Chump challenge, engineered failure, inflato-pumpkin

I forgot to mention in blog space the latest physical challenge Jeremy has presented to me.  It has been covered exclusively in FB space up until now.

Jeremy has a weird aspect to his personality where he has a difficult time staying motivated to exercise consistently just because it is the right thing to do.  He has found he performs best when he has some sort of tangible goal in front of him to provide supplementary motivation.

The other week he was asking me to provide him with some motivation since he had basically done nothing all summer long.  I told him that I am not able to inject him with motivation, that is a something that has to be cultivated inside.

Well a day or two later Jeremy and I were chatting on instant messenger as we often do.  He came up with a challenge.  He wanted to compete against me to see who could do the most pull ups while weighted down with an additional 50 pounds.

I have been relating stories for weeks of my various elbow issues that have eliminated pull ups from my routine for quite awhile.  I have no doubt it entered into his decision process on what challenge to throw out there.

Even with my injuries I didn’t hesitate to accept the challenge since it won’t take place until the end of January, plenty of time for me to rehab and get back into pull up shape. Almost immediately Jeremy started to question the wisdom of his challenge offer.  Within seconds he was shooting out stipulations and handicaps that he thought he should be entitled to.  We also had some back and forth discussion about what punishment/humiliation the loser of the contest should endure.

Whenever Jeremy asks for handicaps in physical challenges I always remind him that I am already spotting him a 12 year handicap in age.  If I challenged a 54 year old to a physical challenge I certainly wouldn’t be looking for any additional advantages. However this is Jeremy and Jeremy always is looking for an angle to exploit.

So after listening to his whining about how unfair this challenge was that HE suggested we agreed to a pro-rated system for the amount of weight that we each would wear.  I would wear the full 50 pound vest and Jeremy would wear less based on the percentage of difference in our body weight on the day of the competition.

For the punishment we agreed to the milk challenge.  The loser has one hour to drink one gallon of whole milk.  This has been proven to be almost impossible physically.  The human body will involuntarily expel whole milk when consumed in that quantity, which we are counting on. (although Jeremy thinks he can do this as well)

So Jeremy now has the motivation he was seeking to jump start his fitness plan and I will have some gold footage to post up on YouTube.  It’s a win/win.

I had Ali grab me an Itunes gift card at the grocery store since my account had 9 cents left on it. During the weekend I tried to scratch off the gray crap that covers the activation number.  Evidently these cards are a little sensitive as far as how much pressure you can apply.  Without even trying I had scraped too hard, making some of the code illegible.

I was pissed. I was pissed at myself for failing at something as simple as scratching a lottery ticket but I was also pissed at Apple for selling cards that easily allowed this to happen.  I couldn’t help but think this was by design, counting on a small percentage of dummies to simply say “oh well, my bad” and throw the card away.

Well a quick Google search revealed I was far from alone in my situation.  Evidently tons of people have the same issue with these shitty cards.  From reading the various complaint threads I found out that my only course of action was to contact Apple support which I did.  I provided the preprinted number on the card as well as the part of the activation code I could read.

A day later I got a nice email back that gave me the activation code to use.  I immediately hopped on Itunes and tried the code, thankful it got resolved quickly.  Three times I tried the code, twice by copying and pasting and a third time by typing it in.  All three attempts were failures.  Damn it!

So I had to contact support yet again, telling them the code they sent me was a fail.  I got another email back with no explanation why the first code didn’t work.  Instead I got further instructions to send them images of both the card and the store receipt.  What a pain in the ass.

Ali and I never do much for Halloween.  In fact if I didn’t do it this year, I doubt we would have put anything out for it. Ali has too much else going on to be concerned.  When I was at the pool store this weekend I saw a cheap, big blow up pumpkin.  For whatever reason I liked it and it’s silly face, even if it was made in China.  I blew it up, threw some weights inside and placed it out front for all to admire.

I like him although I question just how long he will last in the hot Florida sun before the first leak pops up.