I really only have ONE PRESCRIPTION DRUG that I need to take and it’s probably keeping me alive. So why is it that for the past two weeks I KEEP FORGETTING TO TAKE MY MEDICINE? Sheesh.

Well, I am getting old. I have to leave notes to myself to remember to do SIMPLE THINGS like putting away my laundry or cleaning the bathroom. Actually I suppose I’m just avoiding things I don’t want to do right away and I need the reminders to get me off my fat football-watching ass. I should take a cue from my brother-in-law and just put EVERYTHING on a list including things like “eat lunch”. That way I get used to making the lists and following up.

I’ve tried using the reminder apps on my iPhone but a physical hand-written list seems to work the best for me. Weird how that works.

I haven’t been to the gym since last Thursday because I was feeling a little off on Saturday and Monday. Not really bad, but just a little off. Today I was TIRED AS HELL at the gym and stumbled around afterwards, getting home a half-hour after I usually do. I think I’d be walking around in circles if I had the energy. So I guess I as a little off.

So rather than sleep typing, I should probably just sleep. My life is exciting as always.

I felt kind of puny today. Not really sick, but not really well. Kind of like I’d rather not go to the gym and wonder if my lunch really was worth seeing again, or if I really wanted to sit around in shorts while other people worked out. I actually started feeling sick on Friday evening, before the start of THE WEEKEND OF TRANSFERRING MY SISTER’S DATA where I “got” to help her transfer data from her old PC to her shiny new MacBook Pro. I certainly skipped going to the gym on Saturday morning, felt better Sunday (while I remotely continued THE WEEKEND OF TRANSFERRING MY SISTER’S DATA) but felt kind of meh today. So instead of working out I watched football and was forced to drink three pints of stout. FORCED, I say, because the homemade stout from my friend Jeff was losing carbonation.

I figure the opposite of working out has got to be watching football and drinking beer, and possibly eating cheeseburgers. I had two small cheeseburgers from Burgerville last Thursday (when $0.25 of each milkshake was donated to the Brian Grant Foundation so I had a milkshake as well), one double Five Guys cheeseburger for lunch on Friday, and a Killer Burger (the payment for working on THE WEEKEND OF TRANSFERRING MY SISTER’S DATA) so I figure I was pretty cheeseburgered up even without eating one today.

It’s sad when the most interesting thing I can remember this weekend was sharing a disk from XP, looking at it with my sister’s computer which I was screen sharing at home and transferring files all through this mess to get to my computer at home. To transfer her Outlook Email I had to run Thunderbird on the XP computer to get it into a certain format, transfer the data to an old Snow Leopard machine to run a PowerPC program called Eudora Cleaner to get it into the Mac Mail format, and then transfer that data back to my sister’s Mac. WinXP -> Sister’s MacBook Pro -> My MacBook Pro -> My mom’s MacBook, running Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora Cleaner, and two versions of Mac Mail to get it all working. What a mess. Good thing I’m a nerd.

My car is probably going to be confusing me for weeks. I spent a lot of time today trying to figure out how to unlock the back hatch. I finally figured out where the buttons were, but it took several tries. I still forget to turn the car off and yesterday I even forgot to lock the doors. My Civic would lock itself automatically after a while and I guess I was expecting the same with my new car. It’s a bit of a mess, really.

I also really don’t know how the map works.

Right now I have a trial subscription to xmradio. I think my Civic had some satellite radio capabilities but I never did look into it. I finally tried xmradio in a rental car when I went to San Luis Obispo and I’ll probably subscribe. Unlike DirecTV they don’t have a guide that shows you all of the packages and what you do or don’t get on one page. So now I’m up late making a spreadsheet to compare the various service classes.

At least I haven’t had to screw with this all while I’m driving. That would be a mess.

I have to say that Broadway Toyota has been pretty easy to deal with. This is the third vehicle we’ve bought there and I was involved in the purchase of two of the and both times were pretty easy, most likely because our family doesn’t haggle. This time was even easier because I dealt with the Fleet Sales department through a Costco deal. I didn’t end up getting any money off, because I ordered a fairly rare top-of-the-line Prius. But I’ve been waiting since February, TEN MONTHS AGO and when I serendipitously found that they had what I wanted I bought it.

On the minus side, the gadgets are many and my one pass at reading the manual this last weekend didn’t seem to stick. The second reading is working much better. It also stinks like a new car and I’ve never been a big fan of that smell. Fortunately both those things are correctable. Tomorrow, the commute!

I can’t believe some of the crap I lose. I know I had sixteen shares of HP stock that were actually on a physical piece of paper that I had stacked up with old phone bills on the floor of a spare bedroom. At least I had some idea where that was. I realized I hadn’t seen my car title since I bought it back in 2006, and now I need it so I can trade it in a new Prius. It was carefully placed in an unmarked folder and then thrown in the corner. What a mess. At least I found it and it only took about an hour.

Honestly, that was about the most exciting thing that happened to me today besides having to scrape the ice off of my car again this morning. Though I do think I’m allergic to my therapist (i.e. the dog at the gym I pet to lower my blood pressure). After a bit of scritching, my index finger starts to go numb. I figure that’s a bad sign, but I have to trade off numbness for the fun of interacting with the dog(s).

Last week the local PBS station sent out a warning that they were doing maintenance on Sunday night. Fortunately, I was up this morning before my alarm went off and heard the difference between a radio that was off and a radio that was on a station with no audio. I did have to scrape ice off my car windows, but that wasn’t so bad. Still, Monday morning was like you’d expect Monday morning to be.

Yesterday I did get both my ladders out and cleaned the gutter that is the least accessible. I have to put the ladders in my neighbor’s yard and even have to stick one in the middle of one of his trees. It’s a pain in the neck. I put up some netting to try to keep the gutter clear. We’ll see how well that works.

I’ve been wanting an aluminum extension ladder for a few years. I finally found that the local Ace Hardware store (Pearl Hardware) had the best price I could find. The problem was I had to figure out a way to get it home. I finally got my sister to help me move it and that should have meant it was time for me to clean the leaves out of the gutters on the garage. But no, it was freezing today and going to the gym just about killed me. So it was time to enjoy the knowledge that I now had the the ladder, but didn’t actually use it.

Sounds like my Prius is about to be sent down from North Seattle and I may have it next week. Only 10 months of waiting!

The other night when I was having trouble getting to sleep, I think I realized that a lot of the noise in my bedroom was coming from the dehumidifier in the basement. When I got up I started thinking about how I was going to have it not come on in at night. I thought about using a clock-controlled switch of some sort, that ran a solid-state relay that I could get at the surplus electronics store. Then I started to think that the clock could be synchronized to one of the National Bureau of Standards clocks. Or maybe it could be computer controlled and I’d just use, say, an Ethernet connection to the intarwebs to turn it on and off because all my servers are synchronized already. Well, I finally just went and got one of those old-fashioned timers people once used to on and off the lights in the house when no one was home. $5.99 at Harbor Freight.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the slivers of soap I end up with. I started searching the intarwebs for soap making information and I think I finally just realized I was on my own but figured out I could chop up the soap and microwave it in some sort of form. There was a line at the barbershop, so I killed some time at Kitchen Kaboodle where one of the sales people suggested a silicon cupcake form, but they were out. And the cheese graters I thought about using to chop up the soap were all about $15. Fortunately the punk rock barber girl had the best idea: Dollar Tree. I still don’t have the form, but my cheese grater (or, actually, SOAP grater) only cost $1 and I have a container with a bunch of powdered soap.

And finally, I left early because I wanted to clean my gutters before the weather turned to the usual Oregon winterish fun, but my mom sent me on an errand. While I replace my wiper blades about twice a year, she hadn’t replaced them for five years. They didn’t do much to improve the view when it rained. So I ended up at the Toyota dealer, where I also asked about the Prius I ordered in February but hadn’t seen yet. Turns out they just got one in, but it was the wrong color. There’s a good chance that by the end of the weekend I’m going to have a blue Prius and, as of today, the gutters aren’t clean at all.

I can’t believe I couldn’t get to sleep last night, but it was understandable. I was tired, it was late, but I was in the middle of trying to diagnose my network problems. I’ve started to rewire some things and my new intarweb provider is a cable company and not my phone company. So DSL degradation due to spectral interference is going to eliminate the viability of third-party providers so it was time to go to the cable company that I’ve been avoiding for years. I even had to cut my ties to my old ISP, a place I even worked at. It’s been TEN YEARS since I worked there, so that must mean that I’ve had the same ISP for longer than that. And I’m old and I don’t like change.

Well, onto the bright new world. My download speed is 10x faster so now I can fill my head with 10x more crap. And, if we’re lucky, my sister’s knitting (or whatever) blog should load faster as well. We’ll see.

I hate it when I’m sort of sick. I’m not sure how I ate myself sick when I didn’t even eat that much. I went to Ringside on Wednesday and Thursday I actually had to go home from work and take a nap. Well, I’m not sure it’s a nap when it was four hours long and didn’t affect my sleep later that night. I finally made it back to the gym on Saturday and afterwards I not only felt like I was run over by a truck (which is common) but I also was just dog tired. And today I felt worse, but that’s probably partially the brown bottle ‘flu. I still had to get out and clean the leaves out of the gutters, but that’s to be expected this time of year.

I suppose I did break out my new soldering iron yesterday and put some kits together, which made a lot more sense than earlier in the day when I was trying to figure out what to do with all the soap slivers I have from my shower. Surfing the internet for soapmaking wasn’t the most productive thing. At least now I have an iPhone charger and a SIM card reader, though I’ve only tried out the charger to see if it would make the iPhone think it was charging. Getting the SIM card reader working is going to take a bit more effort.

I’m not sure what the worst part of getting old is. Maybe becoming invisible to attractive women, but I’ve always been invisible to attractive women and now maybe they’re actually seeing me and thinking, “Hey, I wonder if he knows my dad?” But beyond all the aches and pains I experience, I had another unpleasant reminder of my age today during my annual physical when I got my oil checked. I’m not sure what age that’s supposed to start and I thought it was 50 but it’s begun.

Huh, I wonder if Google is silently dropping my emails. I don’t trust them either. In any case, I got my DSL back up and running and my not-nearly-as-fast-as-cable connection is back online.