Back in the game, wet win and the rest.

I love three day weekends.  I wish I could engineer my work schedule to have them regularly.  On Thursday I got a 1u server that Homey sent me.  He had a bunch of these servers at home and I needed something to replace my failing celeron server.  I started working on it the same day.  I went out at lunch and got two 1gig memory sticks for it.  I threw them in and started the Windows 2003 Server install.  It went through the text based part of the install fine but then when it rebooted to start the graphical part of the install it came up with a weird error and stopped.  I thought that was odd so I restarted the system, hoping it was a glitch.  Once again it stops with a different error.  I try again and again, each time the system hangs. Son of a bitch.  Then I start questioning myself.  Even though I did a good amount of research into making sure that I got compatible memory, maybe I missed something.  I even went as far as calling Kingston and describing the issue.  He verified I have compatible memory.  He recommended I run a memory tester on it and also that I try just running single sticks to see if I could identify one that was defective.  Hmmm I should have thought of that.

So I pulled one stick out and viola, it ran through setup just fine.  Once the install completed, I cautiously added the second stick and the system came up ok.  But then after awhile another stop error came up.  Ok well now that the system was up I could test the memory.  I tested the shit out of it.  After all sorts of scenarios, one stick, the other stick, both sticks, I arrived at the conclusion that both sticks of memory are fine but the second dimm slot is not.   Whenever I have a second stick in that slot a stop error will always be around the corner.  So I went through the weekend working on it with only one stick of memory and had no further memory dumps.

On Friday Ali was out most of the day doing stuff so I stayed home and did a few chores along with working on the new server and playing WoW, with playing WoW commanding the majority of the time.  The weather outside was great.  I had the windows wide open allowing a nice breeze to flow through the house.  I had it in my mind to have a enjoyable weekend, slim on work, fat on enjoyment.

Ali was signed up to run the Midpoint Madness run on saturday.  This was the run we started off our 5k careers with last year, the first race we ever ran.  Last year it was held in the evening which was cool.  This year it was a typical 8 am start.  It is a race back and forth out over a bridge with a big bump in the middle, a challenging course for florida runners that are used to flat surfaces.  Well I had been belly aching off and on all week to Ali about how I wished I could run it with her.  I wanted to do it but with my hernia/ab strain thing, knee problems and the fact that I hadn’t run a distance more than a mile and a half since May I knew it would be stupid. Well for whatever reason Friday night a wave of inspiration and optimism flowed over me and I proclaimed to Ali that I was going to try to run the race with her on Saturday.   She was surprised by my intentions and reminded me that it wasn’t very smart considering my current situation. But I told her I felt like I could do it so I was going to try.  I was excited and would have a hard enough time sleeping without….

I started to become restless around 3:30.  I thought I may have stirred initially because I was pumped to go out and run.  But as I lay there semi-awake, I smelled something that at first I dismissed as sulfur water, maybe the neighbors sprinklers were firing off at this early hour, I did have the bedroom window open so that was a possibility. However it normally doesn’t smell this strong.  Then my mind wandered some more, hmmm I had some gas issues before bed, could this strong odor be eminating from me?  If it was this was pretty serious.  But once I determined that the smell is not coming and going as flatulence normally does I dismissed it.  As I thought more and more about the smelly situation, the more I woke up.  The more I woke up the more the stinging stench became apparent until I was to the point where I had to get up to investigate.

I get up and see a dark shadow on the mat in the bathroom.  Instantly I fear what is going to be revealed when I light up the room.  I flip the light and am witness to the horror of a big, round puddle of dog diarhea.  Ali who was still asleep was woke up by my activity.  I blurted out to her that Nicki shit in the bathroom and she shot out of bed.  At first she looked for other culprits.  She asked if maybe the diabetic cat did it.  I told her I had the bedroom door shut all night, there was only one culprit.  Normally when we discover a dog accident, Nicki is all ashamed and hides.  For whatever reason this time she remained zonked out on her dog bed, seemingly unaware that we just discovered the bomb she dropped.

So here I am at 3:45 am, carefully carrying the bathroom mat like a diaper full of shit to the washing machine.  As I dump it in, some of the shit gets on the edge of the washing bin so we had to use the utility sink hose to rinse it off.  I don’t think I breathed through my nose during the entire process.  It was disgusting.

Normally if Nicki has to go she would try to wake me up to let me know.  There was no such effort made that I know of which is a bit disturbing.  I left Ali to dump the detergent in the washing machine and I went back to the bathroom to wipe out the drips that didn’t hit the mat.  Well after it was all said and done it was a little after 4am.  I told Ali that I would not be able to go back to sleep, so I didn’t even try.  While Ali went back to sleep in the still smelly bedroom, I got up and started my day, f it.

I ate my breakfast, checked the headlines and my email all before 4:30 am.  Then for the hour before I had to get Ali up for the run I played WoW.  I knew I would be exhausted later but I would just deal with it.  I got Ali up at 5:45.

We allocated plenty of time to get to the race and arrived about an hour early.  I filled out the form and got my timing chip and bib.  It felt great to be a participant as opposed to the spectator I had been at the races for the last 5 months.  Ali confessed to having mixed feelings about me running on several levels.  She was concerned about me running with the mix of physical issues I have had, she also wasn’t looking forward to running with task master Shawn.  When I was still running 5k’s with Ali she had gotten her time down to a best of around 28:15, I was constantly trying to push the pace just a little more each race.  However since she has been running the races herself the times have jumped back up over the 30 minute mark.  Ali often tells me how she just doesn’t feel the need to run a distance as fast as she can as much as just completing the distance.  Of course that is far from my ideas on a race.  To me, a race is an opportunity to push yourself, to see what you can do, to come up against your self-imposed mental/physical boundries and try to break through them.  Well anyway, since I was going to be by her side she was worried that I would be verbally encouraging her to run faster, which she despises.  So I made an effort to not tell her to giddy up and go as I have in some races before.  

I had no idea what to expect from myself.  I just hoped I would be able to finish without significant pain, anything on top of that was a bonus.  I did a lot of warming up and ample stretching in preparation.  The gun sounded and we were off.  Running outside is different than the treadmill, it’s harder.  After a mile I was already feeling tired but not in pain.  We had a good pace going, under 10 minute miles and that was as fast as I needed to go.  Running the hills was tough on the way out, tougher on the way back.  Ali pushed hard to maintain her pace and pushed through the tough spots.  We started near the back of the pack and did a decent amount of passing as the race went on which always makes you feel a bit better.  We passed numerous people that had to stop on the hills.  Even though I was physically tired, I wasn’t feeling any abnormal pain in my knees or groin so I was happy.

  During the last half mile or so we were running with a rather chunky woman.  She kept stopping and walking and then once we passed her she would start running again to catch up and pass us, then she would walk again for a bit and repeat the process.  As we approached the finish she once again started running and was about even with us.  As we approached I had visions of kicking in the after burners and blowing her away but I thought that would make me look sort of pathetic to the many onlookers.  However Ali put on the jets a bit and nipped the woman at the finish, good for her.  We crossed in 10:20 somethin official time, 30:10 according to my gps watch (which was more accurate)  Ali ran strong throughout the race and I got through it intact, with minimal discomfort.  It felt great to finish.  I really thought after the Rumble in June that I was done running and playing volleyball, permanently.  Now I’m back.  I am entertaining playing in a vball tournament with Randall in December to complete the comeback.  I tipped the scales at 189.5 last night so I am officially back at my fighting weight. I’m hoping through careful attention I will be able to extend my athletic hobbies a bit longer.

After doing some stuff around the house, Ali zonked out and took a nap for a good portion of Saturday afternoon.  She was tired from the run and the limited sleep from the dog diarhea alarm clock earlier that morning.  I refused to nap and continued to push on.  I did more work on the server.  I had plans of cloning my old server using the NTBACKUP method where you back up the old server, install the OS on the new server and then restore on top.  A couple tweaks later you have an identical server on new hardware.   Well after an 3 plus hour backup of the old server, I went to restore on the new one but had a glitch.  The old server had Win2K3 Enterprise on it, all I had to install was Win2K3 standard.  You can’t have different versions when you try to restore this way.  My Win2K3 enterprise media was at work, damn it.  Origianlly I resigned myself to waiting till Monday to continue the migration but later I decided I would just start fresh and move the stuff manually.

The old server served double duty for a while as a workstation for Ali, so it had a bunch of extra shit on it that normally isn’t on a server.  Starting fresh on the new one gave me an opportunity to eliminate that stuff.  So during the rest of the weekend I slowly worked on getting it up to snuff, bringin it online as a domain controller,  exchange 2003 server and file server.  Even with one gig of ram, it seems to perform well.  It is a P4 2.8 as opposed to a Celeron 2.4 so it gobbles up commands much better.  The fan in it is quite loud so I wound up running cables from the computer room to the bedroom/hobby room behind it and installed it there.  I’ll get some pics of the new setup up there.

Since Ali is going back to PA next weekend, we decided to take my mom out for her birthday early Saturday night.  We went to one of our favorite restaurants, The Watermark.  We got there early in an attempt to miss the rush of snowbirds.  We were pleasantly surprised that our plan worked and we got to sit right down.  We had a good dinner.  Mom is a daily reader of my blog so she already knows most of what goes on.  She said she hates when I go into technical tangents in the blog so she won’t like parts of today’s entry, sorry mom.  She will be 59 next week, hard to believe.  Time goes so fast.  She commented during dinner that I looked thin and then she stared at me for a prolonged period after saying that, examining me closely.  I told her I weighed right around 190, a good weight for me, what I have weighed for a loooong time.  Still she thought I looked oddly thin.  After dinner we went back to her place and had some fruity tart things Ali picked up at a luncheon/auction thing.  My mom flipped on the radio while we were there, she listens to a station that starts playing Xmas music 24/7 starting in early November.  I asked my mom why she would want to listen to this music already.  She said she likes it.  I found myself constantly drawn away from the conversation as xmas tune after tune came on.  I kept thinking to myself “It’s only November 11th….”

Over the weekend, in between my computer work, WoW playing and house chores I had been cycling the batteries for my rc planes with the intention of getting out there and flying.  So Sunday morning after changing the oil on the Sentra, I gathered my equipment and flew my speedwing.  I went through 4 battery packs and was out there for a good half hour.  It was fun.  My control was a bit shaky at first but in no time I was back to flying inverted, power dives, barrel rolls and thermal gliding.  It was fun.  I am seriously going to try to do it more than once every 6 months.

This weekend the people that live in Michigan but own the house to the right of us were down.  They are down till Tuesday.  I feel bad about it in a way but I feel very little need to be very social with them.  The really aren’t our neighbors, they are the people that live in Michigan that own the house.  From conversations I have had with them, I don’t think they will be moving down here anytime soon.  I will be surprised if they ever do to be honest.  Over the three day weekend I talked to the guy briefly from a distance and let him borrow my ladder to change the batteries in his smoke detectors.  Part of me thinks we should have them over to socialize or whatever but we didn’t.  Plus they brought a friend with this time so I  figure they are doing their own thing, although it seemed like they spent a lot of time just sitting out on their lanai.  You know how you just know when you have things in common with people that make it easy to socialize with them?  Well I don’t get that vibe at all in this situation. Plus there was an incident that happened when they first came down that cast a very bad intial impression on us. I dunno, I guess I am just a big jerk hermit.  They will probably be gone on Tuesday without any further interaction with us.  Although Ali hasn’t really said anything either way about it, she hadn’t suggested any contact with them either so I think she feels pretty similar.  In a way I think we resent someone buying Dee & Paula’s house, whom we were very fond of.  To have them buy it and then let it sit vacant for 99% of the year adds to the bad taste. 

The Eagles broke their three game losing streak with a thumping of the Redskins in wet and soggy conditions.  The game actually could have been more lopsided.  The Eagles scored almost all of their points on a handful of big plays and were more or less unable to sustain drives most of the game.  The one exception was at the end of the game where they were able to impressively run the ball to run out the clock, but the Redskins had given up at that point it seemed.  Although it was a solid win, I still don’t have a great outlook for the long term success of the team.  They just are too inconsistent and make dumb mental errors at key times in games.  The year they went to the Super Bowl almost all the lucky breaks went their way, this year they almost always seem to be on the receiving end of someone else’s good fortune.