So Say we All

Stand and Deliver

Adama's mustache basically equaled weirdness and despair.  The Admiral was a warrior and there was no one to fight for that year.  His son was gone on another ship, the Cylons were gone and he was an old man building ships in bottles on a bigger ship.  When he shaved his 'stache, it meant things were back to normal in the Battlestar universe: fighting Cylons, the main cast back on the ship and men and women showering in the same cramped toilet compartments.  Routine is important, mustache or bare lip.

Out here, I get up, shower, call home and catch the bus to work.  I have four computer monitors I watch everyday, sometimes till my eyes are tired and blurry.  (One night in early July, I experienced double vision for a few hours from the unnatural light blasting at my retinas.)  The first screen is like watching a game of Pac-Man: Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde run around and I see if they turn into fruit.  The second screen is like a BBS game I played in high school: lines like "buy armor for troll army; attack elven horde at dawn" scroll across the screen.  The third screen is Fox News; I think Rupert Murdoch is the Hugh Hefner of network television.  Finally, the fourth screen is where I see emails from my better half with pictures of my kids playing on the beach, tackling large animals and hugging their babysitters (they like older women, too).  Eventually I get the phone call that let's me go home for the night...until I realize the next bus is coming in an hour.  Sometimes old men with dour faces in white vans give me rides back to my room.  They never tell me their names or what they do, but the candy is delicious.

Despite my stiff upper back and neck muscles, I proceeded to optimistically squat, bench and row tonight.  I was disappointed to find out that the lowest weight they have for bench press shirts are for 350lbs (no T-shirt for me).  Pressing my luck, I asked if members of the prestigious Thousand Pound Club get T-shirts. Huckleberry Hound with red hair and freckles did not smile when he told me "No."

So...
Squat: 5-325, 4-325, 2-325
Bench: 5-225, 4-225, 4-225, 4-225, 2-225
Rows: 5x5x180

Breakfast for dinner routine.

Another breakfast hour meal in which I read chapters of When You are Engulfed in Flames while my food digested.  Several non-mustachioed diners gaped as I laughed out loud to David Sedaris sitting in his underwear in a French doctor's office and assisting pathologists inspect a dead body.  If you can't laugh at dead people, well, what kind of a society in which do we live?  It's not easy to write funny sentences while obeying grammatical rules.

Don't drink coffee...sometimes

Coffee is hard on the adrenal glands, depletes your bones of magnesium and has been known to run away with the spoon, but I decided to just have two cups of Earl Grey tea tonight, with some medium chain triglyceride (MCT) oil added in for fun.  We'll see if skipping the coffee and eating an earlier dinner help me get to sleep closer to around the time the sun is getting up.

...I haven't given coffee up forever, just avoided it tonight.

Apparently Styrofoam cups can't handle the heat generated by the kettle at work and the MCT oil.  A crack showed up in the cup where my plastic MRE spoon stirred and scraped away from foam and a globule of tea sprang.  I'll stick to my "eco-friendly" coffee cup and just pretend my tea doesn't taste like yesterday's coffee.

After finishing Sherlock Holmes last night, there is a definite theme of "19th century London stepdad's wanted their stepdaughters' inheritance and would lie to no end to keep it."  If Sherlock Holmes existed today in America, he'd be encountered with the denizens of Fox's "Cops."  As it turns out the final four short stories wound up as follows:

• "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb"; engineer loses thumb while programming a computer; Holmes snorts cocaine due to a counterfeiter's axe; they get away with some of their fake coins
• "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"; a woman is to be married to a young man; man is her father; Holmes does nothing an English Lord; woman was already married whose husband was presumed dead and is at the ceremony; woman flees with husband; Holmes finds the couple and makes them tell the Lord
• "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet"; Colonel Mustard steals a crown; Holmes in opium den Banker holds a crown in his home (already a dumb idea) while crown is collateral for a loan; boyfriend of his neice steals it; Holmes recognizes that banker's son did not do it
• "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"; Holmes stops the Nazis This was one disturbing...Man seeks a nanny for his son and requires that the nanny look like his sick daughter; nanny is forced to cut her hair, hired and then acts out scenes to ward off the daughter's fiance; eventually the fiance and daughter escape and the man and is wife are (slightly) reformed.  Holmes solves mystery, which was again, a father/stepfather wanting his daughters inheritance.  

I've finished David Sedaris' book Naked, which was very funny.  His career seems to be based on his own admitted laziness, description of casual drug and alcohol use and the absurd descriptions of some common things he's gone through in his life.

It's a rest day, but I did do 50 air squats at my desk.  I tend to slouch, lean to the left and crookedify myself in my office chair.

Very unoriginally (I know it's not really a word) I decided to have two pieces of steak, two eggs over hard and a salad.  The combination of olive oil, red vinegar, white vinegar and lemon juice, with a healthy raining of salt, is quite delicious.  No pictures tonight; decided to travel sans backpack and accouterments to the cafeteria.

This is the end of this blog post.  I had something else to add written in my notebook, but left that little red notebook at work.  Tomorrow!

Last night I updated my books read log in Google Drive using the notes I've kept since 2003.  Starting with the Silmarillion and ending today with Me Talk Pretty One Day, I've read 308 books in 11 years, counting ebooks and audio CDs.  If you are interested in genres or what I've read, comment or email me.

Men with beards

So I am finally getting into David Sedaris.  The past two nights I've been going to sleep crying as he talks about his sister Amy's nonconformist makeup ("make me look like someone beat the shit out of me") and describing learning French.  It was interesting seeing him interviewed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart...I wouldn't be opposed to reading about Owls.

Tonight I got to play the game "How to understand what Blogger is telling me."  For whatever reason, Google's Blogger, or blogs hosted by such, show up with some of the menu options in Arabic.  I knew there was a way to fix this, but tonight I switched to French, then Spanish, then German then finally American English.

Again, keeping it short and simple, with 5:00 rests in between sets of squats:

Warmup: 6 15lb weight chinups, 6 bar overhead squats
Workout: Squats 5-225, 5-225, 5-230, 5-235, and 5-240
Cooldown: 6 20lb weighed chinups

I switched up my meals today as well, based on the intermittent fasting technique espoused by Martin Berkhan of leangains.com and others.  Basically I skip breakfast (my 4pm walk in the oven to the cafeteria) and eat around 8pm and 3am.  My fasting is while I sleep and for 4ish hours from when I get up till breakfast (at dinner time).  Working so far.

When I was younger, at dinner my dad used to say, "You should thank that cow (or chicken, or turkey or whatever); it gave its life for you."  So tonight, I thank you, dear dead cow, for the 2 inches of stacked roast beef on my plate.

After I ate this I went back and got two more slices.

Here's more alongside the road artwork.

I think this was after Loki took Thor's GI Joe action figures.

This has got to be the Saint of Killers.  After looking at that picture, if it's not the Saint, then I'm Sam Elliott.

Spoiler alert

I'm more than halfway done with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (thank you, MLA) so far the stories have gone as follows:

• "A Scandal in Bohemia"; Irene Adler; not really solved
• "The Adventure of the Red-Headed League"; a lying redhead and his accomplice were bank robbers
• "A Case of Identity"; it was the woman's stepdad, afraid of losing his daughter's inheritance; Holmes yells at him and then the stepdad leaves
• "The Boscombe Valley Mystery"; it was the dead man's friend from Australia; Holmes took his confession and let him go
• "The Five Orange Pips"; it was the KKK; client died, but vindicated later
• "The Man with the Twisted Lip"; client's husband is a successful beggar; no crime committed
• "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle"; thief steals jewel, puts it in a goose, Holmes confronts him and then lets him go
• "The Adventure of the Speckled Band"; stepdad is afraid of losing his daughter's inheritance (again), kills her and then attempts to kill her twin; is killed by his own snake

I have four stories to finish, but having seen that apparently Holmes only solves half of his cases, I think they'll go like this:

• "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb"; engineer loses thumb while programming a computer; Holmes snorts cocaine
• "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"; a woman is to be married to a young man; man is her father; Holmes does nothing
• "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet"; Colonel Mustard steals a crown; Holmes in opium den
• "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"; Holmes stops the Nazis

David Sedaris is finally getting funny, a la his Me Talk Pretty One Day.  Most of his stories somehow involve him mentioning the fact that he knew he was gay at a young age (ok, got it), but the story about his younger brother (11 years his junior), the brother's filthy mouth and his relationship with the Sedaris' father is hilarious.  Not really a "gonna keep this book for my grandsons to read" but decent enough now.

In an effort to stay 5-10 years behind the current Windows version, I had the pleasure of figuring out how to use Windows 7 at work today.  Some of it was "file X was saved in and is now here" and some was "I can't let you do that Jordan."  Anyway, it was tedious.

No workout tonight; decided to read and rest.  I did eat eggs, chicken sausage, meatballs and a salad.

Two videos I think are worth watching.  Mark Sisson (he's 57) goes on local TV to talk about his philosophy.  If you have an extra tractor tire around your house, try this (she's a paleoer, too).