whole time. I let him know how I thought it was all his fault.

Anyway, I have no effect on town hall and I’ll never be able to get them to stop doing dumb crap like paying for new stadiums with taxpayer money. But I seem to keep mounting my own personal protests when I have the chance.

Heh. Representing the city. That’s actually pretty funny.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that LA lost. The game reminded me of the best of the Harlem Globetrotters vs the Washington Generals. LA got smoked.

I scored a gmail account today. So that means a gigabyte of storage, and Google gets to look through all your email. So, the largest thing I get regularly is that fake Microsoft Security Bulletin that is about 150KB. So that means my gmail account can hold almost 7000 copies of that spam.Whee!

So the Lakers still lost. Hooray! When they assembled the dream team with Gary Payton and that darn Karl Malone, I thought they’d be unstoppable and I was just hoping that they wouldn’t make as far as they did. Today they even brought in the worst of the worst: Rick Fox. It made the loss that much more fun to watch.

I even called Il and told him to watch the 4th quarter. He was convinced he’d jinx the game, too.

Oh, and I told Il that I knew the woman who sat next to us at the David Sedaris show looked familiar. She works out at the same gym I go to. He wanted to know if she asked about “the cute guy I was with.” If she did, I’m sure she’d also ask if we were a couple.

Oh, and I watched Tokyo Story yesterday. Sure it was kind of depressing, but not as horrible as I had feared. There are good people and there are bad people and the kids weren’t as nice as you’d hope. But for some reason, the movie was kind of refreshing.

On the way home from work I usually walk by a large kitchen (I think it’s Meals on Wheels) and I can see the cook watching TV as she works. Today I saw her watching the first quarter of the NBA Finals game between the Lakers and the Pistons. I stopped and peered through the window and checked out the score and the Pistons were up. The cook came out and told me, “The Pistons are spanking the Lakers! I hate the Lakers!”

Who doesn’t?

I watch the NBA playoffs to see the Lakers lose. I watch the MLB playoffs to see the Yankees lose. What else is there?

But the weird thing is that I see my neighbors, too. Plus I saw the woman sitting next to us during David Sedaris’ reading.

So Sherman Alexie is reading on Friday. I wonder if I should go see him again.

David Sedaris made a visit to 23rd Avenue books and a bunch of us sat out in the back court to hear him read. It was a cold, rainy afternoon (it’s Rose Vegetable after all) and the back court isn’t covered. We were cold, wet, and shivering but David Sedaris is worth it. He read from his new book, “Dress your Family in Corduroy and Denim,” and from his diary, and the rain kept coming down. He wanted to stop, but the audience wouldn’t let him.

The surprising thing is how nice he was when he was signing his books. He talked with everyone and went out of his way to say something unique to everyone. He wandered the edge of the crowd before his reading and randomly signed books, even drawing a picture of the cake that was waiting for him in his hotel room. Here’s how he signed a book for my sister:

I told him a story about how she has a book with a questionable author signature and he even asked a bystander to sign as a witness.

I could go on and complain about how I had to change medical insurance at work so we could get coverage for Naturopathic quackery, and how I had to wait 30 minutes at the pharmacy before they sent me away with NOTHING — especially not the drugs that are supposed to keep me alive beyond my 2-5 year death sentence — but it’s much more fun to think about how funny David Sedaris was.

Distractions are good.