Archives April 2008

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We have all seen the staggering costs in the news about the war in Iraq.  Here is a video that talks about the REAL cost of the war when you add in all the associated costs of this cluster f, not just the hundreds of billions being shoved into war profiteers pockets directly.  How does 3 TRILLION dollars sound?

John McCain wants to follow George Bush’s path in Iraq.  Even if I agreed with every other part of his campaign, I would not vote for the guy on this single stance alone.  We can not fix what has been broken for 1400 years, no matter how much money and American lives are thrown away on it.

Not much to say today.  Last night I was organizing my fleet of Roombas to be listed on ebay.  I am breaking them apart into various parts to sell.  It will help me make a few extra bucks.  I have started watching some Battlestar Galactica.  I am trying to get an idea of the storyline.  Edward James Olmos is a lead character in the series.  I first saw him back in the 80’s in Miami Vice, one of my favorite shows of all time.  In that show he played a character very similar in personality to his BG character, a stoic, non nonsense guy in charge.  It’s a part that suits him.

I was outside with Nicki last night a bit.  She just loves being able to run around without constraint.  She was having fun chasing birds that dared to be within her sight range.  I talked to mom last night asking her how her moving prep was going.  It seemed like she has most of her stuff packed up already.  I reminded her she didn’t move for three weeks yet.  She doesn’t have a ton of stuff so moving should be pretty painless.

Maybe I’ll think of more later, maybe not.

Well I called the vet.  The bill stands at $466 currently.  I said f it, keep the cat till Friday so we can make it an even 5 bills.  I love dropping that kind of cash maintaining the health of an animal that generally annoys the shit out of me.

This morning I was running late for work.  As I jammed all my stuff into the truck I noticed there was a slug/snail without it’s shell right in front of the truck, moving very slowly along.  I knew if I pulled out I would probably run it over.  So I try to get the thing out of the way.  Well as soon as I touched it it must have released extra amounts of the slimy shit that it trails behind.  I couldn’t get the thing off the concrete.  So I start pushing it with my finger.  Finally I get it rolled onto it’s back and pick it up and put it in the grass.  My fingers felt incredibly sticky.   It was like I just dipped them in a jar of rubber cement.  So I had to walk back up to the house, turn on the hose and try to blast the gunk off.  Even after drying my hands on a rag in the garage I still had some of the residue on my fingers….  Sometimes it doesn’t pay to value the life of a snail.

I have added even more “stuff” to the blog.  To your left you will notice a poll widget where I can get a sampling of blog readers feelings on various subjects, both serious and not so serious.  I added a little local satellite image of southern Florida as well as another box on the left side that will tell you the current gas price range for the state.

My gym used to offer a daycare/babysitting deal where people could put their kids while their parents worked out.  It dropped the service a long time ago due to lack of use or lack of willingness to pay someone to do it. (I suspect the latter)  Well today a woman came in with her baby in a stroller.  Since there is no babysitting at the gym she simply pushed the stroller around with her to the various pieces of equipment.  I guess it is no big deal but it is yet another gym first for me.  Now if the kid was screaming bloody murder that would have put an entirely different spin on things.

I had all of the old fencing material from Nicki’s dog run piled by the road.  Ali called up the trash service and told them about it, as we are supposed to.  Normally they will send out a big truck to collect non-standard items like that.  Well when Ali called she got some bitchy woman on the phone.  She told her that the posts could be no longer than 4 foot long each and the fencing has to be “bundled”.  Ali told her the posts were all at least 6 feet long (some 8 feet) and the wire was too much of a mess to be bundled.  The woman didn’t care and advised her to cut the posts down.  When Ali asked if the woman could just send out the big truck to collect it she was told “No”.  What the hell?  Ali hung up instead of arguing with the woman further.  I probably would have argued with her longer although I doubt it would have accomplished much. Well anyway, Ali tells me that they came and took all the fence junk today anyway.  What the hell?   🙂

Back in the summer we got a recall notice on our party van.  It was due to some issue with the cruise control that could be a potential fire hazard.  Ford did not have the parts to fix the problem but to ensure the owners safety, their quick fix was to disconnect the cruise control.  The plan was to have me come back in a month or two when they got the parts to complete the repair.  Well the cruise was disconnected in mid-September.

I let 3 months pass by before calling back in December asking “what the hell?”  The Ford dealer said that the parts were still on back order. Um ok, fine.  So for some reason the other day it popped into my head that the van recall STILL had not been completed, 7 months after the initial notice.  I called back the dealer today and again ask “what the hell?” with a little more irritation in my voice.  Once again I am told the parts are STILL on back order and no ETA was posted.  The guy said that the recall actually affected TONS of Ford vehicles, not just the vans.  He apologized but said there was nothing he could do to speed things up.  It seems pretty irresponsible to me for Ford to issue a recall for an issue they weren’t prepared to fix.

Speaking of irresponsible, today Ali called for the final inspection on our fence to close out our permit.  I told her to ask if the open permits that we discovered a month ago had been closed yet.  Nope, neither of their status had changed.  This pissed me off. I called both the pool contractor and the pool cage contractor a month ago and they both assured me that the issue would be taken care of.  To me, a month is enough time to get something done.  So I had to call them both back and once again say “what the hell?”  The pool contractor said he was on vacation for the past week but has been waiting for word back from the person that handles the permits.  He said he would follow up again and get back to me, yea ok.  The pool cage guy again acted like he didn’t forget or disregard my request.  He said he had to come out to our place to take measurements of the cage to submit with the permit.  He said that he would be out in our area this week to take these measurements.  I think he is full of shit and if I didn’t call he would have just continued to do nothing.  I’ll give them both another month, if it isn’t done by then I am filing complaints with the permitting office against both of them.  

I talked to the vet yesterday about Spook.  Ali talked to her on Saturday.  The vet said that the urinary thing the cat has was better treated by a liquid antibiotic instead of the pill they have been forcing down her throat.  The good news is a liquid is easier to give a cat than a pill, the bad thing is the liquid is given twice a day instead of one.  I asked the vet if giving the cat the pill or liquid has gotten any easier since she has been there.  She indicated it still has been a struggle.  I told her that maybe we could pick Spook up and see how it goes.  My motivation had nothing to do with missing the cat, it is purely financial.  She has been there 8 or 9 days.  Since it seems like Spook’s ailment is not terminal we will be getting her back.  I don’t want to pay more of a small ransom than I am sure we already are.  However I have to weigh the dollars with the trauma of trying to give the cat meds.  At the vet there is nowhere for her to hide.  At our place Spook loves to hide under beds and refuses to come out unless I do anything short of poke her with a burning hot cattle prod.  I dunno.  I think I will call the vet, see what the current bill is and if it isn’t insane maybe leave her there until Friday so we will be home over the weekend to monitor any rogue urination attempts. 

I did some prep for her arrival last night.  I rearranged the utility room so that I could have BOTH the manual litter box AND the automatic box set up so the cats have a choice.  Yes it adds up to even more cat maintenance for me but if it results in the cat keeping the excrement where it belongs I am fine with it.  Speaking of excrement, 3 out of the last 4 mornings I have been greeted by piles of throw up as I went into the utility room.  It’s so nice of Buttons to keep me on my toes.  Having Spook out of the house also made it clear that she didn’t have diabetes.  The vast majority of the excrement has remained, meaning it is all from f’ing Buttons.  Evidently her diabetes is ratcheting back up again.  I have started increasing her insulin dosage.  I don’t like doing it though.  Increasing the dosage means if she vomits a lot and then doesn’t eat afterward she could fall back into insulin shock which is pure hell for us.

My web content has been moved to a different server in my hosts web farm so you may notice a few quirks here and there as DNS issues work themselves out.  The server I was on kept running out of disk space. Hopefully things run smoother now. 

I read that Kansas won the NCAA basketball championship last night in an overtime thriller.  I didn’t see the game.  In fact I didn’t even think for one second that the game was on last night.  I didn’t watch any of the tourney.  I just don’t care.  I suppose if I was in a betting pool that would generate some interest.  I don’t like watching young men play sports, I am too jealous.

I have been so tired at night.  I think all of the hard work has caught up to me.  I haven’t gotten a solid 8 hours in at least a week it seems.  It’s wearing on me.  When I got home last night I felt like I could go right to bed.  I didn’t even log into WoW all day long, too tired.

An anniversary quietly passed by, the one year anniversary of me starting the 300 work out. Much like World of Warcraft, I never would have expected to be doing the 300 work out for a full year.  First of all it was so damn hard, harder than any exercise routine I ever had tried.  I also figured it was so hard that hurting myself doing it was pretty much inevitable, which would lead to me bagging it.  Then there is just the burn out factor, doing the same thing for that period of time gets old. Yet, here I am still plugging away.

When I was doing the work out twice a week and wearing a watch to get my time down as far as possible I was borderline crazy about it.  Much to Jeremy’s dismay, I haven’t worn a watch since the Spartan Halloween 07 contest ended. After a year, the week to week improvements are minimal.  I have been doing the full 300 reps for well over 6 months at this point.  I do however continue to make small improvements.

Some exercises I break down into smaller sets with very short breaks in between.  For example I used to break my 50 dead lifts into a 1st set of 30, small break, 10, small break and then the final 10.  Now I do a first set of 35, quick break then 15.  With my push ups I used to pause in the up position briefly at 40 and 45 reps, now I go straight through to 50. The floor wipers at first took me up to 5 mini sets until I eeked out my 50th rep, now I do it in 3 sets with small breaks at 28 and 40 reps.  Likewise the final 25 pull ups could take me as many as 4 sets to get through if I was really beat, now I do it in two with a small break in between.

I expected to get some fitness results when I started the 300.  I didn’t expect the degree of results that I acheived.  When I started the routine I was in the mid 190’s on the scale.  Now I tip them at between 175 and 180 pounds.  When I cut back to doing the routine one time a week in November I expected to gain a few pounds and maybe lose some of that fitness level.  Surprisingly I didn’t lose a thing and have actually lost a few pounds since then at the same time leaning out even further.  It seems like I have my muscle mass at a point where it wants to keep my body weight where it is.  I still eat pretty clean but nowhere to the degree I was when I was preparing for the contest where some dinners consisted of little more than a can of tuna and a big glass of water.

I guess that is the biggest reason I continue to do it.  It works for me.  It has gotten me into the best shape of my adult life and keeps me there.  That and I still enjoy some of the weird looks I get at the gym as people stare back into my corner watching me do rep after rep after rep.

I don’t know if I could jam much more into a single weekend.  It was go, go, go pretty much the entire time.  I left work early on Friday so we could get a head start on our trip up to Clearwater.  Ali was running an all girl 5k called the Iron Girl.  The Iron Girl race series criss crosses the country.  It’s mission statement is to promote healthy lifestyles in women, something that is sorely lacking nowadays.

The drive up went smoothly.  We went directly to the race site so Ali could get her race packet.  It was quite an impressive set up.  This was no small, local race, everything was done BIG.  They also were quite organized.  The process was incredibly easy and smooth.  Since I am doing the timing for our local races I was interested in seeing what they were using for timing.  They had an Ipico set up, something we looked at but it was quite a bit more money than what we went with.  Like our DAG chips, the Ipico timing device is attached to the top of your sneaker.  The race was in a pretty , scenic park right by the water.  After getting her packet we were off to find our hotel.

Due to our trip west over the summer we accumulated enough hotel spiffs to stay at the local La Quinta for free.  It was about 5 miles from the race site.  The hotel was right across from the spring training site for the Phillies, ironic.  The place was on the old side but clean enough.  Thanks to my Slingbox, we were able to somewhat duplicate our normal Tivo and pizza Friday night routine.  We ordered a pizza from Dominoes and then I set up the lap top and used La Quinta’s free in room high speed internet to connect to my Slingbox at home which is connected to our living room Tivo.  Through the magic of tech we were able to watch The Biggest Loser and a Dancing with the Stars episode as we laid in the hotel bed.  It worked remarkably well.  The quality wasn’t bad at all.  The only negative was not having a remote to control the Tivo.  Each commercial break I had to get on the laptop and virtually hit the FF button.  Regardless, the Slingbox is definitely sweet.

The time at the hotel was very stressful for Nicki.  She was a nervous wreck the entire time.  She wouldn’t eat her supper and when I took her out to go to the bathroom she was constantly freaked out and kept her tail firmly planted between her legs.  She wouldn’t even take a leak before bed.  As a result I got a 5 am wake up from her to take her out.

The race started bright and early at 7:30.  We were out the door of the hotel a little after 6:30 to give us time to find a parking spot.  Even with leaving that early, parking was tough to find.  We wound up parking in a Checkers parking lot even though it had an “Unauthorized Vehicles WILL BE TOWED” sign at the entrance.  As we headed down the hill to the race the mass of mostly female humanity was impressive.  They had around 1400 women signed up for the event.  Since Ali had already picked up her race packet we didn’t have a lot to do before the race besides walk around and take it all in.  There was a lot of energy.  As the race time neared Ali ran and stretched a bit and then headed over to the huge pack of women waiting to start.  The race was a 10k and 5k at the same time so it added to the size of the field.  They started together, the 10k’rs just keep going at a point where the 5k’rs turn around.  Instead of a gun, the race started with the sound of the Aflac duck.  Aflac is the major sponsor of the event.  The horde of women headed up the hill that was right at the start.  I was scrambling to find Ali to get a picture.  It was tough having Nicki with because she was constantly trying to pull me all over the place.  I spotted Ali coming towards me and got a picture, unfortunately it was a blurry one.    

So I had about a half hour to kill before Ali would be crossing the finish line.  I spent it just walking the grounds.  Nicki was driving me a bit crazy.  She would be frantically sniffing everything she could.  Then she would spot someone in the crowd that she thought was someone she knew and would pull mightily to get to them.  Then once she realized it wasn’t who she thought it was she would back away in fear, crazy dog.  I walked towards the water with her and looked up at the bridge where I could see the women running across it.  I knew Ali would be struggling with the bridge, it looked like a tough run.

As the half hour approached I tried to get in good position to get a finish line pic of Ali.  I saw her coming down the hill and I hurriedly got the camera ready.  As she approached I was about to take a picture when I noticed the screen was black.  I quickly realized I had the lens cap on, doh.  I quickly threw it open and was able to snap this picture just as she crossed the line. I quickly headed to the end of the finish chute to congratulate her.  She was breathing hard but seemed to be ok otherwise.  She said it was a very hard course, probably the hardest she ever ran.  After she cooled down a bit she got into the food line and scored some first class food.  The food was catered, something I have never seen at an event.  Even though I didn’t run, she grabbed me some food.  Nicki was very happy to see Ali.  After eating we stood in a line for Ali to get her official results which were very basic, just her time and her pace.  It had no other info like how she placed overall or in her age group which I thought was a bit weird.  Ali got a very nice medal for finishing.  She said she really enjoyed herself and would do it again.  You can see all of the pics I took at the event here.

The drive back from Clearwater went smoothly.  We pulled into our driveway a little after noon.  Even though our day had started very early and we both were tired, Ali more than me of course, we had a fence project to complete.  All that was left to do was string fence along two sections.  As the fence project progressed I found myself getting better at various parts of the fence building process.  Well it took me until the last two sections of fence until I perfected the fence stretching process.  With the other sections of fence I stretched I kept having issues with the fence stretching unevenly with the top or bottom section creeping slightly ahead of the other.  I finally figured out it was because I was applying the initial tension by simply driving the truck forward until the fence stretcher got tight.  By doing this I had no control over how the tension on the wire attached to the pole was distributed.  For the last two sections of fence I created the tension by manually cranking the come along and as I did I would stop and adjust the cable to try to keep the length equal on the top and bottom.  I did that and I cranked the fence TIGHT, really tight.  On the last section of fence I had so much tension that as I cranked the come along the truck started to slide towards me.  I nailed the last few staples in and viola, the month long project was complete! Well it was enclosed at least.  Even before I had the last section completely attached, Ali had Nicki out roaming freely.  She didn’t seem as excited as the other day when we left her off leash.  She made up for it later though with several high speed sprinting sessions around the back yard.

I gave myself no time to bask in the glory of the fence being completely enclosed.  There was still a lot of related work to do like cleaning up and finishing ripping down Nicki’s old fencing.  While I was knocking down the old fence the neighbor across the street that helped me get the project started, came over and was surprised to see it was done.  He said it looked great and that I did a real nice job on it.  I didn’t let on the pride that made me feel. 

I got all of Nicki’s old fence down except for one post, one massive, long, extremely heavy post.  It was the post that the 12 foot gate was hung on.  It was bigger, fatter and heavier than anything I put in the ground for the new fence project.  I knew it would be a bitch to get out.  I think when we pulled it from my neighbors old front fence line we had to use his truck to extract it.  I manned the shovel and dug out a big hole around it probably four or five feet across and three feet deep.  I rocked the post back and forth, beat it with my post bar but every attempt to lift it of the hole was fruitless.  I could move it a little bit but after a 6th or 7th attempt I felt an uncomfortable pull in my back so I bagged it for the night.  I knew I would be ripping right back into it the next morning (if I didn’t rip my back) so I left most of the tools, the truck and the tractor out in the yard. Of course we got unexpected hard rain overnight.

When I got up Sunday morning I was relieved that I didn’t feel like a cripple.  I was really worried that I seriously hurt my back.  When I headed back outside I had a new plan of action.  There was no reason for me to extract the entire pole.  I decided to bring out the chain saw and just cut the damn thing below ground level.  Doing so was much easier.  The section of pole that was left was still heavy but manageable.  The rest of Sunday morning was spent cleaning up the rest of the junk left over from the project as well as Ali mowing the grass while I weed whacked.  I got back inside a little after noon.  We had to hurry up and get ready for the Wheel of Fortune auditions!

I originally had hoped to get there shortly before 1 to get the process started.  Ali was much less enthusiastic and wasn’t in much of a rush since she knew the auditions went from 1pm to 5pm.   By the time we actually got there it was closer to 1:30.  I had no idea how Wheel of Fortune auditions went but I imagined it went something like you talk to a screener, they give you a test or maybe simulate a game and then they get back to you.  Well I wasn’t very close.

As we walked up to the college we saw the sign pointing to the auditions.  After turning the corner we saw the line of people waiting.  It was a long line.  As we approached we were given a small application form along with a Wheel of Fortune pen to fill it out with.  The line and the entire event was outside which I didn’t expect.  It was hot as hell yesterday in the upper 80’s.  People were BAKING in the sun and tried to huddle in whatever shade they could find.  On the back of the form it gave a brief description of the process.  It said something about simulated games every 15 minutes.  So ok I figured every 15 minutes or so the line would move as groups of people get to play a simulated game.  As Ali and I were talking about it a girl in front of us clued us in on how the process really goes.  She said that you aren’t guaranteed to get to play the game, in fact your odds of getting to even try out are not good.  What they did was split the 4 hour window into three contestant groups based on the color of your application.  All of the applications in your group get thrown into a bin and then they randomly draw names for people to come up on stage.  There seemed to be at least 500 in people in our group. 

So anyway I expected the line to move every 15 minutes.  But what I found out was the line only truly moves once every hour to hour and a half once the group in front of you finishes.  Standing in line all that time and as we were waiting for the simulated contest to start gave us lots of time to people watch.  There were a lot of old people there, a lot of women and a lot of cellulite.  In front of the Wheel Bus they had a small stage set up with miniature versions of the puzzle board along with a wheel that was spun to select what cheesy prizes the contestants won instead of being used for dollar figures for letters. 

Finally about 1:30 the game starts.  Ali and I were a bit disappointed with how the process was going to go.  At most they would be calling 30 to 40 names out of the hundreds there.  The host for this traveling game show was frantically high energy.  He was as cheesy as you could imagine, talking in his made up game show host voice,  smiling at all times and throwing in rapid fire bad jokes while hopping around on the stage.  He said that more than puzzle solving skill, they are looking for people with personality, people that showed great enthusiasm as they make for entertaining contestants on the show.  He said that getting up on the stage was no guarantee of making the show or even a second audition.  It’s only a small step in the process.  After this audition they were coming back in a month or so for second auditions, that would be much more personal, much more one on one (like I thought this audition would be). Only after passing that test would you be forwarded on to the real show.  He said that even people that aren’t called up still have a shot as their names will be drawn at random to get a shot at the second audition.  I didn’t believe him.

Well the hosts instructions were taken to heart by most there.  There were copious amounts of yelling and screaming.  Ali and I played along with both of us joking about the silliness of the entire scene.  As contestants got called up to play the crowd played along although  we were instructed to keep quiet.  Ali showed off her puzzle solving skills, coming up with the answer almost every time before the people on the stage did.  It came down to the last group and we still had not been called.  A bunch of the people they called had either left or gotten back in line for the next show. (yes some stuck around for all three)  When the last person was called and Ali wasn’t among them I was disappointed. I know she would do real well on the show.  Most of the crowd that was left bolted and didn’t stick around to cheer on the lucky few that were left to play the game.  Ali and I decided to be good sports and stick around to the end. 

It was interesting watching the people that were called up on the stage try to impress the Wheel staff.  Some of them bombed miserably showing the personality of a doorknob.  Others went too far the other way putting on such fake exuberance that it was obviously not genuine.  A few got it right.  The most entertaining was an old guy that sung a bit of a song after revealing he was into karaoke. 

So we headed home with no interest in sitting through the last group of shows.  We figured we gave it a shot.  We talked about how the show misses out on tons of potential contestants using the random screening process.  I guess with the huge numbers they have little choice.  To talk to and test every one of those people individually would take far longer than the four hour window allowed.  Who knows, maybe we will get lucky and have our name drawn in that random drawing that I doubt exists.

When we got back to the house our weekend of non-stop activity continued in earnest.  One of Ali’s best friends growing up was supposed to be coming down for a few days during the week.  We had a lot of tidying up to do to prepare for her arrival.  Ali has been encouraging her to come down and visit pretty much since we moved to Florida.  For whatever reason it never happened but now plans were in place.  Ali was very excited to have her good friend come down and spend a few days with us.  You can imagine how disappointed Ali was when she got a call from her friend in the middle of cleaning Sunday afternoon saying she wasn’t coming down.  She gave various excuses for the change of plans.  Ali tried to talk her out of cancelling the trip but was unsuccessful in doing so.  It’s a shame.  I know Ali is bummed out about the entire situation.  Even though we now didn’t now have to prepare for a visitor, we finished up our prep and cleaning.  Randall is supposed to be stopping over in a couple weeks anyway.  It felt good to get the house somewhat back in order after the chaos of a month of nothing but fence building.

The work continued late into the evening.  A little after 9pm I finished up hanging two shelves in our hobby room to further facilitate getting stuff organized so it can double as an exercise room.  It was a weekend of non-stop stuff.  It felt good to get a lot accomplished.  You can see the final pictures of the fence project here.  Enjoy the fruits of dozens of hours of labor.

Well as you can tell, I really dug into changing things up with the blog yesterday after I installed WordPress 2.5.  I found a way to incorporate my random image header with a newer theme that supports “widgets”.   These widgets allow me to plug in all sorts of extras into the blog.  I added a NASA image of the day, a traffic analyzer that shows information about the traffic coming to the blog, a link to a post one year ago, weather, how many spam comments were blocked, a cleaner drop down menu for browsing prior posts, a new “popular” posts widget and more!  I also signed up for Google ad-sense and installed a WP mod to easily incorporate it into the blog.  I figure if I can make a few bucks while blogging, why not do it? You will notice that some of the Google ads relate to the blog post you are looking at, kinda cool.  It’s a whole lot of change but I like it, a lot.

Small side note, the site crossed 30,000 unique hits.  The accuracy of the hit counter  is questionable since I have had to reset the count from memory quite a few times due to issues with my web host.  Speaking of my host, I requested for my content to get moved to a different box due to the issues I have been having.  When the change happens the site may be unavailable for a day or so while net DNS servers are updated.

Last night I finished up sinking line posts in the ground.  After I scooped out my last bit of dirt with the post hole digger I lifted it high and drove the digger into the ground deep in celebration.  It felt good to be close to the end of the nearly month long project.  All that is left to do is string about 600 feet of wire which I plan to get done Saturday afternoon/evening.  

Ali got home last night just after I finished up with the last line post.  I had Nicki out with me on her leash.  Even though the fence is not totally enclosed, I let her off leash even though I’m sure Ali cringed when I did it.  Nicki immediately started sprinting around in circles, thrilled to be able to run around without a 16 foot restraint attached to her neck.  Ali and I both laughed as we watched her run and run.  We left her off leash until we went back inside.  She was just fine and didn’t try to sprint away from us as Ali has always feared.  As daylight was fading I loaded up the 3 big heavy rolls of fence wire into the back of the truck and dropped them off where they would be installed, saving me from pushing each roll several hundred feet.

This afternoon I am leaving work early so we can head up to Tampa.  Ali is running a 5k up there tomorrow called the Iron Girl.  The race is all women.  She is very excited about competing in an out of town race.  We are taking the pooch along.  I am bringing a laptop with that is loaded with the Slingbox client.  I am hoping we can watch some of our normal Friday night Tivo stuff at the LaQuinta we are staying at via the net.

The cat is still at the vet, we are still in no rush to get her.  I came up with a plan to set up the automatic litter box AND the manual litter box in the utility room once Spook returns.  Then the stupid cats will have a choice.

I received yet ANOTHER Roomba yesterday.  This time it was a jet black scheduler model with “intellibin”.  Intellibin sounds really high tech huh?  All it does is flash a little red led if the dust bin is full.  Since I empty the bin after every run it really is just fluff for me.  I currently have NINE robots at my house, well TEN if I count the Scooba.  It’s time for me to get busy, parting them out to sell on Ebay.  I am going to give one to my mom to try and I plan to keep three for my cleaning crew. (and maybe one more for hacking) All the rest will be finding homes elsewhere either intact or as organ(part) donors.   

I can’t wait to see how Ali’s Wheel of Fortune tryout goes.

I started Tivo’ing Battlestar Galactica.  I keep hearing how awesome it is.  I love sci-fi, I think I will wind up being sorry I got in on it so late.

Oh I forgot, we had another bad experience with RCI last night, what a surprise.  Ali’s friend Sue is going to be driving down to visit us next week.  Her car has some problems so we suggested that she rent a car for the trip.  We offered to help her out.  We had about 30,000 unused RCI points that are expiring at the end of May.  I f we don’t use them, we lose them.  One of the things we can use them for is stuff like rental cars, perfect!  We at least can get some use out of them.  So Ali calls up RCI and explains that we want to rent a car for a friend using our points.  Ok no problem, we can do that.  Oh by the way, there is a $49 fee to do so, another f’ing fee.  When Ali told me about the fee I grumbled but it is to be expected at this point, RCI is all about fees.  So she gives the rep all the info and is told she would be transferred to Budget to complete the reservation.  It will cost us 33,000 points PLUS the $49 fee. Oh and there COULD be additional charges by the rental company but we need to find that out our self.  So Ali gets on with the Budget rep and again gives all the information.  Then I see Ali’s face turn to concern/disbelief.  The rep is telling Ali that they have NO cars available at that location to rent with points but they would happily rent us a car if we wanted to pay for it conventionally.  What a crock of shit.  The rep said that they normally only allocate cars for points at airports.   Ali asked for a supervisor, the guy said he was a supervisor.  Ali hung up, disgusted.  She spent close to a half hour going through this circus only to be told that our points were no good.  By the end of the ordeal she was chiming in on my chant of “RCI sucks”.     

For years I have been bugging Ali about trying out for Wheel of Fortune.  She is great at the game, I have watched her time and again solving puzzles easily, most times faster than the contestants on the show.  She never shared my enthusiasm for going on the show.  Well now there is no excuse for her not to try.  They are going to be doing try outs for the show 12 miles away from our house on Sunday!  I will drag her there if I have to. She is worried that she could choke with the additional pressure.  I have confidence that she will do just fine and if she doesn’t who cares, at least she gave it a shot.  I’m excited to see how it goes.

With all my interest in Mars lately, I was excited to find out that there is another Mars lander scheduled to touch down at th end of May, named Phoenix. Phoenix is going to be landing close to the Martian North Pole.  It isn’t a rover like Spirit and Opportunity, rather a stationary robot.  The area that it is landing in supposedly has a high probability of having frozen water just under the surface.  It’s going to use it’s robotic arm to dig down and analyze what’s underneath.  While perusing the site I also saw a cool image of what the Earth and moon looks like from Mars.  Seeing all of these images make me wish somewhat that I followed one my initial childhood career choices of being involved in some sort of space related career.  It just blows my mind that we are able to do these things.  When I look at the images of far off objects in space taken by the Hubble telescope it puts in perspective just how small our little tiny planet is in the grand scheme of things.  There is so much out there beyond what we know.  There surely is life out there, to deny the probability of it is ludicrous in my opinion. 

I thought my pole installation last night was going to get washed out again.  When I got home there was a steady rain coming down.  I kept monitoring the conditions out the window and when I saw it slowed to a drizzle I headed out the door around 7.  In the span of about an hour I knocked out 9 posts, leaving only 8 more to go until all posts are in the ground.  After work tonight I should be able to easily get those done.  I’m excited by the prospect of retiring my post hole digger.

While I was waiting for the rain to slow and after I was done outside I finished up watching Rocky Balboa for a second time.  I love that damn movie.  Yes I have reviewed the movie before.  Watching it a second time drove home how much I liked it.  Yes there are still the flaws like having a pudgy Mason Dixon (Antonio Tarver) being the “bad” guy.  He is neck and neck with Tommy Gunn (Tommy Morrison) as the worst boxer Rocky faced. Mason Dixon was definitely the worst at fake boxing.  There are plenty of over the top sappy moments where the film tries too hard to lay parallels of Rocky’s life to a real world situation. And then there is the borderline creepy relationship they depict with Rocky and the little girl that called him a “Creepo” in the original film. I am able to overlook all of that.  The film is just filled with so many powerful moments and classic Rocky one-liners.  Let me list a few of my favorites:

After Pauly comes in and makes a scene, Rocky tells him to settle down because people were there trying to have a nice meal.  Pauly says “Rock, having a bunch of Mexicans make Italian food ain’t that special…”

The speech Rocky gives his son after his son tries to talk Rocky out of fighting again because it makes the son look bad. Rocky tells his kid that somewhere along the line the kid stopped taking responsibility for his situation and instead resorted t blaming others (Rocky) for his life.  Rocky tells him cowards point fingers at others.  He tells his kid that life is about taking the setbacks that are dealt to you and moving forward, always moving forward. He leaves his kid speechless on the street.

Pauly says something to Rocky about time catching to all of us.  Rocky offers “yea, especially if you are standing still”

As Rocky is talking to the boxing licensing board after they initially deny his application to fight again.  “the older I get the more I have to leave behind…”

Towards the end of the fight when Rocky gets rocked and is down on one knee, his life of setbacks flash by his eyes and his simple self command of “Get up!”

There are many other moments in the film that I just love. In some ways it is my favorite Rocky movie of all of them.  Maybe my age has something to do with it.      

I had another weird dream last night.  I was staying at some hotel where I ordered room service.  But for some reason this room service charged by the hour.  By the time I was ready to check out the next day the bill was over $1300.  I remember arguing bitterly with the hotel clerk as we went over the itemized bill. 

I just upgraded the blog to WP 2.5, just in case you were interested.  From a user perspective you may not notice any difference but from an admin/editing stand point I see a bunch of changes.  I may mess with the themes a bit to see some of the features I have not used up to this point due to my affinity for my current one that flashes up random images as the header.