It's The Time Of The Season For Weight Gain

Morning weigh-in (Thurs): 179.5#, 14.5% BF
Morning weigh-in (Fri): 181#, 12.5% BF

Uh-oh, I'm not liking those recent weight gains. Not much exercise lately, plenty of bad food, happens this time every year.

Got the last of my costume last night instead of going to the gym, picked up a surgeon outfit. That and the clown wig/makeup, and the horror-movie knife (it plays the screeching shower music from Psycho), and I should be able to put something together. Call me Dr. Bozo!!

Moving right along... I went to Which Brew last night, ran into Theresa for the first time in weeks. Things look OK between us (as friends), and we talked for a while. She's had a rough two months apparently, lot of things going wrong in her life.

Linux Voyager: I cribbed a mini Java-based webserver from that Learning Java CD, which is rather primitive (it can only respond to GET requests), but I was able to browse the copy of my web site that I keep at home, as well as any file on my machine that's in a Mozilla-recognized format. I did that Wednesday night; last night I set up a perl script that writes a little gibberish (inxluding date and tme stamp) to a named pipe, then read the pipe via the server & browser. Results were somewhat unpredictable, but it did work. Very interesting, for me anyway!

By the way, the title of yesterday's post was what Renee Zellweger's character kept saying in Cold Mountain.

All Right, Then!

Morning weigh-in: 179.5#, 14.5% BF

Worked late, then hit the gym last night, followed by laundry and a trip to Which Brew for dinner. Before leaving the house I ran into some neighbors, who told me the story of their daughter-in-law: molested by a relative as a child, parental alcoholism and denial, mental health issues later in life, especially after her own daughter was assaulted -- these are people I know & see every day, this is the kind of shit that's supposed to happen to someone else.

Anyway, Which Brew: it was OK, had a decent conversation with some dude about the Easton Skate Park, but all in all I'd say the evening was a wash: some people in there I didn't really enjoy being around.

The Commoditization Of Desire

Morning weigh-in: 180#, 12% BF

I've been on a nostalgia kick for the past year or so, listening to the punk (or post-punk, or punkish) songs I heard on WPRB back in the 80's. It's funny how true those songs sound today, almost like prophecy, and how little I "got" some of them back then...

The CD for the ride in this morning was a Rhino Records compilation of the Gang of Four. One thing I picked up on recently is that a lot of these bands had a thematic schtick: the Dead Kennedys, for example, seem obsessed with WMD's, class war, and genocide; while the Gang of Four focused on, say, the Thatcher era's economic enthusiasms, market forces as instruments of control, and the commoditization of sexuality to allow market forces to act upon it.

("The commoditization of desire" is a phrase I cribbed from Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, which came out about the same time as these bands, maybe a little later. Some little kid is giving a "what I did last summer" presentation about a trip across the Midwest on I-80, when his brain locks up and all he can do is stutter "corn -- corn -- corn -- corn -- Stukey's... corn -- corn -- corn -- corn -- Stukey's..." over and over.

His parents take him to doctors, speech pathologists etc to no avail, until at one doctor's office some communication passes between the kid and a cockroach on the wall, and he begins to speak: "Well, yes, with respect to the Interstate. Whereas prostitution constitutes the commoditization of desire, the tollbooth exchange constitutes the eroticization of commoditized mobility..." blah blah blah, guess you had to be there and it really wasn't an important part of the story, but the phrase "commoditization of desire" stuck with me.)

Anyway, back to my story. To be continued...

Monday, Already

Morning weigh-in: 179.5#, 12.5 BF

The weekend:

Friday: My car was finally ready. I scammed a ride home from my long-suffering friend and colleague John, who was kind enough to actually take me to the dealer instead... a big mistake on his part. They couldn't find the keys or paperwork, or the manager with access to the locked room where they might have been placed accidentally, or get in touch with the service manager at home... Keep in mind, this evening pickup is not a special event: I'm at the "evening pickup desk," where they handle this stuff all the time, and the service has already been paid for; in the absence of bureaucratic screwups, getting my car should have been a trivial matter. While they're dithering, I spot the the car in the lot, use my keyless entry to get in, retrieve my secret spare ignition key and the receipt, and finally let John know I can get myself home...

Of course, there's still no happy ending. The valve tap is pretty audible despite "everything they could do," and the "check engine" light is on. All these are isolated incidents I'm sure, no systemwide signs of incompetence to see here, move along...

Lots of things have been on hold waiting for the car to arrive, so I spent most of the evening running errands. I get a call from Eric that they're going to a new Mexican place in Emmaus, but I can't join them, maybe I'll be at Which Brew later though. Even later, I get a call from Heath down at Which Brew, trying to talk me into coming out -- turns out, he was hoping I'd bring some women with me ("it's like a friggin sausage party down here!"), like maybe I'd bring T and some of her friends... sorry dude, can't help you there.

Saturday was breakfast at the coffee shop, then I hit the gym and ran more errands. Getting home, I found a call from Doug, saying he'd be campaigning in the afternoon, if I'd like to join him. A few more errands plus a shower, then over to his house where was gearing up for a trip through his neighborhood. Results were a bit more encouraging this time around and we were feeling pretty good when we finished, and Doug got a hankering for buffalo wings. He and Lori and I hit the Brew Works, but there was more than an hour wait, so we went to McGrady's, which has a better beer selection but the food isn't quite as good. There wasn't as much of a dinner crowd there, and we were early for the Saturday Night partytime rush, so things worked out relatively smoothly. We went over to the Funhouse after that to see what was going on (not much, we were way early for that place). After that I went home, and was in bed by 10:30.

Sunday we rode Blue Marsh: me, Doug & Lori on the tandem, Greg, Brian, and Joe & Cindy. Great ride, followed by a an excellent post-ride dinner (or late lunch) . The rest of the day was laundry & naptime.