Trek time, turtle trot, better brick, ditched The Dictator
Saturday I grabbed the dogs relatively early and brought them back for a day of home labor. It was one of those days where it seemed like despite my consistent hard work that I was making slow headway, not a feeling I enjoy. To make things worse it was brutally hot and humid Saturday, especially for mid-May with temps scraping 90 degrees. The highlights of the chores was replacing a defective sprinkler in the front yard and utilizing the battery powered pruning chain/pole saw Todd got me for Christmas. It made short work of the huge seed branches on the coconut palm.
On my way to drop off the girls later I made a pit stop at mom’s place to give her my garden harvest for the day. It was also nice for the dogs to get to spend a few minutes with grandma, they always are very excited to see her.
Saturday night I got out to see the new Star Trek movie. I have never been a hard core Trekkie but I always enjoyed both the tv series and movies. I have seen every Star Trek movie that was released in the theater. I had not read anything in advance about the storyline of this installment, only seeing the previews leading up to it, which looked pretty bad ass.
The movie was good, I enjoyed it. There were a few things that went down that I mentally lol’d at because they made no sense but I won’t reveal them here to protect from being a spoiler. I came away from the movie satisfied but not blown away. Official rating of A-.
On Sunday morning I was on my way to the water park to do another training brick. As I passed under the interstate I noticed something large against the left curb of the three lane wide road. As I went by I saw it was a large turtle. Instantly I went into my animal saver mode. The closest place I could turn off was a turning lane about 300 yards away.
I hop out and start running towards the turtle. At first I ran up on the raised median. I saw the turtle had made it’s way to the center of the three lanes, a prime kill zone by some idiot not paying attention. Luckily there was not that much traffic on the roads yet at that hour. However as I was about 100 yards away I saw a decent amount of cars stopped at the traffic light just before the unofficial turtle crossing. I get off the median and am now running in the center lane, against traffic. My thought process was if someone did not see the turtle, they would at least see me. The last thing I wanted was to witness the turtle getting obliterated as I was only a few seconds away from getting to him.
My strategy seemed to work as cars slowed and avoided both myself and the turtle. I didn’t bother to make eye contact with any of the drivers, I am sure quite a few “wtf is he doing?” looks were shot my way. I scooped up the misguided turtle and carried him across the road to the side next to a canal, figuring that was his intended destination.
When I picked him up he hissed, not realizing that his turtle guardian angel had arrived. As I was making my way down the steep embankment I was rewarded for my efforts with a stream of turtle urine running down my leg. I wasn’t sure if it was fear or another defense mechanism. I sat him by the waters edge, told him it was ok now, and climbed back up. That was one very lucky turtle.
For the second week in a row I did a three headed brick, a 4 mile run, a 12 plus mile bike and a 1200 yard swim. It went better than the week before where I found myself dying at various points. Of course I was still quite tired this time around, especially on the bike, but it was less severe than the prior session which is progress in my book.
This weekend I installed a SSD drive in my home computer. Of course having the experience of doing the same thing at work helped tremendously when migrating my home system, allowing me to avoid a couple pitfalls. I am now enjoying similar performance at home as I have been at work. A cold boot is super fast, the longest part of the process is the initial computer POST and the network authentication time. Anything related to hard drive access is done nearly instantaneously, it’s pretty awesome. 🙂
Sunday night I threw my latest Netflix dvd in the 360, The Dictator. I was a big fan of Borat, I thought it was quite funny. I thought Bruno was much more stupid than funny. Well The Dictator was 100% stupid, well the 15 minutes of it I endured. Yes, it was so stupid I turned the damn thing off. I can not tell you the last time that has happened but it is a testament to how awful the movie was. I did not laugh once during my brief time watching it and I could pretty much guarantee it was going to be a monumental waste of my time to watch anymore.
I’m not sure if it is fair to give a rating to something I only could stomach for a few minutes but I will anyway. It gets a “don’t waste a rental on this piece of shit even if it’s free” F. What I saw was so utterly ridiculous I have no plans to watch another Sascha Baren Cohen movie, ever. It really sucked.