Archives November 2013

I am preparing myself for the next 24 hours where I am going to be stretched, tugged, and pulled in every direction possible in connection with tomorrows monster Thanksgiving race.  My goal is to endure it without breaking a sweat.

After the race is behind me the rest of my 4 day weekend should be considerably more fun.  Mom, Cindy, Cindy’s daughter and Cindy’s mom are going to be at the house for Thanksgiving.  I may venture out Black Friday to join the shopaholics and sometime this weekend I hope to get the Xmas decoration up as well.

Sorry, that’s all I have time to spill.

The beehive of race related activity started in earnest yesterday.  I sent out an email to all registered participants for the Thanksgiving race and immediately started getting inundated with emails from people with questions, many of which the answers to were in the email they were responding to.  It’s frustrating and annoying, but as the main communication outlet for the race I did my best to just take a deep breath and answer the questions quickly and politely, without a hint of sarcasm.

After work I had to stop at the running store to drop off the supplies for the two days of early packet pick up at the store.  That included unpacking and boxing up 2000 race timing bibs.  I had one more stop on the way home, I wound up not getting home until almost 7 pm.  I had more race stuff to do on the computer and again more to do this morning before work.  This process will be rinse and repeat for the next three days.

I forgot to mention how utterly annoyed I was on Friday. It seemed like my day was filled with wall to wall annoyances both at work and elsewhere. I seemed like I was dealing with non-stop incompetence/stupidity from the gun.

Once I was out on the road to go home I had two stops, Sam’s Club and Publix.  At Sam’s I got to deal with a maddening horde of people at the gas pump followed by more aggravation inside.

At Publix it was a pure madhouse with people getting their Thanksgiving supplies.  I tried to keep my calm as I patiently waited for clueless person after clueless person blocking aisles by putting their cart on one side while standing on the other, looking for something.  I almost lost my calm when I was emerging from an aisle and suddenly out of the corner of my eye saw an unrestrained child sprinting across the store from my left.

I stopped abruptly and pulled the cart back. The father was a good 10 feet behind the child, doing nothing to prevent his kid from side swiping someone else. As he came up to me he said “Oh, sorry…” I said “yea…” in a tone with a facial expression that clearly meant “you are a dipshit”.

Despite the aggravation I was feeling, I threw a dollar in the Salvation Army bucket on the way out. Of course once I was in the truck I had a 25 car quagmire waiting to get out of the f’ing shopping center.  Just one of those days I suppose.

My Saturday morning started very early this week, the 3:30 alarm drug my body out of bed unwillingly.  The race I was timing was all the way down in Marco, making the extra time necessary.  This race has always been a bit of a thorn in the side to put on.  The long drive of course is never fun but also this race is staffed mostly with volunteers from the Marco organization that are not familiar with the ins and outs of a race.

The course logistics are troublesome as well with the registration area being several blocks from the race start/finish.  This makes processing any problems with the results very difficult. Despite these challenges, the event went relatively well.  The race also had a healthy amount of growth compared to last year, gaining an additional 80 participants.

The run itself is a tough one, back and forth over the steep bridge that connects Marco Island to the mainland.  Cindy did the race and did well, getting third place in her age group.

When we got back to the house, after doing post race duties I still had chores to do of course. One of them was tending to the freshly planted garden.  Everything that was planted is doing well except for a pepper plant that looks to be meeting an early demise.  We even were able to use some of the romaine and red lettuce in salads over the weekend.

During my yard work I felt a nasty sting on my left shin. It felt more severe than a fire ant bite, more in line with the wasp sting I took to my face a few weeks back.  Instinctively I swatted at the spot but did not see anything.

Over the weekend the area swelled up and was tender.  Cindy looked at it and saw two fang marks.  We are theorizing some sort of spider got me.  Hopefully it isn’t one the brown recluse spiders that hang around my place.

Saturday night Cindy and I went to see the new Hunger Games movie.  I never read any of the books but enjoyed the first movie so seeing number two was a no-brainer.  The theater was actually kind of full, the fullest I can remember a Coconut Pointe movie being for me.  Sure it was still easy to find a good seat but I bet the place was over half full.

The movie was good.  The reason I knew it was good was the clock.  When the movie ended I felt like there should be more to go, it felt like the movie was short.  Well when I looked at my watch when we left it was 9:45, meaning the movie was a good 2:30 minutes long.  For a movie that long to feel short means it is pretty damn good.  I’d give it an A.  I am looking forward to seeing the next installment. If you want to see my 6 second Vine recap, go here. (spoiler alert)

Cindy and I scuttled plans to go for a bike ride Sunday morning.  She was feeling some side effects from her race and I assured her my chore plans for the day would give me enough exercise.  The main target was pressure washing the sheds.  However before doing that I had a smaller chore to do, for my neighbor.

The large collection of water equipment they have apparently is doing a poor job of keeping their well water in good shape.  In an effort to combat that, they have been letting the equipment do a recharge every single night. (not recommended)  Basically when you recharge the equipment it back flushes the white rock filtration substance with brine (salt water).  This process expels tons of waste water which is dumped elsewhere via a drain hose. Well the hose for the system is buried for the most part, except for the end of it which is positioned about 15 feet from my fence line.  The nightly recharges and all the water they dump has turned the corner of my fence into a perennial swamp land for the last few months.

Of course this annoyed me.  Not only did it look like shit, the wet ground has the potential of rotting out the fence posts prematurely which be a major pain in the ass for me.  Finally a couple weeks ago I said something to the husband, telling him they need to reroute that drain line so it doesn’t impact my property.  I even went so far as to give him a big coil of 1/2″ pvc pipe I had left over from when I extended my drain line last year.  I told him all he would need to do is install a coupler to connect the existing line to the new one.

A few days later I saw there was some connector on the line but it was short lived.  It was a press/friction connector that did not hold up to the water pressure, a day or two later it came apart and my corner was again soppy.  I saw the neighbor, she said  she was the one that tried to install the connector. (husband isn’t very handy) I figured I might as well just fix it myself since it impacts me and is an easy fix.

I bought some band clamps and a connector.  The connector I bought actually was a bit small.  I wound up repurposing the one in my drain line.  I’ll just buy myself another.  Connecting the lines together was a bit of a muddy job but not difficult otherwise.  I look forward to having a dry corner.

I then moved onto pressure washing.  For some reason I had the idea in my head that I could pressure wash both sheds in a couple of hours.  I am not sure where I that idea came from.  Instead I spent between 4 and 5 hours out there blasting away.  I was having some pressure washer issues that slowed things down.  The washer would simply shut off periodically without apparent reason.  When I would start it back up it would run fine again, until it shut off again.  In total I probably restarted the damn thing 20 times.  I am going to get some fuel system cleaner to run through it.

I also consumed some time pressure washing a few other items like the exterior of the pool cage, the shed ramps, garden hardware, pavers and more.  The items I cleaned looked tons better.  I emerged from the project soaked from head to toe and covered with mud splatter, hot. The dogs were out at the house on Sunday as well.  It was overcast and on the cool side most of the day so they really enjoyed just hanging outside in the yard.

Sunday night we watched The Amazing Burt Wonderstone.  The movie was funny enough, entertaining enough and short enough to earn a solid B rating.  Worth a Netflix rental but not $20 to see in a theater.

This week is going to be a blur until the Thanksgiving race is done.  There are so many ducks lined up.  Each and everyone has to be a hit and I probably have the most bullets of anyone in this game.  I hope I don’t miss.

Last night I was supposed to be receiving entry information from the race organizer for the 5K I am timing tomorrow.  She was taking registrations on site during early packet pick up yesterday.  I needed those entries to create an updated list for her to use today.  Well that email never came which meant I had to scramble around this morning to try to get everything squared away.  It is just the start of the race related stress I will be dining on for the next week.

Other than timing the race tomorrow the weekend will be pretty standard with chores and getting out to see the next Hunger Games movie Saturday night.

Not much else is floating in my head at the moment other than I am still not sleeping right.  It’s been probably around 10 straight days of waking up before the alarm clock.

So in response to my lack of real world testing of my Dufisthenics Android app, Charlie was nice enough to install it on his Droid phone and verified it worked properly.  Jeremy later conceded and installed it as well.  I hate relying on others to do things for me so I took the additional step of ordering a cheap, but surprisingly capable Android tablet off Amazon.  With my Amazon CC spiff points the out of pocket cost for me was exactly zero dollars. (including free 2 day shipping)

Although the primary reason for the purchase is to be able to test the Android side of my apps, the tablet will be used for other recreational needs as well for sure.

Today marks the start of a very busy week with a race to time on Saturday morning that rolls right into the massive Thanksgiving race next week.  I will be quite glad when Black Friday rolls around.

I still am not sleeping well.  Each morning, no matter what time I go to bed, early or late, I am waking up on my own well before the alarm goes off.  Once I wake up I just roll around restlessly and eventually drag myself out of bed feeling more or less like shit.

I can’t believe I forgot to relay the most interesting part of my day yesterday.  I was on my way to the running club meeting.  I was on a 6 lane road (three lanes per side) and passed a guy riding an ordinary looking mountain bike.  I didn’t notice the bike as much as how this moron was riding it.

He was wearing headphones, and was riding with no hands on the handlebars, relying on forward momentum to steer for him.  Ok I have seen this before. In fact, I have even ridden with no hands for brief periods of time just to see if I could do it.  Of course I would never entertain doing so with 6 lanes of rush hour of traffic in the vicinity.

These items already made the guy a certifiable dumb ass in my book.  However apparently he was interested in raising the bar.  The reason he had no hands on the handlebars was because he had both hands on his smartphone.  He was feverishly texting away, looking at the phone, with no hands on the handlebars and headphones on, with 6 lanes of traffic next to him.

I turned my head and just gazed in disbelief at just how incredibly moronic this visual was.  I continued to monitor the stupidity in the rear view mirror and then it happened, he dumped the bike.  I laughed out loud when I saw it.  He managed to land on his feet but the bike crashed into the curb.

Perhaps this young man will use his crash as a learning tool and no longer bicycle while listening to music and texting with no hands on the handlebars.  Who am I kidding….

Last night was the running club board meeting.  The meeting seemed to suffer from an overabundance of verbosity.  I got a lot of doodle time in.

After the meeting we headed over to South Street and had the required amounts of fun and good times.  Tuesday was karaoke night.  There were some REALLY poor singers there however the most interesting thing was when after 10 pm two “adult” songs were sung.  One was performed by a young woman, it was a dirty version of the Little Mermaid song, which was mildly disturbing.  The second song was equally dirty if not slightly more so.  The few beers I had made me laugh out loud at both of them, despite my confusion about why I was hearing it.

Congrats to Trey Radel, a congressman based out of SW Florida.  He has the dubious honor of being the first US Congressman to be arrested on drug charges since 1982.  Apparently in addition to being a self admitted alcoholic, he also has a liking for cocaine.  He got arrested trying to buy some from an undercover agent at the end of October.

Nowadays it seems much more fashionable for congress members to be rocked by sex scandals.  Getting shamed with a drug bust is very old school.  Way to represent!

I actually got a Dufisthenics app published on Google Play yesterday.  The “real” app I am trying to get published via conduit.com is nowhere to be seen at this point.  I started the submission process for it last week.  Yet, by submitting my Dufisthenics app manually on Google Play I was able to get it out there in less than a day.  Manually trying to publish an app on Apple’s developer platform unfortunately is not so simple.

I had asked Jeremy to install my Dufisthenics app since he has an Android phone.  However, in typical Jeremy fashion he decided to be difficult about it and refused to do so.  Instead I now am wrangling with an Android simulator to see if I can successfully launch the app.

Over the weekend I was talking to my dad.  He mentioned to me that my blog would not load for him.  I told him I would check on it, which I did when I got home.  The blog loaded normally so I wrote it off as just some sort of glitch.

Well yesterday I got multiple reports that the blog was not loading for people, however yet again, when I went there, everything looked fine.  I tried to load the blog on my phone and finally saw the same behavior, just an empty screen with nothing on it and no errors, great.

So I tried a number of things to see if I could remedy the issue.  All of them were unsuccessful.  Finally I was able to get the lights turned back on by disabling all of my WordPress plugins.  I then re-enabled the bare minimum amount of plug ins I needed to and the site was still alive.

WordPress is an awesome web publishing platform but it can be a bit flaky at times due to plug ins treating each other poorly.  I still am not sure why the blog loaded just fine for me from work and home while being dead for everyone else.

Last night involved a BB challenge attempt and creating my third Vine compilation video.  I am now up into the mid-80’s in total Vine videos. I am actually picking up random followers in Vine world, despite being about two decades outside of the primary Vine viewing audience.

Last night was another night of restless sleep, something that has been going on since last week sometime.  I haven’t been able to put my finger on any particular cause.  I am just restless and wake up every morning before the alarm clock goes off, well before it goes off.  It doesn’t make for bright and cheery days.

This past weekend was supposed to be a Randall visit which typically is filled with all sorts of sillyness.  Randall rescheduled for a few weeks in the future, leaving me with a more or less wide open weekend.

Saturday was a stark contrast to the weekend before that was filled with tons and tons of ass busting labor.  This Saturday may have been the most laid back weekend day I have had in a year.  Other than doing the normal weed pulling/garden tending, the day was almost totally void of chores thanks to Cindy knocking out most of it during her day off Friday. It felt weird not buzzing around like normal but the overcast and rainy skies made it feel almost appropriate to just hang out.

One of the things I did was start watching The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series of movies. (not the American Daniel Craig version)  Cindy had recommended this awhile back but I sort of disregarded it when she told me it was actually a foreign film with subtitles.  Reading a movie just was not something that interested me.  Well for whatever reason on Saturday I was more willing to give it a try.

As I expected, watching a film where everyone was speaking Swedish was pretty annoying at first.  Scanning between the subtitle and the movie seemed unnatural.  However Cindy had told me that after awhile it becomes less obtrusive. ( I didn’t believe her) It turns out she was right.  Eventually my brain adjusted to the format and I was able to take in what was going on without much difficulty.

The films are very dark but compelling.  The version on Netflix are the extended cuts, each movie is broken into two 90 minute sections which means in total I spent about 6 hours watching the first two movies.  I never thought I would give a subtitled film an A- rating but here it is.

On Sunday morning Cindy and I did the 30+ mile Ave Maria ride we had planned to do with Randall.  The weather was not as dreary as Saturday and the temps in the high 60’s when we started felt refreshing.  The ride went pretty well.  When we do it we switch off the lead every 5 miles or so to allow the other to benefit from a wind breaker.

Cindy actually struggled during part of the ride, her legs were tired from running 8 miles on the treadmill (while I played Haerthstone) the day before.  Several times when I was ahead I looked back and had lost her which is very rare since she is normally a stronger cyclist than I am.  However she had the last 5 mile lead segment, during which, she was averaging 21+ mph for the majority of it so maybe she was just playing possum to make me feel better.

I had ideas of knocking out half of the pressure washing jobs that are looming over me, the pool area and sheds.  I thought possibly after biking I would have time to do this before the Eagles game.  However after grabbing gas for the cans and running errands I didn’t get back home until after 11:30, too late to get it done. Plus it was abnormally warm yesterday which helped melt away any motivation to do the work. Instead I quickly planted the additional crops we bought for the garden, a tray of kale plants and some stevia.

Wow that Eagles game was truly a tale of two cities.  For basically three quarters the Eagles confirmed that they are truly a much improved team, pushing the Redskins around to build a dominating 24-0 lead.  Then, in the span of 15 minutes they erased that perception.

The Eagles completely imploded, allowing the Redskins to score two touchdowns AND convert two 2 point conversions while doing absolutely nothing on offense themselves.  I guess last weeks 9 minute plus drive to close out the Packer game was just a fluke.

When the defense allowed the Redskins to convert a 3rd and 25 during the final drive I felt sure that they were going to find a way to somehow lose the game which would have been one of the biggest collapses in recent NFL history.  I could feel the anger and rage boiling up inside me as the Skins drove down the field, only 20 yards from scoring a ridiculous third touchdown in the quarter.  Thank goodness RG III made a boneheaded throw which Boykin picked off in the end zone to save the game.  Not only did he save the game, he saved me from looking like a raving lunatic in front of Cindy.

It’s hard to feel great about a game such as this.  Despite the great start, the horrible finish was a sobering pull back into reality.  I will do my best to look at the bright spots like the Eagles being in first place  despite a thoroughly mediocre 6-5 record.  Or perhaps we can all celebrate the Eagles winning their first game at the Linc in over 400 days.  Yes a win is a win is a win.  I can only hope they learn from the black hole they stepped into in the 4th quarter and do a much better job of closing out teams consistently.

Sunday night we watched Bullet to the Head, my latest Netflix rental.  Cindy never heard of the movie and was skeptical that Stallone could pull off a solo action movie himself nowadays.  Her questions were answered, he still can.  Despite being in his mid-60’s I found the movie a quite satisfying rental.  It had everything a brainless action movie should have, good fight scenes, strong one liners, hot chicks and a revenge plot. It get’s a B+ all day long.

There were several high quality Vines produced this weekend.  I will leave it up to you to find them.  However ironically, the funniest one of all may have been produced by Jeremy.

So when I was doing my bills yesterday I noticed my Comcast bill was magically $20 higher than the month before.  I fired up Comcast chat and started ranting.  Evidently the promo I did in April where they gave me basic cable tv service, that I don’t use, and internet for 49.99 had expired.  I was on a new “step” promo where they ONLY raise the price 40% until April of next year and then I get smacked with another 5 bucks which is the full rate.

Argh I am so sick of doing this song and dance with Comcast.  I fired off my normal “I’d like to cancel my service” deal starter but was told only their phone reps in the “Customer Loyalty Department” could offer me any new deals.    In the past I have been able to secure better deals via Comcast online reps.  I angrily clicked the CLOSE CHAT button.

Obviously I need high speed internet service since a large portion of my tv entertainment is delivered down Comcast pipes however paying $70 for that service and throw away, crappy tv service (not even HD) annoys the hell out of me.  I may need to look closer at what high speed DSL can do for me nowadays.