I am such a moron. I invited dad over for lunch today, and on the way to the restaurant I realized that we had an all-hands meeting at 12:30. Doh! I got back in time but we didn't get to eat. Dad seemed somewhat peeved, and I can understand that.

I'm reading more of The Worry Cure and other than learning I'm paranoid (!) not much else has come of it. I've got my worry log going and I think it's going to show I have 3-5 different things I worry about all the time. That's probably not bad, especially if I can get it down to zero.

One downside of listening to Weird Al is that you start to think his songs are the original and the real ones just sound wrong. Kristen also thinks it's funny that I don't even know what the originals are and who sings them. Yea, I'm hip. Fool.

The house was 50 degrees this morning and it was 41 on the ride to work. I was fine on the KLR, I had a shirt on, and my fuzzy jacket, and the tour-master winter jacket and liner on over all that, plus the head sock and my spiffy BMW winter gloves. Seems like it wouldn't be worth it, but actually getting home in 30 minutes makes it worth it. Not too sure about this no heat in the house policy. I know I used to do it all the time, but I must be older now and it's starting to get to me. Either that or I'm just spending more time in the house and less in the garage; parking a warm vehicle in the garage heats it up quite nicely.

I got the crap scared out of me this morning. I took another load of recycling out to the bin this AM and when I got there the crazy Asian lady that "steals" the cans and bottles was huddled in the middle of the recycling bins (sorting cans and staying out of the wind no doubt). I wasn't expecting there to be a person there; she didn't do anything but say "hi", but it still caught me off guard. Guess my brain wasn't engaged, especially with the cold. She sure was happy to get the bottles I was carrying out. Too bad the crazies can't organize and manage to collect all of the recycling to take in for cash. That way the city wouldn't have a chance to charge me to take it away.

Last night it took me over an hour to get home, 237 was a total parking lot and I was in the car due to the rain and temps in the 40s. Yea, I wimped out. The woman ate without me so I stopped by the taco shop in the back of the gas station and got the "6 tacos for $5" deal. They weren't bad, seemed less greasy than others I've had and they had no cheese. Normally I like cheese on my tacos but since I'm making cheese quesadillas on the camp stove today I wanted to avoid cheese for dinner. My life is so complex.

The quesadillas were a success. The first tortillas were a bit undercooked and doughy, but after I got the hang of it they turned out pretty good. I'm such an iron chef. Or maybe an aluminum foil chef.

Both Kenny and Dennis are dealing with snow, and while it was cold here last night and in the morning, I was outside in just a short sleeve shirt while cooking lunch in front of the office. CA may suck in many ways, but the weather is not one of them. Cold tonight again and then sunny and 57 tomorrow. I'll take it, and will even get to ride in. Woo.

Some weird stuff going on at work. The woman said I should be really mad, but I don't have it in me. It so much easier to deal with stuff here than at NVDA.

Had a budget review with my boss today, and somehow we went from about $1M in spending over the next two quarters to $0. We're both a bit confused by the numbers, but if the software we're writing is really that efficient then we really do need no new hardware to cover the rest of the north American market. We both smell something fishy, either that or we need to tell google/yahoo that their algorithms need some work. :)

Went to the range today, did pretty well until the rains came and chased me away. Otherwise, quiet day at home.

I put the BMW up for sale just a few minutes ago. We'll see if anyone bites. My touring days are over for a while it seems. With only 2 weeks of vacation in the next year, and most all of those days spoken for it looks improbable I'll get away. In '08 (sheesh, time is flying by) I'm going to do either an Alaska tour or Europe again or maybe NZ with dad. We'll come up with something.

Lots of driving yesterday. We left my parents around 11-ish and went to Sacto to stop in and visit with some of Kristen's friends, and then we went to Shasta to run the pump and wrap the exposed pipes. It's not a professional job, but I think it should work OK. We did one layer of regular fiberglass insulation and then a 4 mil plastic sheet. I used an entire roll of "gorilla tape" which is supposed to be some super strong "weather resistant" duct tape. It was really cold out so the tape wouldn't stick very well to anything but itself, it only half ass held onto the plastic. I'm hoping today in the sun all that black stuff will heat up and the tape will do it's glue magic. Guess we'll know in June when we go back up and check it.

I didn't wrap the pipe the electrical wires go though, I figure they can't be damaged by cold and I was running out of insulation. It got pretty dark out, but fortunately I had my lantern!! :) I also got a cool pic that works for a windows background. It's not so bright that it's annoying to have as a backdrop, but is more interesting that just black.

On the way back home (all on Friday) we stopped by one of the big Indian casinos on I5. The woman lost some money playing "Texas Tea" (one of her favorite slot machines) and then we ate at the buffet. Nothing like a Vegas buffet but it was at least fish Friday so I got my fill of crab legs. Yum!!!

I cleaned up several years worth of papers that were "organized" on the floor of the office. Now you can actually see the top of my desk and the shredder over heated twice chewing through the pile of old stuff that had built up in the "to shred" pile. Damn banks still send a lot of useless paperwork around.

Make it up to my parents with little drama, traffic was pretty light up until hwy 88 and even on 88 it was moving 45-50 mph which is all the little sentra can do in the mountains anyway.

BART was interesting, not so much on the way up as I was in commute time, but on the way home. Passed out stinky ass homeless dudes, some pot smoking skippies, and a host of really odd people all of who seemed to be on the phone all the time. The car show was pretty normal, not a lot of concept cars and not a lot of people either. We got to compare the Evo IX to the Subaru STi side by side with minimal fuss. Kristen was a bit worried about the rice boy and sorority bimbo crowd around both cars. I was a little surprised at the bimbos myself. Not just the SOs of the rice boys, but 20-30-somethings there by themselves checking out the Evo. Kristen said if it's going to be the new VW beetle then I can't get one. I don't think that's the case. After an hour or so of going back and forth, we settled on the Evo in the dark gray:

We're not getting one or anything, but it was fun to try to take a serious look at the choices and come up with something we could both look at. She said that if we did get one, she would learn to drive stick so I could take her car to psycho class or other places I wouldn't want to take the Evo and then she could use it if she really had to get somewhere.

Kristen's ex is strange, but cool at the same time. His real name is Matt but he officially goes by "Loki", which is even on his business cards. He founded some software company with about 100 employees writing software to analyze documents for lawyers. I didn't understand how the technology works, but it seems to pay well. He wants to move back here, which I think would be cool. I think we could hang.

Yesterday's lunch test was a success. I managed to cook some ramen without blowing up the camp stove, so next week it's quesadillas. I actually had a small crowd out watching me fire the thing up, my boss is really impressed as this stove is the newer version of the one he has and one of the marketing chicks was reminded of the last (disastrous) camping trip she was on in Israel. I'm a celebrity. :)

I'm going to sneak out of work in a few minutes and go catch BART up to the city. I'm meeting the woman so we can go to the intentional auto show. I didn't want to have to go up after t-day, the holiday morons will be out in force and I'm not really up for dealing with that.

So tired, and I can't type correctly nor for very long. The trainer tried to kill me today I'm pretty sure. He had me do a bunch of stuff on the swiss ball. The woman does that all the time and her exercises are pretty easy. The stuff he had me doing was tough and I was worn out after the routine. I guess my core is weak.

Tonight we're going to Nola's for dinner, we're meeting one of Kristen's ex'es from way back. At least I think he's an ex, I'm not really sure. He's supposed to be some super strange tech dude that now lives in Paris and is in town for a short time. Should be interesting.

What a slacker, NVDA Don couldn't get up and to the clays range by 9am so we didn't go. I don't like going later, it's more crowded and it really cuts the day up when you go around noon. Humph.

Today wasn't a total loss though, I spent 4+ hours putting the HID light setup in the KLR. This isn't just some cheesy blue-tinged bulb like the rice boys use, but a real HID setup with a little ballast and everything. I couldn't quite figure out where to mount it, when I remembered the useless charcoal canister in the back behind that little black plate.... out with the dead weight, in with the ballast. I hope it's at least somewhat water proof....

I also removed the extra lights since I can't really run them, and the dash and the voltage gauge. I don't need to watch the volts so much now that I'm running a 35 watt HID setup instead of a 55/60 watt H4 bulb and the LED tail light. I'll get just a boring analog clock and analog thermometer to mount on the mini dash at some point.

We did end up getting out and seeing the Bond movie last night. Very different from the regular Bond fare. The woman didn't hate it as much as she would a regular Bond flick. There was less reliance on high-tech wizardry and car chases than a regular flick as well.

Been in the data center for almost two days solid, so work has been taking up a lot of time. It's been fun, but wearing a headset for 9+ hours at a stretch is getting hard on the head. They're not the best headset of all time, but I didn't think to be wearing them for so long.

Today while out running errands we went by REI and I took back the fireball of death stove. They took it back, and recommended against getting a replacement of the same type (which I wasn't going to do anyway). The sales dude did his pitch and got me to spend way more than I wanted on a stove. We fired it up in the store though and it worked amazingly well... a little too easy in my opinion until I got one home. It fired up exactly as advertised, and I had water boiling in moments (well, 3.5 minutes). I guess you do get what you pay for, this one is awesome and way easier to setup and use, and doesn't turn into a flaming nightmare. The sales droid had a slightly different lighting method than the manual suggests, but his 2-step method seems safer. It does take an extra match though which isn't much of a price. I got the little fuel bottle instead of the 22oz medium one. Since this stove can run on white gas, kerosene, unleaded, diesel, jet fuel, naphtha... basically any sort of flammable liquid. I figure it's unlikely I'll be camping for more than 1 day at a time, and if I do I can steal fuel from the bike or lantern as I originally planned. Plus, two small bottles is easier to pack than 1 huge one.

We ran about a zillion errands today as well, I think all the "must do" stuff that involves driving around is done. I want to vacuum the house and then maybe we can go see the new Bond movie or something fun.

I also got the service finished up on the woman's car. The cap and rotor were in fact worn. She should notice some improvement with the new ones just as she did after the mechanic did the other 90% of the work (plugs, wires, trans fluid, etc). I thought she had those 100k mile plugs and a rotor-less ignition, but I guess maybe that was the Saab?

I'm pretty surprised I can move today, must less get a workout in. Yesterday was the first day with the trainer, and he's not kidding around. He had me basically do both my Monday and Thursday workouts in one day. I thought for sure I would be immobile after that but other than my fingers being really sore I'm doing OK. I did a back workout today and that seems to have gone well. Tonight is yoga night, I hope I've got the strength for that. My body will have no idea what's going on with all this extra work.

The meerkat thing showed up yesterday and I ended up just giving it to her then so she could figure out when we want to make the trip down. You would think I gave her a zillion dollars or something, she was jumping around and clapping and generally happy about the whole thing. Crazy woman. I'm pretty sure I scored a lot of brownie points for the whole thing, but now I'll have to come up with a new Xmas gift.

Oh, so that's how the fire extinguisher works. I got my replacement lantern at REI today and it works great. Then I got all excited and tried to use the stove so it would be ready for next week. After over an hour of dicking with it (and it not working) I gave up and had dinner (the woman made some sort of mushroom soup using leftovers from the open house and it was super tasty) and then went back to give it one more try. I seem to have found "fireball" mode on the stove, and after it shot 3' of flame into the air I managed to get the fuel tank disconnected. It still wouldn't stop burning and I was worried it was going to catch the garage on fire; it was outside but the flames were getting close to the wall. The fire extinguisher made short work of the blaze, I'm amazed how fast it put it out really. One quick shot and foof, it was gone. Now I'm out the cost of replacing the extinguisher. Man, this latest round of REI gear has sucked major ass. Now I have to go to the store again to take this melted death trap back. So much for saving time and fuel. Sigh. Teach me to do the right thing.

I ordered the parts for the woman's car to finish the 60k service as none of the local auto parts places carried them. I can't win on the buy local vs. buy on-line thing.

I'm playing IT guy at my parents place getting their DSL working (obviously it is now). They lost the paper with the router password so I had to reset it and then redo all the wireless configs. I could probably just leave it open, I don't think anyone else is in range of their antenna up here. I did a scan and found zero wireless networks other than theirs (assuming people are SSID broadcasting). Guess there aren't a lot of wireless users in the forest.

I had no idea there would be so many people here. Dad's boss and friends came up in a bus, they chartered it so they wouldn't to worry about drinking and driving. Smart people. I would guess there have been 40-50 people through already. Here I was worried we were making too many snacks. Kinda a bummer it's raining so much.

I forgot to finish what I started yesterday. I got the woman's Xmas gift, although she may end up with it early if she keeps checking the mail. I told her not to, because even though it will have my name on it, she'll know exactly what it is from the return address (plus all packages for me are big and heavy and full if metal junk). We watch "Meerkat Manor" on TV every week, and if you go to the web site they have links to a meerkat rescue place down in Palm Springs. If you give them $100 they'll give you an "adoption kit" which I'm sure is full of crap but you also get to come to the center and play with the meerkats. She kept saying she wanted to do it, and how the business should donate so it's a deduction, etc. Paying the accountants to process that deduction will cost more than it's worth so I just paid for it myself. She'll love it.

Went to my first yoga class last night as well. Every Tuesday night now I'll go to yoga which gives the woman a weeknight to stay late up in the city and have dinner with her friends and whatnot. The class was 18 people, the largest they've had in a while according to the instructor. It's at my normal gym so I won't have to pay extra or feel bad about missing if I have to. I was very tired when I got home last night but didn't feel sore and my back is the best it's been in a long time.

Met with the trainer at the gym yesterday, and he agrees that I need to lose a bit of weight. Well, not weight really, more like body fat. I'm at 17% which is right on the line between "fit" and "average". Now, since the average person is actually overweight, that's not such a good thing! I don't think the chart reflects reality, I think it reflects when reality should be. I can't be 1% away from being overweight. He suggested I either eat better (eek) or I pick up a 5th day of cardio. I don't really want to do cardio 5 days a week, so I think I'm just going to do an extra 10 minutes per day, that's like adding 2 days, or something. The basketball court is always empty in the mornings so I started shooting two baskets and then running to the other end of the court, shooting two there and back again, and again, and again, etc. Sounds lame but it's way better than running more or getting on the ellipse. Maybe I'll actually learn to shoot baskets too; I don't think I've ever played basketball before.

I got the woman's Xmas gift today.

Bah, I spend all this time on line picking out a stove at REI and then go to the store and get it, and wouldn't you know they only carry 1 brand of stove in the store. Yes, I know the whisper stoves are the best, lightest things out there and make you taller, more attractive and have fresh breath, but they're also about 3x what I wanted to spend. They don't even offer "kits" of any sort, you have to buy every little doohickey separately at huge cost just to make it work. I ordered the one I wanted on-line and had it shipped to the house. REI still had a good price on it (amazon was the same) and I'll get my dividend bonus on the purchase too even though I'm using dividend money to buy it with. Recursive dividends or something. :)

Last night's dinner party was pretty good, the soup was tasty, the artichoke dip stuff was fair/icky (I don't really like it, even though I like artichokes) and the gnocchi were OK, if a bit dense. She said they were supposed to be "light and pillowy", but mostly they would have been good ammo for a slingshot. :) Not bad for her first attempt at it though.

Not much went on today, the woman watched the race and I fiddled around in the garage cleaning toys from yesterday, crushing cardboard boxes into the recycle bin, sorting papers and whatever else it is I do when I'm wasting time. I did cook that piece of fish we got at the store the other day, it was pretty good for pan-fried, although now we've got all the windows open as the whole house smells like fish. Doh.

Tried to go to the hot tub for a while, but it's shut down. All the furniture is piled up under a tarp, and we're guessing they're getting ready to paint the pool area. Bummer.

Got a short ride in today too, which is good because next weekend we're going to my parents open house so I'll not be able to ride anywhere (other than moving the Suzuki from the cabin basement to the new garage).

I got caught in the rain the other night on the way home on the KLR. I knew the headlight on the KLR sucked, but I didn't know just how bad it sucked. The stator doesn't have the juice to run my aux lights for more than few minutes (gotta work on that) so it was a scary, slippery ride home. It was the first rain in a long time so all that oil and whatnot on the road turned to slimy soup which makes for an exciting ride.

I got up early and went to the range this morning to try out some loads and not end up wasting the whole day. It was pretty quiet when I got there this AM and got busy right around the time I left.

After I got home we went shopping and used a bunch of the gift cards from the wedding to get the Dyson vacuum. It's pretty slick, it should be able to replace both vacuums I currently use. Macy's had it on sale which was good since normally they were $50 more than anyone else on it. After that (and a stop for a pretzel, can't be forced to go to the maul, er, mall without a pretzel) we went to the grocery store to get stuff for next week and for the dinner party tonight. The woman is making carrot soup, gnocchi and some other stuff I've not identified yet. If it goes bad, I told her we can always order out for pizza.

Monday is the first gym day with the new trainer. I'm going to put some effort into working out instead of just using it to stay in general shape. I told the guy I wanted to get my max bench press up to 250 lbs. My old max was 240, and I'm lucky to get much over 215 at this point. I've got good endurance (can do lots of reps at 185) but I want to get back to a high max. Not having a spotter makes it impossible to make big gains. He's got 10 sessions to get me there. We'll only meet once per week, with me working on the supporting muscles on my own the other 3 times per week.

Not sure what tomorrow brings, other than a trip to REI to get more power bars. I still have some of my dividend credit left I should use before years end and I also want to get a small stove. I picked through the old pots and pans the woman is getting rid of to get the best ones to use with the stove. I want to at least cook at work once or twice.

So, so sore. The woman is having no end of fun poking me in the chest and making me go OW! all the time. Getting back into the workout grove sucks.

Nothing to report so far, just catching up on work stuff and trying to avoid all the Halloween candy that's floating around the office. Damn intern has about a zillion peanut butter cups on her desk and keeps trying to pawn them off on people. Must resist the peanut butter!