Archives October 2014

Last night’s Corporate Run was very well attended, setting a record for the event with 639 participants registered.    As expected the pre-race scene was a bit chaotic but it all worked out in the end.  Cindy helped me do race entries and pack everything back up.  We got out of there a little before 8PM after enjoying some of the complimentary food the event provided for dinner.

I unloaded the truck while Cindy got right to work on making dinner for the dogs who I am sure were starving by that point.  By the time I had all the post race stuff done I was more than ready for a shower and my pillow.

Tonight is the last night of our latest extended dog sitting stint.  Ali returns from her trip to France late tonight.  The issues we had with the dogs waking us up in the middle of the night seemed to be solved by closing the curtain on the bedroom window so no outside stimulus was viewable for Sadie.  As usual, once the dogs leave the house will feel strangely empty for awhile.  Cindy really goes out of her way to take care of the girls.  Nicki especially benefited from Cindy’s nurturing during their stay getting a haircut, bath and daily care of the area around her neck that was irritated from wearing a cone for 10 days.

I am crossing my fingers that the couple relatively dry days we have had recently will continue, allowing us to get the yard manicured.  It looks pretty ragged right now, something that I don’t enjoy.  This is also the time of year that weeds start trying to overtake large portions of my yard.  In the past this would be addressed by spreading weed and feed on these sections.  Now that we have chickens roaming the grounds, that can no longer be the case, that stuff could kill them.  I have found chicken safe weed killers like vinegar but that acts like an herbicide, killing everything, it can’t just target the weeds like weed-n-feed does.  I guess my only option is to just go with the flow and hope once the constant rain ends, the grass again becomes dominant enough to choke out the weeds.

I expect to be quite busy around the homestead this weekend but hope to insert a trip to the movies and maybe some endurance training depending on how I feel.

So the other day a box arrived that contained three stackable jumping platforms that are intended for gym use.  However I bought them to be used by the running club as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place award platforms.  One of them is 18″ high, another is 12″ high and the shortest is a mere 6″ tall.  I figured I may as well get around to unpacking them, little did I know it would take me a solid 15 minutes of hacking, slashing and yanking to make it happen.

The difficulty began immediately, just trying to open the box took awhile due to layers of criss-crossed packing tape. Once I finally cut/tore the box apart the real chore began.  The legs of each platform were fully encased in bubble wrap which in turn was encased in a virtual spider web of packing tape.  Sure I appreciate items being safely packaged but this was ridiculous.  I half wondered if this was somebody’s idea of a joke.

With normal packing, you cut the tape at a couple key points and the item is easily freed from it’s protective packing.  Well this mummy style pack job required me to go leg by leg with my knife hacking away non-stop.  I actually had worked up a sweat by the time I was done.  Crazy.

Last night I got into the final encounter for end boss in WoW.  Unfortunately by the time the group was formed it took 45 minutes.  I had to bail in the middle of it because supper was ready.  I think if I am going to finally complete it I will need to allocate a solid two hour block of time, whenever I may find it.

On my way to work I stopped at a brand new Racetrac to fill up the Tacoma.  I was pleasantly surprised to see they actually sell ethanol free gas.  Ethanol is one of the bigger crocks of shit of our time.  It is a product produced from corn and added to gasoline.  Ethanol is basically just another subsidy to the corn industry.

The thing is adding ethanol to gas makes the gas suck.  Anyone that runs gas powered lawn equipment or has vehicles that sit for an extended period of time is probably familiar with the downfalls of this mutant gasoline.  Ethanol has this nasty habit of turning into a gelatinous substance over time.  When this happens it clogs fuels lines, fuel injectors, carburetors and other parts of the fuel system.  When you add gas stabilizer to fuel that is to combat this very annoying ethanol characteristic.

So anyway, seeing gas without ethanol put a little spring in my step.  The spring collapsed a bit when I saw they charge a 42 cent premium for ethanol-free.  I still elected to dump some ethanol free in the Tacoma, I imagined for the truck it would be like breathing fresh air.

Today is that odd day of the year where I have to leave work early to set up for our only evening race which starts at 6:15.  I am so glad that we stopped chip timing the event last year.  The race is billed as a Corporate Run/Walk where the goal is to get a number of people that don’t normally participate in 5K’s exposed to it.  Hell most of the people probably don’t even exercise on a regular basis. People join as a member of a team where that team is typically a business or group.  We don’t hand out awards based on time, it is based on participation, the team that brings the most people, wins.

When we chip timed the race it was a huge mess since so many of the participants had no idea about the logistics of a race.  I would lose more timing chips at this race than all of the other races combined and the amount of human error that would occur made getting accurate scoring nearly impossible.  Now that is is a “fun run” I still have many responsibilities to handle but sorting through the mistakes of race “noobs” is not one of them.

The numbers for the race for this year have swelled considerably from last year which of course is always a good thing.  In the big picture the goal is a light bulb get turned on for some of these people that never exercise, hopefully inspiring them to continue on with a more health focused lifestyle.

Last night after work we had another running club related meeting, this time about our Thanksgiving race which may be the largest event of the year.  It feels like the planning for this years event has been slacking because last year, the first year of the event, we started early to mid-summer working on it.  As usual I emerged from the meeting with a list of to do’s.

Last night when I got home I again had an extended WoW session completing the second to last part of the end game raid, leaving only the final boss to go.  These encounters are total chaos, especially for me since I go into them with no prior knowledge of how the fights are supposed to go.  For the most part I just try to follow the lead of others, don’t stand in poop and  stay alive.  The boss fights can take a very long time,  the one last night was approaching 15 minutes.  The thing is if the group wipes (dies) before defeating the boss your reward is to go back and do it all over again from the beginning.  Two of the bosses were like that, taking two attempts to kill.

Having 25 players, especially 25 strangers trying to coordinate their efforts leads to conflict as you can imagine.  The more hardcore players that have already done these fights dozens of times have very little patience for those of us that have not.  When the group dies on a boss it instantly leads to waves of rage quitting, verbal chastising and other typical immature internet behavior.  However I am well versed in this behavior and for the most part ignore it unless it gets out of hand.

While I was waiting for the group to form to do the raid I was running around another area of the virtual world trying to work on some solo quests, minding my own business.  Unfortunately the area I was doing this in had a very large collection of opposing faction horde players.  On my server the horde to alliance faction ratio is terribly out of whack. There are many more of them than us so in most situations alliance characters such as myself are outnumbered.  On top of that, compared to serious players of the game, my character is a 98 pound weakling.

Well despite being no challenge for enemy horde players, they insisted on attacking and killing me literally dozens of time as I was trying to get stuff done.  Of course I tried to fight back best I could but having two or three well geared horde players on me at once meant I was dead in a matter of seconds.  Obviously this angers and frustrates me but I just rolled with it, trying to find more remote areas where I was not as easily spotted by these horde players that were so interested in unfair fights.  Even with those frustrations I am still enjoying traveling back into my virtual second home for awhile.  It’s a good disconnect from some of the stresses that roll up on me in my daily grind.

Speaking of grind, yesterday I had a huge serving of running club related things to attend to.  It looks like today I am going back for seconds, followed by our only mid-week, evening race of the year tomorrow.