Full four days

Our Thanksgiving weekend kicked off with the annual holiday 4 mile run.  Of course since we are board members we couldn’t just show up and run.  Instead we got on site around 5:30 for the 7:30 race to help set up and manage the chaos.  It was indeed pretty chaotic.

The race had a HUGE swell in numbers this year.  It was already a big race, last year pulling in more than 1500 runners.  Well this year the number was closer to 2500!

As you can imagine, having this many people descend upon a rather small area in a short period of time is a recipe for disaster.  The race director Matt did a good job trying to alleviate some of the crush of humanity by encouraging people to carpool, take the trolley to the site or ride their bikes there. Even with his efforts it was tough.

The freshly purchased walkie talkies came in handy.  When the full force of the crowd came on site background noise made it pretty difficult to hear though, something headsets would address.  Despite the madness, it was great to see the huge turnout since the majority of the dollars go to a local homeless shelter.  I am not sure what the final dollar figure was but it should have been pretty massive.

So finally race time approached so Ali and I abandoned our posts and moved to the start.  There were far too many people to fit on the road.  Ali, Christie, Michelle and I stood back in a driveway and only got onto the road well after the start command was given.

I broke away almost immediately from the girls who indicated they weren’t interested in pushing pace.  I told them I would see them at the finish.  It was a huge mess for the first couple miles of the race.  There were simply too many people for the width of the road.  I was juking and jiving constantly to try to advance my position.  I can’t tell you how many 18 inch spaces I squeezed through during the first half of the race. I saw a woman get tripped up and fall flat on her face.  With as crowded as it was I am surprised she was the only one I saw first hand.

I wanted to run a decent race.  I knew that all of the traffic I had to get around the first half of the race was going to hurt my time so once I had some free space around me I tried to pick it up.  During the entire run I was only passed a few times and I was the passer hundreds of times.  This happens when you start way in the back.  The nice cool temps made the effort much more bearable.

My legs had felt pretty stiff and heavy early in the race but by the end they were carrying me along pretty well.  As the finish approached I picked a couple targets that I wanted to pass.  One was some gray haired guy that was chastising a young kid for walking.  He said something like “Don’t let an old guy beat you!”  He wasn’t that old, if I would guess he was 40 something like me.  Well I didn’t want to let him beat me either so I passed him with about 200 yards to go.

I turned the corner into the finish line and stopped my watch at 34:28 for the 4 miles.  It was a decent time, a 8:34 per mile pace which was respectable considering the log jam during the first half of the run.  I didn’t see Ali and the girls finish but I later found out they crossed right around the 40 minute mark.  It took me quite awhile until I found them in the huge crowd mulling around the finish.

We didn’t get off the race site until all of the runners had long gone since we helped clean up afterward.  It was the biggest race the club has ever been involved in.  It was a cool way to start off the holiday.

After the race we headed to pick up mom with a brief pit stop at Dunkin Donuts to pick up some go juice.  We loaded up Mom and her delicious pineapple side dish into the party van and headed home.  The dogs were thrilled to see both us and my mom of course.

Mom and Ali got cracking on preparing the meal while I flipped on the tv to catch a small amount of the Macy’s parade.  Our meal this year was once again totally vegetarian consisting of asparagus, the pineapple filling, sweet potatoes, rolls and Tofurkey.  I have really come to like tofurkey believe it or not.  I know it is almost sacrilegious to have a turkey free Thanksgiving but it really doesn’t bother me in the least.  Like most changes, they become easier to swallow over time.

We also gave mom her belated birthday present, a Shark steam mop.  She had told me that she would really like one.  Evidently some of her friends have them and are quite pleased with their performance.  Mom can not tolerate being on her hands and knees to scrub floors at this point so the Shark is a nice alternative.  I got her the “deluxe” model with three different cleaning heads, woohoo.

After pigging out on the tasty meal we cleaned up and relaxed for a bit.  I watched some Thanksgiving football and mom read a book for a bit out on the lanai.  I knew the clock was ticking in her head and she would ask me for departure times sooner rather than later.  Mom always is in a hurry to get back home.

We left our place around 2ish. Mom had a few things she wanted me to do at her place like swap out some florescent lights, look at her running toilet and set up her artificial xmas tree.  I tore through her list quickly.  I asked her if she wanted to test out her Shark while I was there but she said the testing we did at our place was good enough.  The next time I’ll probably see mom is over Christmas where she actually seemed open to staying two days or more!!

To be honest, I don’t recall what we did the rest of Thanksgiving evening but I am pretty sure it wasn’t much besides watch some more football and screw around on the computer.  Ali and were both pretty spent from starting the day at 4:15 am.

On Friday Ali went to work while I was off.  I decided to go check out a few stores based on perusing the ads I saw in the newspaper.  I didn’t do anything crazy like stand at the door at 6am.  Instead I set out on my adventure between 8 and 9.  Most of the things that interested me weren’t really gifts but stuff I could use.  The thing I really wanted was a 2 terabyte external hard drive I saw advertised at Target for a pretty amazing $79.

There are two Targets in my area and I visited both, striking out both times.  Evidently that was one of those deals you had to be waiting at the door for, damn.  OfficeMax had another decent deal for an external drive but they too had sold them all.  I did pick up a sweet deal on a P-touch labeler.  It included two tapes and was only $10.

I went to Home Depot where I wanted to get a few plants as well as some LED Christmas lights.  Last year I was so frustrated by f’ing around with lights I wanted to just get new ones that worked.  I also like the fact that led lights use about 25% of the power of regular lights. (of course they cost 4 times as much) Unfortunately they did not have any of the white variety so I wound up getting the lights at Sam’s.  Their lights actually came on a spool that was designed to be reused for storage which was a big sell for me instead of using cut up pieces of cardboard to haphazardly wrap light sets around. On the way home I stopped to pick up groceries so that Ali wouldn’t have to bother with it.

I busted my ass the rest of the day mowing the property, planting the stuff I got and tending to various chores.  I also took a few minutes to take some pics in my new Crossfit Clitheroe hoodie that my buddy Lee sent me from the UK. He asked me to take a picture wearing it to post to the CC Facebook page.

Of course I wanted to use pictures that were appropriate so I headed out to my pull up station and shot some video with my Flipcam and then pulled some stills off of it. Even though it was 80 degrees and humid I pulled on the sweatshirt and my Adidas training pants and did some brief bar work.  In addition to shooting very high quality video, the Flipcam lets you pull off crystal clear stills as well which is nice.

Friday night I felt in a bit of a bad mood.  This happens a lot when I am home and Ali is working.

Ali was up very early Saturday morning to meet up for a club run.  Instead of staying in bed I found myself up and about at 5:30 am.  I had plans to tackle the other big project on my immediate to do list, trimming the palm trees, all 20 of them.

This is a huge job and I have tackled it various ways over the years.  A couple years ago I bought one of those long pole saws but I found holding and manipulating this over my head for hours and hours was pure shoulder and arm torture.  Last year I went out and bought a 20 foot extension ladder with a high leverage loppers which would allow me to get right up into the tree tops so I could cut the branches up close and personal. Of course being that high up on the ladder has increased the danger coefficient of the entire process as well.

The job has two stages, cutting all the branches and then collecting them all off the ground and depositing them in the fill pit at the back of the property.  I have done this job entirely solo a few times and it is just brutal.  I had asked Ali to help me with it but she wasn’t expecting to be back until around noon.  I figured I would just go around and do all the cutting first and then go back around when she gets home to collect all of the stuff.

Well I was surprised when Ali pulled in earlier than expected.  I told her she could take a nap first if she wanted and I would keep cutting away.  She said she was ok to come out and help.  Having Ali help made what would have been a grueling task only mildly horrible instead.  I would trim up one cluster at a time and then use the back of the truck to haul the branches to the pit.  Ali also used the yard cart attached to the tractor to increase our yard waste transport capacity.

We worked tirelessly for several hours into mid-afternoon.  I was tired, bruised, scraped and bleeding in various spots from the effort but it was finally done.  I told Ali I never trimmed that many trees in a day and thanked her repeatedly for her assistance.  It was hard labor.

Ali looked at me in disbelief when I told her I still wanted to get lights on the tall tree out front.  I said I already had all the stuff out to do it.  She reluctantly came out and helped me wrap the new LED lights around the two trees.  The LED’s emit a different, very bright sort of light that really looked nice when the sun went down.

Ali laid down for a brief nap late in the afternoon.  I figured I would surprise her and set up our Xmas tree while she napped.  I just set up the bare tree, decorations will have to come some other time.

Despite our bust ass Saturday, there was still plenty of stuff I wanted to get done on Sunday.  Ali had already told me she had a lot of her infamous “computer work” to get done so I had already planned to do most of it myself.

One of the things I did was work on two more of the club’s time clocks.  One was a newer model that also needed replacement batteries.  Replacing the batteries was much easier as this clock was more solid state and less mechanical.

The other clock was just like the original one that I ripped apart only to find that the batteries were fine.  Well this time the batteries were actually dead.  I was able to find a replacement set on the internet for $85.

Shortly before lunch I asked Ali to come out and assist me with a Bar-barian forum video.  I never ask Ali to participate in these, in fact I typically shoot them when she isn’t home.  However due to the nature of this challenge I needed her help.  This two month challenge involves doing six different exercises with pyramid rest periods in between.  In order to be an “official” effort the break times had to be kept accurately and that was where Ali came in.  I gave her a stop watch so he could countdown the breaks for me.

The actual challenge was much more difficult that I anticipated, mostly due to the very short breaks that range from 30 seconds to a minute.  One of the exercises were parallel bar dips.

Since I hadn’t built a dip station (yet) I improvised and used two fold up saw horses each weighted down with a 45 pound weight plate.  Doing dips on this set up was very uncomfortable.  I had to contort my body and lift my legs awkwardly throughout the movement which surely cut down on my total by several reps.  I need to find an alternative there.

I squeaked out a total of 92 reps between the six exercises which  were hand stand push ups, bar dips, pull ups, push ups, chin ups and bench dips.  You can hear how badly I was sucking wind during the quick 6 minute session.  It was brief but very intense. If you want to see the effort and Ali’s excellent time keeping you can see it here.

We got to watch most of the frustrating Eagles loss to the Bears.  We didn’t see it all due to an unexpected deluge of rain that knocked out our satellite reception for an extended period of time.  The Birds made a decent comeback at the end but were unable to dig out of the huge hole made by shitty play from their defense and special teams.  The Bears made big play after big play effortlessly against the Eagles, it was so frustrating to watch.  Many of the big plays were set off by Eagle defenders slipping and falling on the terrible surface at Soldier field.  I would have thought the team would be better prepared for the sloppy conditions with longer spikes.  They were falling down left and right.

We don’t have much time to dwell on the loss since the Birds play Thursday night against the Texans.  I will have to utilize my ultracool website running on a laptop connected to my bedroom tv to catch the game.

I played around with my 360 a bit over the weekend.  I used up the 800 credits that were left on the previous owners account and created my own Xbox Live gamertag.  GreenMachine769 if you are interested.  I’ll add anyone to my friend list since I currently don’t have any.