My sister and I are always accusing each other of becoming our father and my behavior as of late (and more importantly, the failings of my body as of late) make me think I’m headed down that path. I was sick this weekend with no severe symptoms but my head hurt and I felt “off” enough that I skipped going to the gym. After walking down to the dry cleaners and having lunch, I decided to take a short nap. Five and a half hours later, I figured I wasn’t completely well. Today I had other vague symptoms at work like light-headedness. If I could just have a fever or a runny nose (and no, I don’t want either) I would know that I had some ailment I was more used to. I even went to the gym and was closer to throwing up than I ever remember being since college when I had the bright idea to push hard on the bench press and squats in the same workout. Fortunately I had the sense to half-ass it the rest of the time I was there, though for me that means going heavy and going slow in a workout meant to be a lighter sprint. I like being contrary.

So in summary, weak, old, maybe a little sick, and it’s Monday. Need to step it up if I’m going Gangnam Style.

Well, I suppose the first thing I need is more common sense, but it’s probably much too late for that. More sleep would be nice as well, since I stayed up way too late after Il’s wedding. But moreover, I probably need lots more than what I think I need.

What I think I need is more music videos. Especially more dance music videos with funny dancing, silly suits, and  goofy looking Asian guys wouldn’t hurt either. I heard this music video is blowing up the intarwebs: Gangnam Style by Psy.

Surprisingly (for a Japanese dude) I have two very good Korean friends, Il (who got married yesterday! hooray!) and Sun. Both of them convinced me that I should NOT learn Korean because what was I going to use it for, to talk to their parents? Because of this I have no idea what the guy is singing. I’m just hoping he’s not talking about killing all the dirty, dirty Japanese or something like that. I hear he went to Boston University and Berklee College of Music, both places where the people were quite pleasant to me while I was attending a technical school across the river from them.

I should stop watching the YouTube video for Gangnam Style and hit the hay. I am, however, conspiring with my sister to get a suit like the one at 1:42 (better view at 3:45). The MC Hammer shorts were also something I thought about, but the suit is something I MUST have.

And I hear the earth moved.

Trek in the Park was rehearsing near where Anna and Il got married!

There was something else exciting that happened and I can’t remember what it was. A stomachache? A free box of Rasinettes? I really can’t remember when I actually sit down and try to scribble it down. My memory isn’t what it used to be and I’m not helping it any with my poor sleep habits.

I was thinking that maybe the things I don’t talk about are the things I care the most about, but you could disprove that by finding things I don’t care about that I don’t talk about. Vintage Falcons. Real falcons of the genus Falco. The Atlanta Falcons. Not too interested in any of those, really, and never mentioned them before now. In any case, the excitement (or lack thereof) in my life has nothing to do with those things. Well at least not yet. Who knows? I do kind of like Peregrine Falcons and football season is coming up.

A friend from the gym asked if I’d been taking a blogging break, and certainly I had. Mainly because there was nothing happening. The most exciting things I can think of are the concrete guy calling me back after a month-and-a-half to look at redoing my driveway, and finding out that the rent for a small furnished apartment in Tokyo is a lot more than I first thought. My brand new FABULOUS laptop continues to be FABULOUS, but I still haven’t sold my old laptop and it’s just sitting in my room. And, since I’m not all that bright, I may even buy ANOTHER laptop next year. (Still single, still no kids, so that means more laptops for me.)

Lots of things have happened to my friends but I wonder if I shouldn’t leave their stories for them to tell. One bought a house (and I helped introduce her to the WASTE TRANSFER STATION, a glorious outing that culminated in the funner-than-you-think task of “pitching shit out of the back of your truck”. And there’s a glorious lightness you feel when you’re rid of that junk that was taking up space in your garage. Another friend is getting married this week and I’m one of the few who were invited. And sadly, a work friend’s partner passed away altogether too young.

So I suppose it’s been an eventful summer and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.

I need to simplify my life and by life I really just mean my banking. I have a stack of credit cards (most of which sit idle most of the time) and several bank accounts. Paying the cards sometimes means I have to shuffle the money around the accounts in some sort of weird ritualistic manner at some late hour where I’m not completely paying attention to what I’m doing and that means I have enough money SOMEWHERE but the account doesn’t get paid because of delays or mistakes on my part. I love banking penalties, so I get to pay hundreds of dollars (or at least one hundreds of dollars) for each mistake. M*th*rf*ck*rs.

I see a mistake I made so I contacted the bank and the credit card, and I was told I CAN’T DO ANYTHING YET because NOTHING IS WRONG YET. So I’m waiting for a large, painful series of alarms to go off sometime tomorrow.

I really hate banks. Maybe I can get my employer to pay me in small denomination bills and put them under my matrress.

I just got my most recent VISA bill and it was much more horrific than I was expecting. Perhaps “horrific” isn’t the proper word, but it pointed out that I had a month of utter gluttony behind me. And my FABULOUS new laptop isn’t even on it (nor is my hotel room). I have a feeling that I’m going to be seeing more horrific VISA bills in the future.

My AT&T contract is up again, and that means I got to unlock my iPhone 4. So now I have an unlocked iPhone 4 and an unlocked iPhone 4S so maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to have cheaper cell phone service in Japan. I suppose i’ll just have to try to find out when I get there.

Along with my utter gluttony, I’ve been neglecting my blog. The database backing the blog, in fact, has been horned for a while (I can’t tell how long) and NOBODY BOTHERED TO TELL ME. In fact, my sister’s blog was probably also down and NOBODY BOTHERED TO TELL ME. Come on now, there are at least dozens of people reading her nonsense and probably three to six reading mine. At least one of those people has my email address and several probably have my cell phone number.

I suppose a nice blank web page was somehow more comforting than knowing what I was really up to, which was not feeling all that well last week. Well I’m back, beaches, and me and my nonsense are about to get, well, middle-aged and GERD-tastic on someone’s ass? Ebay did tell me last week that I’ve been a member for 11 years. Maybe I should bid on some Prilosec.

This is where I talk about going to sleep on time and how I’m going to fail at that again. At least some things don’t change.

I wish I could say I had nothing interesting going on, but I spent last week in beautiful San Francisco at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, filling my head full of things that have nothing to do with my job. Included in that was seeing my friend Megan before she left for LA and eating and drinking way more than I should have. I mean, seriously, look at what I ate the first day with Megan and Nadeem. (Yes, lunch was Umami Burger).

Oh, and click at the images at your own peril, I didn’t bother to shrink them.

Of course I got up early for the keynote, even though I was booked in the WORLD’S LOUDEST HOTEL (and forgot I had earplugs until Friday night) which meant I kept waking up and having these feelings that a keynote without the possibility of seeing Steve Jobs wasn’t much of a keynote at all. Really, it wasn’t as good but it was pretty darn good anyway. My stupid faulty brain has turned the actuality into Tim Cook telling me that the new laptop was FABULOUS and so I got drunk and bought a FABULOUS new laptop the next night. It’s backordered, of course, and should arrive in July sometime. The teases at Apple have put the external optical drive in my hot little hands already, but what good is the drive without my FABULOUS new laptop? By the way, the night of the keynote (Monday night if you’re keeping track) was the last night Megan was still in town, so here’s what was for dinner.

I’m looking for the bottle in the middle.

I didn’t take may more pictures of dinners until Friday at La Mar with the horrible, horrible view and hanging out with a guy I only see once a year. Great guy to hang out with, even though he’s a Hurricanes fan.

What a week! I can’t wait to do it again.

I have to admit that I’m OK with having a fairly dull life most of the time. Sitting at home, in front of the radio, sending Morse code to weird countries and waiting for a postcard that confirms that I talked to that country is something I like to do. Paying way too much money to replace electrical and lighting fixtures in the house is another thing I like to do. Those are activities that are much better when they’re a little dull as “exciting” might mean “electrocution” or “lightning strikes.”

I did go to a wedding on Memorial Day, which sounds like a weird thing to do but I had a great time talking to the friends of the bride (Jenny) and groom (Rob). I know Jenny from the gym and she’s a firecracker. Being a firecracker, her friends were quite interesting as well which made for one of the more interesting and fun weddings I’ve been to. Other than wanting to fall asleep at work today, it was perfect.

Other than that I was lucky that it rained a bit during the weekend because that reduces the power line interference so I pretended to know Morse code during a ham radio contest. That is also another reason I haven’t written anything on my blog lately because it would be work, gym, ham radio, repeat and that’s even boring for me to write about let alone for anyone to read about. I did spend $400 on lighting fixtures but no one would notice unless they were going down to the basement (stair lighting) or were my brother-in-law (because I replaced the chandelier he would hit his head on every time he came over).

I’m incredibly happy to see my mom back but I’m probably going to gain back the 5 lbs I lost when she was gone. I half-assed a weight lost challenge at the gym but I did lose some weight. Oddly enough, the biggest loss came on the day after I ate the two Big Macs. Most of the time, though, I ate less at lunch and dinner and that isn’t going to happen with my mom home. She buys food like she’s going to eat it like a normal person, but she eats like a bird and gives me the leftovers. Plus, I had a steak, an elk burger, and a crab cake sandwich for my dinners this weekend and that’s not going to help. Ah well, if things were easy, they’d be easy.

I also like thinking that my iPhone is telling me things when I have it playing music on shuffle. It started playing music from my high school years that just reminded me how lonely I was back then. At least back then I was filled with hope and didn’t know what I’d be doing in 2012. Teenagers are suicidal enough without know what is awaiting them in middle age. Later it played “Lady Marmalade,” which probably suggests that hookers are my only chance for companionship. At least the last song it played before I shut it off for the night was “Alcohol” by the Bare Naked Ladies which reminded me that I’m a happy drunk. A happy drunk with a full bottle of Scoresby, the Scotch you drink with a straw, waiting at home.

Maybe I’m lonely because I haven’t heard many people on my $5000 ham radio lately because of poor ionospheric conditions. Let’s just say that’s it so I can call it a night, unlike last night when I stayed up late watching the last two episodes of Fringe and then wondered just why I bothered.

Well today was kind of an off day. Off from the gym, off from work after about 10AM. Last night at about 1:30AM I woke up with stomach pains. I do what I usually do, which is roll over and go back to sleep. After rolling over several more times, I finally had to get up and take what I often think is some sort of Japanese placebo called “That’s 21”. Or at least that’s what I think it’s supposed to mean (the label is in Japanese after all). I got up and went to work as usual, but started feeling lousy around 9-ish so I cut the day short.

The reason you’d really know I was sick is because I went home to a house with contractors in it. And the basement stairs are directly below my bed most of the day there was lots of yelling, sawing, and hammering and so it wasn’t calming. But the math is much better: my floor at work has several hundred people and six toilets and three of them can be closed at any given time for cleaning. The house has two toilets and the contractors aren’t coming upstairs so that means one, WITH A HEATED SEAT, all to myself.

I did send out a bunch more QSL cards (the ham radio confirmation postcards you send out after talking to someone) and I rewired the kitchen light. Woo is it bright now. I hope my mom likes it. Also put a connector on my antenna cable. I’m all set for now, I think.

Last week I was tired most of the time and sore from the gym and yesterday I couldn’t get to sleep. Now I’m back to just about passing out and, at the same time, staying up late.

I bought a direction finding antenna to locate the source of the power line noise in the neighborhood. I think I narrowed it down to a pole, but I have to get the attention of the power company to fix it. I’m about to buy yet another toy to narrow it down even more. Walking around carrying a big antenna isn’t really making me look like a normal person, but the noise is interfering with the guys I’m trying to hear on the other side of the planet!

Walking around looking goofy sure beats doing work on the house. I bought a $180 light fixture that didn’t go together the way they said it would and broke the end off of a compact flourescent bulb. Turns out I had to modify the fixture before it would fit together, but they never told me about that. I also had to move around some expensive light switches since contractors are replacing my basement stairs so they wouldn’t damage them. That’s what I get for buying an industrial light switch that costs $40 instead of using the one from Home Depot that costs $2.50.