Archives 2011

Yesterday I decided to get proactive with the neighbor’s barking dog problem since it seems pretty obvious that she thinks leaving the tiny dogs outside most of the day is the solution to their lack of housebreaking.  I ordered this from Hammacher Schlemmer.

How is a bird house going to help my problem you ask?  Well it only looks like a bird house.  What it actually is is a sonic bark deterrent.  When the device “hears” a loud noise like a dog’s bark it fires off a high pitched sound that dogs hear.  Evidently it is a noise they won’t like.  What is supposed to happen is the dog quickly associates the barking with the annoying noise and the behavior stops.

Of course with two dogs of our own we don’t want to indirectly punish them for the yelping next door.  I will be sure that the device is aimed correctly and that the sensitivity is initially set at the lowest setting and go from there.  When I am home I will do some bark  stop training while I keep our dogs inside.  All that would involve is stepping foot outside the east facing lanai door and waiting for the high pitched bark-fest to begin.

My hope is this device won’t be needed to be turned on for very long depending on how long it takes the dogs to get the hint.  Now if I could only find such a device for annoying humans.

Somehow I got on a mailing list for an odd catalog, 100 plus pages of nothing but stuff to reduce your exposure to EMF. (electro magnetic frequencies)  Our daily lives involve us being constantly bathed in EMF from everything you can imagine, microwaves, cell phones, wi-fi hotspots, tv’s, computers, etc…. the list is nearly endless.

Well this book was filled with an amazing array of stuff to help you battle EMF.  I mean if you bought everything in the catalog you could basically put a metallic shield around everything in your house and even your body.  You can buy a pair of EMF absorbing boxer shorts for $110.  I have no doubt that all of the EMF that our bodies are exposed to is not a good thing.  Am I going to walk around in a suit of armor to prevent it?  Nope I guess I’ll just roll the dice on that one.  Here is their website. The picture is an EMF absorbing face shield they recommend you use while working on a computer.

Last night after work I met up with Ali to do more speed work.  We headed over to Sugden Park which was just in the news recently.  Evidently a police sting operation netted three men that were hanging at the park cruising for gay sex.  Two of the gentleman were much older, late 60’s in one case and mid 70’s in the other.  Well of course this didn’t give us a warm and fuzzy feeling about the park but the bottom line is it is a real nice place to run, as long as you do it in pairs.

It was very warm and humid, I was sweating my ass off.  Ali did a nice job keeping up with me during the speed portion of the run, maintaining a sub-9 minute mile pace for three segments that covered a total of 2.5 miles.  I told her she did a great job.

Last night I watched my first episode of Dexter.  Both Randall and Jeremy have been bugging me for awhile to watch the show.  They both said I would like it and even went so far as saying that I sort of reminded them of Dexter.  I am not sure how I should feel about being compared to a serial killer that only kills bad guys that deserve it.  I guess it is a twisted compliment.  I liked the show and will leave it in my Netflix queue to digest as time allows.

Want a quick example of how weighted the scales in this country are towards big business?  Take a look at this while you polish your “Sarah Palin 2012” buttons. Let’s cut health care, social security, education and unemployment benefits so mega-corporations can enjoy massive profits.  Makes perfect sense.

Ali  didn’t have to work on Friday.  She was able to get a good amount of stuff around the house done which lightened what remained for the weekend.  I appreciated her efforts.

One of the reasons it was helpful was we had to time another race Saturday morning.  This is probably my least favorite race to time because it is literally held on the beach.  Sand, wet, salty air and electronics are not a good combination. It makes for a lot of post race hassle with additional clean up.

We had an issue right off the bat.  The electrical outlet that we had used for the race for the past 3 or 4 years no longer worked.  We had to run a couple hundred feet of extension cord from the another pavilion in order to power the site.

Despite the sandy conditions, timing the race went smoothly.  I saw something new at the finish line, a young girl doing a handspring across it.  I’m not quite sure what was her inspiration.

Like I mentioned, when we got home there was extra sand removal work to do.  While I was outside vacuuming sand off the timing mats, Ali was inside washing sandy timing chips. It was tons of fun.

After the majority of the post race stuff was done Ali retired to take a nap while I kept knocking stuff out around the house.  Again, my plan was to keep Sunday pretty much labor free.

I have still been having issues with the neighbor’s chihuahua’s incessantly barking.  She said that she has been disciplining them when they are inside (which seems to be rarely) with a water bottle when they bark.  I told her that it hasn’t seemed to affect their barking while outside.  Saturday afternoon while they were away I thought I would try to make peace with the dogs so perhaps they didn’t feel the need to pollute the air with their ear piercing barks whenever someone is outside.

I went into their dog run area and was able to pick up the noisier of the two dogs.  I petted her and tried to convey that there was no reason to carry on as she does.  Both of the dogs were scared of my hand.  The other chihuahua retreated to the garage.  I interacted with the dog for a good 10 minutes.  On Sunday, it was right back to barking non-stop.  Oh well, I tried.  Something will need to change in the future, this can’t be the long term situation.

Saturday night we went out to dinner with Christy and Michelle for Michelle’s birthday.  We went to California Pizza Kitchen, a chain I never had been to before.  It was quite nice.  The menu was diverse and had a number of items that were Ali-friendly.  Before the meal we went to the Gap so Ali could spend a $50 gift card I got her for Valentine’s Day.  She made out like a bandit due to a 2-1 sale they had going on. For $20 out of pocket she wound up with 7 articles of clothing.

After that Ali made the mistake of taking me into lululemon, the latest place Ali has become obsessed with.  Ali has a pattern of over-consuming when she gets interested in a hobby.  If I pulled out all of her workout/running attire and took a picture of it you would be flabbergasted.   We already have sizable investments in Nike, Under Armour and Reebok gear, enough to clothe a couple classrooms.  Well now it’s on to lululemon.

Well if you know anything about lululemon, you know it is nice stuff but it is obscenely expensive.  I hadn’t known just how expensive until I walked into the store.  It seems like the starting price for anything is $50 and goes up from there.  I saw a pair of average running shorts for $75.  When I started doing some crude math in my head based on the double digit + amount of lululemon clothing Ali has I was taken back by the potential total.  I am going to slip a GPS tracker in Ali’s purse that sends me an alarm whenever she is in the vicinity of that store.

We rounded of our dinner with a stop at Hagen Daz for a small ice cream treat.  It was a nice way to cap the night.  Since I went napless I was running on fumes by the time we left around eight.

Sunday morning I met up with Ali at the water park after she ran 3 miles with the girls.  We did a bike/swim brick.  It was the first time Ali had been on her bike in ages.  We did a 12 + mile ride and averaged somewhere between 16 and 17 mph, which was a good start for her.

In the pool I upped my distance to 1200 meters and felt pretty good while doing so.  I can feel my swimming endurance is starting to come back.  After our swim we ate lunch (early to avoid the mobs) and then we hung out for a bit.  I mostly played Battleheart on Ali’s Ipad but it was pretty tough to do outdoors.  The Ipad is not a great device to use outdoors due to poor visibility.

When we got home we didn’t waste much time until we piled the dogs into the van and headed back out.  I told Ali it had been awhile since they got to go on a ride.  We stopped at Pinch-a-Penny and Home Depot.   At Home Depot I wanted to scout out possible materials for the parallel bars I want to build.  I was unsure if I wanted to build the bars out of cheaper schedule 40 pvc or iron pipe.

I grabbed a section of 2 inch sched 40 pvc pipe and applied some weight to it.  It quickly became apparent it would be a poor choice for supporting body weight due to the amount of flex in a longer section.  I went over to the iron pipe and grabbed the various diameter pipe to imagine what would feel most comfortable doing dips and other exercises on.  It is down to either the 1.5″ or 2″ diameter pipe.  The plan is to set four 4×4’s in concrete a little more than 5 feet high and 25 inches apart, drill holes through them for the pipe and secure the pipe with bolts.   Shouldn’t be too tough.  When it is done hopefully it will look something like this TT.    I am hoping to get the materials this week and get it in the ground this weekend.  The pipe will be the biggest expense of all.  I am hoping to get it built for less that $200.

While I was at Home Depot I had to take a peek at the garden plants.  I grabbed some Swiss Chard that supposedly has multicolor stalks, some red lettuce and another blueberry plant.

When we got home we relaxed most of our remaining time in the weekend.  Well I relaxed more than Ali did.  She made a nice pasta dinner that included a number of items from our garden.  It was good stuff.

So Ali and I made our trip to the fair last night.  Wed decided to just walk to it, something we never did before.  It was bad enough it was going to cost us $20 to get into the fair, we didn’t want to drop another $5 to park, plus it was a nice night for a 1 mile plus walk.

Our normal fair agenda goes like this, look at the animals, eat food that is bad for you, go home.  A few times over the years I did some of the rides there but the past few I haven’t even felt motivated enough to do that.

After going through the farm animal area which was filled with various chickens, turkeys, geese, rabbits and more we checked out their garden exhibit.  We saw a bunch of stuff we were already growing in our garden.  I was most interested in seeing their cauliflower.  Our cauliflower at home has HUGE leaves on it but we still don’t see anything resembling the part of the plant you actually eat.  I was somewhat relieved that I didn’t see any heads developing on their cauliflower either yet, I guess that comes later in the process.

We headed into the animal petting exhibit.  I bought a couple cups of sliced carrots to feed the various animals.  We made various goats, llamas, ostriches, ox, and more happy.

The fair has always had these “SEE THE GIANT HORSE AND COW” exhibits where you pay a dollar each to see these supposedly huge animals.  In all of our fair going years we never went in to see the animals, I just thought it was a scam.

Well I had talked to a couple gym buddies this week that went to the fair and both of them saw the giant horse and cow.  They said it was well worth the dollar. So I decided 2011 was the year we would finally see what was behind the curtain.

We first met Hercules, the giant horse.  He was pretty damn big, I imagine around the same size as a Clydesdale although I have never seen a Clydesdale up close.  He didn’t pay much attention to us and instead focused on devouring his bale of hay.

We then headed next door and handed another two bucks to a kid that was no more than 12 who didn’t say a word to us as he continued to play his PSP.  Black  Jack was not as visually impressive as Hercules, perhaps because he is not as tall.  He was still a huge animal.  Much like Hercules, he hardly noticed us as he worked on his hanging hay bale.  We hung out with the big steer for a little while, wanting to make sure we got a dollars worth of entertainment.

We continued around the fair, checking out other odd animal exhibits like sea lions, a camel and even a shark tank.    Ali really isn’t all that thrilled with seeing these animals in captivity and it bothers me to a degree as well although I do find it cool to see them up close.

We even ventured into the hardcore carnie area, my least favorite portion of the fair.  Since it was a weeknight and still relatively early in the night there weren’t tons of fair goers yet, meaning you were solicited non-stop by creepy carnival people as you went by their stands of stupid games that reward you with worthless junk you don’t need.

I cringed when I heard the electronically modified voice of the clown in the dunk tank.  I flashed back to 5 years prior when I had my traumatic experience with the dunk tank clown, where I was insulted  mercilessly as I was unable to dunk him, despite hitting the target indirectly several times.

I commented to Ali about how seedy life as a carnival worker must be.

As we were walking around we were checking out the food stands.  Ali was looking forward to scoring her customary fair apple dumpling.  There was one problem, it didn’t appear anyone was selling them.  We walked by the stands 3 or 4 times verifying that dumplings were not available.

I mentioned to Ali I was getting a hankering to grab a cheese steak despite having a PB sandwich before we left.  Originally the plan was I was just going to grab some sort of junky desert.  Eventually I relented and grabbed a greasy, messy cheese steak.  It was quite a challenge to eat the sandwich on a bleacher.  On the first bite I wound up wearing some of it on my shorts.

Ali decided to go with soft serve ice cream in a waffle cone for her treat.  I decided to double up on my dietary badness and grabbed a slice of chocolate covered cheese cake.  I bought from a specific stand that was manned by a very nice and personable old man.  I bought it there 100% because he was there.  He was like a bright beacon of niceness in a human sea of scuziness.

The carnival workers were not the only people there that were odd.  There were tons of “Florida Crackers” walking around the fair aka. rednecks, white trash, etc…  I definitely felt like I was in the minority since I still have all my teeth. Let’s just say I don’t think there were many Obama voters there.

We didn’t dilly dally at the fair long since we had to get home to do some prep for a race we are timing this weekend.  We were able to go out a back gate which cut about a half mile off our walk home.

As I mentioned, tomorrow we are timing another race at way too f’ing early.  Saturday night we are going out to dinner with Ali’s girlfriends and Sunday I am hoping to hit the water park for another exercise session.

Wow I produced a lot of content yesterday even without a real blog entry.  The latest Jeremy Xtranormal cartoon hit the streets to much acclaim. Then later I posted two more videos, one of my second attempt at this month’s Bar-barian challenge, and then a second one of me working bar dips.

Both of these have an element of humor in them.  In the static hold you can hear quite clearly the neighbor’s chihuahua yelping away.  I even mentioned it in the video.  The noise hits squarely on my last nerve.

In order to do bar dips, you have to first get yourself on top of the bar.  I figured I would just do a jumping muscle up to do it.  Well I did this after the static hold.  I didn’t think it would hamper me that much in getting up, well it did.  I had to try 5 or 6 times until I finally managed to get on top.

During one of those failed attempts I dropped off the bar and managed to twist my ankle on one of the landscape blocks that had fallen off the stack.  It’s kind of funny.

My latest Netflix dvd arrived in the mail yesterday Gamers: Dorkness Rising.  No, you have never heard of this title and there is a good reason, it sucks.  I had heard it mentioned on the Stern show several months ago and threw it in my Netflix queue.  Either Howard or Ralph said they saw it and it was really funny.  A funny movie about nerdy gamers, ok sounds interesting.

I made the assumption that the movie was about computer/video gamers.  It turns out it was about Dungeon & Dragon players, you know the old style card game thing.  This may have been more relevant in the 90’s, I was surprised to see it was released in 2008.

The movie was kind of funny, funny because it was so cheesy and low budget.  It literally looked like it was created on somebody’s home computer, complete with poorly done Adobe After Effects.  Most of the actors were God awful as you would expect.  It’s funny how for some reason I would view someone that played the D&D board game as far nerdier than a typical WoW player.  Anyway, the movie was stupid from the word go, I’d give it a D, as in DON’T see it.

The movie recommendations I get off the Stern show are hit and miss for me.  Sometimes I love them but more than a few times something that has been talked up on the show turns out to be pretty sad when I view it first hand.

Tonight Ali and I plan to venture out to the county fair.  It should be a people watching extravaganza.

Nothing much happened and I don’t feel like typing.

I met Ali after work yesterday to do more speed work with her.  I was a bit tentative about it since I had just done my own triathlon the day before.  I can’t tell you the last time I have run two days in a row, it literally might have been back in the 90’s.

On top of the back to back days I managed to forget my socks so I was naked inside my New Balance 1064’s.  To top it off, I managed to forget my customary pre-running pair of Advil.  It was not ideal circumstances.

So we took off on our run which totaled close to 5 miles.  During that we had around 2.25 miles of it that was fast pace for Ali, right around the 9 minute mile pace.  By the end of it my legs were definitely feeling the effort from the day before, I was pooped.

I witnessed a horrible incident on the way home.  I was in the center lane of Immokalee Road, a busy 3 lane road.  As I approached a cross street I saw off to my right two dogs walking up towards the road, one larger tan dog and a black one.  There was not a human owner in sight. That area of the road was wide open, there was at least 50 feet of grass between the main road and any trees.  I spotted the dogs easily even being in the middle of the traffic.

So as I drove by the dogs I mentally was cursing the irresponsible owner of these animals that cared so little about them that they couldn’t be bothered with making sure they were restrained.  As I continued I just happened to look in the rear view mirror just to make sure the dogs didn’t go in the road.

I was horrified as I saw the outline of one of the dogs trot, not run, into the first lane of traffic and then promptly get hit by some f’ing asshole in a small SUV.  One second the dog was standing in the middle of the lane, the next it was wedged under the vehicle.

I was enraged and shocked at the same time.  Now I was furious at the driver.  Like I said there were no obstructions to their view, it was broad daylight.  If they were paying attention they would have easily seen the dogs and slowed down.  The front end of the SUV never even dipped like the brakes were applied hard, it just plowed the poor animal over.  I was too far ahead to be able to stop and really do anything about it.  Ali told me when she went by a few minutes later that there were several cars pulled over.  Evidently it was the tan dog that got hit.

It really shook me up seeing that.  I turned the radio off and rode home the rest of the way in silence.  It was the second time in less than a year that I saw first hand road kill committed by f’ing idiots that don’t pay attention to their driving.  Now I have that visual burned into my memory, it has been stuck on “replay” in my head despite my efforts to file it away in the “never see again” drawer.

While Ali went running early Saturday morning I got busy outside.  All of the stuff that moved for paint prep had to be put back in place.

One of the things that had to be put back were our two water barrels, however I wanted to clean them first.  We have had these water barrels in place for years and years and I have never cleaned them.  Let’s just say that was a mistake.

When I dumped the first barrel some sort of gelatinous, black, slimy organic matter poured out. I touched it with my hand and felt like throwing up, it was that gross.  It took quite a lot of pressure washer work to clean out the inside of the barrels.  It made me commit to dumping a cap full of bleach into the barrels once a month or so.

Putting everything back took much longer than taking it out.  Part of the process included pushing back the river rock that was pulled back for the Rhinoshielding which took awhile.  Finally I had everything back in place a little after Ali returned from her run.

After she took a nap we headed out into the yard and attended to mowing / weed whacking the property.  It was looking like shit.  Much like the house with it’s new paint job, the yard was transformed after we were done with it.

I wasn’t done.  Once we moved inside I worked diligently to get pretty much every remaining chore for the weekend done so our Sunday would be free.  Ali generally hates when I push to do this but when a carefree Sunday follows she seems to enjoy it.

While I was at it I installed a new roman shade Ali bought for the office to block out sun that would slip through the holes in the venetian blinds.

I hadn’t done enough that day so I went outside and shot a quick video of my current muscle up progression.

On Saturday night I popped in my latest Netflix dvd, The A-Team.  I had waited a long time to see this flick.  I was a pretty devouted fan of the the original A-Team tv series.  The movie wasn’t bad and it wasn’t great.  Don’t get me wrong, it was jam packed with action pretty much non-stop and there were plenty of bad guys getting what they deserved.  But for whatever reason it just didn’t connect with me all that much.  I’d give it a B.

The plan for Sunday was to head to the water park for a brick.  Since Ali ran Saturday, she was supposed to ride bike and swim while I was going to do all three triathlon activities.  It was very difficult to get Ali out the door.  She was whining like a 5 year old about how she didn’t want to do the bike, she just wanted to swim.  I literally had to ask her a half dozen times to get up so we could get going.  Ali basically HATES doing bike work.  Ironically, any accomplished triathlete will tell you of the three events, being a strong biker will make the biggest difference in your overall performance.

Eventually she was ready to go although we were leaving the house a half hour later than the time I wanted to already be at the park.  I had the truck loaded up with our bikes and all the associated gear. About half way there Ali says to me “you aren’t going to believe this and I swear I didn’t do this on purpose.  I forgot my bike shoes”  Sigh….

Of course I was frustrated but I certainly wasn’t going to drive back to get them.  I knew she didn’t do it on purpose but now that meant I would be doing 2/3 of my workout solo.

When we got to the park I got on my bike while Ali headed inside to start swimming.

I did an 11.30 mile ride at an 18.5 mph pace.  I was pleased with the ride considering I have done very little bike riding since last October. Next up was the run.  I did two 2 mile loops around the park at just below a sub 9 minute mile pace which again I was pleased with.

During the run I had an unexpected encounter with a snake.  As I approached I thought the snake was just a branch that was half on and half off the pathway.  By the time I realized it was a snake I was right on top of it.  It was about 6 feet long and had copper and gold squares on it’s body.  I’m not quite sure what type of snake it was but I wasn’t interested in stopping to find out.

After the run I headed inside to swim, putting in 1000 meters.  The water park was packed, the swimming lanes had a bunch of people around them, including some clueless ones.

As I was heading back from one of my laps I reached for the wall and instead felt my hand hit a hairy back.  Some hispanic guy had hopped in the lap pool and was just standing in the middle of the lane holding a little girl.  What the f??  I popped up and said EXCUSE ME?  The big oaf mumbled something.  As I swam the other direction I saw the lifeguard walking over towards the point of the collision to tell him to get the f out of the lane.  As I passed her I said “Thank you….” during a breath.

Christy and Michelle showed up as I was getting done.  They wanted to do some swimming.  They both had been at a concert the night before.  Evidently there was copious amounts of alcohol consumed.  Christy still seemed a bit drunk.  It was funny.

I had instructed Ali to go get in the food line as I was finishing up since I went through that hellish wait the week before.  Ironically at 12pm there was next to no line, sweet.  However 1:30 must be the witching hour.  Last week I got food around that time.  At 1:30 yesterday the line for food was insane, probably two and a half times what I waited through.  I have no doubt people at the end of that line waited at least an hour to get food.  The park management really needs to find a way to address the slow lines.  For now our fix for it is get your food EARLY.

It seemed like the water park was even more packed than the week before.  We had to walk around for a while just to find two adjacent chairs together, it was nuts.

Urine was the theme of the day.  Michelle swears she swam through a pocket of urine some grown women left in the far end of the lap pool.  The women entered the deep end for a brief period of time and then got right back out, I mean wtf, the bathrooms were right around the corner you lazy pig.  Later, a little girl in the chairs next to us pee’d herself as she stood there while her parents watched.  They reassured her and said “It’s ok”  Sure it’s ok honey you just take a leak whenever you want, on the sidewalk, in the grass, in the pool….  Ugh.

I could feel that I was getting too much sun so we didn’t hang out for a real long time, leaving mid-afternoon.

The rest of our weekend was very nice.  Ali got to take an extended nap, the doors and windows were open letting the dry air blow through the house and we got to chill out, courtesy of getting all the annoying chores done the day before.  It was a blueprint for how I would like most weekends to be.

I caught myself quite often admiring the new look of our house courtesy of the Rhinoshielding.  At the same time I thought how time consuming and miserable the job would have been if I tackled it myself.  It was one of the few times when I didn’t regret paying someone else to do the work.

Yesterday there was a story that Rick Scott was up to more fun and games.  On a special website he had made to prop up his crusade to bastardize state employees, he posted a link to 500 former state workers that receive a pension worth more than 100K a year. This makes for a great headline for the sheep, STATE WORKERS GET $100,000 PENSIONS!!!!!!

This is so insulting on so many levels.

Let’s start with the most obvious.  All of this rhetoric and pining for government transparency is coming from Rick Scott.  The same Rick Scott that was so transparent that he pleaded the 5th 75 times during his questioning regarding Medicare fraud committed by the company he was in charge of.  The same company that wound up paying 1.7 BILLION dollars in fines for their transparently fraudulent activities. The hypocrisy here is sickening.

To have someone that was able to spend upwards of 70 million dollars of his own personal fortune to narrowly get elected via one of the dirtiest smear campaigns on record point a gold encrusted finger at a former state employees is equally ludicrous.

Ok let’s look at these $100,000 pension holders.  They represent .17 percent of all state pensions.   Yes, there is a period in front of the number.  A percentage that is so small that it would be categorized as statistically insignificant by anyone that knows numbers.  Even with these few individuals with these admittedly huge pensions it doesn’t change that the average pension for a state employee works out to something like 16k a year. Oh also, all of these pensions referenced were over a decade ago, minor detail he left out.

Headlines like this work the tea party crazies into a frenzy. LOOK, we are paying for all of these fat cat pensions.  They shouldn’t have pensions because WE DON’T.

This is where the hypocrisy slaps me in the face a second time.  Tea Party folk are almost exclusively Obama haters, crying from every rooftop, STOP THE MUSLIM SOCIALIST!  They lament the idea of national health care or other government benefits that come from redistributing wealth from the upper tier of society.

Yet, this same hive mind has no issues bitching and complaining about state workers if they perceive they have benefits that exceed something they have.  They would prefer if state employees were paid in exactly the same manner as they are?  Sounds hypocritical huh? That’s because it is.  They basically are looking for a SOCIALIST employment compensation system where individuals are paid the same regardless of their education, experience or qualifications.

Don’t give me this bullshit line “yea, but state workers don’t have to pay into their pension”.  A pension is just part of the compensation for the employee, in this case deferred compensation.  Just because it is deferred doesn’t mean it should be looked at as any less real than an hourly wage.

And for the record, I am not in the pension plan.

Idiots.

So before I left yesterday I turned on my wi-fi netcam that I had on the dash of the party van.  Throughout the day I was able to monitor the progress of the painters.  I became quite nervous when I saw the main color being applied, it was looking pinky/peach’ish.  Now I didn’t know if it was because I was viewing it through the netcam which is not exactly a great image or if they maybe messed up the tint.

When I sent a copy of the still image to Ali she was freaked out as I figured she would be.  I went as far as to contact my sales guy and tell him I was watching the process via a remote webcam and the color looked off.  He assured me the tint is a dead match for what we gave him.   So I nervously crossed my fingers what I was seeing was a result of wet paint, lighting and poor web cam color.

During the day yesterday one of our remote branches was down in Everglades City.  They had a power problem the night before, a common occurrence, but their network line did not come up after the outage.

I called in the problem like I have done many times before after verifying the simple stuff like everything was actually turned on.  Throughout the day I got calls back from our provider, unfortunately all of them basically different ways of saying “not fixed”.

So now it is late in the day and I get a call from a tech assigned to the call.  He tells me the circuit is testing fine from a point outside the office.  I ask him “Have you actually gone inside the office to test from there since that is what actually matters?”  No, he hadn’t he isn’t that kind of tech.  What does that mean, he isn’t allowed to walk into buildings? He is an open air only technician?  What the F??

So he tells me that since our equipment is under service contract they need to have it handled by a different department.  Now I was officially annoyed.

He transfers me to another department where I am greeted by a very soft spoken girl.  It quickly becomes very obvious that she is new to the job when she asks me to hold while her “coach” gets on the line to listen.  Again, WHAT THE F?

The girl knows nothing about everything that has gone down already and starts asking me to reinvent the wheel.  Asking for our company name, phone number, etc….  I stop her right there, unable to tolerate any more of this bullshit.  I told her “Can you please get the “COACH” on the line?”   Coach was a woman as well.  As soon as she introduced herself I cut her off and said “Listen, I know this isn’t your fault, but the way this call has been handled is ridiculous”  “I have made many calls for downed network lines over the years and never had to go through this crap to get something fixed”

I continued, “I’ll tell you what.  I am going to hang up, call my sales rep and HE will straighten this out”  Well mr Outdoor Tech only evidently was still lurking on the line, unbeknown to me.  He says that whether I call my sales rep or not, I am going to have to go this route to get the issue addressed.  Of course this turned up the anger dial a few notches on my part and I fired back “Actually no, I won’t have to go through the same procedure” knowing that the county carries a big stick and when we have a problem with our carrier, they will ask how high if we say jump.

I hung up on Team Ineptitude and sent an email to my sales rep, asking him to call me, which he did shortly afterward.  I recanted the circus I had gone through trying to get this circuit back up.  The rep apologized for the confusion and promised he would step in and get it expedited.  We’ll see how things roll today.

On the way home I stopped back at Home Depot to grab another Dapper Tan swatch since I gave my original to Jay.  I wanted to make sure that the color on the walls was what we picked out.

I already knew from monitoring the web cam that they appeared to be damn close to finished as I saw them pulling down paper used to mask the roof line.  It was hard to believe they could repair the cracks, prime it and get two coats of Rhinoshield all in one day.  Later I was told that since they had two sprayers on site instead of the normal one it really makes the job go faster, plus they had an extra set of hands or two.

So I pulled up to the house worried I would see the peachy hue that adorned the web cam.  I was relieved that it looked much better in person.  Holding the swatch up to the wall confirmed the color was right.  The visual difference in the house was pretty stunning.

As I walked around the house it became obvious that these guys really do nice work.  I literally saw no flaws.  I was particularly interested in the areas that were in the worst shape like the hell wall on the east side of the house.  Man, what a difference.  The wall looked perfect.  The entire house literally looks better than it did when it was brand new in 2001.

The only issue I had was on the back deck where they only painted the face of the wood border the accent color and not the sides.  They went back and painted the edges per my request as I knew it would drive Ali nuts.

The crew that was doing the work were very friendly and nice, just as our sales guy has been.  Thanks to the extended daylight they were able to totally finish the job, pulling out after 7.  I signed over my same as cash financing check, thanked the crew and Jay for their work, and that was that.

I walked around the house and took a number of pictures to post on Facebook.  It is very interesting comparing the stark difference in the before and after shots.  I am very glad that we decided to mix up the colors instead of sticking with something very close to what we already had.  It feels like I am walking up to a new home.

Unfortunately Ali didn’t get home till after dark so she couldn’t get a great look but she liked what she saw from the lit lanai.

I am still amazed that they could do all that work in such a short time while doing it in such a high quality manner.  I guess it helps to have the right equipment and years of expertise. I’m very pleased with the result.

This weekend I need to put everything back around the house as well as pushing the stone border back in place.  They recommended I give it a couple days to fully cure.  The yard is in desperate need of attention as well so that will get addressed I’m sure.

Ali’s training buddies have other plans this weekend so I will be Ali’s primary training partner this weekend.  I am thinking about doing a two or even three headed brick at the water park possibly on Sunday.  We’ll see if Ali feels up to it.

Yesterday at the gym I literally raised the bar on my muscle up progress.  Up until a few weeks ago I had been unable to do any variety of muscle up.  Oh, for you bar work noobs, a muscle up is when you get your body from a position below a bar to fully extended above a bar.

I have been working off and on on the movement for a long time.  Well a few weeks ago I read a blurb on beastskills.com that described the transition portion of the muscle up as “getting your shoulders over your wrists”.  Well once I visualized getting my shoulders over my wrists I was able to get my first muscle up, albeit on the cross bar of the smith machine which is maybe six and a half feet high. This allowed me to use some leg assist. Still, I had never been able to do this before using any sort of assist.

So yesterday I upped the ante, moving to the bar that is probably 7.5 feet high in between the pulley stations.  I set up a Reebok step under it with only one step installed, giving me a few extra inches but the bar felt noticeably higher than what I was doing on the Smith machine.  On the Smith machine I was false gripping around a large, rounded support.  Grabbing just a bar felt less substantial.

So I kept running “shoulders over the wrists” through my head as I prepared to give it a go.  I yanked hard, exploded up and forward and found myself in position to easily lock out the dip portion of the movement. I did it, nice!  I tried two more times, missing one mostly due to sweaty hands and then making the last attempt.

It really encourages me, now that I know what the transition is supposed to feel like, that I can soon do a free hanging muscle up in the not too distant future.  I will be trying some assisted muscle ups at home with plenty of chalk soon.  Look for it at the YouTube channel nearest you soon.

There has been another episode released in the epic Jeremy cartoon series.

So yesterday I got home to a crew of 6 or 7 people finishing up pressure washing the house.  As I approached I was really surprised how clean they managed to get the gutters.  I asked the crew leader what they used to do it?  He said it was just a bleach solution.  Wow, I never had that kind of success with bleach.

In addition to cleaning the exterior they did some other prep work like pulling the downspouts off which will be painted the house color.  I walked the perimeter of the house with our sales guy Jay and Felix the crew leader going over exactly what would be done.  Felix seemed very confident in what he was doing which made me feel confident as well.

The job of painting the house which seemed so daunting to me is just another day in the park for them.  They didn’t see any real complications.  Today they will be repairing cracks, applying primer and maybe even getting a first coat of paint on the house depending how stuff goes.  Jay said they pulled additional help in to make sure they get everything done.

Yesterday Randall asked if I was going to stream the paint job.  I hadn’t really thought about it but Randall’s suggestion got my wheels spinning.  After thinking about various ways to do this I came up with a pretty solid option.  I used my spare car battery that I have for powering my timing box and connected it to my DC inverter to provide me with AC.  I then took my wi-fi netcam out to the party van and slapped it on the dash, connecting it to my rigged power source.

I turned it on this morning and checked it out, it seems to be working just fine although the picture is not as clear as I would like.  I am not quite sure how much power the cam uses but I think the battery should be able to power it all day with little difficulty.  It will be kind of cool to peek in on the crew to see what is going on.

If you would like to take a look yourself go here.  Be warned you may have issues viewing the cam with internet explorer, sometimes it can crash the browser.  It is solid with Firefox.  To see the stream enter “dufguest” for both the user name and the password.

If that isn’t geeky enough, last night I decided to install Hyper-V on my home server.  Hyper-V is a Microsoft product that allows you to run virtual servers.  I used a simple tool to create a virtual version of my old Windows 2003 server.  I then mounted that server within Hyper-V.  Just like that I had two servers running one one piece of hardware.  It works great.

Now I can decommission the old server hardware without losing any sleep since I will have a virtual version of it available to fire up whenever I may need it.  Although Hyper-V has been around for a couple years I never really played with it much.  Better late than never, it’s a great product.