Archives 2008

Although we luckily escaped the majority of the wrath of Ike, he still has smacked us around a little bit dumping over two and a half inches of rain on our place in the last 24 hours.  Our property had finally just about dried up with standing water only left in the ditch by the road and a small amount in the back.  Well we are back in the soup, tons of water is to be found everywhere again. It gets a bit frustrating at times.

  With all the water in the past month, frogs have been procreating like crazy.  Our property is overrun with baby tree frogs.  They are literally everywhere.  As you walk across the grass there is constant movement about your feet as frogs scatter to get out of the way.  It’s all part of the magic of living in the sub-tropics.

Yesterday I knocked out the first in my bi-weekly 300 maintenance routines, doing my first 300 since the epic 1500. It went just fine.  I just can’t see myself ever completely abandoning the 300.  I worked so hard to get there that the thought of letting my fitness level slip to the point where I could no longer complete the routine is too depressing to allow it to happen.

I forgot to mention that I am slapping on the sunscreen and sunglasses one more time this year to play vball at South Beach this weekend with Randall. It will be the first volleyball I have played since the Rumble.  I STILL have a trick left shoulder from the Rumble which went down two and a half months ago.  I’m sure by the end of the day my shoulder will once again be ripped up but it’s the last vball action of the year so it doesn’t matter much.  After this tourney, I plan to try to kick my running program into high gear for the winter so I can run some races. Luckily I don’t need my shoulder much to run.

Jeremy challenged my statement in the letter to the blog reader that McCain was “lobbyist controlled” indicating that it was a generalization and not based on fact.  I presented him with the facts. How you like THEM apples? 

Compare these two headless, anonymous people.

Sometimes I don’t like being right.  Republicans are PROS at preying on ignorance.

Grrrr I didn’t get the overall points win last night in FF.  F’in Jay Cutler getting 25 points is bullshit.  McFadden only chipped in 5 points towards my cause leaving me with 111 points for the week while the top dog had 117. Damn it.

We watched what may be the stupidest show on the planet called “The Hole”.  The premise is really stupid, really loud and really silly looking people try to fit through a hole in a wall that is moving towards them.  The hole shape changes each round so various positions are required.  If you fit through the hole you get points and money.  If you don’t you get pushed into the water.  I told Ali I could feel my IQ dropping a few points as I watched it.    It looked like the game show came right out of the film Idiocracy, a 2008 version of “Ow, My Balls”. You really need to see the show to believe it, once.

Ali has been going through some of her old floppy disks to see if there is anything worthwhile on them.  She found one disk that had some long lost pictures on it.  I used to have one of those Sony Mavica cameras that wrote directly to floppy.  These pictures are from back in 2001 when we still lived in the apartment.  I’m not quite sure why I was doing some of these poses.  My first reaction to the pictures was “Look how FAT I was..”  I wasn’t “fat” but I was just soft with no real muscle defintion to be seen anywhere.  I look so dumb.

I almost feel like making this the official Rumble 2008 Video below.  It makes me laugh each time I play it.  I must be a real asshole to play with.

Watching a lot of football yesterday meant watching a lot of commercials as well.  Two stuck out in my head, maybe because I saw a lot of them. First was Hyundai and it’s new flagship car, the Genesis.  The commercials were cool and the car seemed pretty intense with looks like a Mercedes Benz and a 370 HP motor to boot.  It seems to me though the car is coming out 4 years too late.  Um with $4 a gallon gas most consumers are running towards fuel efficient vehicles instead of horsepower monsters that are ready for the race track.  It looks like a nice car though.

The other ad is the vaunted Jerry Seinfield/Bill Gates Microsoft spot.  Jerry signing on to promote MSFT was big news since he is being paid roughly 10 MILLION dollars for the work.  When I saw the commercial, both Ali and I turned to each other and said “WTF?”  The ad campaign is designed to combat the ultra-smart Apple ads where two guys representing the Mac (cool young hip guy) and the PC (chubby middle aged nerd) face off in skits where PC always comes off looking like a dope. Well the Jerry ad is funny just because it makes no sense.  I have no idea how it is supposed to make a consumer interested in Microsoft.  Don’t get me wrong, I am firmly in bed with Microsoft products, it’s how I make a living, but at least in the ad world, Apple’s tv spot’s are waaaaay better.

Video: Shoe Circus

This weekend I had yet another project scheduled, to redo the border around the orchard.  I hadn’t really thought about it until Ali mentioned that we have been doing projects every weekend in the sweltering heat for the last month or so.  It’s true, going back to the door installation when my brother and brother-in-law were down.  After that I had the outside door/stucco trim painting project, the screen replacement project, the painting the office project and now the rip out the border around the orchard and replace it with a 2″x6″ border project. It’s been a bit much.  If I was smart I would put off many of the outdoor projects until the pleasant winter weather arrives.

The broiler was turned up to high once again for this project.  I completely sweated through my first t-shirt in not time at all.  The area around the one side of the orchard just recently had the standing water dry up, leaving a nice muddy mess in it’s wake.  I got nice and dirty as I ripped up the old landscape timbers that were badly rotted.  I threw them in the back of the truck and dumped them in the ditch towards the back of the property.  I also ripped out the border by the shed where the mums were.  The latest flooding killed everything in there.  Ali and I decided to just rip the entire area out.  It never looked great and we got sick of it flooding out during wet season.

So I started on the orchard.  Initially I had this great idea to dig out along the entire border to sink it slightly below ground level to prevent weeds/grass from growing under it.  Trying to dig out the soppy, heavy turf in 90/90 conditions was just miserable.  It didn’t take me long to reconsider my plan.  I wound up just digging out the higher side of the border.  I used the fancy aluminum corners and connectors that I bought for use in the garden border.  I wound up not using them for the garden because the composite lumber didn’t fit them well. 

With Ali’s assistance I assembled the lumber into the connectors with care and then shifted the assembled box around a bit until it was where I wanted it.  It turned out that the border was even further up the hill than I anticipated so I had to dig out a trench for the top edge a second time.  The orchard border actually overlapped the buried sprinkler pipe at this point so I had to make sure to not crack the pipe during the excavation.  Finally I had the new border in place but now I needed more stuff.

My plan was to put sections of weed block under the border and staple it to the bottom to again prevent weeds from creeping underneath.  I needed more weed block.  Originally I had planned to not bother to get the mulch for the area because of the threat of Ike but the revised forecast track and my desire to have the project done changed my mind.  I headed off to HD and grabbed the block and 30 bags of red mulch.  The back of the mud covered Tacoma was filled to the brim with mulch goodness.  I drove slowly on the way home on I-75.  I had nightmares of a bag of mulch flying off on the highway and causing a 10 car pile up.

Once I got home I crawled around on my hands and knees and attached the weed block to the border, again with Ali’s help.  Then I dumped the bags of mulch as Ali spread it around.  30 bags wasn’t enough to cover everything, I’ll need to pick up another 10 bags or so this week. We did our first application of Preen to see if it delivers on it’s promise of a less weedy existence.  I finished off my work on the area for the day by driving a piece of 4 foot rebar into each corner to keep the border in place in the event of hurricanes or the occasional bump with the tractor.  I like the way it turned out although I was very exhausted by the end of it.  Even my finger nails hurt from using my hands as a poor man’s garden tool to rip out clumps of sod. I’ll take some pictures later.

 Like I mentioned, the Ike forecast track has become much more favorable for our area which is a big relief.  We will probably still get rain and some wind as it passes by but nothing all that significant.  I feel bad for wherever it hits up in the northern gulf coast.  Man I would hate to live in Cuba, it seems it has been hit by almost every single storm of the season.  That place has to be a mess.

Yesterday was the first time I got to watch an Eagles game in HD on my 73 inch monster.  It was fantastic in every way.  The picture looked great, the sound on my repaired Bose surround system was flawless and the Eagles performance on the field was pretty much perfect.  Despite missing their two top receivers, the Eagles ripped it up.  They dominated the Rams in pretty much every way imaginable.  I don’t think I could have asked for a better way for the season to start.

I also hopped on the computer and checked out another feature of the NFL Superfan package that I added on to my Sunday Ticket, Supercast.  Supercast allows you to watch all of the games you get with the Sunday Ticket on your computer.  After some initial problems connecting to the service I got it working and watched the Cowboys/Browns game online.  It was pretty damn cool.  The interface is chock full of info and is easy to use.  It’s definitely tailored for the fantasy football player, offering up fantasy stats at the click of a button. 

Speaking of fantasy football, my team if it stays healthy could be quite the powerhouse.  I have already won my game this week while still having one player to play yet tonight.  I also have a good shot to have the most points of any team this week which translates into $50 each week it happens.  This could be my year, finally.  On paper, I have the strongest team in the league. The injury bug already bit me a bit with Marion Barber going out with bruised ribs.  However I made a smart move and drafted Felix Jones as well so if it is a serious injury my ass is covered nicely.

I spent the second half of Sunday just watching football and f’ing off on the computer.  Even though I spent 2/3 of the weekend busting my ass, the afternoon of f’ing off made me feel like a loser. I again have that feeling that there are a lot of little things that I need to do.  I spent some time working some more on the vball video.  Man this is going to be tedious.  I am still in the process where I watch each and every play and decide if it is vball movie worthy or not.  If it is worthy then I trim it to cut out the dead action and label it so I know what it is when I start sticking clips together.  So far after watching the action again from the tourney I would best describe our play as “uninspired”.

I forgot to mention that I am just on a circling pattern, waiting to get an Iphone to replace my Treo. My contract with Sprint ran out at the end of last month.  My experience with the Touch sold me on getting an Iphone.  I’m not sure if I want to spend the extra $100 for the 16 gig model, I probably should but I know they are more difficult to get.  I am waiting for purely financial reasons.  All of these projects cost money plus we have some big bills coming up in the near future, namely the 30,000 mile Camry dealer service and the anniversary trip to Georgia.

The last thing we need is a big nasty storm ripping through our backyard.  The panic has not begun in earnest yet but you can bet if this track does not change significantly over the weekend things are going to get crazy.

My blog entry was already done last night, inadvertently.  One of the readers of my blog strongly disagrees with my position on the election.  He let me know in no uncertain terms with a long email yesterday.  I won’t reveal his identity or post his original email because I didn’t ask permission to do so.  In reading the email exchange I would say that this reader would actually be in the 20 odd percent of people that still APPROVE of George W. Bush, pretty scary.  His MAJOR gripe about Obama is the possibility of more taxes, he is just hell bent against it since it could mean more money out of his pocket.  Below is my reply, somewhat edited for public consumption.

This is something that only has come to me as I have grown older and maybe it will come to you as well.  I started looking at the BIG picture and not just how things are just within my white picket fence.  Trust me I know it is very easy to simplify things down to “ this might affect me in a negative manner so I must be against it”

 So let me establish a few things.  Nobody wants to pay more taxes, NOBODY.  Now if you looked closely at what Obama is proposing tax wise, it is basically returning the tax laws to what they were during Clinton’s administration, some of the 8 most productive years ever.   Also, the tax breaks when looked at in the BIG picture are actually giving far more Americans a tax break than what McCain is endorsing. In fact if you look at the OVERALL picture, McCain’s tax plan is supposed to save Americans about 3% on their taxes on average by 2012, Obama’s proposal  5%.

 I am definitely not a supporter of welfare mentality and you know how I feel about illegals, the 21^st century cockroach.  People definitely should work hard to support themselves and not sneak into other countries to whore their infrastructure.  However the reality is whenever there is money to be handed out for free, scumbags will always be lining up for it or working the system to get more than their fair share.  That truth doesn’t change no matter who is in the White House.

 K more big picture here, the environment.  Is global warming or the idea of it viable?  Well most scientists will say yes but even if they are wrong, common sense would dictate that the earth’s resources are finite and the world’s population is exploding exponentially.  No matter how you look at it, conservation, making the effort to be a green as possible, can not possibly be seen as a negative thing.  In my experience, people that don’t give a f about the environment also don’t give a f about much more than themselves.  There are certainly tons of people like that, it certainly doesn’t make it a smart way to exist on the planet.  More drilling means absolutely nothing.  It’s a pimple on a fat lady’s ass.  New ideas have to be pursued passionately instead of being bought out and squashed by big oil and auto manufacturers.

 Health care – only the people that can afford health care should have it? The rest can die.  It’s an easy stance to take when you can afford it yourself.  To me it seems reasonable that people should have the right to healthcare.  Implementation of that is another story, a government based plan could easily spin into yet another huge mess, sort of like Homeland Security.  But once again, I have health care yet I think the biggest, most modern country in the world should be able to provide healthcare for it’s CITIZENS. (not f’in illegals)

 I could throw everything else out and just not vote McCain because of the old fart’s stance on Iraq.  Anyone that thinks Iraq was/is a good idea has very bad judgment in my opinion.  Saying we almost have “won” the war is like stamping a “dumb ass” stamp on your forehead.

 The vast majority of your objections seem all wrapped up in MORE TAXES.   However the reality is the Bush administration cut taxes recklessly while spending more money that any administration before it and loaning more money than ALL OF THE PREVIOIUS PRESIDENTS COMBINED. Think about that.  You don’t get out of a hole like that without biting the bullet.  It’s like saying “I’m going to work on paying off my credit card debt by getting another credit card”  Yea it would be nice if all of these problems could be fixed without paying for them but that isn’t living in reality.

 I certainly don’t agree with everything Obama supports but I am excited about getting someone in there that isn’t a typical, lobbyist controlled, Washington DC veteran that has been corrupted by two decades in that cesspool.  Having a half black guy elected president would be a pretty awesome thing if you ask me. Although I think the US still has a lot of racism in it.  It’s just below the surface instead out in the open. If anything, I think that is Barrack’s biggest obstacle of all.

 Nah dude I’m not mad.  Your opinion is your opinion and you certainly aren’t alone in your thinking.  It’s all a matter of perspective. Everyone has to decide what is important to them.