My Finger Hurts - Blog Yourself To Sleep

Tonight, right as we were about to turn off the lights and lock the door, Steve knocked over a bin of headset spacers. It was interesting to watch my work day extend as a function of the "headset spacer dispersion radius". One of the spacers I picked up had a tiny sliver of aluminum leftover from the machining process (called a "chip") that inserted itself deep into the tip of my right index finger. Ouch. So I put a box of x-acto blades into my pocket and headed home to spend the next hour digging a hole in my skin.

Moving on... Tonight I was supposed to get dinner with my friends Brian and Kim at our regular sushi place in Hollywood. But Kim wanted to reschedule for next week. Then I was supposed to go to this costume party up here in the valley, but instead I fell asleep in bed while reading up on passive crossover circuits. Then the phone woke me up around 10, and here it is 1:30 am and I haven't been able to fall back asleep. I made myself a sandwich, drank some tomato juice, and hopefully my blogging will help me fall asleep. Maybe I should have kept reading the EE article instead...

Last, but not least, dad sent me his old Sony digital camera this past week. Finally I can take some really cool pictures for my photo blog! Since this evenings activities were confined to my bedroom, and most of them with the lights out, I have the perfect opportunity to show off the nightvision capabilities of this camera. Check it out.

Okay, rolling over...

My Fingers Hurt - Blog Yourself Awake! - Updated

Actually, my fingers don't hurt anymore. They hurt last night after I had been playing with my new electric bass that I think I want to buy from a friend of Brad's. I've just been testing it out for the past couple of days. Teddy has been borrowing my guitar and practicing and writing songs. Now I've been reinspired to learn some new instruments so I picked up this electric bass and started practicing drums again.

Lately, I've been leaving a blank blog entry on my laptop at night so I can wake up the next morning and start writing first thing. The idea here is to give myself something to think about and an activity to do to help wake me up and get out of bed (and off to work on time - maybe). It hasn't been working very well so far. I'm a pretty boring person in the mornings. I mean, if I had a camera, I could take a picture of myself with my puffy eyes and dinosaur hair and THAT would at least be entertaining. Alas...

Lately, I've been having trouble blogging because my mood has been up and down (instead of consistently up for an extended period of time, which I imagine is what made me want to start blogging again). So right, that hasn't been the case.

This stuff, right here, is probably most negative, least entertaining stuff I will ever write here. I don't really want to give any sort of insight through this blog. If I'm bummed out, it will only be apparent through my absence from the blogosphere. The only reason I'm saying this to begin with is so I don't come across as too vapid of a character who always seems to be -

I'm really tired and kinda done with this post anyway. Let's leave it at that.

I guess before I go I can post a random pic. This is me and Les in Ithaca NY (long before I attended college there) riding a slightly different version of the buddy bike. I'm glad I'm not as cool as I used to be or else all the women would be way too intimidated.

Eggs for Breakfast

Saturday mornings are mine again. I used to open up Metropolis (site under construction) five out of the six days I worked every week. Wednesday was my only day off, and then I'd show up in the afternoon on Thursday. This was ok for a while, but Brad got worried about me burning out and Steve wanted to put in a few more hours anyway, so now I don't have to come in until noon or so on Saturdays.

What a boring post this is.

Here's an awesome picture of me and Mark. We're driving his car with a trunk full of beer cans down the hill to Wegmans to redeem them and "get rich".

Mark had come to visit me at school in Ithaca one weekend. During this particular weekend, there was some big football event. Probably homecoming or whatever. It occurred to us that whenever there was a big football game, there would be many tailgating parties. And tailgating parties give jocks the opportunity to drink beer. We then imagined voluminous bins overflowing with sparkling Bud Light cans, thoroughly rinsed and dried. We spent the rest of the day and most of the evening rummaging through filth, only to earn ourselves a whopping nineteen dollars - maybe enough to fill Mark's gas tank for the drive back to Fredonia.

Needless to say, we did not get rich quick. No fancy sports cars. No VIP passes to swanky clubs. No babes. Just an old Saturn with a trunk that probably still smells like beer.

Sleep

Yesterday morning I woke up at 5:15 to drive to the airport with Teddy to pick up a tombstone from customs. Weird, huh? That and a full day of activity put me to sleep at 8:30 last night. Now here it is 6am and I've already been awake for an hour. I'm kind of hoping that I can get back to sleep here again soon.

Teddy's dad was in Canada last month shooting a film for Lifetime or whatever. The tombstone was a prop that he wanted to keep and so they shipped it back to the states for him.

Here's a picture of me and the tombstone. I think I was crying because it was too heavy and I didn't want to lift the thing into the back of my Element. Seriously, it must have weighed 700 lbs. How do you like my curly hair?

I guess I'm all out of stuff to say. Back to sleep.

So much for my nap...

Oh yeah, so I went to Las Vegas last week for Interbike, the international bicycle trade show. This is the second year I've gone, which is weird because it reminds me that I've been working for the shop for over a year, and living in LA for almost two years.

Anyhow, the bike show was a blast. Saw lots of cool stuff like Timbuk2's new line of Single Speed bags. What makes a Single Speed bag different from, say, a Multi Speed bag? Olive and mulch colored canvas and corduroy, of course. These bags are awesome.

This photo was taken by Jeff Thrasher, one of my single speeder buddies from the shop. He was at the show taking photos for MTBR.com and has his own bicycle photo blog around here somewhere, but he won't give me the link until he updates it. Stay tuned.

I probably walked through the casino in the Venitian five or six times each day going to and from Interbike. Gambling is such a turn-off for me. The taller the buildings and the brighter the lights become in Vegas, the more I'm reminded of who is footing the bill. People who have delusions of striking it rich in a casino crack me up. The odds are SO against you!

We had some time to kill between the end of the show and our dinner date with Brad on Thursday, so Steve decided to hang out and play the slots for a while. He wasn't having any luck until I got a 'vibe' from the machine I was neglectfully leaning against. He feeds it his dollar and BAM, he wins 40 bucks. Not bad for the quarter slots... My eyes probably bugged out when the machines started to count up his winnings. I can see how that could get addicting. Yikes.

Necesito aprender espanol!

"Es-peak espania?" I hear this probably once every day at the bike shop. "No, I can't fix that. You need a new wheel" is "No, no puedo fijar eso. Necesitas una rueda nueva." Maybe some of what I learned during my seven long years of spanish classes will come back to me.

This should be helpful.

This might help, but may just make me sound like an idiot.

Another exhausting day gone by at the shop, I'm home now, blogging in bed, trying not to fall asleep. I should probably take a nap before I drive out to Venice to retrieve my phone.

Yeah, nap time.

Back again, again. Maybe.

It should be clear by this point that blogging does not come naturally to me. I guess I lack the proper motivation. Or maybe it's a matter of knowing what the proper motivation is, and then being able to find it. One thing that that helps is surrounding ones self with people who write blogs themselves.

Why do we write these blogs? I ask as if I actually wrote in mine. As if I were actually a member of the blogging community. Am I writing to someone? It's been interesting for me to review my old posts from last year, so maybe a year from now I'll have something more to read.

One last thing. Daniel got a new Mac laptop, and I bought his old one. I can now do things only dreamed of: check email in bed, roll over in the morning and look at porn, blog from the discomfort of my own bathroom. No longer will the call of nature interrupt a conversation on instant messanger. I can now eat at my computer and leave stacks of dirty dishes on the dinner table where they belong, instead of on my desk. Roommates rejoice.