Archives June 2008

I get so annoyed reading idiotic people’s comments in the local e-newspaper.  I don’t know why I subject myself to it.  Today I found this comment in regards to a story about high gas prices particularly annoying and ignorant…

“conservation is the tool of dictators. oil is bubbling up all over the earth but some weak minded people are convinced that humans are destroying the planet. there are termites that make more carbon dioxcide than most countrys. cattle effluants are more of a problem than the cars in Florida.”

Instead of replying with one of my personal rants, I chose to use a great quote I remembered seeing awhile back.

A weak minded individual – “Only after the last tree has been cut down,
only after the last river has been poisoned,
only after the last fish has been caught,
only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten…”

F him… idiot.

Ali read my brilliant idea for national health care and actually was impressed.  She thought it was a great idea.  She suggested I forward it to Obama.  I laughed at her idea but then later I did exactly that.  I went to his senate page and pasted in my blog entry almost verbatim.  It can’t hurt.

Yesterday as I was getting changed for the gym I realized that I stupidly forgot to pack socks.  So I had a decision to make, to wear sneakers with no socks, which I don’t like doing or wearing my tan work socks with little diamonds on them.  I decided on the latter.  I pulled them way down so little more than the top of the sock was visible and bunched up the rest of it inside the sneaker.  It was a bit annoying having the socks bunched up in my shoe but I didn’t catch anyone giving me strange looks so maybe no one noticed. 

Last night I was doing more testing on my Bose system.  I turned it on when I got home to time exactly how long it would stay on.  After 20 minutes the sound cut out.  I turned the unit off and back on a few times.  It would play for a little bit and then immediately cut out.  I decided I would call Bose again since it was now exhibiting the problem.  I kept turning it on, wait for it to cut out and then turn it off and on again, I did it three or four times.  As I was on hold I noticed that the unit was still working longer than the minute or so it had been doing.  I hung up the phone and let it on.  It kept on working from that point on.  I left it on for the 45 minutes or so that Ali did her ballet dvd workout and it worked just fine.  There must just be an electrical component in the head unit that is just flaky.

 Ironically after I have spent a decent amount of time digging into my HD Tivo, my old neighbor told me his Tivo Series 2 unit had died.  It is a lifetime subscription model so getting it fixed makes sense.  Apparently his hdd in the unit died.  Lucky for him I still have my old Series 2 that I pulled out of commission.  I am in the process of pulling an image from my Tivo using WinMFS to place on a new hard drive for his unit.  If all goes as planned he should be back in business shortly.

 Awhile back I posted a link to a site, felonspy.com, that supposedly identified felons that lived around you.  After I posted it I edited the post saying I thought it may be suspect since I could not verify any of names/addresses they listed.  Well Ali sent me this which confirmed my suspicions.  It’s all a big joke.

I knew that since I missed my 300 workout last week that I would pay for it this week.  It seems like somebody raised the toll.  I was sucking major wind and had to take longer breaks than I would like to.

On my way back from the gym I came up with what I thought was a brilliant national health care plan.  Everybody would have the option to be included in a national health care plan with minimal or no costs. But there is a catch, to be covered you have to have a BMI (body mass index) under a certain level and you can not be a smoker or drug user.  I think this would be a fantastic thing.  It would reward people for being healthy!  People that choose to willingly abuse their body through the abuse of food, cigarettes or drugs are welcome to do so.  However these individuals open themselves up for truckloads of additional health issues.  They can continue with their existing private health care plan that they must pay for.  But if you want a free ride on the government plan, you have to do your part towards minimizing the risk taken on by the insurer.  Reward people for working towards a healthy lifestyle, what a concept! 

Ave Maria, the new “Catholic Town” that has been carved out of the middle of nowhere by us is getting hammered by the poor real estate market.  At this point they have sold 10% of the homes that they projected, TEN PERCENT!!!   Better sell a whole lot more pizzas Tom.

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2008/jun/08/ave-maria-lacking-growth-may-affect-projects/

Last night I did not sleep well at all.  It felt like most of the night I was barely asleep with lots of dreams.  I remember one of the dreams pretty well.  I was back at Brecknock where my baseball “career” started.  I was my current age.  It was a scenario sort of like The Rookie where I was throwing batting practice but then it also expanded into me taking batting practice as well as playing the field.  It went on for a long time.  It was just a lot of me practicing with the kids and other coaches.

The apple tree in our orchard has been producing a lot of apples this year.  They aren’t perfect apples.  Many are very small, many get attacked by bugs and birds but we still had collected a nice collection of decent ones.  Ali put them to good use by making a homemade apple pie Friday night.  She was nervous about how it would turn out.  She had no reason to worry, it was awesome.  We had our old neighbor and his new partner over that night and they shared in the apple pie goodness.  We also all had a lot of fun playing the Wii.  Wii Sports is an awesome party game.

I picked up a composter on Friday at Sam’s.  Ali was very excited.  It will give her a place to put various food scraps and turn them into compost which will be great for the garden.  I put it together on Friday.  Ali got the bin started with various organic materials on Saturday.

My Bose Lifestyle 20 surround system that I have had since moving to Florida is starting to flake out.  It started since I got the new tv and console.  Apparently it is a heat related issue.  Basically it will work for 20 minutes or so before the sound simply cuts out.  The unit does not turn off, the sound just goes out.  If you turn it off and let it cool down a bit it will work again for a short while.  I called up Bose yesterday.  The unit had been off overnight so it was working when we went through the simple trouble shooting steps.  The guy is sending me out a cable that goes between the main unit and the sub woofer.  I have zero expectations of that fixing anything and expressed that to customer service rep.  He said that it is the first trouble shooting step they take.  If the cable doesn’t fix it then I am supposed to call back.  At that point they would probably have me send the unit in for repair.  Well I fully expect to be calling them back.  I have been scouring ebay looking for a used unit to snap up cheap but so far have not found any suitable candidates. 

When I was looking up the problem on the internet I ran across tons of Bose haters.  Many people view Bose as overpriced, proprietary junk.  I wouldn’t call the system junk but I don’t think I would buy another system.  The RF remote makes it incompatible with my Logitech Harmony set up and I never have really liked the way the main deck looks.  It sounds good enough but I think I would be just as happy with something else.

The weekend didn’t have much noteworthy about it.  On Saturday I busted ass in the morning mowing.  In the afternoon Ali joined me outside and we trimmed back the palmetto bush hard. Sunday it was inside work with sweeping, laundry and steam cleaning the carpet.  We did spend some time by the pool which was nice.  We still have Zoe with us.  Our neighbor is supposed to come home today.  Yesterday we noticed how bad she stank so we gave her a bath last night.  Even after the bath she didn’t exactly smell like roses.  Zoe seemed a bit depressed and low key the last couple days.  Maybe she misses being in her own house.

Ali leaves for PA Wednesday.  I’ll be solo until Sunday.  My schedule is going to be jammed full of wild parties, drug abuse and loose women.  Yea right.  Getting crazy nowadays may consist of getting drunk while playing some WoW or Wii.

I came up with a physical challenge I want to undertake sometime this summer, a 1500.  A 1500 would be doing a 300 every day of the work week.  I don’t want to do it before the Rumble but maybe sometime shortly after that.  I probably need to do a few two a week 300’s prior to undertaking the challenge.

Yep it’s still on my mind and should be on yours…

Jeremy was watching a video on YouTube of someone surfing this web site and he wanted me to comment about the story.   It is basically a doom and gloom piece about how just f’d the American economy is at this point.  I think by this time myself and most of the American public is almost numb to bad news as each day seems to be filled to the brim with it.  I mean really, just how many f’d up things can we deal with?

The amount of bad things that have come about in the last 8 years is pretty staggering.  Most people start the list of bad Bush related issues at 9/11 but we forget that prior to that we had the dot com stock market implosion.  Then we have 9/11 that has more question marks than answers, 7 years after it’s tragic occurrence.  9/11 lead to a series of smoke screens and parlor tricks that sunk us into a warmongers wet dream, the cluster f in Iraq.  The contrived war has cost thousands of US lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives.  The billions that we flush down the toilet there have hammered us back home, throwing the government into the largest deficit in history, fueled by the Bush administration borrowing more money than every single president before it, COMBINED.

  Thanks to Bush, and the implementation of the gluttonous and all encompassing “Homeland Security Department”, government is now bigger than it ever has been before.  We have given up many freedoms and our privacy under the guise of “safety”.  We have become a nation steered by lies and controlled by fear.

Still even though the signs of global warming are everywhere we have people that refuse to believe that human beings are capable of destroying their own planet.  All time high gas prices has crippled our economy in uncountable ways all the while big oil companies rake in record setting profits.  The housing market is in shambles, food prices are sky high, and America’s population is the fattest in the world.

I mean do I really need anything else to be negative about? 

I was watching a bit of an Oprah show the other night and was shocked by just how fat Oprah has allowed herself to get once again.  Granted the visual was a bit exaggerated because it was taped in standard def but was stretched to fit the tv. But still, she looked HUGE.  It amazes me how Oprah has bounced up and down with her weight over the years.  With as much money as she has, she can afford to have the world’s best trainers and chefs by her side, 24/7.  But even with all of that, she still can’t manage to control what she shoves in her face.  Yea the pic is Kirstie Allie showing off her new cough, cough “slim” figure.  I just found it appropriate. As is this.

The irony of it is that Oprah has made a living off telling other people how to act, think and do.  Specifically, she has tons of shows on healthy living.  How can you take advice on healthy living from someone that has rolled her weight up and down constantly her entire life?  I have heard that her latest weight gain has been attributed to a “health problem”.  Yea, the problem is you are eating more than you are exercising. 

This is the last weekend before Ali heads up to PA.   It will be the last “normal” weekend for awhile.  After Ali comes back, a few days later we pull out to drive right back to PA for the Rumble. 

We still have Zoe at our place.  We have not heard one peep from our neighbor about his plans to return yet which is a bit odd.

Bush misused Iraq intelligence: Senate report