Yesterday my company announced a change to the Employee Stock Purchase Plan. In summary, it now sucks. It used to be that over a six month period we paid 85% of the value of the stock at the start of the period, or the end of the period, whichever was lower. Great deal! If the stock has gone down, you are getting 15% off the purchase price. If the stock has gone up… you get a great deal more off. Assuming you sell the stock as soon as you come into possession of it.
Now it is 5% off the price at the end of the period. Since it takes a few days for the stocks to come into our possession, and with the fluctuating exchange rate, we could actually lose money.
I could get more money by putting the money into bonds for the six months. It would be better if they just said we could buy the stock for 5% off at any time during the period. But because the period ends two weeks after the quarterly report, it is probably the worst time to buy.
My benefits have slowly been eroded since we were bought out. Especially compared to the American employees. I’m really thinking of looking for another job. I like my coworkers so I’ve been avoiding such thoughts. But now…
Well, one thing I’ll do before trying to find a new job is to finish my current home programming project. I’ll look a whole lot better as a programmer if I can show any potential employer a working application that I made all on my own.
Bioware is still in town…

So I tried running today.

Ow.

My legs didn’t feel that bad, but my upper body was not happy with me. Cramps and stitches abound. I sucked it up and did the full run, lagging behind everyone. I had to stop and walk every so often.
The real test will be how I feel tomorrow. Heck, how I feel in the middle of the night is not irrelevant.
In other news there is a large earth moving machine in the vacant lot across the street. It’s doing some digging, but I’m not sure what it is trying to accomplish. It has dug two deep holes, and piled dirt around them, but that’s it. They aren’t even big enough to do anything with. Still, free entertainment.

The cold is gone, but it has left carnage in its wake. That’s what I found out when I went to the physiotherapist this evening. My right shoulder blade is concerning her. It has suddenly started flailing about when I move my arm. These things aren’t usually supposed to do that. So now she wants me to go to the doctor and see what he suggests. I think I realized something was wrong when I noticed I was looking a little hunchbacked in the mirror.
I really don’t like being “special” when seeing medical people. I just want this to be fixed, and I didn’t expect things to get WORSE! That’s the reason I stopped running and went to the physiotherapist.

Yesterday I had an improv class again. I seem to be the only one there who isn’t connected to a high school. Three of my classmates are in high school, in fact the fourth student teaches them. And the fifth just got out of high school. But the class is good, and I’ve got things to work on.

This morning I did some wandering on the internet. I’ve been thinking I need to get Ultima 3 behind me, which would involve turning on the big cow that is the Windows computer. It then occurred to me that there was an alternative. A while back, someone ported Ultima 3 to the Mac. They did it without any of the original code, (not a real port) so there is some doubt as to whether it is an accurate version.
So I did a search, found it, downloaded and tried it out. Very nice. Good graphics, but still maintaining most of the clunky interface from a two decade old game. No drag and drop here. You have to type the proper key codes to do most anything. That said, it has a number of nice features that make using it soooo much easier.
The biggest is that by default, the computer will handle all the battles for you. Sweet! Once a battle starts, you just sit back and watch your finely honed team of adventurers slaughter the orcs. Heck, I’ve seen some battles go so fast that the battle screen has gone away and I’ve already looted the treasure before the opening whine has finished.
Now I come to the dilemma. It is shareware, so I should spend $15US to support it. In fact you can’t win the game without supporting it. Ambrosia is off limits until you do. Or I could turn on the big cow and play the original Ultima 3. Which would be guaranteed to act correctly. But then all the progress I’ve done already would be lost. And I really hate to micro-manage the battles.
While I was contemplating my options (In my heart I know what I will do, I just have to get my brain to figure it out) I decided to drag out the old clue book I got when Ultima 3 was the latest incarnation. It was a small orange book, and I could not find it. That was irony. I save this book for two decades, and when I finally do need it, it’s missing. I eventually found it (In my Ultima trilogy box, not my Ultima collection box). But it is a bit of a disappointment. The maps in it are all done in ASCII art, so it is near impossible to tell where anything is. It doesn’t help that it is insanely easy to find full color helpful maps on the internet.

It’s official. I have a cold. So I’m really not getting any sleep at night. Shoulder pain. Stuffed nose. Really, my body is sabotaging me.

So I’m starting to catch a cold. This week just keeps getting better and better. It isn’t bad, and it may even be going away. It started Monday night with a scratchy throat that I noticed during my regular mid-night wake up at 3:30. Today it had progressed to just a bit of sniffles. My attack strategy is to pump myself full of vitamin pills. It’s worked in the past.
Physiotherapy was on again today. The therapist I saw last Wednesday is on a five week vacation so I’m dealing with a new girl. On Monday she looked at the leg pain and gave me some exercises to try. Today she looked at the progress on the shoulder. She thinks that the neck muscles are partly to blame, so I have to work on them too.
Because I keep waking in the middle of the night, I’m not that energetic. Lethargic would be a better description. I get home and I’m not productive. Heck, I’m even tolerating reality TV. I tried “Invasion Iowa” and it looked promising because it was one of those fake shows Spike TV puts on, but really, it’s still a reality show, and as a rule of thumb, they suck. That said, I changed the channel and started watching another reality show. Something dealing with supermodels. I don’t think I was into the “reality” of the reality show, I was just there to ogle the pretty girls.

I decided to go to New City tonight. The reason I went is that I’m not running tomorrow. With the injuries sustained, I don’t want to aggravate them. I haven’t been to the bar in quite some time.
Surprise, surprise it is Jake’s birthday.
Other than that, the night was pretty standard. Girls would avoid eye contact, the ones that didn’t did not repeat the mistake. I tried dancing, but all I accomplished was looking at the backs of girls.
I did get to see people I haven’t seen in awhile, but none of them are unattached women.
I might be in a bad mood. I blame my shoulder. The torn rotator cuff is not the issue right now. Either I slept on it wrong or the massage I got with the haircut did it. But right now it is very tight and it hurts. A lot. I find rubbing it helps, which I did frequently this evening. Better is to put a hot pack on it. That seems to loosen it up, but that really isn’t an option at the bar.
I’m hot packing it right now, and then I’m going to go to bed.

Another day, another D&D game.
It was nice to have a day off. And as a bonus, I didn’t have much to prepare for the D&D game; the players hadn’t gotten very far in the last game so I had lots left for them to do. That said, it was almost 95% combat for this game. We practically rolled initiative when we started and then stuck with it for the rest of the game. They’re on their second casting of haste.
They did nearly die at some points. I fudged a bit to keep them alive, but not badly. I am most upset about one enemy that I treated with all the brains of a space invader: Appear, get attacked, die. She had the potential for strategy, but I just had her killed easily. Oh well. After the game, we spent about an hour just talking.
The D&D game is becoming less stressful for me because I’m taking a hiatus soon. We’re getting to a point where I either reboot the game, or I deal with a very open-ended quest. Either way I need to spend time detailing the world, which I haven’t really done. So I’m going to take a break and use the sabbatical to prepare stuff. In the meantime Cameron is going to run a Star Wars game. It will be nice to be a player for awhile.
Now I have to figure out what I’m doing the rest of this weekend. The only plan I really have is to get my haircut tomorrow. Speaking of which, it is fairly early so I had better get to sleep.

So I saw a physiotherapist today. Apparently I am the victim of a torn rotator cuff. I have a number of exercises I’m supposed to do twice a day now. I’ve got another appointment on Monday to discuss the pain where my leg connects to my body. I’ve also been told a position to sleep in that should be easier on the shoulder. I’m hoping to eventually be able to sleep through the night.

The investigation of the Mac Plus continues. I have transformed all the SuperPaint files into MacPaint files, a format that has survived to the present.
I then started tackling the WriteNow files. This format is pretty unreadable now, so I’m going through and transforming them to RTF. I did a few, but there are a lot left. I’m taking those slowly, but I did poke around a bit. I found poetry and stories from a creative writing course I took in high school. Apparently I had low self-esteem back then too.
I have four poems that wrote during the same time period. He had a tendency to just scribble them on paper, but it seems I actually did the work to save four of them for posterity. If being in WriteNow format can be considered posterity. They still stand up through the ages as quirky humor. I’ll probably send them to him when I’m done all the raping and pillaging.

In other news I donated blood today. On an unrelated note :-), my shoulder has started hurting again. I’ve made an appointment with a physiotherapist to look into it tomorrow.

Someone at work pointed out to me that the Mac power cables haven’t changed in a long time. True enough, when I went home I discovered that my iMac power cord could be used to power the Mac Plus. So I turned it on for the first time since 1991 and explored. There were a lot of old memories there. A quick game of Crystal Quest and Beyond Dark Castle. Games back then didn’t have great graphics and had to survive on attitude, so they still hold up.
Research has shown that the art program I used back then, SuperPaint, is totally unknown these days. The Performa won’t run it. So on the Mac Plus I need to convert all the old drawings I did to a format that has survived the ages. It is slow going, but I got a bunch of old maps I made onto the laptop. A very circuitous route to get it here, but it can be done.

For the longest time I’ve been promising to get rid of some of the junk I’ve accumulated over the years. The great white whale of this project has been my pile of old computers. (And it literally is a pile.) I can’t just toss them, I have to go through all the data on them and get make sure I save all the important stuff. After nearly two years of avoidance, I’ve been starting the process.
My first hurdle was the Mac Plus. That computer is about twenty years old, and from the time before hard drives. So you would think I wouldn’t have any data to clean up off of that, but you would be wrong. We had eventually purchased a 40mb external hard drive for it. But I figured that I could connect it to the Performa 6200CD (which is only ten years old) and use that to clean it off. (I’m not even going to talk about the pile of floppy disks that I have to deal with too. Thank god the Performa still had a floppy drive.)
So I set up the Performa and it refused to acknowledge the hard drive. It doesn’t have the drivers it needs, or something like that. I found the old install disks for that hard drive, but the Performa is a PowerPC, so it isn’t actually compatible with the 68000 chip that the software expects. So now I’ll need to bring up the Mac Plus to use the hard drive and then use floppy disks for the important data. That would be possible if the hard drive wasn’t using the power cord from the Mac Plus. It seems in the inheriting process for the Mac Plus hard drive, the SCSI and power cables went missing. So I’ve been using others, but now I’ll need to try and scrounge up a Mac Plus power cord for the one hour I’ll need to do this.
Since I can’t do anything about that on a weekend, I worked on trying to network the Performa with my laptop. I had a lot of trouble with that. I could get the Performa to see the laptop, but the connection got dropped every time I entered the password. I figure it has something to do with firewalls. Eventually I got the laptop to connect to the Performa after I tried the bleeding obvious solution: Reboot the computer.
Now that I’ve done the proof of concept, all I have to do is go through all the floppy disks and put the good data onto the hard drive. Then I’ll suck them all onto the laptop.
But I’ll do that some other day.

What an awful play.
If you have the chance to go see the play, “The Fever” by Wallace Shawn, avoid that chance. It is a one man show that lasts an hour and forty-five minutes of pure tedium. He takes five minutes to describe opening up a package that has no consequence to the monologue.
I think the author was trying to give an opinion on communism and morality. But there was no plot so there was nothing interesting to pay attention to. The person two over fell asleep until his girlfriend poked him awake.
What irks me the most is that it got a standing ovation! Even the snoozer got up to applaud. I hate standing ovations, they feel like an inquisition. If you don’t stand an applaud you obviously aren’t one of us! You stick out, even if you choose to sit and clap.
Needless to say, I remained seated.
I like my plays to have plot, and my music to have a melody.

I spoke too soon. At about 3:00 in the morning I woke up with my shoulder screaming in agony. I took an Advil and then figured out the position that would give me the least amount of pain. An hour and a half later I got back to sleep.
That said I had two interesting dreams over the course of night. Good plot in both of them. The first one (pre-agony wakeup) is too hazy to remember now except seemed to involve me trying to get out of scamming friends and family in a tropical vacation place laid out similarly to Edmonton(?!). The second one was a very touching tale about four anthropomorphic animals fighting in both the Korean war and Vietnam. Normally I’m against talking animals in serious drama, but this was done quite well. Each seemed to have a distinctive personality trait different from the others that dictated what would happen to them in the end.
Dreams are really weird when you try and treat them seriously, but I still wish I could remember them after I wake up.

I had my first gig tonight. One of the people in my former improv class had an offer to have us perform for a charity event/party. No money involved, but it was an opportunity for some experience.
The event was trying to raise money for a school in the tsunami region. It was semi-formal, so we had to try and look respectable. Our set only lasted for about 50 minutes. The audience was standing around and didn’t seem that in to the whole experience. There wasn’t a lot of energy from the crowd. So I don’t think we did that great. Nothing sticks out in my head that I did wrong, but it didn’t feel inspired.
Actually the hour we spent warming up seemed more inspired.
Afterwards I hung out at the party. Ate some hors d’oeuvres, watched some other group do dancing. But really, I didn’t know anyone there, so it was just like the bar scene.
No regrets.

My shoulder is feeling a lot better. I haven’t had an advil in twelve hours, but there are times when it doesn’t feel in pain at all. And the rest of the time it is just a small twinge.
I’ve still decided not to go running tomorrow. I have a muscle near my groin that has been having sharp pains. I don’t want to make things worse. With my body feeling like it is falling apart, I’m not going to stress it.

Peter bought a new board game recently. Let me stress that it is a board game. The name: “Civilization: The computer game”. Not exactly truth in advertising. A lot of pieces in this puppy. About 750.
We played the fast game rules, and we were done by 11:00, and it was fun. Of course I found myself playing it like the computer game. A period of rapid expansion where I find the borders I’m comfortable with, then growth in civilization and culture. So I conquered everything in the western hemisphere south of the the US. I couldn’t leave Mexico to the north because Michael was building his own civilization there. So I concentrated on making South America have the biggest cities, and followed it up with an insane zeal for technology.
Peter: “Erik, slow down so we can enjoy an era for awhile.” It was actually a viable strategy because I destroyed Peter’s armies (after he had attacked me) by rendering them obsolete. Which means they disappeared, along with the ships that were used to transport them to my domain.
In the end I won.
I’ve been winning a lot of games at “Random Acts of Gaming”. Maybe I should try losing a few so that others can share the glory.

Arm still hurts. Advil makes the pain go away (somewhat).

What a Scottish day! Ironic?
I say that for two reasons. First, at work, we had a presentation from the head offices in the U.S. The presenter was Scottish and spoke with a distinctive accent. The word “wee” was used. It was a long event, about two hours, and although he was entertaining, by the last half hour it was tiring. But we got pizza for lunch. Score!
The second reason is that a bunch of friends and I went to “The Druid”, a vaguely Irish pub (because the very Irish pub was totally packed). The live band was a bunch of people in kilts with bagpipes. They didn’t strike me as Irish.

In other news my shoulder still hurts. Someone at work showed me an exercise that does help, but the pain doesn’t go away completely.

About ten years ago I was hanging out on the back deck of the family home in Winnipeg. We had a slingshot and were taking shots at a hanging wicker bell of my mother’s. It was a target, and we were completely surprised if we ever hit it.
The problem was that I was posing while pulling back the slingshot. With my left hand holding back the acorn, I held the slingshot in my right hand and rotated my right arm from above my head towards the target. It seemed harmless at the time.
The next day my right shoulder was in major pain. The shoulder joints and muscles are a complicated part of the body. (Think about it. It’s the only body part that can rotate 360 degrees.) The slingshot was putting a stress on them and something must have snapped. I was prescribed Ibuprofin. Eventually the pain stopped. I forget how long it took, but the camping trip we took on the Mantario trail was not pleasant for me.
I think my shoulder got permanently weakened. Five years later I went on the West Coast Trail. After that event my shoulder hurt again for awhile after. I probably stressed it again and the old injury acted up. That pain went away too.
A week ago, last Friday, my shoulder hurt. Anti-inflammatory made the pain go away, so I stopped worrying about it. Yesterday though I went grocery shopping and was carrying a heavy basket around. I woke up in the middle of the night with real pain. I couldn’t get back to sleep. I tried some aspirin, but it didn’t help that much. My shoulder has been in pain all day. I still went on the evening run, but afterwards I stopped off and picked up some Ibuprofin.
Hope I get to sleep tonight.

Got the monkey off my back. (In theory.)
I finally finished all the missions in “Majesty” so I don’t need to play it anymore. I can get back to all the chores I’ve been neglecting. For instance I went grocery shopping and finished reading the Sunday newspaper.
Unfortunately the game has the ability to make a random mission. So I must remain vigilant.

Runner’s Prerogative: After running an insane distance I get to be a complete slob for the rest of the day.
First item of business was brunch, which is getting tedious these days. All these people talk about is running. I’d like to think that I have other interests, and I’m getting sick of the same conversation topic.
After the meal, I did a quick walk to a comic store and grabbed some reading material. I excused the walk because I need to burn some lactic acid out of my legs.
Then I sat through the entire “Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars”. Man that was good. Wrapped up all of the loose ends from the series. I feel a little empty now that I have nothing to look forward to.
I found I had a craving for shrimp tempura. So another walk, this time to a Japanese restaurant where I could sate the craving. Now I’m going to take it easy before I go to bed.

I was supposed to be productive today. I was not.
Last night I took out a five year old computer game, “Majesty”. I really got sucked into that.
The game is like Warcraft, i.e. real time strategy. The big difference is that you aren’t in control of your troops. You can only give the access to resources, like better weapons and magic items. It’s up to each individual to fight, explore or run away. Their choice. It’s an interesting twist, and I enjoyed going back to it. Of course I got into the “five more minutes” trap.
In the evening there was a RAOG. We tried out “Pimp: The Backhanding!” Totally politically incorrect, but good clean fun. I won the one game we played. Even got my favorite “Ho” into my stable. Good times! Then we played a variation of Empire Builder, but set to the rail system of Britain. We didn’t finish that game (it’s still a long play time) but everyone seemed to say that I won.

I woke up this morning with no real pain.
As the day progressed, my shoulder started hurting worse and worse. I think I may have done something to it on the Wednesday run. After that run a lot of things were hurting in me, so I think this might have been one of them. What probably aggravated it was the drastic change in weather here. We had a bit a windstorm today and I think that did it in.
When I got home I slopped some anti-inflammatory all over it. A few hours later and I’m feeling a lot better.

Wow, have I been sporadic here.
I’ll try to find something to blame. I remember last Sunday I ran 29km which put me out of doing anything productive. Since then I’ve been working on a D&D game for tomorrow night. Nothing really exciting to report.
Last Sunday during brunch there was a bunch of people trying to get enough runners to participate in the Kananaskis [sic?] 100 mile relay. There are 10 legs, and it goes over mountains. I would have joined but the same day I should be doing a marathon in Winnipeg. It’s probably for the best that I’m not going. They try and get the newbies to run leg 5, which is practically straight up for 18km.
Dodged a bullet there.

This week started out so well (if you consider Sunday evening the start), but everything has gone downhill since. It really went south on Tuesday. On that day I suspect that I ate some ham that had gone bad. And with the damage I did to my stomach on the Sunday run, I was out of it by late afternoon. I felt queasy and thought I would throw up at any moment. I got home safely and went straight to bed. (It was 15% off at the grocery store and I missed that. Curses!)
On Wednesday I stayed home from work. I kept thinking I would throw up, but I never did. Not for lack of trying. I suspect I might have vomited if I had had any food in my stomach. But you actually need to eat to do that. In the evening I was able to start functioning a bit. So I started cleaning up the place in anticipation of the party.
On Thursday I was able to get back to work. My stomach wasn’t entirely pleased with me, and I could only eat a small lunch. (That and the soup I had bought from the cafe downstairs was bloody awful.) That didn’t end the problems though. Due to anecdotal evidence I had found that not many people could make an After-flood party on Friday, so I moved it to Thursday. So after work I raced around to buy stuff for the horde of people who would come. I bought beer that I will never drink. I also bought a Karaoke machine (because they are fun) with the idea that I could return it the next day. Then I got home and finished up the cleaning.
A grand total of five people showed up. I’m chalking it up as a learning experience. Announce a party further in advance.
Today my stomach continued to mock me. I think it has shrunk to half the size. I can’t eat a full meal anymore.
The final candle on the week came when someone in the improv class announced to everyone he knows via email that he has been accepted to go onto the next level of improv. Since I have not gotten any similar message I can only assume that I failed the class. And they didn’t have the decency to tell me.
So excuse me if I’m not the most buoyant today.

It is done.
I was really nervous before getting on stage, but I still did it. I wasn’t totally bad, but there are one or two moments where I screwed up something. I laughed a bit when I shouldn’t have. And I wasn’t facing the audience when I was speaking at one point. Well if I didn’t have things to improve, I would have too big of an ego.
Afterwards we went to Boston Pizza, on the theatre’s tab (good cause they didn’t pay us). People were wondering what I looked like with a beard, so I passed out my driver’s license which had a picture of me when I had a goatee. The funniest line was when Lisa, holding the driver’s license, asks “Who is this?”
I’m now nervous about tomorrow when I face the co-workers. How do I look someone in the face that saw me under the effects of “Passion in a bottle”.

So doomsday is slowly approaching.
At 8:00 tonight I’m going to be kicked onto a stage in front of a crowd of people, some of which I know. The improv class concludes an hour before and then we have the trial by fire. I’d love to same I’m ready for it, but by definition, I cannot be.
I announced to the entire office what was happening.

I know what you’re thinking: That Erik guy, he doesn’t make a fool of himself often enough. I’ve heard the complaints and now I’m going to do something about it.
On Sunday, at 8:00 PM on the Varscona stage (10329 83 Ave.) in a special show called “Playground”, I will be in full bore fool making. How? I’ve been taking improvisation classes and the powers that be have decided to boot this class onto a stage and see what happens. So come see the carnage of bad improvisers. Watch the slow motion train wreck of disaster unfold! Marvel at your favorite co-worker having a mental meltdown in front of a crowd of people. (No refunds if there is an actual competent performance.)
How much does it cost? It’s a pay-what-you-can admission so it is up to you. We do like the hundred dollar bills to be crisp. But if you can get past the doe-eyed ticket seller by just paying with pocket lint, you’ll get in. (You’ll also go straight to hell, but that’s a long term problem.)
What else are you going to do? Watch the Oscars? Ha! Let me spoil it for you! They thank the Academy. Now you have no excuses.
So come on down to the Varscona theatre and watch me suck!

Yup, I just ooze confidence.
In other news I’ve decided to have an after flood party. It will be this Friday, so I have to get this place cleaned up. That was the plan yesterday, but instead I enjoyed a day of watching TV. Nice and lazy, but I needed the break.

I’m actually amazed at how busy I’m keeping. It seems every night this week I’ve got some activity. Monday is improv class. Tuesday is dance class. Wednesday is running. Thursday is more improv. Friday is looking like a Random Acts of Gaming.
To top it all off, I need to figure out how much money I can contribute towards RRSP. Not a lot since most excess money heads to my mortgage. I just had a long weekend, and I think I may need another.

There is no D&D game this Friday so I decided to try something different. The newspaper last week had an article about how one of the best places to meet women is at dance lessons. I had heard from a friend that “Dance Central” had drop-in classes on Tuesdays and Fridays. With no game, I thought I would try for this Friday. I phoned them up and found out I was wrong. The drop-in classes are on Tuesday and Thursday.
No one can accuse them of being a soft sell. They were quite insistent that I come down for tonight’s class. My current plans had been to keep cleaning up this place and get furniture back into the living room. And do some grocery shopping.
Guess not.
So off to dance class. It was East Coast Swing. Surprisingly, my legs got tired after only an hour of dancing. Different muscles than those for a marathon. There wasn’t much taught, just one move really that we’re supposed to repeat with variations.
I guess other men had read the article as well, because there were more men than women, which the instructor was surprised at. The women who did come were all older, or they had come as part of a couple. So from my perspective, it wasn’t the best place to meet women. I’m not writing it off yet. I’m thinking of taking more lessons to get a feel. However, not this week. I’ve got way too much on my plate.

In other news I admitted to a co-worker when my improv performance would be. The word quickly started to spread. I’m trusting that general laziness will prevent anyone from showing up.

I’m glad I had today off. I’ve been needing a break for awhile. It didn’t help that I worked on the key fob reset on Saturday, but this has been an excellent way to recharge batteries.
I slept in and read. I haven’t had that privilege in awhile. In the afternoon I watched TV. The decadence! The final grouting was made and after it dries, my condo will officially be repaired. (Still need to get the keys back…) I also did a bit of work on my fractal program. I’m trying to understand the best way to have a scrolling window in OS X. Progress is being made, but it is slow. I’d like to spend more time on it, but my long weekend is almost over. I went to dinner at Chianti’s today. (Interesting beggar on the way. He was asking for a donation for marijuana research. Got to admire the creativity at least.) Then I had the last class of Level II Improv. I have a report card and everything! I’ll post the details of that later, because I can’t talk long.

Today I ran 26km. The footing was good for the most part. I rolled my right ankle on one turn. Strangely, my left ankle is the one that hurts now.
Construction continues on my place. The tiles have been put down into the cement. All that needs to be done is a half hour work tomorrow to grout them. Then I will finally have my place back. I’ve been slowly moving furniture back into the living room. I’ve made a pledge to not move anything in until I clean it first. Get rid of the dust and such. So I only have a big screen TV and a chair put out. But they’re clean! This is in preparation for the after-flood party I’m going to have to have.
I got an email today from Rapid Fire Theatre. This is the relevant paragraph:

Come see the new crop! Rapid Fire Theatre has been training and teaching, and wants to show off its latest group of graduates from the RAPID FIRE IMPROV ACADEMY. A special show, Playground, will be staged Feb. 27 at 8 p.m. at the Varscona Theatre, 10329-83 Ave., to showcase the extreme talents of our most advanced academy class. The Level III improvisors will delight and astound you with their wit and spontaneity, so come see the show! Pay-what-you-can admission. Call 448-0695 for reservations.

I’m nervous about this show. Anything else I would be able to prepare for and train myself until I thought I was good enough to show other people. But that’s the exact opposite of improv. I can’t prepare! That’s the point. I’m debating letting people at work know. Some are goading me to say when it is. Flubbing up in front of strangers is easy to stomach. Making an idiot of yourself in front of co-workers… They can harass me the next day!
I’ve been reading Canticle‘s journal recently. I’m feeling left behind in my life. In the span of three months he’s gotten himself a new house, job, and wife. I’ve been pretty stagnant for the last five years.
I need to start living life again.