Archives July 2013

Ali came out to the house to pick up the dogs after their 5 day sleep over.  They of course were happy to see Ali as always and as always there is always a tinge of sadness in me when they leave.

I was hoping to get back out on the mower and knock down the high grass in the back half of the property however huge deluges of rain during the day washed those plans away.  Instead I filled my productivity needs by doing laundry, cleaning Tuki’s cage and the bathrooms, knocking weekend chore targets out of the way.

Speaking of the weekend, it looks like a potluck.  I will be doing some more Miata diagnostics/repairs and might get out to see some movie although I am not quite sure which one yet.

Sunday will probably involve some brick training although I am still smarting from my 355 pound dead lift on Wednesday.  Thankfully the knee that made an awful crunch appears to still be intact.  My lower back, ass and legs seem to have taken more of a hit.

Yea, that’s all I got…

So I got lucky and have had a day and a half with no rain, enough time to let the standing water recede back into the ground.  I didn’t want to waste the opportunity so after feeding the dogs I immediately headed out to hop on the tractor.  Even with my recent sharpening of the blades, the cut isn’t that great, especially on the sections that are extra shaggy, requiring a second pass at times.

I had the dogs out with me when I started the mowing but I left the screen door open in case they wanted to go back inside.  I was surprised that they both almost immediately went inside instead of hanging out in the yard.  However as soon as the dogs heard the tractor shut off when I parked it, they both came back out.  I guess the yard just isn’t as much fun unless I am out there with them.

I still had ample sunlight so I thought I would make my Wednesday evening ultra-productive by replacing the washer nozzles on the Tacoma.  I bought generic but highly rated replacements off Amazon.  The new nozzles utilize a wide fan spray pattern instead of the two stream nozzles that never worked all that well, that came with the truck.

Replacing the nozzles was easy and straightforward, but imagine my frustration when I tested the new nozzles and still had shitty flow out of the driver side.  I decided there had to be some sort of blockage in the piece of tube that ran from the junction at the passenger side nozzle to the driver side.   I had some spare washer line so I threw that in there.

I hopped back in the truck and fired off the washers, BINGO, I had a nice strong spray on both sides.  Since the washers on the truck never worked great, the minor $11 repair felt like it had major rewards.  Sometimes it’s the simple things…

Of course I recorded the job for my growing library of automotive maintenance videos.

After work last night I got home and was happy to see that Nicki was able to hold her urine this time.  We do this routine where I walk around the house making sure there are no “surprises” as Nicki follows me.  When we get back to the last spot, the master bathroom, without seeing any problem areas I throw my hands up and say “good girl!”.  Nicki wags her tail in pride and I reward her with a treat.

I quickly made the dogs supper which again Nicki immediately scarfed down, not leaving a single morsel.  I then hopped in the SSR to head back toward town for the running club meeting.  I figured if I was in a rush the SSR would be the vehicle to take.

As I was cruising down the highway, after a 0-100mph on ramp approach, a large bug smashed the windshield.  Without thinking I flipped on the windshield washer, despite going 85 mph and having the top down.  Well I got an unplanned washer fluid shower as the wind pressure pushed the fluid off the glass and into the passenger compartment. Dumb ass.

The running club meeting was a long one as there were three guests, two that were pitching new races and one talking about their existing race.  We didn’t get out of there until after 8.  As predicted I bypassed any South Street action although I think nobody wound up going anyway.

It feels like there are a number of maintenance chores around the house that I have been neglecting.  The garage and pool deck could use a Dirt Dog session. (if it still works after it’s latest dip in the pool)  The pool cage is starting to take on that lovely green tint that means it is time to pull out the pressure washer.  Parts of the back yard are starting to look like a wheat field from high grass.

I also am going to have to do something about my pool filter.  The hairline crack in the top lid that I tried to fix with PVC cement started leaking again, worse than before.  At first I thought I would have to replace the entire filter and gasped when I saw it could cost me close to $500 to do so.  Luckily more searching revealed I can just buy the top part of it where the crack is for less than $100, evidently this must be a common failure.  Even better I can get it via Amazon with free Prime shipping.  🙂

So yesterday was the first day for a new experiment with the dogs.  I had my neighbor from across the street come and let them out once during the day so I wouldn’t have to drive home and back over my lunch hour.  It was a partial success.

The house was feces free but Nicki was unable to hold her bladder.  Luckily the urine was in the kitchen so the ceramic tile made for easy clean up.  My neighbor came over a little early in the day, around 10:30 so that might have been making Nicki hold it just a little too long.

With her thyroid medicine, Nicki drinks a ton of water and as a result has to pee quite often.  Today the neighbor is going to come over closer to noon to see if it works out better.

So as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, Nicki had not been doing good with her eating.  She appeared to just be sick of the bland hypo-allergenic food she had been eating for 6 months or more.  Ali started including blanched chicken in Nicki’s meals and it has totally flipped around her attitude towards eating.

Before, when I put down the old stuff Nicki would just lay there and not even bother to go up to the dish most of the time.  Now she is sitting by my side as I prep the meals, dying with anticipation.  She has completely cleaned her plate 3 times, something she hadn’t done for me in months.

Of course this diet change requires more legwork, much more than opening a can and dumping it in a bowl.  I bought a big package of boneless chicken thighs at Sam’s, boiled them and put them in a big container in the fridge.  Before each meal I take a couple pieces out, put it in a small bowl with some water and microwave them for a minute.  Then I take them out, cut them into smaller pieces and insert her pills inside the chicken as well as adding a couple other supplements. This then gets mixed in with a can of dog food, she prefers it to get mixed with the Merrick that we used to feed her instead of the vet stuff.

It seems like for whatever reason Nicki likes when more prep work is put into her meals, perhaps just because that is how things were for years before her intestinal episode.  By the time I put her meal down she is only inches away, ready to start gobbling it down. It’s good to see her so interested in eating again.

Tonight I have a rather inconvenient schedule.  I have to drive home, let the dogs out and then drive all the way back to town for a running club meeting.  I will need to skip the typical post meeting drink/eat/bullshit session at South Street so I can get back home to make the dogs dinner.

Friday after work I did my normal post work grocery shopping which this week included a stop at Sam’s Club. One of the things I needed was to restock on Mexican Coke.  Evidently being a Mexican Coke dealer can be pretty profitable.  On the internet I found sites selling cases such as these for upwards of $50.   Considering they cost $18.88 at Sam’s there is a nice fat profit margin out there.

On Saturday morning I drug myself out of bed at 4:30 am for the second week in a row to go do the club run.  Turn out for the run was on the light side but the run was on the faster side, averaging in the high 8’s for the nearly 7.25 mile run.

When I got back home I was feeling  pretty tired from the combination of early wake time with the energy depleted from the run.  I knew I had to get back up and moving else I would fall victim to a nap.  I had hopes of getting a lot of manicuring done in the yard since the standing water had finally evaporated.

I got the weeding done and then decided to eat lunch.  After lunch I needed to go fill the gas cans, by the time I got back the skies had turned menacing.  I got about 10 minutes of weed whacking in before the first downpour hit.  I retreated inside and played some of 400 Days, the Walking Dead sequel on the 360 until the rain stopped.

The break in the rain was only temporary but any rain that fell on me at that point was not enough to force me back inside.

So I was about 90 seconds away from finishing up the weed whacking, trimming the edge of the driveway, walking towards the road.  All of a sudden I hear the rpm’s of the motor rev way up.  I look down and confirm the spool just ran out of line, fck, great luck.  Now of course I could have simply said f it, the 15 yards of un-whacked driveway is no big deal, more than likely I am the only one on the planet that would even notice.  I could simply put the weed whacker away and reload the spool the next time I get the whacker out.

Well whether it is some sort of OCD or whatever it is that drives me to want to finish something I started, I instead chose to walk back to the shed, reload the trimmer line and walk back out front and knock down the remaining hairy edge.  The rain had crossed mowing off the to do list for me, I guess I’ll need to try to knock it out this week.

I mentioned I played 400 days, I actually finished the WD add on Saturday afternoon.  It is basically short story lines about 5 or 6 other people in the zombie apocalypse.  It was fun but not as engaging as the main game and probably a little short on content since I completed everything in a couple hours.

Saturday night Cindy had a small party at her place that was attended by mostly people from the running club I know along with a few that I didn’t.  I utilized BLP’s to help ease the social anxiety I can suffer from in those situations.  It was a fun time that went later than expected.

Sunday morning, after sleeping in much later than normal, I went and picked up the dogs.  Ali is out of town for a few days.  I sat the blue ottoman in the middle of the great room for Nicki to see.  Nicki sniffed it but didn’t have any interest in getting up on it.  The way Nicki’s brain works, if I am too forward in getting her to try the ottoman the more distrustful she will be of it.  However I did lay on it myself to show her it’s intended use.  Sadie also had no issue jumping up there and hanging out for a little bit.

Sunday was a very dreary and wet day.  It seemed like the weather conditions somehow crept into myself as well, I just didn’t feel like doing very much.  Outside of a few scattered chores I spent a lot of  time just vegging out, catching up on Tivo as well as my latest Netflix rental, Surrogates.

Surrogates was a decent rental with an interesting premise, in the future, the majority of people no longer directly interact with the world.  Instead they lay in a contraption which connects them to a cyborg version of themselves, a surrogate.  The movie has Bruce Willis in it so you know it can’t be awful, I’d give it a solid B rating, which may be a little low because I was drowsy while viewing it.

So late Saturday night the jury returned a not guilty verdict on George Zimmerman.  I am not sure if I have talked at all about his shooting of the young black kid.  To me it seems like basically Zimmerman vaulted over the line of what he should have been doing as a member of neighborhood watch, wound up getting his ass beat by the kid that he accosted unnecessarily and decided the gun he was carrying was the way to even the playing field.

From the bits and pieces I heard about the trial, I wasn’t shocked he was found not guilty.  It seems that if the jurors were going to follow the instructions they were given by the court and make a decision solely on the evidence, this was going to be the outcome.

From a moral standpoint, Zimmerman absolutely was to blame for Martin’s death.  He started the conflict with his police officer wannabe mentality and ended it when he pulled the trigger on a kid that didn’t deserve to die.  However with our court system, if the evidence isn’t there to convict someone under the law, you aren’t supposed to be convicted, regardless of the moral circumstances involved.

Although Zimmerman is a “free” man, I don’t expect the rest of his life to be anything anyone would envy.  I imagine he will basically take on the life of someone in a witness protection program.  I doubt he can ever be assured that the next corner he turns won’t be his last, when a Trevon Martin sympathizer decides to invoke their own personal justice on him.

Last night I decided Duf’s garage would once again be open for evening hours, this time to replace the washer fluid reservoir on my Tacoma.  The old tank was brittle and cracking and I was getting hardly any fluid on the windshield when spraying.

I had watched one video outlining the procedure to pull the bottle ahead of time, it didn’t look too bad to get at.  The removal process went smoothly.  Once I had stuff apart I did a stand alone test of the washer pump to make sure it was functional, it was.  I then turned on my air compressor and attached it to the washer tubing to blow it out.

So now I was ready to put the new tank in place.  I took the new tank out of the bag.  I was glad it looked identical to the old tank.  When I order something online I am always worried I won’t get the right part.  Then I flipped the new tank over.  WTF??  The new tank has the same hole as the old one does to insert the washer pump into it, however it had a second, bigger hole right in the bottom of the tank! Damn it!

I was trying to figure out why there would be an inch and a half hole in the bottom of the new tank.  Perhaps it is a tank that works in more than one Toyota model?  Maybe there is a rubber plug in the box that I did not see?  I ripped apart the bag and the box the part came in, nothing….. argh.

So now I had two options.  I put the truck back together sans tank and call the place I got the part from and ask them to either send me some sort of plug or a tank that doesn’t include the mystery hole.  That option would mean more hassle and more waiting.

Option two was find a way to rig it.  I chose option 2.  I spent a good 10 minutes staring at my workbench and the various things I had available to me to try to plug the hole in an effective but unobtrusive way.  I struck out, I was going to have to go out looking for some solution.  I grabbed the new tank and threw it in the party van.

I decided to try the small hardware store that is about 5 miles from my house first.  I was hoping I would get lucky.  I came up with an 1 1/2″ rubber drain plug.  It was a little big for the hole but I figured with a little elbow grease and a piece of sand paper I could make it work.

When I got back I found that sand paper was too slow of an option.  I brought out the dremel with a sanding wheel to enlarge the opening slightly.  I jammed the plug in, then went around the edge of it with silicone and slapped a piece of duct tape on top of it as a safety net.  Yes it looked pretty funny but who cares?

I dumped some water into the freshly plugged tank to verify it was water tight.  It passed the test.  Unfortunately all told, the unexpected hole in total probably added 90 minutes to the replacement process.

So I got the truck back together, dumped washer fluid in and pulled the washer lever.  Fluid sprayed out beautifully on the passenger side.  The driver side was not so beautiful, it was more of a weak stream that didn’t get very high on the windshield at all.    I did some more manipulation of that nozzle, blowing it out again and even hitting it with a tiny drill bit.  Neither thing helped the problem significantly.

The stream on the passenger side is strong and big enough that the entire windshield gets clean when spraying but I still felt dissatisfied.  After all that work I wanted equally strong spray on both sides.  To get what I want I probably need to just replace the nozzles.  I didn’t get back inside until after 8pm.  Here is the video of the theatrics.

This morning I had someone out to the house to look at the AC system.  My Trane system has been fantastic since it was installed in 2010.  It does a great job of keeping the house cool while using significantly less energy than the piece of shit system the house builder threw in.

In the past month or so I noticed/heard something weird while I was working outside.  There was an electrical buzz/vibration sound coming from the outside compressor.  Almost a sound like it was trying to start the motor but couldn’t.  However the house was still being kept cool so I put off calling anyone about it.

Well the high electric bill I just received kicked me into action, placing the call yesterday to the woman who sold us the unit, whom since had started her own HVAC business.  It turns out the noise I was hearing was indicative of a problem, one of the relays is bad as well as a capacitor.    They had to order parts to fix it but the system will continue to function until then in a less efficient manner.

I was surprised when I was handed a 200 dollar bill since the unit was under warranty.  The bill was for labor but the parts were covered.  After the tech left I dug around in my “AC” folder and found the original paperwork.  We had paid for a 10 year extended warranty that is supposed to be parts and labor.

On my way to work I called back Juli and told her that I don’t think I should have been charged anything.  She didn’t remember I had an extended warranty  and confirmed it covers both parts and labor.  She said she would send the check I handed over back to me, sweet.

This weekend I will be moving and shaking as usual.  On Sunday I pick up the dogs for their extended visit.  I made arrangements for my neighbor across the street to come over during the week and let them out during the day as opposed to me doing a crazy nearly 50 mile/ 90 minute round trip in the middle of the day to do the same.  It will be a huge help.

This week has not been much fun.  I have a project at work that has not been going all that well.  Yesterday I did a preliminary demo of the product to my boss and others in the department and it was a mess.  I don’t like when something I am involved with starts to come loose at the ends.  I need to really focus on the project to get things back in line.  The problem in this particular case is it is something that requires the efforts of others as well, perhaps the reason I often prefer to just work alone.

I just sort of feel like I have too many rods in the fire currently and I can’t rotate through them quick enough to keep from getting burned.

On my way home last night I picked up a cheap used leather ottoman via Craigslist.  One of Nicki’s favorite spots to lounge around on is a leather ottoman that Ali took with her.  It’s low enough that Nicki can still climb up on it. She seems to enjoy laying in elevated comfort.  I thought it would be cool if I could once again have something like that at the house for her.

The ottoman I got is old and blue.  It feels sort of like leather but it might be the fake stuff, not that it matters.  I found it ironic that the girl I bought it from said she was an interior designer yet the house she was living in, at least from the outside was not very stylish, complete with Xmas lights still adorning the roof line of the garage and gaudy knick knacks lining the sidewalk..

The ottoman is an inch or two higher than what Ali has but the cushioned part compresses down quite a bit so I hope Nicki can manage.  It also is not as big as the one at the apartment but I think it should be just big enough to let her snooze in comfort.

I have the dogs for a few days early next week so I am hoping the ottoman gets a good field test.  Even if Nicki doesn’t like it I know Sadie will have no issue utilizing it.

I finally finished the Walking Dead game on the 360.  Wow what an epic and different gaming experience. It really felt like I was inside of the Walking Dead tv show.  I don’t think it is a spoiler to say almost everyone winds up dead in the game, after all it is the zombie apocalypse.

I went ahead and spent 5 bucks for the sequel, 400 Days, which I expect to be equally fun.

Last night I did my first Mazda auto repair video, replacing the driver side window regulator in Cindy’s Miata.  I had already been in and out of the door a number of times so I didn’t have much issue replacing the regulator.  I was in and out in less than an hour.

Next up is the Tacoma washer reservoir replacement.

So yesterday I decided to go to the after work club social run at the running store.  In theory it sounded like fun, do a short run (3 miles in my case) and then enjoy free food and beer for an hour or so.  Ali was there as well to handle membership duties as one of the purposes of the event is to drive membership.  She brought a laptop with to work directly with the membership database which I had just finished moving to a new location during the day.

So I returned from the run soaked with sweat and headed inside to see how things were going.  Ali was struggling because she wasn’t familiar with the new membership set up.  I wound up shadowing her the entire time, trying to work through certain problems.  Some of them were solvable, some of them would require me to do further digging.

Well the end result was I didn’t eat anything besides a nacho chip or two and didn’t even get a sip of free beer.  To be honest, there were too many people there, at least for that space.  All of the food was gone (besides nacho chips) in short order.  By the time I pulled out a little after 7:30 I was aggravated and hungry.  I would have been better served just going home and working on mowing the back of the property like I was thinking about doing.

Combined with other things from my Tuesday including work and other issues it added up to just be one of those shitty days.

My spirits were lifted slightly when I got home when I saw a box by the front door.  It was my replacement washer fluid reservoir for the Tacoma.  The factory tank is brittle, cracking and leaking. I hope to replace it soon.

I have an odd question to ask.  Do you go to bed dirty or clean?  For a long time I was a dirty bed person, meaning I would take a shower first thing in the morning but not before bed.  Sometime in the last 15 years I converted to a clean bed person, always taking a shower before going to sleep.

I don’t recall what was the impetus for the change but now, I really have no understanding of why you would want to go day to day any either way.

I mean think about it.  If you take a shower in the morning, by the time you go to bed some 18 hours later your body is coated in the sweat and oils that the human body secretes, not to mention what ever other auxiliary dirt, microbes, residue and bacteria you managed to pick up during the day.  Why would you want to lay in a bed and grind that shit into your sheets and pillow? Depending on how often you wash your bedding, this can attain varying levels of grossness.

On a typical weekday I take a shower at night and then the following morning I will just bend over the tub and wash/wet my hair.  It works for me.

Which are you, dirty or clean and why…..

So when I got home last night I looked around and noticed the standing water was gone except in the trenches by the road.  Evidently yesterday must have been a good evaporation day.  Well I figured I may as well take advantage of it and got out on the mower.

I knew the high grass was going to be chock full of mosquitoes.  I tried to prepare with a generous application of OFF as well as putting on sunglasses and my big, wide brimmed, funny looking hat.  Well it seems that unless I was going to jump into a bathtub full of mosquito repellent, there was no way to keep myself from being mosquito food.  I was constantly swatting.

As I was mowing Bill pulled up, the equipment manager for the running club.  He was dropping off something for me.  As he pulled up I smelled burning brakes.  Bill said that on his way there his brakes locked up.  He said both of his front brakes seemed to lock, he just tried to drive through it, stopping several times to let them cool off along the way.

He said he thought the problem might be electrical, specifically something with the ABS system that could be causing the brakes to apply.  He said he already had his wife on the way to meet him there.  He was actually on his way to go give a quote for some work near by.  I told him that he could borrow my van to do the quote but he said he would  either drive there or have his wife drive him there.

As we waited for her to show up Bill and I exchanged our fix it yourself stories.  Bill told me about his 20 year old lawn tractor that he has repaired countless times.  I knew how much I had to fix my 8 year old Cub Cadet, I can’t imagine trying to keep a 20 year old mower alive.

So Bill decided to try to drive to his appointment with his wife following behind just in case the wheels locked up tight.  I hope he made it.

I buzzed around the rest of the property and got my normal mowing zone knocked down.   The back of the property is badly in need of a haircut as well.  If  I get a few more days of light/no rain perhaps I will try to wedge that in one night after work this week.

What Bill dropped off was the club’s 20 year old Time Machine, a combination timing device and printer that was used to time races before we implemented chip timing 5 or 6 years ago.  I know little about how the box works but I want to get it up and running.  My intentions are to utilize this as a last resort safety net at races.

It is basically a manual system where as a runner comes across you hit a button to indicate a finisher and the time they crossed.  You can also type in the runners bib number to give you more meaningful info.  Right now, if my timing box or the main laptop would blow up on race day I would basically be f’d.

If I have someone manning the time machine during the race at least I would have a crude and less accurate way to scratch some results together.  It also will come in handy in those situations where someone does not get a finish time recorded either due to human or equipment error.

So Thursday was the club’s big holiday 5K, our biggest 5K of the year.  I knew it was going to be a mad house so I wanted to get on site extra early, not that it did me much good.  I was on site about 4:25 am but the equipment truck didn’t get there until closer to 5.  I made the use of my alone time dropping off my timing/registration equipment at their respective locations since the registration area, the start and finish line were in three different spots, each several hundred yards apart.

The night before I had sent out an email asking the board members to try to get there as early as possible and they answered the call.  We had many more bodies on site at 5AM than normal, we put them to good use.  We got the registration area up and ready to receive the roughly 1000 participants that were going to be converging shortly. As expected the parking lot became a beehive of humanity.

Ali and I were swamped with people signing up that morning, we had something like 120 entries to type in before the race.  Ali finished up the data entry as I hurried to the start line.  The starting line crowd extended down the street close to 100 yards, it was quite the scene.

Timing the race had a potentially big bump in the road.  While I was running the finish line Ali was also updating some of the participant information in the system which in theory, should have been ok.  While I was in the system checking a couple things I noticed I wasn’t seeing an average pace number for some of the finished runners.  I thought it was odd but printed out a stack of results to have someone post for me anyway.

Well as I looked more at the results I saw something was f’d up.  A bunch of the women were all showing the same finish time, oh geezus.  This is the sort of issue that crops up time to time and the kind of issue that can only be handled via experience.  Without dropping a bead of sweat I erased all of the results from the race and imported them via a secondary method, hoping it would correct the problem.  Luckily it did.

I could only assume that having the participant data modified while results were coming in caused the problem somehow so I had Ali stop the work.  The rest of the race the times flowed in normally.  All in all for being the largest 5K the club has ever put on, things went very smoothly.

I was both the first one on site and last one to leave as I recollected my equipment from it’s various collection points.  I didn’t mind at all, it gave me a moment to reflect on how cool it is that I witnessed the venue go from empty, to crushed with people, back to empty with hardly a hiccup.

Some guy was flying around his quad copter with a HD camera mounted to it during the race.  Check out the video he compiled here, it’s pretty cool.

I was quite pooped the rest of the 4th of July and didn’t even entertain dragging myself out to see any fireworks shows.  There were a few houses close by that provided mini-versions of pyrotechnics that was enough for me.

On Friday I fast forwarded my weekend chore list, trying to get everything done ahead of time.  Part of that list included my two headed grocery shopping at both Costco and Publix.  I took the SSR out for the errands to make them a lot more fun.

On Saturday morning I decided to go to do the normal club group run.  I wanted to try to do the 7 mile route, a distance I have not covered since I did the stupidly long 16 mile jaunt with Tracy several months ago.

When I walked out the door at 5:20 am I noticed my weather station showed an outdoor humidity level of 99.7%.  I felt every point of it during the run.  All in all, I held up ok to the longer distance run.  I ran it with Mitch, the club president, and Steve.  Luckily neither of them was looking to push pace as we averaged around a 9:20 mile which was plenty for me at that distance.

By the time the run was over my cotton shirt was absolutely drenched.  Thank goodness I have some water proof slip covers in the back of the SSR to accommodate such a situation.

Early Saturday afternoon Ali stopped out with the dogs.  She brought a bunch of empty bins with her.  The purpose of her visit was to collect various dinnerware/bakeware items that have remained at the house.  They stayed there because Alison didn’t have a place to keep them.  Since we set her up with the big Ikea shelving set that was no longer the case.

Ali had not been out to the house in a long time, at least a month, maybe even closer to two.  As we went through the house collecting various things for the bins there were various swells of emotion that rolled in, something that I think is unavoidable, regardless of how much time has passed since the separation.

We hung out with the dogs in the back yard for a bit during a break in the process and Nicki seemed quite content as she laid sprawled out on the carpet with mommy and daddy under the roof of where she spent that majority of her life. It made me smile but feel sad at the same time as I looked at her.

There were too many crates to all fit in Ali’s Volt so I threw the excess and the dogs in the van and went back to her place to help her unload.  Some of the crates had enough weight in them that she would have struggled hauling them up two flights of stairs.

The property has remained bogged down from excessive rain.  Despite the various bodies of water around the yard I tried to at least cut a small portion of the increasingly ratty looking grass, basically mowing the mound the house is built on.  I am hoping for a solid 2-3 rainless days so I can get out there to knock the rest down.

I saw a couple movies over the weekend.  The first one was Life of Pi, a movie I knew little about but had heard was quite good.  I knew it involved animals and little more.  Very early on I got a sense the movie was a Forrest Gump / Castaway hybrid although as things rolled along I realized the film had a personality all of it’s own.

I became very attached to Richard Parker, the tiger, despite his ornery ways and inclination to kill things.  Speaking of killing, there were several scenes of animals, albeit make believe CGI versions of animals, getting killed in ways that I found disturbing.   If you are an animal lover like I am you might want to have your finger close to the fast forward button for a few scenes.

All in all I found the movie touching, deep and meaningful.  It gets a very solid A in my book.  This appeared to be a film that would have been worth seeing the 3D version in theaters.

Last night I watched Jack Reacher on the Xbox, yet another Tom Cruise action film, a role that no one can dispute he excels at.  Despite seeing Tom in this sort of role again and again, I never seem to tire of it.  I enjoyed the film and was ok overlooking a few moments of absolute sillyness.  I’ll give it an A-.

Yesterday morning I went to a duathalon/triathlon but not as a participant.  My initial goal was to go there to talk to and shadow the guy that times their events, John from Endurance Sports Timing.  John and I are in contact a bunch since we both time races and use identical hardware and software to do it.  We often will compare notes, trying to help each other when needed. Cindy decided to sign up for the run/bike/run duathlon since I was going to be there anyway.

The race was staged by Elite Events a father/son team that started putting on events in our area couple years ago.  I had heard various things about their events, mostly negative but never had seen anything first hand.

It was interesting being on the sidelines of a race, observing the loosely controlled chaos instead of being in the middle of it.  I could see where some of the complaints about their events were coming from.  The race started late, there seemed to be inadequate race staff directing participants at key areas of the course and the race results were delayed and had a number of errors.

The registration and finish line area had no bathroom facilities at all.  If you had to relieve yourself you either went in the woods or walked around 3/4 of a mile to the other side of the park, a major f up.  You needed to have at least a couple port-o-potties out there.

On the plus side, the organizer has some good equipment to make the race come off as more professional with nicely branded signage and equipment.  They had a nice PA system with a wireless mic that allowed a lot of flexibility.  I can tell that they have good intentions but perhaps lack the manpower to address the needs to pull off all aspects of a race successfully.  Having races that combine duathalons and triathlons lends itself to scoring problems.  I think simpler would be far better in their case.

On a positive note, Cindy had a great race, winning the masters division, something she never did before.  For her efforts she received a personalized beer glass and a finisher medal.  Unfortunately she was one of the victims of the scoring problems and did not get announced as the masters winner.

During Sunday afternoon I headed outside for a prolonged outdoor workout session, my best outdoor session in months, despite the blazing sun and thick, muggy air.  I knocked out 100 pull ups, 100 push ups along with a number of other calisthenics training on both the bars and my set of rings.

During the workout we had to be very aware of fire ants.  Because of the wet ground they have been migrating closer to the house and it’s higher ground.

I decided to do my first set of push ups in the grass.  Prior to getting into the plank starting position I inspected the spots where my hands and feet were going to be, making sure they were ant free.

As I got to around rep 20 of 25 I started feeling burning on my stomach.  I ignored it and quickly pumped out the last 5 reps.  Well when I glanced down, my white shirt had a couple hundred ants on it and the burning on my abs grew rapidly.  I ripped off my shirt and start swatting and plucking the bastard ants from my mid-section.  I was quite thankful that the elastic band on my shorts was tight enough to discourage the ants from traveling south before chomping down on me.  The rest of the push up sets were performed on the dog deck for safety sake.

All in all I bet the outdoor workout was close to an hour.  I felt tired but accomplished at the same time.  The dip in the pool felt fantastic.

I got my electric bill in the mail.  It was much higher than I have become accustomed to, around $165.  When I looked at the average daily kilowatt usage it was something like 7 units higher per day than the same month last year, which didn’t make any sense, until I thought about it.

There are two possible explanations I can come up with.  Last week I noticed that one of the off stops on my timer for the pool pump had fallen off.  That means instead of running 3 hours a day it was running more like 14-15 hours a day.  I am not sure how long it was screwed up.  If it was for a couple weeks that would be a pretty solid explanation.

The other suspect is my AC system.  A few times I have noticed that the outdoor compressor is making an electrical buzzing/humming noise, a noise I don’t recall hearing before.  The AC system however seems to be functioning otherwise, the house is being kept cool overall.  What I am wondering is if the low speed/power part of the compressor is not working.  The low speed feature of the two speed compressor is a big energy saver, if that is screwed up I would imagine my electric usage could creep up considerably.

I am going to have someone come out to check it.