Mid-week bulge, Bye Bose

So I took Wednesday off from work because I was scheduled to have the pool deck painted.  I woke up with my normal 5:30 alarm because I had stuff to do, most importantly pull everything off the pool deck.  Certain items were difficult to get outside with one set of hands, especially the 4 person table that sits in the covered portion of the lanai.

I planned to put my time at home to good work.  I figured while the deck was being worked on I could change the oil in the party van and the Tacoma since both were long overdue.  I also had someone coming to PM the AC system, something I had not had done since it was installed a year and a half ago.

The painters showed up first and got to work on the deck, cleaning and pressure washing it.  They covered the pool itself in plastic to minimize what got into the water.

The AC guys showed up maybe a half hour later.  I showed them where everything was and they got to work.  At one point I had a total of 6 guys working around the property.  It was a weird feeling.  That feeling was short lived.

Giovanni, the painting lead, said they finished up cleaning the deck and would be back in a day or two to do the actual painting.  I told him I thought it was going to all be done in one day.  He said the deck has to thoroughly dry first, plus the weather forecast for Wednesday had a decent chance of rain. (it did actually rain a little later)  Ok, I guess I misunderstood the process.  So the current plan is for them to come back Friday to resume the work.

The AC guys were quite thorough in their PM which I appreciated.  They said the system looked great which I was happy to hear.  They rolled out, so I quickly went from a staff of 6 to a staff of zero.

I got to work changing the oil on the two vehicles.  In the span of an hour I had both of them done and things cleaned up.

I figured I should use the unexpected free time to get some things done. The theme was get things done that normally wouldnt get done.  I dumped my two full used oil containers at Wal-mart and while I was there grabbed some AV cables to connect my new Yamaha AV receiver.  I just realized I hadn’t mentioned it in the blog yet.

I used my Amazon spiff points to buy a new AV receiver to replace my 12 year old Bose Lifestyle 20 system.  When the house was built, the Bose surround system was one of the crown jewels, I thought I was really putting in a nice system.  Over the years it lost a lot of luster in my eyes.  It broke once and required a lengthy repair process.  It still works now but the LCD display no longer does so operation of the head unit is based on feel alone.

I also found the radio frequency remote really annoying. Specifically, the fact that it wouldn’t allow the surround system to integrate with my Logitech Harmony remote.  If I wanted surround sound I had to perform additional steps that were a pain in the ass and required me to use two remotes instead of one.  As a result, over the years the surround sound system wasn’t used nearly as much as I hoped it would be because it was inconvenient.

So anyway, I bought a Yamaha system to replace it.  I had read that it was possible to connect it to the Bose speakers as long as you utilized the Bose huge, suitcase size amp as well.  Well it turns out that is possible with newer Bose systems but not with my ancient equipment.  So, I then hopped back on Amazon and bought an inexpensive but highly rated 5.1 Yamaha surround speaker set.

Despite not having speakers to hook it to, I installed the receiver the other night.  It is pretty awesome.  It is network connected which allows it to do cool things like play music off my home NAS and be completely controlled by an app on my Iphone.  I think once I get it all tweaked out it will be fantastic.  I just hope I can mount the new speakers without much fuss.

Ok so anyway, back to Wednesday.  After Wal-mart I did another thing I just never seem to get around to, getting a new beach parking pass for the Tacoma.  This years sticker is a big ugly red one that can be seen from 50 yards away.

My big project of the day was kind of a strange one.  I drove down to the Naples on the Run to buy, put together and set up a desk for behind the counter.  Carl, who runs the store had been given an old chest of drawers that he was awkwardly using as a computer desk.  I had told him he needed a desk and volunteered to set it up for him, so that’s what I did.

After taking some measurements of the space I had available, I headed across the street to an Office Depot and found a desk that would work.  It was a Sauder unit so that meant assembly required, lots of assembly.  In total I probably spent over three hours until I had the new desk in place.  It looked much better and afforded Carl a spot to comfortably work on his laptop.  He thanked me for all the work.  I like Carl and didn’t mind helping him out.

By the time I got home it was after 6.  I was looking forward to watching this weeks Walking Dead when I received three emails with a ton of attachments.  Evidently the woman in charge of the race that goes down Saturday had a large sponsor want to sign up a bunch of their employees.  The way they did this was 100% on paper, having their employees fill out forms and then scan them to PDF files.  It was a LOT of registrations, somewhere around 70.

I was quite annoyed as this was the least efficient way to handle the situation.  Normally if a company is going to sign up a bunch of people, the company pays and then we give the company a code they can give to employees to sign up online for free.

So instead I got to spend close to two hours manually entering paper registrations which were filled with incomplete information and bad handwriting.  I was not pleased.

This morning I had my six month dermatologist appointment.  Everything checked out, no burning/cutting/scraping required in the immediate future.