If you haven’t been there yet, it’s father’s day at Raising Hell.

Happy Look Loud Day

This is me, looking loud. Go here to create your own loud look.

[via annelizabeth]

This weightloss stuff isn’t that hard. With a combination of reducing my food intake, making it to the gym about once a week (no time, no time) and intensive whining on the Internet I’ve so far gone down from 84 or 85 kg to 81, currently. What is that, 7 or 8 kilos, right? The equivalent of what, roughly 30 pounds at current rates of exchange?

So Alpha has been after me to go running with her. There is no time to do this, though, that’s our problem. Our schedules are full. From 5.30 in the morning, when we get up, until 7.30 at night when we go to bed, it’s go, go, go. No rest for the wicked. So I set my alarm clock for 5 and basically slept in running clothes, sweats. Woke up a few minutes before the alarm, as always, and did the fireman thing – jumped out of bed, into my shoes and was ready.

The good thing about getting up that early to exercise is your mind can’t believe you’re actually doing it, so you can just do it. If your mind realized you were really serious about exercising, it would find some excuse to stay home.

So we were out running. Running up the sidewalk to the bike path along the creek. Running along. The sunrise was beautiful, outlining large clouds in red and gold.

Running and running along.

Alpha: You’re going too fast. You’ll have a heart attack.
Miguel: [Sweating profusely because it is such a humid morning. Begins to walk, at a moderate walking pace, which is about the speed at which Alpha is "running"] What, you call that running?
Alpha: [Merrily jogging along] Look, I was running last week with a professional athlete. And he told me that I was running too fast.
Miguel: You forgot to close your ITALICS tag.

Alpha: Sorry. How’s that?
Miguel: [Jogs a couple steps to catch up, starts walking again] I was reading an article somewhere about how that’s inaccurate that only slow running burns fat. The article said a combination of slow and fast was better.
Alpha: And?
Miguel: [Jogs a couple steps to catch up] And that’s all I read. I read that and figured I grokked the whole article and started reading the funnies instead.
Alpha: This isn’t exactly what we said in our conversation this morning while running, honey.
Miguel: [Casually wipes sweat from brow] Sure is humid today. Look, get your own blog! This is my blog! I can make people say whatever I want.
Alpha: Oink! Squawk!
Miguel: Heh heh. I can send you to the cornfield! Heh.
Alpha: I read your blog, don’t forget that. The real Alpha reads it, I mean.
Miguel: [Jogs a couple steps to catch up] Oh, I’m in trouble now.
Alpha: Isn’t that a pretty bird?
Miguel: The duck?
Alpha: I know it’s a duck. A duck is a bird!
Miguel: I just said, The Duck? With a question mark. i.e. pretty bird, did you mean the duck when you said pretty bird?
Alpha: Watch your intonation, then.
Miguel: [Jogs a few steps to catch up] Oink, squawk.
[slow pan to sunrise, fade out]

She’s a hot librarian by day, a 3-gallon can of hi-gloss avocado latex paint by night. He’s a three-foot length of garden hose and a golf ball. We fight crime!

I stare at a computer monitor all day at work. Then I go home and, more often than not, I stare at another one for a few more hours for fun. My eyesight used to be perfect. Today I feel naked and incomplete because I forgot my reading glasses.

You know how, when you saw your dad without his glasses as a kid, he looked wrong? That’s how I feel today, wrong.

Otherwise, I’m in a totally better mood. Other people’s blog entries were all so good when I read them this morning. D talking about football. Good body image – skinniness talk at Billegible. Farting women at A Small Victory. Handlesekunde, more handlesekunde than you can shake a stick at, at U.D.N.. Mary botches a bikini trim but is nevertheless happy to be a girl. Mae scary in a tanktop? Paint yourself red at Words Mean Things? Public lesbian peeing, anyone?

And on and on.

Even Melly managed to string a few words together for a change. And all the rest of you. Too numerous to mention. God loves each and every last single one of you.

Excuse me, hang on. Phone.

That was my Id. He wants to go out and rip somebody a new asshole, then tie one on, dance the macarena with starlets covered in chocolate sauce and wake up with a full body tattoo, japanese style, of the carp that causes earthquakes when it flicks its tail.

I told him sorry, I have a cello lesson tonight, then I’m cleaning house with the Superego.

On my way to the store at lunchtime, there is a tree-lined street full of mansions I walk down, past several embassies; here and there are apartment buildings, a rare vacant lot.

On one corner, workmen stand around, leaning against dumptrucks and wrecking machinery, around a gigantic pile of rubble. I’ve worked here for more than 10 years, and walk down that street most days, weather permitting, but for the life of me I can’t remember what used to stand there. Judging from the size of the pile, I guess a structure of some sort, quite large. One of the mansions.

No idea. Something stood there for years and made no impression on me whatsoever.

Further along the street is a large yellow mansion. Walking past one day several years ago, I noticed a bare naked lady standing in the window.

That house I’ll never forget.

To the person who keeps coming to Raising Hell via google searches for Hell: [insert punchline in comments]