You may recall my ranting on Friday regarding a long scratch I discovered on the right rear quarter panel of the SSR when I got out of the car Friday morning. I was incensed that some idiot would be so careless as to scratch my pride and joy especially since I am so careful with where I park it in public. I proclaimed the majority of the population as assholes for their part in this travesty.
So when I got home I just happened to glance at the air compressor that I have tucked in the front corner of the garage. I typically have it pushed right against the wall to make sure it is out of the way of the SSR which gets parked on the same side. Well I noticed that the compressor wasn’t up against the wall like it normally is, it was cocked a little bit, hmmm.
I continued my observation, bending down and looking at the handle of the compressor, which was pointed out into the main garage space. Hmmm there are two areas where something obviously rubbed against it! The light was dawning on me, could I have really done this myself?? Well the tape measure verified my stupidity, when I saw the height of the handle matched the height of the scratches on the truck. Mother f, I am the asshole!
I couldn’t believe I scraped the air compressor, to do so would mean I had to be VERY close to the wall when I backed in over the weekend. I assume because I had the windows up and the stereo loud I hadn’t even heard the noise of paint being removed. Damn now I was really pissed, at myself.
I immediately took steps to prevent this from ever occurring again, wrapping the handle of the air compressor in pipe insulation and duct tape. I also turned it so the handle is now pointing towards the front of the garage where it is even less likely to ever make contact with the SSR.
I had a very unconventional Friday evening, instead of relaxing while eating pizza and watching recorded Tivo content I spent the majority of the evening playing mechanic once again. I had picked up Mom’s Rav 4 the night before to do some additional adjustment on the rear brakes.
I decided I would do a live broadcast of the brake work, you can watch it here if your life is totally devoid of anything better to do. So I started on the passenger side first. After removing the drum I thought it would be a good idea to step on the brake pedal to see if could better hear the spring noise mom was talking about.
I pressed on the brakes a few times and heard nothing so I pressed on the pedal even harder and then I did hear something. It turns out that noise was the one pad slipping off the adjuster bolt. Pushing that hard allowed the brake shoes to expand much further than they would while inside a drum, causing it to pop off. Damn it.
So to get everything back together correctly I had no choice but to take the brake apart again. Luckily my experience from a couple weeks prior made the process less scary even though it still is a bit of a pain in the ass to get it all hooked back together correctly.
After getting everything connected and mounted I was able to start adjusting the brake shoes outward using the star wheel. It was a trial and error process where I would expand the pads a bit, put the drum on, pull the emergency brake a few times to seat the pads and then see how it felt.
After getting the passenger side done I moved to the driver side to repeat the process. This was the side that it seemed like the spring noise was originating from when I drove the vehicle. I carefully inspected everything but did not see anything that looked suspicious. I adjusted the shoes outward, put the tire back on and took it out for a test drive.
I noticed an immediate difference in the way the brakes felt. Originally I had thought I would also need to bleed the brakes because mom was complaining they felt soft. Well that feel was probably due to the rear shoes barely even touching the drums because they were too retracted. With the shoes pushed out the pedal felt much firmer and grabbed higher. The mysterious spring noise had also disappeared in the adjustment process which I was glad about.
Adjusting the rear brakes also corrected the parking brake issue where despite pulling the handle as far as it will go the parking brake didn’t feel like it was securely engaged. After the adjustment the handle causes the brakes to grab securely.
After I finished with mom’s brakes I decided to take a whack at cleaning up my self imposed SSR damage using Scratch-X, a product I have had good success with in the past. After about 10 minutes of elbow grease I was able to greatly improve the appearance of the scratch. If you get your nose down there you can still see it but if I don’t point out to you it would remain invisible. The two vehicle projects were a rewarding way to kick off my weekend.
Saturday morning I planned to go do the club group run. I had originally pegged that I would like to run 10 miles. It was pretty chilly with temps in the 40’s. I decided to don my UA long sleeve cold gear top that I used for the Mudder. I wound up running with Michelle and a friend of hers named Katie. Katie is a little tiny thing but she is a good runner. I let her set the pace since I wasn’t in the mood to push for any PR’s.
They only planned to do 7 miles. During the first half of the run I decided I would cut my distance to 7 as well. Participating in the conversation with the girls was making the distance go down easier. I figured cutting the 3 miles won’t kill me and I had lots of stuff to do anyway so the extra half hour saved won’t be wasted. We wound up doing the 7 miles at a decent 9:30 pace. It was a good run.
I had brought the Camry with to the run. My plan was to take it through the same car wash I took mom’s Rav 4 through before Christmas since they did a pretty damn nice job for $20. I was bummed to see that they weren’t open when I pulled up to it. I guess it was sort of dumb of me to assume they would be open at 7:30, oh well. I hoped that maybe if I got everything done around the house I could come back later and run the car through.
On the drive home I called mom and let her know I would be able to drop her car back off before she had to go into work. She was surprised I had it all done already. She tells me repeatedly how she doesn’t like driving my truck so I figured the quicker she got her Rav 4 back, the better. Plus I had a number of errands to run that I could hit along the way.
So when I got home I asked the girls the magical phrase”do you wanna go for a ride??” Of course they did but were confused when I directed them into mom’s Rav 4, a vehicle they never rode in before. I put down the rear sets to allow for more roaming room. The dogs eventually jumped in with Nicki opting for the rear trunk area and Sadie choosing to ride shotgun, normally her favorite spot.
I hadn’t told mom I was bringing the dogs so she was surprised to have the two of them charging towards her on the lanai when we got there. I told mom that the brakes felt much better but she was welcome to go take a test drive if she wanted to verify it for herself. She said she trusted my evaluation.
So I had a number of stops on the way home, the first one was Pet Supermarket to pick up dog food. As we entered the store one of the women behind the desk said how cute the dogs were and how sad it makes her because they look just like her dog.
Confused, I asked why that made you sad. The women explained that she had to just put her beloved black lab named Buddy down a week ago. I asked her what happened.
She said Buddy had bad arthritis for awhile. She actually had a hip surgery done on the dog try to alleviate some of his discomfort and pain. Well even with the surgery Buddy, who was 13, still was having a lot of problems getting around.
She came home from work the one day and found that Buddy had fallen and was having difficulty moving. The vet told her that Buddy had broken something in his back and was now partially paralyzed. Well despite this the women was not willing to give up. She spent the next week taking care of the dog basically being with him full time. Well when she had to go out eventually to get something she came back and was horrified at what she saw.
Somehow Buddy had managed to drag himself across the floor but wound up getting stuck under some furniture. The dog was crying loudly as she came in and was in a puddle of his own urine. She knew she had to put him down despite it literally breaking her heart to do so.
As she described the scene at the vet’s office it started to make me choke up. She said as Buddy was lying on the table as the medicine was being administered he kept licking the tears off the woman’s face, almost like he was telling her it was ok. It was so freaking sad…. I simply can’t imagine going through that with our dogs.
After the unexpected tear jerking story at the pet store I continued my errands. I stopped at Target to grab a foot bath, a less fancy model than what we bought mom for Christmas. I want it to soak my feet in epsom salt. I have read that doing so is a good way to knock out funky toenails of which I have three. I would really like to clear them up without going the medicinal route. I heard that stuff has a lot of potential unwanted side effects that I would rather not deal with.
I then walked a few doors down to Staples. Ali had a coupon that was expiring that day as well as some Staples Rewards dollars to spend. I walked in not sure I was going to buy. After some wandering around I came across the monitor section. It then hit me.
I have my monster 27 inch monitor and a second, 19″ monitor connected to my PC. The second monitor is conventional 4:3 aspect ratio which has annoyed me due to the decrease in space compared to the wide screen format. I saw they had a 23″ Acer monitor on clearance for $114, wow, that is cheap.
In my head I came up with a two stage plan. I attach the 23 incher to my system as the new second screen and then I move my existing 19 incher over to Ali’s computer, giving her the chance to experience how much better it is to have two screens instead of one. Try it and you will never want to go back.
With the coupon and reward vouchers I walked out of there paying 80 some bucks for a 23″ monitor, damn nice deal.
So when I got home I dug into the meat and potatoes of the housework both inside and out. In less than two hours I had it all handled. Early in the afternoon I had the time to drive the Camry back down to the car wash. Once again I was completely satisfied with the result. For $20 they do a damn nice job both inside and out (Calypso Car Wash).
While I was waiting for the car to come out I was approached by a young kid that was handing out business cards for a new business that was located right behind the car wash. They repair small paint chips and scratches. He said they are running a deal until mid-February where they will go over an entire car for $200. The SSR immediately came to mind with both the monster scratch I put in the side as well as some other small blemishes I have identified during car washing sessions. I told the kid he might be hearing from me.
Saturday night I was going to a retirement party for a co-worker of mine. I was feeling quite tired since I got up at 4:30 to go run. I figured an attempt at a nap would make sense. I wasn’t very successful, laying in bed for around an hour being awake more than asleep. Oh well I guess it was better than nothing.
I had a good time at the party. Debbie lives in a 55+ community. A lot of her retired neighbors were in attendance. It didn’t take long until the party divided into a retired and actively working crowd. We spent a good portion of the evening out on the lanai huddled around a cool propane fueled fire pit to keep warm in the cool night temperatures. We outlasted the old people and closed out the party around 11:30 or so.
I woke up to a beautiful day on Sunday, it was so nice outside with cool but not cold temps, bright blue skies and low humidity. I was looking forward to the day since I knew I already had almost all of the required labor behind me. The girls and I started off the day with our pretty regular trip to DD.
On the way we passed a number of triathletes. This weekend some traveling race organizer was putting on their first ever triathlon in our area. When I first heard of the event months ago it seemed pretty ambitious. They were putting on basically every possible tri distance including sprint, open, olympic, half Ironman and even the daunting FULL IRONMAN.
I could not believe that they would be able to organize such an event in Naples, especially with the traffic control needs for such long courses. Well I heard from other local runners that the turnout for the event was not all that great. I heard somewhere around 600 people signed up in total which is not very much at all if you are breaking it across 5 events. I heard the Ironman division only had like 20 people in it.
Well I saw first hand that the event did indeed happen based on all the riders I saw on Immokalee Road. The event managers spent a FORTUNE on traffic control. Every intersection with a traffic light on Immokalee Road had at least one police man manning it, most had two. I heard they spent around $40,000 just to pay the sheriff’s office to man the roads, wow. Doing the math makes it seem impossible that they actually made any money on the race.
On Sunday they were doing the longer distance tri’s, we had bikers going out beyond our street, I am not quite sure how far out towards Immokalee they went. All I know is the ones I saw looked very, very tired. The cold weather couldn’t have made for a very enjoyable swim either. Like I mentioned, the air temps on Saturday morning were in the 40’s. The gulf water is also quite cold, clicking in at 59 degrees. I was quite glad I didn’t have the looney idea to participate in the event.
Mid-morning after I downed my extra large cup of coffee, I decided to head outside to my parallel bars to make my first attempt at hard mode of this month’s Bar-barian forum challenge. Hard mode involves doing 5 sets of max rep dips. You have a maximum of a scant 45 seconds to rest in between sets.
It was really a tough challenge. I pushed myself hard in the first set which made the remaining 4 sets very, very difficult. When I watched the video back I was bummed out. I realized that on most of my reps I was not getting full enough extension at the top of the movement, I couldn’t count it as an official attempt. It was annoying to go through all of that discomfort and not be able to officially count my 80 total reps but at least I burned out my triceps regardless. They hurt for a good portion of the day.
As I was inside waiting for the video to finish uploading to YouTube I decided to shoot a second video while seated at the desk. I get some questions regarding my exercise videos so I thought it would be cool to do a quick Q&A talking about some of those questions. I actually managed to speak rather clearly for the entire session which surprised me. If you would like to see it click here. I apologize for the out of synch audio and video later in the clip, not sure what happened there.
A little after lunch I packed the girls back into the van for our second “trip” of the day. Of course they were very excited. The drive was very short however, only a couple miles to that preserve Ali and I discovered last week. I thought it would be fun to go there for a hike with the dogs since they are actually allowed to be there.
When we pulled up there was only one other vehicle in the parking lot and the two people that were in it were just shooting pictures around there, we basically had the place to ourselves.
So we walked down a path to a boardwalk, it looked like a very similar set up to the long winding board walk that cuts through Corkscrew Swamp. I thought this was entirely cool, we get to enjoy a scene like Corkscrew without having to pay the $10 a head to do so. On top of that we can take the dogs, how awesome.
Well the boardwalk ended after probably less than a half mile and you are dropped down onto a path, a path surrounded on either side by in your face swamp.
It was a bit of a weird feeling. When we were up on the boardwalk you felt immersed in the environment while at the same time being somewhat protected by the man made structure. Once you hit the path you were right at swamp level, free to interact with the surroundings or for the surroundings to interact with you. I kept in mind the sign at the entrance that depicted some of the wildlife that exists in the preserve including bears, panthers and of course alligators.
Well it didn’t take long at all until that fact was made crystal clear. A couple hundred yards off the ramp we came upon a large drainage pipe that connected the water that was on either side of the path. As we approached all of a sudden we hear a loud splash followed by very violent thrashing. Evidently there was a gator on the bank right by the path and it decided to take off. Both the dogs and myself were quite startled.
For the remainder of the walk I spent as much time scanning both banks for perspective predators as I did taking in the beautiful scenery. I actually thought it might be a smart thing to bring a knife with me on our next trip through the swamp. If something came after me or the dogs I wouldn’t mind having something to tip the scales in my favor as remote of a possibility as that may be.
The dogs were of course loving this adventure. They soon learned after my repeated corrections that drifting over towards the water edge was a no no. Sadie lead the way for most of the walk out like she normally does.
My plan was to walk about 45 minutes into the preserve before turning around and heading back. I was quite glad that I decided to wear my backpack complete with water for both myself and the dogs. Despite the cool start to the day, by mid-afternoon it had warmed up considerably, close to 80 degrees. Both of the dogs drank quite a bit each time I put the bowl down.
Once we turned around to head back it became obvious that both dogs were starting to fatigue, neither of them gets to do much extended cardio as evidenced my Sadie’s latest weigh in at the vet, tipping the scales at a hefty 65 pounds. (she was 38 pounds when we adopted her) The dog’s pace was much slower as we headed back, I found myself bumping into their rear ends repeatedly.
On the way back I actually took pictures of two alligators one of which is the same one that scared the shit out of us. The dogs didn’t notice either gator as they were floating there still as statues.
The dogs were quite glad to make it back into the van, they were so pooped. I was quite excited to find this little gem right in our backyard. I know Ali will love going there with the dogs. If you want to see all the picture I took while there, click here.
Later Sunday afternoon I decided to watch Machete once I saw the Giants game was a blow out. Wow, what a movie. Machete is pretty much the ultimate man movie and makes no apologies for being over the top silly about it. The cast of characters for the film is pretty impressive including Steven Segal, Lindsay Lohan, Cheech, Don Johnson, Robert Deniro, Jessica Alba and Michelle Rodriguez.
Despite blood and guts splattering across the screen on a regular basis I found myself laughing out loud repeatedly. It succeeds in the core function a movie should provide, entertainment, although it definitely will mostly appeal to the male gender. I’d give it an A-. Crack open a six pack and you will enjoy it even more.
I caught a good portion of the Steelers/Broncos game. Wow what a game. It looked like the Steelers were going to come back from a big deficit to finally end the Tim Tebow season of miracles. Instead it was Tebow pulling out yet another miraculous finish, hitting a wide receiver in stride on the first play overtime for a long touchdown. You really can’t help but pull for the guy.
Last night I decided to embark on what could be maybe another Lost-like experience, adding 24 to my Netflix queue. They have every season available for streaming. I know many people were hard core 24 addicts and I just never got involved. It will be interesting to see if I get hooked in. So far I like what I see through an episode and a half.
When I got home last night I had a package from Brooklyn, I was very excited to get this. One of the core Bar-barians, Zef (aka. Zakavelli, Devon) sent me a genuine Bar-barians shirt. He did this as a thanks for the work I have been putting into the Bar-barian forum with the monthly challenges. It was a very nice gesture.
