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It’s really probably not a good sign when you can look back almost a year in the posts just on the main page.

Ok, so let’s see what’s on the post checklist. Whirlwind summer romance….nope. Travel…nope. Salsa dance class to try to facilitate whirlwind romance…sure, why not.

I’ve been through roughly 22 weeks of salsa classes since my last post. And when I look at it that way, I become a bit more disheartened than I was before I wrote it. Certainly I, technically know a lot of moves, but I just feel that I should be able to remember them outside of class a bit better after that long. I’m also fairly concerned that anyone who has not been in the class with me won’t have the slightest idea of what I’m trying to lead. Hopefully I’m just being a bit pessimistic, but I won’t really know until I actually get out there.

Which kind of leads into the second thing of note which is going on. That being the psychological counseling. The original stated goal was to be able to socially interact with other people. So far I’ve been assigned to read Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus, which is a wonderful resource if you happen to have married someone and need to develop a better understanding of why they currently wish to divorce you. That doesn’t really apply to me though, so I’m not especially interested in finishing the book. It also appears that when I do try to interact with people, I phrase things wrongly, and can’t pick up the difference between what I’m saying an how I should have phrased it. So I’m not really sure where the sessions are going. I’ll stick it out through the end of the year (at which point my health benefits will reset) and see if it seems to be helping.

Work is crazy. The manager is out for maternity leave again (we need to sit her down and explain where babies come from when she comes back), so I’m doing her job and mine, but without the various bits of software that make project management possible. On the plus side, I get to tell people what to do. On the minus side, I get paid the same as before, or possibly less, since there isn’t anyone to approve my overtime, so I don’t get paid for it. And I forgot to write down a lunch break on my timesheet for a day last week, so payroll reclassified some time worked as lunch, and then made me fill out a time off request for a half hour since that took me down to 7.5 hours worked that day. I’m not entirely sure that’s legal. Maybe I’ll need to drop a note to the auditors when they come in after Thanksgiving.

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Happy Birthday to Me, Happy Birthday to Me, Happy Birthday dear Meeeee, Happy Birthday to Me.

As I mark this milestone of turning 30, I notice this evening that I’m walking slower, my legs hurt, actually, come to think of it, everything hurts.

Now, possibly this has some connection to 7 hours of paintball today. And even if it doesn’t, I think I’ll blame it on that anyways. It was a nice day for it, sunny but not hot and with a cool breeze. The morning games didn’t go all that well for me, I kept getting knocked out really early, but for the afternoon games I either never got hit, or was hit near the end when I’d advanced to far into the other side of the field and some of those players had hung back, possibly waiting for me, but I’ll just chalk that up to that they lack the warrior spirit. Or were doing the smart thing and guarding their flag.

I was pretty much falling asleep on the drive home, so I’m going to go do that now, and will take the evening as it comes. I’ve been out the last two nights for various things, so I think it might be nice to stay home and watch Sunday night Fox stuff.

There had better not be any sort of basketball preempting what I want.

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I have a new reader, hooray! Good job LinkedIn.

I actually had two network requests this week, from my two readers, so that was moderately interesting in the “I’d better update” kind of way. So, welcome Candice, who knew high school Scott and probably has better blackmail material than just about anyone who can currently find me. I mean emails, IM logs, all that’s easy to fake, but the potential of actual physical letters turning up from the pre-email era (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, which was possibly just a bit ball of magma, as I vaguely recall), that’s just a whole bunch of potential trouble.

In other news, the move to Pasadena is pretty much complete, so probably no one will ever visit me again since I’m not next to Disneyland. *sigh* And I never did get my picture taken with Eeyore. On the plus side, so far the drive has been mysteriously better than the drive from LA. Possibly I’ve gotten a little better at picking lanes. Possibly the GPS function of my phone got enabled by a firmware upgrade a few weeks ago and it interfaces well with Google Maps Traffic telling me where I am, and where everyone else is stopped (Important note: Do not use Google Maps on your phone while driving, it says so right in the thingy you have to agree to before you can use it.)

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When I got home tonight, I noticed the smell of gas in the apartment. This doesn’t concern me a lot, as there are typically 5 flames burning in my apartment due to various pilot lights, so if I’m smelling gas, it’s not at a level that is dangerous, or things would already have exploded. In any case, one of the pilot lights for the stove had gone out, which has happened a few times before, but does lead me to the conclusion that possibly the apartment is trying to kill me.

In related news, I’m moving to Pasadena over the next few weeks, such that the apartment can try to kill the next residents, or catch on fire, as it sees fit. Meanwhile, I will by spending my time on the various highways, hoping that other motorists catch on fire, but do so well off to the side where I’m not effected, or better yet, somewhere behind me and block that traffic off.

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I think I’ve located the source of the mysterious flame color issue I’ve been having. If I keep my humidifier off overnight or so, they all burn blue again, and then go back to yellow when I have it on. So, it’s either the extra water in the air, or it’s something to do with the fine white dust suspended in the air due to my water having a lot of minerals in it, which is then left behind in the air as the tiny water droplets evaporate. I suppose I could buy distilled water and solve that particular problem; which I probably should do since the dust sticks to everything.

In other news, someone did notice that I got a haircut and said it looks good, so the drive up to Santa Monica for a free haircut paid off. Most likely other people would have noticed, but since the majority of people I see at work, I haven’t seen for 2 weeks due to holidays, so they probably forgot what I’m supposed to look like. Not that it’s really all that different, the primary thing is that there is no spiking up in the front, and more of a natural look instead of gel-based. I think I’m supposed to go back again the next time it grows out and have someone with a little more vision make suggestions. At this rate I’ll never fill out my buy 12 get the 13th free card at SuperCuts.

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Foremost in my mind as to changes for the new year is “Why are the various flames in the apartment yellow instead of blue today?” The stove, the water heater, the furnace, all of them are giving yellow flames today, which is a sign that they aren’t being properly oxygenated, and thus aren’t burning completely. I’m somewhat curious as to where my oxygen has gone. I was even more curious as to if carbon monoxide was building up to kill me in my sleep, so I bought a detector, and it is satisfying my worries by displaying a nice 0 on its display. The manual says that 0 means less than 30ppm, which I’m ok with. Also it’s generally a good idea to have a detector anyways, so now I do.

Secondarily, I think 2008 is the year I finally finish my Yahoo personals profile I started a few years ago. Occasionally I log on and reactivate my email address and look at my profile with it’s large blank spaces where a title and some sort of descriptive text should be. Then I draw a blank and go do something else. At least 3 times that something else has been to go find a picture of myself to use for the profile. Then somehow I lose it, and have to find it again the next time. I think I’m going to have to start remembering to take a camera with me when I go places, and then have someone take pictures of me with it, since I don’t really have any pictures of myself.

Third-idarily, I’m sure there is something more pressing I should be promising, but I think I’m going with purchase clothing which does not have holes in it, and throw away the pieces that do. I’m very attached to my old clothes, but at the point where the holes have lined up through several layers, that’s where I draw the line.

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So, I went into my contact list to get the info for the person who is using me as a guinea pig/hair model tomorrow so I could get the address, when what to my wondering eye should appear but at least 100 contacts I know nothing about. Apparently the contacts for someone who knows a lot of people in Moscow, Idaho and Spokane, Washington have found their way into my phone. Also Monsanto and some Biotech, which is at least close to what I’d have, but still, I’m curious as to where they came from. Bluetooth is off, so it wasn’t that. It’s only ever synched to my home computer, which I don’t think knows people I don’t. The only thing I can come up with is that maybe the IR transfer capability is active and somehow my phone was lined up with someone else’s sometime recently.

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So, mid-June is my anniversary date at work, so, that’s when various things like my annual review and any associated changes in status or raises occur. It tends to be a slow process though, and this year being slower than usual due to some time intensive projects my manager has had to work on, so, it finally happened yesterday. As a result, I guess I got promoted in June and got a raise, so I’ll be getting some back pay most likely this week. Which will be nice, but did they really have to wait this long, and then still have it in this tax year? I think it might screw up my goal of having my dental bills be enough of my gross income to be useful. Oh well.

It’s also a bit problematic that now I only have 6 months until my next review to complete my developmental and other goals for the year, which I’ve only found out about now.

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Pretty much I’m away from home the next two weeks. Flying home tomorrow for the funeral Wednesday, then flying back Friday afternoon, and then out again Sunday morning to Maryland for a week there on business.

On the plus side, my phone is working, so I’ll have some sort of net connection during my travels, so I won’t be completely out of touch.

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Well, technically, rocks on my head, but they could have been in it.

It’s a windy day. Wind and trying to skate along a pretty much dry river in what is essentially a desert are not things that go together for two primary reasons. The first is that it’s difficult to make any headway against the wind. The second is that the wind is not entirely wind, but is wind with dirt, leaves, small rocks, and twigs. I feel somewhat scoured. Also blind, but mainly it’s the sand that gets under my fingernails every time I scratch my head that is the most annoying right now.

On the other hand, after turning around to go back to my car, things were really nice in that it didn’t require much effort at all, and on one occasion managed to cover a long flat stretch, a downhill and an uphill without needing to do anything but let the wind push me. Back on the first hand, excessive easily obtained speed doesn’t go well with the various bits of tree debris that had blown onto the path since they kept tripping me up.

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