June 2009 Archives

There's a line between being frugal/thrifty/dollar conscious and being an outright cheap bastard, and every now and again I forget about that line and cross over into true skin-flinted-ness.

My laptop has a flaky wireless connection.  Having just shelled out to fix one problem I figured I may as well finally pick up a fix for this as well and so hit up ebay.  There are lots of wireless cards for sale pulled from my exact model of notebook - they run about $12.  But what ho?  A generic card for only $5?  How can I go wrong?!

My first clue was probably when the package arrived 10 days later with a chinese customs label stamped on the back, posted via air mail and routed through mumbai if I'm reading these stamps right.  It's got a wireless card in it, so that's good.  There are no identifying marks or numbers on the card, so that's going to make finding software for it hard.  After about 20 minutes of searching and three false tries I start to get excited because I've found a solid lead, though granted it's on a chat board for tech support folks in india.  It's about this time that I realize I should probably just cut my losses and order a real card for $7 more.  Okay, it was after downloading the dodgy indian software and having that not work as well.  But still, lesson learned.

Oh, and I got an IRS notice delivered to my house for someone who doesn't live here.  Normally I don't give much credence to those "federal penalty for misuse" notice on envelopes but I think this one I'll heed.  So all in all an interesting mail day.

I may be marrying a Pescetarian, but even she laughed at this

No, I didn't see this in person, but man do I wish I had.  Hooray for the internets

Round 2 of crossfiting has me slightly bruised and with sore hamstrings but I'm manning up for round 3 tonight.  Round 4 is over a week after that (bad scheduling) and then I'll be all signed off to go attend regular classes.  This makes me pumped.  Then I talk to Jordan, who's made it to the final round of the crossfit games and I'm in awe.  Quote him, there are 75 guys in the competition, all others of which he's sure have murdered someone at some point.  Good times.  Regardless, the goal of being back in my normal good general health by the wedding seems completely doable.

So what I don't hate: free games from my work.  Sam & Max is quite enjoyable, moreso when it's free.  Getting my wedding rehersal dinner planning taken care of by my pop - HUGE weight off my mind.  The rubber Bridezilla Kjersting gave us.  The fact that my personality quirks are already rubbing off on Aliki, who now says "meh".

Some things I actually do hate: the interface for the Magic: the Gathering arcade game.  Seriously, who thought forcing turn advancement unless you hit pause in a game that requires lots of thinking was a good idea.  Bah, get off my lawn.

And since I just listened to a "To the Best of our Knowledge" podcast wherin they talk all about wefeelfine.org, I'm feeling anti-lackadaisical.  Ha, that'll mess with their statistics.

God, I can't wait to go to Argentina!

I've done night time deployments before, it's never been that big a deal, but this was/is my first time spending the evening in the "war room."  It's been interesting taking part of the rapid triage, investigation, whatever needs to be done rather than being down on the 'fix this yesterday' end of things, but this really is like making sausage, or bills or whatever the hell the saying is.

Downside is that I had scheduled my next bout of CrossFit introduction for tomorrow morning at 8:00am.  Wait.. today at 8:00am.. in six hours.  Hmm.  Maybe I shouldn't be writing things at 2 in the morning after basically two consecutive days of work.

I'm not sure if sensical is the right word, or even a real word for that matter, but Stupid seemed too harsh and Proactive seemed too much like work.  So "Sensical" it is.  Anyway.  Now that my snowboarding season has shrank to an unacceptably short duration, I've been through several different exotic tropical diseases without the usual intervening physical training to recover, and my age requires a sixth bit to represent (32 for the 99.99% of the population that doesn't think like me), my muscle tone is starting to more closely approximate Martin's than I'd like.  Sorry Marty, easy shot, had to take it.

But I'm getting off track here.

The least sensical thing I've decided to do in a while is start CrossFitting.  Jordan has always raved about it (naturally, since he runs Xplore CrossFit), and honestly the thought of going in for another few months of bench pressing and various contorting machines seems really really boring.  So instead I've opted to work with Level 4 and start flipping tractor tires around a parking lot, or swinging around a soccer ball full of cement.  You know, fun exercise.  It's also helpful to have the wedding coming up in 5 months.  It gives me a nice target date to feel back in shape.

I've opted for Level 4 since they've got classes late enough in the day that an eastside worker such as myself can get to them and they still have some soul.  Not as much as Xplore or Foundation CrossFit, but certainly a hell of a lot more than Northwest CrossFit (which is technically in a more convenient location).  Strangely enough they were also featured in the seattle times yesterday - but I was into them when they were still indie.  Read that article and tell me it doesn't sound fun.  Then read Jordan's story about the python and you'll undertand what I mean by soul

So that's what I'll be doing for the next little while.  That and getting married and starting my masters degree program and building an addition on my house - god only knows why I chose this as the subject to finally write something about.