Holiday sharing
In the spirit of the season, here are 2 funny links:
In the spirit of the season, here are 2 funny links:
I stayed home from work sick yesterday. It’s one of those non-descript “I just kind of feel lousy” kind of things. No energy, sore throat, blah blah blah. I came in to work today because I am going to be off Thursday and Friday anyway. I spent the majority of my sick day just vegging and playing Halo 2. I finished the game. The ending is rather abrupt and not very challenging. I just wasn’t ready for it to be over. Maybe that is a testament to how good the game is, I didn’t want it to end. It is all setup for Halo 3, too bad it will be 2 or 3 years away.
My sis flew in last night for a 5 day visit. I haven’t seen her since she got married 2 July’s ago. Damn that time went fast, unreal. Unfortunately she arrived just as a cold snap did. It was downright cold here last night, this morning it was around 40 degrees. Brrrrrr. It is supposed to be back in the 70’s tomorrow but when these cold snaps hit, they feel extra cold when you aren’t used to them anymore.
Even though we are a couple weeks out from xmas, the blitz is on for us. To make sure stuff gets to people on time we really need to have it all out of here within the next few days. The majority of the xmas cards went out today, there are a few boxes that need to go yet.
My Dad has been known to get “creative” with his gifts over the years. This year was no exception. He arranged for us to get two dragon fruit trees. Ok cool. The catch is they are in Clewiston and I have to go get them. A quick check on mapquest revealed that Clewiston is almost exactly 100 miles away. Why he couldn’t find a more local supplier of fruit trees comes to mind but hey, it’s Dad, I have to admit that I’m not all that surprised. 🙂 So hopefully sometime before the holidays I will have a spare half a day to spend to go get my Christmas present from Padre. Hehe.
It was a busy, exhausting, but rewarding weekend. Saturday was my holiday volleyball tournament over in Fort Lauderdale. I came into it with zero expectations and a determination to relax and not get so bent out of shape if things go wrong. It just isn’t worth it. The weather was quite different from what I am accustomed to playing in. Instead of 90 degrees and 90% humidity it was in the lower 70’s and low humidity. Ali was along and she was actually cool enough to be under towels throughout the day. However it was great weather to play in. The last time I played at Lauderdale it was a mess. The sand is deep and I played like shit. There were 2 nets in the BB division. I had not even looked at a volleyball since South Beach so I knew there would be issues with being out of practice.
Our first match was against 2 asian young guys. Historically, every Asian player I play is lighting quick, can jump like mad and generally frustrate the hell out of me. We were a bit lucky as they were out of practice as well, just like us. I guess we were a little less out of practice as we won the game 15-7. Our play was not flashy with bullet serves and rocket hits. It was more hustle around, save a ball here, place a shot there, make smart serves, kind of play.
Our second game was against some guys we have played before. It was back and forth for a little while but then we took control of that game and won 15-8. Our 3rd game was against 2 tall, lanky, high school kids that were very good indoor players. We had a marathon game with them that drug on forever. We wound up losing the game 15-13 or 16-14 (I can’t quite remember) Even though it was still relatively cool, we were both very tired. Even with the loss, our 2-1 record and point differential was enough to get us a first round bye.
I had been drinking a lot of energy drinks through out the day. They help wake me up and concentrate. As our first playoff game approached I just got finished with a huge Monster energy drink. Although I drank a lot of these, I didn’t eat a lot of food as well. As a result, during that first playoff game, I had a very odd feeling of being hyper yet feeling like I was totally out of gas. I needed food badly. So during side changes I would run over to the cooler and inhale a cereal bar to try to give me some much needed fuel. Eventually I felt better and it came in time to help us pull out the playoff win. The team we beat was another pair of youngsters (early 20’s) that had beaten us in Clearwater. It felt good to exact some revenge and beat the young guys with some more hustle and grit. They were a very fast team. We beat them by somewhere around 11-8.
All that was left were the finals. We were playing the kids that beat us in pool play. They had beaten their 2 playoff opponents rather handily and were ready for more. They played a number of long games all day yet didn’t seem any worse for wear. This game was even longer than the pool play match. They got up 7-3, then we came back and were up 12-8. They came back and we were only up 13-12. These kids made some unbelievable saves. There were several times that Randall and I thought we won the point and were ready to celebrate, when the kids would make a leaping save and keep the play going. Randall was beyond tired. I was tired too but had a little left in the tank yet. We finally got to game point. Randall passed the kid’s hit and it was up close to the net so I made a flash decision to take a whack at it and end it. I hit it off the one kid and it went out of bounds, we win. It was beyond sweet to win. It took all season but we finally came out on top, it felt good. It’s ironic that the tournament that I had the least expectations of, had the best result. I guess it set a good example for me to follow in the future. Getting bent out of shape is not very productive for anyone. The prizes for first place left much to be desired but it was the win that mattered most. We had a celebratory dinner at a cool place across the street and then scooted back across Alligator alley. On the drive back I had a brief period where my peripheral vision had some weird distortion in it. Then that night, I woke up briefly to a freaky feeling of my body weighing 500 lbs. Almost like instead of your arm being asleep, your entire body was asleep. When I relayed these things to Ali she expressed concern about my overuse of the energy drinks along with me taking a vioxx in the morning to combat knee swelling. I’ll cut back on the Red Bull.
Sunday morning we invited our neighbors over for a brunch like thing. After they left we decided to go out and do some xmas shopping we couldn’t get done online and then go to the movies. Sounds innocent enough. I gave it little thought even though the plan was to go to the mall. Go to the mall a couple weeks before Xmas on a Sunday. It hit me as we turned into the jammed parking lot. Cars were circling the lot like sharks, hoping to snake a spot. I preferred to avoid that crap and instead wound up parking in the grass out along the border of the parking lot. Oh well, I thought to myself, I can take it, we have a limited list, we’ll get in, get out, it will be fine. I took a deep breath and stepped inside the mall. Immediately the noise and hoardes of people make my blood pressure jump a few points. I hold onto Ali’s hand and we begin to weave our way through the crowds. At first I was fine, this isn’t so bad, just relax. We picked up our first few items without major drama. Then we went into Bath & Body works. The BBW store at our mall is not very big but it was packed with people. Evidently their stuff is a favorite gift item. Well I too needed some of their stuff to round out my list so we ventured in. Only small steps could be taken and you couldn’t pause for very long at any one item because the backlog behind you kept pushing you forward. If you saw something you wanted to look at closer, you had to go into a holding pattern and circle back around. It was ridiculous. I started to lose it. We picked up our items and managed to get in a line. The checkout girl was pleasant enough. We gave her our items and told her we also wanted to get a gift card. “Fine, I just have to call it in” I didn’t say anything, but exchanged “WTF” glances with Ali. Call in a gift card…. It took awhile. Finally she completed the gift card part of it. Ok, here is your total… I hand her my CC. “I just have to call this in, our lines are busy” What the??? Now my glances with Ali are more prolonged and aggravated. This process takes even longer. As we are standing there, I am watching people on either side of us paying with their credit cards and going on their merry way. While the girl was waiting on the phone, I asked her what the deal was. Why were others paying with CC and I was the lucky one who had to get his verified circa 1973 style? She said the lines were busy and it randomly makes certain registers verify this way. I grumbled a bit and waited for the phone approval to complete. F’in stupid. That incident ruined any chance I had of escaping the mall with my good mood intact. After that I was grumpy. There were a few things that were a bit vague as to what we were going to get and going in one swarming store after another to try to find stuff just sucked. Finally we got our last item and left. The fresh air felt wonderful. I hadn’t been in a mall during an Xmas weekend in years, I don’t plan to do it again. I noticed that pretty much every retailer we dealt with wanted our home phone number, what is up with this? They pass it off as fraud protection but I’m sure it just another way to do customer profiling. Grrrrr.
We got done with the mall misery in time to do the tentative part two of our plan, go see National Treasure finally at a matinee. It still was rather full but we got good seats. It was a good flick, nice action, interesting plot with lots of twists. The bad guy in the movie seemed to either have ESP or the best luck any human being on the planet has ever had with some of the things he managed to figure out but other than that, it was enjoyable. I’d recommend it. Makes you think about the Masons in a different way.
When we got home I made myself pay the bills so I could see first hand the horrendous cc recipts from the holiday gift buying. It really needs to get under control. We spend way too much money at Christmas. By the time the bills got done it was time for the Eagles game. One of the down sides to rooting for a good team is they get a lot of primetime games which equal late nights. The game was a close, hard hitting affair. I was too tired to be very animated through most of it. My most angry moment came in the 4th quarter when the Birds had the Redskinds dead to rights, 3rd and 15. But instead of sending pressure, they drop into a pillow soft zone and leave a guy wide open who picks up the first down easily. It really pissed me off. The Skins qb isn’t great but if you apply no pressure he eventually will find an open man. The Eagles got lucky and managed to squeak it out in the end when the defense got smart and applied some pressure, causing Ramsey to fail miserably on their last gasp effort. The Bird’s defense got hammered with injuries. I hope they aren’t as serious as they looked. The need to be healthy going into the playoffs. What was up with Jevon Kearse acting like someone shot him one second and then be fine 2 minutes later? He did this 3 or 4 times. Weird.
This was surprisingly accurate for both Ali and I. This woman was on a local radio show last night. Run your numbers yourself and see how accurate it is. Weird stuff.
The weekend will be filled up by playing in my holiday vball tournament on Saturday followed by house stuff and Eagles cheering on Sunday. Damn my birthday is next week already. Unreal. The next 3 weeks I work partial weeks, a nice bonus.
I love the look of the new Mustang. It is pretty much a perfect blend of retro styling with modern automotive technology. I’ve only owned one Ford product of the many cars that have been in my collection, a 1990 Ford Probe GT which was really a Mazda anyway. But this new Stang would definitely be high on my list if I was looking for a “just for shits and giggles” car. Damn it is sweet looking. Supposedly, GM is considering doing something similar for the Camaro. Considering how well the new Stang is doing, GM would be crazy to not do so. The old people are the ones who have the money. Bringing back a car that was muscle car nirvana back in thier day with modern technology is a can’t miss.
For the first time since I have worked here, I decorated my office for xmas. Nothing extravagant but I utilized some of my extra xmas lights and strung them along my cabinets and back wall. My co-worker was nice enough to donate a fiber optic wreath to the cause which you can see on the webcam. I even burned the Clay Aiken Christmas cd. Ho ho ho. I feel extra festive this year for some reason. Not sure why.
Wow is it Wednesday already? I’m very shaggy looking right now. My hair is probably the longest it has been in 4 years plus I have the facial hair thing going on for my holiday vball tourney this weekend. Once I can’t stand the longer hair anymore I think I will go the opposite extreme and buzz it shorter than ever before. I also have a disturbing red mark/scab between my eyebrows. I, like most men, have some hair that grows between my eyebrows. Normally, I attend to this by just taking a scissors to it and chopping it off. Well this time my wife offered to wax it for me, looks better, lasts longer. She claims that she did this area for me once before and I whined like a baby about it hurting. I don’t recall it quite that way but I agreed to let her go at it again. Evidently, her wax kit was a bit old and not functioning as it should, because as she ripped the wax off, it wasn’t getting all the hair so she would rip over and over again. It hurt but nothing worth whining about. However when she was done, the area between my eyebrows was beet red. Ali assured me it was normal and should subside by morning. Hehe. Well the repeated rips seemed to rip off a number of layers of skin as I have been walking around with this red scar for 3 days now. Hehe, nobody has had the guts to ask me what the hell happened, even though I know they want to. Funny.
Last night was another nightmare commute home. It took over an hour and a half. I turned onto our normal route home and saw it was backed up as far as the eye could see, after inching along for 10 minutes or so, I made a command decision to backtrack and go the other way home. It was more out of the way but it would beat waiting in this mess. WRONG. The other route was backed up even worse! I was besides myself with frustration. Then I remembered that Sirius had comedy channels. I asked Ali to flip it on. Within minutes I was more relaxed as I laughed at various comedy bits they were playing. It really took the edge off and made what could have been a miserable ride much more managable. Score another one for Sirius.
My weekend was more or less a total Xmas blitz. We went out and bought 2 Christmas trees, one for us and one for my mom. Mom wasn’t going to go through the time and expense of putting up a tree so we stepped in and got it for her. Mom has had a tree every year since I have been alive so I wasn’t going to let this year be the start of a scrooge-like celebration for her. After we set up hers, we went home and got ours up and into water but didn’t put ornaments on it.
Earlier in the day I had planned to hang all of the outside lights. I hung them on the trees out front first, but quickly noticed that I didn’t have nearly enough lights to string along the roofline like last year. WTF? Where are all my lights? I checked, double checked, triple checked everywhere I could think of to find the missing lights but had no luck. Damn it, I certainly didn’t throw them out. After an hour or so of driving myself nuts, I gave up and just added “Xmas Lights” to the list of supplies we had to pick up. So while I was at Sam’s, I bought 4 packs of lights, 400 per box for a total of 1600 lights! More than enough to tackle the job.
Sunday I began the house lighting. It went very well and I had extra lights to boot. I was able to do the entire front and both sides of the house as well as lighting up all the plant life in front of the house. It looked sweet. Just as I was putting away the stuff, Ali, who was busy going through the boxes of inside Xmas decorations, came out with a smirk on her face, holding a box. It was a box of Xmas lights. At first it didn’t click but then she said, here are the lights!!! “Where were they??!!” I surprisingly asked. In the one Christmas box… The same box that I had looked in 3 or 4 times during my frantic search… They were at the bottom of the box, under some other stuff. Although I could have sworn I rooted through each box sufficiently to discover the lights, evidently I wasn’t thorough enough. Dumb me. So now I have enough lights to do a whole farm of Christmas trees. I guess you can never have enough spares.
Ali and I put the ornaments on the tree. Once again, we had more than enough ornaments and some remained on the sidelines as the branches were plenty full already. The last thing to do was get out the train. Instead of doing the normal boring oval of previous years, I decided to go for a twisty turn setup. It took repeated attempts to make the various curved pieces meet up at the same place, but with some luck and a little cohersing of the track connectors I got it together.
We got it done just in time to watch the Eagles DESTROY the Packers. I never expected it to be so lopsided. I can only hope they continue this upswing. Right now it seems like they are head and shoulders over any other team in the NFC.
Oh I forgot, on Monday night we went to a house where they were selling a used pool heater that I saw in the paper. The heater is 3 or 4 years old but has seen next to no use because the guy said his kids didn’t use the pool enough to justify the heater, so he pulled it out. The heater looked to be in good shape and it saved us almost a couple grand over the cost of a new one. All we had to do was get it into the truck. Pool heaters are heavy. Originally, we planned to take it through the garage to my truck that was waiting a few feet past it. Well when we tried to get through the door, it was a few inches too narrow. So we had to carry this thing all they way around the back of the house and out the other side, probably a 300 foot trek. Did I mention this thing was heavy? I bet it was close to 300 pounds. The owner and I stopped 4 or 5 times along the way as the awkward grip I had to use on it would simply fail after a short period of time and I would have to set it down. By the time we lugged it up onto the tailgate, I was huffing like I just ran 5 miles. It is still sitting in the back of my truck, parked in the gargae until I can enlist my neighbor to help me get it down. A friend of mine does pool work and is going to help me hook it up.
No time for an official entry but here are some pics of the house decorated for the holidays, as well as a pic of the ultra-cool lawn tractor sprinklers and the never seen before Cub Cadet tractor that fell off the back of the truck with me on it. Oh, and here are what 1600 xmas lights look like strung together.
Tomorrow I’ll recap any weekend events that come to mind.
I got my Sirius radio kit on Tuesday and of course I had to immediately install it. I actually was able to activate it in my bedroom, running it off a dc power supply I use for my rc planes. Then I got to work installing the car kit. It is less than aesthetically pleasing the way you have to mount the unit. I have the big bracket stuck to the dash but that is really your only option unless you buy a receiver that is integrated into the radio. Routing the antenna from the roof to the receiver was a bit of a challenge as well but a bit of patience paid off. Once it is installed, you tune your radio to one of 5 or 6 frequencies (whichever has the least interference) and then fire up the unit. It really is sweet. Ali immediately went to work finding her favorite stations. So far I only set up one station on my preset list, the 24 hour NFL station. It really is a great piece of technology. Every kind of music you can imagine, commercial free. They even have a 24 hour all Elvis channel. However there are a couple negatives. The antenna basically has to have a view of the sky or you are going to struggle getting signal. Like I mentioned before, the bracket and unit is rather obstrusive to your cars interior. Finally, it takes a little bit of techincal savy to install the car kit, something that many people simply don’t have. When I get the boombox, I will probably have to route my antenna into the drop ceiling and into another office that has a window. The driving force behind me getting the rig was I wanted to be able to listen to Stern when he jumps to Sirius, however I think a big portion of his audience is going to be left behind because listening to the King of alll Media is going to take much more than just hitting the power switch of their radio. But I really am pleased with it. When songs play, it displays the title and artist. I am learning everyday who actually sung these songs I listened to over the years, I never could remember otherwise.
Speaking of awesome technology, the Roomba continues to impress. I let it clean different areas of the house everyday and I come home to a clean floor and a dust bin full of junk. This thing is just incredible.
I finally got a chance to post the tiling pics as well as some pics of the dirt. If you want to see pics of Nicki fanatically digging in one of the huge piles, go here and scroll to the bottom.
This weekend is a holiday decorating blitzkrieg. I will be hanging the outside lights, getting our Christmas tree, setting up the train and maybe even wrapping a few presents. Woo hoo. I really enjoy Christmas, even in Florida.
As I was on my way home from work yesterday waiting at a traffic light, I glanced over to the car in the next lane. It was a newer Pontiac Grand Am with one of those yellow “Support the Troops” magnets on the back. The driver side window was down and hanging out was a man’s arm with one of those Lance Armstrong, “Livestrong” yellow bracelets that are used to help fund cancer research. In the hand attached to the arm was a cigarette that flicked the used butt onto the road just as traffic started to move. On top of the annoyance this instantly generated inside me, it also struck me as ironic and stupid on several levels.
Those magnets are just this years version of the window flags. If you want to support the troops, send them money, write them letters and tell them how much you appreciate them, or better yet, enlist and give them a hand. They certainly would welcome the help. The magnets do nothing but make a “me too” statement. Does anyone NOT support the troops?
The yellow LIVESTRONG bracelet is bought to fight cancer through research. Yet it’s wearer was smoking a cigarette which is like laying down the welcome mat for cancer to move right into your lungs.
Finally, you would think and individual that cared about the troops, cared about fighting cancer would also care about the environment. Evidently not as that butt he casually flicked into the roadway will remain there for a long time to come.
Live dumb, real dumb.
Last night I decided to reinstall the toilet into the master bath. The first go around in the smaller bathroom was a waxy, wet mess so I expected no less this time. Well this toilet was more of a mess. Evidently because of the uneven floor, the builder tried to level the toilet by placing it into wet mortar. So as I tried to scrape the old caulking off the toilet I saw that the bottom of the toilet had caked on cement. So I had to chisel off all of the cement first. Getting the toilet lined up over the bolts is a tough duty. As I tried to suspend the toilet over the bolts in an awkward, bent over position, Ali was trying to line up the bolts from floor level. As I was holding the toilet, some excess water ran out all over the floor so we had to towel up the mess. The wax itself grosses Ali out so she was not enjoying being my toilet installer assistant. We finally got it on. It seemed to sit rather high over the drain flange so I was worried we could have leakage issues. However multiple test flushes proved to be successful. Mission accomplished. Tonight I will caulk it and hopefully by tomorrow we can seal the grout and then move stuff back in.
