Too much, by the foot
Excessive is how I would describe several aspects of my Thanksgiving 4 day weekend. Let me see how much detail I can pull out of my cranium.
Wednesday night was just crazy. I went straight to the running store after leaving work early where packet pick up for the race was going on. There was a huge stack of paper entries waiting for me to key into the system as well as endless emails on my phone notifying me of each online sign up.
When I got home I knew I was going to have to do some creative data entry. I ordered 3000 bibs for this race, a number I thought was overly generous since last year we had around 2250 people in the 5K event. Well when I got done putting everyone in I had 2992 people signed up for the 5k race, leaving me no extra bibs basically for walk up entries.
Luckily I had about 150 bibs left over from last years race. I had to do a lot of tweaking of some numbers and moving blocks of people around to make it all work but finally a little after 9pm I had the data side of things straightened out.
I was utilizing the recently repaired van for hauling the equipment because I had more with me than normal plus we were picking up the dogs on the way home since Ali was flying up to PA immediately after the race. I had a tough time falling asleep as mental checklist after mental checklist was dancing through my brain, trying to make sure I had everything covered.
Even though the alarm went off at an awful 3:30 AM I was up and out of bed with no delay, I felt like the countdown timer had started as soon as my eyes opened. Cindy and I were in downtown Naples well before 5AM unloading equipment. The temps were on the chilly side in the low 50’s but not as bad as last year where it was downright cold.
So early on things were going smoothly. We had gotten there early enough that we had everything set up and ready to go well in advance of the huge crowd of 3000+ people. However when it was 6:45 AM and there still weren’t that many people on site it became a problem. It was almost like knowing a tsunami wave was coming.
Well the wave hit and it hit hard. All of a sudden there was a sea of people converging on the registration area. Ali was having endless paper applications apps thrown at her which I tried to assist on as much as possible. The line of people to pick up their race packets all of a sudden became close to a 100 people deep at one time. We had a problem.
When these race day situations pop up it’s all about how you react to them. Well we didn’t handle this situation as well as it should have been, the pre-registered line just was not moving like it should have. Things were so backed up that we actually delayed the start of the race by 12 minutes.
The scene at the start line was pretty insane. There was a massive lake of humanity extending hundreds of feet behind the timing mats as well as hundreds more people on either side street. Trying to funnel this many people into roughly 25 feet of start line is not easy. I had to stand as a human barricade in front of my timing equipment to prevent it from being run over.
In the middle of the the start a bad situation developed. One of the start mats got kicked which folded up it’s lead edge. Within seconds this fold increased as people repeatedly hit it with their feet, it looked like a half rolled burrito and was a major tripping hazard. I really can’t believe nobody went down. When the crowd thinned just a bit I dashed into the oncoming bodies and tried to flatten the mat out. The one bystander watching saw my attempt and afterward told me I was risking my life doing so.
So I had another issue to deal with. There were so many people in the race it literally took 5 minutes till they all cleared the start. However I knew there were also some VERY fast people in the event, fast enough to complete the 5K distance in close to 15 minutes. I decided to leave the start line up and running as I ran down to the finish line to get it up. After setting up the finish I ran back to the start line which was a couple blocks away to collect the time file. By the time I returned to the finish line the top runners already had crossed the lines, I hoped I would see their times on my monitor screen. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw they were.
Cindy was a very integral part of the event as she reprised her role as race mascot, complete with her turkey costume. It’s a role she was made to do, she absolutely loved interacting with people in a goofy and friendly way. Her contribution really added extra smiles for many, many people at the event.
For my part, I thought timing the race was going well. I had two timing boxes running at the finish line to ensure I had reliable reads, one of them being the timing box I just bought. The first issue I had wasn’t a data related problem, it was a physical one. One of the mats with the used system I bought had a small tear towards the back end of it. Well after thousands of feet running across it this small tear developed into a large tear which I did not even see until a spectator pointed it out to me.
My first attempt at remediation was to fold the mat under at the tear location however it was unsuccessful. After a woman actually tripped on the mat and fell I ripped it off the course and disconnected it from the timing box. At first I thought maybe the torn area could be repaired but closer inspection revealed the mat was just worn out. The areas that weren’t ripped looked thin enough that they could tear easily as well. I guess I will be buying at least one new mat soon.
So once the physical issue was resolved some data issues started to pop up. With this many people I already expected some issues related to the human error that invariably occurs when dealing with these numbers. The first few problems I encountered were exactly that, somebody was wearing the wrong bib or got their bib swapped with somebody else. However I then started getting more worrisome issues.
I had people coming up reporting the didn’t see their name on the results I posted on site. I looked them up and they had a chip start time, when they crossed the mats at the beginning of the race but no time when they ran across the mats at the finish. My first thought was maybe their race bib chip malfunctioned which is rare but can happen occasionally. My concern increased when I took the bibs of a couple of these problem finishers and ran them across the finish line, they read just fine.
After the race the scale of this scenario became clear, there were over 200 people that I had a start time for but no finish time. That’s just great. To have this scenario with two timing boxes up and running seemed nearly impossible. When I started with my corrections I did notice a pattern, it seemed the period of time where all of the failures took place was during the very busy finish segment where there were a non-stop flow of people crossing the mats simultaneously. My assumption was that for whatever reason, the high volume was causing reads to be dropped. I have reached out to several sources, including the manufacturer of the timing equipment looking for answers.
Other than my personal timing related issues the rest of the event went well. I saw lots and lots of smiles that helped to counteract my personal fatigue. I do think that the number of people that were in the event were problematic and if the club wants to continue to allow the event to continue with an uncapped participant level there will have to be several logistical/equipment changes made to better accommodate these numbers.
After the race we had to reload the van in a way that allowed for a small section of unused fold down bed space for the dogs to utilize. I’m not quite sure how but we managed to get everybody in there. When I think about getting rid of the party van I rarely think about these situations. I literally would not have been able to get all of the stuff, dogs, and us into any other vehicle outside of a large van.
When we got home Cindy and I both had a ton to do. Cindy’s family was coming over for Thanksgiving dinner so she had lots of prep to do. My mountain of work was all post race related which included posting results, fixing results, updating the club web site and working on processing the finish line video I collected.
We were both buried in work right up until people started showing up. In total we had 8 people over for the meal, the most I have had under roof for a Thanksgiving dinner in my house ever. We had a large selection of good food to choose from. Cindy’s two nephews that were over were big fans of the chickens. It looked quite funny watching the chickens follow them around the yard. I think everyone had a good time.
When the last person left the second quarter of the Eagles/Cowboys game was starting up. I had so many other things to be concerned with on Thanksgiving that the Eagles playing on Thanksgiving was a minor side show. With that being said I was still thrilled with the end result. To have the Eagles lay a beating on the Cowboys, in Dallas, in front of a national Thanksgiving audience was a perfect way to wind down the day.
On Black Friday Cindy had to work which left me alone to toil as I saw fit. I did do some minor Xmas shopping at Sam’s while I was buying other grocery items but the majority of my day was consumed just doing more work.
I wanted to get the majority of the house chores done so our weekend could be relatively work free (lol to that), because I wanted to get the Xmas lights/decorations up on Saturday. I also took the time to replace the driver side mirror I broke earlier in the week like a moron. Of course I had to make a video out of it.
On Saturday before tending to the lights we had a weird shopping trip at Home Depot. We were there to pick up some other items but out of the blue I pulled Cindy back to the cabinets area. The idea had popped into my head about setting up a corner floor cabinet in the unused corner of the kitchen, between the dog eating platforms.
I was surprised when I saw a corner floor cabinet with a lazy susan inside of it could be had for around 200 bucks with the 15% discount HD was running currently. When I mentioned the idea to Cindy she was very into it as the idea of additional counter and storage space in the kitchen was something she talked about in the past. I completed the impulse buy with no clear plan of how it was going to all work, just a general confidence I would figure something out.
Getting the cabinet into the side door was very difficult, requiring me to remove one of the rear captains chairs and awkwardly wrangle the piece into the van with an assist from a Home Depot employee. Evidently sometime during this process I hurt my left shoulder, an injury that appears to have grown in severity over the last couple days.
When we got the cabinet in the house the wheels were spinning in my head as Cindy and I worked on setting up both the exterior and interior Xmas decorations. As is often the case with my projects, they are organic and mutate as ideas develop.
Cindy and I talked about what to use as a counter top for the cabinet, I said possibly we could find a small piece of granite similar to what the rest of the kitchen is surfaced with. There was potentially high costs associated with that option. Yes it would be ideal to have the counter for the corner match but I am not OCD enough to care that much.
We then talked about the idea of adding a second cabinet on the right, utilizing still available wall space. The idea quickly transformed into reality as we made out second trip to Home Depot of the day. We were confused at first. The corner cabinet was only 16 inches wide but all of the regular floor cabinets were 24″ wide. When we looked a t a cabinet planning flyer we discovered that the corner pieces are designed to have an 8″ gap from the wall when mated to other cabinets, why that is I am not sure.
Cindy and I decided for the top we would take a shot out of making it out of some hard wood stained a dark color. We found some nice looking poplar boards that seemed really cheap, we saw 10 foot long, 10-12 inch wide boards with a price tag of less than $6, what a deal! Well when we got to check out our board pricing ignorance was revealed, the price was the PER FOOT price for the wood. The wood that I thought was only costing us $20 instead wound up costing well over $100.
When we got back we pushed and piled stuff into their estimated position and liked what we saw. When finished we thought it would be a great addition, now we just had to figure out how to get there.
On Saturday night we took a break from the cabinet project obstacle to watch The Purge sequel. I went into the flick assuming it would not be as good of a film as the original which wasn’t fantastic but interesting. The idea of a 12 hour annual period of government endorsed lawlessness is an intriguing concept for sure.
Well Cindy and I both were surprised that we thought the sequel was actually slightly better than the original. There weren’t any big name actors in the sequel but I found it to be able to stand on it’s own feet without them based on story and action. It gets a solid B+ from me.
So Sunday morning we were out the door very early. I had determined that in order to cut the boards as they needed, I had to use a table saw, my circular saw would not give a straight enough rip. A table saw would have been a good thing for various projects I have done in the past so I saw this as a good excuse to finally get one. Of course the cheaper Skillsaw unit I had targeted was sold out at Lowes, I wound up getting Kobalt saw which was more money but had the nice feature of folding up for storage.
Once we got home of course the first job was putting the saw together which took a little longer than I hoped but was pretty straightforward. The majority of the rest of the day was consumed with the kitchen corner project.
I left Cindy mostly in charge of getting the top laid out and stained after I cut the boards to size. At first I concentrated on getting the base cabinets attached to each other and set in place. My goal was to not make the cabinets locked in place permanently. I screwed them together but don’t plan to attach them to the wall. Their size and weight should keep them in place but if for some reason we need to move/change something about them it is doable. The inconsistent kitchen floor made using a shim under the back corner necessary to eliminate wobble.
As far as attaching the boards together that would make the top the ideas there changed several times. Cindy originally thought gluing the boards together would work. I did not, assuming the one inch thick boards simply did not have enough glue-able surface area to be strong enough. After putting our heads together we decided to utilize bottom support pieces screwed across the joints to hold everything together. This presented it’s own challenges.
I did not have wood screws that were short/small enough. I went to the near by hardware store but the smallest I could get were 1 and 5/8″ long. If I drove it through the support piece fully the point of the screw would pop out the top of the surface which obviously is not good. I came up with an unconventional solution to the problem.
I got my washer collection and put three of them onto each wood screw, effectively shortening the screw by around a 1/4″ or so. I carefully secured close to 10 supports on the bottom of countertop using this method. When we flipped it over it felt relatively secure.
However after we cleaned up, leaving the top outside to dry I realized I had created another issue. The clearance on the top of the corner cabinet was just deep enough for the bracing boards I was using. However the screw offset exceeded that clearance, not allowing the top to sit flush on the cabinets. Great.
The day had many on the fly solutions to problems, some of them actually worked like my attaching a series of 2×4 pieces to create an axillary support for the smaller board that was on the wall side of the counter top.
We wrapped up the day of labor very tired and slightly frustrated but both still optimistic that the final outcome will be a great addition to the kitchen workspace. My current plan is to spend my lunch hour getting some thin plywood to use as bracing and team that up with shorter wood screws that won’t need spacers.
The reason I am willing to use my lunch hour to do this instead of going to the gym is my shoulder. I awoke this morning with pretty severe pain doing most left arm movements. I seriously could not imagine much exercise I could do at the gym that wouldn’t hurt so I figured I may as well get more kitchen corner project materials. Of course the costs for the project have grown beyond my original expectations but that is pretty much always the case.
If you want to see the pictures from the project take a look here – https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10153376100572841.1073741879.504877840&type=1&l=0afe926580
Thank goodness I had Cindy to help me shoulder the load throughout the weekend, it was a tough four days.