Little and then big

So of  course the world news is the terrorist attacks in France which I have some thoughts on but I wish to skip chronological order and expand on those last.

So this was declared as tree trimming weekend by myself.  The forecast low in the mid-60’s looked like the lowest temps I was going to see for awhile.  When I woke up Saturday morning I was annoyed to see the thermometer reading 71 degrees.  I wasted very little time and was outside gathering my tree trimming tools by 7:30.  I was solo since Cindy was attending a Blue Zones event in the morning.  It didn’t really matter since I was going to be doing nothing but hacking branches several hours which she couldn’t help me with anyway.

It didn’t take long for the heat to start ramping up as the early morning fog burned off.  I was sweating my ass off even though it was only 9AM.  Thank goodness as the day wore on cloud cover rolled in that kept the sun hidden for the majority of the day.

I found myself getting very frustrated due to losing things.  First I lost my machete that I normally use to hack off rotting cross thatch.  I knew I sat it down in the yard somewhere but could not find it after 10 minutes of circling.  It was found later buried under a pile of branches.   Then later I somehow lost the blade to my cordless SawzAll, it flew out in the process of buzzing off more cross thatch.  Thankfully I had a spare blade.  The lost blade was again found later, under another pile of branches.

For a couple years I have said I need to buy a taller extension ladder, the 20 footer I have just is not tall enough to safely reach a couple of the trees anymore.  Each year I don’t buy another ladder and each year I put myself into increasingly more perilous conditions to trim these monster trees.  Well this year set a new standard in danger.

To trim the tallest tree I had to stand a couple rungs from the top of the ladder and could not even use my new loppers which would require two hands.  Instead I had to trim all of the palm fronds with one hand via the SawzAll while using my off hand to hold onto the tree.  The gusting wind added tree sway into the equation. NEXT year, I am getting a new ladder.

I had an unexpected encounter when I was trimming the second tallest tree on the property.  I was knocking off loose cross thatch and all of a sudden saw a small banded snake that looked a lot like a pygmy rattler bury itself into the branches just above where I was working.  I discontinued work in that area and let the snake be.  I was very surprised to see a snake living that high up in the tree, a first for me.

Tree trimming is a physically grueling and dirty job.  Climbing up and down the ladder and working mostly over your head all day has a way of wearing you down. When I was chopping off rotting cross thatch I would periodically get organic matter facials depending on how I was positioned in relation to the gusting wind.  As I labored on I told myself several times, “you have done this many times, it always sucks, and you always get through it anyway”.

By the time Cindy got home I had four trees left to trim.  She thankfully brought me some much needed coffee which I enjoyed while sitting in a chair in front of the many piles of cut branches that littered the property.  The chickens and Sadie mulled about me in support.

After eating lunch I finished up the remaining trees and then joined Cindy in the equally arduous task of picking up hundreds of palm fronds and the big chunks of rotted cross thatch that were everywhere.

We repeatedly loaded down the back of the Tacoma with huge mountains of debris and drove it back to the fill pit for dumping.   I have a technique to expedite the dumping process.  I try to grab a couple palm fronds at the bottom of the pile and pull them out, most of the time I am able to get the majority of the pile on top of them to slide out as well.  Well during one of those trips that plan backfired.

I had my hands on three or four low fronds and was pulling hard, leaning back so my bodyweight was helping.  All of a sudden instead of the pile coming out, just the fronds I had a a hold of came loose.  The force I was applying resulted in major momentum which catapulted one of the branch ends directly into my nose at high speed.  It felt like I was punched in the face.

I expected a stream of blood to start flowing out of my nostril.  I did start to bleed but it was from the outside, not the inside.  The branch left a nice little gash on the left side of my nose.  After using my shirt a few times as a bandage I asked Cindy instead to run inside and grab me a real one to stop the slow but steady stream of blood.

The clean up actually went faster than I expected it to.  In total we ran nine pickup loads of crap to the fill pit.  By the time we got everything cleaned up it was between three and four in the afternoon, a hard day of labor.

As I surveyed the property and saw the roughly 25 trees that I trimmed up I felt a mixture of pride, relief, and anxiety, knowing I yet again accomplished one of the shittiest home chores I have but will be repeating it once again a scarce 365 days from now.

Saturday night there was no way we had the energy to go out to the movies.  Instead we stayed home and enjoyed a delicious fish sticks dinner while renting Train Wreck On Demand.  The movie was the unrated version of the Amy Schumer comedy meaning it had some very adult scenes which I didn’t think really added much to the movie.  All in all I thought the movie was an average comedy with an average amount of laughs. Amy saying very outrageous and dirty things was funny at first but grew old eventually.  It seemed to rely too heavily on it, much like a lot of Melissa McCarthy’s films.   As a result it gets an average B rating from me.  I honestly expected it to be funnier.

Sunday morning I had no interest in endurance training as I had universal body aches and pains from the tree trimming.  We needed to get to Rural King early anyway since we had used up the rest of the chicken feed.  Although I probably earned a casual Sunday I did not feel comfortable taking one.  The weed whacking had not been done for three weeks, things were looking pretty ratty so I grabbed the whacker and got busy.  My work inspired Cindy to get the mowing done as well which she had planned on doing later this week.  Putting off the chore for a few weeks and whacking additional fence line to compliment the tree trimming meant the task took longer than normal.

When I finished up I had a quick test I wanted to do with the timing system.  Setting up the mats with the MyLaps system is by far the biggest negative since I switched from an Ipico timing system.  The 25 pound mat sections have to be connected together and then have an individual wire run from each mat back to the timing box.  With two people the process can take damn close to 15 minutes if you have the maximum amount of mats laid out, which is eight.

I had a theory that because in prior testing that these mats read chips 3-4 feet to either side that I might be able to only connect every other mat and still get chip reads along the entire mat width.  So I tested it.

My test did sort of prove my theory as I was able to get reads on sections of mat that had no wire attached to them.  It did also show that you are sacrificing field strength when doing so which could be problematic in a high density situation like a start line.  The follow up test to this would be setting up two lines during a real race where the first line wires in every mat and the second line does every other.  You could then easily see if you are losing reads skipping mats by comparing the numbers between the two timing boxes.  However since I will not be using MyLaps after my running club timing stops at the end of January I don’t feel all that motivated to look into it further.  If I would invest in more timing equipment for GMT it would not be with MyLaps.  I prefer something that is reliable AND easy to set up.  MyLaps does not meet that latter criteria.

So the Eagles played the Dolphins Sunday afternoon.  The game started off with the Eagles on fire with them putting in their best first quarter performance of the year, racking up 16 points.  It looked like they were setting the stage for a blowout.  Well the wheel fells off and the team managed a measly field goal for the rest of the game while allowing the Dolphins to stay in the game long enough for a one point, 20-19 win.

Of course there were many directions fingers could be pointed so let’s start naming names.  Caleb Sturgis, why is he still on the roster?  Is there really no better kickers available out there?  This guy is pressed to make extra points, his accuracy is just atrocious.  It’s the second time this year that his miss of a short field goal turned out to be the difference between a win and a loss on the scoreboard.

Sam Bradford, statistically he had an ok day although again he displayed some of that inaccuracy I have been complaining about since early in the season.  He just misses a lot of throws, something commentator Rich Gannon pointed out as well.  He got crushed on that hit that knocked him out of the game and I wouldn’t be surprised if he is out for next week.  I am surprised he lasted this long.

Miles Austin, wtf happened to you?  I remember when you came onto the scene with the Cowboys you were tearing things up for a couple years.  As an Eagle your catch to fck up ratio is all out of whack. Not being able to drag your foot on that TD grab is pretty lame as is your route running, awareness, and ability to make a tough catch.

Byron Maxwell, you are disgustingly overpaid.  The fact that Chip Kelly thought your skillset was worthy of mega dollars in free agency is a further testament to how bad Chip is at assessing talent.  Maxwell sucks.  He gets burned repeatedly each and every game and excels at nothing but pass interference/holding calls and poor tackling.

Matt Sanchez, dude, way to waste no time reinforcing your reputation of choking when it counts, throwing yet another game killing interception in the end zone when the game was on the line.  Plus why in the world did handing off the ball to DeMarco Murray seem to be impossibly complicated for you?  They ran into/tripped one another at least half a dozen times, no joke.  Sanchez is just another non-answer to the QB position long term.

And of course Chip Kelly, your mad scientist like experiments with the Eagle roster in the off season has been a pretty disappointing failure.  I am fine calling the Chip Kelly era as officially played out by the end of year three.  Go back to college where lower talent levels makes your hurry up offense more effective.

It was a bad loss in a season of bad losses.  I expect more to follow.

Ok so let’s talk about the French terrorist attacks which of course were tragic,  As expected there was world wide support for France and social media wasted no time jumping in, making it easy for people to offer one click “support” by changing their profile picture to have an overlay of the French flag.  Also as expected, the terrorist act instantly whipped the Obama haters into a frenzy with them posting non-stop vitriol that accomplished nothing but more division, hate and prejudice.  Repeatedly I saw posts that seemed to indicate that different leadership, gun ownership and more military action in the middle east was the easy answer to these problems.  I just don’t get it.

After nearly a decade and a half of the US being mired in a “war” with terrorists it’s like the American public has learned absolutely nothing as a result.  When I read “we beat the Nazi’s, we can beat ISIS the same way” it just shows an incredible lack of understanding of the situation.  Terrorists are not a conventional army.  They wear no uniforms.  They don’t attack in battalions. They don’t fear death, in many cases they seek it out, seeing it as an opportunity to serve their God in a perverted way.  You can not bomb away this problem.  You are fighting an idea, not an army.

When I see the sweeping, Muslims are the problem generalizations roll in it again shows a lack of thinking, indicating that the radical extremists that perpetrate these atrocities are representative of  Islam as a whole.  It’s like saying the KKK is representative of Christianity.  It’s just silly.

France has reacted very strongly to the attacks, launching near immediate air strikes and locking down the country, trying to get a clear picture of all the connections the terrorists involved had.   These attacks I suppose are the start to the large cup of revenge they plan to indulge themselves in.

Listen, I understand the idea of revenge.  I know how I felt after the 9/11 attacks.  I wanted somebody to pay.  However the lessons of a decade and a half direct involvement/invasion by the US in the middle east quagmire has clearly established that our course of action was massive, incredulously expensive both in dollars and loss of life and mostly ineffective.  If anything our involvement in the region only cultivated more support for the radical Islamist movement.

If France goes in there swinging a bat wildly, killing many ISIS insurgents and innocent civilians that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time it will just pour additional gas on the fire.  The unfortunate result will be giving further credence to how the west deserves any attack upon them, no matter how senseless or brutal in the minds of ISIS and others driven by their similar, contorted religious beliefs.

Do I have the definitive answer to this dilemma? Nope, not even close.  All I know is more bombing, more military action, more of what has been tried for the last 15 years isn’t going to make a difference.  You can’t “defeat” an idea and you are dealing with an enemy that looks at death as a victory.

If you have 5 minutes take a look at this, it explains my point in a much more comprehensive and well written manner.

Also if you want a better understanding of the rat nest of players in thr Syrian conflict, take another 5 minutes and watch this.