The weekend which I thought would be relatively busy was instead relatively lazy. I got home a bit late on Friday night because after work I stopped at a doctor’s place to set up a printer/fax for him. He is pretty much the last person I do on the side work for. I used to eagerly pursue on the side work but it just turned out to be more hassle than it was worth. Many people seem to think once they pay you to work on their computer that you are now have also enlisted as their 24/7 free tech support line. It just is a bad deal so I try to avoid doing home user work like the plague.
Later Friday night I hooked up my Vonage rig, the box came earlier that day. Wow it was soooooo easy. I basically plugged it into my internet router, plugged a phone into it and BINGO it worked. I then tested my whole house theory by unplugging us from Sprint outside, plugging the vonage phone line into the wall jack and BANG that worked beautifully as well. Awesome. I had to reverse it though because our home number won’t be transferred to our Vonage service until the last week of the month. So right now just the phone and fax in the computer room is on Vonage. I did some test calls that sounded just fine and Ali called her brother last night on it as well while I was playing WoW. What cool tech.
On Saturday it was hot as hell, it felt like summer with highs in the 90’s and high humidity. Late morning we headed out and stopped at Sports Authority before going to Home Depot. I was finally getting around to replacing the hard plastic skates that have haunted my feet for the last 15 years. It was a good thing Ali was around. If it wasn’t for her presence I would have walked out of there with the first pair of skates I tried on. That first pair was the cheapest pair of Rollerblades they had. They felt comfortable enough, certainly way better than what I currently had. They were 99 bucks and I was ready to pay and bolt.
However Ali advised me to try on some of the other models, even though they were more expensive. They had a surprisingly decent selection in size 13 skates. I think I tried on 5 or 6 pairs, ranging from the 99 dollar cheapies to the 240 dollar high end Rollerblades model. The high end model had this wild tightening system where you just pulled on one handle and it tightened the entire shoe. However the system looked like it would be prone to failure so I steered away. I was surprised with what my final selection was, a set of K2’s. The boot was nice and soft and felt like it had the most comfortable padding in the base of the skate. They were profiled a bit lower than the Rollerblades which made them feel a bit more stable. They were 179 bucks but I think in the long run they extra money will be well spent if it allows me to roller blade without foot pain. I will put them to their first real world test tomorrow when I accompany Ali on a run.
After the skate purchase we headed to Home Depot to stock up for that day’s project. We grabbed some more mulch, a bunch of dirt to refresh the garden and some vegetables to populate it. By the time we got back and ate lunch it was around 1. I put on my work clothes and headed out. Ugh it was pretty miserable. The thick humid air paired with my jeans just sapped the energy out of me. I dumped the mulch and then tilled the garden after pulling on the tiller for 10-15 minutes to get the damn thing started. Then we dumped the new dirt and I tilled that in. We had some good dirt. The planting of the vegetables I left to Ali pretty much as I just observed, feeling pretty miserable. We planted three different types of tomatoes, a white eggplant, a cucumber, a honeydew melon plant and a cantaloupe (I think) Stuff usually grows well in our garden, the problem is the bugs get to it. I am going to try to be vigilant with spraying the garden with an oil that is supposed to keep the little bastards away.
On Saturday night we watched the movie that I downloaded off Amazon the prior week, The Illusionist. It was a different type of flick than I would normally watch. It had a good plot with lots of twists and a surprise ending. The only thing that sort of bugged me is I never knew exactly if everything he did was actually an illusion or supernatural. The guy brings ghosts back. Kind of hard to fake. I would give the movie a B.
On Sunday a front blew through that brought lots of wind and a decent amount of rain. It swept away the mugginess and instead brought in nice dry air that was more in line with April in Florida. Sunday was a very lazy day by my standards.
The day started extremely early as we had to get up at 5 am to go in and help with the Beach Bum race. When we got to the race site it was still dark. Ali managed the pre-registered registration table while I did various grunt work from setting up tables to filling up the water bottles, with a hose (I cringed). I didn’t envy anyone running the race. It was very windy and still very humid since the front didn’t come through. Just like last year, there were a number of people that did not realize the race was literally held on the beach. It was a tough race, the finishers looked exhausted and I heard story after story about horrible wind, wet, sandy feet and minimal patches of packed sand to run on. Yuck. That is one race I never want to run again. We had everything cleaned up by around 9 and were back home around 10.
With in 15 minutes of getting home, Ali was back in bed, which is where she stayed until around 12:30. She asked me to stay quiet so I just played Wow and little else until she came out. The only “work” I did the rest of the day Sunday was to vacuum the house. Ali had four days off but didn’t wind up doing the cleaning she had planned until the last afternoon of the last day she had off, something I would cringe at. I would so much rather get that shit out of the way first. She is just a natural procrastinator.
Anyway, after my sweeping I decided I would watch some movies that I downloaded that Ali had no interest in seeing. So I settled down and watched Snakes on a Plane and Children of Men. The first thing I want to point out about Snakes on a Plane is it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting it to be. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t a good movie and if you have a fear of snakes you definitely do not want to see this flick. They show people getting killed by snakes in every horrible method you can imagine and some you haven’t ever imagined. It was borderline gruesome at times. It was strange because mixed with these nasty snake attack scenes are these funny slapstick moments. The best thing I can say about the movie is I wasn’t bored. I’d give it a C+.
Children of Men was something I never would have watched if I hadn’t read a blurb somewhere about it being an update version of Blade Runner. Blade runner was a movie I never saw but always heard was good, so that was reason enough for me to download Children of Men. The premise of the movie is very intriguing. It is set two decades in the future. For some reason mankind has the lost the ability to procreate, everyone is infertile and the youngest person on the planet is 18 years old. There were no more children.
The movie makes all sorts of interesting statements about life both in the future and now. Imagine a planet where everyone on it was going to die with no one to replace them? The film is extremely dark with very little positive to say about where man is going except for one little glimmer that the film is centered around. It was really intriguing and made you really think about things. There is one strong moment in the film where the main character asks a rich relative of his what the point of having all his material riches when there would soon be nobody left to enjoy it since everyone would be dead? His answer was that he simply didn’t think about the future. That was how he got by. Man, how prevalent is that thought in today’s society? Very. I would give it a B+.
I am not sure when the last time was that I watched three movies in a weekend. I also actually fired up the Xbox to play a few games. I found that frustrating. In some ways, games are too f’ing complex and realistic for their own good. Granted, since I don’t have the instruction manuals for these games, it makes it tougher but hey, I am reasonably intelligent, I think I should be able to figure out the basic controls for a game without much difficulty.
The first game I tried was LA Rush. It is a racing game. The graphics and action are great except for one flaw. If you aren’t great at the game you only get one stinkin type of car to drive, a rice burning Nissan 240sx. It is maddening. The only way to unlock the other couple dozen cars is by winning street races which is damn near impossible. I have played these types of games before and they normally at least make the first few races pretty easy so the player can at least get some sort of progression going. Not this game, I challenge someone to pick it up and get through the first race without finishing dead last the first 10 times you play it. It frustrated the hell out of me.
Next I figured I would fire up Baseball 2k6 since the baseball season just started. Again, the controls for doing simple things like pitching and batting are so overly complicated it sucks the fun out of it. Sure the graphics look like you are at the ballpark but shit, in my first half inning of pitching I gave up 10 runs on 9 hits. When it was my turn to bat, I hit every f’in button on the controller but couldn’t get the damn guy to swing. Again a manual would help but it shouldn’t require a manual to do the most basic aspects of a game.
I played Superman Returns for 10 minutes. Again, the controls were so complex I spent all my energy trying to remember combinations of key presses to perform abilities instead of just having fun using my super powers. (they need to talk to the developers of Hulk Ultimate Destruction)
Finally I tried Tiger Woods PGA golf. Once again, I couldn’t get it to do the most basic part of a golf game, swing the f’ing club! I could rotate through clubs, adjust angles, slice, hook, camera angles, but not swing the club. It was so stupid. Maybe I am just too dumb to play today’s video games.
My 4th 300 workout Friday went ok although it is getting tougher and tougher to up my reps for each exercise. I did increase my total reps by like 10 or so, totalling 176. Hitting 200 will be a big number, hitting 300, if it ever happens will be a near miracle event.
for the link to this