I got into work this morning and saw that I had voice mail. Yuck. I hate voice mail, in part because I hate talking on the phone. So I listened to my voice mail, and the time stamp was from Sunday morning. What kind of weirdo would call and expect me to be at the office on a Sunday morning? I braced myself for some (perceived) giant emergency. I knew it wasn’t a genuine emergency, because I would have gotten a call on my cell phone for that, but sometimes people think they have emergencies when they don’t really.

Fortunately, it was not an emergency. It was a message from a faculty member I helped on Friday. He was just saying thanks for making his Powerpoint work.

You’re welcome, Professor M. Thanks for leaving me voice mail that was pleasant and not crappy. You brightened my Monday morning.

In other news, we bought a treadmill yesterday. We don’t have it yet; the store person is going to call me today to set up a delivery time. I’m looking forward to it. We got a decent deal; this is one of the most basic of the higher-end models, and it was on sale because it’s a floor model. It seemed like the biggest difference between the various higher-end treadmills was the types of programs and the different kind of stats you can get.

I admit, the advanced stats were appealing, but almost every one of the treadmills with lots of statistical features suffered from poor user interface. By default, they are set to calculate calories burned based on some sort of average-weight person, whatever that is. I suspect they were set at about 300 pounds, because then when you test it out, you’re like, “Holy crap, I burned 50 calories in one minute. This is the awesomest treadmill ever!” Anyway, it’s obviously really important to be able to enter your own actual weight if you want any kind of accuracy in the calories burned.

In just about every treadmill I tried (and I tried about 20 of them), I couldn’t figure out how to enter my weight. I know it’s possible, and at one store the guy got out the manual on my request to try to figure it out because he didn’t know either. We couldn’t find it in the manual. I consider myself fairly adept at clunky user interfaces (remember, people, I am the head WebCT administrator for this entire university, and I am occasionally unlucky enough to have to use Microsoft Windows), but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to customize the weight input! Since Denny and I are both going to be using it, I’ll have to change the weight rather frequently.

I really wish Apple made a treadmill. It could be called the iJog, and it would be sleek and sexy and it would definitely have an iPod dock. I asked if any of them had iPod docks yet, and the employee said no. Bummer.

So anyway, the one we got doesn’t have all the super-fancy features, like the automatic customization of a program based on criteria you enter (such as the desire to keep your heart rate at some particular level), but it does have the basics: calorie count, distance and time count, speed count, a handful of programs with varying intensities, and most importantly, an easy and obvious weight input feature.

I’ve only used treadmills a couple of times when I’ve stayed at hotels with gyms, but I liked it pretty well. I like the statistics on the screen. I usually run outside, but colder weather is coming. Also, my evenings for the foreseeable future are going to be filled with New Play Festival and Sweet Charity rehearsals, so I won’t have as many daylight hours at my disposal.

For those of you who were interested (because this is becoming a catch-all post, it seems), I figured out who my character Carmen is in Sweet Charity. She’s one of the Fandango hostesses, and there is no reason you would know her name, because even though she has the name “Carmen” written above her lines in the script, nobody ever addresses her by name in the text.

It’s a small part, but it will be fun–lots of singing and dancing. We’ll see if I’ll have the energy to come home and use my super-rad treadmill.

As a reward for anyone who is dedicated enough to have read my entire post, here is a treat: the most hilarious mugshot in the world.