Archives 2005

When I was out in Vegas and PA I had to use my phone a bit. I knew I didn’t have a nationwide plan so I would have some roaming charges but still I figured my bill may be twice what it normally is, maybe 70 or 80 bucks. When Ali opened the Cingular bill and said “HOLY SHIT!” I knew it was bad, over 180 dollars. Almost all the calls were a minute but the roaming charges were ridiculous. I guess it is my fault for assuming it wouldn’t be so expensive. I signed up for a nationwide plan today, no more roaming. What a racket…

It’s ironic that by the time I am done with my braces and I’m not conscious about my teeth when I smile, I will still be hesitant to do it because of all the lines that draw across my face now whenever I try to unleash a toothy grin due to my advancing years. Damn it….

This weekend we made our second consecutive trip to the movies, this time to see War of the Worlds. I thought the movie had some amazing visuals, a lot of “look at that” moments that kept me entertained as I wondered about how they did certain things. The amazing, epic scenes of destruction helped to cover up what was really an average flick altogther. I enjoyed it more than Batman, Ali did not. Oh well, I’d give this one a B- to C+, only Fantastic 4 to go, I heard that one has gotten some really horrible reviews but I’ll risk it anyway.

Buttons, the diabetic, on the verge of death several times cat is really getting on our nerves. We think she has feline dimensia. She does all this stupid stuff, has a strange look on her face and is basically just becoming a big pain in the ass. Since her latest near death episode, we started giving her wet food twice a day to supplement her dry food that seemed to make her throw up all too often. She used to anxiously await me putting down the wet food. Now, she gives a casual glance over somedays and instead continues to eat the dry food. She has some ridiculous hang up about drinking water from her water bowl which I change daily. She almost refuses to drink out of it, instead she would much prefer to lick dirty shower water off the floor, drink out of the tupperware container that catches spilled water from Nicki’s water bottle or drink from the bowl of water we have for the dog in the bathroom for overnight. She is obsessed with it. Over the weekend Nicki decided to wake me up at 2am to go to the bathroom. I stumble to the door to let her out, and in rockets the cat, like she was sitting there with her nose jammed into the opening like she was waiting the instant the door opened to allow her access to the water sources. This ridiculous obession, combined with the early morning timeframe enraged me. I angrily grabbed the cat and initially was thinking about throwing it across the living room. I instead just threw her onto the nearby sofa as I yelled at her to stay the F out of the room, like she understood. It’s like the cat doesn’t care if my foot is at the door and the dog is standing guard, she will try to bolt past to get to the bathroom. It is maddening. Yesterday I was disgusted to see a chunk of cat litter adhered to the dryer that is about 2 feet from their COVERED litter box. How it got there I don’t know, I just uttered “F’in cats….” as I left the utility room.

The weekend was a busy one. Because of Dennis, we didn’t mow the grass last weekend. 2 weeks of not mowing during wet season is a recipe for a mowing marathon. The grass in spots was 8 inches high, requiring me to mow very slowly and sometimes hit the same patch more than once. It sucked.

On Saturday I also helped the new neighbors move a Murphy bed from the old neighbor’s place. (they sold and are moving) It was a big piece of furniture that we had to disassemble to get out. The installers wanted 600 bucks to move the bed two doors down. So we did it ourselves in 2 and a half hours and saved them a wad of cash. It wasn’t all that hard, just took some sweat dollars.

After we went to our neighbors place for dinner the other weekend we felt like we lived in a double wide. Everthing was so high end in comparison to our stuff. So that helped nudge us into looking into getting some new countertops. Ours are low end white veneer that are functional but not much else. We are interested in getting corian countertops. We got some quotes from Lowe’s and Home Depot for them. Because of the huge kitchen island, it is going to cost a lot of money. Even though Lowe’s has a free sink promotion, Home Depot was actually a couple hundred less because they charged significantly less per square foot for installation. We want to go with a color called “Silt”, sounds nasty huh? It is a darker color with more gray than anything, with various browns mixed in. It will break up the all white kitchen nicely while matching the browns that are found everywhere else. My gameplan currently is to wait for a HD 10% off anything internet coupon I signed up for and then use that to help offset the big chunk of cash this is going to cost. I’ve had various people recommend granite over Corian since they cost about the same. Ali and I agree that although granite is nice, it would stick out in our house like putting on rhinestone sunglasses. The rest of the house isn’t upscale so we don’t want the countertops to be so out of place with everything else.

That is all.

Even though I am an extremely casual golfer at best, I appreciate and follow the pro game loosely. I just happened to catch Jack Nicklaus finishing of his last major tournament of his career. He struggled a bit all day but finished it like he should. He nailed a 15 to 20 foot hooking putt. He had tears in his eyes for most of the day. When he finished the huge crowd gave him a never ending ovation. It was cool that his old nemesis, Tom Watson was in his foursome as well. When Jack finished, Tom was crying as well. You have to admire Jack Nicklaus, he was so good for so long. I’m glad I caught it live, I’ll remember it.

Two quick gym related stories. Yesterday I was sad to pull into the lot and see a crew of mexicans slaughtering the beautiful mature trees that were scattered throught the parking lot. These had to be at least 20 year old trees that were big and full. All they were leaving were 6 foot tall barren trunks. When we asked at the front desk about the carnage they said they trees were out of “code” for parking lot trees. This county is f’in ridiculous sometimes with the things they find time to worry about. The trees have been around for a few decades and now they are out of code? This place aggravates me sometimes.

As I was up front doing a shoulder machine, I saw an old man, in his 60’s I would assume, with leathery, heavily wrinkled skin, a big belly and smoking a cigarette. I figured he was heading a few doors up to one of the shopping places. Nope, he dumped his cigarette just before he came in the gym to do his “workout” I watched the guy as he went from machine to machine doing minimal weight and using improper form on pretty much every one. I mean what is the point……

I just found that the new appraised value on our house has gone up an astonishing 45% since last tax year. It really is an amazing real estate situation down here. If we moved down here now we would struggle to get our foot in the front door of a 2 bedroom condo.

Since being exposed to the original Jack Lalanne show a couple weeks ago, he has become one of my favorite people of all time. Ali and I go through his workouts in the evening on a pretty regular basis. He is so upbeat, so excited about everything, it’s next to impossible to not pick up part of that. He says some very funny things at times and he doesn’t even realize it. The other day he was instructing you on how to get into position on the chair for a particular exercise, he says “ok now you tremendously overweight people will have a problem with this…” On another show he got a letter from a viewer complaining about him lauding the fitness benefit the goose step move that nazi’s used. He reassured the viewer that he was not a nazi sympathizer. Then after he read the letter he did a “sieg heil” salute and put his index finger under his nose to mimic hitler’s moustache. Every show has little funny moments in them like these. He is great.

I never would have guessed before we got a dog how much she would integrate into a persons life. Nicki has many quirks that are very odd but seem normal to us since we have had her for well over 2 years now. She is a very fussy eater. She normally eats once a day, late at night. There are days where she won’t eat at all or eat very little. I’v tried various tricks to try to encourage her to eat. At first I would act like I was eating her food to show her how good it was. When that stopped working I started yelling the cat’s name once her supper was down. (the cats like to try to steal her food). Nicki would run to her plate to scare away the feline poachers and sometimes that would interest her in eating. Then we started burying various treats into her supper. Soon she learned she could just pick out the treats. So our latest motivator is to put a little bit of wet cat food into her supper. Nicki views this as a forbidden treat since she sees us serving it up and giving it to those rotten cats. This seems to work pretty consistently as she will come over right away to eat the cat food. Normally she will eat the rest of her food, sometimes she will eat a hole out of the food where the cat food was and leave the rest.

In the mornings she has developed another routine. Once I start to prepare our lunches she goes over to her empty plate and licks it, looks at me and cries loudly. That is her hint that she is ready for her marro-bone treat. Marro-bone’s are little hard dog treats with a meaty center. However she won’t eat them if I put them on her plate whole. If they are whole they are too precious to eat and instead she will pick them up and try to bury them somewhere in the house (normally in the pillows of our bed) So instead I pull out the scissors and with her snout inches from my hands I cut the treats up, breaking them into pieces on her plate. She then devours them in no time flat.

Last night she pissed me off. I took her out after 9 to do her business which she did, I figured she was good for the night. It was storming pretty hard around our house so we waited to jump in the shower and in turn got to bed pretty late after 11, we both were tired. Well I get dragged out of my sleep around 1am by the furry alarm clock. I’m groggy and angry but she seems persistent that she now needs to go out. I stumble over to the slider and open it which immediately sets off the house alarm. (I didn’t know Ali set it) So as the alarm and siren is blaring into the dead of the night, I hurry up to the keypad to shut the racket off. I take the dog out, she does a number 2 but it was no emergency. I verbally chastised her for getting me up for a non-event, slam the slider closed and collapse back into bed. Needless to say I am a bit tired this morning. It’s nice that the dog has me so well trained…

We resumed our lucky streak by dodging the brunt of Dennis. Even though Dennis passed us a good 200 miles offshore it still affected our weather for the better part of 3 days. We did mild hurricane prep by putting any loose outside items away as well as pulling all the stuff on the lanai into the wall by the sliding door. I braced a few of the fragile trees in the orchard. I did special work on the one apple tree that has an active mockingbird nest in it. I secured it with rubber tree supports and then took the branches that the nest was built upon, pulled them up and tied them to make a more secure foundation to prevent the nest with 3 little birds in it from blowing away.

Friday night was the biggest rain event for us. When I woke up Saturday morning we had over 3.5″ of rain in the gauge. Our property which had most of the standing water gone on Wednesday is once again surrounded by a series of standing water small lakes. Saturday and Sunday was mostly gusty with periods of light to medium rain. By Sunday morning I was able to put the stuff back outside. I’m glad to report the little birds and their home survived.

On Saturday we had a majorly lazy day. Dennis dictated indoor activities with the constant wind and rain. Ali loves lazy days, she could just lay in bed for hours. Lazy days make me stir crazy. The plus side was I used all the lax time to play hours upon hours of WoW, my guilty obsession. I feel bad at times about sitting there so long, spending so much time trying to acheive various cyber goals that mean nothing outside the context of the game. But it keeps my mind busy, keeps me entertained and insulates me from other things. Well late in the afternoon we did a bit of “work” when we cleaned out some more of the clutter in the bathroom and I installed a makeshift shelf in the bathroom cabinet to double our available space down there, allowing us to clean stuff up.

On Sunday we decided to go running even though it was still overcast and gusty. I expected the stiff wind that was in our face for half the track’s length to significantly slow our times. I was very surprised for us to beat our previous best lap times by a full 6 seconds. The wind affected Ali’s breathing enough that she couldn’t run as many continuous laps as last week so we would stop and walk one then run one for the last couple laps. On lap 12 I told Ali I wanted to run one as fast as I could just to see what kind of time I could do. So I took off, extended my stride and went hard. I’m sure I looked as silly as ever. When I run my natural technique keeps my upper body very upright and straight, even though my legs are moving. It got me the nickname “Road Runner” during my baseball playing days. Anyway, I turned the lap in 1:45 about a 7 minute mile pace, not bad and about the same pace as when I ran the 12 minute run in the Junior High fitness test. I was pleased with that. As we finished the run it started to rain again but the cool rain felt good on our overheated skin.

Over the weekend we saw two movies. On Saturday night we watched Blade 3 on pay-per-view. I wanted to see this in theaters but we never got around to seeing it. It was a good flick, along the lines of the other ones. Great fighting, sweet special affects, a good villian who gets what he deserves in the end. I’d give the film a solid B.

On Sunday we went to the movies. There are 3 movies out currently I wanted to see, Batman Begins, War of the Worlds and Fantastic Four. Since Batman Begins has been out the longest we figured it wouldn’t be out that much longer and the theater should be less crowded. I heard it was a darker Batman and it has made decent money so I figured it was pretty good. I like superhero flicks. Well I didn’t like this one. I thought it was borderline terrible. To compound it’s badness, it was a long movie, well over 2 hours. The storyline bordered on ridiculous. So much of it just didn’t make any sense. Much of the movie is filmed in a dark manner that I guess is supposed to convey the darkness of Batman but in reality all it did was make it hard to see what was going on. The guy that played Batman was lousy. I thought it was stupid how he changed his voice and overacted when he was Batman, speaking in a deep silly voice that didn’t work at all. Batman gets his powers from basically being rich and really pissed off somehow. I don’t want to go into great details to ruin it for any of you victims that didn’t see it yet. I found it odd that in several scenes Mandy Moore had blatantly protruding nipples. I assume this is a look they wanted but it, like so much else in the movie, didn’t fit in and just seemed like an obvious bone thrown to the male audience. Sure there are lots of things blown up, a fast car but none of it really mattered, the plot was just so ridiculous at times, nothing could pull me back into caring about the movie. It gets a D. Hopefully the other two won’t be such disappointments.

Yep there is more big wind heading in our general direction. It appears that it should be comfortably off our coast as it goes by but if we learned anything last year it is you just never really know. The panic level here is pretty low, people aren’t boarding up or anything like that. It is disconcerting that there have been a bunch of storms already and we are early in hurricane season.

I remembered one other observation from Vegas I never got out here. Down here in senior citizen heaven we have police everywhere for some reason. You literally can’t go 5 minutes on the roads without seeing a deputy vehicle. Many more police are here than where I lived in PA, many more. However when I was in Vegas, I went 4 full days and don’t recall seeing one policeman or vehicle on the road. Casino security was the closest I saw to law enforcement. I thought it was very odd that Vegas, the capital of gambling, hookers and whatever else had next no visible police presence.

As the case with most things, I have mixed feelings about the latest terrorist attack. I was struck when a co-worker stopped me in the hall and said “Did you hear that they are linking the attack with AL QEDA?” with fear in her eyes and on her face. I didn’t quite understand why the possible linking of Al Qeda would be shocking. Since 9-11, maybe I have been numbed by all the death and tragedy that fills the news almost every day. As of now the death totals in todays attack are maybe slightly more than the average amount of US troops that have been killed per week in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past two years, yet when those stories are presented daily they get as much attention as the weather report, they are that commonplace. But when the death occurs outside of that area it suddenly becomes much more significant?

I heard Bush give his standard “The terrorists won’t prevail….” speech. Well of course they won’t prevail but you know what, they won’t ever be defeated either. You can’t defeat people whose greatest source of honor is to strap explosives to themselves and blow us up.

That being said, I think it is near pointless for people here to cower in fear that they will be the next victims. We all take far greater risks stepping into our automobiles each day yet we do it blindly and without fear. If it is your time to go it is your time to go whether it be by natural causes, cancer, hit by a bus or a terrorist attack. If you are lucky you won’t even know what happened and you have the bonus of no longer having to be a part of this overpopulated, self-centered, wasteful, rotting society.