Gorilla corner and miscellany
The last 24 hours have been pretty quiet. The Professor starts back to teaching in earnest this week. He had his first Monday night class last night, which meant last night was the first evening I hit the gym without him. It’s easier in a way, since I don’t have him hopping over to check on my progress every fifteen minutes or so. It’s also lonely though. I guess I kinda liked him hopping over to check on my progress every fifteen minutes. Go figure.
The current set up has all the free weights at one side of the gym, all the arm and leg machines on the other side, with a bank of treadmills along the windows (WHY must they always put those things in front of windows? I feel like merchandise on display when I walk.) There’s a loft that has most of the cardio-vascular oriented machines in it (bikes, stair-masters, other weird stuff I have no clue what to do with). The Prof and I have taken to calling the free weight side of the room Gorilla Corner, since that’s where all the guys who come to posture and be seen hang out. They tend to do repetition sets of one, and spend more time talking and hording the drinking fountain (which happens to be on their side of the room) than they do actually working out. I avoid that side of the room.
Last night a few of the Gorillas infiltrated my loft while I was doing my half hour on the bike. The messed around with the other bikes for about five minutes, did a couple of mad dashes on some slide-walker contraption, turned the volume of the television set all the way up, and then bailed to the Corner again. What was most annoying is that the televisions are set too high for me to reach, so I couldn’t kill the volume. I had to do the remaining twenty minutes on the bike while listening to some sit-com I didn’t recognize. Insult to injury was that the television was just behind and above my left shoulder, so it drowned out my Sony Discman and I couldn’t even listen to my music. **grumble**
Other miscellany:
I got an email today from my contact in MIS. It contained a story about how Oliver North supposedly warned us during the Contra hearings in 1987 about bin Laden. I’d already received this MANY times last fall, and it is a total urban legend. (If you are interested check out: Oliver North, which will open in a separate window for you.) This kind of right-wing, historical revisionist crap is starting to really piss me off, and I felt free to tell him so. He now claims he knew all along it was a hoax and just sent it out to see how people reacted. Yeah, right. And he’s got a bridge he wants to sell me while he’s at it.
Months and months and months ago I took that test that proported to tell you what religion you were. The results of that particular test have been rattling around in the back of my mind ever since. (See Cats and Religion from August 24th.) I found a Universal Unitarian church about ten miles from where I live, and have been kicking around checking it out for months. I’m not sure what’s stopping me, except that I hate being the new face in the middle of a crowd that already knows each other. It makes it hard to be invisible. Recently I’ve been feeling an inexplicable need to check it out, to at least see what it’s about. Perhaps one weekend next month, if The Professor elects to sleep in on a Sunday, I’ll try.
Valentine’s Day is coming. I always play the sensible, practical, “it’s a Hallmark holiday” girl at Valentine’s Day. And I suppose it really is a lot of hooey, all things being equal. But there’s a secret part of me that hopes for roses. Or at least purple larkspur. Last year I got cactus. At least Kitten from Hell keeps a respectful distance from the cacti, although she keeps stealing little pumice rocks out of the planter.
I didn’t get anything out of the freezer for dinner again. I wonder what The Prof would do if I told him I wasn’t cooking tonight.