Sorry about the delay in new posts. Been busy most of the time so I’m gonna let it all hang out in one post!

02 Oct 2008 Thursday

Sick.

God I feel like hell today, which just goes to show ya that yesterday I felt even worse and called in sick to work. Today, here I am at work.

It's my sinuses. In the fall they get pretty bad with the big weather changes. Right now my cheek bones feel like eggshells and they're ready to crack. The back of my head feels like someone whacked me with a baseball bat right at the base of my skull.

It doesn't help that when I walked into work this morning it was smoky as hell and stunk to high heaven.

Later...

I'm slowly feeling better as the day wears on and the various forms of medication kick in.

Today is Weight Watchers again. I hope that I've lost a few more pounds. The scales at home are showing about 3-4 pounds gone but you never know what the "official" scale will say until you step on it. It's such an ego boost when you can see the actual numbers and it's lower than the last time.

Today after work I need to head out to the motorcycle shop and pick up some parts for M's bike. I need to take it over and have stage 1 jet kit installed in the carbs one of these days too. It runs alright but it has a flat spot in the power band when you're trying to maintain a steady speed.

03 Oct 2008

Not much to say. The day drags on and on and on....

Seems like most people decided to lay out today and we're working a skeleton crew so that means little work for me. I'd much rather be busy than bored.

As for Weight Watchers, I weighed 1.8 pounds heavier. I discussed this with the coach and she thinks I'm over-doing the program and not eating enough. The first week that I stuck to the plan and was counting all the points and such was a shock to my body and I lost 5 pounds. Now my body is fighting back against the calorie restriction. So I need to eat more because I wasn't using up all my points each day. I don't know, it seems kinda backwards but... We'll see how it works out.

06 Oct 2008 Monday

The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent.

Friday:

Let's start with Friday. On the way home from work my car started acting up so I limped it into the dealership in my area. The engine started to miss-fire and was doing the old herky-jerky and the Check Engine light came on. So far today (Monday), I have yet to hear from the dealership to know what went wrong.

Friday night at bowling I did pretty good though. I rolled a 230, a 193 and a 202 so I was pretty happy with that.

Then there was the phone call Friday night. (See the post "Are You My Father" for details.)

Saturday:

Saturday M and I went out for brunch and then did some book shopping. I picked up about 7 or so books at this little used book shop that we like to shop at.

We watched "Iron Man" that evening. That's a pretty good movie.  Downy had just the right mix of silly and smarmy to pull that role off.

Later that night I went onto iTunes and downloaded the whole first season of "Eureka" from the SciFi channel. I got hooked on this show this year and this is the third season so I had to get caught up on all the back stories. Then I downloaded some episodes I missed on some BBC America shows I watch too. After I watch the "Eureka" episodes I'm going to try to burn a DVD of them to keep. The laptop only has a 40 gig hard drive so I need to free up the space.

Sunday

Sunday was spent getting over the hangover from Saturday night.

Sunday evening M and I headed over to a doctor’s (that M works with) mini-farm for a cook out and to see the animals. Baby goats are cute and now M wants goats and chickens at our place. *Sigh.*

Today I called the dealership and got the news on the car. Nothing too bad and I'll get the car back tonight and do the repairs myself. I just have to pay off the dealer for finding out what was wrong in the first place.

09 Oct 2008 Thursday

Sorry about the delay. The last few evenings have been devoted to working on the car and watching "Eureka" on the laptop.

The car ended up being more of a pain in the butt than I first thought. What had happened was one of the spark plugs has come loose and instead of sparking the way it was supposed to, it was grounding into the head. So when I pulled the #3 spark plug I found out that that plug had pretty much burned up and as I took it out I destroyed the threaded area that it screws into. So now the new spark plug wouldn't tighten up. So I had to put a helia-coil in there.

Basically this involves cutting new threads that are a size bigger than the ones that were in there. Then I had to put an insert into those threads that have the right size threads on the inside for the spark plug.

The hardest part of all of this is that the area that I was working on is recessed down in a hole that is about 4 inches deep. So I was essentially working blind. And I've never done this before.

Now I'm worried that this thing is just a ticking time bomb waiting to blow up on me. I'm really tempted to go ahead and trade it in on a slightly newer vehicle. I like my PT Cruiser and don't really want to give it up, but I just don't know if I want to run the risk of driving it. I also would feel guilty if I traded it in and it blows up on some one else.

I don't know. I'll probably run it for a while and see what happens.

Work, Work, Work

There are rumors floating around that there is going to be some lay-offs here at work. And since I am one of the most recent hires, I may be on the chopping block.

I've been working on getting hired at the local VA where my wife works and right now I'll probably take the first job that comes up just to get in the door. I may have to take a pay cut but it will be worth it in the longer term.

I think that is why my boss was pushing me last week to take this new position running the new product line. But I can't really justify the company investing money and training me in Europe just for me to quit and go to the VA. I just can't tell him that either so I'm kinda stuck if there are going to be lay-offs. Oh Well. I'll just have to ride this pony wherever it may go and hope for the best.

Anyway…

I’m Alive… So Far…