Archives October 2002

This getting dark by 6 deal is a bummer. I don’t get a chance to fly my plane afterwork anymore. 🙁 I may have to take it to work and try to get some lunch time flying in.

Last night I finally attempted to fix the garage door problem. I reversed the two electric eyes. It worked! It is nice to be able to close the door during the daytime again. 🙂

Last night I watched the Wizards/Raptors game because I wanted to see how Jordan looked. I came in during the 4th quarter. It was sad. Jordan looked old and slow. In the space of a couple minutes he clanked 2 free throws, missed a dunk and had a pass stolen. Having ample knee problems myself I can only imagine what playing pro basketball on bad knees is like. I feel bad for him. It is hard to know that you used to be able to perform at a certain level physically and not be able to do it anymore. Hopefully he gets better as the season goes on. I am certainly pulling for him, but last night I felt embarrassed for him. The game itself was horrendous to watch. So sloppy. The NBA just isn’t that fun to watch anymore except for a couple of teams.

This morning I had to scoop a toad out of the pool that was swimming around. The last thing I need is a pool full of tadpoles!

Last night was our Halloween preparation night. We have not carved a pumpkin since we have been down in Florida, but Ali has a pumpkin carving contest at work so we picked one up. My job was the gutting of the pumpkin. It was odd, up north I am used to the inside of a pumpkin being cold and clammy from sitting out in 40-50 degree temperatures. Our Florida pumpkin was hot inside. 🙂 Ali did a nice job of carving. We finished up the night by watching the Peanuts Halloween special. (We have em all on tape) Even though I have seen it a couple dozen times, I still laugh.

Went to bed at 9:30, really tired from the prior nights football game.

Told Ali my spending binge was my last this year. She let’s me get away with a lot. 🙂

Well I didn’t puke at the gym but I sure was tired. Nothing makes me sweat more than leg work.

The time change has had several adverse effects to our daily routine. First, the electric eye on our garage door is flaky and doesn’t work well when there is any sunlight present. Since it is now bright and sunny when we leave, the damn door won’t close. Secondly, when we get home at night it is pitch dark so the outside floodlight is on. This light brings thousands of bugs which in turn brings out the hoardes of toads and frogs. Before we can open the door we have to battle through the insect swarms to chase the frogs and toads away from the outside of the garage door. Once we do clear them out it is a mad dash inside to minimize the amounts of bugs that follow us into the garage. Crazy stuff.

Watched the Eagles on MNF last night. It was another frustrating game. They won but it was ugly. They dominated the game on the ground but couldn’t score points. A couple of lucky breaks that would have went the Giants way and the Birds could have wound up losing a game where they rushed for almost 300 yards! Well a win is a win, I just hope they start clicking on all cylinders. Donovan hasn’t had a good passing performance since he signed the big contract.

It seems like my ex-coworkers up north enjoy analyzing my appearance on the webcam. Oh well it’s funny.

We scored 2, 1 day free passes to Disney from one of Ali’s friends. Looks like we will be doing a 1 day Disney blitz sometime in the next couple weeks.

I went on a bit of a buying binge today. A longer firewire cable, a better battery charger for the plane, a collection of battery packs for it, a used xbox and 2 games all in the space of 24 hours. Yea it is a little over the top. My extra income from Sov more than covers it but I need to cool it. I seem to be a binge spender. Comes and goes in cycles. I am constantly on the look out for more items around the house to sell on Ebay to help offset stuff like this.

Another weekend flies by. Busy busy weekend. Saturday we/I cleaned, pressure washed the bird cages, cleaned all the outside bird feeders, dug out 2 new planting beds to put the plants we bought earlier in the week, installed new steering wheel and repaired clock in the Buick and went out to dinner. I also flew my new plane for the first time. It was rough going early on but my last 2 flights have been crash free except for some rough landings. It is a cool plane much more manueverable than my Firebird XL.

Sunday we had some friends over and watched football most of the day. We had tons of food and I ate like a pig. Gonna punish myself in the gym today. I”l do legs till I barf.

I have my webcam at work setup. During the day it will be on different things in my office, after hours it will be used to babysit my fish. 🙂

Is there a better name is women’s tennis than “Anna Smashnova”? It CAN’T be her real name, no way.

I watched a little bit of the world series. It’s amazing how disinterested I am in baseball now. When I was a teenager it was EVERYTHING to me. Now teams rosters change so often it doesn’t pay to be a fan. I enjoy football so much more. Side note, how lazy are we as a society that we now use big dildo looking balloon contraptions to make noise at games instead of just clapping and yelling? Are we that lazy? And that idiotic Angels fan that thought it would be fun to beat the Giants outfielder on the back with her noise maker, I’m glad she was ejected, hopefully she was fined too. Brainless lemmings.

Remember those catfish I saved and put into the top section of our pond? I went looking for them over the weekend but couldn’t find them. Granted the water was very cloudy so I couldn’t see but I had my hand all over the bottom and didn’t feel one. Odd. However, somehow we now have a crayfish in that top section. No idea how he got there either.

Eagles play the Giants tonight in MNF, gonna be a late night. Medium coffee is on the breakfast menu for tomorrow morning for sure.

Have more Sov contract work lined up so Ali and I splurged at Home Depot last night and bought a bunch of plants and grasses to landscape another area in the back yard. Should look good. I got a chance to put together the rest of my RC plane as well. Looks cool, hope I can fly it without major carnage. 🙂

This weekend is shaping up to a busy one. We have to clean, mow,and landscape. We may have some friends over Sunday and I have some work I would like to get done on the Buick. I’d also like to fly my new plane as well as about half a dozen other miscellaneous jobs. Guess it is better than having nuthin to do.

Watched the Bachelor on tivo last night. I liked that Heather chick he got rid of last night. Too bad she didn’t light his candle. Gwen is too old and Brooke seems too dumb. It will be interesting to see who he chooses. Also saw Survivor, glad to see Rob get kicked, he was an embarassment to the male race, as dumb as they get. Surprised the old folks are hanging in there as well as they are. It was cool when Ted took over defending Rob in the challenge and shut him down. (Yea I watch reality TV, so sue me) 🙂

Got the new plane yesterday. Spent last night decorating it with various Eagle artwork and giving it a modest paintjob. Ali doesn’t like the scary mask with eagle logo that I adorned the main wings with. 🙂 Hoping to get the electronics hooked up tonight. We are blowing off the gym tonight to check out the plant sale at Home Depot. I went (to the gym) the last 3 days, I’ll go again tomorrow, no big deal. Had the webcam pointed at the new plane today. Been working on a new flash intro with Tim for the ZM site. Looks pretty good.

Sold my JumpSoles on ebay. I try to avoid high impact on the joints anymore, not promote it. 🙂 Someone finally bought my satellite mounting arm after 2 unsuccessful tries!! Coworker sent this very funny flash movie. Check it out, you’ll laugh.

Was going to try to rescue the couple remaining catfish but it rained hard yesterday so the drainage ditch is full again. I will have to wait a few days for it to dry up.

Today I should be getting my new RC plane kit It is a step up in difficulty from my Firebird XL but I hope to get it in the air this weekend. It has much more acrobatic capability than the XL since it is a 3 channel set up. Should be interesting to see how it goes.

Got the repaired clock back for the Buick. Opened the box and everything reeked of cigarette smoke. Guess the guy likes to smoke while he works. 🙂 Also should get the new steering wheel Friday. Hopefully this weekend I will get to install both things in the car.

Last night I got the webcam setup! I am using my digital sony camcorder as the webcam device. It seems to be working well. I may also set up a 2nd cam here at work. We will see how it goes.

Last night at the gym I was talking to a guy I know that teaches 8th grade down here. He told me how sad the state of education is down here. Up till now kids were being administratively pushed through the grade levels regardless of their grades. In the next year or two they are going to use FCAT scoring as a basis for promoting students. An FCAT score ranges from 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest). You need a 2 to advance. He said he would not be surprised if HALF of his students would not be able to score a 2. A lot of his 8th graders read at a 4th grade level. It sounds like the shit is going to hit the fan once this mandatory system goes into place. You could have thousands of students being held back causing all sorts of backups in the school system. Could be a MAJOR mess. Can someone remind me of why I should want to have kids again??

More fish adventures. Last night I noticed the 2 front drainage ditches were almost dried up so I decided to be proactive and see if there were more catfish in the little water that was left. I scooped out another 6 of them! They ranged in size from 3 inches to a monster that was 10 inches long or longer. I couldn’t get the big one out he was too big for the net. I will see if I can get him after work tonight. I put the ones I DID capture into the upper part of our 2 tier pond. We have 3 goldfish in the bottom part. I am a little nervous about putting the catfish with the goldfish. We have the shell from the old pond sitting around. I will probably wind up finding a good spot to dig a hole and put the catfish in the old pond shell. After talking to some other people out in my area I found out that there is such a thing as “walking” catfish. Much in the same way of that oriental fish that was in the news, certain catfish can sort of walk and survive out of water for short amounts of time. That would explain how they wind up scattered around the yard.

Last night I was messing with getting my digital camcorder to do double duty as a webcam. It appears that I can do it, EXCEPT that when the camera is in standby mode (not recording) it shuts off in 3 minutes. I am going to try pulling the tape out of it and see how it acts. This would free me up to bring that webcam I got from the neighbors into work to set up the much anticipated FISH CAM!

Ali had me watch a show on DIYNET about Ding Darling sanctuary last night. The sanctuary is down here in our neck of the woods. The birds they showed in the show were great. However the hosts were a man and wife that were SOOOO into bird watching it almost made me embarrassed that I like birds. 🙂 Sooooooo corny.

Watched the Steelers beat up on the Colts last night. Seems they have turned things around after looking like a joke the first few games. Tommy Maddox definitely appears to be an upgrade over Kordell at this point. I watched Maddox in the XFL and he was solid. He won the championship there. Yea it was the XFL but still….

Lunch break, run to the bank and deposit 2 checks. 1 of them was for some consulting work I did for Sov. It was made out to “Duffey Consulting Services” but I thought nothing of it. After picking the slowest line in the drive up. (I ALWAYS manage to do that), the lady comes over the speaker and says they can not do anything with the check since it is made out to a business. I said huh? It has my last name in it and my address??!! Doesn’t matter. So I get the check back and then notice that instead of returning 20 in cash from the other check, she gave me 40. SO I have to go into the lobby and wait another 15 minutes to talk to them inside. Again I try to plead my case with the teller, telling her how I waited awhile for this check and how much of a hassle it is to get it reissued. No dice. So I have to get Sov to reissue a check made out to me. Wonder how long that will take. So I spent half an hour of my lunch to only get frustrated and annoyed. I already ordered that new RC plane this morning which was my “fun” cut of that check. Oh well.

Afterwards I quickly dropped off some old clothes we pulled out while we were moving our clothes to the new furniture at the donation place. Ali wanted to go through the bag and pull out the old underwear that was in it but thankfully I convinced her that the donation people will get rid of whatever they cant use. (yes all the clothes had been washed)

Whew, hot annd humid out there again. Looks like the cold front was only a tease for what will be coming. Ali laid out at our pool this weekend but wouldn’t go in the water, the water was too cold. It was 81 degrees. 🙂 Sheesh.

We got our new furniture this weekend. The only negative was one of the chests had some wood broken by the feet. They will either repair or more likey replace the chest. It looks great. Alison is very excited. We have never had a matching set of anything furniture-wise. Look for pics of it on Ali’s site soon. Found more mystery fish around the property this weekend again. More catfish but these were big ones, 5-6 inches long at least. Freaky stuff.

Helped the neighbor rip down their old antennae and satellite dish. They had 2 webcams, they only needed one. I offered to buy it from them and they said I could have it. Sweet! I am going to try setting it up at work to do a fish tank web cam. Yea, dumb but there are lotsa dumb things on the net. 🙂

Big Eagles win yesterday. The offense was hurting but they did just enough to get the job done. The defense played great. My major angina came when they started to play a soft prevent when they were only up 10. I never will understand why a team who had success all game by applying pressure on the QB all day switched to prevent at the end of a game. A good win though, it shows the Eagles belong with the upper level of teams in the NFC.

Even though we did a decent amount of work this weekend, I still sorta feel like I was a bum. Weird. Friday night was our big softball game. We played the appraiser’s office. Their team was more or less organized. Most people on their team had played before and they had mostly men on their team. Our team consisted of mostly women who NEVER played before. It was rough. I think the final score was 14-7 and they took it easy on us. I didn’t play very well. Had a couple hits but also had an embarrasing pop up with 2 people on base. I played the outfield and had to cover 2/3’s of it myself cause our girls did not know what to do. I played too shallow in the beginning and had to chase down alot of balls. It was equally frustrating as it was fun, however I would do it again under different circumstances.