Took a few days off and rode to Oregon via Hwy 1. Pics are on the main page. It was a long ride:

My brand new tires show some actual wear, but they do have over 1300 miles on them from this trip and the little side rides last weekend. I've got to wash it tomorrow, even if it's kinda rainy as there is a lot of that sea slime on it and I'm guessing it has salt in it.

The woman is still in AZ, she called to let me know things are "fine". Her dad taught the kid how to hit people in the head, and one of the grandmothers taught him to throw stuff. It was all fun until the kid tried to throw the TV remote at his mom and ended up busting it. That will teach 'em. :)

Kristen's mother continues to bug the shit out of me. Not directly of course, but I get to hear her on the phone talking to the woman. Ugh. She is harping on Kristen for only getting Tanner (her brother's precious baby) one birthday gift. The damn kid is 1, he's not even sentient yet and their worried the kid won't get enough crap for his birthday. Never mind that Kristen is taking time off work (that's $160/hr she won't be making) and flying her ass out there (that's another $200) just to be at the party. Isn't that enough? Good god it isn't like the kid did anything, he just lived a whole year. BFD. Her mom is also harping her on her about riding (horses are so dangerous), and about not investing enough for the future, and not being "trapped" with me ('cause I keep her chained to a wall and don't let her do anything), blah, blah, blah. I always wondered why people hated their mother-in-law. Now I can see. Kelly2's mom was fine, and I think my mom is fine (if a bit weird). Why is Kristen's mom such a raving bitch all the time?

After some seriously bad days at work it was nice to have an extra day off. I'm looking forward to tomorrow and going to the gym, eating a leisurely breakfast and then starting to work on the Montero. I'll finally swap out that leaking master cylinder.

Last night we went up to the city for dinner (and some Italian place that was totally forgettable) and to see Beach Blanket Babylon. It's some sort of strange musical, filled with comedy and social satire. I actually liked it, it was a good time. They did an awesome job of singing and whatnot and the whole production was fun and not too political (any time anyone makes fun of politicians there is that risk of going too far and going from funny to soapboxing). After the show we went over to one of Kristen's favorite restaurants in north beach (the Italian part of SF) and got some zucchini chips. They were super tasty. While snacking at the bar (didn't want to wait for a table just for an appetizer) we got to watch some greasy Italian guys in their late 40s hit on some SF-style bimbos in their early 20s. Funny for a while. I apparently have no sense of style as I didn't like the bimbo's clothing at all, the jeans were funky and the baby-doll style tops were not flattering at all (and these chickies were hot). They had some some super-slutty shoes though which are always nice.

Today we went to Home Depot so I could get some boards I needed to finish my loading setup and went to the mall for a pretzel dog (yum!) and to get a few shirts for me. The woman looked for pants but couldn't find anything. We came back and while she watched the Daytona 500, I got all my loading gear setup and actually cranked out 80 rounds of .45. Not exactly a lot but I had to get the hang of everything and setup totally new dies. My powder throw was all rusty so that had to be cleaned up (works great now) and the scale was a bit dirty as well. I had some CCI 300 primers and IMR SR4756 powder left over from '93 (complete with bi-mart and Anderson's sporting goods price tags) so I used that along with some old, old brass I found to load up some of the 185gr slugs I mail ordered. The brass was all mixed head stamps and I'm guessing it's at least twice fired. I say that because some of it was military head stamp brass and the primer crimp had obviously been reamed out. That means one firing as military brass and reloaded (by me I guess) at least once. I won't collect this stuff after I fire it this time, it's looking a little beat up. The primer strikes looked like Ruger markings and there was a few with the telltale Glock "smear" on the primer and the small dent in the case mouth. That must have been from Vareck's (actually now Kenny's) Glock 21. That's the only Glock .45 I can recall being around ever. Maybe tomorrow I'll take the rounds to the range and see if they work right. I'm out of the SR4756 powder though (which is why I stopped at 80 rounds). I have some AA #5 which will work for .45 loads too. Maybe I'll go to Reed's and see what sort of powder they've invented in the last... 13 years. Oy we're getting old.

The garden is doing OK, in spite of the constant rain. This like day 7 for the rain for us, that's hard on us Californians. In Oregon 7 days of rain is like summer. :) I got the carrot seedlings all planted as well as the herbs. I ran out of edamame seeds and not enough of the seedlings actually started. Next time I'll lay out the seeds in the pattern I'm going to plant them and take a picture. That way I can try to see what good seeds look like and just plant those. There was some wild rosemary growing as ground cover over by the neighbors' unit and we swiped (actually dug up) a little tiny starter plant and put it into our boxes. We'll see if it grows.

Oh, and I got called an asshole but some dude at the grocery store who wasn't happy about me taking a spot right up front so we could load the groceries without dragging them through the rain. Kristen was waiting for me while I got the car and heard the dude yelling. I wouldn't have been driving so slow and annoying him if he hadn't started flipping me off and yelling for some unknown reason. She was worried he was going to get out of his car and attack me. I pointed out that if he really got out of hand I could just run him over, the Montero may be crappy but in a flesh vs. steel match it still wins. She has no sense of humor at all! :)

I think the woman is upstairs buying a new computer. Her laptop, which she leaves at the office all the time) is physically broken. I told her a desktop is cheaper and faster and we can get her a removable USB memory stick or little hard drive to keep her patient records on and she can just carry that back and forth. She got some on-line Dell deal for a P4 2.8ghz machine with a 17" flat panel for $750 with her small business discount. Damn, I didn't even know you could get a panel that cheap let alone one with a system. Dell actually shows hyper threading as an "option". For $20 they'll turn it on in the bios for you. That's a pretty sneaky way to get $20.

Holy crap has it been busy at work. Tons and tons and tons of meetings and project plans and planning for meetings and making power point slides. BTW, power point so has the feel of some shitty app that someone whipped up in a college graphics class using LOGO. I'm not a super power user but we must stumble over 5 bugs every time we try to sit down and make a presentation that goes over 1 slide. It's amazing how many times it hoses itself up. The fun ones are when it looks right on one system and then doesn't look right on another, or, if it decides to change the font size randomly every time the slide show is opened. That's always hard to get around. You have to finish it, save but not exit PP and then carry the laptop over to the meeting room without suspending so you don't have to reset all the fonts.

Anyway, last night at 7pm Ed decides that instead of him doing a briefing for the other VPs that I would do it. We were up past midnight trying to get all the info into 3 action-packed slides (with 9 or so "fly in" stages to a design diagram on each one. We did a bunch of dry runs last night and this morning we did two dry runs to the empty board room. It took 11 minutes from the time Ed did the into and handed me the clicker to when I handed it back for Q&A. During the actual presentation it took 55 minutes as the ass hole VP (Gopal) kept jumping in asking questions that were covered later (and he wouldn't accept that the question was answered later he wanted it now and out-of-order) or he would argue points he didn't actually understand. It became obvious he didn't understand and others started jumping on him to get him to give it up and just listen. I don't know if we got anything done... it feels like we should have an answer or two out of that mess but I can't remember. I've got another presentation to do at 5pm and then I'm done. Whew.

I got new tires on the bike yesterday. The Pilot Roads (not "road pilot" like I kept thinking). They're supposed to be the hot tire for the RT. They're way better than my worn out Z6s, that's for damn sure. It's like a whole new bike. I swear they're like 1/2" taller than the others, but maybe it's not that dramatic. It does lean more when on the side stand though, but perhaps it's just that they're not worn down.

We had to shut down the IDC (that's India Design Center) so they could do work on the power and UPSes and whatnot. It happened at 10am our time yesterday, so midnight on Saturday for them and Arun, our local IT guy that makes $10k/year, called me today to ask a few questions on getting the last systems up. He stayed there the whole time the power was being worked on.... so like 30+ hours from the time he got there in the morning. Crazy. He had to stay there to beat on them though or they wouldn't work.

VNC must use some serious bandwidth when running 1280x1024 in 24 bit color mode. I changed the VNC stuff on pong at home to that and even from the desktop at home it's slow. I actually went back to just using a ssh window instead of typing in an xterm in the VNC session. Maybe just having everything on 10mbps wireless is starting to show. I've got yahoo! launch running too which probably isn't helping with the local network. Perhaps someday my 802.11b router will die and I can upgrade like Dennis. That, or I'll move pong to the garage and run a hard wire to the router to get at least some of the traffic off the wireless. Throughput seems OK on the torrents both up and downloading but the latency between keystrokes is horrid.

Yesterday we went to the nursery and spent like $300 on planter boxes, dirt and a few starter plants. Today we planted the strawberries and onions we got as well as the edamame seeds that have sprouted in the indoor starter pots. It's not terribly sunny today (rained Friday, was OK yesterday) but I needed to get them in the ground. They were 3" or so tall and banging against the lid of the indoor "greenhouse" thing. They look so small and unprotected out in the planters....

Last night we went on a quasi-real date. Got dressed up and everything and went to Nola's for dinner. I had one beverage (on an empty stomach, bad idea) and was kinda whacked for most of the meal. The woman had a drink and some sort of desert wine, which they screwed up and brought two glasses of so she drank them both. I thought she was going to kill herself walking back to the car falling off her high heels. She already got thrown off her horse that morning and was sore, not sure why she wanted to get all fancied up for dinner. I would have just wanted to lie around but I guess we do that enough.

My parents are probably going to stop by for dinner tonight. Dad is bringing some steaks or something we can try on the grill. It's first 'real' test.

Oy, the woman just came in and caught me singing along to Cyndi Lauper "Girls just want to have fun" and balancing my checkbook. I think she now doubts my sanity, again.

Last night I assembled the grill and tonight was our first grilled meal. A small salmon steak, two chicken & apple sausages, a large mushroom and some zucchini. I think the zucchini was the best myself, it was very tasty for just having some olive oil, salt and pepper on it. Our food choices are going to seriously expand now that we can grill stuff. Kristen got some ribs at the store too so we'll have to try those. The BBQ from the library says boiling them ahead of time is the worst thing you can do. Oh, I thought that was the right thing. We'll have to see if we can make something tasty happen this weekend.

Oh, and work sucks blah blah blah. It's so routine now it's hardly worth mentioning. I did get my $4700 expense check from the India trip which is nice. No more float for the company.

Working on tax papers tonight. Oy, it's going to be a bad year. I'm going to pay a lot in penalties I bet. :(

Today was pretty busy with errands. We went and ordered the book cases for the front room. "Hoot" Jenkins furniture does all wood stuff and we got a 8' and two 7' alder book cases and are having them stained, uh, some color that looks good with the floor but who's name I forget. No cheap Ikea wood-ish and plastic stuff here, this is all solid wood and looks really nice. It's a shame I'll have all my crappy books on these really nice shelves. Maybe I'll display my D&D stuff from a bygone era. That would be pretty cool. :)

My parents came by and took my tree, we don't have room for it inside with the book cases and we're rearranging the front patio where the tree was to make room for our planters. We went to 3 different nurseries to find planter boxes that will look right and hold all the veggies and stuff we want to grow. We didn't buy any of that today (figured the book cases were enough) but I did get 72 of those little seed starter peat thingies in a plastic "green house" for $6. I started seeds for a bunch of herbs for the woman and carrots, jicama and edamame for me. The edamame will need some trellis or similar to climb up which is easy enough to do and the jicama vines get 10'-15' long. Not exactly sure how I'll deal with those growing out of a pot. We can only plant 2-3 jicama plants in a 1' cube planter so odds of a successful harvest are small.

Dinner last night was tasty as predicted, and I took a Fanta with me to the restaurant just to be weird. They hadn't seen the "real" stuff from Germany. Ha. The waitress did turn me to to some strange apple-grape-cherry drink they have which was pretty good. I still prefer the Fanta.

Next weekend I really need to wash/wax the montero properly. The car wash did a shit job, even on the sides. How hard is it to wash a big flat piece of metal? The clear coat on the paint on the hood is starting to bubble. That's not a good sign, if I don't take care of it now it's going to look like the ultimate white trash vehicle with the paint all scabbing off.

Today I experienced a first... I took the montero through a car wash. It's not a good idea, it whacked up the mirrors and bent the crap out of the antenna. I don't think ancient cars were meant to go through modern car washes.

We were supposed to go for a ride this morning but dad's bike's battery was dead so we instead went to Cal BMW to pick up a battery charger. The new bikes have gel batteries and the regular car battery chargers won't charge them correctly. Since the ride was already screwed so I also installed his tail blazer tail light modulator.

I went to the range briefly just to make sure I knew which end of the gun the bullets came out of. I didn't do so bad, but the gun was filthy. I'll take care of that after I finish this and then get ready to go to Alameda to meet the woman and her friends at the German restaurant. Dinner will be tasty.