HAH.

It was a Monday today, and as punishment for surviving Monday and all the ridiculousness of work, one of my tormentors has arranged an hour-long NOON meeting for me. This follows my hour long 11AM meeting and, I think, is followed by a 1PM meeting. Or maybe not. Maybe I actually get to eat lunch tomorrow.

For some reason I was nervous about going to the gym today. I think it was probably due to the amount of coffee I had to drink to stay awake through all my afternoon meetings (1PM-2PM, 2PM-3PM, 3PM-4PM, and 4PM-4:30PM). It was front squats then a muscle-fatiguing workout of snatches and ball slams. I didn’t finish with a great time, but I did beat several of the yoots in my class, and I was able to front squat 215lbs for my 1 rep max and a P.R. Last week I did NO squats because of my knees.

In other news, they fixed my shower to stop water leaking out some gaps in the door, but that just meant I couldn’t use my fancy new shower today. The doors are up on the rooms and the hardware is almost all in (handles, hinges, and strike plates). Then comes the carpet and we’re even closer to being finished!

I had a pretty full day compared to most of my Saturdays. I like sitting around and reading things off the intarweb, watching DVDs, and basically not doing a whole lot. I do go to the gym in the morning, but most of my Saturdays are pretty boring.

This week was an exception. I started out by somehow destroying my firewall which broke my connection to the intarweb. I thought about looking up instructions on how to fix it, but they’re on the intarweb. I couldn’t pay my bills, check for directions, or check my email. But I had to abandon it to go to the gym.

Today was “Fight Gone Bad.” 247 wasn’t a great score but I did a lot better than last time. I guess I was the only one actually JUMPING during the box jumps, so next time I’ll try stepping up or down. That should add at least 20 to my score pretty easily. Jumping was slower and it also took a lot more energy so I couldn’t catch my breath before heading to the push press. Anyway, it was fun, I was tired, and getting a workout is what counts.

I got home and only had time to shower before I headed to a birthday party for 1YO Zola. I haven’t seen my friend Kim since before she was pregnant with Zola. I know most of her family, too, and it was good to see them as well. As with most birthday parties for little kids, there were lots of adults around and so it wasn’t just me watching a bunch of kids running around. Plus, the teriyaki chicken was great and I ate too much of it.

I got home to fight with the firewall for a bit, and I noticed that I had a bunch of obsolete cables but couldn’t find the one I needed to fix things. I fought with it for a while before I rushed off to a birthday party at a bowling alley for Nadine from the gym who is 29 years older than Zola. I didn’t win any money bowling which I didn’t even know was possible, but they had some convoluted scheme involving colored pins. Devon won $10 for picking up a spare.

Things ended early enough that I was able to find the cabling necessary to hook an ancient SPARCclassic to an ancient SCSI CDROM drive and resurrect my firewall, which is the reason you’re able to read my boring description of my day. Why do I even find it necessary to tell anyone about this? I guess there’s just no one else to tell about my day, and I just wanted to write it down.

I think my morning coffee at work was served without the antidote. My stomach started grumbling soon after and I was lightheaded all morning. This caused me to be argumentative and surly in my morning meeting, but which did motivate me to get a lot more work done during the day.

I was still tired all day and sore in my upper back and knees. By the time 6:30 rolled around I was ready to just go to bed early and skip the gym. But I’m cheap and a creature of habit, so the $10 late fee plus the regular trip to the gym pushed me over the edge and got me to class.

We’re doing Fight Gone Bad on Saturday, and a lot of people are getting nervous about it. I’ve only done it once in the past, last June, back when I had a hard time with push presses, wall ball, and a lot of other things as well. I remember getting a very low score on it, maybe less than 200, so it won’t take much to improve that score. I’m not worried at all.

What did worry me was today’s workout. It was a 250m row, 20 ball slams, and a sprint to the end of the parking lot and back, three times. The last time I did this workout, I ended up bonking and walked on my last run. As tired and sore as I was all day, I wasn’t looking forward to this workout. I ended up getting a cumulative time of 6 minutes for three rounds which was pretty darn good, though I thought I was going to lose my lunch. I think several people actually did lose their lunch from this sprint workout.

Fortunately, tomorrow is Friday but I’m still not going to bed on time. I’m still kind of wired from the workout. It’s the most awake I’ve been all day, just when I should be sleeping.

So I may have been given some feedback at a place where I spend at least 8 hours of my day, and one of the key words may have been, “surly.” I guess I need to work on that, but really I found it to be quite accurate. You are who you are.

More proof that I’m tired this week. Yesterday after getting back from the gym, I tried to close the door to my new bathroom. The door that’s just leaning up against the wall and still needs to be installed. I basically pulled the door onto myself. Today we did a core “grind” workout and when I got home I got this huge cramp in my lower abdomen on the right side. If you’ve had a calf-cramp, you can imagine how much it hurt.

I wonder if I’m dehydrated. I blame change. I usually take a look at people’s workout blogs to see what the workout is, and that keeps my diet on track. (I can usually eat a chavindeca or some tacos and rice and beans and do quite well at the workout, though too much sour cream is not a good idea. We eat a lot of Mexican food for lunch.) THMFIC doesn’t like that people post their workouts early, because some people see the harder workouts and bail out on their class. Today the guys who usually post weren’t at the early workouts and so I didn’t know what was coming. This led to my eating a snack pack of 3 pieces of fried chicken, Greek fries, some sort of dip, and bread. I probably had my sodium intake for the week in one meal.

Jeff from Cincinnati (where they can’t make chili) thinks that a Greek restaurant with hamburgers and fried chicken makes nothing well, but he’s wrong. They make EVERYTHING well at the Mad Greek Deli. I’m just not sure that there’s anything that’s good for me there. At least nothing that I’d go out of my way to order. My favorite is the Chicken Souvlaki Special, but I’ve had most everything there over the years and I’ve not been disappointed.

I made a miscalculation in my weight and I’m not sure I’ve gained all that much. Not that I haven’t been trying during Superbowl Sunday, Il’s birthday dinner, UFC fight night, and other sundry events. I’ve been trying to drink more water lately, and I find I lose several pounds overnight. Part of it is getting up and going to the bathroom, but I’m not quite sure that’s the whole story. A pound is about a pint of water, and I can’t be losing three pints a night.

I’ve really been dragging at both workouts this week. Tonight we had four rounds of the same set of exercises and I was certain after the first round that I wouldn’t make it all the way through. I hope I start feeling better as the week goes on because Saturday is Fight Gone Bad. Not that I really care. I have adopted certain strategies that give me a lower score. For example, on the box jumps I actually JUMP onto the box and JUMP off of the box. Some people step up and/or down, which is quicker. I just don’t want to show up at Crossfit San Francisco and look like a goober again. There is the part where I actually AM a goober, but still.

The high point of my day was going to Target to buy a toilet brush for my new bathroom. I also signed up for “Singles CPR” because the local Red Cross sent me a notice just about the time I thought about signing up for a certification anyway. Plus, as Megan pointed out, screw the Libertarians.

I suppose it’s not a big surprise I’ve gained a bit because I’ve been eating like a pig at lunch lately. But as the kids used to say, “Whatever.” My knees were hurting at the gym so I didn’t get to challenge the women’s record holder in the front squat. I usually try to keep up with her because, well, it’s a goal isn’t it? My stomach has felt kind of funny since Saturday afternoon when I had a tuna melt at Kenny and Zuke’s. I wondered if my dinner from Super Burrito Express needed an antidote, but I’ve since heard that several people from the gym have had the stomach ‘flu. Yet more things to look forward to in my delightful day-to-day existence. In any case, I did finish the workout (with the big hole cut out where I should have been doing front squats) and my knees aren’t perfect, but they don’t hurt like they did last week.

I thought about renewing my CPR certification and my libertarian buddies tried to talk me out of it. I guess it’s not safe to rely on the Good Samaritan laws any longer, and you can be sued for trying to help people. Their suggestion was just to keep walking. I suppose there’s no reason to get the BLS for Healthcare Professionals cert any more, but I may just do Community CPR. Just like anyone else who took the EMT classes, I’ve had a heck of a lot more CPR practice than most people. Fortunately, I’ve never had to use it beyond what the paramedics taught me: It’s not really, “Airway, Breathing, Circulation,” it’s “Airway, Freeway.” (In my case it was modified to, “Airway, 911.”)

I was thinking there’s something I meant to do today, and I’m not certain of what it was. I did, however, remove the unused electrical conduit and another piece of water pipe out of the basement and swept and mopped the grime that accumulates down there. The recent electrical work didn’t help, either, as it knocked grime out of the ceiling. I’ve been blowing black boogers out of nose all day because of that, and I cut myself with the conduit. I figure at least I did something that wasn’t football-related.

Well, my team didn’t win, but it was actually an interesting game this year. I was expecting to go to my buddy Il’s house and see the game with Il, his brother, and his brother’s kids. Il’s brother went skiing this year so it was just me and Il eating a pile of chicken wings, Doritos, and potato chips. Health food. We then watched a Blu-Ray copy of Hancock which was funnier than I remember. Last time I saw it was on a tiny screen on an airplane instead of a 52″ HDTV so I probably missed a lot of the visual effects. My TV is a 15″ standard definition, so it doesn’t compare. At least I now have seven months or so to get an HDTV before football season starts again.

So Joe Fury at the gym, who is older and wiser than me, told me that you’re supposed to tell yourself things during the workout to keep yourself going. For example, during a 1000M row, you’re supposed to tell yourself, “The discomfort is only now. It’s temporary. Keep going.”

I’m not sure what I’m thinking, but usually it’s more like, “I’m too old for this crap. Why am I working this hard? No one is paying me to do this. In fact, this has no bearing on my job, which is what I should be doing right now instead of fooling around in the gym. Oh, hey, I can catch up to that person next to me. Maybe I should try that.”

So we’re not supposed to pay attention to anything other than our own efforts, but I contend that you have to balance that with whatever motivates you, and if your motivation is competition, you have to go with it.

I was asked today why I was such a hater. I think I had some issue with a couple of groups of people. I guess the problem with both groups is that they seem very insular and don’t feel all that friendly. I talk to just about everyone I meet, and a lot of my opinions are based on just the small cross section of those people. But really, I feel like thinking about why I don’t seem to like firemen, when everyone else seems to love them.

I don’t like firemen because the ones I’ve met are rather humorless and macho. Macho I can deal with, but humorless I have a big problem with, especially with people who take themselves too seriously. And a lot of the firemen I’ve met (a small percentage of all the firemen on the planet, mind you) don’t really give a crap about anyone who isn’t either on fire or is a fireman themselves. A couple of my friends worked for the fire department as maintenance staff. One was an electrician and the other was a radio technician, and they were often treated like servants. Not by all the firemen, but by enough that I got the feeling that I shouldn’t bother being friendly because there was a certain club I’d never be able to join and I might as well remember that I wasn’t welcome.

Growing up non-white in Portland, where most everyone is white, there are lots of places where I didn’t feel welcome, and some times where people would want to hurt me when I was minding my own business. I guess that’s why I feel so strongly about “clubs” I can’t join.

Also, it doesn’t really matter, because I doubt any firemen give a crap about one guy who doesn’t like them. It’s not like I go out of my way to impede them or be rude to them. I just don’t feel any reason to join their cheerleading squad.

I’m not worth a $22 bottle of wine, but I’m worth half a $80 bottle of wine. This doesn’t quite make sense, but I suppose the situations were different. The expensive wine was when I was out with my HLP (heterosexual life partner) Il for his birthday dinner, and the $22 bottle of wine was what I drank while I was watching the TV shows I had stored up for this week. I have a couple of winner movies from Greencine this week, Alphaville and City of God but I know I have to keep up with the TV shows or I’ll have nothing to talk about when I meet normal people.

Speaking of other people, here’s a memory that a high school classmate remembers about me and I forgot about.

I have to relate this memory I have of you in high school because I keep thinking about it and laughing!
Senior year in chemistry class, (the teacher) was reading off a list of job prospects and you piped up and said “I wonder what the prospect of being a bum is?” He got really mad and said “Fine Todd if that’s what you want to do is be a bum then go ahead!!” He stopped reading off the list of prospects after that (thank God!). I’m not sure why that sticks so vividly in my mind, but I’m sure entertained by that thought!

Really, every year I’m a little less of an ass. So those of you who know me now, you have no idea how much worse it could be.

I can’t believe the silly actions of some people. Like me. I just bought a program for my iPhone to solve Rubik’s cubes. It’s pretty cool, actually, but quite foolish. I don’t have the time to fool with my Rubik’s cube any more, but I wanted to get it back to normal. Like I said, foolish.

The electrician was in working on the basement, putting in outlets and more lighting. We only had two outlets before, and we’re getting a half-dozen or so put in. We also only had three bare lightbulbs down there and now we’re getting a half-dozen or so. It’s quite bright down there now and kind of frightening. I can see all the crap I’ve stashed and now I’ll have to do something about it.

I have an Italianish suit that I bought when I was in Japan. Of course, that was 20 pounds ago, or is it 40 pounds ago? I weighted about 65kg at the time, and that’s 143lbs. The start of last year I weighed 185lbs and I’m 19 years older now, so I probably don’t have much chance to fit into that suit. It’s in my closet with at least three other suits and several sportcoats that I had back when I was in high school and college. Even more stuff for Goodwill unless I opt for some serious surgical intervention or stop eating altogether. The Mexican restaurants in Hillsboro aren’t going to allow me to even consider fasting as a viable life choice.

THMFIC at the gym was out for a couple of days because of pinkeye. There were seriously odd theories about how pinkeye is spread, most likely due to the rigorous scientific research put forth by the movie Knocked Up. I doubt anyone was rubbing his face on a dog’s behind, so the main theory is probably unlikely to be true. In any case, it’s nice to have him back but unfortunately the brains behind the gym is now sick with the same ailment. I wonder if I should just start wearing goggles to the gym. I could probably find some suitably dorky ones like the BCGs issued by the military. If they’re strong enough I may be able to see through beams so I can actually read the workout without walking to the whiteboard all the time.