Move it out and in, 300 Rising, Lazy

Saturday morning I drug myself out of bed to go do the club bagel run.  The bagel run is a run of varying distances, anywhere from 3 miles up to 13, the duration is up to you.  Afterwards everyone meets at the running store and enjoys some free bagels, juice and coffee.   Cindy and I only ran 5 miles as I am trying to increase my run distance slowly to avoid knee pain complications.

For the second half of the run we were joined by an older guy named Eric that I never saw before.  It turns out Eric had only been in the Naples area for a week and was trying it on for size as he is looking for a place to relocate to from New York.  Eric has had quite an interesting life which started off in Albania and found him living all over the country including Alaska, California and Manhattan.  He also was a tremendous endurance athlete in his younger days.  He ran something like 27 marathons with a personal best of 2:56, that is VERY fast.  He also did the Kona Ironman, geez.

Here I was thinking my 5 mile run at a 9 minute mile pace was actually half decent, lol.

On my way home from the run I had an unplanned stop at Ali’s.  I had been talking to her about buying her office furniture she wanted to unload since she plans to get new stuff when she moves into her new place.  The furniture is nothing fancy but at least I knew it fit the corner at the house well since that is where it resided for many years.  Well I wound up picking the furniture up.

To get the stuff out of Ali’s condo was a bit of a chore.  I had to disassemble the L shaped desk most of the way to be able to get it down the steps and into the bed of the Tacoma.   In addition to the desk I grabbed one of the two file cabinets and a small bookshelf.  To give Ali a place to work we moved ANOTHER small desk to be used temporarily for her computer equipment.  Yes the process was on the tedious side.

When I got home I wasted little time getting busy.  I first removed the used ottoman I had bought with hope of Nicki using it as a resting spot.  She never showed any interest in it whatsoever so I carried it out to the road and plopped it down for someone to take. I then used my furniture sliders to relocate the treadmill to the master bedroom and tucked it next to the far wall where Cindy can use it while having the TV on for a distraction.

I then brought in the desk parts and reassembled them.  The desk was quite a few years old and never felt all that sturdy as is often the case with much furniture you put together.  I decided I wanted to try to stiffen things up.  I did so by utilizing countersunk 2 inch deck screws at various spots.  They worked as I hoped, there is no more wobble or squeaking, the desk feels much better.

I also had a lawn tractor project to knock out, installing my new sunshade.  I saw it as an opportunity for my first ever tractor maintenance video.  The install was very straight forward and simple but I never want to miss up an opportunity to monetize a video for ad dollars.

The new shade is nice.  After I finished installing it I quickly mowed the front mound of the house to test it out.  Even though the sun was out and shining brightly I felt quite comfortable with my head and neck being completely in the shade.   It should make those August mowing sessions more bearable and less UV intensive, something my skin cancer filled history appreciates.

Saturday night was when Cindy and I went to go see the new 300 movie.  I was quite excited to go for the reasons I outlined in the blog last week.  I also was apprehensive since I think every single Zack Snyder movie after 300 was disappointing.  I didn’t want the new 300 to suffer the same fate.  We met up at the theater with our friend Alfred.

Well I am happy to report the movie was good.  Now if you didn’t like the first 300, you won’t like the second.  This isn’t Gone with the Wind, this is blood soaked, smash your face violence where the bad guys (and girls) get what is coming to them. At one point Cindy told me I was hurting her hand from squeezing it too hard during some of the battle scenes, it’s just epic action. I had no idea that for the most part the movie timeline takes place along the original 300 story.  For some reason I thought the new movie was sometime in the future.  They did a good job tying the two together.

Of course for this to be a true 300 movie it had to not only have CGI enhanced violence, it also had to have sex and nudity.  The way the sex was delivered was unexpected.  All three of us exchanged confused looks when it went down.  When you see the movie I am sure you will understand our confusion.

So anyway I thought the movie was good, close in delivering the same straight to the vein testosterone injection as the original 300.  No it won’t incite any deep thoughts or  warm and fuzzy feelings.  Instead you will feel like going out in the parking lot and wrestling an alligator.  I give Rise of an Empire a shiny A, deal with it. Cindy liked it too.

After the movie the three of us hung out at the nearby Fridays for a bit and drank a couple beers.  I hadn’t seen Alfred in a little while so it was good to catch up.

On Sunday I originally had some loose ideas about doing bike/swim brick.  However the clock change forward after a late night, early morning fog and a lack of motivation derailed those plans.  Instead I spent a good portion of the day just being lazy.

Sure I did a few things like help Cindy pull some more stuff out of her apartment, set the Roombas loose on the pool deck, and a few other items but for the most part I just fked off.  I played a lot of WoW and enjoyed doing so, it’s weird how all of a sudden I am liking it again.  Cindy and I also finally got to try out the portable ping pong net I bought her for Xmas.

We utilized the dining room table and it worked out well.  It was a little more narrow and shorter than a regulation ping pong table but it was close enough that neither of us really noticed.  I left the table cloth on the table just to minimize the possibility of ball damage. Doing so took a little bounce out of the ball but not much.

It turns out the dining room is a nice spot to play some ping pong.  We played three very close games and except for a couple times, had no issues with anything getting in the way. The portable net system is really good quality.  Cindy is quite a capable ping pong player, I struggled to beat her all three games and each game was only decided by two points.

I had fun partaking in my lazy Sunday but I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel like a bit of a slob for doing so.