Race ace, Skyfail, 28 trees later, good natured loser

Saturday morning I had another race to time.  Right now I am entering a tough stretch where I have a race going on for 3 consecutive weeks.  Saturday’s race was not too bad though for two reasons.  It only had 200 runners and it was a longer distance, 15K so I had plenty of time to get everything up and running.  Even so I did have a couple weird issues pop up which resulted in a block of lost times that I had to recover using unconventional means.

When I got home I spent the next couple hours getting my indoor items taken care of after completing my post race duties.  After that I decided to go outside and at least start on the dreaded and hated annual tree trimming project.  I got the trees in the front yard trimmed before calling it quits for the day.

Saturday night I saw Skyfall, the latest James Bond film.  I had heard various good things about it which included praise from Roger Moore himself, who called Skyfall the best James Bond film ever, wow.  Well I think Roger, whom is now 85, may be suffering from dementia.

I like Daniel Craig as James Bond and I thought his first film, Casino Royale was really, really good.  The next Bond film was dumb.  I recall my thinking that it was one non-stop action scene with absolutely no attention paid to making an even mildly enjoyable story or plot.  Well with Skyfall they went 180 degrees in the other direction and made this film so much about story and plot (and not a very interesting one at that) that it was basically, boring.  Now granted, I was already half comatose when the movie started because I had been awake since 3:45am but the flick did little to help me stay awake.

I think the main villain in this was the weakest and silliest of any I have ever seen in a Bond film.  I felt no emotion when he gets his at the end, that tells you he wasn’t a very convincing bad guy.  The film also departed from typical Bond roots where James is always trying to save not only himself but also his current love interest in the end. There was none of that.

So anyway, obviously I didn’t really like the movie.  I’d give a C+.  I really would not encourage to spend theater type money to see it.

Sunday morning Ali dropped the dogs off at the house so I could watch them while she was going to work.  I had nothing but tree hell on my schedule so it worked out fine.

Speaking of trees….  every year I profess how awful this job is and that is because it IS awful.  In fact every year it gets a little more awful because trees grow taller.  I have a couple of them that are right at the upper limits of what I can reach with a 20 foot extension ladder and my 8 feet of reaching distance.

It’s the tall trees that are obviously the most dangerous.  In order to get the ladder as high as possible you need to have it standing at a shallow angle.  When the ladder is standing at a shallow angle you have very little margin for error when it comes to your balance.  With some of the limbs I was trying to generate leverage with the loppers directly over my head, you can see the potential for disaster.  I flirted with that potential several time where either the ladder shifted or  my center of gravity started to tip the wrong way.

On top of the danger is the pure misery of the work. F picking up trash, have the people that do prison work release come trim some cabbage palms.  They’ll never break the law again.

Up and down ladders, constantly working above your head utilizing your shoulders in all sort of painful ways.  My knees were killing me from them being propped against rungs of the ladders for hours and I must have hit the funny bone in my elbows at least a dozen times.

In addition to cutting palm fronds and seed branches, on several trees I spent considerable time with the machete.  The machete is the tool of choice to deal with old, dead crosshatch that populates the trunk of cabbage palms.  I hacked away like an crazed killer, sending wooden debris flying in all directions.

In total I pruned 28 trees, but that was only half the fun.  Now I had to go back around the property and pick up the hundreds of palm fronds and all of that wooden debris, throw it in the back of the Tacoma and then dump it in the fill pit at the back of the property.  I have no idea how many trips I made back and forth.

By the time I was all done it was 4pm.  Between the two days I probably spent 9 or 10 solid hours in tree hell.  Everything on my body hurt.  I took a shower and put on pajamas at 4:30 PM, who cares…  Next year, if I am still living here, I plan to buy a battery powered reciprocating saw (sawz-all) to make the job a little more bearable.

Hey, the Eagles lost again, this time it was to the hated Cowboys. To be honest I wasn’t really that bothered by it and actually saw some good things in this game.  If you looked at the score you would think the defense was horrible but actually, outside of the first quarter, they weren’t.  Most of those points came from special teams / turnovers.   The defense actually put a lot of pressure on Romo and for the most part played well for three quarters.

On offense we got to see the first real world test of Nick Foles at QB after Vick went out with a concussion.  For the most part I liked what I saw.  Yea he made a couple mistakes which is to be expected but f, compared to the amount of mistakes Vick makes, it’s nothing.  Foles made quick throws and seemed confident out there, not a scared kid.  It gave me some hope for the future since I think the Mike Vick experiment has just about run it’s course.

I also think the Andy Reid era has officially run it’s course.  In the past two weeks he set new “firsts’, the first time his team ever lost following a bye week and now the first time his team has EVER lost 5 games in a row.  I mean if the Eagles miraculously could win the rest of their games I guess it would save him but there is no way that is happening.  Everything changes sometime, it just so happens that 2012 looks to be that time for the big man.