Brainsprain.net

As of today, I’ve run 100 miles since I started keeping track on July 7, 2008.  That’s 5k five days a week.  That’s 165k today, or 102.52 miles.  I ran my 5k this morning in 38 minutes and 43 seconds.  That’s neither my slowest nor my fastest, but about average.  I weigh 226.6 lbs.  I’m writing this because I wonder what all these statistics were one year ago to see how much I’ve progressed, but at least now next year (or in 3 months or whatever) I can know.

We just got finished expending 2200 water balloons, filled over the last 3 days. It was, again, positively glorious.

I got a little application for my iPhone that should let me blog from anywhere. If it works well, I might be making more frequent entries… Here goes nothing!

I’m actually standing in the Apple store blogging this.  I had hoped the network problems were mine, but the iTunes upgrade very carefully wiped my iPhone in preparation for the 2.0 upgrade and now REFUSES TO REACTIVATE.  Yeah, that means I’m currently without a phone.

The Apple folks here are like, “Well, yeah!  The servers are slammed!”

Thanks.  Thanks a lot.  That’ll teach me.

Beloved
Love like ours must have come before, yet there are moments when I feel ours must be bigger than time itself and somehow able to support the universe.

Between us, symbols have no meaning.
I cannot compare you to the sun or moon, for they fall short.
I do not look at the ring on my hand and think “this is what binds” for it does not.
A ceremony could never contain what it is to be us.

For every moment, I choose my life.
I choose love and joy.
I choose intimacy and companionship.
I choose someone who knows me, who loves me and who chooses me in turn.
I choose you, my love, my heart, my guide.
I choose you.

for Chad 7/7/2008

She calls me out to her
and I stand half-dressed in her wonder.

Just her smell is intoxicating.
salty, metallic and magical

She purrs and builds
and keeps us
right on the edge.

My skin tingles
every time she flashes.
and my toes grip the wet grass
as she screams her intentions
to take us.

All of my senses are filled now
and I must take shelter before
I come to harm, yet I do not want to move
from this storm.

I have been dieting for 2 years now in order to take off the massive amount of weight that I had put on in the last 10 years or so.

My progress has been slow, but substantial. I have gone from a size 24 to a size 12. My goal is to get to a size 9 or 10. At that point, I will feel like I can go into maintenance mode. The journey has taught me so much. I am afraid that the key is diet and exercise and not some fancy pill. Still, if you count calories and keep a good attitude about life you CAN lose the weight.

I woke up Tuesday morning (my birthday) to the sound of my iPhone dinging. Seems a couple of people due to arrive that day had missed their flight, and were texting me to let me know that they would attempt to catch the next flight to Vegas and to sit tight. I got up, and Colleen was still asleep and it was pretty early, so I decided that a great birthday gift to myself would be to go work out. I went to the fitness room and spent some time on a stationary bike and then ran about a mile and a half on a treadmill and returned to the room. I got back and showered and woke the wife and we dressed and met up with everyone to eat breakfast. We ate at the inappropriately named “The Coffee Shop” inside of TI. I say inappropriately named because the coffee was just drip and terrible. No lattes, cappucinos, nothing. The food was pretty good, though. By the time we were finished eating, the stragglers arrived from the airport, having managed to make the next flight. They dropped their stuff in our room, and we hiked across the street to the monorail station and headed over to the Las Vegas Hilton, home of Star Trek: The Experience and where I wanted to spend my birthday.

We got there about fifteen minutes before they opened, and got in the line to buy tickets to the attractions. We got a package deal which included The Klingon Encounter, Borg 4D, pictures on the bridge and in the Borg chamber, and a backstage tour. I waited impatiently for everyone to buy their tickets, and was very excited. When we were finally ready to go through, we presented our tickets to a lady who looked at me and shook her head a little.

She said, “I’ve worked here for ten years. I’ve admitted Klingons who refused to speak English. I’ve seen families of Andorians including infants — PAINTED BLUE. I’ve seen it all. I have never seen anyone as excited to be here as you are.” Best. Compliment. Ever.

We went through and did the two rides, and then stopped for a quick appetizer and drink in Quark’s Bar before the backstage tour.  We went on the tour where we learned all kinds of interesting secrets about the attraction, and then had our pictures taken.  Exhausted, as by this time we’d spent a good five hours Experiencing Star Trek, we sat down in Quark’s Bar for actual food and even more actual booze.

My geekdom sated, we made our way back to the hotel and drank even more in Kahunaville that night.

We got to the airport at dark-thirty Monday morning, and, because we had PAPER TICKETS (which we bartered for with chickens and marked their sale on a clay tablet) we had to wait in Southwest’s long line to exchange them for paper boarding passes per the TSA.  The security line was really long, which is to be expected for a Monday morning and then we all sat down together to eat breakfast.  Some of us opted for boring old breakfast tacos, while others of us opted for the ingenious Mangia breakfast pizza.  Instead of pizza sauce, they use frickin GRAVY.  It was devine.  We got on the plane and split up into our respective middle seats.  Yay.  The flight was uneventful, which is my favorite kind of flight.

We arrived, grabbed our bags, and hopped a shuttle over to Treasure Island, which was now known as TI, and had been almost complete de-pirate-ized.  That makes me sad.  You’d think with Johnny Depp’s latest string of blockbusters, they’d be more into the whole theme.  We lined up at the buffet for second breakfast (the most important breakfast of the day), and April scampered off to her room, looking a little green.  We ate, and then retired to our rooms for a nap.

Colleen and I went down to the pool for a bit after our nap, then we met up with everyone (including a recovered April) for dinner at Kahunaville, a restaurant/bar which was very tasty.  Everyone but Colleen and I had gotten tickets to see Mystéré, so off they went, and we waited in the bar to meet up with Dawn, a friend of mine from high school who now lives in Vegas.  She and her husband took us to dinner down the way at Palm Steak House in Caesar’s Palace (YUM!) and we met some of their friends.  After the show, Shane and April joined us and William (Dawn’s Hubby) drove us to a club where they comped our entry cause it was almost my birthday.  We drank too much and had lots of fun, and then took a cab back to the hotel and passed out.

So I work for a Software as a Service company, and the product I support is designed to contact users by phone, email, SMS, fax, etc., in the event of an emergency or disaster. It is very, very powerful. So a guy gets a genius idea, as an April Fool’s Joke, to have the system repeatedly call a colleague with several silly messages. The problem was that he didn’t know when enough was enough, and didn’t understand the system. He accidentally set it up to recur, which meant the message went out over and over. He also didn’t understand how to stop the recurrence, so he couldn’t cancel it.

Moral of the story: If you’re going to play an April Fool’s Joke, make sure you understand what you’re doing, otherwise an entire company may be laughing at you while your boss is screaming at you for misuse of a very expensive notification system.