Duck dream, 2 hours of life “Stolen”, walking the edge of irresponsibility, in for 13.1, trimming the bush

On Friday night I had a weird dream.

I found myself back in my meat cutting days at Weis Market where I worked for over 3 years in my early 20’s.  I had just got done doing something in the front of the room when my boss, Bob, told me to get something from the cooler in the back.

As I was walking back I was shocked when I saw on a top of boxes an egg crate style container that had live baby ducks in it. These weren’t tiny just hatched ducks, they were about the size of Tuki.  I had no idea why we would have baby ducks in there but the possibilities disgusted me.  Almost on queue as I was standing by the crate of ducklings, one hopped out and fluttered into my chest were I caught it.

I hugged it close to me and immediately walked out the back door as Bob was asking me where I was going.  I didn’t answer him.  I was walking through a neighborhood, looking for a safe place to release the duck to freedom.  Everywhere I looked it seemed there were gangs of stray cats that would love to take out the duck.

I walked and walked for a long time.  Finally I found myself in some remote forest with a nice stream.  Despite being held all this time the duck hadn’t made any fuss, almost like he knew I was his ticket to freedom.  I set the baby duck down in the water and smiled as I saw him happily paddle away.  By the time I got back to the meat room there were baby ducks walking around everywhere. End of dream.

Saturday morning I got up to do the club run.  My plan was to do one more 10 mile run which would be my final barometer in my decision if I was going to run the Hooters Half Marathon which is one week away.

I ran the first half 3.5 miles with Matt.  I ran the rest by myself although I did benefit from others being there.  During the last 3.5 mile segment, far ahead of me I spotted a woman that I designated that I wanted to pass.  I was making up ground on her tediously slow but the quest to pass kept my pace up.  I actually wound up running the last 3.5 faster than the first 3.5 miles.  I hit my goal when I finally passed her with about 300 yards to go till the park entrance.

I wound up covering the 10 miles, basically the same 10 miles that I felt so horrible on two weeks ago, almost 10 minutes faster, running at an average 8:47 pace, a couple seconds within what I did at last years half.  So I had no more excuses to not sign up for the half marathon, which I did later in the weekend.  It is going to be a tall order to beat my time from last year but I plan to utilize my “acquire target, run down target, acquire next target” strategy to get me through it.

On my way home from the run I picked up the dogs since Ali was working.  Compared to last weekend I had few things on the to do list.  One of them was to quickly run the tractor around the yard to mow down the few weeds that were sticking up above the mostly dormant grass.

Saturday afternoon I decided to attend a running club function at South Street.  They had a speaker from the local hospital come in to speak on achieving and maintaining better balance in your physical well being.  Of course I was already pretty well versed on that subject but the free food and a chance to hang out with some of my running club buddies made me decide to go. Plus it was a good excuse to drop the top on the SSR and go for a ride.

I had three beers during the 2 hour event and had a good time.  I was a bit surprised that out of the roughly 50 rsvp’s we received, almost 20 people didn’t show up.

I had a in home Saturday night planned since I was keeping the dogs overnight.  I had received my latest Netflix dvd in the mail, Moon, and wanted to watch it.  I had heard it recommended now by three different sources.  Moon is about a guy that lives alone on the moon in the future, running a mostly automated mining operation.  That is all I will tell you, which isn’t much.  However I thought the film was very well done, it was kind of a throwback to when sci-fi was less about special effects (SE still great anyway), and more about an interesting story.  Moon delivers, rent it.  Solid A from me.

Before bed I flipped on the bedroom Xbox and saw they were offering a free rental of a movie called Stolen, which I never heard of.  I thought it was was a bit odd I never heard of it since it was released in 2012 and it starred Nicholas Cage.  Well after viewing the film, I had a much clearer understanding of why that was, it sucks.

Normally a film with an action/revenge theme will win me over.  Well Stolen is just so incredibly stupid on so many levels it lost me very early on.  The bad guy crosses the line from evil to moronically silly so many times it makes me not care when he gets what is due to him in the end.  The casting of the daughter in the film was horrible as well.  Her attachment to Nick Cage was so manufactured and wooden I had to lol a few times.  You name it, it’s all there, bad acting, predictable plot, ridiculous scenarios, the movie blows from start to finish.  I see why they were giving it away.  My advice to you is to not watch it unless they pay YOU to do so. It gets a D from me.

So I awoke Sunday to a day that really had no major focal point.  I had the vast majority of my to do’s done.  Wow, could I actually have a Sunday where I was just lazy?  What do you think?

To get my exercise fix in I did a quick attempt at one of the BB challenges for this month.

Then later in the morning I had an odd series of events go down.  I had been seeing listings of Mitsubishi DLP’s for really attractive prices for a few weeks.  Evidently Mitsubishi is getting out of the tv business so the sets that are still left in the sales channel can be had at deep discounted prices.

You may ask why I would even be looking at a big DLP tv? I already have one, a 5 year old 73 incher that consumes practically every inch of entertainment “nook” in my great room.  Well I was thinking it would be cool to have one of the newer Mitsu’s that supports 3D, has 5 less years on the odometer and has some additional features my set doesn’t have.  Plus I could give mom my old set.  In my head, these things made sense, at least for a few hours yesterday.

So anyway, I was on slickdeals.net and saw that HH Gregg had an in store special of remaining Mitsubishi 73 inch tv’s for a great price of $799.  For reference, 5 years ago I spent well over 2k for mine.  Some stores had them still, some didn’t.

So just for the hell of it, I called our local store and was told by a guy named Chuck that they had one remaining and it was a display model.  He said that would knock an extra 10% off the price down to a crazy low $700.  Wow.  I was now in full emotional buying (like emotional eating), logic out the window mode.  I told Chuck I would be down to take a look.

I was so sure I was coming back with a new TV that I threw my ratchet straps in the back and two blankets to protect it from harm since it is a display model.  I get down there, walk in the store, and am a bit shocked that there are 7 or 8 men in read shirts staring at me, all HH Gregg staff with nothing to do.  There literally were more staff on the floor than customers.

I briefly said hi as I marched back to the tv section, obviously not requiring any assistance.  I saw the Mitsubishi sitting on a stand by itself.  It looked pretty much identical to mine albeit with some different A/V ports.  I was quickly greeted by a sales guy asking if I needed help.  I told him I talked to Chuck on the phone and would like to wait for him.  He said Chuck was helping a customer but would be with me shortly, ok cool.

I walked around the set some more checking it out, noticing how it was manufactured in October, meaning it wasn’t sitting around all that long, cool.  I thought of how it would be nice to have a fresh tv that I won’t need to be concerned about for a number of years and what a great deal I was going to score. And then it happened,  the voice of logic managed to crawl out from under the pile of bullshit reasons to buy the tv and said “What the fck are you doing?”

I started to reevaluate my reasons to buy the tv one by one.  Ok this tv has 3D support, cool.  How often do I watch 3D movies?  Not much.  When a 3D and 2D version of a movie is in theaters  I really don’t care which I see at this point, the newness has worn off and in fact 3D effects can get downright annoying at times and take away from the film.

Then I moved on to the logic of buying a new tv that is the same size of my existing tv.  There is nothing wrong with my current set.  In fact I just paid $200 a few months back to fix it.  Yes the price of the new TV was great but I could spend $700 less and still have a 73 inch great looking tv to look at, as well as not having to go through the hassle of installing it and transporting the old one by myself.

I then reminded myself that the Tacoma needs 4 new tires a lot more than I need a tv.  In fact there were countless better ways that money could be put to use.  So in the span of 60 seconds I had totally flipped my position.  Chuck had not gotten free yet and it was a good thing.  It saved me from having to awkwardly explain that I had come to my senses. I quietly exited the store, once again passing the hoard of salespeople with nothing to do, except Chuck.

I hopped back in my truck a bit disappointed that my compulsive buying itch was not scratched but at the same time knowing I would be avoiding the buyers remorse that would have been sure to follow.

So when I got home after my near miss tv purchase I was feeling conflicted.  I knew with as hard as I worked last weekend there was nothing wrong with me not wanting to do any projects this weekend.  Plus it was hot and humid on Sunday with temps crossing 85 degrees.  The project I was thinking about doing was cutting down the palmetto bush by the garden.

The palmetto bush has bothered me forever.  One time I spent a lot of time trimming it back hard to make it look a little better.  In no time it became overgrown and ugly looking once again.

So anyway, I was fighting the urge to start the project.  However I grabbed my new cordless reciprocating saw mid-afternoon and walked down to the bush.  I thought that maybe I would just try out my new saw to see how it works.  Well that was the beginning of the end.

At first I thought I would just zip off a few branches.  Well then a few became a few dozen, then after the battery died, out came the extension cord and my original sawz all.  I worked my ass off for a couple hours, sweating and cursing myself along the way for not being able to just chill out.

By the time I was finished the bush looked like this.  I am hoping to get my neighbor to help me using his large tractor to dig/rip the base of the palmetto out of the ground.  It will be a MAJOR pain in the ass to try to do that by hand.

I had some good news in my fight to cut back usage of web host resources by the Bar-barians web site.  Since I implemented a Cloudfront CDN I saw the usage numbers on the site go down dramatically.  Well my good feelings were short lived when I saw another email from my web host this morning that basically said “good, but not good enough”.

Take a look at Feb 23rd and 24th, the first two FULL days of using the CDN. (22nd had it up for part of the day)  The daily bandwidth which at some points was approaching 7 gigabytes was reduced DRAMATICALLY to less than 300 meg.

But the focus of my web hosts email was CPU time which has dropped a lot as well but still over their threshold for shared servers.

Well I noticed that actually this blog is consuming a large share of cpu minutes as well, which I never really paid attention to.  I know a LOT of people read my daily brain dump but I never thought it was enough to put a big dent in my server usage.  Well it is, using about 40% of my total cpu time.   In fact, if I do the same style of optimization on this blog as the Bar-barians site I am pretty sure I can get my overall usage back under the threshold where they will leave me alone.  That would be awesome.

The pool deck is scheduled to be painted on Wednesday.  I was undecided on what color I wanted to paint it, the wall color or the accent color.  After getting some opinions I decided I am going with the accent color.  If I used the wall color it would just be way too much with absolutely nothing to break it up.  The accent color is darker and warmer both of which will give the deck a dramatically different appearance from the off white color it was originally painted. The darker color also will not be so quick to look dirty. I think the end result will be pretty cool.