Into the final countdown

So we are now in the final countdown to Christmas.  I love that it falls on a Sunday this year.  It means I get a 4 day weekend out of the deal, very sweet.

Last night on the way home in the SSR I had to make a couple pit stops to pick up dog food and a final gift for Ali.  I should be officially done with shopping.

When I got home last night I decided to round out my attempts at the Bar-barian challenge, doing hard mode, the one variation I hadn’t tried yet.  Hard mode is another pull up pyramid but with half the amount of rest in between, 30 seconds max.  I managed to get through 9 sets + 7 reps.  I was really hoping to crack double digits. You can see it here.

Today is Alison’s birthday.  The celebration will not be extravagant but it is what she requested, pizza, vanilla Publix cupcakes and to watch Elf on tv last night.

This morning I just placed an order for a PC.  You may say WTF?  Didn’t Duf just get a new pc a few month’s back??  Why yes, I did and I have been quiet pleased with it in all regards but one, video processing power.

The system has ample ram and hard drive space but the Pentium 620 processor is on the very low end as far as number crunching power goes.  When I am generating my many, MANY videos it takes forever as a result.

Well Ali has been having issues with her older Dell system running slowly.  I proposed to her a two tier plan where I replace my box with an I7 based system and she moves to the Lenovo which will be a huge upgrade for her.  She was fine with it, especially since this would be a “my money” purchase that doesn’t touch the budget numbers.

I am snagging a Gateway tower with an I7-2600 processor, 8GB of ram, Nvdia video and a 1.5 TB HDD.  It should tear through video crunching and anything else I throw at it.

So before heading home tonight for Ali’s bday celebration I will be stopping at Mom’s place to do a vehicle swap.  I am leaving my Tacoma there and picking up her Rav 4.  I am taking her car into Duf’s garage for some extensive work.  While it is there I hope to do brake work on both the front and rear brakes, change the oil, oil filter, air filter and give it a bath.

I am not quite sure how it will go since I haven’t been able to find 96 Rav 4 brake job how to video out there but I am confident I can figure it out based on the work I did on the Tacoma and Camry.  The rear brakes on the Rav 4 are the drum variety that I have never touched before.  They can be tricky with the various springs and nuts that are used to hold everything in place.  It should be a good learning experience.

I am hoping to do the club training run on Saturday morning.  I am aiming to do 10 miles.  Randall has talked about possibly doing the Hooters Half Marathon with me in March.  If I am going to do that I need to pick up the running program.

I hope everyone has a great Christmas. My gift to you is I won’t ramble on.