I felt like dogmeat at the gym today. There were sprints and my legs felt like I’d been doing heavy front squats yesterday. I can usually “lap” people on the jingle-jangles and there was no hope of that today. In any case, I’m surprised that I was very coherent afterwards.

Well, looks like they’re announcing a new Kindle tomorrow. The rumors say it’s going to have a bigger screen, which would be good for my sister because she wants that. Personally, I think my screen is fine, and I don’t want them to make it any bigger. At least not for me.

So today my iPhone decided it wanted to be an expensive 16GB paperweight. None of the 3rd party applications worked (no twitter for me) and the worst part is that it forgot it had any music. One of the ways I can survive in a cube next to the World’s Loudest Typer is because of the music on my iPhone. Today, I was reduced to listening to whatever I could find on the intarweb, which turned out to be a lot of Dr. Dre songs on Pandora for some reason. I had to leave early, though, and I even had people come and ask me how I could put up with all the noise today. At least he didn’t sound like he was coughing up the world’s largest hairball today, like he’s been doing for the past week.

My iPhone is back to normal, or so it seems. It’s hard to know when nobody regularly calls or texts me, but it does seem to access the intarweb just fine.

I was DFL today during the workout at the gym. I was almost four minutes behind the fastest person, but I also was using a dball that was 4 pounds heavier and a kettlebell that was 20 pounds heavier. Cumulatively, that’s 30+24+20+16+12+8+4+2=116 times that, or 464 more pounds in ball slams and 2320 pound more in snatches. I suppose I do have about half a foot on her, but she’s a competitor in the Crossfit games and I’m just a computer guy. A computer guy who is seriously doubting the math of that, and really I only did 19.05 lbs more on the kettlebell, so cumulatively that’s only 2210 lbs. I think there were 12 people in our class, mostly women, and so I can safely say that I lifted more weight than the total weight of our whole class, unless we weighed an average of 184 lbs. I don’t think anyone in the class weighed that much alone.

Multiplying the weight by the time (3:49) would give us a value of 8343.8, which is a large number with no significance at all, but apparently there is a dude at the gym who eats about that many calories in a day. He’s a big skinny dude and my current hero. I even heard he sat down and ate two pies at once. I don’t know how to compare that to Sean’s achievement of losing the burrito eating contest (he had a bit left of #3 before he was disqualified) but everyone else in that contest held their stomachs in pain afterwards while Sean went out for ice cream.

So if I do some division, I did 729 lbs/minute more than the fastest person. Another meaningless measure, but I can live with that. Maybe I’ll do what Sean said, “With abs like that, I’d just take my shirt off and eat chocolate cake all day.” I know, I’ve mentioned it before, but a man can dream, can’t he?

Oddly enough, I had two people trying to give me their old TVs today. My sister and brother-in-law have a giant CRT HDTV but we really don’t have anywhere to put it right now. And my next door neighbor got rid of his glass TVs as well. I’m personally trying to get rid of a 13″ glass TV right now, and after I actually buy an LCD TV I’ll probably want to get rid of two 27″ glass TVs as well. Ah the wonders of congress, helping us make more things ready for the landfill.

Didn’t do all that much today. Yesterday’s gym workout made me pretty sore today. We could see it coming in the middle of it yesterday. And after all the horrible missteps trying to fix things around the house yesterday, I though I should probably just lay low, watch my backlog of TV shows, and read a book. Really exciting, but it’s hard to screw things up when you hide. I’ll find out later this week, I’m sure, how poorly that plan turned out for me.

I went to see my friend Melissa from the gym in the Shakespearian play Richard II and I really enjoyed myself. I remember seeing Shakespeare performed as I was growing up and it was always at a huge distance. Seeing it up close in a theatre that only fits about 40 people was great. It’s being done by an all-female cast with little costuming and I’d certainly recommend it. According to the intarweb, it’s playing until May 24.

I saw some pretty odd sights on the way home: a bunch of dudes in red dresses. Thanks to google, I found out it was the Red Dress Party. You’d think I’d know something about those sorts of things.

In any case, the rest of the day was only slightly disastrous. I went wild with caulking in the bathroom and lots of things look like hell where I did it. I replaced a light switch, something I’ve done dozens of times before, but this time I couldn’t find my wire strippers and I even shocked myself. Sheesh. Well, at least my bedroom now has a lighted switch, and the wire strippers are pretty cheap to replace.

The workout at the gym today was another repeated sprint that gave us all ample opportunity to see our lunches again. I made the mistake of thinking that we weren’t going to do what I surreptitiously saw on the board yesterday.

Because of my disbelief, I went to an Ethiopian restaurant for lunch and my mistake made itself clear about 5pm. I’m not sure how but the lamb stew converted itself directly into a gaseous state but I even has to excuse myself and step outside a few times due to “the vapours.” Rowing was made more difficult when I didn’t want to overengage my core and possibly explode my abdomen in some horrific fashion.

I think I kept any outgassing that under control during the workout but I did notice a burning in the back of my throat like my lunch had gotten very close to making a reappearance. Our gym doesn’t encourage that level of exertion, though, and I appreciate that. Not only don’t I want to make myself sick, I’m usually the guy who mops the floor after the workouts.

The other problem I have is that now I don’t feel like passing out after a hard workout. It actually keeps me up later than I should be and I pay for it the next day at work. At least staying up gives me a chance to do some more reading.

So I think typing this into my iPhone has led to TMI. Maybe next time I’ll make sure I write on a screen where I can see more than a twitter postings worth of words.

Really, if I see another play by Shakespeare, I think I want to see Macbeth again. The biggest reason is that I’ve read Macbeth a bunch of times and I kind of know what’s going on. You know how plans are, though, a friend is in Richard II and I’m going to see it, so I’m slogging through the play on my Kindle. Maybe I should just not have friends unless they agree not to do Shakespearian plays unless they’re doing Macbeth. Come to think of it, I’d probably have to re-read Macbeth since it’s been so long since the last time I thought about it at all.

Last night I was up too late reading Just One Look by Harlen Coben. I didn’t really like the book that much, so I powered through it so I could start reading the next book on my list. The odd thing is, I usually power through books I like, too. It has to be a pretty horrible book before I abandon it completely. Usually I just put it down for a long time and read other books before coming back to it. It’s all pretty compulsive of me, but I read just about anything that’s not moving too fast. Problem is, I was going to go to bed early tonight, but it’s time for me to read some more. Maybe if I get some medication, I’d be better. Dontreadatol. Something like that.

Look at that? I thought about waiting to buy my ticket to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference because there was a chance that this economy would limit people from going. It is expensive after all. It sold out already, and fortunately I already have my ticket. San Francisco, here I come!

I often wonder if I should write about what I did at the gym, but lately what I’ve been doing is feeling like throwing up. I had fried chicken for lunch again, and it had enough salt to last me the whole week. We did sprints that made me feel like the chicken would make another appearance, and I had cramps in my quad and my gluteal muscle. In scientific terms, it was a Charley horse in my left upper leg and my right ass cheek. Both made me want to stop what I was doing, but I just slowed down and kept going. That’s pretty much what I do there most of the time.

Today was a Monday and it sure felt that way. I was cranky enough at work and I was really moving slowly at the gym. But instead of going to bed early, I’m still up watching some of the TV shows I missed in the past week. I’m not sure how I went from being kind of slow at the gym to being kind of speedy, but I’m back to being slow. Not a big surprise because I am an old man.

I kind of figured it would be that way today, because my lunch was sitting like a rock in my stomach. Actually, I’m more likely to blame the coffee at work, which probably is some cheap chemical substitute that’s just close enough to coffee to keep us awake without poisoning us to the point of reduced productivity. I’m not sure of this, but my stomach always feels weird on Mondays. I figure it’s more fun to come up with wild conspiracies, as long as I don’t really believe them.

I was going to spend most of the day doing almost nothing, and I mostly succeeded. I caught up on episodes of Dollhouse and Better off Ted but my buddy Il called and wanted help moving a fireplace insert in his parents’ house. This involved standing around and chatting with Il and his brother Duk, and very little moving which is a good thing since the fireplace insert was pretty darn heavy.

As long as I was out I decided to stick more of my dad’s coins into the Coinstar machine. I think Coinstar is kind of a ripoff if you try to get folding money out of it because they charge 8.5%. However, if you decide you want eCertificates (like to Amazon, iTunes, or Cabelas) you get all the money. That’s kind of a scam, too, because I always feel like it’s free money and get an Amazon eCertificate to spend on frivilous items. My dad had 629 pennies, by the way, and his coins plus my pocket change from the past couple of months was $31.69 of Amazon crap for me. That’s about three books on my Kindle.

I was going to waste the rest of the day but Nurse Tiff called and said people were watching the Blazer game at her place, which was great for me because I have no TV signal at my house. She also had tasty steak and asparagus, because nothing says dinner like making your pee smell funny. After the upsetting loss by our team, several of us headed to Voodoo Doughnuts and took them back to Nurse Tiff’s. Now I’ve had so much sugar that my teeth hurt. Somehow, I don’t think if I’m doing this dessert thing right.

I was woken up at 8:40AM by my mom and sister who made it back from Japan today. The good part is that they made it back and they had a great time. The bad part is that I was feeling pretty puny and had to go back to bed, or at least try. I know what hay fever feels like, and it usually doesn’t include lightheadedness. I guess staying up late all week was catching up to me, and I was hoping that I wasn’t getting the ‘flu-like symptoms that seem to be going around. Fortunately, the only thing I had scheduled this weekend was catching up on my TV backlog and trying to figure out what happened to the Batman. (Comic book geekery, in other words.) I also have a book to finish, but there are more where that came from.

It’s funny how moving stuff out of my dad’s room and then pulling up the floor all happened when I was here by myself. The demolition work is probably better to do when you’re the only one around, because it’s loud and dusty, but it would have been nice to have some help taking care of random errands.

Oh, and for those people who think I was going to get my sister fired by complaining about having to do her job: I was their backup plan all along. In fact, her boss was contacting me directly, so he already knows what’s going on. I’m supposed to bill them for my time, but I’d much rather just torture my sister instead. She got me some weird Japanese kits: a wire recorder and a sound synthesizer from Gakken Mook from their “Science for Adults” series to try to placate me. (It’s working.)

I’ve been up late for the past three nights, doing my sister’s job. You’d think I’d have sense enough to go to bed early tonight, but no dice. You’d think after sucking wind at the gym the past two nights, I’d have enough sense to skip a night, but no chance there, either. Tonight was the “Helen” workout and I really wasn’t feeling it. Two laps around the building, 21 kettlebell swings, 15 push-ups, three rounds. My back was cramping, the pollen on the back stretch was thickening the air, and I was just to tired to push myself that extra bit. I did OK, though, 10:16, but I’m sure I could have done better. Oddly enough, last time it took me 10:31.

Tonight, once again, I’m doing my sister’s job for her. I’m up at midnight (I have to get up at 6AM) but her boss has it worse. He lives in Europe and he was up all night with this. We’re both losing sleep because their customer changed a deadline. I’m too stupid to leave them in the lurch.

In any case, I knew I wouldn’t have time for dinner and I mentioned to Sean that I was going to eat Bagel Bites. I was also considering another night of Jack-In-the-Box and yet another Chicken Fajita Pita. Sean told me he had something better for me, and so my dinner was a carton of Muscle Milk. I’m not certain that’s much better for me, but it was quick. I had Pollo Asada for lunch, so I probably needed to cut back on my dinner. I’d never had Pollo Asada at Don Pedro’s before, and it seemed like it had been run over by a car before they served it to me, it was so thin. But I guess they pound it to make it more tender. It was quite tasty. Oh, and I also had a doughnut forced on me mid-afternoon which I’m blaming for making me fall asleep during a phone meeting.

So there you go. I probably won’t be falling asleep during my Friday night date because it sounds like she’s sick of me. Well, I suppose I can’t take credit for her 102°F fever. If we can’t go out, I can sit at home and catch up on some of my TV shows and pay my bills. Exciting times for exciting people, you know.