Back again…

Yeah, I know, I suck because I haven’t updated y’all all recently, blah blah blah. I have an excellent excuse named Fred, who has been mentioned here before and who is my boyfriend/partner/sweet babboo.

Started singing with the Gateway Men’s Chorus, the local gay men’s, uh, chorus, at the urging of the aforementioned BF/P/SB. I also managed to get myself into the Gateway Singers, the auditioned ensemble formed from the larger chorus; that seems to be mostly about timing, though, as the director was looking for a baritone/bass and I just happened to be thinking about joining the chorus. Doesn’t hurt that I can read music, though, or that I have a bit of experience. (or that I’m sleeping with one of the high tenors.)

Ed’s getting married this weekend, and I’m the best man, and I still have to write a toast.

I MUST find the lyrics to “One Two Cha Cha Cha” by Usha Uthup and chorus. The movie it’s from (”Shalimar“) is TOTAL cheeseball, but the music is suitably funky and desi all at once. This particular piece starts it all off and is probably the best earworm-killer I have yet found.

And while I’m thinking about Wikipedia… turns out I’m one of the top thousand (human) contributors to the main article namespace on the largest ‘Pedia (the English-language one). Not entirely sure how to feel about this; after all, most of my edits have been reverts of vandalism, spelling or grammatical fixes, or minor copyediting. (Yes, I’m becoming a WikiGnome.)

Not feeling the workout today — otherwise I’d already be down there — so I’m skipping it. Harrumph. Otherwise, though, things are progressing nicely: squats are about to hit the 405-pound mark (4 45-pound plates on either side of the 45-pound bar), toe raises on the leg-press sled just reached 585 lbs, weights on upper-body exercises are increasing by leaps and bounds, and the mid-section is becoming strong and flexible. I’m even (slowly) upping the amount of cardio I’m doing.

Work… sucks. As always. But at least some key people are starting to develop clue about the wealth of documentation already available on the company intranet.

The network admin and I are talking about developing a new database system for the company, though. Well, OK — we have discussed it jokingly for over a year now, but we’re moving away from the “jokingly” and more towards the “seriously” now. It’d be a MySQL/PHP/Apache project, like so many others, but would be specifically geared towards our unusual needs.

Then again, I have to finish a major project before we can start on any of it, as its deadline got moved up by almost a month. grrr.

Yes, I know I’m rambling.

Oooh — while I’m thinking about it — I snagged a secondhand Thinkpad T23 from work, found its problem (bad hard drive), replaced the bad part, and got a slick Gentoo install going on it. Just need to get the onboard networking components running and it will be supersuh-weet.

Fred and I are going to be moving in together in June, when his current lease expires. We’re essentially living together now — he and I wear the same size, and I’m even wearing his clothes right now, for everything but the whities and the shoes — but it’ll become “official” then. Once we get through this whole wedding bit we’re going to start looking for a place…

The iPod’s filling up gradually, mostly with interesting MP3s I find places. Recent additions include Mozart’s Requiem, Beck’s newest album, a musical version of “Silence of the Lambs” (fave song: “Put the Fucking Lotion in the Basket”), and a German group that covers techno and pop songs in the style of Fred Astaire et al. (”Oops I Did It Again” sounds SO MUCH BETTER this way, I’m not kidding you). I’m also putting chorus rehearsal tracks on there to listen to obsessively.

The iPod has also helped me discover that Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” is completely and utterly inappropriate to play loudly from one’s car stereo when one has the windows down. Suffice to say, you will freak out everybody within earshot.

Going to the ballgame tonight. Should be good. They lost the last one I attended this year, and it was a real heartbreaker: Cardinals down by one, Danny Graves walked Larry Walker to load the bases with one out in the bottom of the night, and Albert Pujols — on the first pitch — grounded into a 5-4 double play. d’oh!

Tonight Fred will learn how to keep score at baseball games, whether he likes it or not. Neener.

More news to come later; now, peach cobbler. Mmmm.