I heard a rumor the Stanley Cup playoffs are going on, the championship series actually. Does ANYONE care about the NHL anymore? I certainly don’t. I mean I guess if the Flyers were in it I would watch but damn I have no idea how the league keeps it’s doors open. The NBA isn’t far above the NHL as far as my interest level goes. I just don’t care about these ultra-paid, possee surrounded, gun toting, whore mongering punks that seem to fill most of the NBA rosters.
So how about a picture of one of my favorite baseball card players ever, Oscar Gamble. How he got a hat on his head I’ll never know.
Well I struggled through another 300 workout, scraping out +4 reps, up to 257 total. The reason it was a struggle is I have had a rather uncomfortable morning with gastrointestinal “issues”.
The nursing home Ali works at has been under quarantine becuase of an outbreak of the norwalk virus. Norwalk is the virus responsible for some of the cruise ship illness outbreaks we all have read about over the past few years. It is highly contagious and it’s symptoms are violent illness resulting in throwing up and diarhea. Well I wondered if I caught it this morning. No I didn’t throw up but I had one of those epsiodes at the work bathroom where you PRAY that noone walks in during. It was bad stuff. Luckily, my prayers were answered and noone walked in during the fireworks. Things have settled down since so maybe it isn’t norwalk. However I can’t recall anything I ate that would set off such a reaction.
Well anyway, after dealing with that, straining yourself through a 300 is not exactly enjoyable. Hopefully the urgent trips to the men’s room are over.
The weekend was good. Once again I took the strategy of knocking out almost all of the household stuff on Saturday, leaving our Sunday pretty much free. It makes for a rough Saturday sometimes but the carefree Sunday makes up for it in my book. We did all the outside chores although a lot of it was delayed because we had off and on showers in the morning as the remnants of tropical storm Barry blew through.
So while we were waiting to go outside I decided to rotate the tires on the Camry. It’s something they recommend doing every 10k miles. Of course the dealer is happy to do this for you, although I am sure they charge you a bundle for it, I bet at least 40 bucks. Since I have two hydraulic floor jacks, I can do the job with not a ton of fuss. It probably took me around a half hour doing it that way.
We have been mowing every other week but it may soon be getting to the point where it once again turns into a weekly chore. The grass is really growing fast. When I was weeding I was pysched to see the two melon plants we have in the garden, a cantaloupe and honeydew, are both producing fruit. Both of them have fruit on them ranging from baseball to softball size. The key now is to keep the f’ing insects from destroying them. We were quite liberal with the application of the anti-insect oil. Our fruit trees are going nuts too. The apple, lemon and key lime trees all have a large amount of fruit coming in right now.
After maybe a solid 4 or 5 hours of work the outside and inside stuff was done. We were done in time for us to take showers and have dinner at a small pizza/deli place that is only a couple miles from our house. We both got sandwiches that were both HUGE. We each only ate half and took the other half with. After that we went to Home Depot and Wild Oats.
At Home Depot we picked up several things. Ali had a coupon that gave you 10 bucks off any sale over 50 dollars. We figured it out just right, coming in at 52 dollars. Saving 20% off the bill was a nice bonus. At Wild Oats Ali needed to pick up a couple things. Wild Oats is an all natural, all organic grocery store. They also were a big sponsor for Ali’s 5k race she organized. She got her things and then I offered that we could “quickly” take a look around, since I was never there before. I wanted to get back home shortly because we were going to watch a movie. Well before I know it, Ali is in her mode where she examines every item on a shelf. She enjoys doing this, picking stuff, up, looking at it, reading the label, putting it back and then repeating. Well I was ok with it for awhile but then I said something, not wanting to spend an hour inspecting the store’s inventory. Ali said “Well you said you wanted to look around…” I said “yes, but you forgot an adjective, QUICKLY” Annoyed, she cut her perusing short and we paid and headed home. It’s a nice store. I had no idea there was that much organic stuff out there.
So we got home and quickly set up to watch a movie I downloaded with Amazon Unbox to the Tivo, Man of the Year. This was an Ali pick, she wanted a funny movie. Wow, the movie was totally average. It got a couple smiles or smirks but really did nothing for me. I wouldn’t recommend it really unless you have nothing else to watch but Lawrence Welk reruns. I give it a C.
Sunday was a nice day, the weather was better and we had a very light list of things to do. The day got off to a noisy start for me when I was getting ready to take Nicki out. I heard dogs barking and then all of a sudden I see a rabbit sprint by followed by two dogs in hot pursuit. One of the dogs looked like a beagle, the other some sort of lab mix, I think. Of course Nicki was going crazy. So I take her out and the beagle ignores us but the lab mix comes over. It has a collar but no tags. It’s bark sounded exactly like the one we hear at all times of day or night. The dog is probably the unfortunate pet of a Mexican family. Well anyway, Nick and her got along really well. They were sniffing and chasing each other around for quite awhile. Eventually they both tired of the games. I told the dog to go home, like it understood me, funny. If Ali was awake and was involved she probably would have restrained the dog and called domestic animals. I am almost immune to seeing loose dogs by now, it happens so often. So Nicki and I went back inside without further action. (oh, the rabbit got away)
After Ali got up, we decided we would finally go out to our land in Lehigh Acres to check on the condition of our For Sale signs. I haven’t gotten any calls on them for quite awhile. I decided to take the party van. But before I did I wanted to pull the passenger side rear wheel to look at the brakes. This is the wheel that gets abnormally hot after driving. The rear brakes were totally overhauled as part of my $1600 repair bill I footed last year and there has only been maybe 3000 miles driven on them since that time.
My 2 1/2 ton floor jack struggled to get the big fat van rear end off the ground. I pull the wheel and the brake drum and a bunch of junk falls out. The junk is pieces of burned up brake pads. The pads are a mess and for whatever reason must not properly retract or are improperly adjusted. I cleaned out the junk, sprayed the assembly with WD-40 as I had Ali press the pedal down. I put it back together and then would check it after our drive. (it was still hot) So I am going to have to take it to the garage once again.
Other than a hot wheel, the party van performed admirably on the trip to Lehigh, no horrible shakes, braking felt ok and the ac was cold. Oh and the windshield washer pump and wipers work well. They got a huge test, trying to keep the windshield clear of the endless splatters from f’ing love bugs. They were terrible. You would drive through swarms of them, it looked and sounded like someone was shooting the front of the van with a paintball gun. I must have gone through a half gallon of wiper fluid up and back.
So we get to the first property, the sign is still up but the area where we wrote in the phone number is totally blank. Evidently the elements totally dissolved the permanent marker. So I pull the sign out and have Ali rewrite it. Nicki watched Ali’s work intently. I put the sign back and we are off to property number two. We come up to where I think it is but there is no sign. I pull over and walk back and forth, looking for it. It is nowhere to be seen, not knocked over, not thrown in the bushes, just gone, great. Well that would explain why the calls have dried up. One property had a blank sign and the other had no sign…. So we are going to have to make a new one and travel back out to stick it in place. I am not sure if I want to put in the standard sign from Home Depot or make one out of wood and paint the information on. It would be less stealable and also would be more resistant to fading.
After stopping at the second property we stopped for gas. The party van has a locking gas cap. I keep the key on the dash of the van. I find it rather annoying to have a key for the cap so I I try to not tighten the cap enough to engage the lock. So after I fill up, I plop the key back on the little tray area, it bounces and disappears from my sight. Where the F did it go?? It was almost like a magic trick, it disappeared but there wasn’t an obvious space for it to fall in to. So Ali and I are looking around. I pull on the console to look if I see the key wedged down there. Nope. I decided, f it, I don’t like the gas cap anyway. There is an auto store right down the street. So I go there, buy a non-locking gas cap (along with some bug dissolving wiper fluid) and my problem is solved for less than 10 bucks.
Once we got back home I had the pleasant job of getting the hundreds of dead love bugs off the van. It was disgusting. First I hit them with the hose to knock the majority of the body off, then I hit it with a soapy brush to get the rest. After a half hour of elbow grease I got most of them off. This is definitely the worst and longest I can remember the love bug problem being.
On Sunday I also got a chance to talk to our neighbor across the street that got the new tractor. I was excited when he said I could borrow it to move fill from our pit. That will be awesome and such a big time saver for me. Hopefully sometime during the next two weeks I will get to give it a try. It has a bucket on the front and a leveling blade in the back. Growing up we had a tractor about the same size we used to mow the grass in Gouglersville. It only had a mower deck though, nothing else.
Ali went to some ballet thing with Michelle late Sunday afternoon. I played some WoW and then sat down to watch Minority Report for the third time. I like the flick, what can I say. It has a scene in there that is incredibly funny to me. It is after John Anderton (Tom Cruise) has his eyeballs replaced so he can’t be identified with a retinal scan. He has it done by some scuzzy criminal doctor in a slum like apartment. After the surgery his eyes are bandaged and he has to leave them covered for 12 hours. The “doctor” shows John two ropes, one leads to the kitchen, the other to the bathroom. Well John gets hungry and follows the rope to the kitchen. The doctor put a jar of milk and a sandwich in there in case Tom gets hungry. He pulls himself to the kitchen, opens the door and the viewer gets an eyeful of a fridge filled with the rancid food and a jar of green milk, all around the good milk and sandwich. Well Tom Cruise doesn’t know that there is bad food in there. He picks up a green, slimy, disgusting sandwich and takes a big bite. He immediately spits the food out and scrambles back into the fridge feeling for the milk. Of course you guessed it, he grabs the green milk, takes a swig and projectile vomits that out as well. That scene makes me laugh my ass off.
Today the 300 workout needed no asterisk. I was finally able to do box jumps. Thanks to Jeremy’s suggestion to jump up but STEP down since it was jumping down that was hurting really. I knocked out 28 of them. I also hit a milestone with dead lifts, cranking out 40. With most of the exercises, since my rep numbers are getting higher, I have to take a mini-pause towards the end before finishing the set.
With dead lifts that pause comes at around 30 reps where I readjust my grip which by that time has slipped quite a bit. With push ups the pause comes at 40 and then again at 45, my chest and arms are burning pretty well by that time. I pause with wipers at 25ish so I can take a breath and fight the feeling of wanting to throw up. With the clean and press things I will pause at 20 for a second again to adjust my grip and take a breath before knocking out the last 5. With pull ups, the first time around, the first 15 come rapid fire, the last 4 have breaks. With the last set of them I go till 9 or 10 until pausing between each rep.
Anyway, the return to box jumps gives me some hope regarding getting back on the volleyball court. I may be able to sneak a June tournament in there. That would be awesome.
Ali is and has been really tired of her job for a long time. Her workplace is filled with a bunch of slackers that make her job very frustrating. She has been hanging in there, waiting for her 401 k matching dollars to be fully vested. She is now at the point where she is either fully vested or very close to being so. So last night we were talking about options.
We are not at a point that she can simply not work. If we sold our two pieces of land in Lehigh, we would probably be able to do it if we really tightened up our spending belts. However right now the market for that land is as dead as can be so that ain’t happening. Ali has been checking out some work from home businesses. There are some possibilities there but none of them pay much at all. She even threw out the idea of waitressing. In that scenario she may be able to get away with working 3 nights a week (most likely weekends) and make enough money for us to keep things going as is. This scenario would allow to her have her days free and also accommodate Ali’s love of sleeping in.
There were various other possible job ideas tossed around. She did some digging around last night on the computer. Who knows what she will wind up doing but I think it is safe to say that she will be bagging out of her current job sooner rather than later. We have enough of a cushion in the bank that she could spend some time looking around without it killing us. However any change will without a doubt require us to examine closely our spending patterns and cut things out that we take for granted right now. I’m willing to make the sacrifice in order to relieve Ali of this large boulder of stress that hangs over her.
This weekend has a lot of yard work on the schedule. Weed whacking, weeding, spraying and mowing will eat up a good part of my Saturday. Last week I saw my neighbor tooling around on a big tractor with a front end bucket and a spreading blade on the back. I assumed he rented it. I found out he bought it. I am trying to get him to either do some work for me with it or allow me to “rent” it from him to bring fill up from the pit. It would certainly beat the shovelling method I have relied on so far.
I forgot to mention that Crazy Jack, our neighbor that lives two doors down from me, whom hates my guts, added something new to his arsenal of white trash equipment, a trampoline.
Jack does very little maintenance on his house, I rarely see him outside. When he does decide to do things like mow his grass or weed whack, it is often at weird times like late on a Sunday evening or immediately after a hard rain or even while it is still raining. However he does like to occasionally decorate the yard with various objects.
For a couple years there was the old piece of shit boat that was later tied to the electric pole for hurricane Wilma. The boat was falling apart and didn’t have a motor. It remained there, tied to the pole for months afterward. Maybe he was worried about it being stolen.
Then there is the basketball pole and rim that he put up. I never, ever have seen one soul out there shooting basketball. This took a beating from Wilma as well and the pole has been affixed at a 45 degree angle for the last two years. He also has a volleyball net that has been in place for the better part of a year which again has become another yard monument. Never seen it used. There also was the picnic table that sat squarely in front of his garage door for at least 3 months.
The house had a huge pile of cinder blocks piled beside it for at least 3 years. An impressive sized collection of weeds mixed in with them over time. Some of them reached at least 6 or 7 feet tall. There is a broken down yard tractor back there as well. Maybe he uses it to mark his property line.
So now we have the trampoline. Last Saturday night I was out walking Nicki around 11 pm and there were people out on the trampoline, bouncing around by a spotlight. Maybe that is why I have never seen the other stuff being used. They only use it late at night.
Crazy.
Man I had a terrible night’s sleep last night. I woke up around 2 am having to go to the bathroom. After that the rest of the night it felt like I was in a real light sleep with constant, nonsensical, rapid fire dreams. The only dream I remember much about was one where I was a trainer on the reality show we watch, Work Out. I was talking to the owner Jackie about something. I remember feeling incredibly distracted during the conversation, not really paying attention to what she was saying. However at the same time I remember feeling like she found me boring and wasn’t interested in talking to me. The rest of the dreams flew through my head so fast they are a blur. I woke up bleary eyed, looking like I downed a couple six packs.
My second monitor for home arrived. It is a used Sony 19 inch monitor, similar to what I have at work. Originally I said something to Ali about giving her the 19 incher and I would hook her older 15 inch LCD to my computer. Ali was at ballet last night so I hooked the big one up to my system. When she got home I asked her if she wanted the big one on her system. She said she didn’t care and said I should just keep it on mine. Ok fine, you don’t have to twist my arm. I will take a picture of my 41 inches of screen real estate.
There is another event that shows up on my Tivo now and then that I always watch right away. Along with anything with UFC, Pride Fighting or World Strongest Man in the title, arm wrestling has joined the list. These events are great. The sport has a lot of characters in it, watching them try to psyche each other out is hilarious.
The opponents have one minute to come to a grip, which rarely happens. Each person is trying to position their hand in such a way that it gives them a leverage advantage. If they can’t grip it themselves, the refs position their hands for them. If once they start, their hands slip apart, they strap them together with a nylon strap.
A wrestler is allowed two fouls per match before they are disqualified. A foul can occur a few ways. If they lift their elbow off the pad during the match is a common one. If a ref is doing the grip and either person moves it is a foul. Also if one guy starts too early he earns a foul.
Of course having a strong arm is a prerequisite for the sport but it seems like having a big, strong hand is even more of an advantage. Some of the matches can be grueling, lasting 30 seconds or more. Their arms have to be killing them. The sport seems to have a lot of older guys that have been at the top of the game for 20 years or more. The different techniques are interesting. It’s almost a rock , paper, scissors thing. One technique will trump another technique if all other things are equal. Anyway, it is a great half hour of entertainment, normally found on ESPN2.
For like two weeks, the area above my ankles, on both legs has been itchy as hell. First I figured it was some bug bite I picked up in our backyard wilderness. But it hasn’t gone away and in fact seems to have spread somewhat. I started worrying it could be a staph infection. I would have never guessed that except for an episode of Ultimate Fighter I saw last season that had the various fighters getting staph infections from rolling around the sweaty mats. With as dirty and unkempt as my gym is, I easily could see a similar scenario.
When I was doing my 300 workout Friday I noticed one guy scratching the shit out of his ankles, just like I have been. Well anyway I went to the doctor today. She said it didn’t look like staph but she prescribed me some twice a day cream that should clean it up. We will see. I have been trying very hard to not scratch it. If I break down and do scratch it, the entire area starts to itch even worse and sets off a snowball of crazy, rub to the bone scratching.
When I came back from the gym there was an elderly couple coming in from the parking lot. They were very old and feeble looking and they both were pushing walkers, slowly. Yes, they drove there.
The old guy that wears nothing but the same muscle shirt at the gym must read my blog. He made a liar out of me by showing up today working out in a button down hawaiian shirt…
Do you remember the days when it really meant something if you had STEEL belted radials on your car?
On my way back from the gym I was crawling through the parking lot as always, dodging pedestrians. I come up to the grocery store and there is an old grumpy woman that comes out. I stop and give her the “come hither” motion with my hand. She shakes her head to her right. I wasn’t sure if she didn’t see me, she had her hair in her face or a fly was dive bombing her nose so I motion again. Again, with an absolutely miserable expression on her face, she snaps her head to the right. Ok then I suppose that means hurry the f up and go past me! So I did.