All that n more, American Express rip off, ouch
We (I) had a pretty ambitious work schedule lined up. We got it all done and even threw another large chore on the list. Even so we had a good amount of leisure time left over.
On Friday when I got home, I sort of expected to be attacked since Ali left a comment on my blog entry regarding my theory that it isn’t easy for me to maintain my weight. However I was pleasantly surprised that there was no animosity and instead, Ali was in a great mood, one of the best moods I have seen her in in a long time. It was great.
Saturday morning Ali had to go help work a race. I stayed home and started on my list. I changed the oil and filter on both my truck and the tractor. Both went well except for a small incident I had trying to free the drain bolt on the truck. After pulling on the wrench mightily, it gave way and my wrist slammed into the surrounding metal, peeling a nice piece of skin off. The bloody wound didn’t stop me from continuing on.
I did some little things around the yard like trimming back the topiary, hibiscus and bushes along the utility equipment. I also took the loppers and trimmed back the palms in Nicki’s area and the many dead leaves on the banana trees.
When Ali got home from the race she was very tired and took a couple hour nap after lunch. I tried to stay quiet and just goofed on the computer. I didn’t go to wake her up until around 3. We called my mom at work and asked her if she wanted to go to dinner with us at Tijuana Flats. She agreed and we said we would pick her up around 6.
Well I still wanted to get the bedroom cleanup knocked out so I enlisted a still drowsy Ali to help me get it done. We pulled most of the furniture away from the walls and swept behind it. We dusted surfaces that normally wouldn’t see attention any other time of the year and we cleaned out and organized the upper cabinet in our laundry center and the big drawer under our bathroom counter. Both of these areas were barfing with junk. We moved through the process quickly and had everything done by 4:30 or so. It gave us just enough time to clean up and take off to get mom.
Mom wasn’t nuts about going to Tijuana Flats, she isn’t real big into Mexican food. I was a bit worried that it may be full since it was Saturday night. It was a pleasant surprise to walk in and see plenty of tables available. With me getting a beer and mom getting a glass of wine, the bill still was only 25 bucks. This place rocks. We all enjoyed our meals, even Mom. She commented that she would come back again which I was glad to hear. We dropped mom back off at home and then shot back home.
On Sunday all I had left on my list was to shampoo the carpets. However, earlier in the weekend Ali mentioned she would like to pressure wash Tuki’s cage and then also pressure wash the shed which was coated with scum on the back and one side that see very little sun. So I pulled the pressure washer out, hooked it up and Ali went at it. After she was done with Tuki’s cage, I drug the rig down to the shed. After showing her how it had to be done, I sort of figured I would see Ali coming inside shortly after starting, asking me to finish it. Cleaning the shed is not easy. You have to hold the pressure wand at weird angles and depending on the wind, you can get quite wet while doing it, something Ali hates. (getting wet) However she stuck it out and did everything she could reach. While she was doing that, I was doing the preliminary step for shampooing the rug, vacuuming it.
I finished vacuuming and then started the steam cleaner. Steam cleaning is monotonous. You have to go much slower than vacuuming because you want to make sure you pull out as much of the solution as possible. My left shoulder was burning by the time I finished from pushing and pulling motion I repeated several hundred times. It always amazes me how much dog hair comes up when I run the steam cleaner, even with sweeping immediately before. The waste water I was dumping was quite dirty so it validated the effort I was putting into it as worthwhile.
As I finished up steam cleaning, Ali finished up what she could do with the shed. I then moved outside, grabbed the ladder and did the higher parts of the shed and at the last minute decided to go all out and climbed on top of the shed and washed down the roof as well. I figured all the shit was in place, why not just do it? Washing on the roof is dangerous. It’s slippery and steep. If I let my balance get too far out from my middle I could have easily taken a header from 12 feet high. I finished up after maybe an hour.
It was barely 1 oclock and we were pretty much done with the chores for the day. We spent the rest of it doing what we felt like (well Ali worked on the bills too) Our tax return hit our bank account on Saturday so that was a nice surprise.
Sunday evening we watched Casino Royale, the latest in the James Bond flicks. This one has a brand new guy playing Bond and he is very good in the part. He is much more of a bad ass than any prior Bond. The film is very long but it is filled with tons of action and more double crossing than you could keep track of. It had a torture scene in it that still makes me cringe. If you asked me to give you an in depth plot review where I was to explain exactly how each character was connected, I would be hard pressed to do so. It didn’t matter, I found the movie very entertaining. It gets a solid A from me.
Our neighbors left last night for a cruise so we are dog sitting Zoe for the next 5 days. She is so funny. The dog is obsessed with food. She thinks every movement you make could possible be food related. She watches you like her life depended on it, hoping that every move you make could possibly result in you tossing her a morsel. You just learn to ignore her but it doesn’t stop her from being your shadow. Nicki likes to taunt Zoe into playing. Zoe sometimes obliges but soon tires of it and goes back to staring at us. It is definitely more work managing two dogs. Double the potty runs, double the feeding and double the attention. It’s fun in a way though too.
American express sucks. They are a bunch of rip off artists. Let me tell you why. Mom got me a gift card from American express for Christmas. It is supposed to be the same as cash, use it anywhere. However unlike a normal gift card where you say, here is 50 bucks, give me a gift card for 50 bucks, American Express charges the purchaser an “activation fee” so they are making money there. Then if you try to use the card for anything less than the full amount, the fun begins.
Say you have a 100 dollar gift card and you use it somewhere and use $74.56 on the purchase. Ok let’s say a month passes and you want to use the remaining $26.44 toward a 50 dollar purchase. If you simply hand the clerk the card and ask them to run it for whatever the remaining balance is they will be unable to do so. (like you can with normal store gift cards) You have to know exactly how much is left on the card in order to use it. If the clerk tries to run it for more than $26.44 it will come back declined instead of approving it for $26.44. So if you plan to use the card in this manner, it requires you either calling, or going in through their website and finding out the balance.
Of course American Express realizes this is a pain in the ass for the customer and is in fact banking on it, hoping that this protocol results in millions of dollars left over in gift cards never gets redeemed. And in fact, they have another policy in place to ensure this happens. If someone tried to use their American Express gift card, had it declined because they didn’t know the exact balance left on it and shoved it back in their wallet, they assume that when they finally do get around to calling the number to get their balance, they will be able to spend it.
Well not if it has been in your wallet for more than a year. After that period of time American Express starts sucking off an additional two dollars a month as some bullshit fee, like it costs them money somehow. So on top of the initial fee they charge the purchaser, they make back additional money on the back end from their bullshit policies, in addition to whatever fee they charge the retailer. It is a crock of shit. Ironically we have received several pre-approved letters from American Express over the last few weeks. Needless to say they went immediately into the shredder. Bunch of greedy bastards.
I saw this exercise in Men’s Health that I decided to try at the gym today. You put two twenty pound dumbbells on the floor, shoulder length apart and assume push up position, perched on the dumbbells. You do a push up and then when you are at the top of the motion, you raise one of the dumbbells off the floors and pull it up like you are doing a mini-dumbbell row. It didn’t look too bad but when I went to try it, it was extremely awkward. I did one set and was only able to do six or seven reps. You had to have your feet very wide to help counter the torque created by pulling one arm off the ground. When I went to try a second set, on the very first pull, I felt a sharp pain shoot down the inside of right leg, across the knee so I immediately stopped. I don’t think I will be trying that one again. I am still planning on giving the “300” workout a shot next Monday. God help me….