Carry That Weight
(31 May - 9 June 2006)

9 June 2006
-Crazy-happy-fun June is underway.  A game tonight, coinciding with 2 of the 4 summer movies I'm really excited about coming out.  Who could've predicted when I wrote Garrison Keillor at age 6 begging him not to move to Denmark & abandon his radio show that I would be watching his movie almost exactly 20 years later?
-Pirates 3, Giants 2.  Despite the unfortunate outcome, this was a fantastic game to watch.  & frankly, if the Giants have to lose to an NL team, I would vote for it being the Pirates... with the Expos moving, they're probably my second-favorite National club.  Regardless, the Giants loaded the bases with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th, & had earlier gotten a hit that would've tied the game were it not for an inexplicable ground-rule double calling back the lead runner in Jason Ellison who was halfway home already.  It was pretty exciting when everyone was on their feet for the entirety of the last two at-bats though.

8 June 2006
-Everything is falling into place.  Everything.
-& even more everything...!
-I can't believe I'm actually somewhat excited about the World Cup this year.  Between Jake & Kunkel, the FIFA game, &, well, the FIFA game some more, I'm kind of into soccer.  It's crazy.  Even more crazy when Ireland didn't qualify this year, falling a hair short of Switzerland.  It's going to be interesting...

7 June 2006
-Migraine:  20 hours, right side, moderate, caused by food.
-Let me tell you, having a migraine that rides out a whole night is no good.  But incomprehensibly overcoming it during a workday under fluorescent lights almost makes up for it.  Combine it with making it through another Mortality Day, one that I was even more concerned about than average, & things are just on the up-&-up.  It's so exciting to get over things that cause concern.  That's the message of today.

6 June 2006
Happy Birthday to Paul Garin III
-What can I say?

5 June 2006
-We apparently need to go back to FIFA camp.
-Awfully tired & pretty well sunburned.  But it's been a phenomenal weekend & I just have no complaints.

4 June 2006
-Got a big crew together for another Sunday afternoon of tennis-ball baseball on the softball diamond.  My team fell in a 6-5 nail-biter in 6 innings.  Arguably just as fun was throwing batting practice to everyone prior to the game, though I got a fair bit sunburned for all this.  We played a couple innings of kickball after yielding the field to some serious softballers, but everyone was exhausted by the time we wandered over to Nations.
-Another Cities & Knights, but this time a squeaker for Russ.  Everyone was within a stone's throw of victory at the end.
-So I was commenting on this amazing article & the general coolness of whale sharks & aquariums when Russ, Fish, & Em started asking whether they were sharks or fish & made fun of me for arguing that sharks were fish.  I was raised my whole childhood to believe there were but a few orders of animals, consisting primarily in mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, crustaceans & fish.  But apparently, sharks & rays are their own order, separate from fish, & with no summarizing single word to describe them.  Who knew?  Apparently everyone who didn't go to grade-school with me.  Now I want to go to the new aquarium in Georgia & see whale sharks that have flown on 747's.

3 June 2006
Happy Birthday to Nikki Hay
-Russ & I wound up the MLB 2005/FIFA machine & once again owe a great debt of enjoyment to EA Sports.  We also introduced Em & Russ to the Cities & Knights expansion to Settlers, with Em winning an absolutely dominating victory.  I love games.

2 June 2006
-Migraine:  12 hours, right side, minor, caused by fluorescent lights.
-I guess that the US really does believe it can keep nuclear technology out of the hands of anyone who wants to use it against them forever.  History & common sense tell us this is a moronic perspective, but it's one that the entire US foreign policy seems founded upon.  One piece of that is convincing as much of the downtrodden rest of the planet that they should nuke us if they get the chance; the other piece is doing everything possible to shut down the proliferation of nuclear technology to those the US doesn't like.  In the 61 years of the nuclear scourge, at least seven other countries figured it out almost entirely on their own.  It's something that most scientists will probably think is child's play in a hundred years.  That is, if there's still a planet at that point.  Wouldn't energies be better served molding a foreign policy that doesn't make the rest of the world desperate to acquire nukes to fling at us?  Wouldn't it make more sense to realize that in 10-20 years, if not much sooner, someone we really don't like will find a way to make a nuke?  My grave fear is that the backup plan for such a scenario is a unilateral first strike before they can assure US destruction.  Tell me the justification for that wouldn't sound exactly like August 1945.
-Time is flying & I still have much to catch up with.  But fun awaits this weekend!
-I pass by literally tens of iPod ads every day in the BART station on my way to & from work.  & the more I examine them, the more I wonder if there's a single iPod ad pose that is actually achievable while listening to an iPod.  Maybe the cords are actually super-long (I've not spent much time with an iPod), but from what I know of any other portable music player, the cords would pose a considerable hazard to anyone gyrating & parading about in the fashion proposed by the ads.  Mayhap they should carry small warning labels at the bottom noting that there is a danger of choking or having one's ears ripped out if one actually imitates the professional dancer on the closed course depicted.
-Today at work, everyone's computers starting falling apart.  It's a good thing, too, because otherwise I would have had nothing to do rather than next to nothing.  There are long-term default projects that I can work on, but they all involve being away from my desk & accordingly I can only do them when some sort of admin staff is around.  Friday afternoons, I have to cover for everyone, & that means long hours at the desk.  I would rather have that than the pure exhaustion of Seneca, though, so I can handle a little boredom.
-Enter Russ, now with the world's least functional cell phone.  Entertainment incoming.

1 June 2006
-I may never stop marveling at how our whole world was saved by a little lack of information.
-Well I knew it wasn't going to last.  But I also thought it would last longer than this.  Now I have to pick up the pieces all over again.

31 May 2006
-In an effort to satiate Fish's suddenly unquenchable thirst for pub quizzes, we ventured out to The Bitter End in western San Francisco late last night.  We met one ourselves.  I mean, we got rocked.  The allegedly easier music round was knowable only by Freez, but the picture round really hammered us, where we got 6 of a possible 20 points and failed to capture the unifying theme that could have brought home perhaps 10 more points.  Surprisingly, pop culture pics elude myself, Fish, & Draper.  We had a good time despite an argument about whether our finishing 24 points (46%) behind the 3rd-place team left us permanently out of contention to go back & place there.  I say emphatically that it does.  On the way back home, we sang a song & noted that the city of San Francisco is about 30% cops after dark.

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