Tuesday, December 19, 2000 - 11:12 p.m.

Tuesday, December 19, 2000 - 11:12 p.m.

I walked a little over 2 miles today. It took about 45-50 minutes to walk to my office and then back home. I'm happy about that. But I also ate some cookies at work and some M&M's here so I don't know if this will offset it. I hope it will and I hope the exercise will increase my metabolism so that I can take it on better and keep it off. Of course later as the pounds start to drop I will need to start working out so that I can improve the tone, too.

Lori told me this morning that she doesn't like my rubbing her back in the mornings. I thought she liked it and I had done it several mornings recently as we lay there wishing we could sleep in longer. That put me in a bad mood for most of the day. She felt bad, but in truth, I'd rather have learned now instead of her laying there each morning getting mad at me while I thought I was doing something she liked. She does like having her back rubbed after work, but not before work. She's a grump in the morning.

Definitely not a morning person. She ended up cheering me up later when she called because I was being goofy and she was getting frustrated but not annoyed with me. She wanted to know what I wanted for Christmas dinner and I kept saying that I didn't want ham. Unless it was thinly sliced and rolled up. I even offered to roll it. She said I could cut it, too, but I want it cut really thin like they do it at the deli.

Work itself was somewhat boring. But in a good way. Nothing much of interest happened today. I did my work and had some extra time. I ended up taking a longer lunch than planned. Originally I was going to go to the mall today and buy the stuff for Lori's Christmas stocking but I didn't because I was grumpy at her. I didn't like being grumpy but that just made me more frustrated that I couldn't change my tune. Natasha even noticed and asked me what was wrong. Sue brought in this card with a pig that looked like Babe on the front wearing a hat and scarf. Inside was a non-descript holiday greeting and a scribbled signature. Candace mistook it for "Sam". Then someone came around and gave us all amazingly wrapped gifts from Kevin. The gift? Pretty dumb, a framed picture of a gumball machine you can hang on the wall. The interesting part is that it's a working gumball machine. Someone had opened each one and slapped a Warner Bros. logo on each one. The boxes looked old, like they had been sitting in a warehouse for years. I told everyone that I was going to put mine in for the gift exchange tomorrow.

We have another cat, Morticia. It was Lori's cat. Carol and Morticia don't get along very well and can't be very close to one another. We used to think Morticia was really mean but then we learned at Pets.com (I miss Pets.com) that some cats have an imbalance where if you pet them too long it starts to get uncomfortable and they will go from purring to biting. So we're more gentle and pet her for shorter periods of time and she's really mellowed and become a much more pleasant cat since then.

That's going to be it for the night again. No time to summarize anything else that's happened in the past 9 years. At this rate, it will be several years before I find the time.