Archives 2013

I talk very little about tv I watch anymore, especially reality tv.  I don’t watch nearly as much tv as I once did although I could certainly get by with watching even less.  One mainstay for me has always been Survivor.

There was a point in time where I thought I would make a good candidate for the show.  I don’t know that is the case anymore, especially with my recent shift to no meat outside of fish and my aversion to killing anything.

So anyway, I found this season, Fans vs Favorites very entertaining.  This time around they brought back a bunch of Survivor veterans to play a bunch of first timers.  I was very happy to see one of these veterans was a guy with the last name of Cochran.

I found Cochran very interesting the first time he played, the biggest reason of which was he had a striking resemblance to Jeremy.  Not only is there a body and face resemblance, aspects of his personality and thought processes make me think I am watching Jeremy’s long lost brother.

When I first mentioned this to Jeremy he took at as a mild insult.  At first glance Cochran might just look like a geeky nerd but further observation reveals he is intelligent, well spoken and has a dry but very funny sense of humor.  His one on one interviews where he talks about what is going on with other contestants and the game itself are some of the best I have ever seen on the show.  Hell the guy just graduated from Harvard Law School.

So anyway, I was quite happy to see he not only won Survivor, he crushed the other two finalists, getting every single vote on the jury.  Yes plowing through 3 hours of Tivo’d Survivor content ate up a good portion of my night (still managed to do a BB Challenge attempt earlier), but I still enjoyed it, even though this was the 13th season.

It is interesting how they handled the finale this year, they have always tried to tweak  it.  In the prior finales they had the jury on stage for the vote tally but then afterward they brought all of the contestants out on stage for Q&A.  For a long time Jeff Probst had at least one question for each survivor player so nobody was overlooked. Then they started to no longer try to talk to everyone, leaving certain players, especially the ones that were eliminated early just sitting there smiling awkwardly the entire show.

This season they totally marginalized the non-jury cast.  They remained in the audience the entire time and were basically just spectators.  It was kind of weird.  I understand the reason behind the decision.  As is the finale show always felt rushed, 48 minutes just isn’t enough time to talk to 16 cast members and jam in all the other extraneous stuff.

I did have to question if it was a good use of time of the producers to bring in Boston Rob to give Phillip some dumb book or interview the original Survivor cast member, Rudy (85 years old now) just so he could use the word “queer” three times when referring to Richard Hatch.  Even dumber was the pre-recorded clip of Hatch sitting naked on a beach chair addressing Rudy and his homophobia.  (I thought he was still in jail for tax evasion)

So even with some of the finale dumbness, I thought this season was great and I will be once again on board for season 14.

Unfortunately watching all of that Survivor meant I only could get through 30 minutes of this weeks Game of Thrones before heavy eyelids forced me into submission.

So after work on Friday I went straight to mom’s place.  We had arranged to do an early Mother’s Day celebration.     I took the SSR to work for the occasion.  I took a few pictures of the truck through out the day.  This one came out the best.

I took mom up to Hemmingway’s in Coconut Point.  We had a nice meal in their outdoor seating area facing the water. During dinner I utilized tech in a way that even made me, a certified geek, appreciate.

Mom had asked me last week if I could pick up a supplement she uses at Costco.  Unfortunately when I went last week they were no longer carrying it. Mom was bummed. However technology came to the rescue.

I whipped out my Iphone, loaded my Amazon app and found the supplement, available with free two day Prime shipping no less.  I placed the order, arranged for it to ship to mom’s place and was done in the span of three minutes.  Tech is so commonplace nowadays I lose appreciation for just how powerful the internet is since it is used so frequently.

After dinner I asked mom if she needed anything else while we were out.  She asked if we could stop over at the nearby Super Target to try to find another ion bracelet similar to what I bought her a couple years ago for Christmas.  They didn’t have  that exact model anymore although they had something similar.  Mom wasn’t interested in the alternative.  I dropped her back off at home and made plans to take her to Trader Joe’s some night this week.

I had an early Saturday morning planned.  Alison was one of the organizers for an all girl 5K that was being put on.  Even though it wasn’t an official GCR event a number of our people showed up to help.  It was a good thing.  Things were pretty chaotic early on.  My role was much different than it is on a typical race day where my nose is mostly planted behind the screen of a laptop.

I wound up on the crew that was setting up the course, using my truck as the transport vehicle.  There was some confusion regarding the course layout so we wound up using the Tacoma odometer to do it along with some guesstimation.  It turned out the course was around 3.2 miles, a little long but pretty damn good for figuring it out on the spot.  After laying the course out I was recruited once again for my truck, this time to take the course marshals out to their various spots.

I got back to the registration area with only 10 minutes to spare.  Luckily the only thing involved with timing this fun run was activating a stop watch at the start so I could set the finish line clock.  Those ideas I had about chip timing the run would have never worked out.

There was a decent turn out for the race, over 150 women signed up.  The number is very good when you factor in that the race was only organized a couple months ago.  A nice chunk of change was raised for the charity the race supported and the women all seemed to have a good time.

Saturday afternoon I was dragging from the early wake up call.  I cut some corners with the house chores, something I don’t normally approve of but it felt like a smart move.  One of the chores was tending the garden.  I pulled a MASSIVE carrot out of the ground, it may be the biggest ever.  It looked like a couple different carrots may have grown into this singular monster.

Saturday night I watched my latest Netflix dvd, John Carter.  This Disney movie made a lot of noise when it was released for both it’s huge production costs (about a quarter of a BILLION dollars) and it’s relatively small box office numbers (only 73 million domestic gross).  Still, it looked like something I would find entertaining.  I did.

The movie was not horrible at all although it certainly did not merit the kind of money that was spent on it.  It seemed like they were definitely trying to hop on the Avatar band wagon in many ways.  John Carter certainly is not a movie that leaves any sort of lasting impression but for at least 2 hours it did a good job of keeping me entertained, B+.

On Sunday morning I did my first endurance training in a looong time, I had not run a single mile since the 16 miles I logged with Tracy a month or so ago.  It has not been a deliberate avoidance of endurance work, just other things have gotten in the way.

Well I went full boat yesterday, combining a run, bike ride and swim.  I paid the price.  The weather yesterday was summertime muggy.  Even with starting relatively early I was sweating my ass off after the 4 mile run.  The bike portion didn’t feel any better, especially after the turn around point where I was pedaling into a slight headwind.  My legs just were out of gas.

I also decided to not wear bike shorts for the ride, instead thinking my running shorts would suffice for the 12.25 mile ride.  I regretted that decision greatly during the last 4-5 miles. My nether regions felt raw.

I was totally spent by the time the swim segment of the workout came up.  When I hopped in the pool, despite very warm water, I had heat exhaustion style goosebumps going on.  The first 400 I swam felt very difficult.  I kept my ass in the pool until I covered an additional 800 yards.

I emerged from the workout exhausted but glad that I completed it.  I need to get more consistent with my Sunday tri training.

Sunday afternoon I was doing my bills.  Part of it was reconciling my credit card statement.  I came across the charge for my visit to Zookies when Troy was down.  I noticed they charged me $6 more than I had authorized.  This pissed me off of course.  There are lots of stories of this going on, restaurant staff padding the charge, assuming most people are too lazy to look closely at their CC statement.

Well that amount of anger was nothing compared to what I felt when I saw the next charge, $599 at UnderArmour Direct!!!!  What the fck??!!  So I immediately call the CC company and report the charge.  I also hopped on to their website to verify that I didn’t see any other bullshit charges, nope UA was the only one.  Someone bought a shitload of athletic clothing on my dime.

Now I have to go through all the bullshit of them cancelling the card, sending me a new one and then my having to update every situation where I have stuff billed directly to the card.  There are a lot of them.

Once I hung up I was doing more head scratching.  The overcharge at Zookies was two days before the Under Armour charge.  I wondered if whomever was brazen enough to pad my food bill also was the person that made the UA purchase.  All they would have needed was the info on the card in many cases.

I called up Zookies and asked for one of the owners, neither was there but they said they would let them know and have them call me.  I got a call back shortly from Mrs Zookie, whom I have talked to several times at the bar, she is very nice.  I explained to her about the overcharge at the bar and my suspicions that it could be connected to the massive UA charge two days later.

She was very concerned by my story.  I told her I have no way of knowing for sure if they are connected but wanted to make her aware that one of her employees could be dealing in CC fraud.  She said she would review the receipts from that night to see whom cashed out the bill.  I thanked her for her effort.

I actually plan to try to do a little investigation on this myself.  Far too often banks basically ignore this fraud and write it off as a cost of doing business.  They won’t even try to prosecute the criminal perpetrating the fraud.

I am going to try to contact Under Armour and get details on the order, specifically what address it was sent to.  Since it was done in my name with my CC I am hoping they will give me this info.  If they do I will pass the address along to Mrs. Zookie to see if it matches up with the address of one of her employees.  If so, BAM, gotcha.

I also have a phone call to make to Comcast.  My promised 49.99 rate seems to have been smoke and mirrors, this months bill was $68. I really dislike Comcast…

So I got up early this morning to go pee, around 3:15 am.  I laid back down fully intending to fall immediately back to sleep.  Instead I rolled around for 45 minutes before I sad f it, and got up.  I tried to be productive with the extra time, working on race things, calling in for a replacement battery under warranty on my Neato, web site updates and finishing up watching DurianRiders YouTube videos.

I find Harley’s point of view and the way he expresses it very entertaining.  In one of the videos I watched he talked about how one of his goals was to promote critical thinking.  I realized that is one of my goals as well all though I never expressed it in quite that way.  Anyway if you have a few minutes to kill check out his channel.

Yesterday I contacted the maker of the supplement I was taking and told them of the results I saw with my T numbers.  They were as shocked as my doctor, saying that typically they will see a bump of 100-150 points  in T with supplementation.  I can’t tell exactly how far I jumped since my previous T test was in 2011 but if I use that as a guideline I launched 800 points in 2 months.  Was it a fluke?  I can’t tell you for sure.  All I know is they asked me to make sure to write a product review. 🙂

So once again the Tarpons cancelled a home game yesterday, giving one days notice.  This time the team they were supposed to play was disqualified for “not meeting minimum league requirements”, whatever that means.

The good news is I wasn’t going to be attending the game anyway because I am taking my mom out for an early Mothers Day celebration tonight.  The bad news is this is just more gas poured on top of the burning ship.  Although the Tarpons do a good job putting a quality product on the field, the rest of the league does not.  As I stated before, I have no idea how there will be another season of arena football at this point.

Originally when I bought the season tickets they were supposed to be for 7 home games.  Currently only 3 home games have been played.  Getting the remaining four in is highly unlikely.

So I have been pricing a new set of tires for the Tacoma.  The prices have been steep, I am looking at dropping somewhere between $600-$700 for new rubber.  That is a lot of dough to drop on the nearly 14 year old truck.

Jeremy had an interesting suggestion. (he has those occasionally)  He said I should look on Craigslist for someone dumping their factory wheels/tires because they put aftermarket phat rims/tires on their truck.    Surprisingly, a CL search did reveal a number of people doing just that.  It isn’t beyond the scope of possibility that I could score a set of wheels/tries with good tread for $400.  The wheels on my Tacoma are pretty beat anyway.  So we will see what opportunities pop up, I have some feelers sent out.

Tomorrow I am helping out with an all girl 5K that Ali and others are involved with.  I have offered to try to chip time the race but Ali didn’t think it was necessary since it is supposed to be more of a “fun run” .  For whatever reason, I almost feel guilty about not timing the race.  One of the things I did during my early AM time was once again offer my services to time the race.  We will see what happens.

The rest of the weekend I plan to split between work/exercise/pleasure/rest.  Hopefully I can find the right balance.

I had a couple local businesses/organizations that have annoyed me recently that I neglected to mention here.  Ironically they are somewhat related.

First up is the Naples Philharmonic or “The Phil” as it has been affectionately known over the years. Recently they announced that they were going to change the name of venue to “Artis – Naples”.  The management explained that they thought that renaming the Phil to Artis better reflected the centers all around dedication to arts of all types, not just the Naples Philharmonic Orchestra that is housed there. To me it sounded elitist, stuffy and unnecessary.

She backed up that the name change was deemed necessary based on some magical surveys that were sent out and mulled over by some people whose job it is to create an issue where none needs to be.  It was deemed that somehow changing the name of the Phil would translate into an important step in the evolution of the building.  This lead to a further burning of dollars, contracting some bullshit firm to think tank new names.  Who knows how much was spent to arrive at a name that rhymes with Fartis, but I can assure you it was way too much.

Well the reaction from the local community was overwhelmingly negative.  The papers lit up with comment after comment chastising the decision to change the name for seemingly no good reason besides the recently installed new management trying to separate/distinguish itself from the founders of the Phil.  To me it sort of seemed like a passive aggressive “f u”.

I am wondering if the Phil (Phartis) management will have a New Coke style revelation, come clean, and say “our bad”?  History shows that the public reacts much more favorably to someone that admits a mistake than someone that refuses to address the big pink elephant in the room. “Hey we fcked up” can go a long way.

As I said, the feedback in the newspaper to the name change was severe, which brings me to my next rant target, that same paper, the Naples Daily News.

Last week, with no notice other than a quick post by the publisher, the paper went to an online subscription model.  This model basically means that if you do not pay for either a conventional paper subscription or an online only subscription, you no longer have access to the majority of the content on the web site and no longer can comment on stories. Instead you are presented with an excerpt of the story and a prompt to get out the credit card.

I know this model has been adopted in some major newspaper publications, although I am not quite sure how successful it has been.  Personally, I think it’s stupid.

For several years the NDN has been polluting their site with in your face ads.  Every time you would load the home page a big box ad would hover over the content with a randomly placed and intentionally small X to dismiss it.  In addition to this they also would sometimes have a huge inline banner ad that would push the news content down for several seconds and then retract upwards.

Yes it was annoying but I viewed it as a way the newspaper ensures viewership of the ads, a trade off that seemed reasonable to me.  This new pay only model does not seem reasonable.

The NDN has a very small local reporting staff.  Much of what is posted on the site is simply national news feeds regurgitated.  Taking away the ability for the community to actively participate and view local stories without digging into their wallet seems counterproductive.  The more eyeballs they get on their online content and the ads associated with it, the better.  This move is going to dramatically reduce that number.

For my part, besides this small rant here, my reaction to this change will be simply to not view the paper online, something I expect repeated by many others.  I think NDN is walking on thin ice.  When you make content unavailable to people they learn to live without it, making your existence even more tenuous and unnecessary.  I’ll get my news from the local tv channel website instead, for free. Bad move NDN.

Congratulations are in order for my brother Todd, whose divorce papers were finally signed by a judge. His divorce proceedings have incredibly been ongoing since July of 2007.  If I tried to relate some of the shit that has gone on related to the divorce it would be hard to believe.  Let’s just say simply good riddance to dead weight.  I feel a little better about my existence that I now can use the title “ex-sister in law” when referring to the worthless bitch.  No, I’m not a big fan.

So finally, finally, finally, around 3 months after I sent in the paperwork for my taxes the refund is sitting in my bank account.  I met Ali at the bank once again yesterday and was able to get the transaction done in 5 minutes.  I have been anxiously awaiting the deposit of these funds to replenish what I already laid out to get the pool deck painted a couple months ago.

I also should be able to finally get a new set of rubber on the Tacoma.  The tires have been worn and noisy for quite a long time, something to be expected since they probably have at least 75,000 miles on them now.

So when I had my physical a few weeks back it was revealed that my testosterone level was ridiculously high, 1360, the reason I wound up getting my man parts ultrasounded. They wanted to rule out some sort of abnormal mass causing the high score.

Well when I initially went in for the exam and was asked about medication I was taking I didn’t even mention a testosterone supplement I was taking because I didn’t feel like it was making any difference.  I had started taking it a few months ago in an attempt to self medicate for some issues I was having that could be related to low T scores.

When I went back in to the office after my initial blood test the doctor sat down and said he had an awkward question for me, he asked if I was taking steroids.  I laughed and said no.  He said that my testosterone number was off the charts high, 1360.  Normal range in healthy men is classified as number between 300-800.

Once he told me my score I told him about the supplement I was taking and how I didn’t bother to mention it because I hadn’t noticed any difference with my issues.  He found it hard to believe that my T number could spike that high with any non-steroid supplement.  He looked up what I was taking online and found the ingredient list.  The major ingredient is something called stinging nettleweed. Still he was dumbfounded by the score.

So anyway the high score was why I was sent for the ultrasound, to rule out a physical problem as the cause.  He also told me to stop taking the supplement ( I already had) and that he wanted to draw more blood later (last week) to see how my levels are.

The ultrasound scan revealed no abnormalities that could cause elevated T production thankfully.  When I went back to the doctor yesterday the results of my second blood test seemed to confirm that my sky high T was tied into the supplement.  My testosterone level had dropped to 785, a nearly 500 point drop and now just inside the upper “normal level”.

The results of the test seem to point to the Revita-T supplement being the sole contributing factor which still is pretty amazing, a T supplement just never produces those kind of numbers.  Hell you could be injecting yourself with testosterone and not see a level that high.  Perhaps my body chemistry just really responds to what is in the pill.

The more surprising thing is I was actually only doing the lower of the two dosing options with the supplement.  The instructions say take either 1 or 2 pills at night before bed.  I was only taking one and there were plenty of nights I forgot to take it altogether.

So anyway, the end result of this month of blood draws, ball scanning, and other uncomfortable/awkward physical examinations is I am walking around with a stellar T score.  For comparison, I had a T test done in 2011 and my number was 560.   I am actually considering resuming my supplement although maybe on an every other day basis.  It is a bit unsettling that the directions also advise you to “cycle” the product on a 2 month on 1 month off schedule, when shooting roids you follow a similar schedule.

So I just got done installing a Samsung SSD drive in my work computer. I was following some very thorough directions that I found here. However I ran into an issue when I was trying to clone the existing system partition to the SSD drive.

I also got myself in trouble using the command line DISKPART tool when I set the wrong partition on my SATA drive as Active, causing a bootmgr error.  Luckily I was able to boot up my Windows 7 recovery cd (be sure to make one first) and fix the problem.

So anyway, after getting my system booted back up on the original SATA drive I decided to throw in the CD that is included with the SSD drive.  On there was a setup for a “Data Migration” utility.  I installed the program and fired it up.

Wow the utility makes migrating an existing installation on a SATA drive to a new SSD drive stupidly easy.  Pick your source drive, pick the SSD drive as the destination and click COPY.  Roughly 25 minutes later my 170 gig of data was moved across.  I shut down the system, unplugged the SATA drive, plugged the data cable for the SSD drive into the port formerly used by the SATA drive and hit the power button. WOW.

Once the POST process was done and the computer started hitting the SSD drive the system was amazingly fast.  My existing Windows 7 install was over a year old at this point.  As a result, when booting off the SATA drive it took well over 5 minutes until everything was done loading up.  This slowness is despite weekly de-fragmentation that had been done to the old drive.

Once I logged into the upgraded system the SSD drive was completely done loading the desktop in less than 15 seconds.  It was amazing.  Every thing I did on the system felt like it had a rocket booster attached compared to how things performed before, it’s just incredible.

I had avoided SSD drives in the past because of the reputation they had early on of wearing out.  Although there are no moving parts in a SSD drive, the repeated writes to the flash memory eventually will make certain areas stop working.  However as in most things in tech, they have gotten much better with SSD drive reliability as time has passed.  The Samsung 840 drive I installed has a 5 year warranty, better than anything you will find on a conventional SATA hard drive.

The huge performance improvement I am seeing makes me want to install the technology on my home computer as well.  Unfortunately SSD drives come with a price, literally.  They are much more expensive than their conventional spinning platter counterparts.  Right now I need to be using that money towards tires instead of toys.

So I head into the gym today and hop on my cardio machine once again for my 5 minute warm up.  Immediately I listen to what they have going on with the AV system today.  Things seemed to have returned to normal.  They were at least playing modern music with actual singing and the volume level was not quite loud enough to be obtrusive.

Back in the free weight area they had ESPN playing on 2 of the 3 tv’s as it should be.  All was almost right with my little gym world once again.

So I was about halfway through my workout when it happened.  All of a sudden I see the TV above the dip station I was on change channels to this fcking non-stop rave/techno concert feed.  I see the volume bar climb as well.  I look around and see one of the girls from the front desk walking away with remote control in hand.

This girl is young, if I had to guess she probably has not reached the legal drinking age.  Perhaps that is why she gave no consideration to how stupid it was to fill the gym with this awful music that she apparently likes. Treating the gym where she works as if she was driving around in her car must seem logical to her young mind.

So I went up front looking for her but she apparently was in one of the back offices.  I went back to the free weight area, climbed on top of the dip tower and turned down the volume on the tv that was polluting the free weight area the most.

Not only did she change the tv over the dip tower, 9 of the 10 tv’s in the gym now had the techo concert playing, it was ridiculous.  As you can imagine, I went through the rest of my work out incredibly perturbed.

As I was walking out the door the young girl and the owners son were back behind the desk.  I got his attention and asked him what was up with the music?  He said, “No good?” I told him it sounds like a rave concert, was terrible, and very distracting.  The girl that was the trigger man for the music aberration looked surprised that someone found her musical tastes annoying and inappropriate.

The owner’s son thanked me for letting him know.  I told him it was just my 2 cents.  However if this continues, I will be taking my 2000 cent monthly gym fee somewhere else.  I have enough things in my life to get annoyed about without having to deal with Silly Sally the Techno/Rave queen.

So you may recall that last week I had to ask the gym staff to turn down the volume on the sound system which was playing bad music at a ridiculously loud level.  Ironically the last two days of last week the gym was devoid of music, relying only on the symphony of iron clattering as the sound system appeared to be broken.

So yesterday I step on my cardio machine and it doesn’t take long for me to notice the latest attempt to steal my sanity.  The sound system was working once again and the volume was at a tolerable level.  The problem was what they were piping through the system.

It appeared to be some German techno band.  There were no words involved, only a repetitive, maddening beat that went on endlessly.  It seriously sounded like it was the same 10 seconds of sound looped, it was AWFUL.  It reminded me of some of the Hispanic music I occasionally hear blaring in my neighborhood.  No matter what song is played the beat is identical and equally maddening.

I actually gave the staff a one day pass and did not complain.  It did not stop me from being amazed at the ignorance of playing rave music in a gym that is filled with more senior citizens than anything else.  Get a clue, cripes.  If that shit is playing again today I will be voicing my opinion.

After work last night I arranged to met Ali at the bank to deposit the tax check, or so I thought.  I arrived at 5:15 and realized the lobby closes at 5 every day except Fridays.   DAMN IT!  The drive through was still open until 5:30 so I hoped Ali and I could just get in one of the vehicles and do the transaction from the curb.

When Ali pulled up I gave her the bad news about lobby hours but told her we could still try the drive through.  Well that plan got scuttled when she realized she forgot to bring her wallet with.  I couldn’t believe that once again I whiffed on getting the check deposited.  The new plan is to deposit the check today, before 5PM.

Lat night I was feeling stupid, (as I do most nights) and I recorded my first Randall shout out in Spanish.  I tried to somewhat look the part.

After work on Friday I stopped at the bank, hoping to finally get the funds from the tax refund in the bank.  I had stopped at Ali’s place first thing in the morning to get her to sign off on it.  So I sent the check up the tube at the drive through teller and heard a voice coming back to me a minute later.

The teller told me that she was unable to deposit the check because it is made to me AND Ali.  Since her name is not on the checking account they are unable to deposit the check without Alison being physically present with her ID.  Damn it….  Ali was equally frustrated when I gave her the news.

Friday night I watched my latest Netflix rental, Chronicle.  I remembered very little about the plot of the movie so I quickly read the description on the dvd sleeve.  Some young guys find some sort of extra terrestrial object that gives them super powers, ok I’m in.

The movie was quite good, better than I expected.  It made me think about how I would react if somehow I managed to obtain some sort of super human ability, if I would use it for good or allow the power to corrupt me.  I would expect it to be somewhere in the middle maybe.  Anyway, I found the movie to be very good, rent it, solid A from me.

Saturday I kept myself quite busy.  We are getting back into the time of year where I can no longer ignore mowing the grass for a month at a time.  I buzzed around on the tractor after tending the garden and weeding the property.  I picked up the girls earlier so they enjoyed themselves hanging out while I toiled.

I actually went around the house with the Dyson, something I need to do less and less because of the robotic sweeping that goes down 3 times a week.   I followed up by letting the Scooba scrub the kitchen and master bathroom, again something that hasn’t gone down in close to a month.

I then targeted vehicle cleaning as the non-standard chore of the day.  I started off with the Tacoma, something that rarely gets washed anymore.

I remember early on in my ownership of the truck I used to be pretty meticulous and regular in washing it.  However 12 years in the Florida sun and a shitty repair job on the passenger side of the truck that has left it with peeling clear coat has made washing the Tacoma a rarity.

As I washed the mostly faded white paint I found myself feeling somewhat sentimental.  I thought about just how many parts of my life the truck has accompanied me through.  It has been a dependable, rock solid companion that has moved me over 120,000 miles around the planet since I bought it in 2001.

The sentimental feelings perhaps were a result of some recent ideas about eventually replacing both the truck and the van with a full size dual cab truck, thinking that would kill two birds with one stone.  I’d be able to still transport all of the raw materials needed to maintain the house but also have plenty of room to carry 2 or 3 additional people and more importantly, two dogs.  Of course to even think about that I would need to get the SSR paid off which isn’t happening anytime soon.

After washing the Tacoma I washed the SSR, the second time doing so in as many weeks.  After I washed it last week I wound up in an unanticipated downpour, negating the work.

I followed up with the party van, not washing the exterior but thoroughly vacuuming the interior to suck up the abundance of dog hair that was filling the space.  I also pulled out the comforter in the bed and threw that in the wash.  I don’t think I had swept out the van since the trip my dad’s in January.  It was long overdue.

Mixed among the chores/projects I needed to do preparation for the race I was timing on Sunday.  I had the freshly washed truck all loaded up and ready to go by 9pm.  My eyelids were closed 30 minutes later as the alarm clock was set for 4 AM.

Some race mornings I pretty much spring up out of bed, ready to tackle the challenge of making everything come together.  Sunday was not one of those days.  The alarm was not welcomed and I almost wound up falling back asleep after turning it off.  I drug myself out of bed and managed to get on site shortly after 5am.

We seemed to have less hands on deck than normal, I was buzzing around for quite awhile until I got to the point where I could settle in and help Alison do data entry.  The race actually started a couple minutes late because I had a little bug to iron out last second.

We had some issues because for some reason participation in the race this year saw a huge unanticipated swelling of numbers.  For the most part our year to year race participation has either been flat or slightly down, mostly due to an oversaturation of races in our area.

Last year the race had less than 350 entries , this year we wound up with just less than 500 people signed up.  There were only 300 shirts ordered for the race and I had only requested 500 race bibs, figuring that was more than adequate based on prior years numbers.  We actually ran out of bibs late in the registration process.

Despite a large amount of runners, timing the event went very smoothly.  I had basically no errors, something that rarely occurs.  I was driving off site by 9:30.

After getting all of the post race work done and eating lunch I felt exhausted.  I laid down for a close to two hour nap and woke up still feeling tired.  I also woke up still coughing and sniffling.  I am going on my third week of this annoying illness.

Sunday night I saw Ironman 3.  I had heard one review of the movie going in and it was very positive.  I came out of the movie agreeing with the review, overall it was a great movie with some very funny moments and one liners sprinkled amongst the kick ass action.   Unlike Spiderman, which was pretty firmly in the lame bucket by the time it hit the third sequel, Ironman 3 delivered and left me wanting more. With the ending of it however, I’m not quite sure where the story goes from here.  Solid A.  My only really negative thought was the 3D version of the film really offered me nothing extra.

I had a very odd dream last night, surely related to my thoughts about replacing the Tacoma.  I saw someone selling a used 2007 Ford pick up truck in the paper and I went to look at it.  The young guy selling it seemed like a pure breed redneck.  When I saw the truck I found it hard to believe that the truck was only 5 or 6 years old.  It had a lot of rough spots which the kid explained away as minor problems.

I knew that there was no way I should buy the truck but instead of just telling the guy no thanks I stuck around and listened to him ramble.  He told me he had a spare body for the truck that I could have, it was at at garage of a “friend” of his.  We hopped in the beat up Ford and drove over there.

The guy opens the garage and it is a cluttered mess.  The kid starts throwing stuff out of the way, creating Iron Man-like chaos as parts and objects crashed into the floor and each other.  He was trying to reach the back wall, evidently there was a secret door where the spare body was kept.  I wound up helping him throw stuff out of the way to get to the door.

Once the door was open it revealed a large sunken space, the top part surrounded by a ledge that had a ton more stuff on it.  The guy again goes on a destruction rampage, pushing the stuff off the ledge, crashing onto both the concrete floor below and the things on it, mostly other cars.  I asked him why he was making such a mess.  He replied simply “I don’t give a fck”  His reply reaffirmed my belief that I should not buy his 2007 Ford.

He pointed to a corner of the area below, saying that was the spare body he was going to give me with the truck.  It was the shell of a late 50’s Corvette.  I remember thinking how mounting a Corvette body on a 2007 Ford truck frame would be more hassle than it’s worth.  Plus where would I put the mulch?  End of dream.

So since the shake up at the gym a few weeks ago I have been observing the changes taking place.  The round robin of temporary managers seems to have halted.  The behind the counter staff was once again mostly turned over. Curiously, most of them now are younger chubby women that look like they never did a sit up in their lives.

From a business standpoint, this makes little sense.  When a perspective gym member walks in the front door, you want an in shape individual greeting them, someone that visually represents the fitness level someone might be aiming for.  Having a muffin topped woman pitching a gym membership seems hypocritical at best and just bad for the bottom line.  I know guys that would be influenced to join a gym solely on how attractive the staff is.

There also is a weird phenomenon that goes on at my gym where gym members somehow transform into gym employees. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen this happen, it’s almost like the place uses it’s membership as a farm system to harvest employees, most of which don’t last more than a few months.

I had to laugh when I saw the latest addition to the gym show up yesterday, a speed/heavy bag set up.  It was plopped right in the middle of the already small open floor space utilized for abs work.  I was like, wtf.  Are we now in a MMA gym?  I had no idea why management would think this was a good idea.  Hell I would much rather see a real pull up bar installed than a boxing station that I guarantee will collect more dust than jabs.

So this Sunday I have a race to time, my first race in almost a month.  After that I get another nice break until Memorial Day.  I do enjoy the open weekends, free of timing responsibilities that this time of year offers me.

I don’t have a lot of specific plans lined up outside of normal to do’s.  Sure it would be nice to catch Iron Man but I would rather let the opening weekend maniacs pass through before seeing the film.

I forgot to mention that I actually have the tax refund check in hand albeit the adjusted amount.  I called the IRS last week and asked them when I could expect to see the refund.  I told the woman that the online status of the account showed it should have been direct deposited on April 10th.   She said that a paper check was actually scheduled to be sent out that day but it could take up to 4 weeks for me to receive it.

Ironically the check only took a couple days to arrive.  It arrived at the same time as a separate letter from the IRS saying that my refund could not be direct deposited, something about the financial institution did not accept the transaction. (huh?)  The letter reiterated the 4 week possible wait to receive the paper check that was already sitting on my counter.  Ali told me she was sent the exact same letter.

My accountant reviewed the dispute the IRS had with our refund amount and is confident the mistake is theirs, he is going to try to get us the disputed amount although it could be a long wait.  The check is still sitting on my counter, I need Alison to sign it as well and then we need to figure out how we are going to divide up the adjusted proceeds.

Speaking of checks, my credit union just implemented remote check deposit service.  I tried it out for the first time last week, it’s pretty damn cool.  To pull off this trick you have to use the credit union mobile app, something I never bothered to install because of lingering hesitation about having my bank account accessible via my phone.

To deposit a check you simply take a picture of the front and back of the check and verify the amount of the check.  Once the image quality is verified by the app you are done!  It is similar to what happens if you deposit a check via an ATM machine except in this situation you just keep the check.

I wasn’t really sure if I should keep the physical check, shred it or something else.  Jeremy suggested just writing CASHED across the front of it and keeping it filed.  I think that is what I will do.  So regardless, it is a very convenient way to handle an old school payment method like paper checks in a high tech, digital manner.

My Google AdSense dollars dropped off a cliff last month and I am trying to put my finger on why.  I have been averaging between $20-$30 a month for the last 6 months.  Last month I made a paltry $1.92.   I put out 9 videos in April and although none of them hit big, continued views on older content was solid.  I now have almost 58,000 views on my rebooted YouTube channel to go along with the half million plus on the old channel.

Maybe just for whatever reason there were dramatically less click thru’s last month.  On my part I am trying to insert my AdSense code into more spots to maximize coverage.  I find it annoying when something is less than what it was before no matter if it is pull up reps or ad dollars.

Wow Tim Tebow really got tossed out in the trash huh?  I place the blame for the situation totally on the Jets shoulders.  This goes back to why they even obtained him in the first place?  It seemed pretty clear from the get go that they didn’t have faith in his QB skills enough to pencil him as a potential starter.  But that seemed  clear to pretty much everyone in the league.

Their use of him kind of reminded me what the Eagles did with Vick his first year with the team where they awkwardly attempted to push Vick into the game plan.  It was a total failure.

I feel bad for Tebow.  He is a good guy and has mostly taken the high road despite poor treatment from the Jets.  It isn’t his fault that his QB skills are not at an NFL level, hopefully some team can find a way to utilize the athletic skills he does possess.