Well, I don’t knit at all. I did talk to the woman at the desk at the gym who was knitting something that looked, well, fuzzy. If not fuzzy, since most yarn looks fuzzy, it looked, well, leafy. In any case, I have no idea. The closest I got to knitting was back in college when I took my sister’s skeins and wound them into balls.

OK, so I just got a phone call that many computer people get from people who aren’t computer people, asking for computer help. Never really a problem, but I can’t remember what I was going to blither on about anyway. I guess that’s for the best.

Well, my ex never called me to pill her cat while she’s off on vacation. Now I’m worried about the cat.

So back to complaining about shirt sizes. I don’t find myself to be a huge guy, but I feel like a pig and according the Body Mass Index charts I’m overweight at 169 lbs. When I left Japan I was 65kg, or about 143lbs. Now I’m close to 169lbs or 76.7kg. Yeesh. My old driver’s license doesn’t show my weight:

But my new one does, and of course the weight is a little off:

But anyway, borderline fat boy (according the the BMI scale) wears a MEDIUM shirt and a SMALL jacket. Yeesh. Can’t we get some coordination between the clothing manufacturers and the health guidelines? And no, they’re not all tight and well, you know, non-heterosexual-looking. Not that it makes any difference. The closest I get to romance is watching the DVD of Love Actually I have on my desk.

My shoulders are all cramped from doing crossword puzzles. I’m fairly sure “AMODST” isn’t a word, but it’s 48 down.

I also spent a long time trying to figure out how to upgrade my sister’s blog to the newest version of Movable Type. So far I can’t get the thing looking right, but it’s working. Since I don’t want to hear a lot of whining from her, I’m not going to change things until I have to. The Movable Type people seem to think that there are people targetting the older blogs, but who knows? Any pointers would be appreciated. I’m not a big fan of Movable Type, but what are can you do?

And as long as everyone else is posting this picture of my sister:

What a holiday movie: Happiness of the Katakuris. Absurd and funny, and the goofy father in the movie is really a famous singer in Japan with a huge following.

I missed another exciting end to a football game. Monday I was walking home when the Miami Dolphins beat the New England Patriots. I mean, the Dolphins have sucked and they were down by 11 points with just over 2 minutes left so I knew they’d have no chance. Stupid me. And instead of watching Green Bay come back after another easy Vikings touchdown, I took a nap. Well, it’s vacation time. Time for naps.

Oh, and the thing I was meaning to mention yesterday was that there was a shooting three blocks from where I work, about half-an-hour before I was on the way to work.

The only part I wonder about is how the Emma Thompson & Alan Rickman thing was supposed to end up. Also, I notice how liking this movie is also supposed to also infer something about my sexuality. But the movie had NAKED WOMEN in it. How could that be gay? Sure it was movie-ish and silly, but it was a movie. Maybe my expectations were lowered by what other people said about it. Sort of like how I can watch totally crappy movies on the USA Network and enjoy them because I don’t expect that much from the USA Network.

I know someone with an injury who says she can’t wait to get back to the gym but what’s there is PAIN and SWEATING. In any case, I’m looking forward to staring at the inside of my eyelids. My arms are barely working enough to hold my pathetic arms above the keyboard.

I can’t remember what else there was. Yeesh. Maybe tomorrow I’ll remember.

As soon as I heard the new Harry Potter book is coming out, I put my name on the hold list for the Multnomah County Library. There are already 166 people on the list! I don’t feel too guilty about taking the book from someone who can’t afford it, or from a kid, because if it’s like the last book I’ll pick it up when the library opens on Saturday morning at 10AM and then keep reading until I finish it. Last time that was sometime in the wee hours of Sunday. The book went back on Sunday morning and the next person got it.

So, as some people are reading political treatises and academic poetry, I’ll be reading a kid’s book. Someone pass the “Lemony Snicket.”

After leaving the gym (and turning up the evil Stairmaster to ELEVEN) I opened my cell phone and I had TWO MISSED MESSAGES! Somebody needs me! No voice messages, so I checked the list of received calls and who is it? It was ME testing my new retro ringtone, from the movie Our Man Flint, a rather corny 60’s spy movie. Converting the ringtone just required me to resample the audio to use 22.050kHz sampling.

I know there was something interesting for me to kvetch about, but right now the endorphins are masking any kvetching I can imagine. Did I mention that several of us (my parents, Megan, Carolyn, and me) went in to by my undeserving sister a mini iPod. We got tired of listening to her try to figure out who else she could get to sign up on the free iPod site. Anyway, she got it early (my brother-in-law opened it last Friday and left pieces of it around the house for her to find because he’s, well, kind of peculiar) and now she’s seeing the joys of having a little MP3 player.

Speaking of which, all my music is sounding a bit off. I think my headphones might be dying. Perhaps you can only play The Pet Shop Boys so many times before they die.

And all I did was change light bulbs. One on the front of the house and one in my mom’s Camry.

About that time I found out that someone had hit the front of my car again. I think I know who did it, but it’s not enough damage to do much about. It’s just the front license plate and bumper.

I got this phone because all my calls were going straight to voicemail. I figured this was a problem with AT&T’s TDMA system, but I now realize this was a system-wide problem. My sister tried to call last night and the first time NOTHING HAPPENED. The second time, the message went directly to voicemail. I think I’ve decided that I really don’t trust the cell phone companies. No surpise there.

So last night my sleep was interrupted twice. The first time I was in the middle of a dream where I was in a classroom full of premeds and I was explaining how I never made it into medical school. Plus the usual parts of why I gave up after all those years and all those rejection letters. And why I’m not trying again, not going to the Carribean to an offshore medical school, not applying to a D.O. program, etc, etc. All I could think was, WHY IS THIS STILL TORMENTING ME? I suppose it was because I talked to a podiatrist at the gym who said I was better off for never getting in. I told him, yeah, but now I was a different kind of bitter.

And back to my cell phone, the pictures aren’t all that great. For example, see the beautifully clear picture of Mt. St. Helens this morning?

Or the beautifully red sunset over the hills of Scappoose?

Or the clear lettering of the Korean bidet store?

Apparently my blog has attracted some sort of occult hen party and they think I’ve been mentioning a certain person too many times. Twice in one week is what I see, but the vigilante mob appears to think that I could be some sort of stalker. I defy the mob to look at my google cache (if there were such a thing) and see if I’ve looked up anything this week besides:

1. Cell phones
2. Cell phone plans
3. Whether Top Gun is going to be re-released on DVD.

Oh, crap. that was all at work. Let me restate that as, “ALL I LOOKED UP LAST WEEK WAS SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION TOPICS LIKE ntp AND sendmail!”

Anyway, I’m banning these following words from my blog to keep from looking like some sort of stalker (and by “some sort” I mean a really, really inept stalker since I just sit at home and use the web to read about ham radio most of the time):

• 10. Chump
• 9. Chumpette
• 8. Yours
• 7. Up
• 6. Pimpmobile
• 5. Bite
• 4. My
• 3. Shiny
• 2. Daffodil
• 1. Ass

Crap. Wrong list.

Ah, crap-a-doodle-doo, I just spent the last several hours trying to get another ringtone working in my new cell phone and it didn’t work. Must be some sort of secret so they can sell me one.