What sort of sadist would?  I suspect grandparents, getting revenge.  I recall being five and listening to an Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas album on repeat for *hours* on long car trips.

Once again, therefore, I found myself buying little anthropomorphic plastic toy cars.  I swear that the next kid I party with is getting a check.

She says "Oh, no, I put it down, I've got plenty of jewelry and we've got to pinch the pennies this year!"  At this point I figure I have her pegged as "chatty lady", roll my eyes sympathetically and say "tell me about it."

Cause, you know, bad economy.  Recession.  Got to cut some corners.

Drinking really hot tea?  Drinking really cold beer?  Having an annoying phone call where you can feel your blood pressure rise and your face turn red?  Sex (Not NEARLY as many as you'd think)?

Dataaaaa.

When I have some time I'm going to see if there's any hacks online so I can get the data simply exported into a .dat or other type of file.  The statistical and graphing utilities on the program are completely inadequate.

The personal trainer is also pretty fun, and not too expensive.  He's a cute Latino (always a weakness of mine) ex-realtor and I find that having a hottie PT is pretty good motivation to get fit.  I'm seeing pretty good results already. 

When I am excited or stressed about something, I have early waking insomnia.  My wedding day, the day of my proposal defense, before taking neat trips; at 3 AM my brain goes all comicstrip Cathy and starts screaming "GAAAH GET UP."

Which is why I got into work today at 5 AM.  This worked out really well since there were no parking issues, and I got quite a bit of work done before going over at 6 AM to queue for Barack Obama.  We were fairly near the front of the line, and thus, we got absolutely primo seats.  I was directly to the podium's right, about 20 feet away. 

We were warmed up by an array of local Democrat luminaries: Governor Bill Ritter, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, former Denver Mayor Frederico Pena (very friendly and shook my hand), and Golden Mayor Jacob Smith.  The crowd was very keen... one lady burst into the Star Spangled Banner... and she had a *killer* voice.  We had a singalong!

Obama himself was about half an hour late.  He's quite a bit taller than he looks on TV... I'd say at least six feet.  His speech mostly dealt with the economy, presumably due to all the nonsense that went on over the weekend with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.  And you know, a lot of people have criticized him in the past for being too pie-in-the-sky and not having cogent plans etc, but this was a GOOD economy speech despite its dry content.  And he went really in depth in the ~40 minutes he talked.  He wants to improve oversight, reregulate some aspects of the banking and financial services industry, and update regulations so that (for example) mortgage brokers and companies are subject to the same restrictions that commercial banks are.  In fact a lot of the speakers dealt with the need to update obsolete financial regulations to deal with 21st century financial transactions rather than simply toss out existing regulations.

He made some very decent points.  You can check it out here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/amandascott/gG5XWF

There were some really good zingers against McCain and trickledown economics.  I find it hard to express how much I really, really, want him to win this fall.