fine whine

1. A pillow
2. A flashlight
3. A chair
4. Firewood and/or kindling
5. Another pillow*

* Seriously, I went camping and didn't take any pillows.Or flashlights, chairs, or firewood. I've heard campers aren't really supposed to bring their own firewood anyway, but the pillows and flashlight would've been handy. Also, my 8' x 6' was supposedly able to fit three sleeping people. For that matter, it's only supposedly 8' wide - it seemed much smaller inside than that.

Two and a half months ago I started a new job. I work in a skyscraper downtown, and I was rather a bit surprised to find that any ascending or descending more than one or two floors' worth of stairs got me out of breath*.

That came as a bit of a shock, as I had never been that badly out of shape. I haven't been working physically-demanding jobs for a while, but even then I hadn't realized I'd let myself go that much. Either I hadn't noticed, or during my months of unemployment and contract work I'd atrophied considerably.

So I decided to do something about it. After a month (I didn't say I decided quickly) I started getting back on my treadmill every night I could. Since then I've burned over 11,000 calories and walked almost 60 miles, which would just about get me to Zanesville or so. My goal is to keep at it at least every other night, and better yet, every night. I've only skipped a few, but tonight's going to be one of them as right now Natalya's resting peacefully on my lap and shoulder. If I set her down, she screams. I'm hoping this is a one-night thing.

Anyway, I'm not posting this to complain about her. I'm trying to guilt myself into making sure that every night when I don't have that good of an excuse not to do it, that I get back on that treadmill. I've recently raised my average mileage (of course to keep myself interested I'm tracking all of this on a spreadsheet) and it would be a tremendous disservice to me to quit with such great momentum.

At least now I can take the stairs without taking a breather in between floors. And that's a pretty good start.

* Another surprise was that the stairwell door of the floor about five below mine that has the nearest convenience shop and snack bar is locked. Fortunately for me, just as I was discovering this, somebody came through the door into the stairwell.

I remembered something else that was somewhat notable for 2007: it marked the first time I'd ever eaten guacamole*.

* For the curious, 2006 was the year of the cantaloupe.

I didn't post as much this year. Notable things about which I wrote nothing:

• Both of my grandfathers died in December. I still haven't figured out what I want to say about that.
• I failed once again to complete a 50,000 word novel in November. But I came up with a much better idea for next year's.
• Natalya turned 1 year old in October, meaning we could finally officially stop worrying about SIDS. Not that I ever did anyway.
• I left the fashion industry in September. I also read the complete Harry Potter series (for the first time) in under four weeks. These two events are not at all related.
• In August (I think) the guy housesitting for my neighbor across the street passed away in her house, and was not found for a week. I was one of the few people on the street who had ever even met the guy, and I didn't even know his name until he was already gone. In cleaning up her house, my neighbor gave me a nice desk ending the four years I'd used my computer with it and me both on the floor.
• I can't really remember much of anything from July. So ends the monthly portion of this wrap-up.*
• The two hundred or so photos I've posted on flickr aren't even a fraction of the over seven gigabytes of JPGs I've created this year.
• I survived watching 61 movies from India, most of which could be considered "Bollywood". Two I watched without any subtitles at all.
• The entire year passed without me attempting to access the internet with my mobile phone, despite it being capable of doing so.

More ideas may occur to me - I just didn't want to let December pass without any posts at all. Happy new year.

* The only other month-based item of note is in January, wherein I visited Chicago the weekend of B-Fest but was unable to attend it because I was in Illinois for less than a total of 24 hours. Eating dinner in the Signature Room of the John Hancock Tower was superb. Being back at my desk eighteen hours later was not.

Despite having joined a fair number of the social networking sites*, I don't really do much on them other than upload a photo or two, identify some "favorite" music and movies, and connect with one or two people (often the same one or two on every site) and then I let my profile languish, logging in very occasionally to check the notifications that don't show up in my email.

The flavor of the month this month is Facebook (see my profile) and I must admit, it's a pretty clean, usable site that blows Myspace (see my profile) out of the water for ease of use, visual appearance, and third-party expandibility.

It's no wonder there has already been a mass migration from the latter to the former.

One of the applications Facebook supports comes from movie rating site Flixster which I had already joined some time ago, played with, and hadn't returned-the interface is slow, rating movies en masse is not simple, and not enough people used it at the time. I connected to a new Flixster account (see it here) and started rating movies again**.

Tired of that, I clicked over to the "never ending quiz" which had drawn Rebecca in, several months ago. It's worse than I remember. More than half of the questions concern Nicole Kidman and Moulin Rouge or Alan Rickman and the Harry Potter films, none of which I've yet seen. Other questions are poorly written, with no capitalization, poor grammar, and misspellings galore.

But what bothered me the most was the True/False questions. Without a single exception every one was always "true".

The questions, I should point out, are all user-submitted, and there are quite possibly millions of them. I'm basing that "every one" statement there on the thirty or so that I encountered so far.

So I started writing my own True/False questions, and (unsurprisingly), making them False. It's a much bigger challenge, fabricating believable movie trivia, than it is to merely copy an item from the Internet Movie Database's extensive trivia archive.

So far I've written eight of these questions (and seven other multiple choice questions) and I'm proud to say that the quiz-takers (who number more than a thousand as of today) have only been correct at most a third of the time. You can see the complete list of questions I've written here. I admit I bookmarked the link and have checked it a few times just to see how I'm doing, and the numbers amuse me.

One example? As of right now, only nineteen of 1,133 people guessed that I'd made this up: "While filming Man on the Moon, Jim Carrey performed weekly comedy shows in Los Angeles, in character, as Andy Kaufman."

As a kid I greatly enjoyed the game Balderdash, though I didn't get many chances to play it.

Anyway, to the quiz. As my questions began appearing for the other people (they're supposedly random) and I kept answering others, I began to see other new questions that were also false, though none (I say this humbly) as convincing as mine.

Now I can play the quiz and know that some of the True/False questions may actually require some thought after all. Frankly, though, I think I'm enjoying writing them more than answering the other ones.

* I'd link the complete list, but based on what I saw from upscoop and pipl, I can't even remember all of the ones I've joined. A halfway-comprehensive list can be found on my about page.

** I was a bit inconsistent - apparently I'm only 84% compatible with myself.

So today was Father's Day, the first one since Natalya was born. Generally for me, as far as I could remember, Father's Day was a day to give my Dad a card and a phone call, and that's about it. I don't remember doing any special stuff (breakfast in bed, etc.) in the past, and didn't really feel the need to, well, need any special treatment myself.

My daughter's a bit young to really get into it anyway*.

My wife, on the other hand, gave me a brand new radio-controlled helicopter. I've always enjoyed playing with radio-controlled toys, having destroyed at least three cars as a child, and having seen my neighbor's collection of helicopters I have wanted one for a while (as seen on my wishlist).

Knowing they were complicated and difficult to control, I actually read the manual a few times while I waited for the batteries to charge.

With the Jessica and Natalya safely inside, I attempted some brief flights. It only took me about an hour to crash and break it beyond repair, at least until I track down some spare parts.

* I'm fairly certain her signature on the card I received was forged, too.