What is the sound of one geek clapping?

I had my first practice round for the new golf league I joined today. My ankles are killing me, after only nine holes, and on top of it, I scored a freakin’ 66.

For those who don’t really follow golf, par for an entire 18-hole round is usually 72. I scored as many strokes on half a round of golf as Tiger Woods usually scores on an entire round.

But then again, part of the reason I’m choosing to do this is so that I can get better. And I did, even just looking at the scores I had on the course today. The second half was MUCH more consistent than the first, although I made quite a few mistakes even on the second half.

The other reason I decided to do the golf league was for my health. It’s part of my new thing for myself. Yesterday, I got up early, climbed on the exercise bike and rode for half an hour before going to work. Today, I played nine holes of golf. Tomorrow, I’m going to make every effort to get my ass up early again and climb on the bike. That’s the most difficult part for me, the getting up part. Can I do it? Absolutely. But in the morning, when I’m lying in my warm, comfortable bed, it’s so difficult to get up, despite how great I feel when I’m done.

I’m sitting in the living room and my eyes are dry. When I realized that my eyes were dry, I glanced up from this computer and saw a haze the likes of which hasn’t been seen since LA on a summer afternoon. I’d forgotten to shut off the oven.

I could have died! There could have been an explosion. I was this close to kicking it.

Well, I had my review today. The company gave me a pretty big raise—pretty big as far as they see it, at any rate. I feel kind of torn about it. On the one hand, I’m certainly glad to get more money (who isn’t, right?), but on the other hand, I feel like with the amount of work I’ve been doing for them I deserve more than what they offered. But at the same time, I know that it was probably the biggest raise, percentage-wise, of anybody in my department, and for that I’m grateful.

I guess what’s left now is to see what I can do with it. I’m not really certain of whether or not I can use it to move closer to work as I’d hoped.

My brother asked me if I wanted to move in with him a few days ago. Since he and his girlfriend broke up, he’s had to cover the mortgage all by himself, and it’s not really feasible. I’m seriously considering it, because it would mean saving quite a bit of money that I could put towards my debts and important things like keeping my car safe to drive. But it’s really no closer to work than I am now (it’s about the same distance, only it’s north instead of west), and in a lot of ways it’s a bad move, like the fact that it’s out in the middle of nowhere, the house has no air conditioning and the wiring isn’t really safe enough to handle it plus the load of our computers, and the bedroom is quite a bit smaller than the one I have now. And it’s living with my brother. Not that we don’t get along or anything; in fact, we get along oh-so-much better than we did when we lived with our parents. It’s just that I don’t really know if I can get adjusted to that kind of thing again.

Maybe it’d be worth it as a shorter-term thing. Maybe I should just look seriously for apartments closer to work and leave it at that. I dunno.

So tomorrow I have my annual review at work. Even though my rational mind knows that they’ve already gone through the whole approval process for my raise and that the review is just a formality that in truth isn’t necessarily tied to my raise anyway, and no amount of mental prodding at the space/time continuum is going to alter it… Cross your fingers or pray to Vishnu or whatever it is you do, so that my company decides to give me, y’know, a million-dollar raise or something. Okay?

That’s all I ask.

Ahhhh, Dante Hicks, you certainly hit the nail on the head. I’m not even supposed to be here today. I’m supposed to be relaxing and maybe cleaning my atrociously dirty apartment right now. Perhaps catching up on some of my TV shows I didn’t get to watch this week. But though I am indeed at home, I am not relaxing, nor am I watching television or even cleaning. No, I’m on this computer, working. And not just any work.

I’m doing exactly the same thing that I was doing last night until ten o’clock.

The tape restore of the server that I rebuilt last night was successful, but only partially so. Apparently, the data that was restored was correct and had no errors, but it was a backup of already-corrupted data. So we essentially restored bad data back to the server. So now, I get to rebuild the server again, and we can put a previous backup on it instead.

I’m over the moon. This is my over-the-moon face.

On a more funny-yet-disturbing note: The over-the-moon comment is a line from The West Wing, spoken by Toby Ziegler (check the link). In doing my web search on the URL for the link, I found out that there’s a (pretty horribly designed) MySpace page for Toby Ziegler. I really don’t know whether to laugh or cry at that. There are other characters, too, if you look at the comments…

So after that last post, I was still at work for another two hours. When I left for work today, it was 8:45. When I got home, it was almost 11 pm.

They don’t pay me enough for this shit.

I wanted to get home at a decent hour tonight. Not because of any particular reason, just it’s been a slightly stressful week and I was hoping to be able to really relax tonight, maybe with a glass or two of wine, maybe a movie…

But apparently when I made that assertion to the heavens, I ended up tempting the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing. Because a server died on us and I was (of course) picked to go rebuild it so that it could be restored from its tape backup. Naturally, this process is taking about three times longer than it should have, and here it is, almost 8 pm and I’m still at work without any semblance of a light at the end of the tunnel in sight.

The fates just looooove me.

I know that there are at least a couple people who read my site, and while it does allow for RSS syndication, let’s face it: not that many people use RSS readers these days. I know that a lot of other people would really rather just get a notice when a site gets updated. So I caved and added an email notification to my site.

So if you feel like getting an email update when I update (those of you that aren’t reading this on LJ, that is), then put your email in here and submit.

My site’s Privacy Policy.

The subject of this post is referring to two things.

First off, the more obvious of the two: I’m still smoke free. I say that because it’s April 2nd, and it’s three months since I quit smoking. And I haven’t had one since. According to QuitMeter, it’s been almost thirteen weeks. In a similar vein, I also have given up most of my soda drinking; I drank a lot of diet soda, an average of at least 2 liters a day. I decided it wasn’t worth it to keep drinking it all, so I’ve been drinking a lot of water lately, which can’t be bad, right? I figure that if I can do this stuff successfully, I can move up to the next step: the much bigger and more challenging task of losing about 70 pounds. That’s more daunting to me than quitting smoking ever was.

As for the other thing. Why am I sore? Well, for a couple reasons. First, I went out on Friday night, with some friends. It started as a going-away party for a friend who was leaving for a new job. It ended at about 3:30 am when I went to sleep after going out to a dance club, then had eggs and bacon at one in the morning with my friend Heather. There’s definitely something to be said for evenings like that.

However, a night of dancing, for a fat guy (see above comment about needing to lose 70 pounds), is really rough on the legs. I’m not exactly in shape, so I’m not so much with the muscle endurance, and my legs were quite sore afterward. Keep this in mind as I talk about the rest of the weekend:

Saturday, I woke up before my alarm clock went off at 8. I showered, got dressed, packed some stuff and then drove down to New York City. I met with a couple friends, had some drinks, and then attended a Dream Theater concert at Radio City Music Hall. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. I had a ticket in the sixth row, and the show was being filmed for a DVD, which pretty much guaranteed that there would be no sitting down for the entirety of the show. Which was three hours.

Now, mentioning again the prior mention of my hearty girth, and noting to you that I have a congenital ankle condition, and you may be able to see the dangers of being on my feet for a continuous three hours. And then, after that, we went to Applebees (about five blocks from the venue), ate a way-too-overpriced meal, and then walked another, what, seven blocks? to the hotel. Really not good for my feet.

When all is said and done, though, I’m not going to complain at all. It was a combination of great friends, a little exercise, a few beers, a slight case of temporary tinnitus, some limping that’ll go for yet a few days more, and some cool memories.

Pictures to follow.

Why the hell is it that in the middle of March, I have the heat turned completely off in my apartment and my air conditioner is on because it’s so damn hot?