abadman

So I started a new workout thing. It's that trendy p90x shit from the infomercial. I'm more of a runner or biker, and typically don't get into manly resistance training work outs at all. In fact, based on how much my spindly pipe cleaner arms ache, I must not have used my arms for anything but eating doughnuts for years. Funny how atrophy sneaks up on you. (I wonder, do big muscles hurt more after a work out, or does it just spread out? I'll probably never know.)

So yeah, the fit test was funny. It's supposed to tell you if your "ready" for such a manly work out. I'm more than fine on cardio and bottom half fitness. Total cream puff failboat on the top.

I actually picked up the idea from another unix admin at work, and now some of the other fat and/or lazy computer nerds are thinking about trying this "super intense work out already fit people and athletes!! YAR YAR YAR!!"

We're going to make it a group sport and work out in the morning at the office. We'll have a uniform consisting of pink solotards, white leg warmers, and white head bands. We'll call it P90uniX or P90eunuchs. We still haven't decided on the spelling yet. It's going to be hot. Watch out office ladies, here comes the macho! RAWR!

You may have read about my alleged domestic squabbles. That is correct. It's getting quite heated. I'm even contemplating doing something intentionally spiteful. That right, I may send back the netflixed BSG dvd before a certain former fiance has even seen it! TAKE THAT! (although I still haven't pulled the sealing tape... giving myself room to back out of such radical and drastic action)

Strange dream.

I was a few hours out of town at something or other with K and she clicked on this this coworker I work with all the time and just killed her! Then we had to check out of the hotel or whatever, so we moved the body to the trunk of my car. There was some loose mention of maybe dropping the stiff off in the country the next day after we got home or something.

So we got home with the stiff, and I parked the car in the garage. We planned to figure out what to do with the it in the morning. So all night the body was in the trunk of my car, and I kept tossing and turning just thinking about the million ways we'll likely be caught and seeing no way out of it. We're were both going to go to jail forever, and K was just sleeping like a baby! Sometime this morning I tossed hard enough to wake up a little bit and realize that it was all a dream and there wasn't a dead body in my trunk.

So Live Face, how does one dispose of a body?

Maybe sneak to a cemetery, look for a freshly dug plot waiting for a morning stiff. Dig the bottom of the whole out a few extra feet and bury your extra stiff under what will be the fresh one due that morning. The old twofer? But how ballsy do you have to be to try something like that. Terrifying let me tell you. Definitely would not sleep at night.

Dinner dog! Thassup!

Corn bread encrusted cat fish
Rice Pilaf w/ green beans and pine nuts
Roasted brussel sprouts

Unfortunately prewife is out of town, so I'm left to enjoy the feast on my own.

Had a great jog today. My new route is 5.6 miles with some enormous hills. I'm keeping under 10 minute mile averages too. I'll totally turn gay for myself if I get much manlier.

EDIT:

OMG, that was so wonderful, I almost feel guilty for enjoying it alone. In my defense though, the beans and sprouts wouldn't have lasted, there are two more of the fishes in the freezer, and the rice started as a box.

Oh, and in other news. I looked up some guitar tab and have been learning God Damn The Sun. It's pretty, and doable for an absolute prenovice like myself. Love that song.

I have this little app I wrote for the PUD treasurer to track new home sales in the hood by scraping the assessor info and diffing it month to month. Lately it's provided a depressing snapshot of housing in decline.

This month there was a divorce or split of some kind: Shift from two person title to one person title with small exchange of money.

Another foreclosure: Transfer for $0 to Bank

And a foreclosure that sold for 68% of the reduced 2009 tax assessment value.

Nifty photo:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/us/23crash.html?_r=1&hp

My fiance put this neat web site up for her sister. It needs some search engine love so I'm linking.

Nails by Kelley -- Bringing Miami Styles to Memphis
Nails by Kelley -- Best Nail Salon in Memphis

My sibs and I are not close at all. We're very different. Like I talked to my brother last time my mom came to town because she called him and made us talk.

I talked to my sister around last christmas when I called, but I don't expect her to call me and don't really care to make the effort this year.

Anyway, in the 7 or so years that I've lived in Wisconsin, I've never received a Christmas gift from them or my father even close to on time for Chistmas. They usually start straggling in some time in January. I think they wait until my gift arrives, and go buy something to reciprocate politely. This year I haven't even bothered to shop for them until today. I've got my Dad covered, but have no idea what to get the sibs. I've been joking with K about how I just need to find a trifecta T with any three of the following: motorcycle, flag, eagle, and/or flames.

I ran across THIS and we both laughed our asses off.

Anyone have any suggestions?

s/employee/coworker/g

Coworker is one of our corporate catch words. I like to add last name to it. "Coworker Stratski." This turns coworker into the new comrad and completely undoes the subtle change of connotation intended by replacing the word employee. You can also add first name and it becomes a sarcastic cult like replacement for "broher." Brother Jacob, Coworker Jacob. See.

I saw a sign that was supposed to mean "employees only" on a door at Target, but apparently they find the word "employee" offensively honest too. Their sign reads "Team Members Only." I thought of going in for a moment. I am technically the member of a team right? It wasn't qualified with "Target Team Members Only" unless your supposed to read the (o) graphic as "target." I would have tried it if not for the number of swarming (o) team members around that particular door.

So why does corporate America want to change the language? Am I wrong for thinking this is all too Animal Farm?

My fiancee is moving in soon, and we've embarked on prettying the place up a bit.

K and I prettied up the bathroom with some orange paint. Actually a light honey tone ceiling, Light orange walls, and a dark orange accent wall opposite the mirror. It orangefabulous. We just finished putting it back together tonight, and she suggests finishing the look with bathroom art. This set me off on a stream of ideas of what "bathroom art" could be. She deemed it LJ worthy, so heres the list. Let me know if you think of any more.

* A painting of orange poop.
* Multi poop painting in style of Warhol's Monroes.
* Black and white picture of me pooping on roses.
* A needle point like the god poems we saw at the creepy old lady b&b, only with the little kid chat dialog about pooping the same poop back and forth forever ))<>((
* I can drink a bunch of water, eat a vitamin b, and write piss in the snow with my uber yellow vitamin b piss then frame a photo of it.
* We can frame ultra close up poop face photos of ourselves.
* A food painting of diaretic foods like prunes, yogurt, raisins, plums.
* A tastefully matted photo of chocolate pudding wrestlers.
* Photos of people taking a crap in that specific bathroom that appear to be taken from a camera hidden inside the exhaust fan.
* A painting of someone pushing out an agonizing sharp one.
* a painting depicting the aftermath of a toilette paper breakage poop finger incident.
* A photograph of Bono.

Just had a dandy storm here in Wisconsin as many of you already know.

I'm amused by the phenomenon of digging out. It forces everyone into a surge of manual labor up and down the street as far as the eye can see. All of us fat beer-and-cheese-stuffed Midwesterners leave our cushy modern life for a couple hours to shovel snow. Even the folks with snow blowers don't have a picnic. The first shovel full when completely buried seems pointless, but you eventually make it to the end of the driveway. Then the plows come and barricade the end of your clean driveway with the heavy road snow, and you get to go right back out and chip away at the wall of plow leavin's. If rush hour beats the plows, you get to watch folks stuck up and down the street digging themselves out. This always seems hopeless when it's you who's stuck, but one way or another, everyone gets out (sometimes days later).

Then maybe it snows the next day and the day after. A good string of storms will turn a driveway into a tunnel with snow mountains as tall as you on either side.

Of course it eventually melts, and all the hard work disappears down the storm sewer.

So anyway, my corp plan provides for broken phone replacement, but I'm not sure if breakage due to malicious abuse is covered. I got this stupid brick of a windows mobile phone and finally 'accidentally' broke it. I must say it was rather durable hardware and took quite a few accidents in stride. So how do I explain the damage? Give me a story.

Sayonara Overwork

Apparently everyone works to much to procreate in Japan so now the bosses are sending their workers home with instructions to sex it up, or at least watch tv together and see what happens. It seems so foreign, poor overworked Japanese. Until you get to the middle of the article and realize that only the US and South Korea have the honor of beating them in work week length.

So where are our "Sayonara Overwork" campaigns. Why does my boss come by at 6:30pm on a Friday with more emergency work to do before going home rather than telling me to get out of there and get my hump on? It's a little know fact that the only thing saving America from a more severe population age shift as seen in other countries like Japan is immigration, largely from Mexico, which we are not appropriately grateful for.

One for the white board.

Karoshi=Death from overwork

Perhaps I'll print this one out, highlight a few spots, and post it in the lunch room.

The cats are so precious when they're sleeping, and they're actually tired at night for a change!

I don't think they got their daytime napping in with me home all day. They're so tuckered out, they're actually cuddling while sleeping rather than hissing and trying to eat other cat face, or my face. The kitten just isn't sleepy often enough.

Feel like I'm coming down with shit. :( The fiancee is getting back tomorrow. I've missed her.

What else ... I need to go get litter.

Riding a bicycle in the winter while intoxicated is hardly responsible, and friggen cold, from what people tell me. It may also lead to catching a bug, theoretically again.

So the little bitch kitten dropped a claw pretty deep in my finger and drew blood for the first time last night, No big deal really, but she crossed the line this morning.

After my first alarm went off, she jumped on the bed and layed down near my head and was all purrs. I should have moved her but I was already half asleep. In my sleep, I eventually moved my head a tiny bit and she jumps up, lets our a surly mraow, sticks a claw in my face and runs away. She's finally pissed me off!

Bitch is taking a time out in the little bathroom while mc eats breakfast. She gets exactly one more shot at that mistake before I take her fucking claws. Better her claws than my eye. Bitch please.

Google maps has this "street view" image of my house. It's very creepy. It's like someone stood in the street in front of every house and took a 360 degree panoramic digital image, and you can step down the street 15 feet at a time and look around. You could almost see me wanking inside if you zoom in on the window.

Simple idea for the auto industry bail out. Take over the health care cost for employees and pensioners for 08/09 fiscal years. This would provide a bridge to the long term health care reform already on the agenda and would underscore how much of a burden the current system is on business. The numbers seem to add up to about the same as the current proposal. (more research needed)

One source put GM's 2005 health care cost at 5.6 billion. (link below)

Thanks as always for you hard work.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/06/16/gms_healthcare_dilemma/

Cat sitting....

This one ... (aka dumpster, bitch, monkey)



is a hand full.

Within 5 minutes:

* Attacked my feat.
* Attacked the other cat twice.
* Jumped up onto the end table and snatched a leaf from my plant
* Ate half the leaf.
* Nocked my gloves and hat off of the arm rest of the couch.
* Attacked my glove.
* Attacked the power cord to my lap top.

And she was so nice yesterday. Me thinks she's taking revenge. I did a little squirt bottle law enforcement a bit before this round of nastiness.

Spent most of yesterday cleaning. I have to finish that up today, put the snow tires on, fill out some benefits/insurance paperwork etc. Not the most interesting time, but I'm glad to be checking things off the todo list. Of course my Mother is visiting from out of town next weekend, so I really can't procrastinate on cleaning any longer.

Cleaning has given me a nice opportunity to listen to music in my CD collection. It's funny how forgotten songs lose their initial meaning and serve more as hooks to personal memories over time.

I think I need more new music. Perhaps I should also go on a friend adding spree in the LJs and add more of the folk I know in meat space.

I wrote a little script to track sales of homes within my immediate neighborhood. This helps the treasurer of the PUD keep his data up to date without tedious and redundant audits. It scrapes the city auditor's web site for changes month to month and sends emails etc. There is some static in the list since a property will change hands in the event of a death or marriage, or with some of the duplexes, investors transferring property to an LLC structure. Thus the $0 dollar sales.

After eliminating the static, it looks like one property sold in September and zero in October. Granted, I would expect it to be slow this time of year, but in 2007, 2 properties moved in October and 4 in September.

Housing prices seem to be mostly stable in this area, but the market is way slower so who knows how long it will hold out. It seems lenders are claiming bigger spreads and only extending credit to the best debtors. My guess is that we're seeing the risk of capital deflation priced into the consumer debt market, though many analysts attribute it to panic. I had a conversation with a personal banker at local bank, and she mentioned that they avoid lending on SUVs now because the depreciation is just to high and unpredictable.

According to a report released this month, a staggering 1/5 of home owners nation wide are upside down on their mortgages now. That is to say they owe more than the house is worth! This is still largely localized though. States like Nevada where nearly 50% of home owners are upside down push the national statistic way up.

October was a month of extremes in the markets too. The most volatile in US market history. Simultaneously being the worst month in 21 years and containing the best week in 34 years. At it's trough, the S&P was off it's peak by about 40%. This was right around the time that I received a call from my mother lamenting her September statement and had to inform her that the worst isn't even reflected on that statement. Not a fun conversation. Global markets were even wilder. Some are speculating that we hit a bottom though. Of course there is no way to be sure where the bottom is until later, but I tend to agree that it's a great time for anyone with a long horizon to buy stock.

Here's the deal young people. Don't let the terror and hyperbole around these events keep you from saving for retirement right now. The best time to invest is the worst time to be invested. Sure this is traumatic for old folks who are overly invested in risky equities and don't have a long enough time horizon to recover losses, that is to say, the baby boomers who are very close to retirement and might not have time to wait out the market or those already retired. But for the rest of us, there is more profit potential in the market than their has been in twenty or thirty years. It's a once or twice in a lifetime sale on equities.

That not to say we're not in a recession. It's an interesting fact that market changes tend to be somewhat predictive (or self fulfilling). That is to say that the price of equities in the market today includes the pain or profit investors expect tomorrow. At these prices, a severe deep, and long recession is "priced in." We'll likely see a jump in equity prices ahead of the recession actually ending too (predictive market theory again). You can expect the recession to drag on through much if not all of next year during which time wages are likely to stagnate and unemployment will rise. I suspect all of this volatility is what prompted the "we don't foresee layoffs" memo at work, which of course is less than comforting. That's the big risk for the young. Hopefully we'll be lucky enough to keep our jobs.

Wishing you luck.