It's midnight, why am I blogging?

Frankly it's because I don't think I'll be sleeping any time soon. This despite the fact that I spent the latter half of today feeling a lot like I spent the first half drinking cheap corn whiskey out of mason jar filled with old cigarette butts. I barely made it through dinner.

I've been working out a lot lately but balancing that with eating badly and drinking too much. Welcome to my half-iron training plan. Half-assed is a viable description, maybe even half-witted. Certainly haphazard. Okay, enough of that.

It's been a while since we visited the Big Book of Stupid Things Ryan Does. For tonight's reading, we're going to start with last Friday night, at the wine, cheese and chocolate party. I actually got through it unscathed, without even reaching for an emergency beer, though I did get into a rather elliptical (and drunkenly stationary) political argument. Thankfully, other, more intoxicated people were there to break things up by trying far harder than I was to be coherent. I beat it before they figured out how to turn on the karaoke machine.

Made it home around 1AM, tried unsuccessfully to sleep. Valuable lesson learned: When drinking wine and eating chocolate and carb-laden crakers, your body gets a bit jacked up. When you do sleep, your dreams are jittery and Tarantino-like. Lots of jump cuts and marginal acting. Surreal montages of dancing costumed characters like the ones at Disneyland only creepier. But I digress.

I finally entered this, let's call it a fugue state, at about 3AM. Just in time to have the alarm go off at 6 so I could head down to Coronado and help the TNT squad learn to grab water bottles while cycling. Valuable lesson learned: When newbies unload their used bottles, check their hand position and be ready to duck.

After the TNTers wrapped up, it was time to do my training for the day, which consisted of crashing Katie's far gnarlier than anticipated workout. Stay off the Strand at 1PM. And definitely at 3. Trust me. Even without sweating out red wine, it sucks when you get blown out of your aero bars. And the running is best left undiscussed.

Needless to say, when I made it home around 7PM I was largely non-functional.

Sleep helped, though I crashed right through my planned Sunday surf session. What's one more week's worth of dust on the board? Did manage a cove swim, though not the planned 2-miler. (There's always this week, right?) And then it was off to meet Mark for a beer...er, Mark and Tauni for four pitchers...

Monday sucked. And the visit to UCLA didn't help matters. Have I ever mentioned my irrational loathing of the City of Angels? Another post entirely.

Skip forward to last night and the 80's cover band at the House of Blues. How do you go wrong with a fat bassist in a Devo costume, a singer dressed like Spiccoli (complete with white zinc on the nose) and a wannabe Slash on lead guitar? You just can't, I tell ya. You just can't. Especially when they know Don't Stop Believin' AND Come On Eileen. Oh, and we got free tickets to see Dramarama. Even though the cover guys played Anything, Anything, so I get to be all blase about it and compare the originals to their imitators. Hope they bring their A game.

Again, too much beer and a sketchy salad led to weird dreams and not enough sleep, so of course I got up and joined Brian and the gang for a swim this morning. I missed the bat rays, but I did see a seal. And I swam like I was still drunk. Brian, you couldn't stay in my slipstream because it was a moving target. I blame the currents. Yeah. Currents. Not the Red Trolley. What would a trolley be doing in the Cove anyway?

I'll close with this: I got a call today from a client telling me that the audio on their main display had gone out. I tried everything I could think of to fix it remotely. I rebooted their computers. I had the guy on site check the TV volume and make sure no one had turned it down. I read PC log files looking for weird cryptic error codes. Finally, I gave up and drove down to El Cajon to see for myself. Guess what? They had unplugged the #$%#!@ speaker.

And curtain.