Dinner with Karl at Angelina Ristorante was good. Good also was catching up with him, hearing stories of life in Japan. I think I've got to put it on the calendar for next year, since it's his last year. I could manage spending a week there, right? It sounds interesting, that's for sure. Last day of work until the new year for me. I sorta need it. Also looking forward to the slight break in working out. I'm fairly tired and my triceps have been pretty much sore ever since I started swimming, even with the weekends off. Didn't do a mile this morning, but still a heavy dose, 81 lengths. Got plenty to do tonight before shipping off tomorrow. My parents and I are gonna try and get on an earlier flight, instead of our schedule 7:45pm tomorrow. Should be interesting. Hopefully everyone's flying out today instead. So Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas to all my readers.

Went to the gym twice yesterday. I went back in the evening for my first run in months. Rough. I don't like those elliptical machines, doesn't seem to have a good range of motion for me, so it was the treadmill. Good thing is, I wasn't winded. Legs definitely feel tired though. But there was no chance of me getting up this morning to go swimming. I was wiped. Started watching Rounders to prep for the upcoming trip to Vegas, where it's currently not that warm. It's 54°F for a high, and supposed to rain while we're there. Sweet. However in LA it's a respectable 70°F. I might have to try and do some swimming at my brother's place. But it's freezing here in Chi and E-towns. Karl's in town for the holidays, back from Japan, so meeting up with him for dinner and drinks.

Swam my first mile this morning. Well, sorta, if swimming a mile 50 ft at a time counts. Watched A Christmas Story a couple days ago, and put on Mr. Destiny last night. I'm definitely running out of hard drive space. Since the 3 shows I record have reruns, it means I get to catch up with all the episodes that I've missed, and well, that eats up space. And fast. Right now I'm just shuffling things around to make sure I've got enough to record. Even that's getting sketchy. Hard to believe Christmas is right around the corner, like 4 days away. Oh, and I got a haircut yesterday. Haven't gone to a barber in well over 2 years, I haven't looked like this in well over 2 years. Crazy. Different. Good.

Busy weekend. Potluck for C.Moore and Monica Friday night at Tun's, which went well. Good food, good company. Kaze was a great team. Also got to play a little Celebrities. Good, wholesome fun. Saturday, finished up MSCL. Some napping. Watched Happy Gilmore with Bryan before Raz came over before heading up with the Russells to see Quinn's Uncles at the Red Line Tap. A dive bar, but I liked it, probably because it was pretty quiet with live music. The band was good. 2 brothers, singer, guitars. Simple and good. More napping on Sunday before heading over to Bryan's for Chili. Leaving Las Vegas is still such a good movie. So is Dodgeball. Did some sewing clean up as well, a button here, a torn pocket there. All hackish, not very nice. But the stitches hold together. Going to start running on top of the swimming this week. Figured that'd be better than just showing up on a beach to play ultimate. Headed out Friday night for LA. Nothing else for the week.

Did laundry and made some food for the potluck tonight. Of course that meant a really late bedtime, but I still managed to get up and go for a swim this morning. Good stuff, feeling sore, and all that. Would be nice to get some more sleep though. One definite plan for the weekend is seeing Russell's assisant's band playing up at the Red Line Tap at 11pm tomorrow. Let's hope I can stay up that late. Otherwise, might try and watch a couple movies, maybe head outside, maybe stay inside, who knows. But so tired. And to think I've been doing so well with my sleep habits as of late.

I've agreed to return to beach ultimate, at least for one tournament, Lei-Out in Los Angeles, January 15-16, 2005. We'll see what this means for the 2005 season. Guess I'm not Ricky Williams. Did not see Ray last night due to my ineptitude reading movie listings. I thought it was playing at 7pm, it was actually playing at 8:30pm. It does play at 7pm starting tomorrow though, not that that helps. Also on a bad note, I missed the last 1/2 hour of the 2 hour pilot of Lost in HD. I was hoping to get them all in HD. No idea why it stopped working. Also, had some sort of power outage/failure yesterday mid day. Had to reset all my clocks when I got home. Also set up my home theater stuff a little bit better. Racks are pretty cool. Gotta do some cooking tonight for a pot luck tomorrow and try and fit in some laundry as well. I definitely feel like I'm making progress with swimming, but now that I'm coming back to ultimate, I'll have to try running or something too. It's almost gotten to the point where I don't smell the chlorine anymore. Oh, and my ankle's feeling just fine now. I forgot to mention, it's not cartilage damage at all, just a displaced ligament that popped back into place a couple weeks ago. So it's fine.

So Blade:Trinity? Ugh. Not good at all. When did vampires talk like they have braces? I don't even know if I'm gonna get the DVD, and people know, that's definitely a sign that it's a bad movie, cause I buy crap DVD's. But Jessica Biel is hot, and Ryan Reynolds is funny. But still, ugh. No one was in the pool this morning, either at 6:10am when I got in, or 6:50am when I left. I guess Tuesdays are the busy days, but with such an early start, I made myself breakfast and finished another episode of MSCL, the one where Jordan holds Angela's hand walking down the hallway at the end. I'm finally turning into the morning person I've always wanted to be.

First time I've gone to the gym and the pool was full. A little annoying, but I just went home and had some breakfast and watched another episode of MSCL. I guess I just have to go earlier. Or learn to share a lane. Going for Blade:Trinity tonight at River East at 7:40pm. Ray tomorrow night at City North at 7pm. I always associate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with chicken soup, or the other way around. And PBnJ is always Grape Smuckers. And chunky peanut butter has nothing on creamy. The preordered DVD's for this Tuesday didn't get shipped out till today, a change. Means I won't get them till end of the week.

Been going through My so-called Life episodes. At first it was a little difficult to get back into, even if it was my favorite TV show when I was, what, 16 or so? But I slipped back in. Almost able to quote the pilot episode word for word. Took out the shoulder pads on a camel blazer I have, and then tried to sew it back together. I may have to get a professional to do it, as my stitches were coming apart last night. Might try and watch a couple movies this week.

Wow. Posting on a Saturday. Impressive. I did make it out to the Choral concert Friday night. Honestly, a little disappointed. I was hoping for something awe inspiring, jaw dropping, chilling. But just a good quality chorale. Finally replaced the water filter on the fridge. The water was definitely tasting a bit off lately. Hung out at the Russell's before watching Ocean's 12. Great movie. Good fun. Dinner at Darwin's, as usual. The Apple & Honey Roasted Ham is quite good. Then headed back to Bryan's and watched the first episode of Carnivale. Also quite good. I've got all sorts of TV on DVD that I'm looking at, now that I've got the big changer. And an early bedtime.

Dinner was good, Yoshi's Cafe is a really nice restaurant. And it's so close too. Catching up with Katie Kelly was great as well. So nice to be able to walk home from things, instead of cabs or driving. Went swimming this morning, every day this week, and I'm exhausted. And I found out the pool size, it's tiny at 50ft (~15m). Just over a 100 lengths to get a mile. I've got a lot of work to do. Might catchup dinner with AJ tonight, movies and such tomorrow and Sunday with the boys. And sleep. Definitely need some sleep. Or rest. Or both.

4th day for swimming. I'm really getting tired, but it's good. Definitely good. Got a monster paper cut at Kinko's yesterday, trying to print out color version of my rasterbation file, but no luck. Issues with margins, as I expected. If anyone else is interested, I'm gonna hit up the William Ferris Chorale at Out Lady of Mount Carmel church tomorrow night, 8pm. A little pricy, $30, I think, but hey, I've never been. Catchup dinner with Katie Kelly tonight at Yoshi's Cafe. I've walked by the restaurant many times and I always glance at their menu, and it looks fabulous. Listening to my iPod, again. Holiday music, of course. Not that I haven't spent enough money already, but I really need some sort of AV rack for my equipment now. Not sure what, but I'll probably try something simple to get some air to the receiver/amp.

Can't get to my home box, so no email connectivity for the day. I did get a 400 DVD changer by cashing in my Sony Points. It's all for TV season sets. Makes it easy to plow through, say Buffy seasons 1-7, or randomly watch some episode of the first 8 seasons of friends. Any sort of distraction helps. I'm also rapidly running out of hard disk space. This 8 bay firewire enclosure looks awfully tempting. Filled with 400 GB drives, that's 3.2 TB. A little overkill, sure. But probably worth something since a high def DVD replacement won't be out for another year or so. Gonna hit my first Immaculate Conception mass in a good while. I'm leaning towards my current regular, Our Lady of Mount Carmel on Belmont, but it's been a really long time since I've been to the Sheil Center up here at Northwestern. Tempting. Third day in a row for swimming. Helps me get to sleep at night, that's for sure. I'm off of loofah/loofa/luffa/loufahs and back onto bar soap. Still need to get a haircut.
I think my home box just has a new IP address. At least it's still pulling down mail. I really do need to fix the posting of the IP address when it changes. Never mind, it's still around, old address, just having trouble getting to it. Slow network or something.

Just trying to make it through the days. Thought I might be coming down with something, so I'm hitting the vitamin water pretty hard. Not stopping me from swimming though. I'm feeling better about my breaststoke, for sure. Still not ballsy enough to try the fly yet. Popped in Ocean's 11 to prep for the sequel this weekend. I completely got that and Blade: Trinity's release dates mixed up, Blade comes out tomorrow. Tomorrow is also Feast of the Immaculate Conception. And today's only Tuesday.

Holiday party, Danger party. Dinner with Russell and Sarah Saturday night, before the Danger party, also some ice cream too. Good stuff. Realized that a flask filled with Scotch is a good thing. Made it to mass Saturday afternoon as well. Oh, and since I seem to be doing this update in reverse order, earlier Saturday afternoon used the paper cutter at Kinkos for some rasterbation image. I used this one, and made it 44x77" big. It's sweet. Anyway, printing them out with margins meant I needed to trim them. But I screwed up, so I'll see if I can print it out in color without margins at Kinkos soon. Also while looking for a toy for the Danger party I found out that baseball gloves are really really expensive. Good thing to know. Oh, and Saturday morning did some laundry, finally. Sunday was pretty lazy, but I did head up to Evanston to check out the library's book sale. Got nada. But a pleasant way to spend 3 hours. Oh, Vitamin Water has a couple new flavors, Defense, a nice apple raspberry with C+Zinc, and Formula 50, grape with 50% across the board. Defense is good, of course, and Formula 50 was pretty bland. Oh, and I finally caught up on all the Lost episodes too. I think I want to catch Closer sometime this week, you know, twist the knife and all. Lost is new this week, Veronica Mars is a repeat, and Jack & Bobby goes on hiatus for a while.

I guess this exercise stuff takes something out of me. Made it swimming this morning. Got new shoes, didn't even have to roll any dice to get them, Merrells, a new brand for me to follow blindly. Still working on the hair, it's not quite long enough to do anything interesting with it yet, but I am hoping for maybe something like anime style, like the Artifical Kid, well, maybe not battery powered. Still haven't done any laundry. I might have to go check out Escape, a new store/gaming location down on Halsted between Dickens and Webster. Someplace I can check out Japan-only Sony products, along with all the other stuff I read about at Gizmodo and Engadget.

Well, didn't go swimming the morning. Too tired. From what? Good question. Got most of my costume for the Danger party, just have to get some accessories and a toy. Hair is definitely getting a little out of control. Starting to feel mulletish. Oh, I didn't get last night's episode of Lost recorded in HD (stupid antenna placement), which means I'll grab it via bittorrent again, but still, I thought I had it all set up properly. And it doesn't look like ABC's gonna rerun it anytime soon. Ugh. Just wishing RCN would provide HDTV. Would make my life a whole lot simpler. Also realized that my TV does not have a VGA input. That sucks. So I guess, not that good of a Wednesday.

Went swimming again this morning. I'm curious to see if I can keep this up. Better question would be how much of a workout I can get with 1/2 hour of swimming. Stayed in last night, and out of the rain/snow cold. I'm just plowing through "The Quark and the Jaguar", just like back in college and reading words on the page. Not sure how much comprehension's going on there at all. Need to sneak in a laundry set soon. Added another gallery, this one mimicking this page. So add your own funny comment, like this one . I'll add the funniest ones as captions instead of comments. Oh, and the last thing for the week, company holiday party on Friday. Exciting.