Archives 2008

Thank GOD they sprayed for mosquitoes last night.  Our property was overrun with them.  Ali said she was attacked during the day yesterday.  When I went outside last night to walk Nicki I flipped on the outdoor spotlight and witnessed no less than 500 mosquitoes on the screen by the light, just waiting for a victim to attack.  It was pretty nasty.  The plane must have went over last night because this morning there was no sign of them.

I had another bizarre dream last night that I only remember parts of.  I was in a suit walking around a high school that also had a mall built into it.  I remember walking around trying to act like I was undercover security.  At one point I was mad when I looked on my shoulder and saw a big huge clump of cat hair stuck to the shoulder of my jacket.  Later I had to take a leak.  Instead of urinals they had a version of a piss trough.  This trough was about a third of the way filled with water.  In the corner of it was what looked an intake/drain to recycle the piss water.  The intake had what looked to be one of those small paper cups you put stuff like ketchup in.  Standing next to the trough, was some custodian looking guy.  He was beefy and had black hair in a buzz cut.  He sort of looked retarded. 

So I started to relieve myself, letting loose in the trough.  As I did the custodian jumped to life and yelled “Sir! Can you please pee at the pee cup?”, pointing to the ketchup cup sort of thing.  I said nothing and just gave him a look of confusion.  I adjusted my angle and pointed towards the “pee cup”.  At that exact moment the bathroom got rushed with people, class must have let out.  All of a sudden I had males all around me, all with their deals out, all pissing at the same time.  I had streams of urine flying by either arm as everyone was aiming for the pee cup.  I remember pulling my arms in tight to my sides to prevent my suit from getting wet.  I finished up as quick as I could and got the hell out of there.  That’s all I remember, I’m just glad I didn’t wet the bed.

Since next week is short due to Labor Day I decided to try to trudge through the daunting 1500 this week.  I don’t want to wait another two weeks to plow through the pain.  Like most things in my life, I ‘d rather get it over with than put it off.  One down, four to go.

I’m pleased to announce that in support of my effort,  Jeremy has vowed to do one pull up a day in a show of solidarity.

We just can not get a break in the precipitation.  Since Fay we have not had a dry day to allow the standing water on our property to recede all that much.  We need about a solid week without rain to dry our property out.

So Ali and I tackled re-screening the torn sections of the lanai on Saturday.  It was a project that I was nervous about.  I figured it was going to be extremely difficult to get the new screens tight enough so they would look like all the rest.  It turns out my concern was unfounded.  Replacing the screens took longer than I expected, pretty much all of Saturday, but it wasn’t all that difficult.  The most annoying part was that most of the sections I had to replace had anchoring cable and hardware on them that had to be removed first before replacing the screen.

Now if I was doing the job myself it would have certainly been more difficult to get the screens tight.  With Ali assisting she was able to pull on the screening as I pressed the spline into place.  The end result was great.  If I walked you out on the lanai I don’t think you would be able to tell which screens were replaced.  The one section I could not do is the top corner section.  Instead I used some screen patches to cover up the small tear in the corner.  I’m hoping that will hold up.  I can now add “screen installer” to my resume right below sprinkler and fence installer.

Even though we spent the majority of the day working on the screens and it was getting late in the day, I still wanted to try to get out to see Tropic Thunder.  We both cleaned up quickly and had a lightning fast dinner at Moe’s Southwest Grille as we tried to make the 7:15 showing.  When we go to the ticket booth the girl said the 7:15 show was very full.  We got seats for the 7:45 showing instead but I had the idea to still walk into the 7:15 movie and see if we could find two decent seats.  The 7:15 show was in a ridiculously small theater.  The only seats available were in the first few rows which would have sucked so I reluctantly marched over to the 7:45 theater.  I was pissed we slammed down our food to make the 7:15 movie and now instead we would be twiddling our thumbs for a half hour.  We had decided to go to the Naples theater instead of the nice Coconut Point theater we visited the last few times.  It didn’t take me long to regret the decision.

This theater is normally quite busy and Saturday night was no different.  Ali and I were thrilled when a group of loud high school kids came in before the movie.  They were swearing and carrying on loudly.  Ali said that she was sure I was the same way when I was that age which I agreed with but it didn’t make it much easier to take.  I whispered to Ali, “THIS is why I download my movies….”  Paying 20 bucks to be annoyed by people just makes little to no sense.  Luckily once the movie started there was enough laugh out loud moments that we didn’t notice the little angels.

Yes the movie was funny, very funny.  Mind you it is jammed full of “adult” type humor with truckloads of swearing, something you might not want to take grandma to.  But it was really, really funny.  Robert Downey Jr stole the show with his portrayal of a black man.  I also was SHOCKED by Tom Cruise’s role in the movie.  He did more swearing in his brief role in this flick then in his prior 25 years on film combined.  I liked hearing Tom talk with a gutter mouth, it made him seem like less of a creepy scientologist.  Unlike many comedies, especially Will Ferrell movies, there were many funny parts beyond what they show you in the previews, Ali and I laughed throughout. We both really liked it, I’d give it a solid A.

I watched a good amount of the Olympics over the weekend.  I wanted to fill up on it since it was all coming to an end.  I was amazed that the men’s indoor vball team won gold.  What a feel good story after the tragedy their coach faced at the beginning of the games.  Watching the men’s indoor game is just incredible.  The speed and the power of the game makes me feel like a toddler in terms of my volleyball prowess in comparison to these guys.  I got to watch a variety of other sports like table tennis, mountain biking, rhythmic gymnastics and more. 

I also tuned in to the closing ceremonies, once again expecting it to be a visual explosion.  It didn’t disappoint.  The closing ceremony was nearly as spectacular as the opening.  The worst part was when London put on it’s brief skit for the 2012 games.  It seemed like rank amateur’s following up after a masterful professional.  How about the mayor of London coming out and looking like a sloppy dope?  Button up your suit jacket, bloody hell.  Everything about these Olympics was top notch which is probably why it translated into the most watched event in TV history.  The Chinese did a fantastic job of putting on the games, setting a standard that is unlikely to be equalled anytime again in my lifetime.  I’m glad I had the opportunity to witness it.   As the flame was extinguished I felt legitimately sad. 

So all the hoopla is over and Barack finally named his VP candidate, Joe Biden. I have to be honest, the choice doesn’t excite me in the least.  To pick a stodgy, old died in the wool Washington politician as the running mate for a candidate that is all about change seems counter productive.  I have read why the selection was made, Biden has a long history of foreign affairs experience, something that Obama’s critics dig at his lack of.  Personally, I’m not that interested in someone that has a long foreign affairs resume because frankly, I think we have done a shitty job for the most part with our foreign affairs, especially over the last 8 years. 

It didn’t take long for the McCain camp to dig through Biden’s quotes when he was an early 2008 presidential candidate, bringing his criticism of Obama at that time back into the spotlight.  “Not ready to lead” will be the phrase pounded into our heads over the next few months.  I would have much preferred Hilary on the ticket, it would have represented the best of both worlds in my eyes.  I’m seriously concerned that the democrats could find a way to actually lose an election where the opposing party has driven the country into the toilet for the last 8 years.  It’s hard to imagine people looking around at the current situation we are in and vote for more of the same.  Brainwashing is a republican specialty though, better wrap your head in aluminum foil until after November.

Yep I knocked out my third 300 of the week, another first in my 300 achievements.   Doing three 300’s in 5 days is physically demanding as numbers two and three have progressively more residual soreness from the prior workouts. My lower back is what takes the biggest beating.  Those 50 dead lifts get more and more uncomfortable as the week goes on.   Right now I am thinking another 900 next week and then maybe try to jump into the 1500 the following week.

 A big salute goes out to the US beach volleyball teams that both took gold at the Olympics.  A big raspberry goes out to the US sprinters that all choked big time and failed to win a single gold medal which is unheard of.  The biggest choke was both the men and women relay teams dropping the baton.  Hell they dropped it in the preliminary rounds when you aren’t even trying to go your fastest, pretty pathetic.

It’s hard to believe but we are still seeing rain from the bands of Fay.  In the past 24 hours we saw another 2 inches of rain out at our place.  That means that since Monday night we have had over a FOOT OF RAIN.  To put this into persepctive, an inch of rain translates into a foot of snow.  So if it was below freezing we would be sitting under 12 feet of snow right now.  Needless to say our property is soaked.

Last night after work I wanted to address the one screen panel that was totally blown out.  My repair using fishing line and duct tape had failed.  I went out there with my new screening tools.  I ripped out the screen and reattached it along the top and left edge holding it in place with the spline.  However since the screen was ripped along the edges it is a bit too short to cover the opening so I once again used duct tape to block those areas.  It should do until I get to work on it in earnest this weekend. After I was done with the screen I worked on getting the large insects out of the pool area.  I safely recovered 3 dragonflies, two huge moths and one gigantic bee. 

As usual I have a bunch to do this weekend.  It’s a bit worse than normal because Ali has worked the past three days so not much has gotten done around the house.  Is there ever a weekend when there isn’t much to do?  Doesn’t seem so.

I wonder who the VP candidates will be?  I heard that McCain is now ahead in some polls.  That is amazing and sad.  It looks like his new campaign slogan is working, “I’m John McCain and I’m white.”

Last night after work I stopped at Home Depot to check out screening supplies.  They had plenty of them, further assuring my feeling that my pool cage tearing was out of the ordinary for the strength of the winds in Fay, otherwise the store would have been cleaned out of screens.  Anyway I was able to pick up supplies to replace the panels and spent a measly $44.  I have heard that installers charge upwards of $100 a panel to replace them so I am willing to attempt the repair myself if I can spend 10% of what a professional would charge me.  I did some research yesterday and I don’t see any reason why I couldn’t replace the screens myself.  Hell I’ve installed, fencing, a sprinkler system, and ceramic tile.  The screen should be a walk in the park.

I’ve really enjoyed the Olympics, I watch some of it every night.  In fact I almost feel guilty I don’t get to watch it more, there is just so much going on.  I seem to be enjoying it more now than ever before.  Maybe it is the impressive venues in Beijing or maybe NBC is doing a better job with the coverage or maybe it just looks so damn good on my 73 inch HD TV. It doesn’t seem to matter what sport is on, I enjoy watching the competition.  It made me think more than once that maybe I should have concentrated more on being an olympic athlete instead of a baseball player.

Of course with me when I am watching the female athletes I am instantly evaluating and categorizing them in terms of their appearance.  On the low end of the scale have been the olympic swimmers and the women marathoners.  The lookers are few and far between in that sport.  On the top end of the scale has been the women volleyball players, and topping all of them has been the team from Poland surprisingly.  Every single woman on that team was very attractive.  The 110 meter hurdler from Sweden that fell down in her race was top notch as well.   Regardless of their looks, I admire the hell out of any woman or man that is competing in the Olympics.  To push yourself until you are competing at a world class level in any sport is something to aspire to.

Below is a picture of the new front door before and after painting, I also added a few pics to the end of the Fay page that shows a bit more of what I painted.

My sister Meg snapped a few pictures of Randall and I at the Rumble.  You can see the rest of what she took here.  It is the only currently available media of my 2008 Rumble appearance.  I have two camcorders full of video at home that I have not been motivated to rip yet.  It has sat dormant partly because of me being busy with other projects and partly because our end result was not very spectacular.  I will get around to it someday.  I can put lipstick on any pig.

Speaking of the Rumble, I still have a chronically sore left shoulder since the event nearly two months ago.  Lately it feels sore almost all of the time.  Now I know I have aggravated it a few times at the gym as well as just doing labor around the house.  Playing extended amounts of Wii when my bro was down certainly didn’t help things along either.  I am making a concerted effort to not aggravate it now so it can heal up.  Ironically doing most conventional shoulder exercises at the gym don’t bother it at all.  It’s when I do pressing chest exercises where it starts to burn, especially the flat bench variety. I was hoping to get a few more vball tournaments in this year but doing so at this point would be like hacking off my left arm with a chainsaw. 

This week I have jumped right back into doing multiple 300’s even though I had a 12 day layoff due to the family visiting.  I have two under my belt this week and I am considering knocking out a third on Friday which would give me a nifty 900.  Ironically as physically demanding the 300 is, I have hardly hurt myself at all doing it over the past year and a half.

No that isn’t a duck on a lake.  It is a duck in our back yard.  If my rain gauge is accurate, we got almost 10 inches of rain in a 24 hour period.  Here are some pictures of the result.

The storm itself wasn’t as scary as Wilma since the wind gusts probably topped out somewhere in the 60’s but it still did a pretty good job of messing up or property.  The combination of massive amounts of rain that soaks the ground combined with high winds is a recipe to knock down trees/plants.  Both of our oak trees up front have slight leans to the south.  The trees in the orchard, the banana trees, the tree on the corner of the house mound and the huge cactus took more of a beating. 

We also had more pool cage problems.  The cage was intact but 1 screen panel totally blew out and four others (that I can see) ripped along an edge.  This really pisses me off.  Remember I had the pool cage guy come out to replace the one panel that had a tear from just normal wind?  Well all of the panels but one that ripped were along the same back side of the cage.  I wouldn’t be so bent out of shape about it if both of our neighbors cages had some damage as well.  The one house had ONE panel knocked out and that was a panel that the owner replaced themselves.  Otherwise both of their cages survived Wilma AND Fay without losing screens.  My $17,000 cage, supposedly built to the latest code was the only one to have such amounts of damage. I had half a mind to call up the pool cage guy again and bitch him out but I know it would accomplish nothing and I don’t want the guy even touching the cage at this point.  For what we paid I expect that cage to be bullet proof.  I think I will write him a letter though letting him how I feel about the quality of his work.

I was positive we would lose power during Fay, we always lose power during major storms.  We had tons of quick power hits where the house would go dark.  Each time it did I held my breath, knowing if power didn’t kick back on within a few seconds we would be dead in the water.  Amazingly, it stayed up the entire time.  Stranger yet was our neighbor across the street and the neighbor next door lost power for a good portion of the day.  There must have been a very isolated local problem on their circuit.  The only thing we did lose was cable/internet and that was only for a couple hours until it came back.

Once internet came back up I waited out the rain by working on getting my web site repaired.  My attempts to have IX web hosting help me were pointless and a waste of time.  Since they only keep a back up a week max and flush their server logs daily there was no way to recover via their back up or find out exactly what happened since I didn’t notice the hack in time.  I was at my wit’s end on how I was going to fix it all.  Luckily I had a back up of my duf.net stuff on my D-link NAS from early July so I started the LONG process of uploading that back up to my host.  There were over 30,000 files to upload. However I still had a bunch of stuff that would need to be manually cleaned.

As I was searching the internet for some way to automate this process and having little luck, I saw Charlie was online.  Charlie is a programmer by trade and he has helped me out many times before with various issues.  I wasn’t really sure if he could help me out in this instance or not.  I described to him what the hack did, namely inserted code to display links for viagra and other limp dick products into ALL of my html and php files.  I sent him some examples of corrupted files.  I was floored when he said he thought he could whip something up to fix the files in a batch manner.  Wow. 

The next morning in my email I had the program and did a small test.  It worked!  All I had to basically do was download my hacked files from my web host to my pc, clean them and then reupload them to the host.  All of the transferring back and forth took a lot of time but it took a fraction of what I would have spent manually fixing everything.  Huge kudos go out to Charlie for saving my ass once again.  He rocks.

Once the rain finally stopped we went outside to clean up a bit and put most things back in place.  I wanted to address the damaged screens so our lanai didn’t become a mosquito haven.  The panels with only 1 side ripped were patched up decently with some duct tape but when I tried to duct tape the totally blown out panel in place it failed shortly.  I went out again and strung some fishing line through the top of the screen and attached the line to some of the bolts on the cage and then hit it again with more duct tape.  As of this morning it is still in place.  We have a real redneck looking pool cage right now.

I uprighted the huge cactus by the lanai and secured it to the metal pole next to it.  I couldn’t believe how much the sucker weighed.  It was tough to push back to the upright position.  I tried to straighten up a few of the other leaning trees but the ground was too saturated so it was wasted effort.

The newly installed, painted front door passed with flying colors.  No water found it’s way through and the paint looks unscathed on both the door and stucco trim.  There is still more clean up for us to do.  I am debating if I want to try to repair the pool screen myself.  I think it is at least worth a try. 

I was not in a great mood yesterday due to sitting through another near hurricane and it’s end results as well as the huge mess I was dealing with with my web hosted files.  Ali tried to soften the blow by making me THE chocolate cake, the one my mom makes.  It turned out great and did make me feel better.

That is the report for Fay.  The house is on a lake but we never lost power for more than a few seconds, a minor miracle.  Charlie performed some programming magic to allow me to recover from my hack, he is a life saver.

This is going to be brief as I have my own data hurricane to deal with.  Evidently whatever happened to my hosted web files that reset all of their permissions also went in and appended bullshit code to all of my .htm/.hml files as well as many of my PHP files. I am not quite sure how I am going to fix it all.  It is a f’ing mess.

The weekend was extremely busy.  Even though Ali really helped out by knocking out some of the chores early, I had other things to do to replace them.  After weed whacking Saturday morning I headed to Home Depot to buy paint for the door/trim as well as some other stuff.  On a whim I thought I would look at lawn sweepers since this time of year every grass cutting results in huge piles of cut grass piled on top of the thick sections of our lawn.  I was amazed when I stumbled across a John Deere Lawn Sweeper that normally sells for $299 marked down to $175.  It was meant to be.  After getting the green light from Ali I loaded the huge box onto a flat bed.

I then headed over to the paint department and got a quick lesson in paint.  Originally I figured I would be getting one can of paint to do both the stucco trim on the front of the house and the door since they are painted the same color.  I also figured I would need primer for the door part of the job.  Well I was wrong on both counts.  I wound up getting special masonry/cement paint for the stucco that is designed to cover up hairline cracks and stretch to prevent them from reappearing.  Then I got a small can of paint for the door area that had the primer built into it which eliminated the need to primer separately.   My biggest concern was having the two different paints match but the clerk said it should match just fine.

Once I got home I dug into assembling the lawn sweeper. Whew, it was a long process that seemed longer as I was doing it in the middle of the driveway, baking in the sun.  It probably took me and hour and a half to get it all together.  Once it was assembled I had Ali come out to do the first test run.  It worked GREAT.  It ripped through the clumps of grass with no problems, throwing them into the big catch bin.  It’s a cool design that allows you to empty it without even getting off the mower.  We had a couple near disasters during the testing where Ali didn’t think of the dangers of running over the extension cords we have down in the grass.  In a split second the sweeper had sucked up the cord and wrapped it around the brushes.  That took awhile to sort out.   The bottom line is it is an awesome tool to help our lawn look nice.

My Sunday was filled with painting, lots of painting.  I put 3 coats of paint on the door area and two on the stucco.  When I started painting the stucco I immediately noticed that the paint was considerably lighter in color than what was there even though we matched up the existing color with a swatch of color.  It was light enough that it was hard to discern the difference between the bare walls and trim.  Thankfully after two coats and allowing it to dry it darkened up enough to again see a contrast.  The stucco paint also did a great job of masking any cracks that were present.  It makes me anxious to repaint the entire house with the stuff.

I was involved with the painting for the majority of the day.  After that we did some hurricane prep, picking up loose items and cleaning off the patio.  Even though our neighbor across the street put up his shutters we elected not to.  The forecast track for this thing has shifted left and right a number of times and depending on what the final track is, we could have some substantial wind or wind that is on par with our summer thunderstorms.  I just hope I am not being overly optimistic by not putting up the shutters.  2005 proved to me that hurricane forecasters really are just making semi-educated guesses.  We also could get lots of rain with Fay.  If we get the 4-8 inches they say is possible our entire property minus the mound the house is on will be underwater.  I’m sure this will be 24 hours of drama. Yay.