Archives May 2004

First things first, since some of you only read this for the pictures, they are located here. Be sure to read the captions.

Troy’s flight was’t getting in until late. It turned out to be even later when he called me and said that due to some storms in the south, his connection had been delayed an hour, meaning his touch down time in Fort Myers was a few minutes before midnight, ugh. Oh well, I picked him up and while I was waiting I grabbed a latte from Starbucks. When I tried to fall asleep that night I was cursing myself for drinking it. A dreary eyed way to start the visit.

On Friday we tried to lay out some game plans for the weekend. There were several things we were talking about doing like going to the casino, the beach, and the dogtrack during the course of his visit. However on Friday we elected to do none of these things and instead decided to grab lunch at the beach and then headed out to the airboat place. On the way out I was describing how old fashioned this place was. I had my camera ready to snap a picture of the “DANGER, MICROWAVE IN USE” sign from the 60’s that has adorned the front door of this place for as long as I have been coming. Wouldn’t you know they have started to actually do some renovations and the sign was no longer there, bummer! They had a new door, a new sign and redid the ticket booth as well. However, Troy still could get a good sense of the age of this place by the many things that were still apparently untouched from the 50’s that were everywhere. Even though I probably have been on the airboats 7 or 8 times by now it still is entertaining enough that I don’t mind going again for our first time guests. I also took Troy to see the country’s smallest functional post office as well as quick spin through Everglades City. Everglades City is so small that it has one school for ALL grades K-12. It is another place that looks like it has been largely untouched for 30 or 40 years.

After we got home we had to clean up to go to the ECHL hockey game. It was a pretty raucous crowd considering we are talking about hockey that is 2 levels away frm NHL quality. The crowd was really into it but sadly the opposing team just wore down the Blades and wound up winning 4-1. Troy and I drank a decent amount which meant we made frequent bathroom visits, which in turn meant we waited in big lines. Well in truth my line wasn’t as bad because I decided to take a walk to the practice rinks and go there. However, those areas are VERY cold which made the feeling of urgency multiply exponentially. There was the normal amount of sillyness you would expect at a game, people with colored faces, dressed up in costume and plenty of drunken people to laugh at. It took us a good 45 minutes to just get out of the lot after the game.

On Saturday we had the dog track on the schedule. Troy wanted to go to watch and bet on the Preakness. However in the morning I had to run in to work to address an issue so we got to the track a little later than we expected. I had never been to a dog or horse track before so it was all new stuff for me. My first impression was dubious as we passed two drunken, staggering rednecks on their way back out to their cars while yelling at the little kid that was with to hurry up in language that is not suitable for blogging, nice. Once we got to the clubhouse it was a nice surprise, very clean and modern. I was immediately struck by the imagery of loser tickets scattered about, people intently studying odds books like they were studying for SAT’s and the intensity of people watching the various races taking place simultaneously on the dozens of screens. We settled into a nice spot where we had our own TV’s and a good view of the track. I was impressed by the technology of the entire system. You basically could throw money in a terminal, get a credit voucher and then place bets for this track or any of the other dozen or so that were running instantaneously. It was really cool. If you win the payout was immediatwely reflected when you pumped the winning ticket back into the machine. The amount of ways you could bet and the strategy behind the bettting was way beyond what I could take in during one sitting. I stuck with simple small bets, usually betting on the favorite. I had a few small winners but probably wound up losing 20 to 30 bucks overall. It wasn’t bad for 4+ hours of entertainment. It was really an experience seeing the dogs run. They were much faster than I imagined, they absolutely flew around the 1/4 mile track. They did it in about 30 seconds. It was very funny to watch them gate up the dogs, in almost every race one or more of the dogs had to stop and relieve itself before hand, nerves maybe? Then as the pace rabbits came around you could see the dogs pawing at the door, going crazy to chase it. Funny stuff. Since my new found fondness for dogs I felt a little uneasy because I have heard the stories of how greyhounds have a rough life. However they looked very happy to be chasing that rabbit so I didn’t think of it much. I really enjoyed the track, I am sure I will be back. Saturday night was low key, we ate pizza, drank beer and watched The Rundown on Pay-per-view. It was another late night.

Sunday was the big finale, although you wouldn’t know it. Ali was going shopping with my mom that day so Troy and I had most of the day to ourselves. We talked about hitting the beach, maybe the casino but nothing concrete. It was blustery and raining outside in the morning so we decided to fire up the XBox and play some NFL2K4. Troy and I have a long running football video game history dating back to the early Madden games. During the history of our contests I have a stellar winning percentage with Troy only stealing a few games here and there when I was off my game. However with NFL 2K4, I had only played the game maybe twice since I got it for Christmas and I hadn’t played it for at least 5 months so I was far from polished in my gameplay. It showed in the first game as I suffered an embarrasing loss of 28-3. Of course I couldn’t leave it at that and we played 2 more games that were hard fought but I wound up winning both pretty convincingly by the end. Our mini-tournament took us into the early afternoon and we still really hadn’t done anything. The skies had cleared so we decided to quickly pack up and hit the beach. The beach wasn’t that full so that was a nice change. We went in the Gulf, it was nearly 80 degrees. As we were standing there cooling off, we noticed what appeared to be a large man standing out in the water down from us. As our eyes focused, we realized what we were looking at was in reality a large woman that had her bathing suit top off! It was not an appealing image. She must have been european as she stood out there for a long time in that state. She pulled the suit up to exit the water and then Troy said he saw her lying on her blanket sans top again. Nasty. After some more relaxing, we grabbed a drink at the bar located right off the beach and then headed home.

Ali was suprised by our lack of activity for the day but we enjoyed ourselves so that was all that was important. Sunday night we wrapped things up with a trip to the Snook Inn for a very relaxing and enjoyable dinner. We take almost everyone that comes down there, it is just such a great place. Sitting by the water, listening to live music in open air is just fantastic. On the way back we stopped at a huge beach souveneir place where we had fun trying on hats and checking out all the paraphinalia. Troy wanted to pick up some things for his daughter. Once we got home it was late but even so we had to have one more XBox football match to prove decidely who was the dominant player. I won by 2 scores, however for almost 3 quarters it was a zero zero deadlock so we were more evenly matched than the final score showed.

This morning I got up a little early in order to drop him off at the airport. It was great having him visit, hopefully he gets to do it on a more regular basis. Next scheduled visitors are my brother and sister-in-law memorial day weekend then in June we have my dad and Alison’s brother coming down. We are making up for lost time since we had next to zero visitors during the past year. Today I am feeling a bit drained from a lot of late nights and consumption of much more alcohol than is normal. Long blog but what did you expect?

Oh yea, I finally kicked the cold/flu thing over the weekend. It hung on about as long as any illness I can recall having.

It was ironic that the local ECHL hockey team, the Everblades were playing the team from my old home town, the Reading Royals. It was a great series that the Blades managed to pull out. I jumped on the bandwagon and got 3 tickets for game 1 of the championship series on Friday. Keener is going to go with us. Should be fun.

I picked up the cat yesterday. She was back to normal more or less. The treatment plan calls for halfing her insulin dosage and montioring her progress from there. Did I mention I am sick of cats? The grand total in vet bills for this go round was about 300 dollars.

When I read of the video taped beheading of the American civilian that is out there, it made me ill. I have no desire to see that clip, it would just haunt me. It just reaffirms my hatred for these insane bastards. I am getting to the point where I just want to get our people out of Iraq and let the country fall into chaos like it is going to do anyway the moment we leave. I mean what is the point? They hate us, it is costing us a fortune to be there and once we let them off the leash they will immediately turn to civil war as the preferred method to establish a government. However don’t let my aversion to staying in Iraq lead you to think I don’t want every one of these terrorist bastards that continue to take shots at our people to pay dearly. If we capture those murderers that beheaded that man are we going to complain if they get rough treatment in prison? It’s just a no win situation however I look at it. The world is just f’d. It’s not a matter of if it will all blow apart, just how long till it happens.

Yep I’m still ill. This morning I was coughing, sneezing and blowing my nose non-stop. I am going to the gym today for the first time in over a week and try to burn this shit out of me. Going to do an hour of hard cardio.

Last night was unpleasant. Shortly after we got home, I was working on my computer and looked over at Buttons, the diabetic cat. She was meowing loudly and looked like she was getting ready to heave like she does on a psuedo-regular basis. I told Ali and she came in with a paper towel trying to catch the mess. Well after a bit it became obvious ther was something else going on. The cat’s toungue was hanging out of her mouth and she was panting at an unbelieveably fast rate. She was sort of staggering around as well. The Ali yells, SHE’s PEEING! Oh great. I didn’t know what was going on, if she was having a stroke, a heart attack, or a seizure. I scooped her into a box and took her out on the lanai. I let her out and she continued staggering, panting, meowing and then she dropped a number 2 as well. Ali called the emergency animal hospital and of course they advise we bring her in as fast as possible. It was decided I would be the one to take her since I would be the more reasonable one if it came down to some sort of decision on the cat’s well being. This place is open from 5pm to 8am every night, weird but tailored to these types of situatons and as I later found out, custom tailored to try to financially rape anyone that needs their services.

The first thing when I got in the door I had to fill out a form and agree to a 69 dollar charge regardless of what action was necessary. They took her back and came out shortly afterward saying her blood sugar was very low, and this was a hypo-glycemic reaction. This has never happened before so I was surprised to hear this. The Vet outlined a treatment plan which I said was fine and then she said she would prepare an estimate and send it out. One of the assistants presented me with the estimate, it had a low and high end number. The low end was 335 bucks and the high end was over 500. Woah! I immediately expressed my surprise and concern over this huge number and told her I needed to call my wife. This is why I went, because Ali would have just rubber stamped any treatment plan without regard to the cost, it’s just her way.

I went back in and asked to talk to the vet to go over the “estimate” When she came out I expressed my concern over the high costs we were being quoted and began to go over the estimate line by line. Included were a number of diagnostic tests that may have been helpful however they were unnecessary to stabilize the cat. I explained that in the past we have dropped big bucks on her condition when she was first diagnosed and there was a financial line that I did not want to cross. The cat is over 10 years old, has bad teeth, and has puking issues so I am not going to throw a fortune into treatment. She is getting to be an old cat and the diabetes acclerates this. We agreed upon a slimmed down plan that still cost me over 200 bucks. I just really hate how operations like that seem to take advantage of you because they know you have few options.

We picked the cat up this morning. She seemed better. We are taking her to our normal vet today to get a workup to see if we need to adjust her insulin level. Apparently what happened yesterday was because for some reason the cat ate very little yesterday and as a result, the insulin pulled her blood sugar level way down, causing the reaction. It will be interesting to see what the revised plan is. I had such a headache when I got home last night, hopefully the news is good. I’m just not willing to go to extremes to maintain our cats at this point. They are both getting up there and when it is their time, I am willing to let them go.

The weekend was ok, even though I was and still am feeling sick I loaded up on cold meds to help me be able to function enough to get the stuff done I wanted to. My illness has transformed from just being extremly lethargic and weak to having an infinitely runny nose along with a good dose of sneezing, coughing and looking like I just got done cutting a dozen onions. I’m really sick of it. (no pun intended) I was a good son and took my Mom out to dinner for Mother’s day.

The Survivor finale was great. So much drama, hurt feelings, backstabbing and twists that it is pointless to try to recap it all. Just a few points:

Jenna was stupid to backstab Rupert.

I never saw 2 finalists get hammered at the final vote as much as Rob and Amber did, however, what Shi_Ann said was quite true. Anyone complaining about being backstabbed didn’t have much of a leg to stand on, it is part of the game. Lex was the biggest complainer about being done wrong yet he cut the legs out from multiple people himself.

Amber actually looked BETTER on the island. She looked like trailer trash at the finale.

Rob looked like he has been sucking on a helium tank, he fattened right up.

Richard Hatch is a camera hog

They focused too much on the Rob/Amber stuff in the after show, they didn’t talk to half of the people

I can’t believe Rob proposed to Amber, what is the over/under till that ends?

Plastic surgery is amazing, they actually made Sue look like a woman

The Tom fake handshake was an all-time classic

What is with Jeff Probst, standing out on the landing gear of the copter just holding on with one hand? Little turbulence and bye bye Jeffy.

I thought in was in poor taste to show 10 promos for the upcoming Charles Manson documentary…. stupid.

It was the best Survivor to date.

The house next door SOLD. Woohoo, my property value just shot up 50k more than I thought it was worth! Down the street there is an empty lot for sale, it is the same size as ours that we paid roughly 23k for 3 years ago, it is listed for 87k! Incredible.

The house that is being built right next to our place had an info/sales sheet in a tube on the realtor sign. Being nosy, I grabbed one. The house being built is slighter bigger than ours, it has 3 car garage opposed to our 2 and it will have 4 bedrooms as opposed to the 3 we have. It is on a smaller lot than ours and does not include a pool, paved driveway or outside storage shed.. The sale price floored me, 335k! The idea that someone would pay that much money to put up with the hassles we do living out there amazes me. However I am pulling whole heartedly for it to sell for that. Such a sale would set the bar very high on our property value which will greatly benefit us. If we can just put up with the inconvenience for awhile yet there could be a big payoff down the road.

I have spent a good 4 or 5 hours working on a pc here that has some ultra-resilient spyware installed on it. I have cleaned it repeatedly both automatically using tools like SpyBot and AdAware and manually gone in and deleted rouge files. The damn thing reinstalls itself after cleanup. It is just crazy how dug in some of this junk can be. I am not sure what is worse at this point, spyware, spam or viruses/worms. If your spyware detection software flags something called Evula, watch out, you are in for a lot of headaches.

Weekend is basically a house chores session. I am hoping I get some strength back so I can do it all. Right now I still feel pretty terrible.

I like disaster movies, they entertain me. When I saw the previews for 10.5 starting a month or so ago it looked fantastic, awesome special effects, things blowing up all over the place, great stuff. Well I suffered through 4 hours of it. It sucked. It had some of the worst acting I may have ever seen in a movie. Bo Duke was in it as a middle aged dad, I just wanted to see him jump the General Lee. It sucks seeing him as an old dude. The story lines they had going were way too many, way too sappy and very poorly written. They used a lot of the “24” style of production where you have multiple windows going at once, that was extremely annoying. If anyone else sat through this I would love to know your opinions. The special effects were good, that was it, and unlike most disaster flicks where crisis is averted, this one ends with southern california becoming an island. Total waste of time.

Last night was Big Band night on American Idol. Damn it was boring. I don’t quite understand the reasoning behind having these kids sing all these genres of music when it is all about being a pop star. Didn’t enjoy it one bit. What was up with Paula crying at the end?

I have been home sick the past 2 days. It’s an odd illness where the main problem is I feel extremely weak and achy like you do when you have the flu but I don’t have the other symptoms. Just standing up makes me tired. Hope to kick it soon, feeling ill really gets me down.

I woke up without the alarm on Saturday morning. I didn’t feel any better than the day before but I didn’t feel any worse either so I guess that was all I could ask for. I pulled out of my place solo (we decided ALi would stay home to watch the dog) at about 5:45 am. The tourney website said you had to be there by 8 or risk paying a 10 dollar late fee. Well of course I didn’t want to pay more. I got there way early, about 7:25 am. I checked in, waited for my partner to show, applied sunblock, went to the bathroom a few times and waited and waited. Our pool play did not begin till 10 am which sucked. They said it was due to a “computer glitch” F that, if the computers don’t work do the pools by hand.

This was the first time I ever played with a “blind” partner, I never even met him before. He is a funny guy and a good player. We started out the day well, we jumped to an 8-0 lead in the first game and then stuck. We were playing a team that just was not good and somehow we let them get back into it and I think we were actually down to them 8-9 at one point. We came back and won the game but it was way closer than it should have been. In doubles it is crucial to know what your partner will and won’t get because if you both go for a ball usually it ends up badly. We had a bunch of that going on.

Game 2 was against some young asian kids. They warmed up forever and then just before the match they dropped and did some pushups and handstands, a new experience for me. These kids weren’t awesome hitters but they were good with placement shots and they were fast as hell. Balls I thought they had no shot of getting to they would get up with relative ease. We had a bunch of long rallies with both teams making good saves, however in most of them they wound up winning. The game went on for close to an hour. With temps pushing the upper 80’s with high humidity it was pretty tiring. In the end they won by 3 points.

After that long battle we had to immediately play our 3rd and final game of pool play. I didn’t think about it before the match but this game would determine if we did or didn’t make it to the playoffs. If I had thought about that I may have played with more desperation. It was a team that we should have beaten pretty easily. Like all the other games we shot out to an early lead and then faltered. A lot of sloppy plays and unforced errors on our side did us in. That last loss hurt the worst.

Even with the setbacks I think we generally had a good time playing with each other and I think many of the problems we had could be rectified with more regular play. We are going to play another tournament in 3 weeks.

The best part of the tournament was that I came out of it virtually unscathed. No significant limps, no shoulders that felt like I should be in a sling, just 2 brushburns on either knee. That is great and gives me some confidence that I may be able to play some significant hours this season without having to deal with severe week after trauma.

The rest of the weekend was low key. Alison did the majority of the weekend chores while I played which I appreciated. On Sunday we took Nicki back to the dog beach only to find that again we hit it at high tide, even worse than last time, there was no dry beach to be found at all. So we put our gear back in the car and just let her run and play in the water for awhile. She had fun. Later in the day Ali asked me if there was more I wanted to get done and I think she was surprised when I calmly said “Nope”. Even though there were a lot of things I could do, I had some inner discussions where I came to realize that the only one that really cares about all this stuff I do is me. There is no pressure to get all that stuff done every weekend except from myself. I am seriously going to try to ratchet it back as best I can in order to make things less stressful for myself and Ali.

Got to watch the first Kill Bill movie, I enjoyed it, looking forward to seeing the second one.