Since I’ve paid off my mortgage I decided that I would buy a new laptop. A MacBook Pro looked like just the thing to sate my nerdity. But, then I heard that July was the worst month to buy a Mac. Because the WWDC happens in August, that is when new Macs will be announced. Probably at the Steve-note. My goal for major purchases these days is to not feel stupid. So I don’t want to buy anything that will be obsolete in a month.
But said Steve-note was today. No new Mac laptops were announced. So that leaves me with a dilemma. Another rumor has been out that since Intel released new chips that new Apple laptops would be arriving at the end of this month or the start of the next.
Peer pressure is mounting that I stop waiting and start spending my money and get a laptop. But that conflicts with my “Don’t feel stupid” policy. I should wait a month, but my current laptop is feeling old. (Don’t say that out loud. I don’t want it to hear.)

I went to the Heritage Days festival yesterday. A fine time to take a dose of other cultures. I went with a co-worker who is working in Canada temporarily so she can apply for a visa to return to the states. So, that’s an added bonus of culture.
We walked from Whyte avenue all the way to the park, which is about 4km. Add on the run on Wednesday and Thursday, and I was fairly exhausted for the Sunday morning run today.
But, let’s talk about the festival. It was nice. The Iberian-Canadian exhibit had the best performance with the martial-arts dancers. The song they sang got stuck in my head for awhile after. Usually I just go for the food and try to avoid the culture, but I got more of it this time.
The thing is fairly well organized, but it could be better. One idea I had was instead of having all the pavilions in a semi-line, they should instead be in the form of a map of the world. However, I can also think of problems with that. For instance, popular exhibits like France would be totally dwarfed by other countries like India. (Not to say that India isn’t popular, but I recall long lines for the French exhibits.) That could probably be solved by stylizing the map. But the biggest problem is that countries that neighbor each other frequently don’t get along. Ethiopia would be next to Eritrea. China next to Taiwan. Serbia next to Croatia. Israeli vs. Arab. And most importantly, France next to Italy.

For me, Earl’s is a lot like Sony.
When you buy a Sony product, you aren’t necessarily getting a better product. You will probably get a fine piece of electronics, but you are paying extra for the advertising.
With Earl’s, the food is quite a bit overpriced. They are somewhat more subtle with their advertising though. I don’t recall ever seeing a commercial for them. Their advertising is via gorgeous waitresses. They only seem to hire the drop-dead beautiful. (Unless you accidentally get the table being served by the owner’s daughter.) But the food isn’t any better, and the girls want nothing to do with you after you’ve given them their tip.
Other restaurants have a more economical bait-and-switch approach. They hire one drop-dead beautiful woman, then have her work as the hostess. So when you go to the restaurant, the first thing you see is this beauty, but then when you sit down, you find yourself interacting with something that may have crawled out of the sewer.
I suppose what is most annoying is that as a man I will fall for it every time.

Today, at work, I had to take a short educational course. It was compliance training.
Today’s course was on how not to give bribes to foreign government officials. Most of it seemed obvious.
At the end though, I noticed that they had not once said anything about bribing local (non-foreign) government officials.

I haven’t updated in awhile. And for that I apologize. I’ve been busy.
As previously noted, I had a mortgage-burning party. Actually, no, it hasn’t been previously noted. But in any case, it happened last Saturday.
I would like to think it was a successful party. I had about thirteen people show up. There were some demographics that didn’t bother to show up, but I easily met quorum. It split into two parties. One was out on the balcony playing the guitar and singing. The other was inside with the food and drinks and discussing meaty subjects.
However it looks like I’ll need to throw another party soon. A You-people-were-supposed-to-drink-all-my-beer-the-first-time party. (It will probably be a barbecue.) That would allow me some space in my fridge which is currently overflowing with a beverage I don’t like to drink. I mean, the bottle of vodka wasn’t even opened.
Well, better luck next time.

Well, my friend is visiting.
My goal to totally exhaust him is going poorly. Mainly because he came pre-exhausted. (I blame his children.) No challenge there. I’m letting him sleep in, and hopefully that will give him some energy reserves that I can spend the rest of the day depleting.
I’ve got a party this evening. I’ll drag him around town getting ready for it. There is also the “Taste of Edmonton” going on, but I’m thinking of saving that for tomorrow. I’ll try and replace it with a Whyte Avenue wander. That will probably involve exercise, so that should be good to tucker him out.
Yes. My plan is coming together.

Last week I did something I had never done before, but I should have a long time ago.
I saw “Hamlet”. It’s actually hard to avoid the play in this day and age. But now I can finally make sense of the play “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead”. I’ve seen it several times, but I couldn’t help but feel some of it was lost on me. (I’m not sure but I think the performance of Hamlet I saw included a few extras to link it more closely with the “… are Dead” play.) Now I can understand all the Hamlet jokes people tell. (Not that there are a lot of them.)
I suppose my timing on seeing it was good, because this weekend I also took an acting course for the first time. I’ve been hip deep in improv courses, but I really have just been winging it when it comes to acting. I never even took it in high school.
I’m not sure how much I got from the course. The first part seemed to focus on improvising. I’d like to think I have that mostly down. Then the rest was more scripted. We were each given a part in a small section of some plays. Then we were to perform those parts. But the teacher never actually taught us how to perform. All I got was how to breath like the character, or walk like the character, or how to figure out the motivations of the character. Now I suppose those are all a good foundation for acting like the character, but I’m wondering if I am missing something. I never feel comfortable trying to portray strong emotions that I’m not familiar with. I’m not a very emotional person. No one has told me how to pretend plausibly that I am feeling a certain way.
I’m thinking of taking a season long course and hope that it gives me a better idea.

Okay, it was a learning experience for what should be an obvious lesson. I knew it was probably a dumb idea, but I still thought it could be done.
Basically, I thought I could buy a slurpee and then scooter a few blocks. I should point out that my scooter doesn’t have a cup holder. (Why would it?) It was a short distance. It was risky, but as long as I was careful, why couldn’t I?
Initial tests of holding it in one hand and using the right hand for acceleration and braking seemed to work. Then I got more confident and tried putting it on the seat between my legs. That was the mistake. As soon as I braked, even gently, it fell down to the floor. The lid did not stay on.
So I’ve traded the price of a slurpee for a learning experience and a sticky scooter. But I think I lost the lesson. I now think I know what to do, so we will be repeating this fiasco at some time in the future.

A thought occurred to me.
In the past, hobbies lasted for the lifetime of the participant. You could start a hobby, and have a reasonable chance of amusing yourself with it for the rest of your life. The skills you developed at the start would last. If you played a sport, age would catch up with you, but you could still have fun playing. More sedate hobbies, like stamp collecting wouldn’t change at all.
These days, the hobby of video games breaks that mold.
Video games are spurious. The fun I have had with old games will never come again. The skills and strategies I gained to play “Uncharted Waters” will wither and die.
I could try the game again because I did have fun playing it in the past, but I also finished it. And now there are more advanced games that I should try. It’s a never ending battle to get a hit from the latest game. Unfortunately I tend to look back. I’ve been working to play games that have been gone for decades, simply because I never finished them the first time around. I’ve already finished Ultima 1 to 3, and someday Ultima 4 will fall before me.
But I can’t dwell in the past forever. I have a literal pile of old computers lurking in my closet; A Mac Performa 6200, and a Mac Plus that will never be used again. But I am now going through the process of taking them to my car for a trip to the Eco station. A part of me is dying, but I have to face facts. I will probably never enjoy “Dark Castle” on it again. (Although I hear you can get it for cell phones now.) I won’t have an epic battle in “Reach for the Stars”. All I will have is the memories.

Plants are stupid.
I don’t mean in a they-won’t-get-into-Harvard kind of way, but just in a self-preservation way. I have a poinsettia that I have been growing for awhile. I enjoy whenever it makes a new branch and starts growing in a different direction. But this plant seems to be determined to grow in the stupidest ways. Most often it is a case of reach exceeding grasp. It will grow a branch out in a direction and then not try and support the branch so that it bends under its own weight. Or it just breaks off. Heck, I have one brach that has been going in a downward trend for some time, and has almost run out of room to go down.
However, they are good for the economy.
Last week, after the Whyte Avenue parade, there was a lady handing out little saplings so that people could plant a tree. It was nice. But I don’t have a yard. So I needed to buy a pot to put the sprout in. But you also need dirt. Dirt does not come in small bags. They come in large 25 liter bags. You can not get a small bag unless you want very expensive dirt. So I went the cheapest way, which involved a lot of dirt I do not need. To support a small fir tree that will probably die in a few weeks.
Healthy economy though.

I saw the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie yesterday. Although, it could more truly be said I saw it early this morning. The movie didn’t start until 11:24, and I didn’t get out until 2:00 in the morning. Thank god for the overpriced popcorn and coke. Which for me was dinner and a vital source of caffeine.
It has been the best summer movie so far. After the disappointment of X-Men: The Last Stand and the love/hate relationship with Superman Returns it was nice to see a movie that was entirely good. The only complaints I could have is a little too much CGI (suspension of disbelief tends to shut down when CGI stunts happen) and a very slight pacing problem. But those are minor quibbles. If you see only one summer movie, this seems to be the one to see.
Sequels, as a rule of thumb, tend to be poor in comparison. I think that is the nature of the beast though. If you make the sequel at the same time as the original, you can have them flow together. But usually the sequel is only made after the movie execs see the original is a hit. So they feel disjointed. Often a number of hard coincidences are needed to get the characters to interact with each other again. This movie fell victim to that, but they did their best to get people who don’t necessarily like each other to work together again.
What they did do quite well is really make it a sequel right. You do that by taking elements from the first movie (usually minor ones if the sequel wasn’t made at the same time) and make them far more of a plot hook in the next. The other way is to not introduce too many new characters, and use as many from the first movie as possible. Pirates did that in spades. Almost every character from the first is in the second. Even ones that don’t make sense were forced in. Mostly, I suspect, because they were good comic relief.
My final piece of advice. The credits last ten minutes. There is a brief ten second scene waiting for you at the end. You will feel no sense of loss if you miss it, and you could probably predict that that was what happened. So if you don’t want to wait through all those names, don’t feel too bad. But at least you know it is there.

Yesterday there was a Theatresports show that I got to be in. For me it was last minute as I only found out about it on Tuesday. Which was a problem because I already had plans for Friday. But I was able to shuffle the plans a bit and I could do both. I wasn’t even sure if I should show up. It has been four weeks since I last did any form of improv, so I was rusty. I did my best to prepare by reading the comments given to me during the last few improv classes I had attended.
Fortunately, I was only on for about twenty minutes. I didn’t do horribly. But I didn’t do great. I forgot all of the comments that had been given to me. Mostly that I am controlling. I guess when I am stressed, I start pushing a story, and everybody else better come along for the ride. This is a bad thing. I have to be more trusting. It really hit me in the speaking-in-one-voice part where I had an idea for a story, and so I wasn’t listening to what word Jonathan was starting to say.
I should have stayed for the notes after the show, and I regret that, but I had to go rushing off.

I saw the new Superman movie the other day. It has taken me a few days to digest the results.
Superman is iconic. It is hard to dislike a movie of his, unless the director hates the subject. I mean, as soon as they started playing the Superman march, it was impossible not to feel pumped. You watch the man of steel lifting something heavy and you feel inspired. And the director did a lot of good things. He did a good job of showing how invulnerable he is. And I give points for never shoving America into our faces. A character even asks if he still stands for truth and justice. He never asks about the “American way”. I thought that was a nice touch.
But there were problems too. I don’t want to discuss them in detail because I don’t want to spoil the movie for others. The timing was off. We take too long to see things evolve that should just end with Superman showing up. They did that well in the first movie, but in this one we see superfluous special effects. Near the end of the movie we see Superman put in a situation that I feel should have a more profound effect and lasted longer, but then it just goes away.
Lex Luthor in this day and age is supposed to be a ruthlessly evil billionaire. But since this movie is based off the original ones, he is back to being an evil real-estate agent.
The reason I bring these up is that I was similarly disappointed with X-Men United. Superman Returns was a much better movie, but I still found faults.
The question is this: As I become older, am I no longer enjoying the good superhero action movies? Do I now prefer dramas? It a frightening prospect. I can deal with my body falling apart. But if I can’t enjoy a good action movie, a certain quality of life issue rears its ugly head.

So I did the K-100 relay yesterday. I did leg 5 which only has one hill so it wasn’t too bad.
It was very hot. And because of the higher altitude, I had less atmosphere to shield me. So I am now sporting a nice sunburn. I had slathered on a bit of SPF-8 sunscreen, but it didn’t protect much. Fortunately I had taken off my shirt for the run so I don’t have a farmer’s tan.
My support team for my leg wasn’t that good. It consisted of two people who are secretly camels in disguise. So they didn’t think I needed that much water. They were supposed to show up every two kilometers to see if I needed anything, shout encouragement, and take pictures. And they were good for the first few stops. Then it started stretching out to every five kilometers. When I did see them and got water, I drank the entire bottle within two kilometers, which left for a very dry run. I could even feel myself powering down from lack of fuel. I passed someone and was doing well but they got water and I watched them motor past me. So people passed me. But the other groups tend to put their best people on this leg so I can’t feel too bad.
At one point, there was a rather large mountain goat with an impressive rack on the side of the road. Munching grass. All the runners passing by were probably the best entertainment going. However, when I started getting close he looked like he was deciding to cross the road and was ambling towards me. When we were a few meters apart, I just treated him like any other pedestrian I come across during a run. A nod of the head and keep going.
After I passed I didn’t look back.
Then I just steamed along. I did mug another support vehicle for some water. That helped give me some fuel. The small child holding the sign “Run faster! There is a bear behind you.” was cute, but didn’t really increase my speed. In the end I did the 17.6km in 1:41:27. I wonder how much faster I could have done it with a decent supply of water.
I don’t know yet how my group did. We weren’t a competitive team. You can’t be when you are sporting a few senior citizens. Unfortunately, there was a death in the family of one of our runners, so we had to make different arrangements. We moved people around and had one of our runners do two legs. He did amazingly well. Probably because the two legs used different muscles. His first leg was mostly uphill and his second leg was all downhill.
Today I ache and I am taking it easy.

I discovered a way to put a spring into my step today.
This might only be a guy-thing, and/or a computer person thing. Essentially it is marking territory.

I registered a domain name.

It’s quite a nice feeling. I now have a spot on the information superhighway that I can call my own. In fact I have two spots! One for the theoretical company I would need if I ever finish writing my programming project and want to distribute it. The other is for personal stuff.
I didn’t need the personal stuff one, but once you start marking turf, why stop?

Awhile ago I heard that people aren’t reading as much anymore. I think I saw it on a television program. So in the back of my head I thought I should rectify that. I haven’t read anything fiction in awhile, so I was as guilty as the average North American.
On impulse I bought the book, jPod yesterday. And then I thought I would read a bit.

I think I have figured out why I don’t read as much anymore. It’s because I have poor self-control. With television and movies, they only last a set time. The good ones don’t take too much more than two hours. You can plan your day around them.
With a book, you start one and plan to only “read a bit”. Then you notice that you have run out of pages and it is three in the morning. Mind you, this book had large chunks that were easy to skip. Did it really need to list all the prime numbers between 10,000 and 100,000? Probably not, but that’s a dozen pages that just fly by. Sort of like the long sections of elven poetry in Lord of the Rings.
Based off of my reading pattern though I would recommend jPod to a friend.

I still got up early today to do my run. So I am pleasantly running on 4.5 hours sleep. I’m surprisingly goofy right now. And happy? I’ve noticed that I am not that good at typing either. Lot’s of mistakes. The “delete” key is my friend. My drive to the run didn’t go so well. I took a large number of wrong turns for a destination that is only 2km away.
I wouldn’t have tested drunk, but I think that would be a fault of the testing mechanism. I’m not 100% sure I was qualified to be driving.

The rain has started.
People have started parking on my street.

Who will win in this confrontation? Who will prove the victor? Who will reign supreme over Whyte Avenue?

I am not a hockey fan. Until last week I had never watched a hockey game. At all. I saw the occasional clip, but never an entire game. It did mean that when the insanity happens two blocks to the north on Whyte Avenue, I never felt a part of it. I can’t justifiably go crazy, as I’m not pumped up as everyone else.
But a friend convinced me to come to the bar and watch a game. So I have now watched two games of hockey. My friend was very helpful and gave me lessons as to what goes on in a game. So I learned about “offside” and “icing”. Like I said, I’ve never watched a game. I’m a bad Canadian.
The two games weren’t that inspiring as I got to watch the Oilers lose both of them. So it never sucked me in.
In fact tonight, I was enjoying reading the book jPod on my balcony. I had picked it up this morning. I could easily keep track of the game though. When a goal is scored, I can hear the cheer from the bars. I even got to see a helicopter circling over my place. Presumably that was a TV camera mounted on its nose.
Now I hear that the Oilers have won a game. We treat the hockey players like gods in this town. So our pantheon has beaten their pantheon. The wild party will start. How wild it is, is up for debate. It’s a weekend night, so the drunk people can stay out late and trash the place. But the temperature is dropping and it looks like rain. That would put a damper on the celebrations.

Go Oilers! 🙂

I have a problem that I’m sure lots of other people would like to have.
Now that I have paid off my mortgage, what do I spend my money on? My default answer would be RRSPs, but I need to celebrate and spend it on stuff of no practical value.
I went to BestBuy today, firmly convinced that I would buy something. The biggest criteria is that I don’t want to feel stupid in six months.
I could get an iPod? But a friend has a fifth generation one, so to keep up with the Joneses, I need to have a sixth generation one, which could come out any day now. If I buy a current model now, when the new one comes out I will feel stupid.
I could get a PVR? My VCR is starting to die, so this is a completely valid option. Except I’ve kept track and figured out that I only watch about an hour and a half of TV each week. That would be a lot of money on something I wouldn’t use much.
Underworld: Evolution just came out on DVD. $25. It’s going to be half of that in six months, and I already have movies I already own that I haven’t seen.
The same story goes for video games. Some still need to be taken out of the shrink wrap after two years.
In the end I bought nothing at BestBuy.
I am going to go with some books. I placed an Amazon order. Hardly sexy, but it is something I’ll enjoy.

Which of the seven deadly sins can have its letters rearranged to form the word for a landscaping tool?

Every so often someone in our office writes a problem on to the whiteboard in the main meeting room. That was the latest. So a bunch of programmers started thinking about this one. It first started with trying to figure out the seven deadly sins. Once that was done, we couldn’t figure out the rest.
We did come up with a solution though. LUST can be rearranged into SLUT. That’s a kind of Ho(e). Isn’t it?

We didn’t write our answer down.

Plan A was simple. I got a call from a friend and we decided to go with two of his co-workers to “The Bank Ultralounge”. Off we went. The place was dead when we got there at 10:00. It got better, but it still seemed to have a poor girl:guy ratio. At around 11:30 we decided it was a lost cause and would go with Plan B.
Plan B was down the street to “Fluid”. There it was more happening. There were more good looking women. However they had already hooked up. Plus there still wasn’t enough of them.
So Plan C took us to West Edmonton Mall where we tried to go to “Escape”. But it appeared to be closed, permanently. We got out of the car and checked out the new night club, “Fever”. We had our ID checked. But before we paid the $5 cover, we looked in. Not enough people to justify it.
Plan D was for “Dante’s”. Initial observations were good. There were two very hot looking women in the line in front of us. However, after we passed ID, the cover there was $10, and it looked iffy. My friend decided to take a bullet for the team. He paid the cover and looked around. When he came back out he loudly pronounced for all to hear “That is the worst place ever!” Apparently the median age was in the fifties. He also had a traumatic experience with someone losing their toupee. The two hot girls were nowhere to be seen. Maybe all the good looking women were in the big RV trying out for the Ms. Grand Prix Edmonton. Or something like that.
Plan E took us back downtown. We passed by “The Met” but it looked dead, so we tried the “Overtime Bar and Grill”, famous for its police stings. By now it was 1:00 and the place looked like it was dying. We backed out and decided that “The Druid” would be our plan F.
This was the most successful plan. The place was busy. A good selection of women was available to look at, and in our imaginations we could contemplate talking to them. The only down side was that this Irish pub seemed to have an unhealthy fascination with rap music.
When all was said and done, and we were walking back to the car a pair of girls proclaimed I had a “nice ass”. Darn straight! And don’t you forget it.

I feel for a scam at the Farmer’s Market last fall.
I’m not the most organized when it comes to vegetables and spices. I buy as small an amount as possible, but I always seem to let it go to waste. I don’t know how many times I’ve bought a head of garlic, used some cloves, and then watched the rest sprout tendrils and try to grow out of my kitchen. I don’t like to eat garlic that is attempting to grow stuff.
I realized that I use parsley very rarely, but I do use it for the occasional recipe. Every time I purchase it from the grocery store I buy a bunch, use a few sprigs and watch the rest go bad before I need to repeat the process. So when I saw that I could buy an entire living parsley plant from the Farmer’s Market, I thought it was a great idea. I could grow the parsley I need. So I plunked down the money for the plant and took it home.
Since it was several parsley plants, I split the bunch with my mother. I took some dirt from her dirt pile to replace the missing earth so the pot could still be level.
The problem is that either I can’t keep a plant alive, or that parsley traditionally dies in winter. (Hence the scam.)
So I was left with a pot of earth. Since I had a head of garlic on my kitchen counter doing its usual thing, I dumped it in the pile of earth. It grew quickly and looked like it was well on its way to… something. Then all of a sudden, all the green withered and died. Did I water it too much, or too little?
I have a poinsettia that I’ve kept alive for a year and a half. I’m proud of that. However, it fell over a month ago and several branches broke off. As an experiment, I took some of the broken branches and planted them in the pot. Usually they never take, but I used recent growths, and they haven’t died yet. They don’t make roots, but I think the two have grown bigger leaves.
Then, at about the same time, something else green sprouted from the pot. I have no idea what it is though. Is it parsley? Is it some garlic that survived from a root? Is it something that was growing in my mother’s dirt pile? Who knows!? I’m not a gardener. But it is getting bigger and trying to get to the window.
To add to the fun, I bought some parsley seeds and dumped them in last week. I’m assuming that is what sprouted there overnight.

Went to the bank today.
Paid off my entire mortgage.

What did you do today?

Since I’m injured, and not running for awhile I thought it would be as good a time as any to donate blood. I’m not using it. And if I do it now, I get points for my company in Corporate Challenge.
So after work I headed off to the clinic. It’s a fairly simple process to drain your life force. Usually it is risk free. Not today.
They had the Oiler’s hockey game on television. The nurses were somewhat distracted by it. They claimed they were paying attention to their job, but their eyes kept glancing to the television. When you’re dealing with people waving around sharp needles, that is a little disconcerting.
Thankfully I made my getaway with no major injuries. There was bloodshed, but that’s what I went there for.

I went to work on my scooter today. When I got to the place where I was front-ended yesterday, I was behind the exact same truck. He still had no rear bumper. I’m also wondering if the oilers flag that was covering his back window was there yesterday?
We got through the intersection without incident.

Right, decision made. I’m going to go to Calgary this weekend.
So, Improv people, I won’t be attending the Sunday Jam.
Calgary people, I’ll be able to see you, assuming I know of a way to contact you.
Winnipeg people, go back to sleep.

I woke up too early and felt a little sick. However, I was able to get back to sleep when I turned my clock off so it wouldn’t alarm later. So I got a bit more sleep and was feeling much better when I did wake. Of course, I left for work late, but I was accepting of that. It is okay to be an hour late if I make up for it later.
Of course I was even later when someone decided to back into my car.
I was traveling west on 107th Avenue, in the left hand turn lane to head south onto 170th Street. Ahead of me was a white truck, also attempting to turn left. He had partially entered the intersection on the green light and was waiting for a gap in the eastbound traffic so that he could complete the turn. That gap never happened, and the light turned red. Instead of proceeding through he decided to get out of the intersection the other way. I.e. To reverse.
Apparently he didn’t see me. Maybe the white of my car blended with the white of his truck. Or maybe his pickup was too big for him to manage and I was hidden behind him. In either case, he reversed slowly into me. I tried to back up out of his way, but he was quicker than me.
It wouldn’t have been too bad under normal circumstances. But, for whatever reason, he decided that his truck didn’t need a rear bumper. So the truck (which is higher than my car) backed its frame into the hood of my car.
We exchanged information. Apparently he didn’t want to proceed forward because he thought a red-light camera might ticket him. I don’t believe that is possible if you are already in the intersection.
In either case I have contacted my insurance company and even gotten an estimate on the damages. It won’t be repaired until mid-June, so I’m thinking of checking a different autobody shop.
My worry is that since there aren’t any witnesses, he might blame me for the accident. I’m depending on human decency right now.
In other news, I got my scooter back from its spring tune up. I rode up and down Whyte Avenue once. It’s a nice change of pace. Since it will be 31 degrees tomorrow, it should be a good day to ride it.

I am contemplating taking a trip to Calgary this weekend. It is a holiday weekend, so I should probably do something. A chance to see the parents and let them spoil me. I could even see some friends while down there. Now I am all in favor of this, but there are a number of reasons not to.
I have various chores that I need to get done. Some are computer based, so I could do them while down there, but it is hard to concentrate on work. Then again, will I have better time concentrating here?
It’s still up in the air. But that’s the good thing about family only being a drive away, I can make the plans at the last minute.

It’s a beautiful day out. The temperature got into the mid-twenties today. Since we can’t seem to get the air-circulation right at work, it was rather warm. I also didn’t have enough sleep last night, leading to a slight headache. So what I would like to do is sit on my balcony, sip some lemonade and enjoy myself.
Instead I have to close up all the windows because there is a Bobcat playing in the dirt across the street. Those things are far louder than they have a right to be.

Well Forestt Gump had it right. “Stupid is as stupid does.”
A friend called me and wanted to go on a short run. Apparently I can’t say no to runs. So despite all evidence that my foot would rather I not go running, I felt it would be my best interests to pound the pavement.
In my defense, my foot didn’t hurt too badly at the time he called. And really, it is a beautiful day out.
It doesn’t feel too bad now. I’ve put a cold compress on it. I should be fine, but I big part of me is thinking of bailing on the regular Sunday morning run.