Why is it that my hobbies punish me for neglecting them? Too much time off the bike means a sore ass as I start to ride more. Playing my mandolin too infrequently means seriously painful, bordering on blistered fingertips upon picking it back up. I really need to get busy building up (and maintaining) some calluses.
My happy little Shamrock is starting to look like its old self. It finally put out its first couple of sets of flowers this past weekend. It should be covered with blooms in no time.
Does the Spring Fever make one shop compulsively? If so, then that’s probably what I’ve got. In just the last two weeks I’ve bought:
5 new cycling caps (what the Hell, they’re cheap, right?)
1 “new” CPU (another 3.0G/512K/800Mhz Pentium 4)
&
Yet another video card (for a thus-far unsuccessful attempt to run CUDA on Kubuntu).
At least they’re all fairly small (<$50) purchases, so I guess it's not so bad. It’s not like I’m buying new bikes or fancy new wheelsets (yet).
This just totally blows my mind. I shudder to think of all the horrific face-plants and ass-bustings that come along the way to being able to do this.
The bit at about 3:08 literally made me blurt out “Oh my God!” the first time I saw it.
Why is it that when you’re running late and in a hurry, everything possible seems to conspire to slow you down? Last night I was running a bit late, getting ready for work. I grabbed my hair brush and it immediately self-destructed. The rubber part which holds the metal bristles divorced itself from the handle and flew off. It only just avoided splashing down in the toilet (wouldn’t that have been a nice touch?).
It’s surprisingly difficult to brush your hair with a floppy piece of rubber studded with metal bristles, particularly given the wild and desperately in need of cutting condition my hair finds itself in. So of course this added more time which I didn’t have to spare to my preparations. I finally made it out the door only to be thwarted and delayed by every red-light I came to, random cops rolling with radar, and an abundance of cars driving 5 mph below the limit.
Really though, if this is all I can find to bitch about, things aren’t going too bad. You know?
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so this should save me quite a bit of typing:
Back on April 1st, I ordered a (warning: nerd content) serial to RJ-45 cable which I need to update the firmware on my new-to-me Belkin 8 port KVM.
Yesterday it still hadn’t come and the seller’s website was showing its status as “processing”, which would imply that it hadn’t shipped yet. Naturally I emailed them to ask what the deal was and, naturally, it arrived today. It just blows my mind how often that exact same scenario plays out.
Today I spoke with the dog owner’s insurance company. It seems (knock on wood) that they realize that I’m being completely reasonable are going to do likewise. Just after getting off the phone with them, I get a call from the local court’s ‘Restitution Coordinator’. She called to see how I was and what sort of expenses I’ve incurred. I told her of my conversation with the insurance folks and that I don’t anticipate any major expenses, but one never knows. So, she’s going to pass this on to the judge (the dog’s owner has to appear in court tomorrow). She said she’d let know the outcome of the hearing and said that if I have any expenses that the insurance company won’t cover to let them know and they’ll assist me in recouping.
The bite seems to look a little worse, but is feeling marginally better.
I had a nice ride today, no excitement. Well, an asshole in an SUV yelled some sort of Doppler-shifted gibberish at me. All I made out was “the road”. Then, as I was stopped in left turn lane at the light near my house a man in a pick up (to my right) said to me, “You made good time”. Apparently we’d both been caught at a light a few blocks away together and he was impressed I’d caught him again.
Not a bad day at all. Seems like the system is going to work as it should, and the assholes were canceled out by the friendly folks.
Last night my beard shed a hair that was gray at the tip, dark at the root. Am I going un-gray?
Guess who got tricked into thinking he’d overslept, made a mad dash getting ready and getting to work only to discover he was 57 minutes early?
Yeah, it was me. Thanks a whole fucking bunch, George W. Bush. Thanks for turning my ‘never has to be reset CD alarm clock’ into a ‘has to be reset four fucking times a year torture device’.
Fucker.
I think Mike McIntee of the fabulous CBS Late Show Wahoo Gazette might be stalking me. ‘What makes you think that’, you ask? This excerpt from Thursday’s Wahoo Gazette, for one thing.
I was reading in somebody’s blog today about his being bitten by a dog. Dog bites man? I didn’t think that was news.
You would think the least he could do is toss a link my way, like before.
Went out for my first ‘real’ ride of the season today. You can probably guess what happened on my way back into town. Black chow comes charging down his driveway (where the owner was impotently standing by), with no wasted movement he makes straight for me and chomps down on my ankle. The owners were cool (though not nearly apologetic enough for my taste) and are saying they’ll cover my expenses. Wasted a lot of my evening talking to them, at the Urgent Care, and at Wal-Mart picking up the de rigueur antibiotics. Tomorrow I have to call animal control folks back and talk to them. Hopefully they will report back that the dog is, in fact, up on all of his shots. The owners said he was, but c’mon, what the hell else are they gonna say?
Got a couple of nasty punctures/gashes in the back of my calf, one with a chunk ripped out! First time I’ve been bitten, had to make it a good one, I guess.
And now, I think I’ll go listen to the Dead Kennedys’ song from which I purloined this post’s title.