Archives February 2014

Saturday morning I followed through with my plan to reboot my running program.  Cindy and I did a little over 3 miles at the nearby track.  Running on the track can deliver a pretty high dosage of boredom as you circle the same 400 meters again and again but it is also nice to know exactly how far you have gone and how far you have yet to go without a GPS.

I had to derail Cindy from her usual talk heavy tendencies as the run went on.  Since I hadn’t run since New Year’s Day I wasn’t feeling all that great.  When I don’t feel all that great I try to insulate my mind from my body by letting it drift to whatever subject it lands on.  Responding to someone else’s conversation breaks that process.  The good thing is Cindy knows that and if I give her the NTZ (no talk zone) indicator, she is pretty good at just letting me be.

My GPS and Cindy’s had a pretty large disagreement on how far and how fast we ran.  My Garmin said we logged something like 3.29 miles at an 8:33 pace.  Cindy’s said we did something like 3.17 at a 9:00 pace.  I liked my numbers better.  Either way I felt well exerted and as a bonus left the track without a limp.  My right knee felt ok.

When I got back to the house I headed outside to tend to outdoor chores.  Despite the extensive efforts that were put into the protecting the garden during recent cold spells the tomatoes have officially bit the dust.  I ripped out the two dead plants.

I had everything finished up by noon clearing the way for my next automotive project, bypassing the transmission cooler on my Tacoma.

You may wonder why I was bypassing my perfectly good factory trans cooler?  Well recently a guy commented on one of my other Tacoma videos, thanking me for the guidance it gave him on his repair.  He also clued me in to another common failure of Tacomas around the age of mine, trans cooler ruptures.  Evidently the factory transmission  cooler, which is enclosed within the radiator has a history of failing.  If that happens, antifreeze is pumped into the transmission which will kill it shortly thereafter.  Well the last thing I need to is to replace the transmission on my 15 year old truck so I figured installing a $40 trans cooler was a good insurance policy.

I won’t go into vast detail on the trials and tribulations of the replacement (there were many) as they are outlined in the video.  The end result was I got the cooler installed albeit using methods that are less than ideal in my book.  I will be keeping an eye on the front end of the truck to make sure I don’t see any trans fluid puddles going forward.  So far, so good.

On Saturday night we watched Don Jon, a movie about a guy that is majorly addicted to porn.  The movie was entertaining enough but I can’t really tell you much about the plot, I am not sure if there really was much of one. It was a solid Netflix rental but if you are a sexual prude, steer clear. It gets a firm (no pun intended) B.

Sunday morning was utilized mostly to get more maintenance done, both the automotive and landscape variety.  Cindy’s Miata was due for an oil change.  She helped me do the work and actually enjoyed participating.  After that I recharged her AC system as it was not blowing cold air anymore, despite the large chunk of money Cindy spent getting the compressor replaced last year.

Adding coolant to the system got it blowing cold again.  I am hoping whatever is leaking is doing so in small quantity so I can just recharge it every couple of months of instead of throwing more repair money into the Miata which is already firmly in the “throwing good money after bad” category when it comes to repair costs.

After car maintenance was completed we headed to the backyard for landscape work.  The areca palms outer fronds had all turned brown from the cold temps.  I wanted to give them a nice haircut, they were overgrown anyway.  I threw the hedge trimming attachment on my weed whacker and went nuts, leaving piles of decapitated palm fronds in my wake.

Cindy was on clean up duty, picking up the fronds and throwing them in the yard cart I had attached to the tractor, dumping them in the trench in the rear of the yard.  Having her help made the task go MUCH faster than it would have flying solo.

Most of Sunday afternoon was low key.  Sometime mid-afternoon a thought hit me as I glanced at the calendar while doing my bills.  I noticed that next Monday was President’s Day, a day off for me.  I recalled that Cindy said she had off Friday and Saturday as well.  I wondered if somehow I could turn this into a short notice road trip to PA to visit my dad and step mom?

In March I have work and race commitments that would make a trip impossible.  If I wanted to do it in 2014 it would have to be now.  When I mentioned the idea to Cindy she was all for it, she was excited about the prospect of seeing and playing in snow in person, something she never has had a chance to do, ever.  Of course this was all preliminary, I had to get a number of things lined up, first of all checking with Dad if he is ok with a short notice visit.

Dad was surprised by my proposal but happy to hear it.  After verifying with my step mom, since she is the one who winds up doing most work associated with having company, he said he was cool with us coming up.

Next up I floated the idea to Ali. Ideally I would have liked to take both dogs along for the visit, despite the fecal disaster I encountered last year from Nicki.  Ali was not agreeable to my taking Nicki again for fear of a relapse of that very poopy scenario so Sadie will be making the trek solo.  However once we get to my dad’s place she will have my dad’s three dogs to keep her company.  She will have a TON of fun.

Today I got the green light from work to take the time off so the trip is officially a go.

All of a sudden I now I have a massive list of things to get handled before the early Friday morning departure.  I have a lot of mental checklists to mark off.  Of course a lot of those marks are party van related.  Everytime I push off for another road trip in the van it is always a leap of faith to some degree since it is an 18 year old vehicle.  However each time I have called it into action it has gotten me to and from my numerous destinations with only a few small bumps in the road.

This winter in PA has been brutal, cold and long.  The temps at my dad’s place have been non-stop frigid almost every day since Christmas. We will be lucky to see a couple days that get above freezing. It will be quite the eye opener for Cindy since she gets cold when temps dip into the 60’s. Seeing the new sheep and llama additions to my dad and stepmom’s animal menagerie should be fun as well.

I got a call from my accountant yesterday letting me know he was done with my taxes already.  I am hoping the refund I am getting will be enough to cover getting the pool enclosure re-screened, something that is probably a year or two overdue.  There are a number of panels on the top of the cage that are torn along the spline.

Last night I “made dinner” for Cindy and myself, juice.  When I was flying solo I had a period of time where I was juicing pretty regularly and days I didn’t juice a lot of my meals were wraps with just veggies/nuts in them.  It’s probably not a coincidence that when I was doing that I weighed 10 pounds less.

I got away from juicing primarily because I found it to be above the hassle quotient I was willing to tolerate with food prep.  Between prepping/cleaning the fruits/veggies to juice and the pretty messy clean up afterwards I just tired of it. Not only was cleaning the juicer a PIA, cleaning up the food shrapnel that sprays out during the juicing process was annoying as well.

Well last week I got the inspiration to pick up the juicing ball, at least on a limited basis.  I am thinking maybe I could do it one or two times a week as a dinner replacement.  Cindy, who is always game for pretty much anything healthy lifestyle related was excited to juice.  Well she was less excited after taking the first sip.

The juice was a mixture of celery, carrots, tomatoes, and beets.  By the time I was finished the juice container was filled to the very brim.  I would best describe the juice as tasting very “earthy” as in like you were drinking dirt.

I attributed the taste to perhaps me not cleaning the beets as thoroughly as I should have although I don’t think I did anything differently than I did in the past.   The only thing  I might have done differently in the past was add an orange or apple to it as well.

Cindy tried to amend the dirt juice by mixing in some orange juice from the bottle.  She said it didn’t help much.  I choked mine down as is.  Cindy got hers down as well.  So our dinner last night consisted of a salad and the cup of dirt juice.  Surprisingly I didn’t feel ravenous later.  Despite the bad taste, the juice was a super concentrated shot of everything great fresh vegetables gives you .

I watched some of the Olympics last night, I originally thought the opening ceremonies were last night.  Instead it was just some of the events like snowboarding and skating.  Still I watched a hour or so of it.

I mixed it in with doing so server work at the office from home.  I have been trying to get a few things implemented this week and have only been partially successful in doing so which is frustrating.  I followed up with getting to work an hour early this morning to continue tweaking.

This weekend has a lot of potential things to keep me busy.  I may try to start it off with putting in 3-5 miles at the local track to see how my tricky right knee feels.  After that the chores will begin in earnest.  I would like to get the auxiliary trans cooler I bought for the Tacoma installed and perhaps a partial trans fluid swap while I am at it.  I have the supplies to change the oil on Cindy’s Miata as well so that should get knocked out too.   The front discs on the Tacoma are going to need to be replaced in the near future as well.

So yesterday I was pointed to various stories that were tied into a statement made by Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary.   The full statement was this:

Over the longer run, CBO finds that because of this law, individuals will be empowered to make choices about their own lives and livelihoods, like retiring on time rather than working into their elderly years or choosing to spend more time with their families. At the beginning of this year, we noted that as part of this new day in health care, Americans would no longer be trapped in a job just to provide coverage for their families, and would have the opportunity to pursue their dreams.

However conservatives took a few key words to represent the statement in a manner that is obviously 180 degrees different than how it was intended.  This tactic is used again and again by the media to gain influence with the massive portion of the population that are too ignorant, lazy , or indifferent to actually form their own opinions.

Carney was saying that the availability of the ACA act allows individuals to not be stuck in a job that is inadequate in other ways because it was the only way they could get health insurance for themselves and/or their family. They can instead pursue other work or even start a business without fear of not having a way to get affordable health care insurance.  Conservatives and their media counterparts instead ingested this positive idea and crapped out that instead it means it encourages people to quit their jobs, stay at home and have others pay for their healthcare.

Anyone with the ability to construct a sentence of more than 5 words should be able to see just how ridiculous it is to interpret what Carney really said as meaning “Americans should stop working to “pursue their dreams” (stay at home).  It’s absolutely moronic yet sadly there are millions of Americans that will eat every morsel of this bullshit and come back asking for seconds.

America is so fcked up.  Thank you Koch brothers for your diligent and tireless work to ensure this is more and more the status quo every single day.  Distract the masses by pitting them against each other while those at the top chuckle at all of us from their golden balconies.

Last night had a nice combo of activities that I find enjoyable.  I wanted to do the bar dip version of this month’s BB challenge but I wanted to do it from a different perspective, overhead.   To do so I mounted my new GoPro on the Phantom.

To mount the camera I actually used the waterproof mount that came with the camera, the mount that comes with the Phantom is actually a little big for the Hero 3+ which is smaller than the Hero 3.

I also utilized my moon gel.  I put one piece under the foot that attached to the bottom of the quadracopter and then another under the camera inside the waterproof mount.  The combo seemed to work very well, there was very minimal distortion in the video.  I still need to balance the props, the audio from the flight make the props sound quite “buzzy”.

So anyway, I figured with the very wide field of view the GoPro has and the ability of the Phantom to more or less hover in place without pilot input, I should be able to film my attempt from above.  Mounting the GoPro in the waterproof case actually resulted in the cam being upside down.  Luckily the GoPro has the ability to flip video on the fly just by telling it that UP is the other direction.

So I got the copter in the air and positioned it so it looked like the GoPro was more or less pointed at the pull up bar.  I set the transmitter on the table and got to work.  The copter drifted around slightly due to wind but with the wide angle lens it didn’t matter.  I think it turned out quite well, I will surely dig deeper into this video recording method in the future.  Here is the finished product.

After the challenge was over I flew around some more, capturing some more cool aerial footage.  I am having ideas float around in my head of some future uses of my flying aerial rig that could be pretty cool.

My enjoyable night was rounded out with some gaming time playing both WoW (dinged 90 with my second toon) and Hearthstone (kicked some ass with my Warlock & Hunter).  It felt good to have a  night of doing nothing except what I want to do instead of things I have to do.

I had a weird dream last night.

I was back at the house I grew up at in Gouglersville.  I was walking down the road near the bottom of the hill with my dad.  We had Sadie along.  Dad had her on a long extend-a-leash.  The creek that runs along the road was much bigger than I remember, looking more like a small river.

Sadie, as she often does, was far ahead exploring.  She headed down the slope that lead into the creek/river and started wading in.  Before I knew it she was a good 15 feet from shore with my dad still holding the leash.  I yell to my dad, “You shouldn’t let her go in there, there are sharks!”  “I know, I know” my dad said in his mildly dismissive tone.  Dad is never one to take much heed to potential danger, confident that he will always somehow fall outside the odds.

Well as soon as my dad gets done speaking I see two large shadows moving quickly in the water which was no more than knee deep.  As my eyes focused I saw it was not one but TWO sharks and big ones at that, 7-8 feet long at least.  I scream at my dad, who was now in the creek/river himself as Sadie pulled along,  about the sharks.  He says he sees them and starts “running” as fast as you can in knee high water, pulling Sadie back behind him.

As Dad is hauling ass towards the bank the sharks pass directly in front of him, I was sure he was going to either step on them or trip over them.  He somehow avoids them and makes it to shore, however he momentarily forgets that Sadie is still in the water.  I run towards him and yell, “GO, GO, GO” meaning he needed to pull Sadie out the rest of the way.

My eyes widened as Sadie was moving towards land, both sharks had swung around and were hauling ass straight towards her, like twin torpedoes.  As Sadie came out of the water the sharks shot out of the water, missing her barely before they both roll back into the river/creek.

Sadie had no idea anything was wrong at all, standing there with her typical dog smile after she shook off the water.  End of dream.

Feel free to ignore this.

I forgot to mention that Monday night I watched This is 40, a comedy about what married life is like after you cross the four decade barrier.  It had some really funny parts that I could definitely identify with.  Unfortunately the movie suffered from another bout of drowsiness on my part, my eyes closed quite a bit during it.  Still, it was definitely a solid Netflix rental, deserving of at least a B+ rating.

All of a sudden yesterday I started seeing a locust swarm of “My FB Movies” popping up on people’s timelines. Evidently as part of celebrating being in existence for 10 years, Facebook has implemented some sort of script that creates a 62 second video for each and every user, scraping their metadata to poop out a recap of their “lives” on Facebook.  It appears to do so primarily by using pictures and updates that received the most attention.

This morning I posted that I would not be sharing MY FB movie with anyone.  Part of it is based on my dislike for lemming mentality. Part of is it my like of absurd/ironic statements, since most aspects of my life have been out front and naked in social media for the last half decade or more.  For me, of all people, to say I don’t want to share my canned FB movie makes no sense. Working as intended.

Very little to add since I did a blog update late yesterday afternoon.

I am looking to redo some things about my fitness routine, not so much changing what I do dramatically but more when I do it.  For whatever reason I arbitrarily decided to make squat/DL day Wednesdays  6 months ago when I started including it as a consistent part of my weekly routine.    However since doing this my endurance training has really suffered.

The biggest reason for this is squat/DL day has a bad habit of making my lower body very, very sore.  So sore that when Saturday rolls around, they day I used to do a long run, my legs/knees/hips still felt pretty miserable and not up to the task.  So as a result I just don’t get out much to run, well that and the persistent right knee pain I have been dealing with.

So anyway, my new plan is to move my DL/Squats to early in the week, either Monday or Tuesday.  My hope is doing so will allow my lower body to recover enough to run by the weekend.  In has been my experience that doing lower body strength work and running have been more or less mutually exclusive, at least in my world.  Either I squatted or I ran, never both on a consistent basis.

My Saturday was pretty jam packed.  I first headed outside to work the normal outdoors maintenance which was sorely needed since the last two weekends race logistics and/or Randall housing kept me from my normal rounds.  The garden was pretty messy.  I spent time removing things that were killed or severely damaged from the cold few days we had the last couple weeks.  I walked around and picked up a lot of yard shrapnel and then made my rounds with the weed whacker, something that hasn’t been done in weeks.

I then moved inside where I cleaned and did additional prep for the party.  It just felt like there was tons to do even though in the back of my mind I realized I had most of the day Sunday to prep as well if needed. I just hate procrastinating.

One of the big things I needed to get knocked out on Saturday was making my chocolate birthday cake, as it was promised as one of the features of the SB party.  I once again filmed the cake creation process, this time being much more concise in documenting it.  The entire video is less than 5 minutes.  I think this cake turned out the best of any attempts I have done.  The cake itself was super moist and the icing turned out just about perfect in flavor and texture.

Cindy and I went to see I Frankenstein Saturday night.  The movie was dead smack in the middle for me.  It was fine but would have been equally fine viewing at home and definitely was not worth the premium to see it in 3D.  It gets a B.

So Sunday morning Cindy and I tossed around the idea of doing a DD bike ride however it was really foggy early on so we scrapped the idea in favor of getting a head start on party prep.  Cindy had planned on a nice varied selection of food items so her primary job was food prep although she had really put a lot of planning into other elements of the party as well.  Most of my contribution was technical and logistical, move that, set up this, etc…

One of the ideas I had was to set up a second tv on the pool deck so people could enjoy the game outdoors if seating got to be a pain indoors.  I had bought a cheap portable antenna to pull in the signal from the Ft Myers tower.  I set the tv up, attached the antenna and had a crystal clear HD picture.    Too bad it turned out that not a single person watched the game outside, instead the game was broadcast outdoors for whatever gnats were hanging around.  Part of my Sunday also included hopping on the tractor and quickly mowing the yard to compliment the weed whacking I performed the day before.

I had to do some work on a server at work from home Sunday.  At least it was supposed to be from home.  Unfortunately something went wrong with my remote control session and I had no choice but to haul ass into work to fix it and then haul ass back out to the house to help in the final prep.

While I was in the shower Randall had shown up, fresh off his first ever half marathon in Miami that morning. (grats dude)  It was VERY hot for early February, not a good day to run at all.  I was glad to see he survived it, that is all you are really trying to do your first time.

So surprisingly people did actual start showing up around 5 to take advantage of my backyard playground. Before we long we had 10 people+ outside taking turns on the slackline, flipping tires, and messing around on my pull up bars.  It was a fun way to start the event. I was the only one to successfully traverse the line the entire distance, twice, just saying. 😉

So the party then moved indoors and the drinking began in earnest.  I had planned for people bringing a lot of their own beer in addition to the 4 cases I bought.  I turned the utility sink into an auxiliary cooler by cleaning it up, lining it with a trash bag and dumping in a bag of ice.  It worked out pretty well.

With people bringing their own  adult beverages we just had a ridiculous amount of alcohol on hand, enough to fulfill the drinking needs of a group four times the size of what we had.  We were over provisioned for food as well but not to quite the same degree thank goodness.

So the game started and the fun ramped up.  Most of the room was pulling for the Broncos, my buddy Sean was really the only person really pulling for the Seahawks, and in a very demonstrative manner at that.  He was so into it that I grabbed my ancient number 55 Brian Bosworth Seahawks jersey that I bought for some odd reason two decades ago, and gave it to him. I even personalized the jersey with his name.

The game was surprising in many ways, starting with the Seahawks scoring a safety on the very first play of the game.  If someone would have picked SAFETY as the first type of score on the betting board they would have cleaned up.  The Seahawks absolutely demolished the Broncos from start to finish.  The number one defense versus number one offense match up was a clear beat down, something like the 2nd or third biggest blow out in Super Bowl (no I am not going to say the Big Game, fcking ridiculous) history.

I thought the commercials this year were very strong although because of the noise in the room I had a hard time hearing some of them from time to time.  I won’t bother reviewing them, my general opinion follows most others in what were the best.  There was some very creative and funny advertising genius on display for sure.

A group of people had to head out around halftime for various reasons but there was still a strong core group that lasted to the end of the game. Despite our encouragement for others to take food/drink with them, for the most part we wound up keeping enough food/beer to feed a small army.

All in all I think the party was a huge success, everyone appeared to have a lot of fun which is all you hope for when hosting something like this.  Heaping amounts of credit needs to go on Cindy’s back.  She really did a hell of a job making sure people were taken care of. After everyone left it was just Randall, Cindy and I.  Randall took Monday off so he could just crash at my place.  We stayed up for awhile trying to get as much cleaned up as possible.  There was quite a bit as you can imagine.

This morning I woke up not really feeling hung over at all, just tired.  Although I drank probably a six pack at the party or a little more, I shut it down pretty early instead of drinking right up to the bell which probably helped.

When Randall got up I fired up Season 2 of The Walking Dead video game.  I had bought the game a couple weeks ago but hadn’t tried playing it yet.  I bought it on the bedroom Xbox so I had to download it to the great room Xbox before I could play.

So I fire up the game and start playing.  After maybe 20 minutes of play I zig when I should have zagged and die.  No problem, the game does auto saves along the way so if you die you can jump back in close to that point.  Well on the death screen there is a prompt to hit the A button to continue.  I hit it, nothing, oh, maybe it’s doing something in the back ground. I wait some more and hit it again, nothing.  What the fck??

Ok well it appeared obvious the game was hung.  I assumed it was just a glitch so I exited the game and figured I would be back to my last save point.  Wrong.  I launched the game and was transported back to square one, well that is annoying as shit.  I handed the controller over to Randall so he could go through it the second time.  I wrote it off to the Xbox just fcking up.

So Randall does well and gets well past the point where I died before he bites the dust.  He put in at least a half hour of time in.  Again I am presented with hit A to continue screen and again it does nothing.  What the fck??????????!!!!!!  I had no option but to again exit the game and again we lost all progress, we now had put well over an hour into the damn game and our reward was to start over again.

Well before I got on the hamster wheel on more time I decided to check online to see if this annoying problem was isolated to me or not.  The answer was not.  Evidently the problem is the end result of Microsoft’s stupid licensing restrictions.  Basically, because I bought the game on my other Xbox, it wasn’t allowing me to save the game on another one.

This behavior is annoying enough as is.  To me, if I bought a game I should be able to download and play it on any Xbox I own.  But even if you set that belief aside, allowing me to install the game on another console with no warning of any sort alerting me to the fact that I will wind up wasting tons of time if I ever die, is ridiculous.

I did find a “fix” for the behavior.  Basically you do a license transfer of your downloaded content from one Xbox to another however this is a one way trip.  Now I can no longer play the game on my bedroom Xbox and Microsoft only allows you to do a license transfer once every 4 months.  This sort of restrictive use policy is bullshit in my opinion.  If I bought a hard disc copy of the game I could load and play it on either system without issue.  Just because I buy a copy of a game that is digital only format doesn’t mean that ability should be removed.

After Randall left I still had a number of to do’s.  I ran out to get supplies to change the oil in the SSR, Tacoma and Cindy’s Miata.  All three vehicles were overdue for an oil change.  Cindy’s won’t get done till this weekend but I knocked out the SSR and Tacoma this afternoon.  I also swapped out the air filters in both vehicles.

Overall things went well before I received a dirty oil facial while working on the Tacoma.  The truck was parked in the same direction as the wind was blowing rather strongly.  Once I removed the oil drain plug the stream of warm, dirty oil was immediately misdirected out of the oil catch pan and all over the driveway and my upper body.  It was a mess.

I had some ideas of installing the auxiliary trans cooler I bought for the Tacoma but I decided my time would be better spent putting the rest of the party hangover items away.  I repacked the unused beer in the boxes it came in.  I had a full case of Michelob Ultra and nearly full cases of Coors, Bud Light and Miller Lite when I was done.  During the afternoon I was able to give  away half of my beer surplus, donating the Coors to my neighbor next door and the Mich Ultra to my other neighbor across the street.  They both appreciated my Super Bowl party surplus.

About 4PM I finally had the house more or less back to the way it was prior to the party.

During the afternoon, the sandhill cranes that up until this point had been seen exclusively in my neighbors yard, decided to come check out things on the other side of the fence.  These birds are incredibly loud when they communicate, the loudest bird I ever heard first hand.  Today the were quiet as they walked around the yard.  I hope they decide to hang out more, they are a beautiful and awesome addition to the various wildlife that hangs out around the house.  Now if they only would scare off armadillos….

Tomorrow my normal routine returns although physically I don’t know if I am quite ready for it.  The combo of squatting and deadlifting followed by a day of ass to grass squat holds has really laid me out.  Even today, some 4 days later I have some very acute soreness from it in my legs.  Getting old isn’t for sissies.