FPB, Ted, Tired

So once again Saturday I managed to consume almost my entire day doing work around the house.  Part of the work got particularly messy when I decided to use the pressure washer, which I had already pulled out to blast crud off the mower deck, to clean the castle stone border around the pool.  In the 9-10 months that the stones have been in place they had become encrusted in black mildew just as many things do in the south Florida climate.

Hitting the stones with the high pressure washer did a great job of blasting the scuzz off the stones.  Unfortunately it also did a great job of bouncing alot of it, along with dirt/sand all over me.  The front of my body was coated with shit from head to toe, the price of pressure washing…

I did take a break to do something fun for a little bit.  A little while ago my sister and her husband went to a race track where you could take various high performance vehicles out for a spin.  I saw my sis driving a high end Audi and Damon driving a Lamborghini and a Ferrari.  Video was provided by something similar to a GoPro, mounted behind the driver to give a FPV (first person view)  It was cool.

So anyway, it gave me the idea to do my own first person view video with the SSR.  I don’t have a GoPro or a GoPro style mount so I used the next best thing, a paper towel roll and duct tape.  I jammed my Flip camera into one end, placed the paper towels on the top of the SSR “waterfall” that separates the driver and passenger seats and crudely secured it to the windscreen with a big chunk of duct tape.  It looked absolutely ridiculous.

I had no idea how the rig would work once I got on the road.  My biggest concern was it didn’t fly out of the truck.  I turned on the camera and hit the road.

As you can tell from the 4:30 of video, the rig didn’t work all that well once I was up to speed, the video starts to shake violently from getting buffeted by the wind.  However there was one part it did work pretty well for. Behold my FPB (first person burnout)

On Sunday morning it was brick time but in a different manner than normal.  Cindy agreed to do the DD ride with me which is an out and back to the nearest Dunkin Donuts which is almost exactly 10 miles from my house, making for a challenging 20 mile overall ride.  Despite leaving before 8AM, the heat and humidity arrived in force very early on.

I lead on the way to DD, we covered the first 10 miles in something like 31:30, a good pace considering I haven’t done this ride in ages.  After downing a small coffee we headed back east, typically the more difficult of the two directions since the wind is normally working more against you.  Cindy got in front and maintained a crazy pace of 20+ mph, at times even scraping 23,  I was down on the aero bars of my Dawes giving everything I had to stay within 6 or 7 feet of her to catch some of the wind blocking.  Otherwise there would be no way I could have maintained that speed.

We actually wound up doing a negative split on the ride and I am almost positive it is the fastest that 20 miles has ever been gobbled up, even faster than when I have done the ride with Randall. Cindy is a really strong cyclist obviously, significantly better than I am.

So after arriving home I was exhausted. Staying on the aero bars for 10 miles pedaling my ass off had sucked all of the energy out of my legs.  Still, I wanted to get some swimming in.  So we changed and headed to the water park.  I got 1500 yards in the pool.  I wasn’t as fast as the week before when all I did was swim and averaged 10 minutes per 500.  I still pulled a good time for me, averaging about 10:30 per segment.

After the laps we got some additional ancillary exercise by climbing the water slide tower 5 times to do each slide one time.  By the time it was all over I was spent.  The bust ass bike in the heat followed by the swimming was like pulling the drain plug on my energy reserves.  I had ideas of changing the oil on the Tacoma Sunday afternoon but I said f it, I was just too tired to head back out into the afternoon frying pan heat to do it.  I took a two hour nap instead.

Last night I saw Ted, the movie about the talking, crude teddy bear.  I heard it was funny, really funny.  It was.  I laughed out loud a ton, it was lots of fun as long as you don’t get offended by dirty humor.  If you haven’t seen it and are looking for a way to fill a couple hours with laughs rent it. I give it a shiny A.

This is one of those weird weeks for me, I am doing remote classroom training from home.  The best part of it is the class doesn’t start till 10AM, meaning I get to sleep in and get stuff done around here (like the write the blog) before having to “work”.  I am hoping this training will be more interesting than the last I attended.  It should be since it is a subject I am more interested in, Windows Server 2012 installation and configuration.