Month: July 2008

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general

Crippling gout and the bookcase swap

I had a dream that I had a crippling case of gout, and that my toes were completely out of alignment – like my pinky toe was at a 90 degree angle outward. When I woke up, my feet were really hurting. I hate when shit like that happens.

There must be a low pressure front moving in. I have four barometers in the house. Two are attached to my ankles and are size 11. The other two are chasing each other around the house like mad. If I want to know if it rains, I check my feet, and then see if the cats are insane that day. Works better than any mercury in a tube.

I finished moving paragraphline.com. Check it out and let me know if you find anything’s broken. There’s a lot of work to do, and I need to set up the blog and start posting news there.

I have to go to Denver next week. Highs in the low 90s, lows in the upper 50s. It’s bad enough that they are getting militant about carry-ons and luggage and I will have limited room, it’s worse when I have to pack both shorts and a jacket. I also realized last night that every single piece of dress clothes I own does not fit me whatsoever. All of my dress pants are 38s, and now when I wear a 34, it’s loose and needs a belt. I was also buying 2XL shirts, and now I’m right on the verge of going down to L. And 90% of the shirts I have are long-sleeved. I think there’s no way around a trip to Old Navy today to get a couple of shirts and a pair of pants.

I am not excited about a 6:20 AM flight Monday. I am getting excited about going to a game at Coors Field on Tuesday. The Rockies have really slid going into the All-Star break, but they were playing good last night, so maybe they’re over the hump and there will be some good baseball. They are playing the Dodgers though. The only advantage is that the Dodgers are currently a second baseman and two outfielders away from having an entire baseball team on the disabled list. Juan Pierre, Scott Proctor, Brad Penny, Mark Sweeney, Tony Abreu, Rafael Furcal – and Takashi Saito is probably out for the season. Fingers crossed.

I have lots to do on the gas book. It’s going well, but I am scrambling – I hoped to get a draft done by the end of the month, and that’s not looking as well as I thought.

My other project was swapping two of my bookcases, so there’s a shorter one next to my desk. I had this monsterous tall bookcase on that wall, and when I was at my desk, it made the room look darker. Now there’s a smaller one made of light wood there, and it does make it brighter. It really ties together the room. (No wait, that’s a rug.)

OK, off to read about natural gas cars.

Categories
general

Denver car time machine

I’ve been meaning to update for a while, but everything other than my stuff has taken over lately. Hopefully, I will just work on my book and catch up today. I also get to drive to Torrance today, which sounds like a pain in the ass, and I guess it is, but I very rarely drive my car these days. Most days, I either eat lunch and dinner from the fridge, or walk, mostly to Subway, but there’s another sandwich shop (Hogan’s Heroes), that I hit when I can’t do the Jared thing anymore. (Oddly enough, my favorite sub is now the Veggie Max. I still love the BMT, but my old holdout, a 6-inch BMT with cheese, bacon, and mayo, is about a weeks’ worth of fat.) Anyway, I don’t drive my car that much, and I do love driving my car, so it’s always good to take a run down PCH, even at $4.45 a gallon.

My car still reminds me a lot of Denver, and I have enough distance from Denver that I have odd nostalgia about it. I guess this came up, because last night I was listening to BT’s This Binary Universe, which is a very ethereal and emotional album, and deeply reminds me of the end of summer/start of fall last year. It’s the kind of album that will always remind me of that point in my life, of that year, and for whatever reason, when it came up in shuffle last night, it deeply hit me. I don’t want to live in Denver, and I don’t want to be in last year anymore, and I realize it’s stupid to look back and say “hey, remember 12 months ago?” but maybe not being there makes it more nostalgic to think of there again, if that makes any sense. And in a strange irony, I have to go to Denver next week. But I won’t be in our apartment, and I won’t have the Yaris there, and Sarah won’t be there, and I will spend all of my time in a hotel down in Lone Tree, except for one brief outing to go see the Rockies lose to the Dodgers.

The gas book – it goes. It’s 150 pages, but I have a lot of holes to fill. I’m starting to worry about all of the post-writing things, like the fact that I don’t have a cover, and don’t know how I will sell it. I also need a web site, and a way to convince people that I’m somehow an authority on this stuff.

I am doing a lot with Paragraph Line Books, too. I’m in the process of getting set up to print books directly with Ingram, and bypass the lulu.com process, hopefully at a savings. I’m also moving paragraphline.com to dreamhost, and that will let me add some new features. I’m also supposedly working on #13 of the zine, and I’m supposed to be writing my story for it, but I haven’t had time to even look at it. Maybe later today.

As of Sunday, I have lost 28.6 pounds in 12 weeks. That puts me at 186.2. Using a BMI calculator (which may or may not be bullshit), 185 and above is overweight, starting at 184 is the normal range. WW says my ideal range is 147-177. I think getting to 175 would be reasonable, and 170 would be work, but I have no idea how I could maintain below 170, let along 147.

Okay, work.

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general

10%

I’m back from SF – been back since Friday. It was a pretty easy trip back, mostly because we both carried on our luggage, which is getting harder and harder to do. The last two times I’ve flown, I got the magic TSA “kilroy was here” slip in my luggage. I think I have had three or four of those now; I should collect them and coat the outside of a suitcase with them. Or maybe put one on cafepress and make a t-shirt. (Actually, I would LOVE to, before my next Dodgers game, make a shirt that’s a parody of the old “Raid Kills Bugs Dead” logo, but with “Penny Kills Umps Dead” and a sketch of an umpire getting hit in the face with a ball.)

As of Sunday, I have lost 10% of my body weight. I’ve gone from 214.8 to 192.6 since 4/27. My eventual goal is somewhere between 170 and 175, which maybe I will hit by fall. I think the deal with Weight Watchers is when you meet your goal, you don’t have to pay anymore and can come for free, but you start paying again if you go above. It would be nice to lose another 20 pounds in another 10 weeks, but I know that won’t happen. And I have not been working out at all, aside from walking, so I will need to get on the case there. Liggett mentioned rowing machines on LJ, which I don’t have in my gym. But, I live a few blocks from the largest body of the water on the planet, which makes me wonder if I could find a place in the marina to rent a canoe or kayak on a regular basis for cheap, and figure that shit out. I wanted to do this in Denver when I was laid up with a bum ankle, but Denver essentially has no water, except for those stupid fake lake fountains they put in front of planned communities and malls.

Bart Everson has been keeping paper journals since around the 18th century, but all of them were underwater after Katrina. He was able to carefully dry them out and scan them, and now he has put a batch on lulu.com for free download or purchase. Check it out at http://www.lulu.com/content/2747572. I wish I could scan in my old journals, except they only go back to about 1993 with some fits and bursts going back to early high school. But my handwriting is completely unreadable, and I tend to put the things I don’t want in public on the paper version. I am itching to get another book out on lulu. My last non-zine book was The Necrokonicon, and that was mid-2006.

I am writing a new book, and it is about how to get better fuel economy and drive cheaper. I know that’s all the rage right now, which is why I am trying to get this book done and on Lulu as fast as possible. I might need a couple of you to give this thing a read before I unleash it, so drop me a line if you’re interested. I think my only caveat is that reviewers have to pinky-swear that they’ll tell all of their friends and try to get someone else to buy a copy, because I risk the situation that the three people who would buy one are the three people I gave a free copy.

I accidentally left my iPod in my car and left it playing on shuffle, so a shitload of songs got added to my last.fm thing. It sort of freaked me out, because I was like “how was I listening to GTR eight hours ago?”