Because she expressed some interest, and because I didn't want to play again for a couple months, I gave my copy of Civ 3 to @dragonjaze when I finished my last game. Now she's actually playing it. When will she come to bed? Will she remember to eat? Will she remember to reassemble her car's dashboard before driving to work Monday? Will she remember having a job by Monday morning? Turn-based games are dangerous.

Nah, I'm surely overstating the risk and should relax with some Nethack .... Especially since the TV still hasn't been fixed and WGN (both SD and HD) don't work well enough to watch the Sox tonight.

Your July Keno numbers:

• Chest: 44¼"
• Bicep: 15"
• Stomach: 44¾"
• Waist: 39¾"
• Hips: 42½"
• Thigh: 19-25¼"
• Neck: 18"
• Weight: 231.4#

Most of those are down about an inch over June. Bicep was up an inch, oddly. Not like I've been lifting any more weight than before. Maybe it will deflate again next month.

The weight was from Wednesday morning, as always, and the girths were from last night, since we went out Wednesday night and didn't have time. Speaking of which, Chili's is not a low-carb destination. When it was suggested I thought, cool, fajitas, and ignore the tortillas! No, 17-22 net carbs without tortillas and condiments. They even turn a plain steak ("Classic Sirloin") into seven carbs. Do they dip everything in honey? We went to Red Lobster instead. In addition to a nice, smartphone-friendly (although you have to click through to the "desktop site" to see it) nutrition page, they let meat be meat. The salads were still high though. In hindsight I should have gotten one and eaten half, but instead I skipped that, then picked the three zero-carb "Choose Your Own Feast" items (with broccoli).

I remain faithful to Induction, which makes my rate of weight loss interesting. It's good enough that I'm not trying to troubleshoot it more, but I wonder what that means for future stages. In particular, what it will mean for my blood sugar. That's been below 100 at every reading for a month now, but will I only continue that with either extreme restrictions or medicine? At least metformin is cheap.

Add a second issue to the list with WOW cable — the Emergency Alert System implementation on the Cisco DVR moderately stinks. I understand the legal requirements, but they do not include cutting off normal audio to play the recorded statement. Not for a local weather bulletin, anyway. The system is there so the President can override the media when he chooses, at which point they must play the message. But the National Weather Service issues emergency alerts almost every day, so I effectively can't watch anything with this box. e.g. right now it's pointing out that it rained this morning. And the TV volume is low enough that I couldn't hear the actual program that was on from over here. The alerts comes on at twice the volume of any program that wasn't directed by Michael Bay.

I have a call in on my low signal problems. If they fix that, I'll decide whether I want to keep the Cisco box, buy/build my own DVR, or downgrade to a DTA (without HD ... no, not really). Or switch to Comcast anyway. They have a much better implementation on their Motorola DVR, or at least they did last year. They couldn't keep their cable modems up, but they did a good job with video. Or switch to DirecTV, which only has to carry national alerts.

It takes so much work to just sit in front of the TV for a bit. How do other people do it?

Really, Emergency Broadcast System? You need to inform people watching Judge Judy at 2:30 in the afternoon to "avoid strenuous outdoor activity"?

Cable was installed this morning and is halfway working. There's not enough signal coming in on some frequencies. Looks like a big dead spot at 693-711 MHz, and also 555-567. If I remove every splitter and go straight from the pole tap to the DVR, the rest that I've tried come in fine. A couple channels right below each of those ranges are also very touchy, showing the difference between a split signal and a straight run the best. Of course I don't want to remove every splitter, and thus disconnect my modem and second TV, but I'll do it for diagnosis.

Now to do something with the information. And I won't be at home with as much spare time for another week.

IDOT, thanks for doing highway 20 at the same time the toll road has Elgin ramps closed for construction.  I'm glad I don't commute except by train (and two days this quarter it looks like I'll have to go to Lisle).  @dragonjaze will be unimpressed when she hears.

The way Illinois bureaus couldn't care less about coordinating with each other is a detriment to quality of life around here, which is something state level agencies also couldn't care less about.  See also: Metra-Pace schedule coordination.

232.2 this morning, probably slightly aided by ongoing dehydration. Although really, it's been so hot that we've had the air on all week, and it's actually a little cooler inside than it was before we were forced to do that. I have to mow the lawn today, possibly the hottest day of the year, due to having been on-call the last week. I should get a reading tomorrow morning to see what that does to me. I may lose half a pound in peeling skin after getting burned up today. Wait ... OK, I did remember to buy sunscreen some time recently. That will help.

The lawn mowing is required today due to the return of cable television to the house tomorrow morning. The back lawn is high enough to lose a cable guy in right now. The front has gone pleasantly dormant and doesn't need to be touched until next week when the forecast drops 15-20 degrees.

I grew up here. This is a contradiction:

"Expect about a week of sizzling temperatures, mostly in the lower to mid-90s, according to the National Weather Service."

Sizzling, Sun-Times? It's just finally getting seasonal. I'm not saying I enjoy it, but it's not that bad. It has to be at least 97 to sizzle, and that's not forecast:

Of course, I could live here:

How did she get me to start looking at those forecasts?

ROTFL:  http://youtu.be/FJ7QsEytQq4 (via Gapers Block)

Now if only I had friends who understood one word of it ....

Really, Amazon? You're offering to buy back a calendar of the current year in July? And you couldn't have made this offer two weeks ago, before it became one of the worst six month late Xmas gifts in memory?

Most of the things I could have said for the last week were omitted because I've had my computer off a lot of the time. I should get something set up on my phone to inflict maximum damage on you people.

Wednesday I broke my work laptop's mouse, so I shut down my personal computer and moved its trackball over. That kept, barring wasting ten seconds moving it back, me from using my computer Thursday and Friday. On Saturday I overcompensated by getting two mice and a trackball. I did the west suburban computer store triple play: MicroCenter in Westmont, Fry's in Downers Grove, and CompUSA in Naperville. I got two clearance mice at MicroCenter: one very ordinary Microsoft mouse, and one Kensington mini-mouse (but not micro-) with a retractable cord. Later I got the Kensington Expert Mouse, which is a four-button trackball plus a scroll ring. So Saturday night and Sunday I was back up.

Monday morning was the great Chicago storm, which both was and wasn't. It wasn't more than 30 minutes of rain, five of them heavy. But those five minutes of heavy rain came in a storm front that supposedly had hurricane-force winds that took out power to almost 870,000 area customers at one point. I had just sat down to work and got about twenty minutes in when it happened. Power stayed off for a little over 13 hours, coming on just as we were settling into a hot bed for an uncomfortable night. We were lucky, judging by reports that 350,000 of those customers were still down at 11:00 AM yesterday and 250,000 at 11:00 PM. I did have to throw out most of what was in the refrigerator, despite it not being opened, but the restoration was quick enough to give everything in the freezers passing marks.

Yesterday everything was fine here, except I was busy making up for missing a day of work so I didn't get to do anything personal.

All that downtime saved you from hearing about things like my Green Lantern dream, in which my only power was to set things on fire, which I mainly did to women that wouldn't get out of the way when I was shopping for skirts at the mall. I was less hero, more transvestite misogynist pyromaniac loner that happened to drive a green station wagon. I had no sidekick, because I had no friends.

To save another post, because it's Wednesday: 235.8, still under 100 when I remember to check.

My on-call week starts in a few hours. It looks busy. I know I'm up all night Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, at least.

Whatever has been happening recently, whether it's the seasonal weather, distractions with video games, or whatever, it's working. I somehow made it through a reverse surprise birthday party with the diet intact but having sacrificed my dignity to it. That's what happens with @dragonjaze's family, and it's not really worthy of comment.

(Reverse surprise party: when you insist there's no party this weekend when the guests ask about someone's birthday plans, then call them up three hours before dinner is served on Sunday and tell them they have to show up. OK, there's a slightly longer story than that, which was so predictable that I knew it before it was ever told. Again, all normal for that family.)

It's Wednesday again, and it's time to get another number from the flat bathroom accessory. It was oddly unsettled this morning, not giving me a single reading the first couple checks. Then it decided on a number and stayed there, so that's what I'll go with: 238.0. That's 5.0 off for the week. Not too bad. Better yet, from my doctor's perspective, I went another week without another 100+ sugar reading. (When I remember to get them, that is. I sat down and ate dinner next to my meter twice in the last week without remember to check first.) If I've actually figured out my issues and can keep this up, I might be able to start eating again by winter.

The APR on my credit union savings account dropped from 0.1% to 0.05% in May. Well, my budget's blown. That's a 2¢ difference every month on the $500 balance I keep there.

At great personal risk, I have validated that Civ 3 remains as addictive as ever. Do not touch if you value anything resembling productivity.

Also, it is way too easy on "Cheiftan". I can't remember the last time I won, but I just did, and it had been obvious that I would for most of the 20th century.  "Ceaser the Pathetic" got a diplomatic victory ... without even meeting a majority of the world's civilizations. I didn't even meet my immediate neighbor until around 1000 AD. Seriously, check out my world map:

I'll get back into it at a real difficulty level in a couple months. The urge to play it has been satisfied for now.

We were supposed to have a high of 97 today. I never saw it pass 87. What happened? How are we supposed to kill off our elderly with this excuse for a summer?