Archives September 2010

I picked up Ali from the airport yesterday afternoon.  She arrived carrying a bag stuffed with shoo fly pies, a total of 8 that we will dole out to some co-workers, neighbors and friends with a “healthy” amount left over for ourselves.

Shortly after we got home we were out in the garden harvesting our corn crop.  The corn plants had started to brown so we figured it was time to grab our bounty.  In some cases we waited too long, the corn was already drying out.  Those cobs went out to the bird feeders.

In total we harvested 9 cobs of edible corn.  Some of them were a bit odd looking but we got a few that looked pretty nice.  Ali cooked the corn and then I cut it off the cob to eat later.  We tasted the corn as it was prepared, it tasted like normal corn, despite it’s somewhat odd appearance.

Ali and I were both proud to have successfully grown corn to completion, especially during a brutal, hot Florida summer.  I am hoping to get a couple more raised beds that we can use to grow more corn in the future.

I did a double take this morning when I saw the headline that Andy Reid pulled a 180 on his quarterback plans.  After the game on Sunday he said without question Kolb was back as the starter this week.  After all, it certainly wouldn’t be very fair to have Kolb lose his starting job after 1/2 of poor play.  I agreed with the decision to put Kolb back in there and let him take his lumps.  It’s the only way we will know if we have something or not at QB. Plus, this team isn’t going anywhere.  If they made the playoffs they would be a one and done entry at best, they just have too many problems on the offensive line and defense.

Well I was very surprised to see Andy reverse his position and now proclaim Vick as the starter based on his performance.  From afar it certainly seems like Reid has buckled to public pressure from “what have you done for me lately” Eagles fans.

Fatso justified his change of heart by pointing to the strong numbers for the 6 quarters Vick played.  He tried to walk the fine line of elevating Vick without making it seem like Kolb is a failure.  No matter how he paints it he has now created a mess in my opinion.

Sure I think Vick may give you a better chance to win short term.  His legs give him more of an opportunity to escape the pressure that has been applied through the Eagles porous offensive line.  But to me I think Andy has now thrown out the baby with the bath water.  Now Kolb no longer can have any security if and when he gets another chance.  How could he feel good about a coach that appointed him as THE starter and then abandons him after one half of game 1?  He can’t.

I think this is a mistake, I guess in January we will see if my opinion changes.

I heard some rumbling about the Event on NBC prior to it’s debut last night so I set it up on the bedroom Tivo.  I checked it out last night when it was about 45 minutes into the show, so I could skip commercials.

The show has some familiar faces on it like the red headed woman with a bad leg from ER and Blair Underwood from LA Law.  I immediately got a Lost kind of feel to the show where you are shown present day events and then you are flashed back in time to slowly fill in the many, many gaps in what exactly is going on.

I was sleepy when I started watching the show, by the time it was over I was wide awake, a good barometer.  I don’t want to say much in case you haven’t seen it yet.  If it is like most NBC shows you can catch up on old episodes online after they air. So far it gets two thumbs up from me.

Ali flies back to Florida this afternoon after another visit with her nieces.  I am becoming quite accustomed to stints at home alone at this point.

I saw some video that illustrated how much EMF radiation compact fluorescent bulbs throw off.  It was pretty staggering.  We have a bunch of them in our house.  It makes me want to bite the bullet and grab some ultra-expensive but longer lasting and non-emf emitting LED light bulbs instead.

Friday night I had to do some after hours work out at our Immokalee branch.  After hours work with my job is pretty few and far between thank goodness.  The work involved rewiring the office to relocate some network equipment.  We had our wiring contractors there to do the work, I was just there to make sure everything worked when we were done.

The two guys doing the work I knew from way back when I started.  I hadn’t seen either of them for a couple years.  While we were waiting for the office to officially close we had time to shoot the shit a bit.  In the course of doing so I found out a couple things I didn’t expect.

One of the guys told me that he lost a child awhile ago. Shocked, I asked what happened.  My shock magnified several times over when he said their daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.  She was in the day care. Wow. I really didn’t know what to say.  He told me some of the details of the event, how originally he thought the building his wife was in  across the street was bombed.  It sounded truly horrific.

Later I was talking to the other guy who is a Haitian.  He mentioned how much of his family is still in Haiti.  Of course I asked if they were ok after the earthquake.  Luckily he said they all made it through the catastrophe ok.  He said however that his sister is STILL living in a tent some 8-9 months after the quake.

I told him that is amazing considering the massive amount of relief dollars that was collected for Haiti.  He said that they are still deciding what to do with most of it.  He said if the money is just given to the corrupt Haitian government they will steal most of it.

Needless to say I didn’t expect my Friday night to include being smacked in the face with the reality of two huge tragedies. It was kind of surreal. It made getting all bent out of shape over trivial stuff seem more trivial.

Since Ali was out of town I had to do all of the timing duties for the Saturday race which ironically was in Immokalee as well, myself.  Ali and I figured it wasn’t a big deal since the race was expected to have a small turn out.

For the most part it wasn’t too bad although the layout of the race logistically was a problem.  The finish line was on one side of the main road and the registration area was across the road in the casino parking lot.  I found myself having to go back and forth quite a bit which was a problem.

The race only had 135 entries but the race organizer was very pleased with that number.  Despite the small amount of runners, the race had a huge outpouring of support.  They had TONS of volunteers and the finish line energy was just great with the spectators cheering on the people finishing in 40 minutes as much as the sub 20 crowd.

Timing went ok with the normal amount of screw ups at the end related to human error. I had to listen to some women yell and complain at the end.  Evidently she showed up late.  There was some sort of communication breakdown where the registration people thought the woman wanted to sign up when in reality she had pre-registered and was just going to walk.

Anyway, this woman felt that the race staff was very rude to her and she proclaimed that she would never participate in one of our events again and she would tell all of her friends the same thing.  I tried to be polite and address her problems but she didn’t want to be consoled, she just wanted to be angry.  They crossed the finish line 75 minutes after the race started, a blistering 24-25 minute per mile pace, sheesh.  I was cleaned up and back on the road by 9:15.

Once I got back home I embarked on a blistering pace of housework both indoor and outdoor variety.  I worked non-stop until 4pm, trying to clear my Sunday slate for triathlon training and football.

When I finished I had a “fun” thing I wanted to get done, the September Bar-barian forum challenge.  I had planned to do it when Randall was over but we never found the time.  This month’s challenege is to do 100 reps of various exercises.  The goal is to mix up a variety of different exercises to get to that number.  Of course to make it challenging you should use good form and try to go from exercise to exercise with minimal rest.

As I was doing chores during the day I was trying to decide what exercises to do.  Because of my right elbow problem a lot of exercises are off the table right now. I decided to break my 100 reps into 25 push ups, 25 box jumps, 30 recline leg raises, 10 ring dips and 10 atomic push ups.

Of course the camera was rolling for the effort and it captured some funny moments, mostly of me failing. Failing at speaking, failing mid-set, lots of fail in there to make you laugh.  Take a look if you have 10 minutes or so.  Even with the failing it was a pretty tiring 100 reps, I was spent at the end.

Saturday night I shot my second video of the day, this time me shaving my head once again.  This time I upped the stakes further, going with the shortest attachment available, an 1/8th inch.  I figured it would work out well for the triathlon this upcoming weekend, low drag.  I am practically bald.

I went to bed Saturday night after 11, I was totally exhausted.

Sunday my plan was to do another brick at and around the water park.  Saturday I was debating throughout the day if I wanted to include running in the brick.  My hamstrings and knees were both feeling a bit sore.  That soreness was still present Sunday morning so running was dropped from the activity list.

I loaded up the bike and headed down to the park.  The ride was tough.  Heading north I hit a steady head wind that made maintaining 17 mph a challenge at times.  Heading south was just the opposite, I averaged a solid 20+ the entire leg.  Overall my gps said I averaged 18 mph, the mapmyride app had me down in the 16’s but I think that is deducting speed when I am stopped at a traffic light.

After the ride I headed in to swim.  Both Michelle and Christie, Ali’s training buddies were in there getting ready to swim laps.  I hopped in the pool and told them I would time a 400.  We all started together.

Michelle is a good swimmer, good enough that she was in front of me for almost the entire 400.  I only caught up and passed her during the last couple laps.  “Racing” against her knocked my swim time down to 7:30, a number I would have never thought I could hit two months ago.  Michelle finished only 5 or 6 seconds after me.

After a brief rest I did another 400 at a more leisurely 9 minute rate.  That was enough of a brick for me.  After drying off I hung out with Michelle and her family for a little bit before I grabbed myself a quick bite to eat.  After eating I headed right out to get home before the Eagles game.

I forgot to mention a funny Nicki moment.  When I left to go train I realized I forgot my GPS so I turned around and went home to get it.  I pulled up by the garage door, hopped out of the truck, leaving my door open and ran inside, leaving the door that leads to the garage cracked as well.

As I was getting ready to go back out I noticed that Nicki wasn’t anywhere to be seen.  I stepped out in the garage and see her in the truck, behind the steering wheel with a big, “let’s go on a ride!” dog smile.  It took me quite awhile to coax Nicki out of the truck.  I had to resort to bribing her with a piece of dried chicken breast.  She just hates being left behind.

I really didn’t know what to expect out of the Eagles this week against Detroit.  The Lions have been doormats of the league for several years now but the game was in Detroit, Mike Vick was starting and the Eagles showed week one that once again they are a very hot and cold team.

Things started out poorly with the Eagles allowing the Detroit rookie running back to gash them time and time again for huge yardage.  Running was all the Lions could do, their back up QB looked extremely average otherwise.

After allowing the Lions to get ahead 17-7 the Eagles came alive, both running and passing the ball.  Vick played very well, avoiding a consistent blitz time and again to turn nothing into something.  Going into the 4th quarter the Eagles now owned a commanding 35-17 lead.

Even though I knew what was coming, I hoped I was wrong, not the prevent, anything but the f’ing prevent.

Well true to form, the Birds wen into soft mode, playing off all receivers 10 yards and allowing huge chunks of yardage underneath.  All of a sudden the Lions shitty QB was transformed into an All-Pro thanks to this moronic strategy.  The Eagles allowed two touchdowns just like that.

I was enraged, furious with the team playing scared with a lead.  I had my phone by the recliner and went on a Facebook update rampage, expressing my feelings.

After losing an onside kick the Eagles were on the cusp of blowing what should have been a sure win.  Thank goodness the Lions failed while driving for the tying/winning score.

The monumental collapse almost entirely wiped out any good feeling about winning a game for me.  I absolutely can not stand the ignorance of a prevent defense strategy.  You abandon what has worked all game and hand the team charity yards/points?

Not only did the game leave a bad taste in my mouth on the screen, it also screwed me over virtually.  The Eagles defense went from scoring me a decent amount of points to scoring next to nothing after playing matador during the 4th quarter.  They let that scrub QB throw for something like 350 yards, almost all of it coming during the last quarter. F’in morons.

I have to say I am somewhat embarrassed by what I am reading on the Eagles message boards.  It’s all about the Vick / Kolb debate.  After one bad half by Kolb and a game and a half of solid play by Vick it seems like most fans are ready to declare Kevin Kolb a failure and Mike Vick the new messiah.  Yea Vick played well for sure and made plays with his feet that Kolb will never make. But WTF, you have to give Kolb a shot at least.

I have news for Eagles fans, this team isn’t that good.  The offensive line is a mess, the linebackers suck and the defensive coordinator is meek.  The Birds a re a young team that has to grow.  I want to give Kolb a chance to prove his worth, good or bad.  You can’t give him one half of football to do it.  I guess the quick fix mentality even permeates the ranks of Eagle fan-dom.

Sunday night I watched my latest Netflix rental, Valkyrie.  The premise of this movie always sounded interesting to me, assassinate Hitler.  Well for some reason the producers of this movie didn’t seem very concerned with believability when shooting this film.

Tom Cruise does not look like or sound like a German.  They made no attempt to add an element of realism to the movie by having any actor even use German accents.  In fact almost every notable character spoke with an English accent. It was really a dumb move and detracted from what otherwise could have been a strong movie. As is I’d only give it a B-.

This weekend I got to utilize Facetime on my Iphone 4 for the first time.  My nieces both just got new Iphone Touches that support Facetime.  For the most part it worked pretty well except for the occasional pause here and there.  I could see them, they could see me.

I have to say though I would not want to be a regular user of something like Facetime.  Sure it is nice to see the person on the other side some times but it makes you feel like you have to put on a show instead of just having your conversation. Plus some of the up nostril shots are less than appealing.

Geez a weekend solo and I didn’t have one drop of alcohol, I must be slipping.

So the AC contractors came back yesterday to finish up.  They did the remaining work in the attic, installed a second return in our bedroom and replaced all of the vent grills in the house, except one.  They miscounted how many they needed.

The second return in our bedroom is not in a great spot.  Because of the layout of the equipment in the garage, the return location had to be low on the wall, behind one of our dressers.  Of course this is going to make changing that filter a rather large pain in the rear.  Our options are to rearrange the furniture somehow or just keep some furniture sliders under that dresser permanently to make movement easier.

The new vent grills are a nice addition.  They allow me to direct cold air downward into the living space instead of along the ceiling.  The air flow in the rooms farthest away from the AC equipment that used to have just a trickle of cold air is much improved now.

Last night I also moved everything back in the garage and set up the new high tech thermostat to use a schedule which was not very intuitive.  I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the manual.

All in all Ali and I are very pleased with the new system.  It’s quiet, works well and should last me well into old fartdom.

Did you hear about all this bullshit about Jets players paying attention to a hot Mexican reporter?  Evidently she was at Jets practice and some of the players took notice of her.  The reporter evidently just commented about the attention on twitter, not even complaining about it, just mentioning it.

Well somehow this mushroomed into all sorts of ridiculous bullshit.  Now they want Jets players to undergo “sensitivity training”  and the league sent out a memo to all 32 teams to remind them to be nice.

Cut me a f’ing break.  A hot female reporter goes into a football practice and all of a sudden the world is outraged that the players paid attention to her?  I mean really, it is ridiculous.  Let’s funnel some of that wasted energy being outraged over something that matters. Idiots.

I had an unplanned 4 day weekend, let’s see how much of it I can remember.

Last week we had a bunch of heavy rain that left our property a soggy mess. I didn’t want all the grass to become jungle-like so I decided to at least mow the high area around the house. In addition to that I was buzzing around the house trying to get all of the chores done so my Sunday would be free for tri-training and football.

Saturday night we were invited over by our ex-neighbor to his new house.  We missed the official house warming a few weeks back because Ali was in PA.  As a bonus they were fine with us bringing our dogs along too since they used to dogsit Nicki in the past.

Their house is EXTREMELY cool.  From the front it looks like a tiny little place, it isn’t very wide at all.  This was due to it being built on a narrow 75 foot wide lot.  However the house is very, very long, it is built like a stretched out rectangle.  It is also a courtyard layout which I never had seen first hand before, it is simply fantastic.

When you go into the front doors you immediately enter the courtyard that has a small pool.  To your left is a built in guest house with everything a guest would need to live comfortably.  As you walk past the pool you come into the doors for the main living area.

We immediately got the tour of the place.  It’s just great.  The place was decorated perfectly, everything matched, everything flowed, it felt like you were in a model home.  We weren’t surprised since that was the way the house next to us was as well when Rick lived there.

The dogs loved the big layout as well.  They had fun playing with our friend’s dog Zoe.  Zoe was Nicki’s first ever dog friend.  Even though they see each other very rarely anymore they both instantly remember the other.

We had a very enjoyable evening drinking, eating way too much and talking.  It was good to catch up.

Sunday morning Ali and planned on doing a simulation tri.  Instead of doing a bike/run/swim we wanted to do the real order of events, swim/bike/run.  We wanted to do the full distance we would do in the race and try to do quick transitions as well. The one negative was the pool doesn’t open until 10 am so that means we would be pushing the bike and run back deeper into the heat of the day, oh well.

So we pulled up to the water park and used our newly acquired year long family pass to get in.  We saw our friends Michelle, Taylor and their two boys as we were getting ready to go in. We didn’t waste much time until we were in the pool.

After doing a 50 meter warm up we were off and swimming.  I had my gps watch timing the session.  We did the sprint tri distance of 400 meters.  I swam steady, trying to make sure to not go too fast and gas.  I was psyched when I stopped the watch after 16 laps at 8:40, a full two minutes less than my other timed 400 effort.  My swimming style leaves a lot to be desired but it at least allows me to breathe without feeling air starved.  My gorilla length arms make up for my poor form as I was able to put distance between both Ali and Michelle who were swimming as well.

I started getting dried off and ready to scoot back out to the truck to start the bike segment.  Ali and I hopped on our bikes and were off.

For the bike, in addition to my Garmin GPS, I utilized a cool app on my Iphone called iMapmyRide.  It utilizes the built in GPS to track every detail of your ride and seamlessly upload it to their site. It’s pretty damn cool.

We did the bike at Ali’s pace, we are trying to get her more comfortable with going faster.  She did better than last week and she averaged between 15-16mph for the 13 mile ride.

When we got back I took a big drink, threw on my running sneakers and took off.  For the 5k I ran my own pace and let Ali run hers.  It was late morning by this time and it was hot as hell.  The stifling humidity made every step of the run not fun at all.  I kept a decent pace, faster than last week’s effort and finished the 5K in 28 minutes and change.  My total exercise time, not counting transitions was something like 1:25, not bad considering in a race my bike pace would be up another 3 or 4 mph.

I was exhausted at the end.  I was so overheated.  I tried to walk around for a bit but soon just sat under a tree waiting for Ali to finish.  When she came up to the truck she was dying of thirst and asked if I could go get her a cold water from the vending machine, the water we brought was either gone or hot from being in the bed of the truck.

I reached in my pocket for the spare truck key and felt nothing.  The panic grew as I patted down the other pocket and felt NOTHING.  You have to be kidding me, tell me I lost the damn key.

I instantly had nightmares running through my head of retracing our bike AND running route to look for the f’ing key.  I figured I should retrace my steps backwards so I went over to where I was sitting on the grass, not expecting to see anything.  What a relief, the key was laying there, major crisis averted.  I will NOT just leave the key in my pocket again.

Ali and I were both pleased with our session.  We also were both thoroughly spent.  As soon as we went back inside the water park we headed for the pool to get our elevated body temperatures down.  It felt GREAT.

This was the 4th weekend in a row that we had been to the water park.  We enjoyed relaxing af5ter the 90 minutes of exertion.  We took a few laps around the lazy river, ate lunch and hung out.  Between 2 and 3 we packed up and headed out, the Eagles home opener was scheduled to kick off at 4.

Before the game I quickly moved stuff around in the garage to accommodate the work on the AC.  I had to move the fridge to the other side and also take down a shelf that was right in front of the air handler.

So Ali and I settled in front of the TV for the big Eagles game.  This was a big deal, for the first time in over a decade that Donovan McNabb was not going to be at the controls.  The general consensus was Kolb has great potential so we were excited to see how his first game as the starting QB would be.  Well needless to say, we weren’t impressed.

The Eagles offense went absolutely nowhere with Kolb behind center.  He forced a number of throws, several of which could have been easily intercepted.  He took a whack during the second quarter that they later deemed was a concussion.  All of a sudden Mike Vick was the QB.

I didn’t have much hope for the game.  The Eagles D was starting to get dominated by the Packers and with Vick behind center I didn’t expect much.  Well Vick at least made a game out of it between scrambling for 100 + yards and connecting on some passes down the stretch.  The Eagles were actually in position to tie the game before failing on a 4th and 1.

I didn’t find a whole lot in the game that made me think anything above a .500 record this year is likely.  The defense was ok for awhile but eventually gave up yards in chunks.  The offense was a disjointed mess.  Special teams were very poor as well.

The game made me regret investing so heavily in the Eagles for my fantasy team.  Kolb, my starting QB got me a nice and tidy zero points. Who knows what the season holds.  Regardless, I will watch and cheer them on.

I also watched the Redskins/Cowboys game with interest.  Like most Eagle fans we were curious how Donovan would do with his new team.  It was a good outcome in that regard.  McNabb was average at best in his performance but the hated Cowboys went down in flames 13-7.

All weekend I was dealing with technical issues related to relocating my web content to new servers.  I had to contact IX Webhosting support at least a half dozen times for assistance.  To their credit, all of the support staff I dealt with did a nice job in getting me back up and running although it took a bit longer than I hoped.  At this point all of my content is up and running on new hardware.  I have a few remaining bugs to squash but nothing major.

I took off Monday so I could be around for the AC install. The plan was I would be there Monday and Ali could be home Tuesday.  I was told that by the end of day one the new unit should be up and running and then on day two the new duct work would be completed.

The installers showed up on time and got busy.  Once the AC was turned off it started getting warm in the house, slowly at first but accelerating as the afternoon sun beat down on the roof.  I was sweating my ass off inside.  At their climax the temps inside reached 90 degrees.

I battled the heat via three pool sessions and sitting in the office under the ceiling fan running at high speed.  Even so I was soaked through my shirt.

Mid-afternoon I got the bad news from the installers.  They new unit would not be up and running until Tuesday.  They had to do so much prep work to fix the various problems created by the original installation that it put them behind schedule.

I called and gave Ali the news that we wouldn’t have AC in the house.  Luckily I had a contingency plan. In the smaller shed I still had the small room unit air conditioner I bought 5 years ago on ebay.  It was still in the box, never used.

I lugged the unit up to our bedroom and “installed” it.  Our windows are much wider than conventional windows so in order to completely fill in the gaps I used cushions from our outside table and chair set.  Yea it looked pretty trashy but it worked.

I was impressed at the sheer size of the new equipment. Both the outside compressor and the air handler were much larger than the equipment they replaced.  The compressor has to be at least five feet tall.  It sure looked like it was up to the task of cooling our house.

Luckily the room unit AC was able to do a good job of cooling our bedroom.  Ali and were able to at least sleep in comfort.  When I opened the door to go back out into the main living area on Tuesday it felt like I was walking into a steam room.

I called my boss and asked to take Tuesday off as well.  I wanted to be around in case something major came up.

The crew showed up earlier on Tuesday.  Their plan was to get up in the attic and get the new vents put in before the attic got insanely warm.  Ali and I could hear them crawling around in the attic for much of the morning, I did not envy them in the least.

Mid-afternoon they were finally ready to turn the system on.  They hit the switch and everything worked, thank goodness.  The system seemed to work quite well, dropping the temps in the house 8 degrees in 90 minutes while removing the excessive humidity that made it so uncomfortable.  We got a new high tech thermostat that I thought was cool.  It’s touch screen and even has an exterior temperature reading.

The installers are back again today to finish up.  They are adding a second small return to the system, installing a couple more new ducts and replacing all of the air registers in the house from the cheap stamped variety to fully adjustable models.

It was quite an expensive home improvement but one that we hope will pay for itself over the life of the system.

Blog is back and relocated after more than a few technical difficulties.

Yesterday I attempted to install Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to give it a try.  It is Microsoft’s offering for the IM/Video/Audio collaboration world.  Well I had the bright idea of putting it on our server that runs our Sharepoint 2010 intranet. Don’t do that.

Once the installation finished it broke my access to Sharepoint.  Every page on the site would prompt me for credentials and when I entered my credentials it still wouldn’t let me in. Luckily I was able to recover by first deactivating and then uninstalling OCS.  I had nightmare scenarios running through my head of a tape restore of the box to correct my f up.

I’d still like to see how OCS works but I will either do it on it’s own box or on a virtual server.

I also spent a bunch of time looking into alternatives to process our online credit card transactions for races.  We currently use active.com  Active is a nice site and works well.  The problem is they charge a lot, a minimum of a $3.25 fee tacked on to the race registration.  Based on the survey I did a couple weeks ago, that fee is seen as a major deterrent to many runners to registering online.  They simply don’t want to fork out those extra dollars. There are other race registration sites.  Some of them offer lower fees but less convenience.

I decided I would look into other options.  One option would be to sign up with a merchant account where we would take the credit cards directly.  This option would dramatically drop our costs form $3.25 a runner down to less than 50 cents per.  However this method opens up a whole new bag of worms where I would need to devise some way to handle these transactions in a batch manner, otherwise I am losing much of the advantage of online registration from a timing perspective.

I also looked at some races that use Google checkout for races.  This is a slightly more expensive way to do it although it would probably be less hassle to get files I could import into the timing system.  By the end of last night my head was spinning from looking at so many options.

One by product of this is I think I am going to finally bite the bullet and migrate my various web sites to new servers within the IX Webhosting domain.  They have older servers that run older control panels and have less features and new servers with newer control panels and more features.  My stuff is on the older variety.

I have resisted migrating because frankly it is a large pain in the ass to do so. It requires me to back up and restore everything on my site as well as manually recreate dozens of settings on the new server.  I think I will just bite the bullet and do it finally.

Our new AC is supposed to be installed next Monday/Tuesday with the possibility of it spilling over to Wednesday.  Ali and I are going to split the house sitting duties between us, I plan on taking off Monday and she can stay home Tuesday.

I am a bit nervous about the whole thing.  The communication between myself and Haines has been less than stellar.  I have been the one to call them for information instead of them proactively calling me.

I forgot to mention that good old D. Wayne called back to follow up on his sales call last week.  You may recall D was the guy that came off like a slick car salesman.

The purpose of his call was to let me know that there was yet another “special” and if we agreed to have a new system put in this week he would be willing to further discount the price.

I informed D. Wayne that I went with another company.  He asked me for reasons.  I was honest and told him that to me it seemed like he was more interested in just throwing some new equipment in place and not addressing the other issues with our AC system.  I also mentioned the negative information I heard both via mouth and on the internet about Amana AC equipment.

D of course was defensive and said that he could find stuff on the internet saying that Amana is better than Trane.  Well a pissing match was pointless.  I told D I appreciated his effort and was sure he would be selling lots of stuff, just not to me.

When I hung up I said “Bye DWAYNE” , not using his preferred, two syllable pronunciation.

Yep I could have paid a lot less money if I went with his company but “you get what you pay for” is a rule I felt was important to follow in something as major as AC replacement.

So I finally got around to listing my old Iphone 3G on Craigs List yesterday.  I did a bit of snooping around and saw that $200 was about the going rate for a 16gb 3G in good condition.  I took a few pictures of the old phone with the new phone and posted an ad right before lunch.

When I got back from the gym I had 4 voice mails about the phone.  I called back the first guy.  He indicated he was very interested  in the phone and we made arrangements to meet up late in the day.  I told him that I had others interested in the phone but I would give him first dibs since he called first.

I met him at a McDonald’s on my way home.  He told me the phone was actually for his son that is doing some sort of ministry work in Afghanistan.  He said his soon would jailbreak the phone so it could be used over there. God bless Apple hackers.

He did the standard CraigList lowball, offering me $150.  I however was not flexible as I normally would be knowing that I had 4 other people chomping at the bit.  I told him I was firm on the $200 based on what I saw other phones going for on CL and the fact that I had 4 or 5 other people lined up behind him.  I made it clear I was willing to take my ball and go home.  Knowing he had no leverage he agreed to the $200. So my old phone will soon be on it’s way to the Middle East, kind of bizarre.

Yesterday we finally made a firm commitment on AC replacement.  We are going with the last company that gave us an estimate, Haines AC.  This is the company that got recommended to my mom.  Ironically, they were the most expensive quote.  They also are doing the most work in overhauling our AC system.  If the work qualifies us for the Florida rebate as they expect, our final out of pocket cost will be almost identical to what the other finalist was going to charge.

I had one sticking point with Haines.  When I indicated I wanted to pay with our American Express card the sales rep originally said they would have to add 1.5% to the quote because of the slim margins.  Well I called back yesterday and said we would do it if they honored the original quote price using the AE card with no 1.5% penalty, my logic being with $2600 of labor built into the quote there was more than a little wiggle room. The rep agreed to my terms.

This should all happen pretty quickly, possibly as soon as next week.  I am looking forward to having a top notch AC system that I won’t have to worry about for the next decade or more.

I have to laugh at this moron in Florida that wants to burn the Koran.  His simplistic logic is radical Muslims routinely deface symbols of Christianity and America, so we should do the same thing to the muslim holy book on 9/11, sort of like a big FU to the Muslim community.

Now my question to this clown would be “What exactly are you trying to accomplish?”

Is he trying to show that we are as primitive as radical muslims?  Perhaps we could also behead a few muslims on camera?  Maybe do a few public stonings while we are at it?

How will he feel when yet another American soldier is killed in an attack directly aimed as retribution for this stupid act?

This is grandstanding, pure and simple.  This “man of God” is simply looking to shine a spotlight upon himself and in the process generate income from other dipshits that think in a similar manner.

You know I was thinking the other day that God, if he exists, could have made the world such a better place if he wanted to.  Instead of only existing in manuscript he could have simply made regular appearances to mankind, sort of like a presidential news conference.

God could appear to the entire world yearly,  ending all speculation about his existence and in one fell swoop end all of the bloodshed that has occurred in his name century after century.  We would all know the real deal, it would be unquestionable.  If a mere dumb mortal like me realizes this, why doesn’t he? Hmmmmmm.

A lot of stuff to cover from the long three day weekend so grab the large size coffee.

Our Friday night was consumed mostly by  preparations for the race.  Ali and I entered close to 150 paper applications.  This race was a blueprint for what is wrong with our registration process.  In total the race had around 650 entries.  560 of those entries happened in the last week and the majority of those were on paper during the last couple days.

This is the behavior that our registration policy has cultivated.  Trying to reprogram people to get into the habit of registering online and early will be a tough task for sure but necessary if I am going to continue to be involved in the process.

Crawling out of bed at 4:10 am Saturday morning was not welcomed.  By the time we arrived on site around 5:30 there was already a bee hive of activity going on.  The pre-race scene was hectic.

One of the volunteers asked if she could plug her coffee pot into my surge protector.  I told her with all of the halogen lights plugged in that adding a coffee pot could pop the circuit.  She said she didn’t think it would pull much power so she plugged it in.  Less than a minute later the pavilion was dark.

Well now there was a mad scramble.  Luckily the event director had a key that got us into a room that had the breaker box.  I flipped the breaker and we had power again.  What I didn’t realize was that door also had an alarm system on it.

About a minute after restoring power the alarm starts blaring, very loudly.  Well obviously I didn’t have a code to kill it so we had no choice but to let it blow.  I am sure any neighbors within earshot loved hearing that racket at 6 am.  We figured cops would show up and turn it off.  The alarm continued to sound for a good 10-15 minutes but cops never came.  Then suddenly it stopped.  I am not sure if it just resets after a period of time or was turned off remotely. Either way it was welcomed silence.

Ali and I had a hectic scene as well at the day of race registration table.  In between trying to frantically get all of the last minute runners into the system we were repeatedly interrupted to handle screw ups.  We had 12-15 people that signed up, got their number but then did not have the corresponding timing chip available.  This happens when somebody in the registration area screws up.  These mistakes snowball at the end into a bunch of people with inaccurate times after the race.

Ali was planning to run in the race with her girlfriends so I did the last 15 minutes of data entry solo.  We had dumb asses scrambling up to the table late, I think we got some paper shoved at us as late as 7:25. (race starts at 7:30) I had more registrations to do but I had to get to the start line to time the race.

As I was quick stepping it towards the start line I heard the race director call my name on his bull horn.  I had a second bull horn with me and I yelled “DON’T START YET” as I approached.

So the race starts and I have to run back to the finish area to enter the stack of late entries.  I was entering people right up until a minute before the first runner crossed at the 16 minute mark, it was pretty nuts.

The timing system worked fine as it always does.  I was surprised when I saw Ali come across the finish line under the 29 minute mark.  She hadn’t run a 5K that fast in quite awhile, I guess her track practice has been paying off.

After the race was over I packed up and headed home solo.  Ali was scheduled to run another 3 miles in addition to the 5k and she was going to swim with the girls after that.  I got home and spent the next couple hours attending to my normal post race duties.

Randall was supposed to drive over on Saturday to hang out for a couple days.  Earlier in the week he said something about showing up around noon.  I joked to Ali that means he will be over around two.  Randall stretched the window even further not showing up until closer to 4.  His tardiness was actually a good thing, it gave me time to get some more stuff done around the house.

Randall came bearing gifts, flowers and wine for Ali, dried chicken breast for the dogs and a card with Carraba’s gifts cards for me as thanks for some electronics I gave him a few months back.  He got a bunch of the stuff at the Ave Maria Publix.  He wanted to see the place for himself after reading about it in my blog. Sadie and Nicki were very excited to see Randall as well, he likes to play with them.

I asked Randall if he wanted to go see Expendables that night.  Ali had an option to go to a party being held by her track coach so she was fine with us going.  Randall was fine with going so I bought tickets online for Silverspot, the high end luxury theater.

We wound up just grabbing food at the theater, we both got the mini-burger platter which was good.  We headed in for the movie with about 10 minutes to spare.

We were sitting right next to a woman and her daughter.  The kid was only 10 which I thought was a bit young for an R rated film like Expendables.  We chatted with the woman a bit and she described her daughter as a “mature” 10, whatever that means.  We continued talking with them for a bit as we waited for the theater to go dark.  Then “it” happened.

We heard the sound of childrens voices, VERY young childrens voices.  All four of us looked in horror as two adults came up the steps with no less than 6 children.  These kids made the 10 year old next to me look like a college student.  None of them could have been older than 6.

We were shocked.  At first we assumed they had to walk into the wrong theater.  Who would be ignorant enough to take a group of small children into such a movie?  Well we got our answer, these people.  It was just beyond the scope of my imagination.

So the movie starts and these kids are carrying on the entire time as little kids do.  While the screen is filled with exploding heads, T&A and language that would make a sailor blush, these adults sat there with these kids like it was no big deal.  Luckily for the most part the action of the movie drowned out the little munchkins noise but there were several times their incessant chatter was very annoying.  They got “shushed” repeatedly with little change in their actions.  Ironically the woman next to us with the 10 year old was probably the most annoyed of all.

Well luckily, although the kids were a distraction, we still got to enjoy the movie.  It was awesome seeing all of these guys that normally carry a movie themselves work together. It was a throwback action film and both Randall and I liked it a lot, I’d give it an A.  No it isn’t going to make you a deep thinker but it surely will entertain you for around two hours.  It’s hard to believe Stallone is in his early 60’s.  He is still ripped to shreds, a tribute to the power of HGH.

When Randall and I got home we started in on a series of Wii battles.  We played tennis, bowling, baseball and ping pong among others.  For the most part I came out on the losing end of the games but all of them were closely contested.  Ali shot some Iphone video of the contests once she got back from the party.  There is some funny footage in there.  You can see the clips here, here, here and here.

Sunday morning Randall agreed to do a brick with Ali and I.  We decided to once again head to the water park and use that as our training grounds.  We did the bike portion first.  Ali decided to use her clips this time for the ride.  She had a funny (since she wasn’t hurt) fall while she was clipped in.  It was funny because she was standing still.  She had one foot clipped in and one not.  Somehow her balance tipped towards the clipped in foot and she went right over.

Ali said she was fine if Randall and I rode ahead.  We had a tail wind for the first leg of the ride and it translated into some very fast pacing, at least for me.  For the most part the first 5 miles was done in a 22 mph+ pace.   The ride back into the wind was slower but still 18-19 which isn’t bad.

Randall had me drafting him for a good portion of the ride.  Basically you try to keep within a couple feet of the rider in front of you.  Doing so allows you to miss the majority of the headwind that slows you down  and maintain the same speed as the guy in front while spending much less energy. It was best to have him lead since he is a much more accomplished biker than I am. After we got back to the park I circled back to meet up with Ali to make sure she was doing ok which she was.

Next up was the run.  Ali and Randall ran together.  They were only going to do about a mile run since Ali had just run the day before and Randall hates to run anyway.  I elected to do the full 5K once again.  I was not thrilled with my decision once I was out on the course.

I pushed myself much harder during the bike this week as opposed to the week prior when I was riding with Ali.  The extra energy expenditure on the bike made the run more difficult.  The intense sun and high humidity didn’t help much either.  I managed to grind out the 5K in under 29 minutes, not a great time for me but not horrible considering the circumstances.

Ali and I decided to buy a year long family pass to the water park instead of paying $10 a head each time we go.  This was the third week in a row we went.  Randall was smuggled in as one of our “kids’ unbeknown to management.  We hit the lap pool.

I did 800 meters total.  I timed my first 400 meters and it clicked in right around 10 minutes.  Now I am sure open water and a bunch of bodies will slow that time down a bit in the actual tri.  Randall did some swimming too but it was pretty ugly.  I got tired just watching him try to swim.

After swimming all three of us were pretty exhausted.  We spent two or three hours just chilling at the park.. We spent a good chunk of it just floating around the lazy river.  Randall only did a few trips down the water slides. On his last trip down he bottomed out in the splash down pool and scratched up his back pretty well.  That was enough for him.

Sunday night while Ali worked on the bills Randall and I watched Crank 2 on Netflix.  Randall said he saw the first one and liked it so we loaded up the sequel.  Ali watched the first bit of it before heading off to do the bills.  Luckily she left the room before the scene where Jason Statham is humping some woman in the middle of a horse race track.  Yea, the movie was filled with over the top silliness but it made me laugh quite a bit.  I’d give it a solid B.

On Labor Day Ali elected to work while Randall and I entertained ourselves.  Randall had suggested we go on another bike ride Sunday night but I was negative about it since I was already feeling sore from the brick in the morning.  Sunday I was pretty achy but I felt good enough to ride.  I just told him I wouldn’t want to be trying to set new pace records.

We elected to do the 20 mile Dunkin Donut ride.  Even without trying to push the pace we covered the distance much faster than I ever have by myself, averaging 18-19 mph over the course of 20 miles.  We had a 10-15 minute coffee and donut break at the halfway point. Randall was nice enough to be the windbreaker for the entire ride, I stayed within close drafting distance the entire way making it easier for me to maintain pace.

After the ride we were both a sweaty mess.  We cooled off in the pool for awhile.  We actually managed to wear Sadie out as she ran endlessly around the pool encouraging us to splash her.

On Monday afternoon we watched Kick Ass. This was a dvd rental from Netflix.  I rented it after I heard Howard say how much he liked it.  I actually regretted ordering it after I heard an ad for the dvd which had nothing but swearing scenes.  I thought that if that is what they are trying to push then it may not be worth watching. I was wrong.

I expected Kick Ass to basically just be a spoof of a real super hero movie and in the beginning it was.  However as the film went on it actually turned into a somewhat compelling story with real ass kicking, real bad guys and real action.  By the end of it I was cheering on Kick Ass and Hit Girl as they annihilated the bad guys.  It was a thoroughly enjoyable movie and not the one trick pony I thought it might be.  I’d give it a solid A, no shit.  Check it out yourself and see what I mean.

Randall and I loaded up Wii Fit Plus and tried out a bunch of the balance games.  Jeremy had mentioned to me awhile ago they were very good but I never checked them out.  He was right.  Sure some of the games were silly but almost every one was fun to play.  Randall and I particularly enjoyed the snowball fight, obstacle course and juggling games.

Before Randall headed back east we watched the end of Major League and the beginning of Bull Durham.  We both had a good weekend even if we didn’t get to complete a Bar-barian forum video.