Burning

There is a bad brush fire out in our area that so far has torched more than 200 acres and taken several homes with it.  It’s not close enough to be a threat to us but we could see and smell the smoke from it.  Much of Golden Gate Estates is covered in pine trees.  Many of the homes are carved into these heavily wooded lots.  These homes are very vulnerable in a fire situation.  It was one of the reasons Ali and I were happy when we found an open lot to build our place on.  Some of the pictures from the fire are pretty scary.  There is a good chance this fire was set/caused by a human being as there have been no storms with associated lightning recently.

Last night I was very busy once again.  The first couple hours after I got home I spent trying to continue work on my bearing upgrade for the Roomba which was a failure.  I lost patience with the process of widening the plastic holes and decided to use a dremel to assist me.  Using the dremel caused the holes to get out of round.  I shit canned the project, angry with myself for not taking some time to research how to properly enlarge the holes.

The baker’s cabinet that Ali ordered arrived yesterday in three large boxes.  We spent the rest of the night working on that.  We got the base of it assembled and in place.  All that is left is to put the top hutch section together.  It looks nice and fits in with our other stuff pretty well.  Ali is excited about it since she spent a lot of time trying to find something that fit her “vision”.

I scored tickets for the Phillies yesterday.  The Sunday after the Rumble, Randall, my brother and my niece are going to go down to watch them play the Angels.  Originally I was going to buy them through the Phillies web site but the only 4 tickets available were high up in the stadium off to the third base side.  I did some digging on Stub Hub.  Todd had mentioned it would be cool to maybe be in the outfield or down the lines where foul balls or home run balls are a possibility.  I found 4 tickets in the left field corner in the lower level.  Yea they were more expensive but I don’t figure to be going to many Phillie games in the future, it was worth it to get some decent seats to me.  It should be a fun time.  Ali is content to chill out with Nicki at my dad’s place while we go to the game.

The weekend will be busy enough. There is grass to mow, a house to clean.  I am in the process of upgrading my Tivo HD hard drive from the factory 160 gig to a more generous 500 gig.  This time I don’t expect any technical snafu’s as I am using a drive that is designed for DVR use. I’d love to go see Indiana Jones sometime during the weekend but I don’t think it is going to work out since Ali will be gone a good chunk of Sunday.  

For the first time since I have lived here they are having a beach vball tournament right here in Naples this weekend.  Can you believe that I am not playing??  For years I have been driving hour after hour to go to tournaments around the state, wishing for something to be held close to me.  It finally has happened and I’m not gonna get to play.  Randall has something else going on.  I asked Jeremy as well but he expressed no interest in travelling.  I even sent out a general plea for a partner on a Florida vball email list but it looks like the moderator never got around to releasing it.  Oh well.

 I have to go back out to the tax sale this afternoon and Monday morning, yay.