Jack and the book, weekend, AFHV, snake, furniture, record, NO, quote
I forgot to mention last week a hilarious Jack Lalanne show we watched. In this episode, he incorporated a normal hard cover book into the workout. He had us squeeze the book in front for the chest, extend it behind for a triceps exercise and several other book exercises. Then he had us laying on our backs, he says “Ok, put the book in your mouth and bite down on it!” then you were supposed to raise your head up and down while clenching on the book. This exercise caused uncontrollable laughter from me and I didn’t follow along. It looked so damn funny. These shows are just awesome.
On Saturday night we had our neighbors over. We played a marathon game of Dogopoly, a dog based version of monopoly. When we called the game at 12:30am I was the clear leader in money and was declared winner, but we found out that we weren’t exactly following all the rules and if we were, my one neighbor would have won it all for sure. It was a hollow victory.
On Sunday we had outside work to do, the biggest job was mowing the grass. As I was weed whacking and Ali was on the lawn tractor she came over to me and motioned for me to follow her. She pointed to the ground. I looked down and saw a snake that evidently didn’t vacate the area of the mower and got clipped by the blades. It was bleeding badly from the middle but wasn’t dead and was writhing around. Ali was very upset. I wasn’t sure what to do. I debated if I should take a shovel and try to end it for the poor snake or leave it be to let things run their course. I decided to pick the snake up with a shovel and I took him over to high grass. I laid him down, told him we were sorry and I covered him with palm fronds to shelter him. For some reason I had this ridiculous hope that he would be able to recover from his injuries. I checked on him a couple hours later and was still hanging on but when I checked on him the next morning he was gone. I felt like shit as I dug a hole and buried him. I guess the better choice would have been to just try to kill him instantly to end whatever suffering a snake feels. I just dreaded the prospect of him not dying after my first attempt and me having to repeatedly try to turn out the lights for him. Hopefully I don’t have to find myself in that situation again anytime soon. It was an Eastern Garter snake, a species that I had not seen in our yard before.
On Monday we went to Haverty’s, where my mom works, for now. She has worked there since she moved down to Naples but has never been thrilled about working at the place. She just got a new job that sounds much better where she is part salary/ part commission instead of all commission. So anyway, we went there to look at china cabinets. Ali has wanted one for a long time and my thinking was since my mom was only going to be selling furniture for another week, we should see if we can buy from her, something we never did in all of her years in the furniture business. So we dropped in unannounced and had my mom show us what they had. After a bit of back and forth action we landed on a cabinet we liked. However the original idea of just buying a cabinet had mutated into buying a cabinet, a matching dining room table with 6 chairs, and a mini-curio cabinet. This approach would give us a second room in the house with matching furniture (bedroom was first) that we didn’t put together from a box. It will look great when it comes I’m sure. It’s a decent chunk of change but it felt good to finally buy something from mom.
I used to watch America Funniest Home Videos faithfully during it’s first run in the late 80’s-early 90’s when Bob Sagat was the host. Around that same time period I bought my first camcorder and used it all the time to tape events. One of these events I caught on tape was what I thought was a potential 10,000 dollar winner. I was rolling at a party at my ex-inlaws house. My ex-wife’s 2 uncles were in the shot and her cousin, a cute little girl. The one uncle was holding a pinata and Becky was blindfolded. Brian was holding the pinata a little high and got wailed point blank in the jewels. It was funny as hell. I immediately dubbed the tape and sent it off, waiting for a call to come out to Hollywood that never came. Well Sunday night Ali was cutting my hair and I had the TV on. I flipped to live TV, something I almost never do anymore. The latest version of AFHV was on with the Hollywood Squares guy as host. I’m watching funny clip after clip, enjoying the show. They came to a segment where they showed a rapid fire sequence of people and pinatas. One of the clips struck me as odd. Thanks to Tivo, I was able to back up the live broadcast and look again. I’ll be damned! They were showing my clip! They were showing my clip that I sent in at least a dozen years earlier! I was dumbfounded, that first, they were showing the tape after all these years and second, that I just happened to be watching the show which I normally NEVER see anymore. The irony of it is one of those things just make you scratch your head. I plan on ripping off the clip and saving it on my web site. It really is amazing that I saw this. I may even contact my ex-inlaws to clue them in.
On Labor day we had no holiday plans but then our neighbors asked us Monday afternoon if we wanted to come over for a short notice cookout. At first I was not agreeable to going cause I had a few things I wanted to do, one of them was playing Warcraft. But then I went over and had a good time. I found out that my neighbor likes play tennis, golf and bowl, all things I enjoy as well so we agreed to get some matches going. We are trying to get Nicki more comfortable with them so they could pet sit for us when we go to Palm Springs.
It would be awesome to be able to do that instead of kenneling her.
Today we set yet another record for commute time. It’s ironic that it came the day after my letter to the editor hit the presses on Labor Day. To reach the first intersection, 2 miles from our house took 43 minutes. This was leaving at 6:38 am. I continued my email barrage of county officials, again sending in the times from today’s drive and again asking that they reverse the unfortunate decision to allow dump trucks into traffic earlier. I hope to get some sort of action soon. It is miserable.
Speaking of miserable but in terms far more serious, the New Orleans situation is going to get dramatic if the predictions of thousands of confirmed deaths come true as they pump water out of the city. W is taking a big beating on this, however, as much as I can’t stand the man I realize that the logistics of mobilizing all that equipment, manpower and supplies is something that can not happen instantly. Perhaps the biggest fault was not anticipating the doom sooner and have stuff starting to mobilize before the hurricane even struck. It is going to be a miserable news week as more and more stories and images of the destruction in the region come to light.
Todays quote from George Orwell
?Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise?