I think I’ve got a pattern going here.
Once a season I finally get up the nerve to ask a girl out on a date. When (not if) I’m told no, it takes me about three months to try again with someone else.
Needless to say, I’m feeling a little depressed right now. There is a girl in my improv class that I like, so I asked if she was interested in seeing a movie coming out soon. At least she was nice enough to say that the movie in question was one she had promised to see with her boyfriend. It’s nicer to get shot down that way than to just find yourself waiting at a coffee place for someone who isn’t going to show up.
Actually, I don’t feel depressed. Just stupid.

This injury sucks.
I only ran 10 km today. My physiotherapist says not to run for more than an hour, so I’m good there. But what bothers me is that the group I would normally run with is doing 29km right now. I started with them and they should be just about reaching the halfway point as I type this. I ran with them for 5km, keeping up well, but it fell apart as I turned around. Going down the hill things really started hurting and I had to walk large chunks of the route back.
Physical exercise: You spend so much effort to bring yourself up to a certain level, and it is so easily taken away. And this is the third Spring in a row that I’ve been injured. Two years ago it was the knee. Last year the foot. This is the season of the shoulder.

I got a new computer at work on Monday, so I’ve been trying to get it up to speed. Mostly copying files from the old computer to the new one and installing software. I’m a big fan of QuickTime as opposed to the Windows Media Player. It has nothing to do with Apple versus Microsoft. I just think the interface for QuickTime is so much cleaner and friendlier. So of course I went to the Apple site and downloaded the latest version. Surprisingly it came with iTunes. Not really a problem.
Today I found a rogue MP3 wandering aimlessly in the mess of files. So I double-click it to figure out what it was. iTunes comes up and plays the song. But first it scans my hard drive for every other music file it can find. Wow, that many.
I play a few in the privacy of my own office. Then curiosity gets me while playing, Heaven, and I press the arrow next to the artist’s name. Suddenly I’m in the iTunes music store, looking at every song by DJ Sammy. (For the record, I own the CD.) He has some new ones and I click for a thirty second snippet. I like it, I’ll buy it when I get home. A quick look at the mixes people have made shows some other songs that I’ve been wanting to get. Score. I’ll do a more intensive browse at home and buy several songs.
When I get home, none of those songs are available. DJ Sammy has apparently never released any music.
The problem is that because I work for an American company, my computer thinks it is located in Washington state. So the computer was browsing the American iTunes store. Not the Canadian one.
This annoys me. A lot of songs I want are out of my grasp, and I don’t know why. I want to give these people money, why won’t they take it?
Technically I could buy the songs at work and then take them home, but that doesn’t feel ethical. And I don’t want to pay the higher US prices.

So the physiotherapist says to me today that she is getting an intern next week and that she’s looking forward to showing me to her. “Why?” “Because you’re interesting.”
Things you don’t want to hear from a doctor.
She also says it isn’t looking good for me running a marathon this June. So there is a possibility I won’t be running the Manitoba Marathon this year. Which is a pity because it would be one of the last chances I have since my parents are planning on leaving there this year.
It’s a nice flat course.

I just got back from improv class. It normally isn’t held today, but it was moved because this Monday some event is happening that is affecting high schools. Since that covers most of the class, they moved it. It was a great class! The main part was that we did a scene and then had some other improvisers comment on it and analyze it. Figure out what went wrong and what went right. Then, and here is the good part, we did the scene over again with some changes to make it better.
This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. In classes, I constantly do scenes and then afterwards learn what I did wrong. I feel bad and wish I could do it over again. But that’s the nature of improv. It’s ephemeral. If it sucks, oh well, it’s over, don’t dwell on it. So I was in some really good scenes. I think I got a lot better as an improviser.
After the class, on impulse, I grabbed a bite to eat at the Sugarbowl. I had the best meal I’ve had in a long time. It was a beautifully cooked fish on a bed of scalloped potatoes. Delicious!

I got up early today and went on a run with the Sunday run groups. The dumb part was that I went with the normal group, which was doing 23km. After about 15 minutes with the 3:30 pace group I realized I wouldn’t be able to keep up, and fell back to the 3:45 group. It was better, but I spent the entire run breathing heavy. I think (as a non-medical person) what is happening is that I have muscles desperately trying to keep my shoulder blade in place and so they are always tight. This prevents me from breathing in fully, so I’m running out of oxygen.
As it was, I abandoned myself about 7km away from home. I stopped running and walked (mostly) the rest of the way back.
My shoulder is feeling good though. As long as I don’t know anything intensive that requires breathing heavily.

This morning there was a presentation for the entire office. Everything wrong with companies seemed to come to light at it.
The first indication of impending doom was that it was between 9:30 and 12:00 in the morning… for the people on the west coast. Here in Edmonton, it was 10:30 to 1:00. It is so nice to know that the management of the company thinks of the people in Edmonton, and their lunch hour.
Next item of doom was the video. It seems that the remote viewing software wasn’t up to snuff. So while we could see the desktop of the person giving the presentation, it was too large, so it appeared on the local computer in a scrolling window. So we could only see 2/3 of the PowerPoint slide show at a time. This wouldn’t have been so bad if it was a normal slide show. You know, the kind with lots of white space, seven lines of seven words each. No, our presenter decided that modern PowerPoint slide shows should have as much information crammed into each slide as possible. So we got to see the show with someone constantly scrolling around the window so we could see everything going on.
The biggest problem was that the presenter was in love with business-speak. The kind of language where you can recognize the words as English, but man was never meant to put them together like that. The entire thing was dull, dull, DULL! No one else could concentrate on it enough to figure out what was going on. A co-worker said he did his best to stay awake, but he couldn’t do it without making snide comments.
That’s the biggest benefit of being a satellite office. We can make comments that will never get back to the dark overlords at the home base.
Eventually I had enough and just left. I got some productive work done.
An email was sent out in the afternoon telling people how they should be acting at meetings. Listen, don’t leave, don’t play with electronics, show respect for the presenter. I’m sure parts were directed at me. However, part was directed at the president of our local office. He spent the entire presentation typing on his laptop. And he didn’t need to take notes because he had a copy of the slide show.
I heard later that some marketing people are doing all their work within PowerPoint. Storing all the information that is relevant to the entire project. This allows them to give a presentation at the drop of a hat. But it also means viewers are looking at a dump of information, much of which isn’t relevant.

In the lunch room today, Jenny asked me what I was having for dinner tonight. She wanted to know what a bachelor usually eats. Perfect timing for me. I’m having Weiner Schnitzel. Except instead of using veal, I was using pork tenderloin. A butter sauce will be added using capers, parsley, and lemon.
I’m feeling good about myself since. An obvious bait, expecting an answer of “leftover pizza”, deflected by nice gourmet food.

And yes, I actually did have it. Mind you, it was leftovers, but I still made it myself.

Today I went running again. Just to be safe I took an Ibuprofin before heading out. I believe they are the same thing as Advil, which I’m immune to, but the pure stuff seems to still dull the pain.
Anyway, the run today went well. The five minute group seemed to be going slower than usual, which was good. I got a bit further this time before I had to take a quick walk for the pain, but after that, I was doing great. I concentrated on breathing through my chest, and although there was still pain, it was controllable. Now my shoulder is feeling better than it has in a long time. I don’t think I’m up for a very long run on Sunday, but I’m still going to go running.

I seem to have a plan on how to deal with the sleepless nights this busted shoulder is causing. It seems to involve staying up later than usual so that I’m too tired to wake up in the middle of the night.
The problem with this plan is that it is making me cranky. The cure is worse than the disease?

Yesterday, as I was watching more TV than I should, there was a Mars bar commercial on that had a song that I liked. There was only one line of the lyrics that I heard “How does it feel”. So I popped onto my computer and googled that, with the keyword “Lyrics”. There too many songs with that title. And that title did not match the song when I tried it in iTunes.
Then I did a google search on “Mars commercial” with that line. Score! Someone complaining about how inappropriate that song is in a commercial. The name of the song: “Blue Monday”. Now all I need to do is find out who made it. A google search with the line and the title turned up “Orgy”
Woo hoo! It’s in iTunes. The thirty seconds I hear sounds about right. A little off, but close enough. A purchase later and I have the song. It’s good, but quite a bit more “Rock” than I expected.
It was about five minutes later that I found that many other people have done that song. The originator (as near as I can tell) was “New Order”. A band I’ve liked in the past. The version on iTunes even sounds better.
Now I’m in the conundrum over whether to purchase the New Order version. It feels dumb to buy the same song twice. But what I’ve got to realize is that I’m getting a lot more bang for my buck with iTunes than I ever had with CD purchases. I’ll probably get it eventually.

I found a site that stores a lot of flash movies. I’ve noticed there are two main varieties of flash movies. Those that someone has spent time crafting and give a good viewing. Then there are the others where it looks like someone trying to learn flash and put his homework up for the world to see.
The second stupidity yesterday was that it took me about five minutes to figure out that the badger badger badger song has no ending and will not change no matter how long it is watched.

An interesting weekend.
Saturday was spent in two states. In one state there was condo board work. We’re trying to get the back alley paved, but to do that, we need a petition signed with a certain percentage of people by April 15th. We’ve sort of dropped the ball on this so we’re scrambling to get enough signatures. So I’ve been, every so often, phoning the people I’ve been assigned to try and make an appointment to get the signatures.
On the other state, I’ve been leaving to go get stuff I’ve been wanting to get done. I went shopping and bought some new clothes and got some household items I’ve been needing. Clothes shopping is very entertaining if you admit you have no idea what looks good, and then let the cute girls make you try clothing. I like being the center of attention
Then there was Saturday evening.
I got invited out by a girl to go to a fetish store opening.
Things you wouldn’t expect to happen in your life, and then they do. Now of course I might be exaggerating a bit. I was invited by a runner friend, Monica, to get together. We haven’t seen each other in awhile so it was a chance to catch up. She lives in a small apartment building filled with gay men. They all seem very close. One of them was a past “Mr. Edmonton Leather” so he had to make an appearance at the grand re-opening of “B&D Emporium”, the fetish store in question. (I’ve been there before to try and get the demon wings I wanted for halloween. Never did though.) Everyone else in the building was going, so Monica was too. She really didn’t want to, as she was tired, and just wanted to relax. I have the philosophy though that if I’m invited out, I have to go. So I wasn’t the most supportive of letting her relax.
Anyway, it was a nice party there. Food and drinks. Even got introduced to whippings. All in all, a full evening.
Today I did an exercycle for an hour and a half (boring!), wandered a bit on Whyte, then watched a lot of television. No it wasn’t productive, but it was the weekend.

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.