I noticed something this weekend of concern. I’m lopsided.
I was looking in the mirror and got a good glimpse of my pectoral muscles. The one on my left looks pretty good, dare I say sexy, but on the right it looks… flaccid. I’m assuming that this is because of my shoulder injury. I must be favoring my left arm leaving my right muscles to atrophy.
The solution I suppose is to start forcing myself to use my right arm more. Which shouldn’t be a problem since I am right-handed. It should be my natural behavior. Except evidence is proving otherwise.
I want to concentrate on my running form. I might not be swinging my right arm the same amount as the left. That might also be an explanation.

Really, last night was pretty much the first time I ever drank beer. I’ve had numerous opportunities before for beer, even free, but I never drank it. I guess peer pressure, and a friend who wouldn’t take “No” for an answer, finally did me in. The secret is apparently to not sip, but to take a good swallow.
Today I still felt the taste in my mouth. And I don’t know if there is a hint of a craving for it. Which doesn’t make sense since I much preferred the Shirley Temple I had after the beer.

I have no shame.

Went to the bar. Just got back. Yes, I am aware it is a work night.
I went with a co-worker and his friend. He was quite supportive and seemed to be trying to make me a better person. This involved me drinking half a pint of Kokanee Gold. I apparently need to acquire the taste for beer.
Also I can’t seem to do anything right. I need to swear more. I need to drink. I also need to learn how to talk to women with confidence, especially if they start the conversation.

It was warm enough to do hill training today, but we have finally had snow. I figured I didn’t want to try charging up a hill when it is slippery. So I went back to the treadmill.
On Sunday I with a shorter running group than usual, because I was taking Harry the dog with me. He kept up well for the ten kilometers. The last two or three he was lagging, but he did finish. I’m sure he enjoyed it. After the first kilometer he had calmed down that I started letting him off the leash in safe areas. An interesting result of this was that when the group of runners was packed into the woodland trails behind Hawerelak park, he started expressing his genes.
He is a border collie cross, so he started herding the pack of runners.
No nipping or anything, but he started circling the group to make sure there weren’t any stragglers. I could have put him on the leash again but it didn’t look like he was getting in the way, and he seemed to be having a good time.

I was exhausted today. It was a different sort of exhaustion than I am used to. Usually when I haven’t had enough sleep I try and keep my eyes open as best as possible. This time I had no trouble with that, but concentration was shot. It was because after a weekend with a dog that had a moral objection to people sleeping, I had also stayed up too late last night.
Still it didn’t stop me from going to a model call.
I noticed on the door to the stairwell in my building that the Academy of Alberta Aesthetics was having a model call. I wasn’t sure what it was, and with good judgement shot to hell from fatigue, I went and checked it out. The pretty girl was very convincing, so I was soon being interviewed by three students of the academy to see if I would be good as a model for some event in March. I think they are interested in using me. I have prior experience being a model from being a chronic volunteer last November in Jamaica. Plus I am obviously comfortable being in front of a lot of people since I do improv.
At one point they were asking for vital statistics about me. I didn’t know what my eye color was because I never look at them. Really, how can I? So I go forward to let one of them tell me and she said I had freaky bluish-green eyes. Usually I only get that reaction if I am wearing cats-eye contact lenses.
That interview only took fifteen minutes after work. I went home and took a quick nap, ate dinner and then got to my improv class half an hour late. I didn’t miss much, just some warm up exercises. The class is too crowded so I don’t feel I’m getting that much out of it. So I don’t feel bad about being late.
The nap helped because I am quite alert right now, and about to do the same mistake I did last night and stay up too late.

This was a whirlwind weekend.
Last Thanksgiving I purchased a turkey. The plan was to cook it and invite people over to eat it. A dinner party if you will; For all the people who wouldn’t be able to have a good Thanksgiving dinner. That plan got trashed when I went to my parent’s for Thanksgiving.
So the turkey stayed in the freezer until this long weekend. I invited all the people who didn’t have turkey at the correct time to come over. I even had my parents there to help celebrate. But not to help cook.
Cooking with my mother in the area is rather difficult. I wanted to do this party by myself. She said she was bringing Waldorf salad and stuffing, and I thought I would leave her that, but I would do the rest myself. In her defense, she left the turkey itself to me, but she was insidious with everything else. I really wasn’t allowed to be involved with the gravy sauce at all. The rice and peas were a fight to do my part. Still, it was a good turkey for the seven people around the table. I finally opened up one of the twelve year old bottles of rum that I had purchased in Jamaica. The daiquiris were apparently very good. The party didn’t officially die until around midnight when the last person left.
Interestingly, for a time there were two turkey’s living in my refrigerator. The aforementioned bird and another one I had picked up at the farmer’s market on Saturday. The Hutterites make great turkeys and my mother wanted one for the “Welcome home” party when my sister visits in four weeks.

Hill training isn’t fun. I find that I am no longer looking forward to the Wednesday evening runs. It is no longer a social activity but a lonely slog up and down the hill.
So, when it became cold today I felt no guilt in skipping the run. It really isn’t that cold, temperature wise it is only -13 degrees. However, the wind chill makes it feel like -23. That’s good enough for me on a day when motivation is low.
In my defense I did go onto the treadmill in my gym. I set it to a high degree angle and tried to find how long I could keep that up. Treadmill running is different from what I’m used to so I couldn’t keep it up for very long. Still it was training.

Many years ago I went to Chianti’s for Valentine’s day. It is a nice Italian restaurant that some might consider romantic. I was single at the time and was only looking for a meal. Afterwards I described the experience as “I went to Chiant’s and glared at all the happy couples.” The thing is that it keeps happening. Not every year, but quite often I am there irrespective of it being Valentine’s day. I went again today because I go on Tuesdays before my improv class. Crowded.
At least I got groped by a Mary on this day. Unfortunately it wasn’t a girlfriend. Mary Nowski was a doctor doing nerve induction testing on me. Worse, it wasn’t really a women, but Dr. Marynowski. An aged gentleman.
My only other concern for today is that I took my car in for a yearly checkup. They found a leak in a rear strut. It isn’t serious but it would take approximately $700 to repair. It’s under warranty for 60,000km/3 years. I’m way under for the kilometers but way past for the years, so it isn’t covered. I’ll save it for after my mortgage is paid off.
The weird thing is that after the repair, my key doesn’t always work in my lock. The car starts fine with the key, but in the door it just doesn’t turn. I believe that it is because they washed the car and it is finally cold here. So some water got into the lock and is jamming it up. If the car is in one of the heated garages that are at work or home, it seems fine. But after sitting outside for a few hours while I was at improv, it jammed up again. Luckily I could open the passenger door. I’m hoping a night in heat will evaporate enough of the water to stop this from happening.
My sister gave me a lock deicer that I’m going to start carrying around.

It’s been awhile since I last posted. So I should spend time catching up.
Fah! That’s boring.
Today was rough though. I was operating on three and a half hours sleep when I thought it would be a good idea to run 20km. It felt good to run, because it was so nice out. The high today was +12. But by the time the afternoon rolled around I had collapsed in bed and totally ignored the beautiful weather.
The reason for the lack of sleep was the previous evening. A co-worker’s wife was in Taiwan for a few months so he decided to host a dinner party. It was just him, me and another co-worker. The dinner was fantastic with delicious butter chicken, Tandoori chicken and a bunch of things I can’t remember and can barely pronounce. The host uses Bittorrent and had downloaded a bunch of TV shows. One we watched was Posted in Uncategorized

I have a friend, Peter, who has been more encouraging than my other friends. He wants to actually go out and do things. He makes my other friends look like sedentary sloths. It’s great.
Today, he decided that I need to get new clothes to help me look better at bars. So off to West Edmonton Mall where I go through a large amount of money to get new clothes and shoes. I’m sure I look nice in them, but I had planned on the Ralphbucks going to pay off my mortgage, and a large purchase doesn’t help.
But I do need to get new clothes.

Yesterday I think I wasted the day. I spent most of the afternoon on the computer. I would like to say it was on computer games. But, instead it was spent going through old computers and trying to transfer files in obsolete formats into non-obsolete ones. I finally knocked off the hard drive of the Macintosh Plus (20 years old), and the Macintosh Performa 6200 (ten years old). I wrote rather prolifically in my younger days, so there are quite a number of files. Unfortunately, I did most of my writing in a program called “Write Now”. That file format is no longer supported, so I have to work on the old programs to save the files in RTF format which the later Macs actually like.
Some of the transfers have been harder than others. A few files were written in Nisus in a newspaper style which has been impossible to maintain. Sacrifices have been made with format to preserve content. I’ve also had problems with multiple files existing. I sometimes find the same file existing on two different computers, and I have to figure out which one is the more recent.
It has been nice seeing some of the old memories. I even have works by friends that were buried in the electronic sediments. And now that I have two computers cleared, I can look at getting rid of them and reclaiming space. And not worry about moving them.
Then I started on the old floppy disks. (The Performa 6200 is the latest computer I have that can still accept a floppy.) Most of them had already been transferred to hard drives long ago, but I ran across the floppy that I kept a journal on. From April 4th, 1991, I kept a journal for a few months. All of it written in “Write Now”. Each day in its own file. It isn’t really critical to preserve them, but that feels like a cop-out attitude. I wrote it originally for posterity (I’m assuming) and it would be wrong to just toss it.
Mind you, it isn’t high literature. I would be tempted to store them in LiveJournal, except it doesn’t shed me in the most glowing of light. I would be about 17, in grade twelve at the time. A time when the average boy is hormones and stupid. The final line of the first entry pretty much summarizes it: “So far all I can say is that this diary is going to be very private.” So it is probably best if I keep them for myself.

I haven’t updated for awhile, and for that I apologize. I thought it was because nothing very interesting has happened, but that isn’t totally true. I have a few drips and drabs of… stuff.
On Saturday I saw Underworld Evolution. It was good, nearly as much so as the prequel. It kept up with plot development and we learned secrets of the world that helped explain previous actions. My only problem is that in the last few minutes it fell into the common Hollywood trap: “Hey this fight scene is going great. Let’s spice it up by breaking a few laws of physics and probability and kick it up a notch by adding another hazard for the people to fight around.” All that really does is strain credibility.
Sunday had a 14km run. I had stayed up too late the previous night so I was wasted by the time the afternoon rolled around. I still went to the improv jam in the evening, but I was the only one. (Aside from the two moderators.)
On Monday my Ralphbucks arrived. A $400 bribe from King Ralph to forget that the conservatives have been in power for far too long and have no idea what to do with all the money they won from the geology lottery. I would have preferred that the money went to better the province, maybe by building infrastructure. However, I still am not giving it to charity. It’s going to pay off my mortgage.
Tuesday was another Improv class. The class is too crowded so I’m not enjoying it. I’m not getting a chance to actually do improv, and I feel my skills are starting to slide. Afterwards I went to Improvaoke. A former teacher was doing a combination of improv and karaoke at a nearby bar. The end result of that was me staying up too late. I didn’t sleep that well either.
Wednesday was a disaster. I got into work in a haze, and I was not very productive. In the evening there was running. I did hill training again. I have noticed that I am no longer looking forward to the Wednesday evening run. I don’t know if it is because when you are running hills there isn’t a chance to socialize, or that it is just hard to do. My legs don’t ache as much, so I suppose that is good.