All wet

Saturday morning I wanted to get going early with outside to do’s, primarily to beat what has been pretty oppressive heat.  I was already up because Cindy had left early to help volunteer at the kid’s triathlon before she had to head into work.

While I was weeding I thought it would be cool to let the chickens out to roam around.  As they normally do when left out on their own they stayed relatively close to the coop, under trees, and in a mulched area.  Once in awhile I would see one or two of them doing a quick dash back and forth, chickens seem to be good short distance sprinters.

I was a bit concerned about how difficult it would be for me to get them to go back into the coop by myself.  So far corralling the chicks has been something Cindy and I have always had to tackle as a team.  Luckily it proved to be much simpler.  I opened the side door of the coop and then went to go get the tractor.  When I drove it over to the small shed to gas up all three of the chickens immediately retreated to the safety of their coop instinctively.  I closed the door behind them and gave them some cracked corn as a reward.

Last week we had a number of afternoon downpours, enough that we had standing water around the property.  On Saturday morning all of the water beside the front drainage ditch had evaporated, I figured I should take advantage of it by getting the grass mowed.  It turned out to be a very good decision, Saturday afternoon the skies opened and submerged much of the property once again.

On Saturday night Cindy and I went to see the new Planet of the Apes movie.  For the most part I thought it was really good.  It’s too bad that it fell into a Claude Van Damme type ending, with apes.  It pulled what would have been an A- rating down to a B+ in my book.  It’s still well worth seeing.  We saw the 3D version that offered absolutely nothing extra to the experience.  To be honest, for 95% of movies, 3D is just an afterthought that is all about being able to charge patrons a premium and has little to do with enhancing the movie enjoyment.

On Sunday morning I originally had ideas to run the 10K loop outside the water park and follow that up with swimming.  When I woke up I wasn’t feeling so great so running 6+ miles in what was already very warm and humid conditions sounded like a bad idea.  Instead we did a swimming only session where I tallied a total of 1600 yards in the pool. It was a good effort considering the last time I did any swimming was at the Fitness Challenge in early June.

Cindy once again had run ins while swimming laps, something that seems to happen to her more often than not. First a kid jumped in unannounced and bumped into her, later another hispanic family was jumping in her lane until I told them they could go into the one I just vacated.  I have never had someone try to jump in my lane while I was swimming.  It has happened to Cindy tons.  Perhaps the “Lap Swim Only” sign needs to be updated to include “vuelta de natación sólo”  She also had to ask a hispanic woman that was smoking like a chimney right outside the pool fence line to please move somewhere else.  Cindy’s rather fluent spanish makes these situations easier to navigate.

After swimming we picked up the dogs to assume dog sitting duty until Wednesday evening.

Sunday afternoon was once again wet.  Cindy and I spent it attending to various things. I did get outside briefly to fly my Phantom.  I had installed a set of larger carbon fiber props I bought online quite awhile ago.  The quad flew like shit with them.  It did not want to hold a stable hover and even when it was sort of still it was still wobbling back and forth.  I took it inside and threw on my new set of genuine DJI plastic props and it flew 100% better.

Last night we watched American Hustle, a movie staged in the late 70’s, featuring Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, and Jennifer Lawrence.  There were also two guys from Boardwalk Empire in the film as well as a short but meaningful appearance by Robert DeNiro. The film was long but well done.  Unfortunately drowsiness caused me to sort of miss out on a key moment but Cindy explained it to me after the fact.  It gets a strong B+ from me.