Rhinoshield, Dash part deux, Out at 9, Reading Wrecked

I have talked about painting the exterior of our house for the last few years.  Like many aspects of our house, the builders used minimal quality materials when painting the house.  Not only is the paint on the house chalky, it is also stained in several places.  In addition the stucco surface has a bunch of hairline cracking in it.

If I did the job myself I planned to use elastomeric paint which has the ability to stretch.  Supposedly this type of paint is a good choice with stucco to help hide these cracks.  Doing the job myself would be quite labor intensive, probably the main reason it hasn’t been done yet in addition to the fact that I simply dislike painting in general.

Well last week Ali just happened to pull out a card from one of those advertising packs you get in the mail now and then.  It was from a company named Rhinoshield.  Rhinoshield is an exterior ceramic coating as opposed to plain paint.  I went on their website and did some looking around.

The process seemed pretty extensive (especially the prep work) and the 25 year no questions asked, transferable warranty was really appealing.  Of course I assumed all of this came at a premium price although I had no idea how premium it would be.

So I had a guy come out yesterday to give me a quote.  He was a younger guy named Jay (nowadays if you are in your 20’s you are young kid to me). He measured the house and gave me some background about the company.  He said that Rhinoshield is pretty much the best solution to cracking stucco.  Not only do they fix existing hairline cracks first, they lay down a super elastic primer on top of the repair before laying on the tough, thick ceramic top coat.

Jay was a cool kid, we got along well.  He thought my 73 inch tv was beyond kick ass.  He liked our dogs as well, always a plus.

So eventually we got down to numbers and to my surprise they weren’t as bad as thought they could be.  Yes it was still a hell of a lot of money but when I factored in not having to basically ever worry about painting the house again along with a 12 month same as cash financing plan that was available it suddenly made the option more realistic.

I told Jay I needed to discuss it with my wife which he understood.

Ali was on board with the idea, especially with the free 12 month financing which would allow us to budget the cost pretty easily.  The older I get, the more I find myself interested in doing high quality, long lasting home improvements that both add value to the house and minimize future maintenance.  If it ever comes time to sell the house, a transferable paint warranty is a nice little perk. If I did it myself I would save a couple grand but it would not look nearly as good or last nearly as long.

So I will probably call Jay back today and ask him if he can help me out a little bit on the price, might as well ask.

So yesterday I fought more with the buggy, slow Sony Dash website in an effort to get my new, geeky alarm clock configured.  My efforts were met with frustration as I continued to experience time outs and extremely slow response.

I happened to find a Sony Dash group on FB.  I posted there my frustrations with the site and was surprised to get a response from a Sony rep that monitors the group. She said that there were some issues with the site that were being checked out.

Then magically, maybe an hour after I complained, the site all of a sudden was working great.  I guess they found and squashed the problem. Well all of a sudden I could actually explore some of the multitude of widgets available for the Dash and man are there a bunch of them.  There are 227 clock widgets alone.  In total there are over 1500 apps available.

I had fun checking some of the apps out.  I have my Dash now set up on my nightstand.  It will take some tweaking to get everything the way I want it.  The cool thing is I can get on the Dash website at work and configure what is on my Dash at home.  I don’t think I’ll be retiring my regular alarm clock though for those times I absolutely have to make sure I get up.

So I ran 3 miles at the gym yesterday.  Once again it was an uncomfortable struggle.  I am really not happy with the correlation between running longer versus my performance on shorter, faster runs. When I started to running 7-10 miles it seemed logical that runs of significantly less distance should feel more comfortable.

Well that hasn’t been the case at all, in fact my shorter 2 and 3 mile training runs have felt more difficult then when I was doing exclusively shorter, faster runs for my sprint tri training in the 2nd half of 2010.  I find this discouraging.

This poor short run performance paired with the gut wrenching 7 mile run I had last Sunday really has knocked my confidence level down for the half marathon I am doing on Sunday.  I need to make sure I start conservatively.  Gassing at the 6 or 7 mile mark would be a recipe for disaster.

Ali posted a link to a NBC news video in her Facebook feed.  It was a story about small cities in the country that are more or less dying.  I was curious why she would post such a thing until I saw what city the story was about, good ole Reading, PA, my home area.

The gist of the story is how many small cities in America are on the verge of collapse and Reading is a pretty damn good example.  Of course the idea that Reading is a shithole is not news to anyone that has lived in or around it in the past 25 years.  However it seems like things have gone from bad to horrific.

The story talks bout Reading’s glory days when it was home to many manufacturing companies and then how it rediscovered itself by becoming the outlet capital of the NE United States.  Well there is no glory left to be found in Reading, it has the highest welfare rate in the entire state, with nearly 35% of it’s population at or below that income level.

The story depicted a town who now is best known for being a place that people can’t wait to get the hell out of.  It made me a bit sad to see Reading shown so negatively but unfortunately it is reality,  Not exactly the 15 seconds of fame the town was hoping for.

I have no clue how you even begin to fix a mess that large.  The majority of the buildings are ancient and badly in need of repair, if they can even be repaired.  The tax rate in the town is so high it is ridiculous.  Who wants to pay a fortune in taxes to live in an area that is such a mess? Not me and evidently not many other people either.