I’ve spent several days, maybe weeks, trying to get a doorbell upstairs. Tried to run a wire down the same way I did before, but the downstairs renovations blocked my way. That took a day. I was told I should try using the duct chase that used to be the furnace chimney and that required holes in the sheet metal firebreak and an access panel in the sheetrock. Do you know how hard it is to find an access panel that isn’t made of chintzy plastic?

Anyway, just getting a hole in the sheet metal isn’t good enough, so I needed to get a rubber grommet in a hole that I had to make by hand. A punch would have been nice, but I only had access to one side of the metal. Anyway, after I got the wire to the basement, and routed through the rafters/floor joists down there, I wired it up only to find that it wasn’t quite right. I’m not sure what clown wired up the doorbells but I think things were randomly connected until things worked. Add a couple of hours while I rewired things to make sense, and I was able to hook the upstairs doorbell up for testing.

Then I found out that the doorbell transformer wasn’t beefy enough too handle two doorbells. Guess what I’m going to try to find tomorrow?

I didn’t really have time to be much more than busy at work, and then I finally left it wasn’t early. I made it to three hardware stores and OfficeMax tonight so I can get on with my weekend wiring activities. Actually all I want to do is to wire a doorbell but it’s going to require installing an access panel, cutting a hole in a sheet metal firebreak, and then some more easy drilling as I get the wire over to the transformer. A lot of work to put a doorbell in upstairs so I can be in my office and actually hear the thing ring. Or not.

Really, I just need another way to get wires from upstairs to downstairs now that my old route is blocked off. It’s taken me weeks so I’m pretty excited to get this done.

I’ve been giving myself haircuts for the past few weeks. I can’t get the back of my head as well as someone else can, but it does seem more even than the professional barber gets it. The sad part is after four uses my professional Oster blades seem to be dulling. Might be my Asian hair doing it.

I know, I’m not going to attract any women doing this awful self-barbering, but I’ve realized women like things that I’m just to stubborn to do. At least on the dating sites, I seem to be lacking a desire for:

• camping (my standard response is: if I wanted to sleep with a stick up my ass, I’d shove a stick up my ass and sleep in a comfortable bed)
• dancing (really, the only other people who want to dance to the music I like to dance to are guys who want to dance with guys)
• live music (I’ve always found live music to be too loud and distorted, but my first concert was Journey and my ears rang for a week afterwards)
• kinky sex (I’m very liberal in what I think other people should be able to do, but I’m really boring in what I do myself)

So I’m boring and stubborn and this is going to keep me alone. But it is going to save me money on haircuts.

It’s bad when I think about my life sucking especially since I know that I’m just waiting for my luck to change and I’m not taking an active role in making things any better. But I can live with that. What’s worse is when my body fails me and I realize that I’m getting old. Life threatening chronic conditions aside, I just live in a state of denial and that keeps me going day-to-day so more back pains and lower abdominal muscle cramps remind me of my mortality and just put me in a worse mood than my job (where every day lately feels like a Monday), or the Republicans regaining the House, or the neverending repairs to the house.

I know my troubles aren’t that bad, but I really hate being jostled out of my fantasy normalcy. I just want to live my crappy life with the things that make me happy, eating as much bad food as I want and standing in my shower for as long as I want. I think standing in the shower is the happiest I am all day long and I don’t want to be reminded of the natural resources I’m wasting.

OK, enough of that. Eater Magazine has a list of the 38 Essential restaurants of Portland and I think I’m going to try hitting a few more of them. By myself, of course, since I have no friends. At my age I’m supposed to be married with kids and without interests besides the kids sucking my life out of me.

AND IF YOU’RE WONDERING I’M DRINKING MYSELF HAPPY RIGHT NOW SO I’M FEELING QUITE FINE. THAT AND ADVIL AND TOMORROW WILL BE A NEW DAY (with a 20 mile commute and a soul-sucking job).

I got home late from the gym because I was making sure that one of my friends had a way to stay out of the cold as he waited for the locksmith to let him into his car. The worst part was that after waiting over an hour, the locksmith who had quoted him $35 on the phone wanted $145 to let him in his car. I’m not sure who the service was, but Pop-a-lock only quoted him $60. I think he talked them down to that price and got on his way, but not without some doing.

Not really sure if anything else exciting is happening on a Tuesday. Kind of craving a cheeseburger, but that’s about it.

I was feeling like I was in a bad mood, but I couldn’t remember exactly why I should feel so bad. After my first day of work of the new year, I kind of felt tired and saw a bleak future ahead of me but that’s not any different than most Mondays at work. I went to the gym and it was one of the workouts where I get DFL but Sean beat me to the finish, or whatever you do when you get beat by someone who comes in after you, but I’m never upset by getting DFL or close to DFL in that workout. I found out one of the guys I know at the gym is an M.D., which reminded me of how I failed to get into medical school, but he was a doctor with a sense of humor and even told me some doctor jokes.

So basically, nothing really good happened, but nothing bad happened either.

I tell doctor jokes and it pisses off humorless doctors.

• Q: How do you hide a dollar from an orthopod?
• A: Hide it in a book.

• Q: How do you hide a dollar from a radiologist? (The doctor with the sense of humor is a radiologist.)
• A: Pin it to the patient.

• Q: How do you hide a dollar from a plastic surgeon?
• A: You can’t.

He told me a joke I can’t really repeat because it’s obscene and makes fun of anesthesiologists, who are usually my people, i.e. Asians. Oh, and when he told me he’s a radiologist, I said, “Funny, you don’t look Asian,” and he got it.

So there you have it with some of my bad jokes. I’m an old man. I’m entitled to tell bad jokes.

On the plus side, I won an eBay auction today. It’s for a butt-set with tone dialling, something I’ve wanted but really have limited use for. If you’re wondering what a butt-set is, here’s a picture:

I usually need a butt-set once or twice a year. Maybe I can use it for a Halloween costume.

There was supposed to be a hard part about wiring up my fire alarms, and an easy part. The hard part was getting into the tiny area just under the peak of the roof to run the wires between the alarms, and the easy part was supposed to be dropping the wire down to the basement in case I needed to hook up something there. So much for hard vs. easy. Turns out that the space I was using, the slot between the sewer pipe and the framing, was really just because of sloppy work and Jay the contractor “fixed it” so I can’t use it any longer. Time for plan B, which is going to require a bunch more work.

Ah, well. I need a hobby, right? No girlfriend to suck up my time. Wait, I have that reading resolution I need to avoid as well. Huh. If I just make it a remodeling resolution, maybe I can avoid it all.

I was going back into my various attic spaces today, but Megan was spending her last day in town before heading back to SF so I had two beers with her instead. Honestly, I doubt I’m going to lose the five pounds I’ve gained over the holidays. My guess is that I’m just hosed.

Other friends have suggested that I first send out warning text messages to various people before I go up into the attic so they can come looking for me if I don’t come back out. There’s a very small space up there and if I cramp up, I’m hosed.

In any case, that’s about all the excitement I have for today. A small obsessive desire to do some more home repair, but not enough to actually get it done.

Basically, I now have two more things that could be added to the resolutions to not be finished:

• Finishing the remodeling
• Losing some weight

I guess I could try to be introspective and think of all the things that happened last year, but all I can think of is how miserable it was to crawl around in the attic and how annoyed I am that my computer is acting up. I think I know what’s going on with the computer, though, the huge week-long data transfer is horking up my networking. Sheesh.

I was trying to get up into the attic so I could wire the fire alarms together, not that I need to wire the fire alarms together. There’s a space a few feet tall above the stairs that leads to the triangular space below the peak of the roof. It’s crammed full of heating ducts and wiring and it takes some contortions to get up there, but I went crawling up because, well, I had nothing better to do besides obsessing about how my computer was failing me. I wanted to run some bell wire up there, and I figured this was the easiest way to make sure the wire went the way I wanted it to.

I also had to slap some paint on the plaster that Jay the Contractor put up yesterday.

All this meant some frantic trips to Parr Lumber (the only place I could find open close by) and spilling of paint and primer.

This dead (-ish) computer did give me some more time to read, and I think I’ve come up with one New Years Resolution. But it’s boring. And it involves reading. I’ll have to think of something better.

Happy New Year to the three people who read this! You know who you are.

So I was up late on Tuesday trying to get a motion detection program working on a security camera for my sister’s front porch. Then I stayed up late last night trying to sort out all the pictures I have on my hard drive that don’t really seem all that organized. I’m not sure I have everything in there.

I also found out that my laptop hasn’t been backing up because if you encrypt your home directory with FileVault, it only backs up when you log off. No wonder it was taking so long to reboot my Mac, it was trying to back up my home directory. Well, I found a way to reenable backups and I set it on its merry way and so far, after fourteen hours, it’s backed up 12G out of 177G. So, lessee, does that mean it’s going to take eight-and-a-half more days to back up the hard drive using Time Machine? Sheesh. And I was giving a friend a hard time for a 48H backup.

So there you have it. That, plus my mental faculties appear to be slipping, or at least my concentration. At the gym we do warmups of things like 3 windmills per side. I’ll end up doing four on a side and then stand there wondering if three comes before or after four. I hope it’s not something permanent.

I am being tortured by my sister’s old Netbook and a program called “motion” that doesn’t work the way I want it to.

Often at night I get stuck doing something quite stupid that my brain won’t let me stop doing. Like fixing all the song titles in an iTunes playlist, or fixing broken links in my blog. It might make more sense just to avoid my computer at night, butbut then what would I do? Read? When I start reading, I can crank through two or three mysteries a week and I stay up even later than I do now. Plus, books get expensive and they take up all sorts of space. I suppose that’s one of the advantages to my Kindle; it doesn’t clutter up the house with books, especially when they’re throw-away mysteries that I don’t think I’ll re-read.

I’m still playing with getting a security camera set up for my sister, so she can check the front doorstep for packages without leaving her office. I’m not sure why I keep buying more video cameras, but they’re usually $20 or less and they’re kind of fun to play with. Most of them have some IR LEDs for night vision and that makes for some fun pictures. Either that or this lack of sleep is not just helping me get fatter (that and the cookies) but it’s turning me into some sort of undead creature.

Huh. I wonder if I look any better in the morning at work.

I didn’t do all that much today, not surprisingly. Watched a season of “Bored to Death” which was remarkably interesting, went down to Starbucks to get out of the house, but really did very little of anything until dinnertime. I think I had one of the tastiest beef dishes I’ve ever had at Red Onion, also known as “D4.” Beef tenderloin on spinach. I think if my buddy Sean ever breaks his vegan diet and decides to eat beef again, this is what he should have first.

But I think I wasn’t the only one bored today. I got a call from Jay the Contractor after I emailed him and he said, “What did you get for Xmas? A lump of coal?” Sure. Only without the coal.

I did finish my library book before the Dec 26 due date, so I did SOMETHING. Just not a whole lot.