Sebbylite

Polo.

Yeah, I’ve been in my own little world lately. My bad.

So what has been keeping me from blogging over the past month and a half? Absolutely nothing. I’ve actually had more free time over the past three months than I usually do, so of course I’ve been using that free time to watch movies and stalk people on Facebook. You know, that important stuff that needs to get done every day.

I also went to Japan with Sockeye for the Dream Cup, which was a fun time. And since I took over 1200 pictures in the 5 days we were there, I’ve been editing those pictures in free time as well (here’s some), although not nearly at the pace I should be in order to post them.

Basically I’ve been doing a whole lot of nothing. It’s not often that I have so much time with so little to do, and it’s throwing me a bit. Plus I’m still recovering from the knee surgery last January. And by recovering, I mean that my knee feels good and I really want to start running around again, but with the 5 weeks off I seem to have gotten tendonitis in my achilles. Stupid tendonitis. But this should be easier to get rid of, and I’ll be back and ready to play soon.

But I will say that more posts are coming. Since the tournament part of Dream Cup was already covered by a bunch of people, I’ve been writing up the non-frisbee related parts to post. I’ve got Day 1 and 2 done, and will post those soon. Days 3, 4, and 5 are coming too.

So you’ll be hearing more from me soon, don’t worry.

I play a lot of pick-up basketball at the gym I go to, mostly because I can’t really see a game and not play in it. But also because I love playing basketball and I feel good during and after playing.

The gym I play at has a pretty good game too. Usually there are only 1-2 “chumps” out there at any given point in time, and everyone can at least catch the ball on a consistent basis. And of course there are also the guys that can actually play, and are usually the reason why a team wins and stays on the court for 5 games in a row. These are also the guys that I like to guard. Let’s face it, I’m not an offensive powerhouse on the court. But I realize this, so I do what I can do (rebound, make lay-ups, and play defense). The main thing I do is play defense, because that part is the most fun for me. It’s a challenge on a more personal level than the 5v5 game, it’s you against him, and it is your job to ensure that he doesn’t score. And I take that seriously, because it’s fun to beat guys who think that they are the hottest shit on the court since they first started making pumps.

Anyway, back before they switched ownership of the gym, there was a little bit different crowd that went to play. One guy in particular I always liked playing against, because he was good. Not only was he good, but he actually tried when he was out there, unlike a lot of guys who just dribble down the court and shoot from just past half-court because they are lazy. It was always a big challenge for me to play against him: he was strong, a good shot, quick, and didn’t lose the ball that easily. I’m sure that he didn’t give two rabbit farts about me, but I always knew that if he was there, it would be a good game.

Then I saw him outside of the gym about 2-3 weeks ago, and lost all respect for him. Why, you ask? Well, he was walking across the street while I was driving, and he was following behind this tiny pug with a pink jacket on. I could hardly keep myself from laughing out loud at him. Because even if it was his girlfriend’s dog and he was just taking the pug out for a walk, as soon as you get out of the house you take that damn jacket off and stash it in your pocket until you get back again.

Like I said, he hasn’t been back to the gym to play that I’ve seen since they changed ownership. But if he did come back, I’m not sure I could take him seriously anymore.

I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s Resolutions (honestly, how can you improve upon perfection?), and only partly because I don’t feel like change is necessary just for change’s sake. While I agree that it is a good idea to take stock of yourself and how you are living your life, and then making the necessary changes for a better physical/mental/emotional life, why does it only happen once a year? Why wouldn’t it be a regular checkup, just like you do for your car? Every 3 months or 3000 miles, get an oil change and update your goals list to make sure that you remain on track and motivated. That sounds much better to me.

And that is also the reason that I like this site’s idea. Basically, instead of a New Year’s Resolution, you create an honest list of goals that you would like to achieve. And the list spans about 2 3/4 years, so you can add in goals that will take a little time to come to pass. Then every few months, you can update your list and see where you stand.

Probably the biggest issue for me is coming up with 101 goals that I actually want to accomplish. I know that they are out there, but coming up with them all at once is a little beyond me. Plus I feel like if you saddle yourself with a number (hmmm, “saddle yourself”…there’s something else I can add to the list), you’ll end up adding crap goals that are either too easy (wake up for work tomorrow morning), or so ambitious that you won’t be able to accomplish it even in the timespan (become President of the United States). So I’ll start simple, with this partial list:

1. Go back to Mars (Best. Tournament. Ever.)
2. Pay off credit card debt
3. Get new computer/laptop
4. Find a hotel and rent a room by the hour
5. 15 hikes in the Cascades/Olympics (2 done already)
6. Start yoga
7. Start writing letters to Ty again
8. Stay clean shaven for a month or more (started 1/20/08, finished 2/20/08)
9. Frame my duck
10. Go to more drive-in movies
11. Redesign and get my tattoo redone
12. Go see a live play, somewhere nice
13. See an opera
14. Defragment my laptop(did 2-3 times, computer is still slow)
15. Update my “States Visited” list, and try to finish that
16. No caffeine for 2 weeks
17. No alcohol for 2 months
18. Go to either Teatro Zinzani or Cirque de Soleil
19. Learn how to snowboard
20. Get a job I like and can grow with
21. Fix/tune-up/get a new bike, and ride it more
22. 100 push-ups in under 5 minutes
23. 4:30 mile
24. Get more flexible
25. Visit an art gallery during an art opening
26. Do the tourist things in Seattle that I’ve never done
27. Complete 2 of the things from my idea notebook
28. get 8 hours of sleep or more a night for a month
29. See more Sounders games
30. Take a boxing class/lesson
31. Design, develop, and implement a website for myself
32. Learn Javascipt/DHTML/AJAX
33. Learn Coldfusion
34. Deal with my crappy Wells Fargo IRA and retirement accounts
35. Take a dance class
36. Organize my music in iTunes
37. Start and finish 2 woodworking projects
38. Get laptop power supply checked out, then run sysclean
39. Clean out garage, and make it usable

As you can see, I’ve got a pretty good list started already, and I’ve even got a start on a couple of them. As for the rest, well, hopefully I’ll be back to update this list with new info every couple of months. And yes, I’ll take pictures to post of the “dance class” I take, because it’s going to be pretty amusing. I already feel sorry for my instructor.

Brought to my attention by Frankie, and I decided that it not only needed to be a pic-a-day, but also needed to showcase the reopening of the comments by having a Caption Contest (I added a little bit of comment-spam-catcher, so if for whatever reason you can’t comment, send me an email and I’ll try to fix it). So bring it on, do your worst. You know He would…

What can I say, I’m boring.

Or at least that is what almost all of my doctors and nurses told me today. I’m not allergic to anything, I don’t have any sort of medical history (other than getting my wisdom teeth out, which doesn’t count), I’m pretty healthy in general, I have a good heart and lungs, I don’t notice or squeam when they put the IV in or give me shots, I don’t get nauseous from being in general anesthesia, and I don’t even notice that I had surgery today other than the fact that I can’t move my leg much. Basically, boring.

Although it seems that no one believes me when I say that my knee doesn’t hurt at all. The nurses kept asking if I wanted a wheelchair to get out of the Recovery Room. All my friends claim that it is just the leftover pain medication that is masking the knee pain (although if it was leftover pain medication, why would my throat hurt from having the breathing tube in and then removed, but not my knee?). And my dad just flat out doesn’t believe me (he had ACL surgery a long time ago, and it didn’t go good for him).

Not that I am going to tell any of this to my office. They hooked me up with a laptop so that I could work from home, and by golly I’m going to do just that for as long as I can. I should be able to push through until at least next Wednesday before I need to go back into the office, which is amazing.

I guess the best story I can tell about today is that the anesthesiologist who was working on me all morning was mildly attractive (not in scrubs, but her ID picture was pretty good), and that they gave me some vanilla pudding when I woke up. Of course we had to settle on vanilla pudding because they didn’t have what I originally asked for (bacon, eggs, waffles, and toast), but it was pretty good anyway.

Oh, and the fact that my dog hates me now. I lumber around after him, which he doesn’t really understand. And I don’t move very fast, so when I took him for a walk this afternoon, he kept looking back at me as if to say “What the hell, man?!? I move faster than this when I’m dragging my ass on the carpet at home. Let’s get a move on here!”. Maybe that is my imagination, but if I were him that’s definitely what I would be thinking.

Unless anything goes drastically bad or uncharacteristically good, this is probably the last I’m going to tell everyone about the whole process. For the most part, it was boring, and I’m not so much of an asshole that I’ll subject you to a hour by hour account of my recovery (I’m close, but I’m also lazy which is taking precedence right now). So this is me, hour 5, saying I’m bored of watching movies already, and I’m out.

As I sit here and read through my “Patient Education: About Your Surgery Experience”, I can’t help but laugh at how stupid people are. Honestly, does it really need to be said that if you have had a regional anesthetic, then that part of your body will be numb until it wears off? I guess it does.

But this one really got me:

Please do not do any of the following for 24 hours after anesthesia or sleeping medicine: drive, drink alcohol, travel alone, operate machinery, sign any legal papers, be responsible for another person such as a child.

Damn. I guess that will signing won’t get done this week. And that settlement for the class action suit? Not gonna happen. Oh, and those adoptions papers that I was going to sign? Well it looks like I’m just going to be put back to the bottom of the list. And I was going to close on my new house too, but oh well, that can wait for next Monday.

Ah, sarcasm. I love it.

I decided to go out hiking on Saturday, because it was the last weekend that I will have the full use of two legs for about a month and a half.

Yep, I’m going under the knife on Friday. What for, you may ask? Well, the “patellar tendonitis” that I’ve been dealing with for the past year has actually turned out to be a torn patellar tendon. And the options were 1) deal with it for the next 10-15 years until you give up playing sports altogether, or 2) have surgery and be back to 100% in about 5-6 months. Freakily, I chose the latter.

Back to the hike, which was awesome. Esky loves the snow, and as soon as we got out of the car he just started running around in it, stopping every once in a while to eat a mouthful just because. I also like the snow, but it makes taking pictures a little tough, especially since it was raining for the first part of the hike, until I got a little higher in elevation. But I got a couple good shots, some of which are added to the end of this post.

Basically the hike was straight uphill, which I wasn’t really looking for but it turned out to be good for me anyway. Esky ranged ahead the whole time, jumping in streams and digging up rocks, checking out different things off the trail, and generally having a grand old time. I was a little slower (since I only have two legs, and was carrying all my stuff), but still managed to go fast enough to keep him happy. After about a mile of uphill, we came to an overlook of I-90. The snow was really coming down at that time, which makes for bad pictures but an awesome view. You couldn’t really tell what was snow falling, what was snow on the ground, what was cloud, and what was freeway. Pretty neat. (Yeah, that’s right, I said “neat”, what are you going to do about it?)

Here’s a couple shots I did get that turned out:

Snow berms before we got into them.

Did I mention that the dog likes snow?

Sounds like pretty solid advice. At least as far as signs are concerned…

Who would have guessed 20 years ago that we would have so many different means of communication available to us today, and yet we use so few of them to actually talk to people?

For example, the other night I was involved in a Facebook version of Scrabble with a friend, and over the course of the night we chatted through gmail and talked on the phone. There was also a way to chat through the Scrabulous application, which we used a little bit, and then over the last few days we’ve emailed and sent text messages as well. And yet I don’t feel like we actually said all that much to each other. It was mostly just telling stories, funny anecdotes, trash-talking, and general shenanigans.

If you think about it, I’m sure that you can probably also add your own version of this story to your own blog. How often do you tell your family that you love them? How often do you tell your friends why they are your friends? How often do you tell the boy/girl that you have a crush on that you do have a crush on them? How often do you tell your significant other that they are the greatest person in your world? How often do you tell your coworkers that you appreciate the team effort? For me, the answer to most of these is never.

I’m also pretty sure that I’m generalizing here - I know that I’m not the most expressive person in the world when it comes to “feelings” (blech!). But if you think about it, a lot of the comedy bits out there in terms of movies, sitcoms, etc deal with just this type of situation. How many times have you seen a movie with this scenario: guy and girl are best friends since childhood, girl finds Mr. Perfect to the chagrin of guy so guy does everything he can to discredit Mr. Perfect, but Mr. Perfect ends up being too good so guy gives up and gives his blessing to girl, girl realizes how good guy is from this one simple act and calls off the wedding to be with him? Don’t you think this all could have been avoided if they had just said something to one another before Mr. Perfect came around? I’m pretty sure that these “best friends since childhood” talked to each other every day via phone, text message, chatting, in person, etc. And I’m also pretty sure that this scenario is so prevalent because everyone has run into this situation in some form or another.

Now I’m not saying that just telling someone what you really mean is going to be the impetus to save the world. But you have to admit that it’s a good spot to start, right? And maybe putting down the phone/blackberry and actually talking with someone is how that happens.

Then again, it could just be me.

I know so many people that need one of these.

I remember I was in charge of making sure that my brother woke up for school while we were growing up. Yes, my older brother, the one that is supposed to be more responsible, blah blah blah. Basically he wouldn’t even use the snooze button, he would just sleep through whatever alarm was set, until I walked in and pushed him out of bed. Then of course he was mad at me all day long…

But if I had one of these here things, I never would have had to be in charge of him. More than likely the whole neighborhood would have been woken up as well, but that’s not my problem now is it?

Still, I like the theory.

Skipping rocks on Lake Michigan.

My brother just sent me a text message, and I’m not sure if it is because it is my birthday soon or if there is an actual International Disadvantaged People Day, but this is what it said:

Today is International Disadvantaged People Day. Please send an encouraging message to a retarded friend just as I’ve done for you. Because I don’t care if you lick windows, screw farm animals, take the short bus, or occasionally shit on yourself. You hang in there Sunshine, you’re Special!

So consider this my forwarding of said text message. Because I know that the only people that actually find what I write amusing probably do ride the short bus. Or have to use sporks because they aren’t allowed to use forks for fear they might harm themselves. Or have to wear a helmet indoors to prevent injury. Or wear rec-specs when they play in athletic events. You know, Disadvantaged People.

On a side note, the 2009 Special Olympics World Winter Games will be held in Boise, and I’m pretty sure that my brother isn’t going to be able to take it. Because on the one hand, they are Olympians. But on the other hand, they are Special Olympians.

And now I’m pretty sure I’ve alienated half of my remaining readership (2 people). And I’m also pretty sure I’ll be going to Hell. So drop me a line sometime…