Fourteen months after deciding I wanted one, and deciding I should get one at Best Buy because I had a big store credit there, I FINALLY found a Best Buy with Wiis in stock at a time when I could actually afford one.

After the last time I came close to getting a Wii eight fucking months ago, I shoved the difference between the store credit and the cost of the Wii into my savings account, and said no matter how fucking broke I was, when I finally found one, I’d be able to buy it.

Today, work sent me out to buy some crappy CD’s, and while pestering the clerk about whether they had one I couldn’t find, I said, “You guys don’t have any Wiis, do you?”

Finally. FINALLY. The answer was yes.

God bless exurbia and its overstocked big-box stores. This store said they sell out in two days when Wiis show up, whereas the one in my more urban area generally sells out in under an hour.

I set it up. I’m way too tired to start trying to play it tonight, but I’ll be killing some serious time this weekend with it.

God help me when I scrape together enough money to buy Guitar Hero. I doubt I’ll ever leave the house again.

Well, I cracked.

I had resisted taking a PA job for three months, since I didn’t want to take a minor step back professionally just because I didn’t want to sit around the house all day.

That resistance came crashing down yesterday when a friend emailed looking to replace herself, and I’ll be working on a pilot for the next few weeks to months starting tomorrow.

The pay is crap (as all PA pay is), but when you add in the mileage, it’s at least more than I’d be making sitting on my ass and collecting unemployment.

It will hopefully have the added benefit of the restoration of my sanity, which has recently been hanging by a frightfully thin thread after three months of unemployment.

The people seem cool, and luckily fairly okay with the idea that if I get a better offer, I’m going to take it. The transience of employment in pilot season actually works in my favor there.

The main downside is that the office is in frickin’ Santa Clarita, so that’s a nice little 70 mile daily round trip, before I even start doing runs. At least it means I’ll get a lot more mileage, since it’s way far from pretty much everything.

The people who sell me gas and change my oil are going to love this job.

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.

The Strike is dead.

Hooray! My computer is back!

What makes me really happy is that they didn’t wipe my hard drive, so I’m pretty much back up and running immediately, with the exception of a few files I had to move around from the external drive I was saving everything to while I was using the temporary computer.

The really excellent news is that because they turned the repair around faster than they thought they would, the rental place only charged me for two weeks, even though I had it a couple extra days. Saved me another $80.

So basically, for waiting four extra days to get my computer back, I saved almost $700 in the great scheme of things.

I mean granted, this was still a very, very expensive excursion into the world of Setting An Example For People Of Why You Should Not Drop Your $2500 Computer.

But good lord, it could have been a lot worse.

I got a call from the folks at Apple about my computer today.

The bad news is, because I have a matte screen on my MacBook Pro and will not even consider getting a glossy screen, they won’t have a part in until Feb 7th, and won’t have my computer back to me until Feb. 11-12.

The good news is, to compensate me for my inconvenience, they offered me two options.

1. Ship me a brand new computer with the exact same specs for the same amount I would have paid for the repair, and have it arrive Friday (Feb 1) or Monday (Feb 4), or

2. Cut the price of the repair in half, and get it back the 11th-12th.

I have to admit, option #1 was thoroughly tempting, especially because after a week of using the temp MacBook, I’m more certain than ever that I made the right decision to spring for the Pro. The reflections on the glossy screen drive me batshit.

But after calling the computer rental place to see how much it would cost to extend the rental and running some numbers with sales tax, I realized that waiting was going to save me almost $600 to just wait for the repair.

So, the bad news is, I have to put up with the tiny, glossy, pain in the ass rental for a while longer, but the good news is, I save six hundred bucks.

At this point, the option that saves me $600 wins, even if it involves fire ants. Which, thankfully, this does not.

Broadway stagehands: Followers when it comes to calling strikes (having called theirs about a week into the WGA strike), but let’s hope they’re leaders when it comes to settling them.

Now it’s down to the main body of the WGA and the CBS news writers.

It’s at least a somewhat hopeful portent, and for the week we finish filming and 95% of the remainder of the people I work with get laid off, I’m clinging to whatever hope I can.

Let’s just hope it’s not an oncoming train.

Although at this point, I consider the two sides sitting in the same room, staring hatefully across the table at each other for eight hours to be a giant step in the right direction.

If they actually to get this shit settled, it’ll be a Christmas miracle.

I’ve lost 27 pounds since mid-February, despite a three-month break from the gym for two casts and a surgery. That’s good, but it’s not what I’m proud of.

What I’m proud of is that finally, nine months into 2007, I’ve finally finished reading 2006 issues of Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and Entertainment Weekly.

If I keep going at this rate, I might actually catch up with the present sometime in 2008.

The cast is off! Sadly, I still can’t itch the scar because I’m still gauzed up, but at least the stitches are out (that, by the way, hurt like a motherfucker) and I can wash three weeks worth of crap off my leg.

It’s still pretty goddamn sore, and I can see a gigantic bruise peeking out from under my bandages at the site of the incision.

The good news is that for the most part, it doesn’t hurt when I’m not putting pressure on it, which is a distinct improvement from its pre-surgical state. The doc also said it’s making good progress.

Walking, if you can call it that, is still a fairly slow, painful process because of how badly my leg has atrophied, though it’s quite a bit better than it was when the cast first came off yesterday.

I start back with Physical Therapy on Friday, and then I go 3 nights a week for the next month and a half or so. It’s going to be a colossal inconvenience, but I’m ready. I want this nonsense done with.

I’m not counting any chickens, but it’s looking a lot more promising than it was.