The Onion has outdone itself this week:

Idiom Shortage Leaves Nation All Sewed Up In Horse Pies

WASHINGTON—Authorities expect the shortage to subside by April, but until then, urge citizens to skip shy the rickshaw until the flypaper marigolds can waterfall.

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The whole thing is just outstanding, particularly if you think about Dan Rather saying all these things out loud. You know he would use each and every one if he could.

Two things causing concern.

First, I got on the scale, and was happy to see I’d lost another pound. The bad news was, I realized I hadn’t weighed Chaplin in a while, so I picked him up to do the whole “weigh self holding cat, weigh self, subtract” method to see how much he weighed.

The big fucker weighs 18 pounds! Somehow, he’s put on two pounds in the last few months. I’ve been feeding him roughly the same amount, so I’m a little mystified as to how he’s porked up so much.

Second, I’m trapped in my apartment. After months of fighting with my landlord, they finally replaced part of my rotting doorframe. However, when they re-hung the door, they did a piss-poor job of it.

At first, the door was just sticking, which I could live with, but it’s deteriorated badly. Now it takes a ridiculous amount of effort just to enter and leave the damn apartment. It’s worse than it was before, which I didn’t think was possible.

What’s sad about this is that it really doesn’t affect me too much at all, since I’ve barely been leaving the house anyway. Hopefully they’ll get this fixed by a reasonable hour tomorrow, and I’ll be able to at least take the trash out and go to the gym.

Not a lot going on with me at the moment, mostly scraping along while I try to find myself a new job. A few points to share from the trenches of brokedom:

- My $3 a meal effort seems to be working well. 30 days a month x 3 meals a day x $3 meal is $270/mo for food, and I’m ahead of that pace even counting the few times I’ve gone out in the last couple months, and the food I bought for my Super Bowl party (though to be fair, I froze the considerable leftovers and have been eating them myself).

The fact that I’ve been eating much less food than I used to (at least as measured by volume) and drinking very little alcohol due to my ongoing diet and exercise program is probably helping this initiative considerably.

- The one thing I have to stop doing is just spending days in the house watching TV and movies, and surfing the internet. The fact that not leaving the house is a much cheaper proposition than leaving the house has led me to several movie marathons and sessions of power-watching TV series.

I’ve seen dozens and dozens and dozens of movies and TV shows in the last couple of months, but there’s one distinct downside: I feel like I’m turning into a zombie.

I should at least go sit out by the pool and read for an hour, or ride my bike aimlessly, or something that does not involve staring at the TV or the computer. Otherwise I’m going to need glasses, and I don’t think my COBRA covers vision.

- One thing that’s killing me: Now instead of being able to see my work friends at work, I have to go to their various houses to see them. With gas costing about $3.20 a gallon and many of them living way the fuck out in the Valley, this is getting to be an expensive proposition.

I’ve already spent the same on gas this year as I had this time last year (not counting my trip to SF to pick up my TV), and I haven’t been driving to work, for work, from work every day. Stupid giant LA with its severe sprawl and piss-poor public transportation.

- Finally, I’ve been selling a bunch of old electronics and such through eBay, but the prices people pay for DVDs there just don’t make it worth it. Have any of you guys ever sold anything through Amazon Marketplace? You seem to be able to get more reasonable prices for used DVDs through there, but I recall hearing their cut of the sale is really huge.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be working again soon, and can go back to eating 3 meals a day at work, and being too busy to go out rather than too broke.

You know you’re a geek when you think, “God, this job-hunting would be so much easier with a spreadsheet.”

You are an even bigger geek when you actually make that spreadsheet.

You realize being a geek is a good thing when said spreadsheet actually does turn out to be helpful.

To balance out my bragging in the post below, I thought I’d share a story about how unbelievably stupid I (as well as several other people I shall not name to protect their pride) felt after bar trivia on Thursday.

The last question was fairly straightforward: There are twelve state capitals that start with the letters d, m, j, and p. Name them all.

We got eleven: Denver, Dover, Des Moines, Madison, Montgomery, Montpelier, Juneau, Jackson, Jefferson City, Pierre, and Providence. We could not, for the life of us figure out the twelfth.

We started verbally going through the capitals in a sort of map of the US: “Washington’s Olympia, so no. Oregon’s Salem, so no. California’s Sacramento, so no.”

Then we hit it: “Arizona’s Phoenix, so no.” We all nodded. Eight of us, over one million dollars worth of education between us. Not one of us listened to that statement and thought, “Wait, Phoenix is not spelled with an F.”

We tried for five more minutes until answer sheets were demanded and then turned it in with the twelfth spot blank. I haven’t felt as dumb as I did when the quizmaster identified Phoenix as our missing answer in a looooooong time.

The hell of it is, we somehow still managed to win the grand prize. We’d been doing well in an extremely tough set of rounds, so getting the eleven answers was enough.

I didn’t think I’d ever be able to describe a bar trivia victory as Pyhrric, but we were so mad at ourselves, I think this qualified.

The fact that we failed in such a doofy fashion STILL bothers me four days later.

A year ago this weekend, I got on the scale, and the number I saw almost made my eyes bug out of my head.

I’d had to greatly reduce my gym time because of my ongoing foot problems, and I hit a number I’d sworn I’d never let myself hit. I saw that number, and said, goddamn it, that’s it.

I am doing something about my weight, and I’m getting this shit off for good. I am losing the eighty pounds it will take me to get back to where I was my junior year of high school, when I was swimming a kilometer a day, five days a week.

I am not eating obscene amounts of food anymore, I am drawing a line in the fucking sand, and saying this is the end of being dangerously overweight and horribly out of shape.

Of course, I didn’t actually say anything about it at the time, because I’ve tried to draw these lines before. I’ve dieted and dieted and dieted and taken the occasional stab at exercise. It has always come back with a vengeance.

This time, it’s different. This time exercise is the primary objective, with portion control following. I didn’t go on a diet, I changed the way I live my life. And I’ll be goddamned: It actually worked.

One calendar year later, nine months of working out until I practically fell over at the gym later (plus three months off for foot surgery and related follies), I have dropped 42 pounds. More than halfway to my eventual goal, and a very encouraging distance from where I started.

Two jeans sizes (and close to a third) smaller. Wearing shit I haven’t worn in years. Weighing what I weighed my sophomore year of college, a ridiculous seven years ago.

If I sound like I’m proud of myself, I damn well am. I’ll be honest, I did not know if I could do this. But when I started keeping an eye on calories and actually working out at the gym, instead of just going to the gym, it started coming off.

I can almost leg press my own body weight now. I’m doing bicep curls with 85 lbs, and chest-pressing 90 (after being almost killed by 40 lbs on each at the beginning). And the difference both the weight loss and the strength training I’m doing have made with my bad leg are huge.

When I first tried to switch from the recumbent bike to the elliptical in October, I could barely do 5 minutes without feeling like my leg was going to fall off. Now I can do 25 minutes AFTER doing a strenuous half hour on the bike.

I just feel so much better physically, it’s hard to describe without using a corny and overly literal phrase like “a weight off my shoulders.”

There’s a whole section of my life that’s been throw into ridiculous turmoil lately, but for this to finally, FINALLY, start to go right, it gives me so much more confidence that I can overcome the other nonsense that I’ve stressed so much less about the turmoil than I would have a year ago.

I will now give myself public motivation to finish the job: My goal, and it is a pretty big one, is to lose the remaining 38 pounds by Halloween. That puts me at losing about five pounds a month, which is roughly the speed I’ve been going.

It has to be done, and for once in my life, I can finally say with confidence: It will.

Because then I’d get to participate in unbelievably awesome stuff like this, from the voices behind Spongebob Squarepants:

via Dave Barry’s blog and BoingBoing.

The Strike is dead.

I’ve finally uploaded the last of the best of my Europe photos, from my 2005 trip with Mark.

Here’s a link to the full set, the captions have descriptions of what the hell it is that you’re looking at, along with some entertaining stories of stuff we did while over in Euroland.

If, unlike me, you don’t have an abundance of free time on your hands, they’re also broken down country by country if you don’t want to look at all 400 or so of them.

As long as it took me to upload all my photos, I’d hate to see how long it takes Mark to upload his. He took about three times as many pictures as I did, though in all fairness, he’s a much better photographer.

And since I’m talking about Mark as a photographer, I think this is obligatory:

Saturday I went to the Golden Dragon parade celebrating Chinese New Year with some friends, and my pictures are up.

I’m really happy with how these came out, since this is the first time I went shooting with my giant (70-300mm) lens and did manual focus the entire time.

I will say, this is the first parade I’ve been to in a while, and I’d forgotten how incredibly repetitive parades are: Dragon, dragon, float, marching band, dragon, marching band, Kung Fu school, dragon, dragon, marching band, dragon….

A few of the highlights (click to go to each photo’s Flickr page: