Tuesday, February 18, 2003


Blah. I have the shakes. Every once in a while I feel shakey like this. It feels like someone pumped me full of too much coffee only I'm also sleepy to boot! I think its a lack of food problem and so I just ate a granola bar. It hasn't kicked in yet. Knock on wood that it will soon and up my energy a bit. I never can predict when I'll feel this way. Maybe its related to Aunt Flo arriving yesterday. What I would dearly love to do right now is lie down on the floor under my cube desk and take a cat nap. Somehow I don't think this would go over well with the boss.


I didn't get my dryer vent cleaned out yesterday. I couldn't find an appropriate tool to use. So I fired an email off to my neighbor asking to borrow his shop vac to clean out the vent. I haven't heard back from him yet. I'm assuming a shop vac is a very strong vacuum cleaner that I can poke into the vent and suck up all the accumulated lint. If this doesn't work then its off to the yellow pages to find a dryer vent cleaner. I did do a wash this weekend and I carried my clean wet cloths in my red wagon to the complex public dryer in the club house, deposited $0.75 in the machine and dried my cloths. At least I don't have to put the wet cloths in my car and find a laundramat for a dryer.


I emptied my chest drawers and fix the drawer bottoms this weekend. All of them had come out of their slots and were sagging into the drawers below so when I would pull out one drawer the sag would catch on the one below and open it up too. I got the drawers back into the slots and then used some duct tape to hopefully secure the drawer bottoms in the slots so they won't come out again and resag.


My hike Sunday had a low turn out. Just one person showed up and that person met me at the trail head. It turned out to be a fortuitous as I woefully underestimated the mileage and the one person who did show up, Pam, is a leader herself and took the change in plans while hiking in stride. We never did make it down to the beach as it was more like a 5 mile hike to the beach than a 5 mile hike to the beach and back like I advertised. I really don't know where I managed to come up with that mileage estimate. It must have been bad map reading day when I wrote that description. The weather wasn't too bad. I think that is what scared away most people. We had a little bit of rain when we reached the ridge top but as we sat down to eat some lunch, the rain stopped and the sun came out. We got a nice view of Brooks falls with water in it! The woods in the area were a very lush green due to all the rain. It felt vaguely Hawaii like Pam said. I couldn't confirm that since I haven't been to Hawaii. We had fun talking and probably did about 6 or 7 miles in the end. We were out hiking from 11:15 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.


I skipped the Nisene Marks hike on Saturday. I was intending on going on the hike on Friday but I woke up so danged tired Saturday that I turned off the alarm, rolled over, and went back to sleep. I slept till noon. I needed that but I'm sorry to have missed the hike. I had a very lazy Saturday of hanging out on the couch watching TV and playing on the internet most of the day.


I got my tax refunds last week! I had them deposited right into my bank account.


My GPS is still in the mail. It got to Ames on Thursday according to the UPS tracking web page. I called the dude who signed for it this morning asking what happened to it. The package came to Shipping and Receiving and they sent it on to the mail room. It got stuck in the mail room. I called the mail room and they said last week they were short of two staff members and fell behind on delivering mail. They told me it should arrive today and if it doesn't to give them another call. Shucks. I want my new toy!