Collateral damage, rotted, , grading, running, timed

Wow the weekend seemed quite busy with all sorts of things. Friday night we did our normal Tivo marathon watching Biggest Loser and then Celebrity Apprentice.  Apprentice is quite entertaining this season. Watching born again Steven Baldwin clash with brutally honest Brit Piers is very funny.  Piers also clashes regularly with that wench Omarossa who has no basis for being on the show except that she thinks she actually is someone. It’s good fun.

On Saturday I did a bunch of outside work weeding and pruning and then hopped inside to clean the bird cage.  When Ali got back from the gym she worked on cleaning.  I took some time Saturday afternoon to try out my latest Wii things like the Wii Zapper with the included game Link’s Crossbow Training as well as Resident Evil 4.  The Wii Zapper is a simple but cool little device that transforms your Wii controllers into a gun.  It works pretty well.  I found Link’s Crossbow to be pretty good for a throw in game, who doesn’t love blowing stuff up?  Resident Evil 4 is scary as I remember it.  Originally I thought it was designed for the Wii Zapper but it isn’t.  The control takes some getting used to.  IN game, when a zombie is nearby the music changes to a more menacing tune.  I found myself panicking as I heard the music change but did not see a zombie.  Some times it takes awhile till he shows up, axe in hand.  I am sure my heart rate jumps up dramatically while playing.  I only played the game for a half hour or so before I had to attend to more chores.  It’s a good game I will invest some more time in this week.

On Saturday a guy that is a member of our running club stopped out at our place to take a look at our property.  He runs a grading business and I talked to him about grading our land at the last race.  Much of property is filled with small trenches that run the width of the property dating back to when it was used as farm land.  There are also various low spots that could use some fill.  Bill’s business has really taken a beating due to the housing slow down so I was very happy to get him involved.  His estimate actually came in less than I figured and if things go as planned he will be out there Wednesday ripping things up and smoothing them out.

 We had made plans to go out to dinner and the movies to see Rambo on Saturday night.  However the race timing system that we missed delivery of on Friday was supposed to show up on Saturday.  I didn’t want to miss delivery again.  Luckily it showed up around 3, about an hour before we were going to get ready to go.

So we get cleaned up and head out for a 4:50 showing of Rambo 4.  The plan was to go to the movie first, dinner second, Home Depot 3rd.  I had seen all the Rambos, Ali had seen none of them.  I never really gave the fact that Ali never saw a Rambo much thought, my mistake.  So we get into the theater and the movie starts.  About 15 minutes into it after seeing a horrible scene where a village in Burma is attacked Ali looks at me and tells me “You OWE me BIG time” with no hint of a smile. A few minutes later I start to hear sniffling.  I look over and Ali is crying after watching another horrible scene of violence where more villagers are killed brutally, including women and children. I asked her what was wrong although I knew the answer already.  Rambo had managed to spill collateral damage out into the audience.  I quietly asked her what she wanted to do.  I said we could leave, she said no.  A few more minutes of wall to wall violence was all she could take.  I was about to again offer for us to just leave and I could catch it on dvd or something.  She said she could just leave and go to Target and look around till the movie was over and then pick me up.  I said that was fine.  I handed her over the keys and my wallet.  It was best that she left, the violence only picked up from there.

So let me talk about the film.  First, it is shocking that it is based on a conflict in Burma that has been going on for 50 or 60 years.  A conflict that nobody hears about.  The atrocities that the film is based on are as horrible as it gets.  Stallone does a good job playing Rambo as he always does.  Rambo is a stone cold killing machine, although there is always a small soft spot that makes him lovable in an perverse way.  Yea he kills people by the hundreds but they are all bad guys that deserve it.  That being said, the movie is an hour and a half gore fest.  There are graphic scenes of women and children being killed as well as women being abused in all sorts of disgusting ways.  I realize the point was to drive home the reality of the situation that is going down in Burma.  Even so at times, it was over the top violence, even for me.  In fact I think Rambo 4 may have taken away the “most violent film I ever saw” award from Saving Private Ryan. Rambo 2 was plenty violent too, the difference here is all the violence against women and children.

  Stallone even at 60 makes a convincing Rambo.  Albeit a much thicker one.  His years of roids has made his head visibly bigger than you remember back in the 80’s and early 90’s.  He is still very muscular although he kept his shirt on the entire film.  Even at his advanced age you found yourself cheering him on as he exacted revenge on an entire army battalion of bad guys.  I’d give it a B+ Guys, don’t take your significant other to this film unless she knows what she is in for.

So afterwards Ali picked me up.  I immediately apologized for the experience.  It was stupid of me to subject her to that without thinking ahead of time.  Ali said it just really upset her to see that sort of violence and realize it wasn’t exaggerated, these sort of things actually happen in 2008.   I told her situations like this, the situation in Africa, the holocaust are big reasons that I think the concept of a God is implausible. No god could allow such acts of violence and torture to be carried out upon totally innocent people. It’s that simple. 

So anyway, after the traumatic start to our date, we mixed things up and decided to hit Home Depot first before dinner.  I wanted to get several things, including some landscape timbers to replace the rotted ones we had in various spots around the property.  I was careful to handle the nasty looking timbers with only my hands so I didn’t look like a dirty bum for dinner.  I grabbed 10 of them thinking that would be enough to at least replace the back border around the pool which is the most rotted out area.

Then we headed off to Roman Oven for what I hoped to be a nice dinner.  We had been there once before and had a nice time.  This time wasn’t so great.  It seemed “cheaper” than I remembered.  The seating was too compacted, you were too close to the adjacent people.  The paper napkins added to cheap feeling.  My food was good enough.  Ali’s came out differently than she ordered, I told her we should send it back but she insisted she was ok with it.  Once she started on it there was even more reason to send it back as she had to salt it because it was so bland.  Even with the problems, when the waitress came by to ask how everything was we muttered “fine…”  I should have just stepped out and told the waitress about the problem, even if Ali insisted it was ok.. I think it was like one of those situations where a woman says no but really means yes.  I think Ali would have appreciated me saying something even though she said she didn’t care.  I was mad at myself about it afterwards.  So after a totally average dining experience I felt no need to return to Roman Oven anytime soon, it just did nothing for me.  On the drive home I was bummed that the night out was more or less a disaster. The final annoyance came on the drive home when we got snared in more than a mile long back log of cars waiting to turn into the county fair.

Sunday was busy.  I don’t like Sunday’s to be busy.  I like to have the vast majority of the chores done Saturday so I can coast into the end of a weekend.  I had a truck full of wood that needed to be installed.  So I started ripping out the old timbers along the back of the pool.  I quickly realized I didn’t have enough wood for the job.  I had forgotten that I stacked the timbers 2 deep along the border.  So my gameplan changed and I decided to replace the border around the pond.  However I figured I would still remove the rotted stuff along the pool.  It turned out to be much more challenging than expected.

The wood itself was easy to remove, much of it broke apart in my hands as I pulled it up.  The problem was the rebar I used to secure it.  When I installed the border I used 5 foot long sections of rebar, wanting to make sure it was securely anchored.  Well when I installed it I gave no thought to the possibility of replacing it down the road.  I quickly learned that 5 foot long rebar is  a bitch to pull out once it has been in the ground several years.  I tried various tactics at first, starting with simply grabbing the rebar and pulling with my hands which was a joke.  Then I took the sledge and beat the rebar back and forth, trying to loosen it up.  I got one or two pieces out this way but for all the others it didn’t help.  I contemplated just pounding the rebar all the way into the ground but again found that with four and a half feet already in the ground, that last 6 inches were near impossible.  I was frustrated.

So after some brainstorming I decided to use a method I have used before to remove stubborn objects, attach an old steel cabled dog leash I had in the shed to the Tacoma and pull.  I was thrilled when the first piece I tried this on pulled right out.  Subsequent attempts didn’t go quite as well.  Instead of pulling the rebar out, I was bending it over and then snapping the steel cable.  I snapped the cable 4 or 5 times, each time resulting in me tying a make shift knot in the cable and trying again.  Eventually I tired of it and gave up.  I climbed under the truck to untie the cable but found that the knot around the frame had pulled too tight to remove so I came out with a set of wire cutters.  The cutters were not up to the task either.  I only managed to make the knot more of a mess.  So I decided the way to break the knot was to attach it to another piece of rebar and snap it.  As I gave the knot some slack I wound up having a loop to attach to the rebar instead of the single strand I kept breaking.  When I pulled with this configuration  the cable actually held firm instead of snapping.  I was able to pull out the remaining pieces of rebar.

  When I only had 2 more pieces of rebar to go I realized something horrible.  I had been pulling the rebar against the buried pvc for the sprinkler system.  I thought that I may have broken the pvc in doing so.  I nervously went over and turned on the sprinklers for that zone and was relieved to see they still worked correctly.  That would have been a big mess to fix.  So after pulling all that rebar out I still had a problem, the knot in the steel cable was still intact.  So I gnawed on the exposed steel cable for a good 10 minutes until it FINALLY broke free so I could remove it from the truck.  Next time I’ll just buy a darn chain.

So now I was free to start the border around the pond.  Replacement went smoothly, it looks pretty decent although there is one angle where I wish I would have used an inside instead of an outside cut.  After putting the equipment away from that task I planted a couple plants in the area where I ripped out all of the ferns and then applied a fresh layer of mulch so it didn’t look so unkempt.  While I was doing much of this work Ali was doing the gardener thing, planting various crops both in the garden and in seed starter trays.  We are trying to start carrots, corn and spinach.  The other week I threw a few pieces of garlic that were sprouting in the bag into the garden.  Those have started to shoot up out of the ground.  There is something satisfying about growing your own food.

During the afternoon I felt a bit overwhelmed, the house felt like it was in disarray and the weekend was winding down.  Part of the disarray came from the timing system I had set up in the great room.  I wanted to simulate a race to see if everything worked.  It took quite a bit of trial and error.  I found out after looking at the instructions AFTER setting it up that I did a few things that could potentially damage the system, luckily the system seemed to survive my ignorance.  The DAG system is a French product.  The ENGLISH instructions seem to lose something in the translation and there were some gaps in the information.  After trudging through it for a couple hours I finally got most of it figured out.  I was able to run a simulated 3 person race, time it and then export the timing results to the racing software to generate results, pretty cool.  I was sort of proud for getting it all to work.  The only bummer is the timing chips that are given to the runners are back ordered and won’t be available until early March.  At this point I feel comfortable enough that I could do a real world test race and muddle through it.  It’s pretty cool tech.

Late in the day we went to the track to do another prep run for the 5k we are doing next Saturday evening.  I didn’t really feel like doing it.  I was a bit tired from the weekend of work I already had performed and it was quite windy out which always is a pain in the ass to run into.   Ali agreed to do it even though she had done a bust ass group power class Saturday followed by a grueling spinning class Sunday morning so I had no excuse not to do it.  As we ran I found myself thinking about the issues I was having with the timing system and actually came up with some strategies to address them.  Ali impressed me when I gave her the option to stop at 2.5 miles and she said she wanted to do 2.75.  We finished the run at a less than blistering 10:30 pace but with the very windy conditions that wasn’t too bad.  I look forward to the race next weekend, there will be literally thousands of people along the route cheering us on.

While we ate dinner Sunday night we watched some reality show about beauty pageant moms.  Boy was that disturbing.  Seeing these women live vicariously through their 7 year old daughters was just ridiculous.  I couldn’t believe the things they do to these little girls to get them ready.  I many cases they wear wigs or hair extensions and even put on a set of mini-dentures to make it appear like they have perfect pearly white teeth in their little mouths.  It was just sad.