March 18th, 2008
Getting Things Done Day
Finally I feel awake. Between twelve hours of sleep last night and the pool workout yesterday afternoon, I feel pretty good finally. I’ve been a sleepwalking zombie since around Friday, but I may actually be back to normal now. I’ve been too mentally “cloudy” to do much of anything, including blogging, so the first thing this morning I wrote blog entries for the 16th, 17th, and the beginning of this one. In about two hours I have a doctor’s appointment, and he’ll want blood samples, so I can’t eat this morning; since I went to be so early I am starving. I’ve already decided that after the doctors I am going to my favorite Chinese restaurant, the China Cottage. It’s right next door to the doctor’s office, so it can’t get any more convenient than that. I think they’re open early enough that I can get in after my appointment. I’m debating whether I want Kung-Poa Chicken or Szechuan Chicken. The Szechuan is much sweeter, and therefore not so good for me, but then again, it’s after the blood test, so who’s gonna know? I also plan to go back to the pool this afternoon, and that takes a couple of hours right out of the middle of the afternoon. But the rest of the day, I plan to get lots of little things done.
(Later)
OK, that went pretty much as planned. I went to the Doctor’s, but the appointment was early than expected so I had time to kill afterwards. I went to the local bookstore, Books & Co., and bought a book and a couple of magazines. The magazines were Astronomy and Sky & Telescope (yeah, I’m a space geek) and the book was something about writing Horror stories. I don’t know why I bought the book, I have a hugestack of reading material that I have barely touched, including two new books I ordered in Japan to be waiting for me when I got home last week. While I was at the bookstore, I picked up some Easter cards for the kiddies.
Anyway, I killed half an hour at the bookstore and then headed off to the Chinese restaurant. I went with the szechuan chicken, which comes with egg drop soup, fried rice, a crab rangoon and a spicy chicken leg. MMMMMMMM! I’ll have to go back again for some kung-pao soon. I actually prefer the kung-pao, but since it was right after the blood test, I decided to go with the “bad” choice for today.
Board Bored
After lunch, I went home and fiddled with the Internet a little bit, looking into some new chat options. I’m pretty much bored with my message board and am looking for an excuse to shut it down. I like the chat system, and I am looking for a replacement where I can do chat without the overhead of a message board. Actually, I’m bored with all the message boards I used to frequent, and have hardly peeked at them in the past six months; they’re mostly just a bunch of negative people tearing down anything and everything while adding nothing of productive use. Back when the boards revolved around selling online, there was information there to be learned; anymore they’re just a bunch of self-referential cliques. Bah! Anyway, my own message board has slowed down to where there are only a few friends that post there, and I’m not that interested in maintaining it anymore. I’m much more interested in writing for the several blogs that I run and contribute to. Still, I didn’t spend too much time on this project, maybe an hour.
Then it was pool time, so I headed back to the community college and swam for about two hours. Yesterday was mostly playing around, but today was more of a workout day. Ouch; my harms and shoulders are gonna hurt tonight!
After the pool, I stopped by Big Boy and had their salad bar. The burgers and regular food at Big Boy here are nothing especially good; actually they are pretty blah, barely better than McDonalds, and sometimes worse. But their salad bar is pretty good. Unlike the salad bar at the Japan Big Boy, they have a pretty large selection of stuff.
On returning home, I messed around on the Net some more and then went to bed. I didn’t get anything especially productive done today, but at least I was awake for a normal span of time.
Back To School
I haven’t heard anything from Fukuyama yet; I expect an answer tomorrow sometime. I expect that I’ll turn them down unless the offer is truly outstanding, which I doubt it will be the case. I do expect to hear from them even if the answer is “no.”
A different, completely unrelated decision I need to make is whether or not I’d like to take some classes at the Community College. Obviously, I don’t need any classes for credit, but they have plenty to offer just for fun. I could take a class to learning Flash or Java programming. I used to know Java but it’s changed a lot over the past few years. I never really tried learning Flash before. I guess I could just buy a book; that’d be faster than a ten-week class anyway.
Another option would be to take a class learning the Spanish language. I could fit in Spanish 111 in the spring, and then take 112 and 113 over the summer, getting in a whole year’s worth of classes before August, with the option of starting the 200-level classes in the next school year. I still want to learn another language, but unless I go back to Japan pretty quickly, I’m going to forget everything I learned there. Spanish would be far easier to learn in my opinion, since there are many resources here in English. Or I could just go for a plain and simple fun class and take a course in SCUBA. I’ve always thought that would be fun, although it wouldn’t be of much use here in Dayton. Classes at the Community College are cheap enough I could take one in the evenings and not be out much money or time. Since the classes are in the evening, it wouldn’t make much impct on any future job decisions.
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