Tomorrow
I’ll be 3000 miles away in Southern Cali, woooohooo! See ya Tuesday or Wednesday.
I’ll be 3000 miles away in Southern Cali, woooohooo! See ya Tuesday or Wednesday.
My cam is back on. It shows my left side where my skin thing is, right in front of my ear. I shaved my sideburns off since I figured it would be necessary anyway when cutting day comes around. See if you can find it…
I am dl’ing a bunch of stuff thru BitTorrent, something I haven’t done in a long time. I grabbed some songs I want to use in my next volleyball video and an app or two.
I went to bed last night a little after 9. I didn’t play 1 second of WoW. I was tired.
This weekend I had to do a server upgrade for work. It is the main DC for our windows domain as well as being our Exchange email server so to it is a rather important box. Friday night I was up till 3am while I was VPN’d into work doing a backup and restore of the box onto new hardware. Then I was up at 7am and went into work to continue the migration. I had a few issues but all in all the upgrade went smoothly and everything is fine this morning.
We had our furniture delivered on Saturday minus one piece. Evidently they left a message the day before mentioning that one piece was damaged and would not be delivered but Ali accidentally deleted the message before listening to it. So we have a new table, 6 chairs, mini curio cabinet and half of a large curio cabinet. It sucks that the missing piece will not show up for at least another 3 weeks. The stuff we got looks great though. I’ll throw up some pics when I get a chance.
Our property had been dry enough that the grass was turning brown. Now all of a sudden in the last 5 days or so we have been hammered with rain and now have lakes around the house again. We mowed yesterday around the puddles and in fact I finished up the tractor mowing in a light rain. It was a wet, green sticky mess. I filled up our garden with more cherry tomato plants, canteloupe, watermelon and broccolli. The pumpkin plant I have in there is doing great. It would be sweet to grow our own Halloween pumpkin.
Sunday morning Ali set yet another running record. She did 2.25 miles consecutively and 3 miles total. Our short term goal of running a 5k together looks like more and more of a possibility. I’m proud of her. I enjoy our runs a lot.
I found out that I was once again on local tv. One of the tv stations evidently had footage of me from the truck meeting Wednesday night. From what I was told it was just short footage of me in the audience, nothing very exciting. I didn’t see it. Our neighbors saw it.
The Eagles had a tremendous comeback win. They played terrible in the beginning, making error after error and letting the Chief running backs run wild. Then they came roraring back and scored 31 unanswered points. It was a great game to watch. I can’t remember the last time the Eagles had a win like that. Normally once things start to slide like that, the Birds aren’t great at changing things up. It was a great win.
We have a short week and fly out early Thursday for Palm Springs, returning late on Monday. I really don’t know what to expect but I am looking forward to it none the less. Southern California always has held interest in my mind and actually was one of the places that was on my short list along with Florida of where I wanted to live. I’m looking forward to it.
Last night Alison and I attended a meeting regarding dump trucks and their relationship with the community. Dump trucks are pretty well hated for several reasons. They start up at 4-5am in residential areas of the estates and in many cases become unwelcome alarm clocks at these wee hours of the morning. Some truck drivers are wreckless and most importantly to me, the trucks are a huge part of the daily traffic quagmire we have been in since they have been allowed to leave earlier for the past month.
The meeting had 7 speakers and a moderator who was one of the writers for the local paper. The meeting was well covered with reporters from all the local TV networks as well as the newspaper. There was a big turnout, between 200-300 people. From glancing around the room it looked like the truckers had a large majority of the audience. Each speaker had 8 minutes to talk then an hour of question and answer followed. Some of the speakers were good, there were 3 that were pretty worthless. It was a bit annoying hearing things said up on stage that you would have loved to stand up and refute but there was no real time interaction permitted. The Q&A session was a mess. The moderator did a piss poor job of presenting the questions. He did not throw out questions that asked the exact same thing in a slightly different manner. Then after he asked it he would keep asking for additional responses from the panel even though the question had been answered previously.
Surprisingly to us, the biggest question that kept coming up was the issue of truck drivers parking their trucks in the yard of their homes. I would guess 75% of the questions were tied to this issue. I can imagine if you had a dump truck next door that was firing up in early AM 6 days a week it would get very annoying. I suppose we are lucky we have no truck drivers in our immediate vicinity. Ali submitted a question regarding the trucks impact on the morning commute which was not really answered directly. The panel members that addressed it made statements that made assumptions that were just not true and just annoyed the hell out of both of us.
Ironically we got the most information AFTER the meeting when Ali talked to some of the deputies that patrol our area and I got to talk to the commissioner for our district at length about a few things. I’ve sent the man countless emails but never spoke to him so it was cool. I found out many things I didn’t know and it made me appreciate how the guy is trying to do whatever he can to help things along short of jumping into a front end loader and building the road himself.
It was a frustrating but informative 2 hours.
I JUST got the call back from the dermatologist. The spot near my ear is basil cell skin cancer. Basil cell is the least dangerous type of skin cancer but still it’s cancer which is more than a bit scary. In mid-October I go in to have it removed. They basically keep cutting away until they don’t detect any more bad cells. Ugh.
Jack Lalanne had a very funny show on Monday. He opened the show talking about how temptation is everywhere, how inner demons are pulling at you to live an unhealthy lifestyle and how they are all around you. Then all of a sudden he pulls out a cap gun and starts firing into the air at random while yelling “Get out of here demons! We don’t need you around!” When he started firing his gun his dog, Happy who was sitting on the set got freaked and ran off. It was funny as hell. Yesterday as I walked up the hall I saw that Jack was on Fox News being interviewed. Even though he is 91 now he still seemed ultra energetic. I wish I could have seen/heard the entire interview. I love that guy.
Tonight is a community meeting regarding the problems with dump trucks in the community. I will be in attendance and will be very eager to get in a few questions of my own. I left at 6:30 this morning and got to work at 8:10, this delay caused primarily by these wonderful mechanical monsters clogging the traffic flow.
Dummy number one is me. Yesterday I was getting changed to go to the gym at lunch and as I was digging through my bag I realized that I didn’t pack my sneakers. Doh! Well that was not going to stop me from getting my exercise fix so I threw on my gym clothes and then wore my docksiders with no socks. Yea I’m sure it looked ridiculous but noone can say I’m not dedicated. 🙂
Dummy number two is some guy that wrote a letter to the editor yesterday. I can only hope this was toungue in cheek, but knowing some of the people that live here, he could have been dead serious. Humiliated by weeds…. Here is the letter:
Bad weeds
Editor, Daily News:
I am disappointed and appalled, and extremely embarrassed, by the weed conditions exploding at the intersection of Golden Gate Parkway and Goodlette-Frank Road.
It should not matter whether the city or county is responsible for the disgusting weeds growing between crevices at that intersection.
Someone, anyone, just do it. Eradicate the uncontrolled weed growth.
I’m humiliated and disturbed by the non-action of management to elicit some action.
END QUOTE
This weekend was ok but I am more than a bit tired. On Saturday I spent an hour or two cleaning out the 2nd bedroom. This bedroom had been designated as the hobby room as it has 2 desks with one being for my RC stuff and the other set up with Ali’s sewing machine. However over the last 6 months or so it mutated into the junk room, filled with boxes, packing material, golf clubs and assorted other things that don’t belong there. Ali had a PC show so I did it myself which was better anyway. Unlike Ali, I don’t have such a strong aversion to just getting rid of shit that we don’t need. Ali sees something and thinks how maybe someday in some remote situation, we may possibly need this so she holds onto it. She also will hold things in the hopes of properly recycling them. But since she was MIA I was able to go through whirlwind style and quickly separate stuff into trash, yard sale or other piles and deal with each appropriately.
Later in the afternoon I decided I would tackle mowing the back of our property. It hadn’t been done in a couple months so it was jungle thick, meaning I had to go turtle slow. I spent over 3 hours sitting on the tractor. By the time I was done I looked like a furry grass mutant as the sweat that covered me caused the grass clippings to adhere to my skin. Saturday night was car night at the casino so we headed over. We had some decent success at the video poker machines. We didn’t win the car but at least someone with a last name ending in Z didn’t win either. We didn’t get to bed till 1am.
Sunday Nicki didn’t care about our late night and insisted on getting me up at 7. I was really tired. Ali woke up a few hours later and we went for our run. Ali set yet another record, running 2 miles straight and a total run of 2.75 miles. Her recent progress has been awesome. Just as we finished there were 2 hispanic soccer teams that showed up for a match at the field inside the track. It was interesting watching the pre-game warmups.
Before the Eagles game the neighbor brought over their little Jack Russel Terrier, Zoe in an attempt to socialize her with Nicki. Zoe is a bit of a terror initially, barking and trying to attack any dogs she doesn’t know. However after a few minutes she settled down. We had her and Nicki in the dog run area for a good half hour together and besides one or two small incidents they got along fine. It was cool, plus Nicki was more relaxed with our neighbor which is a relief since we plan on having them tend to the pets while we are in Palm Springs.
The Eagles game was a good one. It seemed like the Eagles played better than the score indicated and should have won by more. It was a heroic effort by Akers to kick that game winning field goal with a wrecked hamstring. I’m not sure why he was even active on the roster on Sunday since it was apparent last week that the hamstring was screwed up. Those things take time to heal up. It was a nice win.
I did something I have done very rarely in the past year, flew my rc plane. I took my high speed flying wing out and chucked it in the air. My skills were a bit rusty at first but after a few minutes I was doing power dives, loops and rolls like I hadn’t missed a beat. WoW has pretty much sucked my motivation to fly RC away but it was nice change to fly again. On a later run I was out there for a long time as I would climb the wing to high altitudes and then cut the motor and just glide on the currents for a long time. I enjoyed it and plan to reintroduce it as a more regular part of me leisure activities. WoW will always be there.
Maybe all my bitching helped just a bit when it comes to the very light work schedule of the road crew doing our widening project. For the first time I can remember, there was a full crew doing work on the road Saturday morning. It’s about f’in time.
This morning I was DEAD tired from a weekend of light sleep. In a few minutes I go to the dermatologist. Ali has been bugging me to go for awhile to have a few odd spots looked at. Hopefully all is well. I have spent more than my fair time in the sun over the years, much of it without sunblock.
My email exchange with county officials regarding the miserable road conditions out at our place has continued. One of my email exchanges was CC’d out to an email list that a rep from the local paper saw and found interesting. She called my house and asked if she could turn it into a letter to the editor, I said “Sure” , the more people that see it, the better. County officials tell me that it is reasonable that an 8 mile project should take 5 years. I laugh at that but have not taken the time to present them a long list of projects that dwarf this in scope but have been completed in less time. Right now my favorite example is the Chesepeake Bay-Bridge tunnel that was COMPLETED in less than 4 years. Our straight as an arrow, flat, 8 mile segment takes 5 years, and this is deemed as reasonable, total BS.
Last night as I was cleaning off the kitchen counter I saw a letter from Capital One regarding their “new and improved” airmiles plan. They had just changed the plan less than a year ago so I thought it was odd that they would change it again. The way it used to work was whatever the price of the ticket, you multiplied it times 100 and that was how many miles it cost. So for example if I bought a $160 dollar ticket, that would be 16,000 miles. Well as I read the new redemption schedule I quickly got very pissed off. The new plan goes like this, if the ticket is less than 150 bucks, it costs you 15,000 miles. Of course it is very difficult to find a roundtrip ticket for 150 bucks anymore. If the ticket costs $150.01 to $350 it costs you a flat 35,000 MILES!!!! WTF?????? I was freaking and I picked up the phone and dialed. Ali said “You are going to call them now??” Hell yes. I got some robotic female on the phone and after giving my info I explained to her how outrageous the new plan is. I gave her the example of how the 160 dollar ticket that costs me 16,000 miles now will cost me 35,000 miles in the new plan. I asked her how this was “new and improved” from a customer standpoint? Reading from her script, she pointed out how I get 500 “bonus” miles when the new plan goes into effect and how I can get double miles if I buy from “preferrred” businesses. I immediately idenitifed those perks as next to useless if it was going to cost me so many more miles for a ticket. I told her I realized she had no control over it but I wanted her to pass along how ridiculous the new plan was and how it will likely result in me taking my business elsewhere. She apologized for the inconvenience but offered no counters to my proposal that the new plan sucks. I hung up knowing my gripe would probably never heard beyond the customer service sheep I just spoke to, yet it took a bit of a load off my back to at least express it. I mean come on, do they think people are stupid?? Jerks.
Rita seems to be close to an instant replay of Katrina, giving Fla a glancing blow and then reving up to a super storm over the bathtub warm waters of the gulf. If anything good came from Katrina it’s that the people in Texas aren’t f’ing around and are getting out. I’d be lying if I said the huge onslaught of named storms down here in the past 2 years doesn’t concern me.
Although I haven’t blogged it, Ali and were regular Big Brother 6 watchers which ended on Tuesday night. I wasn’t very pleased with either of the final two players. My favorite player was Kasar. When he got his chance to address Jennifer who backstabbed him after he gave her HoH it was great. He was dead serious when she told her to think for herself and it was surprising that she admitted that she didn’t do that. That one move made her the most hated person in the game for me by far. I was somewhat surprised Ivette didn’t win it all since she spent the entire game preaching how much her family could use the money. I guess it fell on deaf ears.
Reality programming is now in full force. What was a pretty empty tv schedule for me now has Survivor, Apprentice, ER and soon to come, American Idol plus others to fill up the time.
Hey today is the first day of fall, I would have never known except for it being mentioned on the radio. When I was in PA I would be counting down to this day from a month out or more as it signified the end of fun things like weekend volleyball tournaments, weeknights at Gary’s and most outdoor activities I consider enjoyable. The change it had on my moods was dramatic. Now if anything, I look forward to the oncoming 70 degree, low humidity weather that is on it’s way for us over the winter. I have been down here long enough that I almost take pleasant winters for granted, where as the first year or two I relished in the wonder of it all.
First rain band rolled through a little after noon. Had hard wind and horizontal rain for awhile, by 1pm it tapered off to light rain.