Archives March 2016

I am a big fan of the spring time change which allows me to get stuff done after work outside during the week instead of having to stuff it all into the weekend.  Last night I took advantage of the extra time and headed outside to weed whack the property, something that hasn’t been done in well over a month.  Cindy had just mowed the property during the afternoon so capping it off with proper weed whacking left the yard looking nicely manicured and added to my “get stuff done” quota for the day.

Yesterday I managed to complete the migration of my old emails, some dating all the way back to 2000 to my Office 365 email account.  Basically the way I made it work was to configure my local mail client, in my case Outlook 2013 to connect to both my old and new accounts and then move emails/folders between the two accounts.  This should also be able to be accomplished by backing up your old emails to a PST file and then importing it into your new account but for some odd reason the PST export would fail on my old stuff.  Regardless, duf.net email is up and running on Office 365 and all is well.

So you may recall that I have not one but TWO Ring smart doorbells in my household, one at the front door and another on the chicken coop.  Well now down the road I can see the potential for adding a 3rd.  Ring just introduced a new model, the Ring Pro which is smaller, has higher resolution video (1080P vs 720p), 5G wireless band support for faster network connection, and custom motion zones where you can literally draw what areas you want monitored instead of the more vague zones it utilizes now.  The only negative is the device does not have an internal battery so it must be hard wired to power, unlike the current model of Ring.

In addition to the new model, they are introducing a new feature for all Rings where you can click into a live video feed whenever you want, instead of just when someone presses the button or when motion is detected.  It will be a cool way to check in whenever I feel like it. I am a big Ring fan.

Today is St Patricks Day and thanks to the effort of Cindy I actually wore green to work.  Ironically most years I make no effort to wear green on the holiday despite my very Irish name.  It’s actually hard for me to not wear green as it is the color that dominates my shirt collection.  I will however continue my tradition of not drinking any alcohol on a holiday that is all about inebriation.   It’s just the contrarian in me teaming up with my inner hermit.

For something like 15 years I have been hosting my personal email on a server in my house.  It is a full Windows server complete with business class Microsoft Exchange.  It currently is a Windows 2008 R2 server running Exchange 2010.  There have been a handful of incidents over the years where I had an outage or some data loss but for the most part my in home set up has been solid.  However the technology is getting long in the tooth so I have been considering what I wanted to do next, get better server hardware at home so I could update to the most recent versions of Windows server and Exchange or do what many businesses are doing nowadays, move my email to the cloud. Maintaining my own home email server at one point seemed like a cool/fun idea. Nowadays it just seems like more of a pain in the ass.

There are two dominant players in the cloud email business, Google Apps and Office 365.  Since I get a deal on Office 365 through my Microsoft affiliations/certifications it was a pretty easy choice for me as to which I would use.   Getting email for my duf.net domain flowing to the Office 365 server was pretty simple and easy.  What is not so easy is doing stuff like migrating email from my old server into the account.  I was surprised how much trouble I have had thus far making that part of the migration happen.  Hopefully by the end of the day the move will be 100% complete.

I forgot to mention that over the weekend I had a surprising discovery by the pool equipment.  It looked like there was black tar on the wall.  A closer look revealed shrapnel in the area, the remnants of the pool pump capacitor.  I have heard of capacitors exploding before but I never imagined it would have this much power.  The casing on the pool pump for the cap was blown off and the capacitor itself was now in multiple pieces. I have had the capacitor on the pool pump fail several times in the past but in those situations the capacitor was just dead, there was no explosion.

I collected the pieces and took them with me to Pinch-a-Penny where I bought the cap.  It was only purchased last June so I held out hope it would be covered under some sort of warranty since it is a relatively expensive item at $50.  The store owner said there is no warranty on electrical items since they could be damaged by outside sources.  I plopped down the credit card for yet another new capacitor.

The owner said before I hooked up the new cap I should make sure that the impeller on the pool was not seized which could possibly cause the capacitor to fail.  When I got home I did just that.  The impeller felt unencumbered.  I installed the new cap and stood behind the pool heater and turned my head away as I flipped the power, just in case.  The pump fired up normally and ran fine all afternoon.

  When I got home yesterday Cindy’s daughter Katie was there visiting.  She stayed for dinner as we caught up on this week’s Walking Dead.

In some ways Katie reminds me of myself at her age when I was still trying to find some sort of definitive direction to go with my life.  Just last week she passed her real estate exam, a big step for her which was awesome.

As always, the energy level in the house goes up by several factors when Katie is around.  It makes Cindy so happy since we don’t get to see her very often.  The chickens seem to like when Katie is around too.

Before winter started I made myself a list of some small projects I wanted to get done while the temps were cooler and the property was dryer.  Unfortunately the weather this winter has been the most abnormal since I moved to Florida nearly 16 years ago with warm temps and way more precipitation than normal.   As a result I haven’t been doing that great at working the list, almost half of the items are still not crossed off.  Ironically on Saturday I decided I wanted to tackle a project that I forgot to put on the list but that needed to be done nonetheless.

The wooden ramp that I built after the 12′ x 20′ shed was installed some 13-14 years ago was in rough shape.  The years in the elements had really done a number on it with the wood starting to break down in various spots.  I actually had wanted to rebuild it for a couple years.  For whatever reason Saturday morning while I was weeding I made the mental commitment to do it, today.

When Cindy and I were out on errands we picked up the necessary lumber at Home Depot.  I was actually pleasantly surprised that the materials I needed for the job added up to less than $85.  On the way home we picked up Sadie for a weekend visit.  After eating lunch I began the project.

First up was removal of the old ramp.  At first I had a silly idea of actually taking the old ramp apart in an orderly fashion by unscrewing all of the boards.  That idea lasted all of 2 minutes.  Instead I used a post bar and sledge hammer to break loose the ramp from the shed and then flipped the old ramp out of the way more or less intact.

The original ramp was one of my very early construction projects at the house.  There were a number of design flaws.  The support beams underneath were only 2″x 4″s while the top surface of the ramp was heavy 2×6’s.  I also had gaps in between the top boards.  I think at the time the gaps were just a cost savings effort to use less lumber.  The end result of the gaps has been a somewhat hazardous walking surface as well as allowing space for weeds to grow in between the gaps. The new ramp used a reversed plan with 2×6’s for the supports with conventional decking up top, sans the gaps.  My many construction projects over the years have allowed me to learn from past mistakes.

Construction of the ramp took a good portion of the afternoon.  Cindy helped me during the decking stage of the build, using the pry bar to apply pressure to the planks to keep them as flush as possible to each other despite some minor bends in some of the boards.  Once the last board was screwed down Cindy put the first coat of waterproofing/stain on the surface to protect it. We were both very happy with the outcome.  The ramp looked good and felt rock solid.  Hopefully it will last well into the next decade.

On Saturday night we were beat and decided to just do movie night at home watching our latest Netflix DVD, The Walk.  It is a movie about the french guy that strung a wire across the world trade centers and walked back and forth for around 90 minutes back in the 70’s.  I actually saw the documentary about this amazing feat a few years ago.  I thought the movie did a good job of capturing the incredible and borderline insane bravery required for a man to walk a wire between the two tallest buildings in the world.  The visuals of the walk made Cindy and I turn away at times, it really felt like you were on the wire with him.  I thought it was a very solid B+ rental.

On Sunday neither Cindy or I said a single word about doing any endurance training.  My back and abs were both killing me from the ramp project plus the clocks jumping ahead made everything feel late already.  We made our second trip to Rural King of the weekend, probably an unnecessary one but we wanted to give Sadie a chance to walk around the store, something she really seems to enjoy.  When we got home we spent about an hour outside working before eating a late lunch.  For whatever reason after lunch we both just felt pooped.  We wound up crashing back in the bedroom for a couple hours half napping while some show on the DIY network about flipping junk houses in Texas was on tv.

The rest of the weekend expired without incident.  We started binge watching the latest season of House of Cards on Netflix.  That is a quality show in case you haven’t heard.

Over the weekend I finally released my lengthy blog entry regarding my drone incident at Yellowstone Park.  If you have some time to kill you may want to take a look at how the Yellowstone National Park Service likes to ruin park visitors holiday season through capricious, retroactive enforcement of poorly communicated park regulations via YouTube videos and calls on personal cell phones.

This is a story that has it’s origins back in early September but has been on my plate since Christmas Eve.  It is a story that is still in the process of being written therefore this article will not be totally complete until the gavel has hit the desk.  This will be long, very, very long so you may want to pour a second cup of coffee and have a third brewing.

So anyway, I have owned my DJI Phantom quadcopter for a couple years.  During that time I have equipped it with a GoPro camera allowing me to capture beautiful aerial views of various areas.  On our 2015 western road trip I packed it up in it’s hard shell case hoping to get some nice footage of the breath taking venues in the western United States.

One of the places I flew briefly was in Yellowstone Park on the second of the two days we spent in the park.  The flight was perhaps a total of 5 minutes in length and took place in a deserted area in the northwest corner of the park on our way out of the park en route to Idaho.  The aerial footage was scenic but uneventful.  The most interesting part of it all was when the drone bounced upon landing and had a gust of wind blow it a few feet down a small hill.  The footage was edited down to around 90 seconds and I posted it to YouTube when I got back from the trip, just as I posted most of my other aerial videos.

So the story now fast forwards in time to Christmas Eve, more than three and a half months later.  As I was driving around trying to get some last minute Christmas shopping done I noticed several calls coming in from a Wyoming number.  I did not answer the phone as I generally do not answer unknown numbers to avoid unwanted solicitations.  This happened three or four times and each time the individual on the other end chose to not leave a voicemail message.  It was very odd that somebody so interested in speaking to me would not leave a message so the next time the call came through curiosity got the better of me and I answered it, fully prepared to hang up on the person as soon as I heard what they were selling.

Well the man on the other line identified himself.  He said he was a park ranger and he asked if I minded if he asked me a few questions regarding my drone flight I had posted in YouTube.  Wow now my curiosity was really peaked, I had no idea why he would be calling about the flight, the quickest explanation that popped into my head was he was looking for permission to use the video elsewhere, a request I have had with other YouTube video content of mine. So I said sure, go ahead although I was still confused about the whole thing, it was bizarre.  Well it got a lot more bizarre in the next 10 minutes.

So the ranger started asking me for some details of the flight like what date, time, and location the flight took place.  I was in the car still during the call so I had no specific details just vague estimates since it was over 3 months ago.  He asked more things like was there anyone else around, whose car was in the video and other specifics which did not seem to make sense.  Why would he care about these things?

So I stopped and asked him why he was asking all of these questions.  After he has asked me enough questions to thoroughly entrap myself he then tells me that it is against park violations to launch or land a drone within national park boundaries.  I was silent for a second as the reality of that moment sunk in.  I immediately told the ranger I had absolutely no idea that there was a restriction on drone flights.  I saw no information at the park regarding it.  I emphasized that if I knew there was a ban there was absolutely no way I would have flown, it isn’t worth it.

As the ranger listened to me he offered up that he believed that I did not know about the ban ahead of time but he still had to file a citation for the offense.  Say what???  When he first mentioned it was a violation I assumed, ok, he is going to warn me to never do it again and to remove the video from YouTube which seemed appropriate.  Surely his call alone was more than enough to ensure I never fly inside park boundaries again, if that was truly the goal.  I paused for a few seconds, fighting back the anger reflex that wanted to lash out at the ranger about the abandonment of common sense when it came to the situation.  A citation, for a flight with no park impact not witnessed by any park ranger outside of YouTube, 3 months post, with fuzzy dates, times and locations.   You have to be kidding me.

Ok so I tried to calm down and gather my thoughts.  I told the ranger that I didn’t understand.  I said if he believed I had no prior knowledge of the ban and he agreed that nothing destructive or dangerous occurred during the flight, why would a warning not be an appropriate course of action?  He indicated he had “no choice” (bullshit), and that he was not required to prove I had prior knowledge of the ban, only that a flight took place.

I again indicated this did not make sense to me. I asked for clarification about this rule and where park visitors are notified about it.  The ranger said it was “in the news” a lot when the ban was enacted in late 2014 and that there is signage posted at certain points in the park.  When I asked for specifics about where the signage was placed he could not give me the details.  Again, it wasn’t their job to make sure I knew.

The only thing the ranger offered up was that perhaps the judge would side with me and would agree a warning was appropriate.  The ranger completed ruining my Christmas Eve by saying normally you are required to appear in person in front of a federal judge for NPS citations but since I live so far away the court would PROBABLY allow me to appear via phone.  The ranger said I should receive paperwork in the mail regarding the citation and I should expect to have my court date in early February some time.  Before hanging up the ranger asked if there were any other questions he could answer for me.  Of course I could not ask what I really wanted to know, why the National Park Service has nothing better to do on Christmas Eve than surf YouTube to retroactively cite people for poorly communicated park restrictions of violations where no people, animals, or park property were negatively impacted whatsoever.  Instead, I said no and hung up the phone shortly before getting back home.  I was literally in shell shock.

So the first thing I did was delete the video on YouTube as obviously I didn’t want to post footage of something that I now knew was a banned activity.  The next thing I did was a lot of internet research on the park drone ban.  As is often the case it came about due to a few people doing stupid things.  One drone pilot crashed into Yellowstone Lake and then asked park rangers for assistance in retrieving it. But the most egregious offense was a German tourist who crashed his drone into a famous Yellowstone Geyser.  The drone sunk to the bottom of the geyser and was never retrieved.  Park officials are concerned that as the materials inside the drone break down, especially the battery , it will permanently change the appearance of the geyser.

Although I hate that a few careless drone operators had ruined it for thousands of other drone hobbyists, I can understand how incidents like that would cause a reaction from the NPS that resulted in the ban.  But in my situation, there were circumstances different from any other documented case I found online and there were only a handful.  In the cases I found online a park ranger was directly involved in the incident and there was some sort of impact on park property, people or animals.  (another guy buzzed bison and flew around a bunch of tourists near a geyser)

So anyway the rest of Christmas Eve and Christmas were tainted by the rangers phone call.  Despite trying my best to enjoy myself I had this situation weighing on me heavily.  As an adult I have not had so much as a speeding ticket.  To be told I may need to appear in front of a federal judge for a federal citation was a big deal to me.  For the next several days I slept terribly with the incident gnawing at my mind. I was angry at myself for being trusting/naive enough to give the ranger the information he needed.  I was angry that park rangers have so little going on that they surf internet media sites looking for ways to cite visitors and I had tremendous anxiety not knowing what the end result of it all would be.

So I contacted a friend of mine from the running club that is a lawyer, an estate/probate lawyer, but a lawyer nonetheless.  I recanted the situation to him and asked him if this is even possible, to cite someone via YouTube and contact them via cell phone calls instead of through official channels like mail.  The lawyer said he had never heard of either practice, YouTube policing or prosecution via cell phone.  He advised me to just sit tight and see if anything ever shows up in the mail.

For about three weeks that is exactly what I did, sit tight and hope the park ranger office realized they were being unreasonable.  Nothing ever arrived in the mail but then the calls started again.  I did not bother to answer them this time as I figured if there was something I needed to actually deal with they would actually leave a message.  After some hang ups over a couple days a message was finally left. It was from another park ranger, although they like to identify themselves as law enforcement officers on the phone.  The ranger asked me to call him back to talk about details about the case and what the prosecutor was recommending.

After talking to my lawyer buddy again I decided I should just ignore cell phone contacts going forward.  If they wanted to move forward with this capricious enforcement case let them do so though certified mail like any normal law enforcement agency does.  So the day after I make that decision I get ANOTHER voicemail but instead of Wyoming, this number was a local 239 area code.  It was from a female park ranger from Everglades National Park.  In the message she indicated she had the Yellowstone citation and needed to deliver it in person.  Well now that a nearby agency was involved I felt like I needed to respond.

I called the woman back.  I asked her why the citation had to be hand delivered instead of sent through the mail.  She said it had to be handed to me by a ranger.  It was like somehow her handing me a citation now was the same as a park ranger catching me in the act in Yellowstone four months ago? It seemed stupid.  I told her to just meet me at work in the parking lot.  The female ranger arrived with her short male partner, fully decked out in thick chest pad armor and weapons holstered on each hip.  I tried to engage the woman about the situation and explain why it seemed so ridiculous.  She said she was only the messenger and little else. Sorry, I thought you were a NPS law enforcement officer as well.

When I went back in the office a new wave of anger flowed through me.  I could hardly believe my federal tax dollars were being used to pay for my own prosecution of a non-event captured on YouTube, 3 months after it occurred.  I was also amazed at the citation itself that had not one shred of accurate date or time information on it.  Why would time and date of a violation be insignificant?  The citation stated the violation occurred on September 10th at 6:46 PM.  I was not even in the park at that point, we had driven back to Cody, WY for the night.

So in addition to the citation I was given information regarding the court out in Yellowstone, including the contact information for the prosecutor for the case.  I decided to call him.  Once he pulled up my case info he told me he had some good news and bad news.  The good news was the I should not be required to appear in person, a phone appearance will be acceptable.  The bad news was the “standard” fine in this sort of offense is $1035  This was the first time I heard an actual dollar figure thrown out regarding my violation, to have that number be four digits long was not expected.  I again gave background on the circumstances of the incident and how I had zero knowledge of the ban.  The prosecutor said he also believed I did not know but said he had no responsibility either, just like the park rangers, to prove I knew I was violating the law.

He apparently had the ranger that was so kind as to ruin my Christmas in the office, evidently park citations are big business.  The ranger indicated that all park visitors are supposed to be handed a newspaper that mentions the drone ban on the front page.  I told them I did not recall being handed any newspaper but I would check with my girlfriend since she kept EVERYTHING from the trip.  I later confirmed we did not get a paper.  I took pictures of what we were handed and emailed them to the prosecutor.  He responded back that he would talk further to the ranger about the case.  It was the first shred of good news I had heard.  I held out hope that perhaps common sense could actually prevail and they would decide to drop the citation.

Well after a couple weeks of hearing nothing I followed up with the prosecutor who then said the rangers office should be getting back to me. Ok great, hopefully this was good news! It took me a week to get in touch with them after some phone tag.  I was not happy with the outcome of the conversation.  The ranger acted like I never sent the pictures to the prosecutor, he instead wanted to encourage me to take a plea deal.  In exchange for pleading guilty the prosecutor would recommend a $1035 dollar fine that broke down to a $500 fine, a $500 community service donation to Yellowstone and $35 in court costs.  This was officially all about the money and nothing else.  They make the fine small enough that it is not practical to hire a lawyer but large enough to both cause significant financial pain to people as well as funnel healthy chunks of money into the park service, one citation at a time. I was so frustrated.  Obviously this case had nothing to do with educating drone hobbyist about the flight restriction and curbing future behavior, it is all a shakedown for money.

So my anger was stoked again to a high level after the call with the ranger.  Despite the refusal of the NPS to use what I would consider a common sense approach to this point I went through an email exchange with the the ranger, trying to back up my claim that this was an unreasonable citation.  In my emails I included a link to an article in “High Country News”  from July 2015 where the subject was the drone ban in parks.  In the article a park employee from nearby Grand Teton park said that despite the drone ban being in place since late 2014, there have been more drone flights in parks in 2015.  He explained a large part of this as “many people just don’t know about the ban in national parks”  Later in the article it states,  “In most parks, rangers have adopted a solicitous approach. They respond to sightings (usually called in by other visitors or park employees), then try to find the pilots once the machine is on the ground, and gently inform them of the ban. Most hobbyists have been receptive to it. Citations are generally only issued when drone operators have “noncompliant attitudes,” or if the incident is especially egregious.” Obviously this is not the attitude of Yellowstone park rangers who instead appear to put a priority on maximizing park citation revenue by searching social media for retroactive violations.

I also included the article that documented a drone case from October 2014 where a tourist was flying his drone around a crowded tourist area near a geyser basin.  In addition he flew his drone around a nearby group of bison which could spook the animals and send them charging.  This man was fined the same $1035 that was being proposed for my situation which seemed totally not congruent. The ranger was not very receptive to my attempts to illustrate the holes in the logic being used in this situation.

I also had contact with a lawyer in the Miami area I know from my calisthenics contacts.  He specializes in traffic citation defense but I got his opinion on my situation.  I even went as far as contacting two Wyoming lawyers to explain my situation and see if it was worth fighting.  Although both lawyers agreed the circumstances around the citation seem shady and possibly winnable, the bottom line was I would spend more fighting the ticket (significantly more)than paying the fine.  Sure it would be nice to fight the ticket in the name of principal but I don’t have enough disposable income to throw at a cause to simply prove a point. My frustrating conclusion was I would accept the plea deal and use my opportunity to make a “mitigating statement” to the judge, explaining my side of the story to hopefully at least get the fine reduced.

Ever since the call on Christmas Eve, which I still think was totally unnecessary and very inconsiderate of the ranger, I have had this hanging in the back of my mind.  My phone appearance was scheduled for March 3rd, yesterday.  I made my appearance in my office with the door closed.  The judge actually was handling three cases at once, one other drone violation and a DUI case.  I found it interesting that the other drone defendant was evidently also “apprehended” via YouTube.  This guy seemingly did know about the drone restriction as he tried to spice up his YouTube video for more hits, naming it something like “Merica, drones banned in national parks” with a pic of a drone flying at Mt Rushmore.  He admitted to the judge it was a stupid thing to do, the judge agreed.

So I had typed up a little more than a page long mitigating statement that I initially planned to read at the appropriate time.  Since there were two other defendants involved I didn’t feel right about reading the entire thing.  Instead I just made my two main points, I had no idea about the drone ban going in and that the fine seems out of whack compared to the tourist/geyser/bison buzzing guy that was fined the same as being proposed for me.

I have to be honest I was surprised that the judge actually did seem to have an open mind.  I had sort of assumed no matter what I would say I was going to be railroaded into the recommended $1035 fine.  Instead the judge used my mitigating statements as a basis to reduce my fine by $250 less than the prosecutor recommended, a luxury not provided to my fellow drone enthusiast.  Although it was not nearly as satisfying as a complete dismissal would be it offered me some sense that at least some common sense was finally utilized in this ordeal, which was absent from the NPS or prosecutor offices.  I thanked the judge for the additional consideration before the call was terminated.

Almost as soon as the call was over I managed to track down my co-defendant on Facebook and started a conversation with him comparing notes.  He too got the ridiculous Christmas Eve call and he too was presented with a citation with random incident details.  Like me he would have liked to fight the citation but financial reality curtailed his efforts as well.  It was somewhat therapeutic to at least talk with someone else that has been subjected to the same treatment by the NPS.

At this point I now have to satisfy my $750 tab to the government/NPS.  This experience has really been an eye opener about just how government agencies can prey upon the public, resorting to social media policing, personal cell phone calls and whatever else is needed to protect the world from those dangerous drone hobbyists.  It makes me proud to know that our tax dollars were utilized to prosecute criminals such as myself.  I will surely sleep better at night.

So when I walked in the door yesterday after work I did a double take.  During the day a back splash magically appeared in the kitchen.  Of course I knew Cindy had ordered the material to do it but I had no idea it showed up yesterday and no clue she put it up already.  I thought it looked really cool and the colors worked well with the counters and floor in the kitchen/great room.

Although it looks like a ceramic tile it is actually some sort of vinyl type material with self adhesive backing.  Cindy did a real nice job with the install, meshing together the sections smoothly in a way that looks professional.  The backsplash when combined with the Hue colored lighting we have under the cabinet was very cool as well.  The additional reflection of light just looks great.

I thanked Cindy repeatedly throughout the night for doing the work.  It was not the sort of surprise I expected on a Wednesday evening.

Yesterday I paid the fine and court cost portion of my drone violation online which added up to $285.  I now have to only cut an additional $500 check for my “community service payment” (aka shakedown money) to Yellowstone in order to fulfill the penalty requirements for my citation.  I have to admit that I did consider pulling a move that would make my dad smile, dumping $500 in loose pennies in a box and shipping them out to the park.  Look for my full drone violation blog entry soon.

I reupped my Tarpons arena football season tickets last night.  Even though the games are sort of a joke, Cindy and I do still enjoy getting out there.  It adds some variety to our entertainment schedule and it is how we first started going out in the first place.  I am still amazed they are actually doing another season.  The attendance numbers at the games make it seem like all the team does is bleed money.

If you had any doubt about how the Eagles management outside of Chip Kelly felt about his personnel moves last year, things should be crystal clear now.  The team is dumping most of the players that the Chipster brought in last year including Demarco Murray, Byron Maxwell, and Kiki Alonso.  All three of these players were large disappointments last year and contributed very little to the team.  Actually Maxwell was a big contributor albeit a negative one, helping the team lose with his nasty habit of getting burned for big plays time and time again. It seems to me like Chip is picking up where he left off in San Francisco with Kapernik publicly declaring he wants nothing to do with the 2016 Chip Kelly flavored 49ers.

Of course the Eagles won’t get much value for dumping these players other than some salary cap relief and some insignificant draft picks but I really don’t care.  I fully support removing the Chip Kelly stains on the team wherever possible.  I certainly wasn’t thrilled with the announcement that the team extended Sam Bradford with a contract that guaranteed around 25 million dollars.

There was not one moment last year where I actually felt impressed by anything Sam Bradford did.  His statistics would back me up since he was around the 25th or 26th rated QB in the league.  Rewarding Bradford for that ho-hum year combined with his glorious history of season ending injuries seems like a poor choice.  I would have been much happier with the front office going for a full sweep of Kelly moves and letting Bradford move on as well.  I already assume the team is going to struggle this year, having Bradford on the roster is going to do nothing to mitigate that situation.

Bernie had another huge win yesterday, winning the Michigan primary, a state he was not so long ago predicted to be losing by 20 points or more.  The national media is doing everything it can to make the masses think that Hilary as the nominee is a foregone conclusion, perhaps to try to let some of the air out of the constantly growing Bernie balloon.  If the democrats didn’t still utilize the moronic “super delegate” system where people whom are literally bought and paid for get to have a significant say in the outcome of the primary, this race would be even tighter.

Yesterday I took advantage of Florida early voting, placing my vote for the presidential primary.  Since the elections office is literally next door to my office it is incredibly convenient.  Since I am technically still a registered republican I am only allowed to vote in the republican primary per state voting laws.  I thought it was odd that the ballot included every single candidate that had declared themselves a candidate even if they dropped out of the race at this point.  I voted for the only republican candidate that seems to still have a grasp on reality and has not participated in the endless stream of mud slinging and name calling, John Kasich.  Of course as is often the case with a sensible candidate, he has little to no shot of winning but at least he is fighting the good fight. The ballot only had one other local question on it so filling it out was a 30 second process followed by two minutes waiting for an elderly voter to understand the process of inserting his ballot into the electronic scanner.

I woke up on Saturday feeling marginally better than I had been feeling for most of last week.  I felt like I would push the envelope a little and head outside to get some stuff done in the yard.  At Home Depot we bought some sod and five bags of large white egg rock.  Both of these things were to address chicken collateral damage.

The chickens over the last couple weeks had once again dug out a number of large holes in the yard.  After back filling them I covered the holes as best I could with the sod pieces.  The egg rock was used to fill the small beds in front of the chicken run.  They used to have mulch and plants in them but the chickens quickly destroyed them.  After removing a good amount of the remaining dirt we laid down new weed block and filled the area with the stones.  The size and weight of the stones should make them less able to be kicked around, unlike the mulch and smaller rock the birds have scattered around property.  Cleaning up after the chickens is a full time job.

Cindy had seen there was a car show out at Ave Maria as part of some other event that was being hosted there.  She suggested we go check it out.  To be honest the idea didn’t thrill me, doing the outside labor had already tapped the majority of my depleted energy reserves.  Cindy however was very excited by the idea so we hopped in the SSR and cruised out there.  It was indeed a beautiful day for a drive.

I hadn’t been out to Ave Maria in a little while.  After being a monumental flop upon it’s launch in 2007, “Catholic Town” has seen a nice resurgence in growth along with the rest of the real estate market in our area.  There was a nice crowd of people at the event that featured a number of stands as well as a stage with live music.

There was a good variety of vehicles at the car show featuring the very old to the very new.  There was no doubt that my SSR would have been a worthy addition to the line up.  Cindy and I took our time checking out every vehicle.  Seeing the time, money, and effort put into these vehicles was worthy of admiration.

The cars were lined up on either side of the center of town.  In between checking out the sides we went inside the centerpiece of the town, the Ave Maria cathedral.  Of course I have seen the outside of the beautiful church many, many times but I never had an opportunity to step inside, something Cindy was very interested in doing as well.

The inside of the structure is indeed beautiful with the seemingly seamless lattice of support girders criss-crossing overhead.  It’s modern styling was quite the contrast to St. John of the Divine which we visited in NYC but still quite impressive in it’s own way.  Cindy said it took her breath away at first.  We took our time exploring the church, it was quiet and peaceful.

After seeing the rest of the vehicles we each grabbed a small ice cream and enjoyed it outside in one of the many available seating areas.  When we left I was glad that Cindy gave me the kick in the rear end to come out to Catholic Town, it was a nice way to spend an hour or two.

On Saturday night we finally got out to see Deadpool, a movie I have been wanting to see for quite awhile.  A combination of timing and illness had thwarted our previous plans to see it.  We decided to give Paragon theater another chance despite the unpleasant experience we had last time with the woman behind us that was a distraction pretty much the entire time.  Despite the luxury power reclining seats at Paragon there is a distinct disadvantage, the theaters are small.  The small size means that if you are unfortunate enough to have an inconsiderate asshole in the theater it is not very easy to minimize their impact by moving elsewhere since the amount of real estate is limited.  Luckily this time around we managed to avoid another rude incident.

The movie was great, the first R rated super hero movie I ever recall seeing.  It is action packed and hilarious pretty much from start to finish.  I don’t know if they could possibly find anybody more perfect for the role than Ryan Reynolds.  Now of course the R rating means you shouldn’t be hauling your 12 year old into the theater with you but as an adult super hero flick, Deadpool is just about perfect in my book, A+.

On Sunday morning I had a not so bright idea that Cindy and I should try to do a Dunkin Donuts ride on our bikes.  I did so with the disclaimer that we would do it with absolutely no concern for speed, just a desire to complete the 20 miles of distance.  I knew very early on it was going to be a struggle.  Despite having a good wind at our back early on, I was already feeling pooped after 3 miles only pedaling at 15-16 mph pace.  When we got to Dunkin Donuts  I was in absolutely no rush to get started again, milking my small coffee for as long as possible.

The ride back was in a word, brutal.  Even if I was 100% healthy it would have been hard with a near constant stiff headwind pushing back against every crank on the pedal.  With us both still feeling the side effects of illness it was just miserable.  I kept dropping gears as necessary and kept my head down, trying to not focus on just how far yet we had to go.  When we finally turned back onto our street there was no customary acceleration for the last 1/4 mile of road to the driveway, just the same labored cadence as we finally pulled into home.  When we got to the garage door even stepping off the bike seemed like too much work at first.   I just stood there with my elbows resting heavily on the handlebars while my head dropped.  Man that took a lot out of me.

The bike ride derailed most of my rough ideas for additional projects during the day.  Cindy and I spent an unusual amount of time just chilling out, both of us were just beat. I shaved my head once again, an attempt to symbolically cut the illness from my body.  Sunday night we watched my latest Netflix dvd, The Last Witch Hunter.  It was a very average film that was ok to kill a couple hours.  I’d give it a very middle of the road B.

I was quite surprised like most of the world to see that Nate Diaz submitted Connor McGregor in the second round of the UFC event Saturday night.  I have come to be a big fan of Connor’s despite his trash talking, a trait that normally turns me off very quickly.  There is something different about the way Connor delivers his trash.  Many times it is pretty obvious that the talk is all about creating discord within whomever his next opponent is.  His insults are normally creative and quite funny.  They also are delivered in a way that shows Connor’s intelligence.  Despite his often brash and abrasive exterior there is another part of him that is truly worthy of admiration and praise.

After the normal amount of trash talk leading up to the Diaz fight, Connor gave credit to Nate after the loss showing more class and respect than many people would expect.  It will be interesting to see how things go from here.  Up until Saturday night Connor had a Mike Tyson in his prime aura of invulnerability.  Now that he has his first UFC loss around his neck we will see if he is able to to keep his confidence and resume his track record of kicking ass and taking names.