Pictures from the horse show are up on the main page. Today I tried to screw with the camera more, put it in manual mode and locked it to ISO400 speed to keep it from being so blurry. It worked, they're not blurry on day 2, but the color sucks and they're all grainy. Only so many options on what's now a sub $150 camera.

These new socks are awesome. The woman said I would be more comfortable having socks without holes in them. She was right. They're really fluffy too.

We went to the sharks game the other night, the first at-home playoff game. Supposedly very exciting; they were handing out towels to spin and everything. Woo. The seats were weird. I assumed it was a regular luxury box as they were penthouse level, but instead of the enclosed box it was this open terrace arrangement. There was basically two boxes stuck together but all open and the seating was just at the top of the cheap end zone seats. We still had a bar, food, tons of snacks (I ate way too many chicken wings), etc on the terrace though so it was worth going. We also got some snazzy parking passes which saved a ton of time. The woman specifically had told me not to turn down any free hockey tickets this late in the season.... she's probably glad she said that or I would have given them away. I've got a few pics, have to upload them later.

I think today I'll officially say that I've learned to jump rope. I never really tried it before and since the woman got this stupid jump rope at home and does it every night I felt I should at least try it. After nearly killing myself with her watching I started trying (alone) at the gym as I've found where they stash the ropes. This AM I managed to go as long as I wanted, so I'm going to call that success and go try to show off the next time she's jumping.

Dad stopped by and dropped off another gold shipment that came in yesterday. Only 3 oz left to get delivered. I'm still excited about this.

I was just thinking over some of what Eric said the other night. He does seem to be living for both the future and the present, whereas I only focus on the future. I'm willing to be unhappy now for some promise of happiness in the future. That's not necessarily the best plan, as the future will always be in the future. Humph. Not sure what to do about this, just thought I would write it down.

At work today someone was talking about Ho Hos (the junk food, not a 3-way with two cheap hookers) and I commented that I wanted one for some reason. They don't have them in the vending machines at work thank dog, so after dinner we walked to 7-11 and I picked up a pack. Ugh, they're worse than I remember, not sure why I wanted them. They're also crazy full of calories for being nothing more than fluffy sugar with some pseudo-chocolate on them. Cravings are funny that way.

I floated the idea past the woman of renting an apartment in the city for the summer, or a few months in the summer. Craigslist is full of sublets, people taking off for the summer and wanting someone to rent their space. I would like to at least try to live in the city once. I think I've mentioned it before, but now it somehow seems more feasible that the woman is around. She would love the shorer commute, might be able to not use the car at all. I would have to figure something out for the bike. Kinda hard on the RT to have it in the city and getting all thrashed, and I don't think the Suzuki could cut it doing 80 mph on the freeway every day. Sounds like an excuse to research EX500s again! :) Man, I sure love researching stuff.

I need a 3 day weekend. I'm just now getting relaxed and it's time to go back to work again. Went to the range today and tried some new loads, cleaned toys and the garage and generally fiddled around.

The woman started doing her on-line traffic school. Looks like a joke, but $20 on that is better than losing all the discounts on insurance we have now.

Time to go pack and get ready for the upcoming week. It's promising to be a crappy one as people are already bitching on email about stuff. Glad I didn't actually read all the email, just glanced at the crackberry. Otherwise I would start to get all pissed before it's time.

Major score on getting stuff done today. The woman went off to ride and I took the 3/8" and 1/2" plate steel samples over to Reeds. The psycho instructor is going to shoot at both of them and see if the 3/8" stuff can hold up to lots of .45 hits. If it does dad is going to cut out some IPSC style targets out of it for us (finally a use for the plasma cutter!) so we'll have them in the next class. If the 3/8" can't take it, we'll use the 1/2" stuff. The only down side is the weight, each one will weigh 45 lbs or 60 lbs each, depending on thickness. Oy that's going to suck humping those things from the storage shed out to the firing line.

After Reeds I went to work and screwed around with the photocopier for a while and got my tax returns copied for the new tax people. Next I went home and got the bike and went to Cal BMW to get tires. I asked about the options and they suggested I get the Michelin Pilot Power:

It's supposed to be a dual compound tire. Softer grippy rubber on the edges, harder in the middle. They won't give me the zillion miles I get out of the Pilot Roads, but they should be a lot better on the track on the 15th. I used my gift certificate from Kristen's parents to offset some of the cost, and I'll pull and install the wheels myself for more savings.

After finishing there, I came home and cleaned up some mail crap, planted the last of the carrot sprouts and the last lettuce sprouts. A snail ate my lettuce seedlings I put out last week so I put these new ones in the planter with the copper band on it. That keeps them off the herbs so it should work here too. Stupid snails. I tossed the rest of the ungerminated seeds I planted, the planters are full for the season.

The woman came back from her ride and returning the saddle she was testing (the stores will let you take saddles out for a test ride to make sure they fit your horse; the one she tried didn't) and we went to the mall. I wanted to get 3 shirts and some socks. I ended up finding one more pair of the pants I really liked so I got them, and 4 shirts total. Plus the socks, so it was more of a success than I had hoped for. The woman also got some funky pants while we were there.

Now I'm just sitting here reading sniper's hide while the woman yells at the TV. The NASCAR Phoenix race is tonight. Night races are good in the desert, although it's only 85F in Phoenix today.

No plans for tomorrow other than reading the paper at Starbucks. Gotta come up with something depending on the weather. I gotta wash the crap off the Montero at some point.

Dad reported he got 31.5 mpg in the Sentra on the way up. There were about 70 miles of commuting on the tank from me, and going UP the mountain burns a lot of gas. I bet he gets closer to 34 or better on the way back. It's rated 35 highway, but I'm guessing he's trying to go 80 all the time. It probably doesn't like that.

Somehow I got sick. That's not right.

Got to visit with Eric a bit last night. Showed off the data center, got to realize how little of modern tech words I know, went for good cheap Chinese food and was generally social.

My dad wanted to borrow the Sentra. He's going to pickup mom's car to bring it down for service and she's afraid to drive the truck so he wanted to give her the Sentra instead. Crazy. The truck can sit here doing nothing just as easily as the car. While we were doing the swap I stopped by the jewelers and picked up the first part of my gold & silver shipment. It's just damn cool. They're not all new gold coins, they're mixed years. I was showing Eric last night how people pay more for older coins, like a 1990 gold eagle was $70 more than a new one. Gold is gold to me, but I bet I did slightly better with this buy than I would have if I bought them on-line since they were selling 2006 coins the cheapest and I got a mix going back to 1990 at no extra cost. Here are some samples from today:

The woman and I had a fight last night, I think. It was very odd, and I can't tell what it was about. Something is wrong though. It's more of a "check engine light" sort of failure vs a "wheel just fell off". You know something is amiss, but it's not obvious what it is.

On another note, I ordered a t-shirt from our on-line store. I have about 3 years of company credit stored up, mostly because all the shirts and swag they've offered are crap. Now there is a microfiber t-shirt on the list, so I'll see if it's any good. The microfiber shirts I got from REI rock for traveling.

I also brought in one of the potted broccoli plants to work. I'm going to try to grow it inside and see what happens.

My desk has been squeaking for weeks. I thought it was the keyboard tray, but it turns out that it was one of the mounts that holds the desk portion to the cube wall. Took me a while to figure that out, I'm not so good at tracking sounds. Now my entire cube smells of WD40 and there are some stains on the fabric in the back corners where I lubed the connections. Whatever man, at least it's not constantly squeaking when I type.

I forgot to mention that last night we walked to the "Taqueria Las Vegas" down on North Milpitas blvd. We were going to try to expand our restaurants past the Japanese/Chinese/Korean shopping center and down in to the strip mall with the Pho noodle place. On the way though, we found the taco joint. We've seen it a zillion times driving by and it's always busy so we figured we should give it a try. The woman had a funky looking quesadilla and I had some carne asada tacos... and a beer! Yea, for some reason I ordered a Pacifico beer with my tacos. No idea what happened, I just wasn't in a water sort of mood. The food was good and the beer made it seem like I was in Hong Kong. :) Next time we'll go across the street for Pho, or for some sandwiches, there is a Subway over there. We also passed some sort of weird ass hole-in-the-wall dim sum place that only did take-out. Nothing was in English so we couldn't figure out the menu on the door. Oh, and the Chinese place we go to was closed. Don't know if they're out of business or just remodeling. Again, we can't read the sign. Starting to be a trend. :(

I think I've reached my limit in Dungeon Siege. 2 hours 42 minutes of total play (I'm guessing that's how it saves the games based on timestamps). Glad I didn't buy World of Warcraft the other day, it's probably more of the same just with better graphics and on-line fees.

Boring day at work today. I worked on power point slides for my presentation on Monday. I had most of Thursday blocked off to work on them but got motivated to do it today. Maybe a lot of people are on vacation or something which is why it's so quiet?

Gas at the stupid expensive station went from $3 yesterday to $3.10 today. Even the cheapie station is $2.85. Looks like we're in for some high prices this summer.

I tweaked a bunch of the squid cache settings. It has 37gb of space for the cache, but wouldn't use more than 100 mb. It also wouldn't cache anything over 4k in size to disk, and wouldn't hold anything over 8k in memory. You would think they would up the defaults after it's 1998 introduction. Even I have more than 100mb of disk space free. I'm letting it hold 350mb in memory (max) since pong only has 512. I've still been unable to find any larger sticks that the Dell machine can use. Everything in the scrap pile in work is either too fast (PC2100/2700) or too slow PC100. It wants PC133 which I found some of but it's either registered and it doesn't want that, or it's not and it needs it. If I could find a quiet running 2u box I would grab one but nothing is as quiet as that Dell.

Psycho class on Saturday wasn't nearly as bad as last time. It rained on and off all day, but my fancy rain gear worked to keep the majority of it off me. The pants only work about 75% because you can't have them sealed right and still have access to your pockets and whatnot. I need the cargo pockets, the rear pockets and my belt/holster/gun available while still trying to stay dry. Tough to do. For the final they had us searching the shoot house with 2-4 bad guys inside. I did OK, I didn't get killed and I didn't shoot anyone who didn't need to be shot. Random people say how they would react in a firefight, but I really doubt they know. It was all I could do to keep my shots in the right place and not end up getting blinded (those "tactical flashlights" are crazy bright when it's dark out).

Sunday my parents came over for dinner and the whole day was pretty much gone with cleaning up from Saturday, relaxing, reading the paper, playing some Dungeon Siege, etc. I only played the game to see how fast the new machine would run it. I've got everything turned up to max detail, running in 1024x768 mode, etc. Sometimes it still gets bogged down. Wonder what the hell they developed it on? I thought it ran OK on my PIII/450, can't see how it could slow down at all on the 2ghz system with twice the RAM and a zillion times the graphics performance. I read some review of the geforce 6200 and it's good for being cheap, but they don't recommend it for gamers. Real gamers should spring for the extra $50 and get the 6600. Well, for free from the pile at work, I'll take the 6200. :)

Couple of pictures to liven the place up. First, my 1 sq. ft. carrot patch. It's only half planted, I'm waiting for the next batch of seedlings to sprout and I'll plant the other half. Probably don't need a tractor on this farm yet. Next, our stash of fire logs. Doesn't everyone stockpile them in the spare bathroom? Maybe it's only those people who live in small houses. Next is the circuit breaker panel. Not much going on there yet, PG&E hasn't called me back. Last is the $20k in cash I pulled out of the bank to buy the gold and silver with. Stupid gold went up another $15/oz today.

Raining again. It was nice yesterday and this morning but now it's back to rain. So much for the hope that it wouldn't be wet at class this weekend. At least it's not that cold.

I just heard the generators outside start. Testing is Wednesday, wonder what's going on? Better go check.

I played electrician today, chasing down that short in the breaker panel. Turns out there are 2 bad breakers, the one I thought was bad and the main breaker. To reset the main breaker with a hammer. Oy. I talked to the electrician on the phone (and Griffith at work) so they could talk me through the not so delicate surgery to get the house back on-line. I've got the replacement parts now, but PG&E won't even be calling me until next week to schedule a time to come and shut the meter off so I can replace the mains. Rains must have them super backed up.

I also stopped by the jeweler today and asked them about gold. They can get me gold coins at good prices (within 0.5% of on-line prices easily) and without sales tax. I need to pay in cash though. Wells Fargo only has about $5k in currency you can take out before you have to special order, so I had to place and order for the money I'll need. They said they could give me $8500 at once, but it would be in a lot of 10s and 5s.

I also reloaded XP onto the woman's machine and got it working on the network again. So instead of spending my day off doing fun stuff, I got to play electrician, money launder and PC technician. Sigh.

Went to the Spike & Mike animation festival thing last night. It was the woman's idea, so I get to pick the next movie. It had some funny parts, and some gross parts (I just kept my eyes closed) but I'm still not sure it was worth the price of admission. She liked it, so I guess that's what really counts.

My hearing is so strange. I can't always make out conversations, but on the way home last night I announced that I thought the power steering pump was low on fluid because I could hear it. The woman thought I was nuts, she couldn't hear anything, but when I checked it was in fact low. Maybe having above average low frequency hearing is good for something other than picking up lots of distortion in daily life.

Today I was going to go to the range, but it doesn't look like Don is coming up so I probably won't go. It's not as fun to go by myself, no one to show off to. :) Instead I think we're going to REI to look for rain pants for me (the forecast shows rain all week, so my class is likely to be rainy on Saturday) and some gloves I can shoot in. The rich psychos had some north face gloves they got at REI that they let me use that were awesome. I don't want to have to rely on their generosity again so I should get a pair. I've got tons of dividend credit due to putting all the home improvements on my REI card. I also want to get an outer shell for my fancy fuzzy jacket. New Zealand always looks cold/rainy/strange on TV, so I would like to be prepared. Getting that shell now at the end of the season should be cheaper than getting it in October.

My broccoli seeds have sprouted, they're almost 2" tall in a week or so. I'm going to start the hardening process (taking them outside during the day to get them used to the temps) today. Last year I had 5 plants, not sure what I'm going to do with all these sprouts. I need more garden area. Kenny has tons of room for his plants, I have about 4 square feet. Two 1 sq. ft. boxes and one 2 sq ft box. Crazy.

Last night was the big birthday party for me at the traditional restaurant: Chevy's. Woohoo. Mom is working up by the cabin now (in preparation for their house being finished and them moving in sometime in June) so she couldn't come so it was just dad, Kristen and I. No singing. Afterward we went home to have french silk pie (one of the truly tasty things the woman can whip up) and open gifts. I got my much needed razor, and some BBQ tongs that hopefully won't collapse and drop stuff like the existing ones do. Leaving work early was probably the best part of the day. :)

The woman says I always get cranky and distant around my birthday. She's actually been around for 3 of them now, so I guess she gets an opinion. She also remembers exactly what happened at each one and what the problem was. This damned memory of hers.

I just got the draft of the pre-nup from the lawyer. It's 16 pages! Here I thought this was going to be simple.

The little sentra was so much happier with it's new cap and rotor, I decided to finish the job and replace the plugs and wires too. Another leap forward in smoothness. It's probably about as good as it's going to get with 114k miles on it; there has to be some degradation of performance in all that time. I suppose I'll try to order a hubcap at some point. Steve (the former owner) had it on his to-do list for 4 years and never got around to it. If they sold them locally it would probably be easy but since that credit card theft on-line I'm being really picky about where I use it. Stolen hubcap vendors seem like a risk.

I paid for insurance on the Sentra. Full coverage, $100 deductible, $422/year. That seems cheap. I also put a new cap and rotor in (I thought it was idling rough, the woman said I was nuts, but either way the new parts cleared it) and got all big pimpin' by putting a dome light bulb in. Yea. We got lights. All I need is the one hub cap and it's done. I'm going to keep it too I decided. The Montero will go back into storage at the cabin (dad is sure we still have the 20'x20' tarp we used to cover it last time) and I'll drive this for a while. It's red, but it's quiet, comfy and gets 35 mpg (according to Edmund's). I figure if I get tired of it in 6 months I can sell it then and still make money. The automatic is so not me, but what can you do.

Vacuumed the house and the car, planted a bunch of seeds in the starter peat pots, tossed about 50000 lbs of junk mail that had built up (I love the new all-in-one recycle bin, don't have to sort anything) and hung some pictures in the den that I've been meaning to do for 6 months now.

Losing that extra hour must have motivated me at least a little, I got a lot done in less time. Not sure what to do with the rest of my day such that it is. Maybe I'll finish cleaning the garage. I'm wanting more storage cabinets to organize my loading stuff, it's starting to get out of hand.

Just listed the Sentra on Craigslist. What the hell man, if I can flip it before Friday it could be a good thing. Otherwise I gotta hang on to it to get my CD player money out of it. :)

Whoa, a little too much adult in the adult beverages tonight. I'm feeling a bit punchy.

Some random fun photos I've finally got around to uploading. First, my small Fanta collection from places I've been this year: Thailand, Taiwan and Germany. Everyone needs a hobby, right?

Next we have the corn I planted today. While out registering for crap at linens and things we stopped by the nursery and picked up some seeds, those little peat pot things to start the seeds and some corn plants, and some herb plants. We don't have real dirt like everyone else so our garden is pretty lame. I don't expect this corn to produce, but whatever. I had 2 seedlings left so I planed them over by the PG&E access road. One is by a sprinkler, the other is just on a little hill I can see from the back deck. It will be interesting to see if they grow.

Finally we have the pictures of the $800 Sentra. I washed and waxed it today, and also went to best buy and had a working radio installed. It's a JVC unit, the new version of what's in the Montero. Works like a charm. Tomorrow I'm going to look for a hubcap to replace the missing one and get a dome light bulb. The fan switch sorta works if you're nice to it, maybe I won't have to fix that after all. I also should clean the interior, you can see crapola on the carpet in the shot. Oh, and I used some serious hair dryer time to get the sticker off the back that had the dealer's name on it, it was actually one sticker per letter, over 30 in all. What a pain. I also got a little carried away and took the "Sentra" and "Xe" badges off the back. They were worn and looked bad, I think it looks pretty clean with just the Nissan logo on the back now.