Giving Irene too much credit, a day in the office, a workout, and underwear night…

~Saturday~ I was up at 8:30 after eight hours of sleep. I pretty much avoided looking outside with Hurricane Irene lingering on the east coast today.

I went into the office for a good chunk of the day, where I caught up on a lot of work tasks, as well as taking care of some personal online things.


At about 5:00, I headed to the gym. Traveling up Kaplan to go the “back way” to the gym, I came upon a police car parked across both lanes of the road blocking traffic.

Just beyond it, I could see a tree whose massively thick trunk had split in two with half of the tree haven fallen across the road, taking down a couple of power lines with it. I was more than happy to detour the area to avoid potentially live wires in the road.

After a ridiculous number of turns in the nearby neighborhood, I ended up out on Avent Ferry Road, which I took up to Athens Drive, over to Buck Jones Road.

There are 20 television sets in my gym, 10 of them along the front of the gym, and then another 10 about halfway back for the exercise machines toward the rear of the gym. In each row, the TVs are labeled from left to right from 1 to 10, and the 1 on the front row is tuned to the same station as the 1 on the back row, and so on. Usually.

Today, however, all of the TVs except one were displaying blue screens with a number (presumably the cable channel number) in the upper left corner. One TV—#6 on the front row—was broadcasting a baseball game. The #6 on the second row was not.

My first thought, an inane one in retrospect, was that Hurricane Irene had knocked out all of those cable stations such that they couldn’t broadcast. Only eventually did it occur to me that, “Doh! It was probably the cable service to the gym that was out, not all those stations.” Bless my mess.

I did 300 (15 sets of 20) ab crunches, and then I did 45 minutes—the longest I’ve done in a long time—of cardio on the elliptical machine. It’s been a long time since I’ve done 45 minutes of cardio, but it really wasn’t bad at all. Just time consuming.


I was going to do some more work from home, but I couldn’t get my Thinkpad to boot up, and it’s the only machine I have at home right now that has Microsoft Word on it, which is what I needed to do the work that I wanted to do. Oh well.

My Aunt Rita called from Florida to ask me if I’d heard from my parents, since she’d been trying reach them after hearing that Hurricane Irene had touched down not far from Camp Lejeune.

I told her that I had not and assured her that I would let her know when I did hear from them.


I met Joe at Flex at a little after 10:30, where it was underwear night.

Joe left later in the evening to go check out the supposed “Foam Party” that was going on at 313, but returned not too long after that to report that it hardly was. Glad I didn’t bother going over myself.

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