Archives 2005

This weekend I had some work duties related to the driver license systems getting upgraded at a couple of our branches. It required me to be on call as well as going into the offices a couple times over the weekend. However I already had pegged this weekend as “deck building weekend” so it was going to get done come hell or high water.

The deck was for Nicki’s area, a small 8 foot by 8 foot platform would be large enough from our calculations. Like I said previously, I rarely do projects like this in a normal fashion. I didn’t draw anything up, I didn’t write up a materials list, rather I went to Home Depot, grabbed what wood and materials I figured I would need and went for it. Of course this technique leaves much room for error and I had to make an additional trip to HD to pick up some more materials.

The project covered parts of both days. On day 1 we got the frame built, dug the holes and cemented it into place. We cemented it down so it doesn’t blow away if we have another hurricane season like last year. On day 2 we installed all the decking as well as the little ceramic tile piece I made months ago with left over materials from the bathroom tile job. I got creative and spelled out Nicki’s name in tile and then drug her over to it and put her paw into the wet grout to make a paw print to forever mark the area as hers. Yea corny but cool at the same time. You can see a bunch of pics of the project in various stages here.

Some of the boards I got were not exactly straight and required some prying with an iron pipe to straighten them out as we hurriedly drove in screws to keep it in place. It all wrapped up round 5 oclock on Sunday. It looks good, is sturdy and will be nice place to relax and read a book while Nicki runs around untethered. The last part of the project will involve getting a skid or two of sod to create a nice grass area and maybe planting a tree or two. I am pleased at how it is coming together.

The local paper ran several front page stories on Sunday regarding the horrific traffic is in our area everyday. It really put a big glaring spotlight on just how terrible it is and how poor of a job the county has done at managing the growth that causes the gridlock. Ali and I had the opportunity to be in one of those articles but I declined because I didn’t want to cause waves at work. But after reading the way the articles were written, I probably could have done it with little problem. Oh well.

The news in recent months has been nothing short of horrific. The tsunami and it’s aftermath, the war in Iraq with no end in sight, incredible deficits, the BTK killer, global genicide in 3rd world countries, and now the terrible shootings at the courthouse. It all just makes me sad, makes me think what is the point of it all. We are living on a timebomb. We will end ourselves way before someone does it for us.

Over the weekend we dug up a bunch of pineapple plants we had around the property to take into work and give away. We had too many and wanted to plant some different stuff in those spots. Pineapple plant leaves have a serated, saw-like edge to them which resulted in both Ali and I getting many cuts and thorns into our hands and arms. There were a couple offshoots that broke off that I tried to give away but noone wanted them. So I took the offshoots home, feeling bad about just throwing them out so I decided I would plant them in the back of the property and see if they would take root.

So I rushed home and immediately drove the truck around back. Daylight was waning so I had to hurry up. So while I am still in my work clothes I grab the shovel and drive to the back of the property. I dig out one hole and dump in one of the plants, I got a few more cuts right away trying to set it in place. Then I jump to the other side of the fill pit to plant another one. I dig the hole extra wide to make it easier to get the plant into the hole. I plop the plant in and start scooping the dirt back in with my hands. I notice that these cuts on my hands were painful. Then I noticed the pain increasing and spreading to different areas. I look down, you guessed it, I must have dug into a fire ant tunnel and had dozens of them all over my hands. So I am cursing, frantically trying to bat them all off. They literally have a death grip on the skin. You could squash one, dismember it, it won’t release the grip until you directly pull or tweak it off. So my now burning hands finish off the job safely, using the shovel at all times to pack in the remaining dirt. I go inside and pull out pineapple splinters with a tweezers while examining the forming welts from the fireant assault.

I fired off a letter to the editor which I haven’t done for a little while. It was regarding the closure of left turns out of a development that was one of the big contributors to the gridlock in the first 3 miles of our commute.

When I was younger I had several runs in with warts on my hands. They are nasty. Well I have had one on the palm side of my left middle finger forever. A year at least, maybe longer. Well I got sick of looking at it so I got some things that look like band-aids and wore them for about a week. It makes the skin in that area look all white and dead looking. This weekend I pulled one off and there was a nice neat circle of skin that came off, wart included! Yea that makes for good blogging huh?

On top of the warts when I was younger, my friends enjoyed calling me “ringworm”. When I was a kid I accidentally bumped my wrist against the scorching hot muffler of the tractor. As a resulut I have a small patch of skin on my wrist to this day that has an abnormal look and texture to it. Some astute classmate said it looked like I had ringworm so for a couple years I battled that name but eventually tired of explaining it was a burn. So I would just answer to ringworm, less fuss. 🙂

Ali and I went to the beach for the first time in months on Sunday. It was sunny but there was a very cool breeze blowing off the gulf so as soon as the sun would duck behind a cloud it would feel uncomfortably cool in your bathing suit. I stuck my feet in the gulf. The 70 degree water felt very cold. However there were a few brave souls actually out in the water. The beach itself was packed.

There were 2 women and one of their daughters sitting within 10 feet of us. The entire time we were there (hour to hour and a half) one of these females was talking the entire time. Talking on their cell phones, to each other, it never ended. Ali was extremely annoyed with these women and moved further away and laid on her blanket with her thumbs in her ears. I was less bothered by it because I was reading a good book that isolated me from the squawking. Even with the distraction, I enjoyed just sitting there with the sounds and smells of the beach, reading a book. It’s something we have to reintroduce into our routine on a regular basis. For cripes sakes we can get to the beach in less time than it takes to watch a Tivo accelerated episode of the Osbournes. We need to take advantage of it.

When we had enough, on the walk back to the car I saw another first. As we were on the downside of a reasonably steep bridge there was a woman on rollerblades on her cell phone as she braked hard to keep from accelerating down the hill. I could hardly believe it but she seemed to have done it before as she navigated it without issue. It just looked odd.

On Saturday we went to Home Depot to accumulate the wood needed for phase 2 of the Nicki play area construction project. With projects like this you would think I would have everything drawn out by a plan so I know exactly what I need. For whatever reason I rarely do that, instead I have the idea, dimensions and shape pretty much entirely in my head. The construction process itself is rather dynamic, changing as it goes. I hope to break ground on the deck this upcoming weekend.

My Hot Wheels collection has expanded to the point where I needed a better display option. Check out the new arrangement on the cam page. You can also check my ever-lengthening hair. My mom saw me for the first time in a little while and was amazed at how long my hair is. For the better part of 10 years it’s been high and tight. Now it is frumpy and even sort of curls at spots. I just wanted to look a bit different, even if it meant looking more unkept.

The girls on AI are definitely inferior to the men as a group this year. Most of them sounded very average last night. However there was something definitely off on the sound levels with the show last night. Almost all the girls sounded like they were being drowned out by the music.

I threw up a pic of my monster monitor. It’s big, it takes up lots of space so doing things like eating at my computer desk are a bit more inconvenient but it’s worth it. It’s fantastic for gaming and supports higher resolution than the Sony throw in monitor I got with the puter.

Yesterday at the gym I finally “met” a guy that I actually knew from the gym for 2 or 3 years. He used to go to Powerhouse, then joined Gold’s for a year and now he joined the new gym I go to. I have talked to the guy off and on many times at the gym but neither of us bothered to ask each others names. For whatever reason I have a hard time initiating friendly conversations and when I do, I feel odd about asking about names. It’s probably because I am miserable at small talk. Well anyway, yesterday I decided after 3 years I would learn the gym guy’s name. So after he got done spotting me on a set I simply said “I don’t remember if I ever asked you your name, but if I did, I forgot it.” So I find out his name is Dan and I tell him my name. Somehow it felt like a small burden was lifted off my back. So I now have maybe 3 or 4 people at the gym I know by name. I wish I could be more friendly with others as I welcome interaction with most human beings, especially those that share a common interest in physical fitness. I just have a tough time taking the first step. However once that step is taken, it almost always results in finding out that there was nothing to be hesitant about.

Maybe the repeated late nights over the last month or so have caught up to me. Last night I was just spent. On Sunday night I was up late not playing WoW but watching the academy awards. I am not really that into award shows. The biggest kick I get out of it is analyzing how the various stars are holding up. (IE. he looks REAL old, that guy put on a ton of weight, she had work done….) It somehow makes me feel better about my own physical attrition.

It’s been very busy at work the past few days. I implemented an ironclad internet lockdown policy here to terminate the frivolous surfing that was going on. Surfing msn, a shopping site is fine, I don’t care but when people are downloading stuff on their puters like spyware, browser hijackers and the sort, that makes me get involved and spend lots of time cleaning them up. So last week or so I just had enough and came up with the new lockdown setup. People aren’t happy but oh well, always a few spoil it for the many.

We have been in the middle of a drought for some time now. However this weekend we got close to 2 inches of rain. It’s a bummer that it sort of washed out the weekend but it was very needed so I don’t really mind.

I did a couple puter upgrades over the weekend. I scored a SWEET used 21 inch monitor off Ebay. With shipping it came to 120 bucks. It’s in great shape. Making it fit on my desk required me cutting out a big square from the back of my computer desk to let the back end pop through. It is the size of a tv set. IT ROCKS! I had been having intermittent HDD errors as well. So instead of waiting for it to totally crap on me, I replaced the 2 80 giggers with one 200 gig drive. The swap and data transfer took a few hours but I managed to do it without loss of data.

The crappy weather sort of played right into my push to get to level 40 in WoW. Level 40 is a big number in the game because that is the level you can get a mount (horse). A horse makes a huge difference in the game because it shaves big time off travel in the game. Traveling by foot is very tedious. There are times in the game you spend 10-15 minutes doing nothing but running from one spot to the other. With a mount this time gets cut by 60%. I did some incredible (for me) marathon sessions, staying up into the early morning both Friday and Saturday nights. I finally clicked 40 on Sunday afternoon. I picked out a black horse and named it Nicholas. It’s a sense of accomplishment that would only be understood by someone involved in the madness. If you related this to me 3 months ago my reply would have been “Yay….you pyscho.” 🙂

American Idol has tweaked various aspects of the show this year during the preliminary stages and for the most part the changes have been fine. However last night during the first “vote” show. a another twist really turned me off. The writers of the show evidently thinks the audience enjoys if they play mind games with the contestants. You’re safe, PYSCH! you aren’t! You are outta here!!!! That is basically what they were doing last night and it was stupid. The contestants are stressed out enough without playing with their heads as well. Then the routine of “Ok we just crushed your dream, so how about you sing the song that got you kicked off one more time?” schtick is ridiculous as well. The show is starting to steer towards not being on my core list of shows anymore.

The local paper posted a request for residents of our area to write in about the traffic nightmare during our commute. Ali jumped right in and wrote a good letter describing what the traffic grind is like out here everyday. It was so good that someone from the paper wrote back saying they wanted to hitch a ride with us next week to ride along and document the misery as part of the article they are writing. We want to do it but I first have to make sure that certain toes wouldn’t be stepped on by participating. Since I am a county employee and the road diaster is a county problem, I need to proceed with caution. But boy, could I give the reporter an earful….

Some more traffic tales for today. Last night on the way home our normal route was gridlocked due to a looky lu delay of ‘tards staring at a minor accident off the side of the road. So we took a detour. The detour turned onto a road where the speed limit is 25 with signs posted how it is STRICTLY ENFORCED. Ok great. Well we were flabbergasted with what they installed as speed control devices. In maybe a mile or two stretch there were 14, little mini S turns in the road. These S turns were so tight that a go kart would have a hard time staying within the lines without slowing to walking speed. This was some geniuses idea for speed control. Of course all the traffic simply drove right down the center of the S. I’m sure some idiot consultant was paid huge bucks and even more money was spent installing these ridiculous attempts at vehicle control.

Today on my way to the ortho, I was behind an old, short bald man in a full size car. As I am approaching him I notice his brake lights are on so I slow down. As I watch, I realize this old fart is pulling away from me, with his brake lights on the entire time. He was obviously 2 footing the brake and gas, one of the cardinal sins of driving. There are so many examples of this type of driver on the road right now it is suffocating.

Some people go to the gym to look good and some go to the gym to LOOK good. Todays example bordered on lunacy. There was a black dude there with a tight white tank top with matching black studded leather straps around both biceps and both wrists. When I saw it I shook myself to verify I wasn’t dreaming that I wasn’t sitting at a performace of the village people. Nope I was conscious and yes this guy was actually wearing this. Wow.

Blogging has been slim, I know. I can’t help but be honest and admit that WoW has been the primary culprit of the decline in blogging. I’ve been watching less TV, paying less attention to the rest of the world, ergo my blogging has tailed off. However, believe it or not I do have other things that I still do.

I had a 3 day weekend and enjoyed it. The weather has been close to perfect for maybe a month or so. Lows in the mid 50’s highs in the mid to upper 70’s with no humidity. The only downside has been that for that same month we have literally not had any rain. It’s odd using the word “drought” in SW Florida but that is how winters are here, it almost never rains. To combat the drought, every week I spend and hour to an hour and a half soaking each landscape plant thoroughly with my 250 foot long hose. It’s a pain in the ass, but the plants seem to be doing better with this method instead of the soaker hose network I used in years past. After I did my watering run yesterday, I felt creative and decided to take some pictures of the flowers that are around our property, even in February. Take a look, some turned out real well.

On Saturday, Ali and busted hump and got the fencing up around Nicki’s area. Ali pulled on the fence while I nailed it in place. It was dirty sweaty work. If it was summertime, we surely would have dropped before completion. Nicki’s area is completely enclosed at this point. There are many things we want to do inside of it yet, but at least she can run around in there and play. I have some pictures of the area and pictures of Nicki playing in it (bottom of the page) online.

I have been still watching some TV believe it or not. I try to stick to the normal shows, The Apprentice, Survivor, American Idol and ER are the only shows I keep current with. Is it better to spend what used to be TV time (and then some) playing WoW instead? I think so. It’s much more mentally engaging than TV. On the flip side it is more physically taxing. The late nights catch up to you.

Had an odd dream over the weekend. Ali and I were at a football game, in Pittsburgh I think. Somehow we were in box seats, I think Denver and someone else were playing (not the Steelers). The dream fast forwards, I am sitting in the stands and all of a sudden the football comes up towards the stands after the opposing team scored (again do not know how) I am just sitting there, making no effort to catch it. The ball caroms off some crazed fans hands and lands neatly in my lap. I am thrilled with my good fortune and clasp onto the ball and hold it low out of plain view. Then I remember seeing the ref, looking up into the stands scanning for the ball, motioning for it to be returned. I don’t want to do that. Then the crowd starts chanting “Throw it back, throw it back” (like they do with homerun balls at some baseball games. Still, I act like nothing is going on, keeping the ball low, firmly grasped, while trying to look as unassuming as possible. Then the dream fast forwards again, I have fallen asleep for the duration of the football game. I wake up and the stands are nearly empty. Ali wakes me and the first thing I do is verify that I still have the ball, which I do. I feel relieved. My interpretation: lately I have been having feelings about the uselessness of trying to save the world. (the chanting fans and ref) Bush is still president, the world is going to hell, noone gives a damn about anything that doesn’t directly affect them. I do my part and I can’t worry about the rest of the world, so I kept the ball……