Archives February 2008

My ideas about picking up some cheap 5 speed Mustang was not well received by Ali.  First there is the money aspect of it.  Even if the car is cheap, that same money could be used to do any number of household projects that are on the list first.  Second, Ali referred back to the frustration and anguish the 88 Salvage Title Vette gave me. I agreed the Vette was much more trouble than it was worth but I skipped that and instead pointed out that the 71 Buick that went up in flames was great and I enjoyed having that.  I certainly wouldn’t buy a salvage title car again and I would be more picky in the selection process.  Of course it is all a moot point because the numbers just don’t look favorable enough to do so.  When Ali mentioned that we couldn’t afford it of course it triggered me to take a look through the bills since Ali has taken over doing them for quite some time now.  It made me say “hmmmmmmmm…”  Oh well, I think it will happen some time, just not sure when.  There is sure to be no shortage of 5 liter, 5 speed Mustangs in the forseeable future.

I forgot to mention that after our Rambo disaster and less than positive dining experience I wanted to make amends so I agreed to stop at the Coldstone on the way home for ice cream.  I remember when Coldstone first came to our area it was all the craze.  People lined up out the door to pay ridiculous prices for ice cream.  Evidently the craze has died down.  When we went into the place there were only a couple people ahead of us. 

I never had been in a Coldstone before, the closest I came to one was going to a Maggy Moo’s, a very similar type of joint.  I don’t particularly enjoy going out for ice cream for two reasons.  First the ice cream they serve you is as about as bad of a food as you can get, filled with heaps of fat and sugar.  You might as well have the server slap the ice cream onto your gut.  Second, they charge you ridiculous prices for it.  When I went to MM’s in the past I tried to minimize the damage by ordering something like a raspberry sorbet that wasn’t nearly as sinful as the ice cream.

Well this time I went a bit crazy and got the cookie dough ice cream with a kit kat busted up into it.  I got the smallest size they had.  Ali got a small as well and still the bill came to more than 8 bucks, crazy.  The ice cream seemed to do a good job of atoning for the mess that had occurred up to that point.  It is a treat Ali doesn’t have very often since she has been involved with me.  If she wanted to be a Coldstone regular we would have to find different living arrangements.

One thing I forgot to mention about the Rambo experience was the surprising make up of the audience which had more senior citizens than anything else.  It just didn’t strike me as the type of movie a nice old retired couple would want to see.  I was a bit disgusted as I left when I saw a guy come out of there with his young son, less than 10 years old.  Why in the F would you take a little kid to that?  Crazy.

On the way back from the gym there was a lot of traffic.  I was stopped at a light with one vehicle in front of me, a Sheriff pickup truck.  As our light turned green, cars continued turning in front of us for a good 5 seconds after their turning arrow went red.  I saw the person driving the Sheriff vehicle throw his hands up in disgust.  Um ok, how about flipping on your lights and go ticket these bastards?  I guess he was on a lunch break. 

 For some reason, today I got the urge to have a muscle car again and a 5 speed one at that.  I just miss it.  I was eying up some 5 liter Mustangs on Autotrader which is by itself odd as I have always been a GM man as far as muscle goes.  You can get a decent set of wheels for less than 5k.  Of course now that I am a middle aged man you don’t do such things, you instead spend your money on “sensible” things like home interior accessories and pet luxury items.  I dunno, for some reason I just yearned for the sounds of a V8 as it gets rowed through it’s gears. It just connects with a part of your brain right next door to the parts that like sex and Rambo. 

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.

I used some of the fund from selling the Sony laptop to get a couple things for the Wii, a Wii Zapper and Resident Evil 4.  The Wii Zapper is a plastic “gun” that you mount the Wii controllers into to make shooting games more realistic.  Resident Evil is the first “dark” game I have bought for the Wii.  Everything so far has been light and juvenile.  Resident Evil is far from light and cheery as you can get.  In the game it’s you against the zombies.  Either blow their heads off or they eat you.  I didn’t get a chance to try either thing yet.

The new season of Survivor kicked off last night.  The twist this year is it is fan favorites against super fans of the show, sort of a spin off of the all star survivor they did a few years ago.  The FAVORITES team is a bit of a disappointment.  There are some people on there that were not notable at all.  There were some people that I was glad to see like Yau Man and James the Grave Digger. Ironically, one of the biggest names on the favorites team, that little dork Johnny Fairplay basically asked to be voted out at the first tribal council.  His teammates obliged.  I think the show will be decent. 

I have a lot of stuff planned for the weekend.  I want to buy a bunch of landscape timbers and start work on replacing the rotted out sections of our borders.  We have cleaning to do, we are doing our Sunday run to prep for the 5k the following weekend, and I would like to get out to see Rambo as well.

Mitt Romney dropped out of the race, leaving John McCain as THE nominee for the republicans.  I seems to me that McCain is now trying to be all things to all people, and in the process losing credibility with me.  He is bought and paid for.

My boss at work was nice enough to hook me up with 2 new monitors as well as a stand to mount them on.  I now have a whopping 38 inches of screen real estate to play with.  It’s pretty darn cool.  It almost feels like I am in the cockpit of a plane.

Jeremy said my post the other day made me sound old. F that young, skinny kid.  Let’s see how another decade changes his tune!

Ali and I caught a bit of Moment of Truth last night.  Wow what a show.  They ask people all these shitty questions and if they are truthful about it they get to win more and more money.  There was some young guy that totally buried himself.  He is a former marine that now is working as a waiter.  In the span of ten minutes he admitted that he stole other people’s tips, pumped up customer’s bills so he would get a higher tip, that he drove drunk, that he uses lack of money as an excuse to not propose to his girlfriend, that he did things in the marine corp he was ashamed of, that he made ethnic jokes about his girlfriend’s family and that he has sent flirtatious text messages to other women in the past 6 months.  After exposing himself as a total loser on national tv he was finally at the second money plateau where he could win 25 grand.  His question was if he ever stuffed his pants when he worked as an underwear model.  He said he did not, they said he lied, he loses.  He received no money and heaps of shame. Atta boy.  Oh yea, the show increases the drama by having the contestants friends and family (and girlfriend) sitting close by so you get to see their reactions.  Yes the show hits way below the belt but damn it is funny and entertaining. I would NEVER go on the show. 

There is some woman that works somewhere in the county complex that I see on a semi-regular basis.  I have never spoken a word to the woman.  I do however have a strong dislike for her.  Even though I have never communicated with her I can tell she is a big C, which is a word I don’t use very often.  If I were to guess she is somewhere in her 40’s.  You can tell that she thinks she is much more attractive than she actually is.  If you walk within 20 feet of the woman you will bump into her ego.  But that alone isn’t what makes me dislike her.  She is a stuck up, me first, f everyone else kind of bitch.  Why would I know this?

First, she parks wherever she wants instead of the spots on the outer edge of the lot where county employees should park.  Second, there was the incident when an employee of ours was hit by an asshole driving through the lot.  Our employee was shaken up, standing outside her car, crying.  Next to her car was an open parking space.  Well this bitch decides she HAS to park there and even though there are 3 people standing next to our employee, the woman pulls into the space, missing one of the people by mere inches.  She gets out of the car, never acknowledges us and struts into the complex with her nose firmly planted into the air.  Third, she has one of those evil bunny stickers on her rear window.  She’s too old for shit like that.  Those stickers are for cute young girls, not old cougars that think it is still 1988.  Finally, she drives like an asshole.  The woman actually lives within a couple miles of me and many times I see her following the same route I do.  You can’t miss her, she is the one tailgating and changing lanes constantly like her ass was on fire. Well the other day a large grin came across my face as I glanced over at the flashing lights on the side of the road and saw the C pulled over.  Couldn’t happen to a more deserving piece of shit.

The USPS is a joke anymore.  Never mind the near constant increases in stamp prices, they basically doubled the costs of shipping with them via priority mail almost overnight.  It is f’ing ridiculous.  The USPS used to be a nice, affordable alternative to UPS and Fed-EX. Sure their tracking leaves a lot to be desired but it was cheap.  Those days are long gone.  I just paid 13 bucks to ship a 3 pound object.  Last year it would have cost me less than half that to ship the same thing.  Cut me a break with the greed. Sure I can understand an increase in prices with increases in fuel prices, however a 100% or more increase is fiscal rape.  I need to find a reasonable alternative. 

I felt too blah to do a 300 yesterday at the gym.  Luckily my gym buddy wasn’t there.

 I added a Bush countdown widget to the blog, in case you are too blind to see it.  It counts down the remaining days of madness we have left.

Speaking of Mr Bush, I keep forgetting to talk about the “stimulus” package he has been pushing so hard for.  I think that it is in a word, stupid.  It seems like just more simple political posturing that has only one true purpose, to garner votes for republicans.  That being said, I don’t understand why it apparently has democratic support as well, albeit a slightly different version.  Let me get this straight, we are facing the largest deficit in US history, W just submitted the largest budget in US history and we are going to pile on top by sending out rebate checks to US taxpayers???  I mean where is the logic in this?  Sending people a rebate check for five or six hundred bucks isn’t going to change their life in any significant manner whatsoever.  It will however cost the US government billions of dollars that they already don’t have.  It is like the government is patterning it’s spending after the typical US consumer that is buried in credit card debt.  Buy now, pay later, and dearly.  Keep my 600 bucks and use it towards the social security fund or to help lop dollars off our astronomical debt.  It seems that the government is targeting idiots that think no deeper than “Um me get check, me like money…”  Argh it’s so frustrating.

I was playing Super Mario galaxy last night on the Wii.  The game is downright frantic at times., enough to freak me out.  There was a zone I was in where you rode a manta ray along strips of water suspended in space.  If you went off the edge of the water you fell to your death.  For the life of me I could not stay on the course, it was driving me mad.    Then I gave up on that and went to another zone that was worse.  You know those things you give babies that have various cut out shapes that you insert into holes of the same shape, like triangle, square circle?  Well in this zone imagine you have these holes on a flat sheet and they are moving in various directions.  Mario has to walk across these sheets and avoid all the open spaces which are everywhere. If you fall into a space, you die. It was maddening.  It stressed me out.  I said to Ali several times “How in the world do little kids do this…”  Ali commented it was no wonder most kids today seem to be hyper with ADD.  I was glad when I died the final time, it was just too much.

Our next door neighbors whom we have become good friends with over the years have a For Sale sign in front of their house.  They are going their separate ways.  It is very depressing for us.  We loved having neighbors we got a long with plus since Nicki knows and loves them, they were able to come over and attend to her if we needed it.  It’s going to really suck when they go.  The only perverse hope we have is because of the down housing market, it may be awhile until they can sell the place. Oh well, I guess all things change, sooner or later.

Saturday was the day of Ali’s race, the day she has been doing endless prep for months for.  The day started at the ungodly hour of 3:30 am.  Getting out of bed was not very easy, it felt like there was a magnet pulling me back into bed.  There was a minor miracle about 15 minutes later when Ali got out of bed by herself without any prodding from me.  The anticipation of the big day was enough to get her out of bed.  We left the house before 4:30 and got to the race area by about 5am.

The race didn’t start until 8am but there was tons to do to get ready.  First we hammered in some parking signs then we went out onto the course and set up cones, mile markers and the tables to be used for the water stop.  On the way back we put up the rest of the parking signs.  Leading up to the race was a whirlwind of activity of preparation, things were hectic but thanks to some changes Ali made, much less hectic than the year before.  The scene at registration was much more organized this year thanks to having two registration tables far apart as well as upping the amount of port-o-potties at registration from 2 to 7.   There were a lot of people running with their dogs, having all the dogs mulling about made for good entertainment.

There were a lot of runners, over 450 registered, about 380 came through the finish.  As the race director, Ali was the one to start the race which she did while standing in the back of the Toyota.

The race starts and the huge pack of runners and dogs head down the road.  After a brief moment of joy where Ali realized that the hard part was over, we were off first to the registration area and then up to the finish line.  The first place runner was all by himself, he crossed the finish line of the roughly 3 and 3/4 mile course in 21 minutes and change, pretty fast but slower than the first place runner from last year.  I was amazed when I saw the second place runner come in, a 13 YEAR OLD kid.  Holy cow.  At the finish line I was the one handing out finish cards to the runners with dogs.  Ali had a whole set of prizes for the dogs that finished. 

It is always interesting standing at the finish of a race.  First I got to witness first hand how crappy the club’s current system of timing a race is, the card system.   As people come across the finish line that are exhausted and delirious, you shove a card in their face and quickly tell them to fill it out.  Many times there are packs of runners that cross simultaneously, trying to get cards out to all of these people without backing up the finish chute is very tricky.  Many times the people that do actually fill out the cards do so in very shaky handwriting that is hard to read.  It’s also common that the sweat from their hands also distorts what they write down.  It’s just a huge pain in the ass.

I also find it interesting how different people finish.  Some come across like it’s no big deal, not accelerating or decelerating at all.  Some sprint madly to the finish, especially if they are next to someone that they want to edge out.  Others limp in and slow down as they approach the line.  The way people finish offers some insight into their personality.  There was a woman that finished that sprinted across while looking like she was about to die.  She was gasping for air while making just hideous facial expressions.  I told Ali about her.  She said she had seen this woman before and she always does that at the end, sexy.

Before the race was over I handed over the dog cards to Ali so I could go out and pick up the course with the truck.  It took me awhile to get it all loaded up.  By the time I got back to the finish Ali was already handing out awards.  All throughout the day I had heard nothing but positive comments from the participants, they had fun, they liked the food, and liked the dogs.  Ali was very good on the PA system handling the awards, she is very good in that role, speaking in front of others, something I would fail miserably at.

As she was handing out the awards I indulged in some of the food that was left, I was hungry.  Then it was back to work, ripping stuff down and putting stuff away.  Luckily we had a lot of volunteers that made the sizable job go much quicker.  We put the last thing away around 11 am.  The people from the Humane Society thanked Ali for a fantastic event and that was that.  You can see the pictures we took and the results on the web site here.

Ali and I were exhausted from getting up so early and busting ass.  After we unpacked Ali went back to take a 3 or 4 hour nap. I on the other hand decided I had no time to rest and worked on stuff around the house.  We had some bagels left over from the race, instead of throwing them out I decided to throw them into the food processor and chop them into crumbs for the birds.  I scurried about doing various chores and then sat down to eat lunch and play some WoW.  Playing WoW wasn’t a great idea, sitting still made the feeling of sleepiness amplify.  A few times while I was playing I found myself closing my eyes.  I refused to go take a nap though.

Once Ali woke up I took Tuki’s cage outside and pressure washed it, it was pretty messy and needed it.  Saturday night we watched stuff on Tivo and Ali started working on getting the race results transcribed for the web site, another extremely laborious and monotonous job due to the card system.  This is another step the chip system will eliminate. I will be able to generate results with the click of a mouse.

Originally on Sunday we had talked about going to the track to run.  My knees were still feeling a bit tender from the 5k I ran Friday compiled with the running around I did on Saturday working the race so we decided to take the day off.  

On Sunday even though I did a lot of housework, I still had a lot of time to play WoW which was fine.  About 4:30 we started getting ready to go to our friends house for their Super Bowl party. We showed up at their place about 5:30.  They have an awesome big house that is just beautiful.  When we got there there were only 3 other people there, I thought , wow, maybe it won’t be as crowded as advertised.  Well that idea ended quickly as the doorbell rang again and again.  At it’s highest there were probably almost 20 people there.

Our friends went through the trouble of having the event catered and there was plenty of alcohol as well, both things I indulged in more than I should have.  I only knew a few people there but everyone seemed nice enough.  There was a British couple there that knew nothing about American football, various people tried to explain things as the game progressed.  There was a loud funny black guy there named BB, he is a huge Dolphins fan that had a vested interest in seeing the Patriots lose to keep the Dolphins exclusive claim of a perfect season intact.  BB talked very loud and VERY fast, I had a VERY hard time understanding him.  Most of the times if he was talking at me I just smiled, shook my head and said “yea!” 

Our host Jessie, is an electrician whom also happens to be a huge Cowboys fan, poor guy.  Anyway he was involved in the construction of the new location we are opening up.  Shortly after we got there he surprised me by saying he had heard how I fired the state installer.  Evidently the story of my interaction with the installer has spread far and wide.  I clarified the story and told Jessie I didn’t fire the guy, I just told his boss I never wanted the guy working in Collier county again and as a result he got fired.  regardless, Jessie found the whole thing fascinating because he knows I am basically mild mannered.  I am very mild mannered until the bullshit piles too high, then the flip switches. Jessie went all out in his super bowl prep, he even went out and bought a widescreen LCD tv the day before the game, geez.

We brought along our famous betting board where we have 16 different bets in the 16 blocks.  People put down 50 cents per bet and wrote their name next to it.  This was the largest crowd the betting board was ever involved in.  It went over well again, even with the new people.  It adds to the fun of the game.  I think by the time the game was over Ali and I were down $1.75, not bad.

As predicted, having that many people made watching the game and/or commercials rather difficult at times.  I drank 5 or 6 beers in an attempt to artificially create more social behavior out of me but it was only mildly successful.  I ate way too much of the food as well.  During the second half of the game, the drinking and eating combined with the residual damage from limited sleep the night before was really taking it’s toll.  I could hardly stay awake.  I sat on the couch and found myself on the verge of dozing off time and again.

I finally woke up enough to witness the classic finish of the game.  It was great, even if it was the Giants that did it.  They harassed Tom Brady the entire game and made the Patriots look human.  That catch the guy made pressing the ball against his helmet was incredible.  I was happy to see the Patriots have their huge bubble explode in their face.  I can only imagine how disappointed they are.  Them winning was basically a foregone conclusion, for them to choke the way they did erases the magic of an undefeated system.  That is going to be hard to walk around with.

As noted before, it was very hard to catch the commercials with all that was going on.  I saw a few of them and reviewed some more of them on the internet at http://www.myspace.com.superbowlads this morning.  There were some really funny ones this year and a lot of them.  The Bud Light, cars.com, Fed Ex carrier pigeons,  Bridgestone, Tide talking stain, T-mobile with Barkley and Dwayne Wade, and Budweiser dog and horse ads are my favorites out of what I saw.  I will review the other ones I missed today.

After the game ended Ali and I made a pretty quick exit, we were both drop dead tired.  Once we got home we quickly made our preparations for bed.  I was so tired that there was no tv watching before bed, no reading, just straight to sleep.  I woke up this morning not feeling like going to work in the least.  The day after the Super Bowl should be a national holiday, seriously.

During the night I had some sort of dream where it felt like someone put cold hands on the side of my head.  It half woke up because it literally felt like someone touched my head, I dismissed it thinking maybe Ali accidentally threw her hand on my head.  Well when I walked into the bathroom to get ready this morning, I came up with another, grosser theory about what I felt.  Under the bathroom counter in the dog bowl filled with water was a tree frog, a full size, adult tree frog.  I have no idea how in the world this thing got in the house and how it managed to find the only open body of water.  I wondered if the cold “fingers” I felt in my dream were actually tree frog feet as they landed and jumped off my head.  I had to wake up Ali up to tell her about our bizarre visitor.  I put a magazine over the bowl and carried the frog outside.  Where did this thing come from…

I am supposed to do a 300 today.  I feel like shit.  I may bow out and do a normal workout instead today.  I guess it depends on if my 300 buddy is there and ready to go.  I can’t wimp out if he is ready to roll.  I need a 300 to punish my body for my gluttony of Sunday.

Haven’t had much time to blog this week.

Yesterday morning as I was making my lunch I happened to glance over towards Tuki’s cage and noticed the door was open.  I was a bit freaked out when I saw it and quickly went around the corner to see where he was.  He was perched on top of his cage and evidently had been there all night.  Ali was up late that night working on stuff for her race.  Evidently she was too tired to notice that Tuki was still out of his cage before going to bed.  Luckily no disasters happened.

Speaking of Ali’s race, that is consuming most waking moments Ali has had the past week or so.  There are so many things that are associated with planning an event such as this.  Ali has done a great job with it.  There are already 300 runners pre-registered for the race, with day of runners, we will surely smash last year’s entry total.  Saturday should be an exhausting but fun day.

The weekend will be quite busy with the race taking place on Saturday and the Super Bowl on Sunday.  We are going to a friend’s house for a party. When I heard there could be 12-20 people there I was a bit taken back.  It wasn’t because I am anti-social, as Ali immediately offered up, it’s because with that many people you don’t actually get to enjoy the game.  It’s too loud, good seating will be at a premium and there will be too many distractions.  Plus I like checking out the commercials as much as the game.  Oh well I’ll grin and bear it.  I am hoping by the time next year’s Super Bowl hits I will have 73 inches of reason that we host the party back at our place.

This morning I had my dentist appointment.  The hygienist that cleaned my teeth had an embarrassingly loud stomach growl going on the entire time she was cleaning my teeth.  She apologized a couple times but f course there was nothing she could do about it.  A few times I laughed out loud at some of the very loud sounds coming from the woman’s gut.  Look ma, no cavities.

I called my step mom last night to wish her a happy birthday, something I don’t believe I have EVER done. There is no particular reason I haven’t called her on her birthday it just was never an established pattern of behavior.  I don’t call my half-brother or sister on their birthdays either.  I love all of them, I just don’t talk to them all that much.  My step mom is very nice and god knows she has to have the patience of a saint to deal with my dad’s large amount of “quirks”.  Well anyway I decided to call her last night and wish her happy birthday “in person”.  We had a nice talk on the phone catching up on the latest and greatest.  I was happy to hear that she really likes the Roomba that Ali and I got them for Christmas.  They have a gaggle of cats and dogs so the Roomba has a constant stream of animal hair to keep up on.  I told her we hoped to do another drive out west to visit them and see more sites. I could tell she was surprised by my call but I also could tell she appreciated it.