i accidently only brought my 50mm so my pics are kinda weak. i’m sure that broad with the 10 foot, $1000 lens got some good shots though.

here is my flickr set from the wedding:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kentomatic/sets/72157604324277879

ben called it and chekezie is out. i’m loving this top 10 though, ’cause they’re all so good/so hot that i hate to see any of them go.

it’s funny and all, but what if she doesn’t become president and is gone and forgotten in 6 months?

man, these new arrowhead and crystal geyser water bottles suck. they’re super thin, and probably use half the plastic as a normal bottle which is great for the environment. but when i’m fighting to get one open, once i break the cap free, the pressure i put on the bottle to get leverage makes half of the damn water fly out. grr!!!

only a couple more months before it’s boating season!

speaking of which, eric finally bought his 24 hour fitness membership and we hit the gym last night. my workouts have been all over the place lately. about a month ago, i fucked up my shoulder doing some of my biggest weights, so i really haven’t been able to work out chest and shoulders too hard at all. but this has given me more time to focus on arms and abs and back (apparently of which i need the most work on).

my shoulder is finally starting to get better and now that i’ve got a workout buddy again i can hopefully get back on track and be ready for summer!

ben posted something similar to this the other day, but this is on a bigger scale. freaky!

i’m a bit late to the party on this one, since my only other two book-reading buddies have already read it, but it was per their recommendation that i even bothered to pick it up.

first of all, the time traveler’s wife is the best romance story ever. it was probably one of the best of any kind of stories that i’ve read, although to be fair, i usually read those fiction-thrillers they sell at the airport by crichton or rollins or grisham. the premise sounds complicated: clare first meets henry when she’s 6 and he’s 36, when they get married clare is 23 and henry is 31. once you get into it though, it all makes sense, that is if you subscribe to the single-timeline theory of time travel, and believe in absolute fate, where you can’t ever change anything even if you know the future, because every attempt to change the future has already been attempted and resulted in a predetermined outcome. while i prefer the multi-timeline theories of time travel, the time traveling in this book stays nice and tighty, and i spent my time enjoying the story and not contemplating time travel theory.

the biggest take-away for me from this book was just how precious and how fleeting time is. the story really made me reflect on how much i take my love and youth for granted. yeh, yeh, sounds sappy, but that’s what a good book will do to you. they’re making a big-screen adaptation that will come out later this year with eric bana as henry and rachel mcadams as clare. i’m skeptical that they’ll be able to capture the awesomeness of the book, but i’ll be there opening night to find out.

so i have a few different things wrong with me right now, my left shoulder is fucked up from working out, although it’s definitely getting better, my right knee has been messed up for a long time, and recently i noticed that my spine wasn’t perfectly straight near my lower back.

so yesterday i went to the back specialist, and he was trying really hard to get me to admit to some pain, although i hadn’t been having any. i said sometimes when i’d been sitting at my desk all day, my back would get a bit sore, and he asked “what do you do to take the edge off”? i was like wtf? is he trying to bust me for drugs or something? anyway, he also criticized me for slouching which i often do, especially when i’m tired, even though this apparently had nothing to do with my scoliosis, he kept saying, oh, we’ll get to that.

so he tells me that my back muscles are too weak to support me (this is without even taking off my shirt, or feeling up my sweet back muscles). i tell him that i have a strong back and tell him the weights of different exercises i can do, which he seemingly doesn’t believe. (this is a tall thin nigerian runner looking dude) he starts telling me that i must not work out right, that my form is bad, that i need to do slower reps, all this stuff, without asking me about my routine, seeing my form, or even seeing my sweet back! and then we get into this kinda argumentative conversation about muscles for looks vs. muscles for function, and he says something like “why would you want to be big and buff, when you can be stronger and lean like me?” at which point i’m just sick of this quack and bet him $100 that i can outlift him in any back exercise.

obviously the consulation just got awkward from there. he recommends me to go to physical therapy to build up my atrophied back, and i then steer the conversation to my crooked spine which he says has a 10 degree bend, but that that’s not too uncommon and isn’t likely to get much worse if i can build up some muscle in by back. jerk.

i’ve only been on my bike a couple times this year, but i finally got a real ride in on saturday morning. i’m close enough to palos verdes now, that i can just ride there instead of having to pack up my bike and drive to the area, so i met up with a co-worker and we did a 25 mile ride up and around the palos verdes hills. the weather was still a bit cooler than i like to ride in, but i’m picky and have sensitive ears. my knee has been giving me a lot of trouble lately, especially on bike rides, and my new speedplay pedals only seemed to help so much. i’ve got another doctor’s appointment today and if it turns out i do need to have surgery, i’ll prolly wait until after summer since i don’t want to be laid out and gimpy during the best part of the year.