My weekend sans spouse went fine. I kept busy for most of it. Ali had to leave early Saturday morning for her conference. Shortly after she left I was outside working on my list. After weeding the property I got inspired to cut down some low hanging limbs. Then my inspiration grew and I decided to address the non-fruit bearing banana trees that are in the bed in front of the two palms by the pool. They in a word looked shitty.
Banana trees can be a bit of a pain in the ass. If left to their own means they will reproduce indefinitely, continuing to send up additional trees until it overruns an area. Well the banana trees in this area were doing just that. It just looked like a big mess. Originally I had ideas of trying to dig them out intact and sticking them somewhere else, where that somewhere would be was undetermined. However it didn’t take me long at all to figure out it would be a huge pain in the ass. Trying to dig them out while battling the big huge, wet leaves knocking you around was not going to work. I decided to use brute force.
Out came the chain saw. After f’ing with it for a good 10 minutes to get it to start it finally spit to life. It made short work of the trees. After knocking down the trunks, digging out the root balls was surprisingly easy. I carted all of the organic material back to the ditch to act as cheap landfill. Hopefully Ali is ok with my command decision. In the past she complained about the overgrown appearance of that area so I think she will be glad to see it cleaned up.
The people that own the house to the west of us happened to be down over the weekend. The live in Michigan. We try to be neighborly to them even though they are only in Florida a few weeks out of the year. Well it seems that most times they are done I get asked to assist in one thing or another at their place. This time was no different. The guy came out while I was dumping the debris and asked if I would mind helping him pick up some furniture his wife bought at a second hand store, the curse of owning a truck. Even though I was right in the middle of my outdoor chores I had little choice but to agree unless I wanted to come off as a major prick. I told him to give me a little bit of time and then we could go.
I was sweating buckets from working outside so I decided it would be a good time to tackle another item on the list, replacing the pool drains. I grabbed the two replacement drains, a screw driver, my scuba mask and a 35 pound dumbbell to anchor me to the bottom of the pool. I expected drain replacement to be challenging, it lived up to my expectations and then some.
I already had the old drain cover off of one of the floor drains. I used that cover as a rough template to line up where the screws needed to go on the new universal drain cover. I put on my mask, take a deep breath and head down to start the process. I quickly discovered that trying to do something precise like lining up a screw with a hole is far more difficult underwater, while holding on to a dumb bell with one hand, and holding your breath. The task was made more difficult by the fact that the new drain cover was naturally buoyant and wanted to float upward. Soon I wised up and used the dumb bell to also hold down the cover. Even so to attach the first drain cover took at least 10 dives from the surface. Each consecutive time I went down it seemed I could hold my breath for shorter periods of time. I found myself getting progressively angrier each time I surfaced gasping for air.
At one point I thought there was no way I could do this by simply holding my breath. I got out and put a few sections of pool cleaner hose together and stuck the one end in my mouth to see if that could serve as a crude air supply. The hose was quite large and uncomfortable to to keep in my mouth. I’m sure it looked like I was casting for a bad porn movie. I decided I would probably wind up sucking more water than air with this arrangement.
So I hopped back in the pool and just held my breath some more. Finally my persistence paid off and I got the first drain cover securely attached. The second drain cover went better since I learned some lessons from the first one. Even with one drain under my belt it still took quite a few dives until I got the second drain attached. I was quite relieved when I tightened the last screw. I emerged from the pool and flipped on the floor drains to verify the covers served their purpose. They seemed to allow adequate flow. Then it was time for the real test. I threw the pool cleaner into the pool and let it go crazy. It ran the rest of the day and did not get stuck once. Mission accomplished. After 6 years I finally removed that thorn from my side, hallelujah.
After my Jacques Cousteau impression I told the neighbor I was ready to go pick up his furniture. On the way there he said something about wanting to fill up my truck with gas for my trouble. The gracious part of me immediately declined his offer, saying that at $4 a gallon and the truck being 3/4 empty it would cost way too much. Of course the practical part of me would have liked to score a free fill up. We picked up and delivered the furniture back to their place without issue. Their house is barren, only having sparse furniture here and there since it is only a secondary residence at this point. They invited me over for sloppy joe’s later since they knew Ali was out of town. I accepted their offer somewhat reluctantly just because I knew I still had all of the mowing and weed whacking to do.
So I dug into the grass maintenance. Normally Ali mans the tractor while I weed whack which greatly cuts down on the time required. Doing it by myself was a drag. After I finished I jumped in the pool once again to serve as a poor man’s shower and then went next door to eat. The neighbors had brought down the wife’s parents with them. They are both very old and didn’t say hardly a word during the entire time I was there. Most of the dinner I listened to stories of how my neighbor was an accomplished athlete in his youth playing all the major sports at a high level. He is in the mid 50’s now and if you looked at him you have no idea he had an athletic background. After dinner I excused myself, saying I still had to prepare the dog’s dinner, a major operation.
On Saturday night I watched the original Hell boy. I knew little of Hell boy besides it is a comic book series. I didn’t really know what to expect of the movie. I was pleasantly surprised, I liked it a lot. I was entertained throughout. It had a good story, good action, and good effects. it made me anxious to see Hell boy 2 which recently came out. I’d give the first one a B+ or A-.
I was so busy all day long that I kept missing Ali’s calls from the conference. She was getting worried when I finally got around to calling her back that night. She said she had scenarios of me drowning in the pool running through her head.
On Sunday I had mostly indoor chores left to do. I was pretty diligent and had almost everything knocked out a little after noon. The rest of the day was very laid back and enjoyable. I played some WoW, took a dip in the pool, flew my Sky Scooter
, played some games on the Xbox as well as the Wii.
While I was playing my hacked Xbox I realized how cool it is. Not only can I play games off the hard drive, it also serves as a very cool media center that I still use to play music and movies. It also is several years old. I thought about how it would suck if the hard drive died in it so I decided to guard against that possibility. I backed up the crucial files as well as several games I would like to keep onto my NAS for safe keeping. Now the only thing I need to do is create a disaster recovery CD that I could boot the system with if I had to replace the drive. It’s a precaution I will be glad I took if something ever goes down.
Sunday night I watched my second movies of the weekend, 10,000 BC. I could tell the movie probably had a huge budget. Recreating a time 12,000 years ago can’t be cheap. The special effects were great, but they always are anymore. I found the film generally boring. I just didn’t care about what was going on. There were several times I considered bailing on it entirely, something I never do. It just wasn’t that good. I’d give it a C.
I’m looking forward to seeing the new Batman. I wonder if it is as fantastic as some have said it is. In my experience, super hyped films rarely live up to their billing for me. Once Ali gets back I will check it out myself.
Can you believe the entire weekend I didn’t drink one drop of alcohol? I just was too busy, too tired or too distracted to even care. Ali comes back tomorrow, it will be good to have her back under the roof.
second, Ali has done very little running in the past few months. As a result the unit has been sitting around collecting dust. I decided to take it into work and play with it myself. The first thing I did was convert a couple DIVX movies to a format playable on the Touch. To do this I used Videroa, a free but ad filled solution that seemed to do a great job. It took a little more than an hour for it to convert a full length movie. The movies looked great on the Ipod Touch. 
My personal weather station at home has had problems for awhile. The turbine on the wind sensor seized up ages ago and the rain sensor has been flaky for awhile as well. I