Pilates O' Death

Pilates is a form of exercise long touted by the svelte, celebrity set. A couple summers ago I bought a DVD of 'beginners' pilates off a discounted book rack. Tried it at home exactly twice. Actually made it half way through the dreary dialogue put one by two, highly toned, tanned and blonde Aussie bimbos. Bimbettes? Bimbii?


Fast forward to here and now and after 1.5 months of sitting on my ever-widening ass at Boeing all day, I decided to join a gym. So I'm going to this 24hr Yuppie Gymboree and today I tried my first real live pilates. Like, in front of other people. Dear Gawd.

The instructor was this friendly, cheerful Asian guy of indeterminate sexual orientation (read: half the male population of Puget Sound) but as soon as the crooning Enya CD started, he turned mean. (Right after it hit me that I was THE oldest, fattest one in the studio).

I vaguely remember him saying something about lying on your back with knees tucked and bent and arms near your head and doing this NIGHTMARISH variation on a stomach crunch. I was supposed to flex my left ribs down toward my left hip and then again on the opposite side. I don't know about most of you, but on me, that part of my body (lats?) is nothing but 100% cellulite.

It wasn't so much a matter of using muscles I didn't know I had as trying to use muscles I haven't had since summer 1996 when I was a lean, mean USFS firefighting machine.

But that's okay because I have wine. Oh, yes. And I have aspirin and ice packs. And I just got the seventh season of "Buffy" on DVD today.

Free-Range Psychos

For anybody that might care, I was sorta attacked on Wednesday afternoon. Broad daylight, nice neighborhood, birds chirping, all that.

I had just ridden one of the Boeing Field metro buses back up to downtown, hopped off at the downtown library and was hoofin' it up between Virginia Mason and Harborview Medical Center when this 6'2" black guy with pupils the size of dinner plates came pogoing down the sidewalk.

Got two inches from my nose, started screaming at me, shoved me, yes, it was great fun. Fortunately I had my ear buds in and was listening to my mp3 player so I missed half of the "GONNA FUCK U UP WHITE BITCH" comments. Apparently my wearing sunglasses set him off, tho, probably just the mere fact I was 1) female and 2) a pedestrian would have been enough.

Anyhoo, after a few minutes of "GONNA FUCK U UP!" he bounded down the sidewalk screaming over his shoulder at me.

I was gonna call the Seattle P.D. but as they have the same Catch-n-Release policy as the Portland P.D. I just blew it off.

Irony was I had my stun gun with me, in my freakin' hoodie pocket the whole time. It's this ridiculous dildo-looking thing, 'stun baton' I think the box said.

I just kept flashing on these videos I'd seen on YouTube of idiot drunk kids playing with stun guns. They'd down a shot of tequila, zap themselves and then giggle. I was seriously concerned that Batshit Psycho would have done the same thing since he was obviously flying on the Seattle meth-heroin-cocaine-PCP cocktail so loved by our colorful street people.

Yes, in the Pacific Northwest we don't have mental hospitals anymore. Why that would require actually have a national health plan and an infrastructure for social services and we ain't even got that. Yep, round here all our violent crazies are FREE RANGE -- like the chicken farms only more thrilling.

Geek World

It's official. I've attended my first computer convention. I don't know if that makes me a geek tho'. I still can't write XML for shit and I don't know that I ever want to learn Javascript. The only script I wanna write is the kind for movies.



Saturday, April 28th I caught a free charter bus ride courtesy Pogolinux to Bellingham, Wash., the City of Subdued Excitement. Bellingham is 15 miles south of Vancouver, B.C. and the air was filled with the sounds of 'oh geez' and 'aye'. There was also rabid talk about MySQL. I just kept wondering: Sequel to what?

Anyhoo, I found the outdoor sculptures at Bellingham Technical College more interesting than endless pics of true geeks standing behind their various tables gushing geekspeak and drooling over the latest Linux distro. ('Distro' = OS or platform).

And I won't talk about how I spent five hours camped out back in RE Lectronics room coercing three Linux geeks into helping me get that damn, cursed Toshiba laptop working. Suffice it to say, in the end, I donated it to RE Lectronics for parts and they are now supposed to set me up with a trade in.

Tho', I think this will involve me renting a car Memorial Day weekend and driving up there to further coerce them into dusting off an old Dell or Compaq laptop and installing Ubuntu on it for me.

My life is so much more care-free and efficient now that computers are in it. I can just smell the chip sets smoking.

Here's some legit pics from Brian Lane of the various vendors/sponsors and ubergeeks.