Dieting sucks, but so does breaking the two hundred mark on the scale…

I took the dog for another walk this evening, although she was a hell of a lot more rambunctious than she was last night. Nonetheless, I’ve got a feeling that it’s actually going to become a regular thing this summer, as we both need the exercise and it’s a nice break from staring at a computer screen all night. I figured that the route we’ve taken so far was about two miles long and even though I’ve never really considered walking to be exercise before, I’m sure it’s gotta be better than just walking back and forth between the refrigerator and the computer…

I guess I’ve also kinda started my “diet” this weekend, to go along with the whole exercise thing…you know, with bikini season in full tilt now and all! We’ve been down this road before, and I’ve never really been able to keep it up for more than a week or two, citing time constraints or some other nonsense, but now it’s not even a matter of cutting down so that I don’t need to carry as much lead while I’m diving (although that’s still a bonus!) – I just don’t want to have to buy a whole new wardrobe here shortly! Ok, so maybe it’s not that bad, but if I could manage to lose ten or twenty pounds this summer, it certainly couldn’t hurt much!

So this new diet that I’m trying now is one that I’ve somewhat created myself, or more so adapted from somebody else’s plan. Basically, my goal is to prove that this diet pill that they’re always advertising on the radio – calor-ad or cal-a-trim or whatever – is a bunch of hooey. You’ll note in the instructions that they also say that you need to drink eight glasses of water a day and stop eating three hours before bedtime, so I’m going to just do that and leave out the stupid pills altogether. Mind you, eight glasses of water is technically sixty-four ounces, or damn near two liters, which I’ve yet to be able to ingest in a single day…but that’s probably just because I keep leaving it until the last minute. I guess it basically comes down to not drinking much else other than water, so you hammer away at it all day, which could be tough because I’m also horrendously addicted to Dr. Pepper (the beverage, you sickos…), but we’ll see what happens.

The plan is lots of water, no more snacking late at night, a few sit-ups here and there, and a couple of miles wandering around town with the dog…twenty pounds in three months? Wish me luck!

Hmmm…

Wednesday marked the first day of my five-day weekend, yet oddly enough I still managed to spend nearly an hour of my time at work last night and I have a list of people that I need to call tomorrow morning. What part of vacation is so difficult to understand?

Tip for Anyone Planning on Taking Time Off from Work:

Don’t turn your cell phone on…ever! It may result in quite the mess and your co-workers will inevitably hate you for taking the same personal time that they don’t seem to have a problem with taking, but ultimately, they’ll never learn to fly for themselves if you don’t let them crash every once in a while.

Besides, they don’t pay you nearly enough to be “on call” for them, anyways…

I hate my bank…

I have money, or at least I do in theory, but for some reason I can’t have my money. If I had just deposited it today, I would almost understand because it usually takes a day for them to get my hard-earned cash into that little computer of theirs, but I didn’t deposit it today – I deposited it last week. I even tried to get some out over the weekend, but it wouldn’t let me have any, so I put even more in, thinking it might see the errors in its ways and help a brother out, but no… “You have almost two hundred dollars in your account and you can’t touch a dime of it.”

People keep telling me that I should switch to a credit union, but I’m honestly thinking about cutting out the middle man and just keeping my money in a cardboard box from now on. My bill collectors probably won’t like getting paid in loose change and dirty five dollar bills, but as long as that box doesn’t hold out on me like the greedy corporate jerks who are currently hoarding my money, it’ll be worth the extra effort…

‘Twas a foggy day in the Alpine Village…

The past couple of days have been filled with home entertaining goodness, as my boss finally remembered to pick-up the first half of my entertainment center over in Traverse City. Finally migrating everything over at about one in the morning, though, I realized just how shabby the original wiring with this system was when I first hooked it up. Adding a game here or a component there, I’ve now got a literal spiderweb of cables, but fortunately I’m still over another hundred dollars away from dealing with that mess! My only gripe with my new stand is that currently the center channel to my stereo system is behind a pair of glass doors, but at least I don’t have to worry about waking up to find my TV in a pile on the floor after the stand collapsed after years and years of abuse…

I also took the opportunity to pick-up a new universal remote control while I was throwing money away, although I’ve never had too much luck with these things in the past. Hopefully this one will be a little better than the last, as it apparently has a new feature that allows it to learn old commands from my other remotes so I can actually put them away instead of keeping them handy for the one or two commands that didn’t carry over. Hell, for what I paid for the thing, it should get up by itself, walk over to the TV and push the buttons by hand when it can’t figure out what I want it to do! Ahh, the joys of being lazy…

They Fight Crime!

He’s a sword-wielding crooked stage actor on a mission from God. She’s a transdimensional hypochondriac barmaid with the power to see death. They fight crime!


He’s a scarfaced coffee-fuelled sorceror moving from town to town, helping folk in trouble. She’s a sarcastic communist mechanic in the witness protection scheme. They fight crime!


He’s an all-American small-town matador gone bad. She’s a blind wisecracking Hell’s Angel on her way to prison for a murder she didn’t commit. They fight crime!

http://www.rain-street.org/fightcrime.htm

Eleven Random Things I’d Like to Do Before I Die…

1. Go SCUBA diving on the Great Barrier Reef
2. Play a round of golf with the Pope
3. Write an episode of The Simpsons
4. Have sex, preferrably with a girl…
5. Visit my new plot of land on the moon
6. Speak to an auditorium full of college students about something profound
7. Ride an elephant
8. Attend a taping of Late Night with Conan O’Brien
9. Fly to Paris for lunch, just to make fun of the waiter
10. Make a cameo appearance in a James Bond movie
11. Participate in a jam session with Keanu Reeves, Dave Barry, and Bermuda Schwartz

Some movies are best left without a sequel…

Well, I finally got around to watching The Matrix: Reloaded the other night and all I have to say is, *yawn*…

Mind you, I ended up watching a pirated copy off the ‘net because I’ve found it’s exceedingly difficult to find a theater that is open at 2:00 AM (and because I’m a gigantic nerd). The quality wasn’t top notch, so maybe that had something to do with my movie-going -staying experience, but it just didn’t strike me like this phenomenal piece of cinematography that it was made up to be. I thought that the original was great – it left a few things hanging, but still told an entire story – but now it seems like we’re just pushing this story along into the next sequel and it was really obvious, or at least I thought it was. The first one stood out because it was a milestone of its time, but they followed the exact same formula to make this one and I honestly think that they could’ve done better by just leaving it be and creating a whole new story. Of course, I’ll still probably buy the DVD when it comes out, at least for the special effects and whatnot, but you won’t catch me lining up three weeks before the opening for tickets to The Matrix: Revolutions, that’s for sure!

Not that you’d catch me lining up more than ten or fifteen minutes for any movie tickets. I’m told that I don’t have the proper wardrobe for it, anyways…