Self gifted

My four day holiday weekend started off with timing a race in Marco Island.  It was supposed to be very cold (it was) and it was also Ali’s birthday so I told her she could stay home in bed if she wanted to.  She opted to come out anyway.

I had on 4 layers of clothing on my upper body, my Eagles knit beanie and the thin gloves I use for outside work.  Even with all of this I still found myself pretty damn cold during various parts of the morning.  I had a few glitches during the race but for the most part the timing went ok.

Ali got a treat when at the awards ceremony the club president lead the crowd in singing her happy birthday.  Of course she was embarrassed but also appreciated the efforts.

As I was doing the race prep I shot footage for a video I posted on the GCR Facebook page outlining what is involved in race timing.

After getting home I tried to take care of as much stuff as I could around the house although I was feeling quite tired from the 3:45am wake up.  I went out Saturday night, first to a bar that is housed inside of the local Whole Foods store.

A running club buddy told me about this bar, I thought he was kidding at first.  It turned out to be very cool.  In the back corner of the busy organic grocery store is a very nice little bar.  You have the option to buy wine/beer off their shelves and enjoy it at the bar very affordably or order stuff by the bottle/glass in a conventional manner if you like.

The young guy that was behind the bar was incredibly nice and friendly, he was very interested in making sure that we enjoyed ourselves.  I gave him a huge tip, hell it is the holiday season and he deserved it.  What a great guy.

That was followed up with dinner at Seasons 52 where I had another really nice dining experience.  That place has quickly rocketed up my favorite restaurants list.

On Sunday we had a “party” planned at another running club board member’s place.  This party was actually a ruse for what was really some mind numbing labor that I needed help with.  I had 2500 race bibs that needed to have 2500 timing devices affixed to them.

I loaded up the truck with several boxes of the raw materials needed for this project and then picked up Ali on the way.  I didn’t have a clear game plan of exactly how we were going to do this and still keep things accurate and organized.

When I received the timing devices I was also sent a file that mapped each bib to a unique sequential number.  The first device had a unique number ending in 7500, the next was 7501, then 7502, etc…  My plan at first was to make sure the bibs they were affixed to made sense, so 7501 would be bib 1, 7502, bib 2…

Well at it’s peak we probably had at least a dozen people there helping to affix the chip to the bib, which was a very tedious process.  The timing device just barely fit on the back of the bib and had to be carefully placed between the holes that are used for pins.  With two tables of people working away it almost felt like we were in a Chinese Iphone factory.

So early on in the process I decided that trying to keep the bibs associated with the timing device numbers was more trouble than it’s worth.  Instead I was having people just hand me their stacks of completed bibs and then I would run them one at a time over the USB scanner attached to a laptop.  This way people could work faster since they didn’t have to worry about matching specific tags to bibs and I got to double check that each timing device was functional.

This did definitely help speed things up for everyone else.  Unfortunately it made my job pretty immense.  Before long I had stacks upon stacks of bibs on the floor beside me, waiting to be scanned.  The army of bib assemblers far outpaced my ability to scan the bibs in.  I was probably scanning bibs close to an hour after the last one had been assembled.  My arm and back was aching by the end of it.  Out of the 2500 bibs I only had one that appeared to be dead.

Attending the bib party meant I didn’t catch any of the Eagles game which was no big deal as they once again lost, pretty much welding shut the door on Andy Reid’s tenure as the Eagles coach.

One thing I was interested in was how my fantasy football team was doing since I was in the championship game.  I wound up losing despite scoring a big 134 points.  It was a bit frustrating when I saw that if I would have started the San Diego defense instead of the Texans I could have pulled out a win.

So for the second time in my fantasy football career I came up one game short of winning it all.  Despite falling short, financially I made out well, more than doubling my $200 team entry fee in prize money.

Sunday night I had an unexpected and unpleasant visit from what felt like stomach flu/food poisoning.  All of a sudden I found myself feeling very cold, nauseous, and tired.  That was followed by a couple bathroom trips that were pretty horrific.  Thank goodness it came and went.

On Monday, Christmas Eve, I found myself with quite a long list of to do’s.  I had a number of last minute things to pick up as well as a bunch of things to get organized and wrapped at the house.

I was on the go for a good portion of the day but did find a few minutes to sneak in an attempt at the push up mode of this month’s BB challenge.

Obviously this holiday season has been very different from any other of my adult life with the relationship changes that have gone down in 2012.  One such difference was for the first time ever and I mean ever, I didn’t watch a single Christmas special, something in the past I always enjoyed and looked forward to.

This 2012 Christmas Eve followed the same unconventional feel.  It didn’t feel like Christmas Eve in the least unless I happened to turn the corner and saw the tree with presents surrounding it.

For years I have bitched and moaned how Christmas just never feels like I hoped it would anymore.  For some reason the fact that it doesn’t feel like it did when I was young still disappoints me, even though it is irrational to think it ever would feel the same.  It is what it is.

Another deviation from typical Christmas Eve protocol was the lack of my mom sleeping in the guest room.  Since moving to Florida mom has always come over the night before so she is around for the bright and early present opening ceremonies.  Mom had developed a pretty awful cold so we agreed I would just run out and pick her up Christmas morning.

I awoke Christmas morning later than expected.  When I talked to mom the day before I told her I would pick her up something like 7:00 to 7:30am.  When I said it I meant 7:30, mom took it as meaning as she needed to be ready to go at 7:00.  My eyes focused on the clock from my bed at 7:04am.

I got out of bed and called mom right away.  She was annoyed since she got herself up at 6 am since I told her I would be there by 7.  I reminded her I told her 7-7:30 but it didn’t make her feel any better.  I hopped in the SSR and hauled ass to her place, picking her up 15 minutes after my original 7:30 time window, oh well.

Ali was going to bring the dogs out around 9 so we decided that we would eat breakfast BEFORE opening any presents.  This was another “never before” thing.  Hell there were times the wrapping paper would start getting torn at 6AM.  Even with the blah adult Christmas experiences of recent years still, everything is already torn apart by 8AM.  This year a present wasn’t even touched till damn close to 10AM, wow.

The present stash understandably was different this year as Ali and I agreed to not buy anything for each other.  Despite this, I had quite a pile of gifts under the tree with a “S” on them.  Some of them were presents sent to me by my brother and dad which I wrapped.  However about half of them were the various self gifts I purchased myself.

Yea I guess it is weird but I still kind of enjoyed opening up my packages I wrapped myself with care.  Some of my self gift highlights were my Daisy air rifle and micro helicopter.

Despite our edict to not buy each other anything I did sneak in a gift for Ali.  It was something very practical that she needed, a Neato.  She felt bad that I did an end around of our agreement but I told her it was not a big deal.

Mom had a ton of little things to open up, most of them were somehow money related, the gift that keeps on giving. The dogs were excited as always to open their presents which included various toys and treats.

I got to talk to Todd and Torrin before taking mom back home.  While mom was on the phone with Todd I got to play with some of my toys.  I popped a few holes in a Diet Coke can from about 40-50 feet away with my air rifle.  It seems that the gun shoots left and low of the sight.  I will need to see what sort of adjustments I can make.  I quickly discovered that pumping an air rifle can be extremely tough on the forearms.

On my way back I stopped at Ali’s to set up the Neato.  We did a quick test run.  It looks like the Neato will be a big help with staying on top of the non-stop flow of dog fur that tries to take over Ali’s place.

When I got home I did still have one thing that is a long standing Christmas tradition, depression.  When the gift giving festivities are over, even on a year like this where I basically just bought crap for myself, I feel bummed out.  It always happens and I always dislike the feeling.

For whatever reason I find the process of cleaning up and putting away things very sullen.  It’s hard to verbalize why it still would bother me since Christmas isn’t really Christmas to much of a degree anymore.  Maybe it is just all the build up to the day from the outside world.  Even if I am not excited about the day, a lot of people are, and to have the big moment come and go must still deflate me.  Of course when I noticed later in the night that it also happens to be a full moon right now it helped to explain the bad feelings further.

During the afternoon I tried to put some of that negative energy to use out on the pull up bar.  I hoped to beat my one set max of 30 reps I pulled off a couple weeks ago.  I had to stop my momentum early on in the set because of some back and forth swinging that probably sabotaged my number as I only could manage 28 reps, still more than respectable.

Saturday night I was invited to a Christmas party held at the huge, beautiful house of the running club president.  I was seriously considering just bagging it and not going because of my mood and sort of feeling ill.  However when I talked to my dad later in the afternoon, mentioning both my bad mood and the party invite he said I should just go.  I took his advice since pushing myself into things that I am either uncomfortable with or not wanting to do has been a motto since the split. I hopped in the SSR and headed out.

I was one of the first guests to arrive.  I got to meet Mitch and Erica’s new dog, Diesel, he was such a loveable dog.  I lost count of how many times I petted him throughout the night.  I volunteered to help with the ton of things that were getting prepared.  At first I was the vegetarian chili stirrer.  Later I got to bake a pan of potato skins.  When given the choice, I would much rather have the option to do something while socializing.  Just sitting there and doing nothing but mingling is not my forte, at all.

I brought my own fun juice, a six pack of Bud Light Platinums.  I drank them all, so you can imagine I was quite affected for awhile, I was.  The alcohol helped loosen up my mouth and inhibitions, when the party was in full swing I was bouncing around pretty well.

I stuck around almost to the very end, Ali and a few others helped with clean up.  My primary role in the process was taking full recyclable bags out to the garage.  I headed out somewhere around 11.  I put on a sweatshirt and dropped the top on the SSR.  I had a nice drive home that included a full power acceleration onto the highway that touched triple digits very briefly. I love driving that truck.

I woke up this morning feeling like hell.  Calling in sick of work sounded like a very good idea.  Instead I did the honorable thing and drug my ass out of bed, sucked down some coffee at work and will plod ahead, clear of yet another Christmas day.