I seem to be off of my game in life, as of late. My ability to manage my time is nonexistent, and consequently everything suffers—most notably for you all, my blog languishes. The worst thing about not having time-management skills is that you eventually become painfully aware of the time you piss away. If the feeling that you’re losing your opportunity to do something kickass is like a dagger in your side, then the knowledge that you are knowingly pissing away your time is that little extra twist of the blade.

As usual, I pin the blame squarely on lack of sleep. Why expend energy doing something nifty, when you can stare slack-jawed at the Ars Technica forums? (That was my crime earlier this evening, FWIW.)

A quick run-down of events of late, that I may try to catch up on sleep: ate Japanese food with Eric and Brian on Friday evening, followed by a trip to the almost-barren Heritage Mall. There I noticed a portrait of Young Elvis, which intrigued me such that I repeatedly mentioned it throughout the rest of the evening; I should buy that and hang it over my bed or something. (The true cause of my interest: who in the world needs a portrait of a young Elvis hanging in their home?) We ended the evening by crashing Kevin and Nate’s place, as Andy and Nick had elected to make a rare C-town appearance. That devolved into watching Ali G Indahouse (memorable pseudo-quote: “Is it true that you drugged the leaders of the world?”), followed by Drawn Together, the “first animated reality show” that truly deserved its “MA” rating. It’s also hilarious.

Saturday I was going to take a nap, but I…er…did something during the day, and then got a call requesting that I pick Kevin and his girlfriend (who had an injured foot) up from the Civil War game—this became a second evening spent over at Nate and Kevin’s. Though Nick had returned north, Neil had arrived to take his place… We were awed by the folks living across the street from Nate’s porch, where the guys apparently found it hilarious to urinate off the back of their porch. They then tried to engage Neil in a swearing contest; anyone who knows Neil should find that concept hilarious, as there’s nobody on Earth who can swear more than Neil.

The idea of Neil using his cop-knock was also brought up, but never implemented. That was probably for the best, as those other guys were pretty darn drunk.

Today: I raked leaves. Yay. And ow. Mostly ow.

One of those things I’ve never been able to do all that well is fold shirts. I mean, I can cram them into a suitcase and whatnot—they just don’t come out all that hot. Not anymore! Thanks to a link on AppleGeeks, I have now seen this Japanese how-to video and learned a valuable new trick. (Marin was actually the one to first piece it together, but I’ll ignore that.)

My reaction upon seeing the video was exactly the same as when I discovered that this technique actually works:

Holy shit!

Have I mentioned that I’m now actually dancing at the Wednesday night dance practice sessions? Not just chatting, but dancing. That’s crazy talk. I’m even starting to pick up on the names of various leads (above and beyond the names “everybody” knows), which makes it easier to chat with more people.

My only problem is that my feet now hurt something fierce—that’s an issue I’m not used to dealing with.

I even waltzed nicely, which was balm for my bruised ego. (It’s so basic—how could I have screwed it up?)

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Yeah, so dance is pretty much the only event of interest in my life most days. I’m sure you didn’t notice.

Hey! Awesome! National Treasure opens tomorrow. I don’t know about you, but that looks like as good a dumb-fun movie as one can find. Maybe.

I’ll have to check the reviews.

The moral of my missing credit card statement story: if you have a drawer full of stuff you’ll process “later,” you can’t let “later” drift out to the point where that stuff accumulates beyond the top of the drawer and thus gets shoved to the back of the drawer, where you (later) won’t look for that stuff.

Anyway.

This weekend I learned a valuable limitation of my all-too-limited dancing skill: I cannot dance when I’m dog-tired. That “cannot” is strict.

Alas, I learned that while trying to waltz with Kristina. It’s been a long, long time… oh, bump that. I don’t think I’ve ever quite waltzed that poorly, before. And it’s all because of a lack of sleep.

Having recovered some since that ugly Saturday evening, I can once again dance to the best of my abilities. Of course, we started West Coast Swing off this evening by watching video of some of the best WCS dancers in the world: afterwards, our comparatively simplistic moves weren’t quite as impressive.

The real rub of it, though, is that it’s not our moves that are poor: it’s the rest of our presentation. The professional dancers we watched could make the most basic steps look fantastic—and I’m talking the simple stuff, not the move where the follow literally formed a ring around the lead and then dropped down to around his waist, like a hoop caught on a peg. That was crazy.

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Another major deal of the week is the ongoing Deep Discount DVD 20% off sale. If you can stand how slow the site is, that’s a hell of a bargain.

I’ve lost the secret documents!

Which is just great—the last thing I need is to be the victim of identity theft. I suppose I’m going to have to tear my house apart from top to bottom in the hopes that this thing just got shuffled into some random corner.

Of course, we took out garbage and recycling yesterday. I may already be sunk….

[Update: here’s a hint for my opening reference, for those few of you who haven’t seen it yet.]

The bulk of the last few days has been a hideous amalgamation of dog walks and work. Do note that I omitted “full nights of sleep” from that list. (Did I mention that my parents were gone this week?)

Yoshi has this annoying tendency to bark at the paper delivery people—at 5:00 in the morning. Silencing that usually takes me two rounds of getting out of bed and telling him “enough!” He then starts barking again about 8:00 am, ostensibly because he needs to go out. Thus my day begins, and then begins again.

Following that first walk is shower, work, lunch, work, walk Yoshi, work, and then finally return home in the evening. From there my sister and I eat dinner (trying also to make sure our grandma has something to eat as well), and then I get to listen to her fret over her awful group until late into the night. Combine the late nights with interrupted sleep cycles and whatnot, and I haven’t had a good eight hours of sleep until last night—when my folks came home.

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About my sister’s group: she’s in a class that has a major group paper, and that paper was due this last Thursday. On Tuesday evening she had started to revise what the others had written—and discovered huge swaths of plagiarism in two of the other gals’ work.

They were going to turn this thing in with six people’s names on it. (Plagiarism, if you aren’t aware, has punishments that range from getting an F on the assignment to getting kicked out of the university.) Their plagiarized sources included the CIA World Fact Book—and, as Brian noted, “[the World Fact Book] is a good source, but is bad for being caught [plagiarizing].”

See the quotation marks? (Actually, I can’t remember Brian’s exact words… consider this dramatic license.) These gals thought it wasn’t plagiarism if they cited the paragraphs they cut and pasted. (???)

Anyway, that devolved into a messy group dynamic where the self-appointed leader and hog of information (and plagiarist) became quite pissed at my sister for calling plagiarism by its true name. Add in some chats with the professor, and it was obvious this team wasn’t going to be able to function.

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I wish I had been the one facing off that other gal as she tried to get mad at me. I swear, I would have rained righteous hellfire on her until she was sobbing in the fetal position. You don’t attempt to fuck people over like she did, and then expect to be able to get pissy at the person who calls you on it.

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Other notable events of the week: one afternoon Yoshi was running around in the park, and ran up to a bigger, meaner dog. Thankfully, he only ended up with two minor scrapes and a tiny puncture wound in the end—but we learned the noise Yoshi makes when he’s in pain. (He starts sounding like a female dog.) And then, another afternoon, Calliope managed to kill a bird and leave it as a present on our doorstep. I nearly stepped on the poor thing as I was leaving the house, which didn’t do anything for my heart.

Once again I have reaffirmed (as I did during my parents’ previous vacation, when Cricket managed to have diarrhea all over the entryway) that I don’t want pets of my own at this point in my life—and kids are out of the question.

I think I might be on the verge of attaining a more enlightened state in dance. Now it seems that when I screw up my footwork—barring especially egregious errors (e.g. tripping myself)—I’m able to keep leading the follow appropriately (they don’t notice that I’ve really mucked myself up) and then get my feet where they ought to be, to continue on without interruption.

For lack of a better term, I shall call this ability error correction.

Additionally, I shall call the use of computer/electronic terms to describe dance skills unwise. That, however, will not prevent me from continuing to do so.

Though it’s easy to say and/or type, that’s a very big deal when you’re dancing. Historically, my response to getting off-beat has been immediate and total Brain Freeze. And brain freeze is not a condition that allows for a continued lead, let alone a graceful recovery.

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If you’ve been under a rock lately, then you might not realize that today is the day that Mozilla Firefox turned 1.0. I’ve personally turned to OmniWeb for my browsing needs, but if I were on a PC I’d be all over Firefox. My PC experience is limited, but it didn’t take long for me to learn to dislike IE.

Of course, I still have a copy of Firefox on my machine. The more browsers the merrier, right? (I only have…oh…six browsers on my computer. One, Opera, is there only because some other program decided to install it; the others survive of my own free will.)

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If you’ve really been under a rock (or don’t read the rants at MegaTokyo), you wouldn’t know that a rat “brain” has learned how to fly a plane in a flight simulator. This begs the question: why the hell can’t I?

The screwed up sidebar pictures I had? That’s the result of FTPing image files using the “text” transfer protocol. Remember, kids, binary transfers for image files; text transfers for text files! (My FTP program also has an automatic setting, but for whatever reason that likes to screw up my Movable Type installation—which, you may recall, I was updating over the weekend.)

Now you may witness the true chaos I’ve unleashed in brent//BLOG Extreme! Ha ha ha ha ha!

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Over the weekend, Brian and I attempted to predict the outcome of the recent election (it’s hard to predict past events, but we tried our best) via repeated application of Soul Calibur II. Brian decided (and I agreed) that Yoshimitsu was most like Bush, and Voldo was most like Kerry. Brian also supplied the latest Newsweek, which had a nice map of which states were leaning which way. The setup was simple: if a state was solidly for a candidate, we gave that state to them; if a state was tentatively leaning one way, that character got infinite health and the opponent got 100% health (meaning, effectively, the only way the other candidate could win would be to ring-out his opponent before he ran out of life); if it was a true swing state, both characters got 200% health. Time was unlimited, and the matches were best-of-nine. We flipped a coin for each matchup, to determine who would play which character.

It was a grueling campaign.

And, at the end of the day, Kerry squeezed through. Obviously our model is fine—it just has a perfect negative correlation with reality. The fact that I happened to be the master of cheap knockout moves, Brian took a good while to figure out how to throw me off my cheap game (namely, to stay down on the ground for longer than I expected), and that I had a string of rounds where I represented Kerry, in no way biased the outcome.

Needless to say, we’ll be all over the 2008 presidential election. Maybe even before it happens.

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My folks are off in vacation-land right now, which has left me and my sister to take care of Yoshi and Calliope. Marin’s in a crunch-time at school, though, which effectively leaves me to take care of walking Yoshi. This normally wouldn’t be all that big of a deal (aside from the time commitment—Yoshi likes to walk), except that recently he’s taken to wandering around the park behind my house some, followed by wandering around the neighborhood streets. I anticipated the park—and failed to anticipate the streets that would follow—and so wore a pair of ill-fitting boots the last two days.

Ow!