Author: splicer

I took the rac­ing bike out for the first ride of the year. It was­n’t as nice out there as it looked a few hours ago, and I turned back real ear­ly on in def­er­ence to the chill, and gen­er­al lack of moti­va­tion. I can say I got in my pre­scribed 20 min­utes of mod­er­ate activ­i­ty, but that’s sort of nothing.

In any case, I got to burn off some ner­vous ener­gy, I guess.

Bicy­cling just isn’t fun the way I … Read the rest

I was giv­en a food plan by my train­er. And a spe­cial book for writ­ing every­thing down in. I have a calo­rie total and a list of alter­nate foods and trade­off val­ues. Sounds like they’ve basi­cal­ly ripped off the Weight Watch­ers point sys­tem with a bunch of cat­e­gories. That’s all well and good, but it’s WORK.

It’s now a lit­tle after noon and I’ve thought about get­ting break­fast a few times. Each time I’ve decid­ed that dig­ging out the food plan … Read the rest

I have a train­er now. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to afford a train­er, but this one seems to know his stuff, so after a few weeks meet­ing with him three times a week maybe I’ll knock back to twice or even once a week. We’ll see how it goes.

He instruct­ed me to not do any weightlift­ing in between ses­sions for now. I’m to con­cen­trate only on car­dio and do the resis­tance stuff only under his super­vi­sion. … Read the rest

I don’t feel the pull that some do to get drunk dur­ing the hol­i­days. I’m grate­ful for that. It’s not like I don’t have a lot of emo­tion­al crap come up at this time of year, but I don’t have the same asso­ci­a­tion some do with New Years as THE time to drink. EVERY day was THE time to drink.

Before my ex lived with me, one of her room­mates was one of the Sis­ters of Per­pet­u­al Indul­gence. One time we … Read the rest

I fig­ured that if I’m gonna start swim­ming to get ready for the 2005 Escape from Alca­traz, I should have a pair of those cool Speedos I see oth­er swim­mers wear­ing all the time.

They keep the water out of my eyes real­ly well, and I like that it came with replace­ment nose-bridges for dif­fer­ent shaped noses. Now I just got­ta learn how to breathe when I swim.… Read the rest

I’ve been search­ing for Iraj Pezeshkzad’s My Uncle Napoleon, the nov­el that made “going to San Fran­cis­co” a euphemism for sex in Far­si, for almost a year now. The San Fran­cis­co Pub­lic Library does­n’t have it, and none of the respectable book­sellers with Peo­ple Who Know About Books at the coun­ters have been able to find it either. I was even sent over to abebooks.com to search the vast net­work of inde­pen­dent book­sellers for the book I want.

So today, … Read the rest

OK, well, I keep on get­ting older.

Thanks go out to for tak­ing me out to see Kill Bill at the Park­way tonight. I was actu­al­ly pret­ty depressed most of the day, not real­ly relat­ed to turn­ing 34 I don’t think, but the steadi­ness of my crawl toward death did­n’t help much either.

Turns out that piz­za, root beer, and good com­pa­ny goes a long way to fight depres­sion. Must keep this in mind for future reference.

Anoth­er Lone­ly Day—… Read the rest

The lat­est death toll from this morn­ing’s earth­quake in Bam, Iran is over 20,000 with 50,000 addi­tion­al injured. The quake was mea­sured at 6.5 on the Richter scale, the same mag­ni­tude as Mon­day’s Paso Rob­les quake which killed two. Just yes­ter­day I was say­ing how «only two» can’t seem for­tu­nate to the fam­i­lies of those two women, but today I’m left only with a chill com­bin­ing grat­i­tude for mod­ern seis­mi­cal­ly-sound archi­tec­ture in the place … Read the rest

Apolo­gies to marlowe1 for men­tion­ing this, because no one should ever be encour­aged to write, right? but my moth­er, out of the blue today, told me that she wish­es I would write more. Not write to her more, but that I should try to get published.

It’s easy to dis­miss her because she sees what­ev­er writ­ing she’s seen through moth­er’s eyes. But my moth­er has actu­al­ly been pub­lished, so I have some respect for her opin­ion. And my step­fa­ther … Read the rest