Girlfriend Vacation Running Journal 2

4:35 AM Got awoken by bad cat who was trying to climb on my bedside table. Normally, only JR is afflicted by them. Kicked both cats out and realized one had knocked my water over onto the carpet.
8:50 AM Cursed my job for conditioning my body to wake up early.
9:15 AM Decided to start my day. But to show my disapproval and reluctance, I'm going to spend the first 2 hours of the day in bed.
11:49 AM After reading a good deal of , Boston.com/globe/sports, and the RSS feed of slashdot.com, I got up to bring Another State of Mind (Netflix) to the mailbox. Instead of leaving it in our mailbox for the mailman to pick, I decided to enjoy the cloudless day and walk it down the street to the box. Hey, that could be all the going outside I do today.
12:05 PM Got back from my walk, so I'm now reading an article about The Birth of the Notebook on MobilePC. Why do I care about the history of mobile computing? One interesting fact is that portable PCs originally referred to the idea of being able to use what we now refer to as desktop computers anywhere.
12:21 PM Finished reading an article on Business 2.0 about how Apple is going to use the iPod and iTunes brand to continue kicking ass in the coming years.
12:42-1:42 PM I spent about an hour looking into discount online brokerage houses. I'm convinced there is an "Online Brokerage Association" that mandates every member must keep their fee schedule murkily confusing and make it difficult for interested investing novices to spend their money. I imagine that through an agreement between Federal Regulators and the OBA, online brokerages stay out of the regulatory spotlight by making a concerted effort to confuse and repel idiotic and impulsive consumers like me. Right now I see myself as a bleeding dolphin in the middle of the ocean. I'm being circled by sharks dressed as discount online brokerage houses. They're just waiting for me to make a decision so that they can eat me alive with hidden fees and surcharges. Individual sharks keep making a run at me, woosh, there goes an Ameritrade hammerhead, swish, a Scottrade great white. With whom will I invest? I don't know. But for now I've been sufficiently scared off. But I will swim again.
1:46 PM My arcane and indisputably geeky New Year's resolution was to track every cent I earned and spent this year. In that name I updated my Quicken records.
1:53 PM I need a new password system. I continually forget the passwords on my credit card site.
2:15 PM I Tried to figure out the difference between audio files in MP3 format compared to audio files in AAC format. I think I might have been going about things all wrong for the last year by ripping everything into 128 MP3. I don't ever really hear a difference, but I guess AAC takes up less space?
3:00 PM Took a shower to prepare for going to the grocery store.
3:34 PM The productivity begins right now. I'm going to throw in a load of laundry, go to the pet store and the grocery store and then clean. Or at least the laundry and stores.
5:22 PM For proof to the old adage don't go shopping on an empty stomach see AC's Shopping Trip on the 26th of March, 2005. Talk about bleeding dolphin in the middle of the ocean, I didn't stand a chance. I bought 3 of everything that I don't need. I see a sale on things I eat and buy a lot of it. This does keep me from having to go to the grocery store, but did I need 4 pints of Ben and Jerry's? I still haven't eaten the Ben and Jerry's I bought when it was on sale a couple weeks ago.
Let the productivity continue.
6:15 PM Cleaned toilet, bedroom, coffee table. Started working on spreadsheet again. Watched West Virginia totally blow a lead and lose to Louisville and Rick Pitino. I don't even like the Celtics very much, but I hate Rick Pitino. He wrote a book called "Success is a Choice" and that may be true, but if it is, why the F would you choose anything except success? And if you know it's a choice why would you make the decision to sign Travis Knight? There's only one explanation: Rick Pitino chose to fail while coaching the Celtics which makes his tenure here even worse, because he failed on purpose.
8:15 PM Started cooking and cleaning the kitchen. Pasta and chicken in different forms make up the majority of my diet, so I'm making a pound of chicken sausage, a pound of pasta and some sauce. I'll make several meals out of this that I can bring to work this week. Or else I'll just leave it on the stove and eat it until JR comes home tomorrow, it's probably what I should have done yesterday. Up until this point all I've eaten today is a banana and some ice cream. I'm pretty hungry.
9:34 PM Finally sated. It didn't come out as well as I would have hoped, but dinner is finally eaten.
9:38 PM Starting Outfoxed (Netflix).
9:45 PM Decided to work for an hour and paused Outfoxed.
10:45 PM Back on Outfoxed.
12:10 AM Outfoxed is over. It was pretty good. It seemed to me it was the film version of "Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them."
1:00 AM I'm going to get into bed and watch a little bit of Closer, my second Jude Law movie in two days.
3:15 AM Damn it! I watched the entire thing. What was I thinking? Closer was pretty good, but I happen to hate most movies that were plays first. There is something different about dialogue written for the stage as opposed to the screen. People in plays and movies of plays tend to say stuff you wouldn't hear in real life and the conversations are almost always between two people only. Also, the timing always seems off, like the characters wait an extra beat before saying anything at all, which is what drives me craziest about this genre of film. Next time you have a conversation, try to get the other person to agree to count to one before responding to anything you say and you'll know what I mean.