New Year new challenges, Impossible, Inside Job ,orange Dick, hood ornaments, fat, sick & nearly dead
It was quite nice getting to enjoy my second extended weekend of a row. We had made no definitive plans for New Year’s Eve, we decided it would be just as good to just do our thing.
Ali really busted ass on Friday, getting almost all of the chores done around the house which was AWESOME. It was so nice to not have to worry about them. Saturday morning I went out with the girls in the party van on a number of errands. I needed to get some hardware to repair our bathroom sink, a few items at AutoZone and of course some DD coffee. I received two DD related gifts for Christmas, a $25 gift card and a travel mug that costs less to refill than if you buy a normal cup. I used both of them on Saturday.
Since the normal house chores were done I came up with a small project to do much to Ali’s dismay, cleaning out the big shed. I assured Ali it’s wasn’t that big of a project and only should take an hour or so to do. (took more like 90 minutes) The shed had not been cleaned/organized in a couple years, a by product of us abandoning the monthly cleaning project idea Ali had come up with years ago. It was a mess and had dirt and sand all over the floor.
Ali and I got busy. We wound up throwing/recycling a ton of stuff. I also had a yard cart of unwanted items that I deposited by the road. 90% of it was taken within a few hours. The shed looks a ton better after our efforts. We have a bunch of unused shelf space now which is always a good thing. Hopefully I can keep it tidy for awhile.
After the shed work I had a little sweat worked up. I figured it was as good of time as any to make one more, last day of the month, last day of the year attempt at the December Bar-barians challenge in Bar-baric mode. (muscle ups) I had made a couple attempts earlier in the month and wasn’t all that satisfied with either of them, I had a goal of completing at least 5 full layers of reps.
The attempt turned out to be one of my best efforts of 2011. My set where I was supposed to get 5 reps actually contained 8 attempts. Three times I went up and couldn’t get over the bar. Instead of dropping off immediately I hung on the bar and kept trying until I eventually got all 5 reps. It was tough as hell but I really wanted to prove to myself I could do it. I knocked out a total of 17 reps, considering I only figured out how to do the movement a couple months ago I am quite happy with how far I have come so far. There is much further to go..
So we decided to do something we have never done before on a New Year’s Eve, go to a movie (and dinner). I had scoped out reserving a seat at SilverSpot earlier in the day but by that time all they had were shitty seats so we instead decided to go to Coconut Point, where the theater is never full.
The movie showed at 6:45 and 7:15 so we hit Carraba’s early, right around 5’ish. I was sort of surprised that even that early we wound up waiting about 20 minutes for a table. I didn’t mind all that much though as I sucked down my 2 for 1 happy hour beers while we were waiting.
By the time we left around 6:30 the place was MOBBED. When I was in the bathroom some old chubby italian looking guy with slicked back hair said to me “I can’t believe this, you would think this was the only restaurant open New Year’s Eve” I laughed and said it was a good excuse to take advantage of the happy hour special.
The movie we were seeing was the latest Mission Impossible sequel. We always have enjoyed the series. I was surprised that the normally empty Coconut Point theater was untypically full. Yea there were still seats available but I think it was probably the most bodies I ever saw in one of their theaters. I guess going to the movies on New Year’s Eve is more popular of a past time than I realized.
The movie was very entertaining and filled with grab your seat suspense throughout. With MI you don’t really have to bother with analyzing the reality of any of these situations happening in real life, you just kind of roll with it. I walked out of there quite satisfied. I’d give the film an A-.
When we got home we once again were unhappy to see they propped Dick Clark up in front of the camera. This year they added a new disturbing twist if his barely coherent post-stroke speech pattern wasn’t bad enough. They gave him a positively AWFUL orange tinted spray tan. He looked bizarre.
If it is possible, I think his speaking was even worse this year, I could make out every third or fourth word. Yes, I know, Dick had a stroke and in a way it is admirable that he is trying to continue on his tradition. However at this point I think he has more than proved his point, if he continues to insist on being on camera until he croaks it is obviously just about an ego stroke at this point more than anything else.
This was his 40th year of doing the broadcast, a nice even number. I was hoping he would take that as an opportunity to announce he was finally leaving the broadcast once and for all. No such announcement took place unfortunately.
The Lady Gaga performance was just bizarre. Her initial costume looked like a black version of the monster from Bugs Bunny cartoons. Then she later removed the outer cover and performed in the bird cage like shell underneath. Ali and I spent much of the performance exchanging confused looks. It was so weird.
Ali slept in New Years Day, I was up relatively early, before 7, despite not getting to sleep until close to 1.
When Ali got up she again was not all that happy that I had started another project, the process of removing the interior Christmas decorations, bringing in the bins from the shed. Ali is going to be out of town this upcoming weekend so if we didn’t undecorate now that meant either I would have to do the entire process myself or wait another two weeks to do it.
Much like the shed cleaning, taking down the stuff wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed it could be. Again we had the entire process done in less than an hour and a half. I decided to leave the outside lights up for another two weeks. I like the way they look.
We sat down and watched the Eagles play their last game of the year. They had another mostly strong performance, pulling away at the end for a convincing 34-10 victory over the hapless Redskins. It’s bittersweet that the team finished up the year with a four game winning streak.
The success at the end might distort what was a crystal clear picture of ineptitude for the majority of the season. This team was one of the most disappointing I can ever recall rooting for because of their massive expectations, elite talent level and maddening inconsistency.
The defense which repeatedly blew games late during the first half of the season has put in 4 solid performances in a row to end the year. So does that mean Juan Castillo actually has a slight clue on how a NFL defense should be run? I don’t really know at this point.
Mike Vick certainly had an average at best year. His numbers are extremely middle of the pack, very disappointing from a guy that was paid HUGE money prior to the season, money that only an elite QB should command.
The Eagles had the most turn overs of any team in the NFL, a back breaking stat that is largely responsible for their 8-8 record, despite brandishing an offense that gained the most yards from scrimmage of any Eagle team in history. Even their defense, which blew so many games wound up statistically in the top 10 of the league. What a bizarre year it has been. It will be very interesting to see what changes are ultimately made with this team.
Sunday evening I attended to another small SSR project, installing some CNC cut under hood emblems. The under hood insulator blanket has the SSR logo indented into it. Well these colorful metal pieces spruce things up. I have had them for quite awhile but hadn’t gotten around to getting the weather strip adhesive that is recommended to attach them.
The instructions had two options for installing the letters. The recommended way was to remove the hood insulator from the car and then use weights on the letters while they set over night. The other option was to stick them on and then use something like painters tape to hold them in place while they dried.
Well I tried the easy route at first and immediately regretted it. Trying to carefully place the weather strip solution with the blanket still intact was not a very precise process. As a result when I went to press the letters in place I wound up getting some of the adhesive on the surface of the letters.
After wrangling with it for awhile I had all three letters in place, held with the blue painters tape however I immediately felt this was not adequate. I wound up popping the 5 plastic connectors that held the blanket in place and putting it on the ground. I then took a few of our small dumbbells and placed them on the letters to make sure pressure was applied as they cured.
I was annoyed with myself for not just pulling the hood blanket off in the first place, it was stupidly easy to do. The next day after cleaning up the excess adhesive on the letters with Goo Gone, I reattached the blanket and was pleased with the final result. The letters feel securely attached, something that would have been in doubt if I used the tape only method with the blanket still on the car.
Sunday night Ali and I watched a documentary I received via Netflix, Inside Job. The film documents the background of the financial implosion of 2008. It is some pretty incredibly awful stuff. The scope of greed and corruption that is outlined in detail is disgusting. I had no idea what a credit swap was going into the film. Now that I do, the idea that they are even legal seems absolutely ludicrous.
Derivatives and the extensive efforts that were made by these crooks to exclude them from regulation is another rotten egg in the basket of this mess. This is just another classic and all too common example of money running the political agenda instead of the desire for the common good.
I also found it very disappointing to see that basically since Ronald Reagen was in office and started this mess, there has been participation by every president since then to continue/grow this problem, including Clinton and Obama. Obama railed about how corrupt the system was during his campaign but when he got into office he appointed individuals that were integral in creating the financial disaster that hit us (Larry Sommers, Tim Geither)
It also became clear that Alan Greenspan, whom was acclaimed as a financial genius for most of his couple decade tenure as chairman of the fed was actually a huge cog in the wheel of corruption.
The movie will have you shaking your head in disgust so much that you will need to pop a couple Advil the next day. Do yourself a favor and watch it and get informed. Don’t expect to be happy about what you see, you will be disgusted. It just reenforced my feeling that there is so much corruption in the world that the only real solution is to blow it all up and start over. Of course the film gets an A from me.
Our Monday was pretty nice. Mid-morning we loaded the bikes up for a nearly 20 mile ride. Ali was trying to do intervals on the ride on the east/west segments of the rectangle route. She really was working hard on the into the head wind segments. She really struggles with her bike endurance at this point, something I know she wants to get better at in 2012.
Later in the day I wanted to start off my 2012 like I ended 2011 with another attempt at a physical challenge. This time I was attempting a non-Bar-barian challenge. Instead this one was run by Fitstream and being judged by a couple of my bar buddies that live in the UK. This challenge was dead hang pull ups.
A dead hang pull up is tougher because between each rep you have to hang fully extended at the bottom of the rep before pulling back up. To ensure there was adequate pause at the bottom the contest also requires for you to say “one second” before pulling back up. This contest had some additional rules as well like having to prove the date of the attempt and including your name and location in the video info since there are actual prizes to the winners. (unlike Bar-barian forum challenges)
Much like my muscle up challenge a couple days prior, I really pushed to get absolutely every rep that I could. I managed to squeeze out 20 reps, only two short of my all time, non-dead hang record of 22. 20 dead hangs is no joke. My video was the first one posted in the contest. I was pleased it was well received by the community, all of the comments thus far have been very positive.
As you can tell I had a busy weekend preparing video. In addition to the exercise videos, I finally got around to publishing the footage I shot during the Rav 4 brake work. You will notice the muscle up video has some different video elements to it. This is because I used AVS video editor to do it. I was having some issues with black video in my normal video editor, Windows Movie Maker.
Through some digging I found out that the issue was actually caused by the current version of the Nvidia drivers I was running. I updated to the newer beta drivers and the problem disappeared. I like the AVS suite but for quick and simple editing Movie Maker works just fine.
Doing all of this video work gave me ample time to put the new beefier computer to work. I was quite happy to see it chews through video compilations dramatically faster. If I were to estimate I would say it takes around 25% of the time the Lenovo did to do similar work.
Last night in bed I finished up watching a documentary I stumbled upon via a Hulu suggestion, called Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead. The film is a self documentary of an entertaining Australian dude going on a 60 day fast where he consumed nothing but juiced fruits and vegetables.
In addition to the creators results, the film also documented the results of a 429 pound truck driver that was inspired by Joe. Both men made dramatic turn arounds in their health. Joe lost around 100 pounds from the 300 + pounds he started at (not all during the fast) and the 400 pounder had dropped 200 pounds!
Although 60 days of doing nothing but drinking your food is extreme, even doing a shorter, periodic 10 day mini-fast has the potential to dramatically improve someone’s well being.
I half jokingly asked Ali if she would consider trying a 10 day juicing fast. To my surprise she said she would be game for it. Even for people like us that eat much cleaner than most, going all juice would be a challenge to pull off for sure. The curve people seem to follow on it is the first couple days are pretty damn awful as you fight the urge to eat your normal diet. However by the end of the 10 days it is almost universal that you feel fantastic.
I am willing to take the plunge, doing it with Ali will make it more tolerable for sure.