All posts by Duf

Yesterday before I went to the gym I went out and grabbed a SpotBot to add to my robotic army.  Last night I put it to the test with a stain that has been in the carpet in our bedroom for ever.  It was the end result of Nicki chewing a rawhide that was “beef basted”.  It was brownish, reddish in color.  Evidently the combination of whatever colored the bone and Nicki’s saliva created a substance that has resisted all attempts to clean it. 

I had a problem initially getting the SpotBot to spray down solution, I had to push down harder on the cleaning solution tank.  Operation of the unit is a no-brainer.  Push the appropriate button depending if it is a set or fresh stain and walk away.  The light cycle takes 3 minutes, the deep cycle takes 6.  Well I ran it through two deep cycles and one light cycle and the stain remained.  It was lighter so it gave me some hope if I continued to let the SpotBot work on it, it may eventually clean up.

It’s cool watching the cleaner do it’s thing.  It sprays, scrubs and vacuums in cycles.  The scrubbing action reverses direction often to work the stain from different angles.  I will mess with it some more over other stains that reside throughout the house until I give it a final grade.

My robotic arsenal is quite large.  It includes 3 Roombas, 1 Scooba, 1 Dirt Dog, 1 SpotBot, a Littermaid automatic litterbox, and the automatic hand soap dispenser we got from Sharper Image. 

Lately I have been trying to do a few things around the house at night instead of spending most the evening sitting on my ass either watching stuff on the Tivo or playing WoW.  The other night I walked around with a can of WD-40 and sprayed the hinges of several doors that were habitual squeakers.  Last night I washed and vacuumed my truck as the sun was going down.  It was very dirty.  There are tons of little, easy things that need to be done around the house that seem to get continually shelved  for one reason or another.

Speaking of WoW, I just got my 7th character to the games highest level of 70.  My ultimate goal is to get all 9 of my characters there.  I have one character for each class in the game.  If you play WoW, you know how long it takes to get seven 70’s. Yay.  My buddy had a virtual disaster happen this week.  Someone broke into his WoW account and stole all of his items, all of his money and even transferred two of his characters to other realms.  He had a trojan on his computer that stole his account information.  This is a huge problem in WoW and happens quite often.  These cyber criminals break into an account, clean it out and sell all of the virtual loot for real world dollars.  My buddy has no idea how he got the trojan on his computer, he generally practices “safe” computing.  It makes me paranoid as well that my virtual empire could disappear very easily.

So I am four days into my different regimen which to this point has just been basically substituting eggs (egg beaters), oj and toast for the bowl of cereal I normally have.  In reality I doubt that this small change will have a big effect.  My dinners this week have not been ideal as we have been trying to eat through the various leftovers from the weekend buffet.  At the gym I am trying to superset exercises with minimal rest to make my lunch time workouts more effective.

  The one visual change that is easy to identify is the hair on my face.  It’s funny at work how the women are divided on my look with a hairy face.  Some like it, but more do not.  Some say I look handsome with it, more mature (old), more rugged.  Some just crinkle their nose and shake their head.  One woman even went as far to say that I looked like a “pervert” with the facial hair. That was not a comment I expected.  Anyway, I have a long way to go until I shave again, it will be interesting to see what a month of hair growth will wind up looking like.

Yesterday for some reason I was thinking about playing golf at Manor golf course.  When I was younger I played golf much more than I do nowadays and I played at Manor golf course more than any other place.  Manor was located near our house and had been around for a long time.  It seemed every time I went there, there was the same old, grumpy guy behind the desk.  I always had the feeling he looked down on me because I was typically wearing sneakers and a t-shirt as opposed to golf spikes and a collared shirt.  The clubhouse itself was very small and very old.  The cashier area lead to a small flight of stairs down to the bar area where they had a small tv that was normally playing some sporting event.  It was cozy.

Manor had some memorable holes.  Number one was dead straight but went up a huge hill.  I rarely got off the tee there well.  The course itself was pretty open, despite being nestled among the trees.  There were a decent amount of fairways that were hemmed in with trees.  Those holes were the ones were I lost the most balls as I never was one to hit the ball straight with any consistency. Hole 10 was across a huge valley with a road running through it.  The green was doglegged to the right, you couldn’t see it from the tee box.  Hole 15 was a short par 3 but you were shooting over a road and a pond.  I rarely hit the green there.  The final hole was again up a hill, over a ravine with trees lining the “fairway”.  It was a challenging way to wind things up.

The entire course was up and down hills with each hole holding a rather unique personality.  I only used a cart a few times there, even with the long hilly terrain.  At that age, saving a few dollars was worth the added exercise.  I have played golf down here in SW Florida at a number of courses and even though they are typically beautifully landscaped with hardly a blade of grass out of place, they feel generic and manufactured.  I’d take old Manor golf course located outside of Gouglersville, PA any day, even with the grumpy old man behind the counter.

Gee I wonder if tobacco lobbyists pad W’s pockets at all?  Nah…

I successfully installed my two Lithium Ion battery packs into two dead Roomba battery shells.  Was easy. Not much else to say.

But animoto.com is pretty cool

The Treo 750 showed up at the door yesterday and I dug into it quickly. My initial impressions were positive, it looked cleaner (no external antenna), felt lighter and smaller in my hand. I threw it on the charger first as advised to get the battery up to full strength. You can see a comparison of the 650 versus the 750 below. (750 has no antenna)  Then I tried to activate it using the instructions included with the phone.  Of course they didn’t work although I didn’t really expect them to since I was porting Ali’s number from Verizon.

So I called up the activation line and was met by confusion.  they didn’t have the phone number in their system.  I was all ready for yet another customer service cluster F.  However I was pleasantly surprised.  I got transferred to a guy that was able to fix everything on the fly.  He was very polite and in about 10 to 15 minutes it was all worked out and the new phone was up and running.  Kudos to ATT/Cingular phone reps.

Once I was live on the air I started working on getting the device configured with my home Exchange 2003 environment.  It was easy to do.  That was one of the biggest pain’s with the Palm OS, getting it to sync properly with Outlook.  All the time sync attempts would fail or produce unexpected results such as duplicating events in the calendar and/or people in your contacts.  It was very annoying.

With Windows Mobile 5 this process is a dream in comparison.  Updating your Exchange back end is nearly instant with constant pushing and pulling going on.  Instead of a manual sync of mail that happened once an hour with the 650, all calendar updates and outgoing and incoming email happen as soon as they occur.  It works great. The Windows Mobile Internet Explorer also did a better job of displaying web pages than the odd Blazer browser that is used by the Palm OS. 

I spent a few hours digging through the OS, I never used Windows Mobile.  I have been a Palm user since the Palm III.  Even though I appreciated the Palm OS and was very familiar with it, I prefer the Palm version of Windows Mobile.  It just seems easier, more intuitive and more visually appealing.  At least so far, I am a fan.  Supposedly there will be a free upgrade to Windows Mobile 6 offered soon which will pile on even more features into the OS, adding to it’s appeal.  I look forward to it.  Playing with the 750 makes me want to check into the contract on my phone to see when it is up, I’m jealous.

Last night Ali got home late, she was at the hairdresser forever.  I have been bugging her forever to change up her hairstyle.  For awhile I was pressing her to get a perm.  She had one perm years ago and I really liked it.  However she kept putting me off and eventually the idea was ditched because supposedly it would be too severe on her hair.  Then I have been bugging her to cut it.  When I met her, her hair was about shoulder length and I liked it that way.  She has fought that as well.  She said that others have told her they like her hair long.  It annoyed me that she was less concerned with the opinion of her husband when it comes to her appearance.  

Anyway she finally caved and let her hairdresser cut it yesterday.  She pulled into the garage looking totally different.  Her hair lost 8 or 9 inches in length at least, was colored dark, much darker than I ever saw and was cut in a way that looked really good.  The color at first threw me for a loop as I typically like lighter hair but after a bit I adjusted to it and liked that as well.  Ali who was petrified to get it cut beforehand was thrilled with the end result.  I reasoned with her that a shorter hair cut is just better for her because her hair is thin, thin long hair just doesn’t hold up.  The rest of the night she was prancing around, she was so pleased with the outcome.  I guess I WAS right. 🙂

I realized this morning I forgot to update my 300 spreadsheet after Friday’s workout.  Luckily I remembered the numbers and did it this morning.  I missed out on doing it yesterday and the gym totally for that matter because I somehow forgot to pack shorts.

I caught episode two of Heroes last night.  It was still great.  The biggest disappointment was the “limited commercial interruptions” that we enjoyed during week one was replaced with UNLIMITED commercial interruptions.  It was f’ing insane, I didn’t count but I am pretty sure there were at least 10 commercial breaks.  That is such a turn off.

Speaking of TV, we are getting majorly backed up with stuff we can watch.  The stupid Dancing with the Stars triple header each week eats up way too much time.  I may bow out of the show already and just let Ali watch it if she wants. On the DVR we have episodes of Biggest Loser, Kitchen Nightmare’s, DWTS and probably an episode or two of ER.  On top of the Tivo programming I have a TON of movies at home to watch like Ocean’s 13, 1408, FF4 Rise of the Silver Surfer, Hitched, Die Hard 4 and Epic Movie, sheesh.

I plan on trying to update my blog software to the latest and greatest version so the blog could be unavailable during the day.

The blog has been updated without a hitch.  I love it when a plan comes together.

I forgot two things.  Today I forgot to pack shorts for the gym.  I packed two t-shirts but no shorts.  I was pissed cause I had another 300 planned.  I also forgot to mention that I received my spartan Halloween costume on Saturday.  I was  a bit disappointed to find that the weapons pictured on the cover were not included with the costume.  I also thought the helmet was a rigid plastic design, instead it is made out of vinyl and only looks right if I press on the sides of it with my hands.  Otherwise the are on either side of my face bows out and doesn’t look right.  Of course I tried it on.  No I did not take any pictures.   I am sure when the time comes at the end of the month I will look sufficiently ridiculous.

It was a pretty hectic weekend with my sister being down to visit.  They flew in late Thursday night.  Friday after work we were supposed to meet at my mom’s  place before heading out to dinner.  I had to snag groceries before meeting them so I hit Publix for a whirlwind shopping trip, hurry home, unload the groceries, walk the dog, feed the dog and shoot right back out the door.

I was a few minutes late but I still beat my sister to my mom’s place.  We met Ali at Carraba’s and had yet another quality dining experience.  After dinner we made plans to meet back up with them Saturday afternoon.  I took my mom back home but told her I would look at her cable.  Earlier in the day she lost most of the channels and the ones she could see were snowy and fuzzy.  She said that on the other side of the duplex there was an HVAC guy working earlier in the day and she thought the problem could be connected.

I was in shorts and a t-shirt, not great clothing for crawling around in a dusty, blown in fiberglass insulation filled attic.  Instantly the fiberglass dug into my exposed skin.  The air handler unit looked brand new, I assume that was what was replaced.  Beyond the air handler I spotted a splitter with three coax cables running into it, I figured that was a good place to look.  Getting to it was a challenge.  I had to crawl over the air handler, through the ceiling joices while keeping low enough to not impale myself on the nails poking through from the roof.  After a lot of grunting and sweating, I got to the splitter, pulled on one cable and it instantly pulled loose of the crimped fitting, problem spotted.

Of course I didn’t have any coax fittings with me so I asked my mom to throw me up some duct tape.  I jammed the cable back into the fitting, verified with my mom that the picture quality had returned, and then sloppily taped it in place with the duct tape.  I figured this would work for now until I could get some new fittings to fix it properly.

Saturday morning I was outside early, before 9 am.  I knew my time to get house chores done would be very limited between visiting with Torrin and having to work a 20k race Sunday morning.   So by the time that Ali got home from the gym late morning I had almost everything done.  We cleaned up and headed over to the condo in Fort Myers beach where Torrin, Emily, my brother-in-law and his parents were staying.  The place was right on the gulf, facing the water, it was an AWESOME view. We had some time to kill until mom got done working so we spent it down at the pool/beach with everyone.  My niece really enjoys the water, it was fun to see her playing in both the pool and the gulf. The plan was I would go pick up my mom after she was done and bring her back to Ft Myers beach and then go to dinner around there.

Before we went back to FMB, I wanted to quickly go back into mom’s attic and fix the coax cable with one of the new connectors I bought.  Of course it didn’t go well.  I brought long pants and a long sleeve shirt to protect me from the dirty insulation, however it also served to insulate me, making the hot attic feel hotter.  I was sweating profusely within minutes.  So I crawled back to the splitter and tried to connect one of the two new coax connectors in the small pack I bought.  I ran into an issue, I didn’t have a good tool to crimp with.  I forgot to bring a pliers and mom could not find one.  I wound up trying to crimp it with a diag snip.  I failed miserably and destroyed the connector.  Ok , well I had one more to go.  I was more careful this time, tried to crimp it with a pseudo pliers I had with me and again failed miserably.  Now I was pissed off.  I certainly didn’t want to crawl back into this sweaty hell hole again.  So I came up with plan C, I took apart the original connector, jammed the cable into it and tried to re-crimp it.  I connected it to the splitter and asked mom how it was.  If the connector was still the pic was good, if I moved it around some interference shows up.  Ok, well that was good enough, luckily the splitter should remain motionless tucked away in it’s dark, hot, dusty home.  I crawled back down, verified the picture was still good and was satisfied.  I hopped in mom’s shower to rinse off a bit before heading back up to the condo.

When we got back up there everyone was ready to go.  The place that was selected was very close to the condo, two or three blocks away.  Ali, mom, and I decided to walk while the rest piled in the mini-van. This place was very quaint with a big salad bar and a decent menu selection.  We had a nice meal  which my Damon’s dad covertly paid for before anyone knew. ( I paid for everyone the night before at Carraba’s)  We went back to the condo, said our goodbye’s and made plans for everyone to come over to our house the next day to do a bbq on the grill/hang out thing.

I was anxious to get to bed Saturday night since I had to get up at 5am to go work the 20k race.  Originally Ali was going to go as well to volunteer but right before bed she decided she would sit this one out.  I HAD to go because I committed to shadow the guy from the Fort Myers Track club that was going to time the race electronically.  The local running club we belong to is planning to move from a manual timing method to an automated, electronic timing set up and they want me to be the one to run the whole deal.

So I peeled myself out of bed at 5am, feeling like death warmed over.  I get to the race and start the shadowing process.  The guy from FMTC is a very nice and very willing to share whatever knowledge he has regarding timing a race.  I picked up all sorts of background info that will be helpful in getting our own equipment set up.  The biggest drawback of the process was the race was a long 20k.  It was more than three hours until the last timed participant crossed the line.  That translated to a long time to just sit around.  I didn’t get out of there until around 11.

Once I got home I was dropped right into another whirlwind of activity getting ready for everyone to show up.  I immediately unleashed the Roombas to do some vacuuming while I scurried about doing whatever else had to be done.  Ali had run to the grocery store and loaded up on more food, our fridge was barfing full with it. 

So everyone shows up and shortly afterwards my sister, Ali, my mom, my niece and my brother-in-laws mom are off to the outlets for shopping.  So Damon, his dad and I hung out the house.  I had the Packers game on while Damon and I drank significant amounts of beer and chowed down on significant amounts of food that was displayed across the kitchen island.  After roughly a six pack I had enough, the beer combined with getting up so early had me nearly passed out in the chair.  After the game was over Damon and I jumped in the pool to wake up.  It was a crappy, overcast, windy day out so the water didn’t feel that great although I had flipped on the pool heater earlier in the day to warm it up a bit. 

Between 4 and 5 the women returned from their shopping excursion and it was soon time to begin prep on another meal.  I was the grill guy and it was a tough assignment.  Typically I am throwing two burgers on the grill for Nicki and I, cook them for 5 or 10 minutes and I’m done.  This time I had boneless chicken breast, hamburgers and hot dogs to prepare.  Having a variety of food on the grill at one time was a tough thing to manage since they take different amounts of time to prepare.  With some pointers from both Damon’s and my mom, I muddled through it and we presented food that was at least edible. 

Somewhere around 7:30ish, everyone got ready to shove off.  We said our goodbye’s as we would not be seeing them again before they leave on Tuesday.  We cleaned up what was left to do, although most of it was already done by Ali and whomever else helped.  I felt like a sloth from the combo of drinking and eating.  It’s a feeling I absolutely hate.

It was almost time for the Eagles game.  I was so tired I knew there was zero chance I would make it through the entire game and it was just as well, it was a disaster.  The team is so inconsistent, so undisciplined and so uninspired I can barely find the motivation to watch them.  Somehow after steamrolling Detroit and throwing 56 points on the scoreboard, the very next week they managed to be held to 3 measly points against what was statistically one of the very worst defenses in the NFL.  Along the way the Eagles committed an obscene amount of penalties as well as giving up an unbelievable 12 sacks.  It seemed like Andy refused to react to the horrid performance of his offensive line by changing things up.  Instead it was full speed ahead with a game plan that was obviously not working.  The fat SOB just can not think on his feet apparently.  Far too often it seems like if Plan A doesn’t work, there is no Plan B.  It’s maddening.  I fell asleep for much of the second half, thank God.  What a disaster.  I really am ready for a house cleaning.  The core of players they have has gone as far as they are going to go in my opinion. 

At least the Phillies have provided a bright spot to the Philadelphia sports scene.  They have been battling all season to get to the playoffs  and erased a huge deficit to the Mets to make the playoffs for the first time since the early 90’s. I’m sure Mets fans are crushed by the colossal choke their team has performed.  That makes it even sweeter.  I suppose I need to learn the names of more than 3 Phillie players.  I actually would like to watch the playoff games.  It will be the first serious baseball I have seen in years.

My October, Spratan-prep grind has now begun in earnest.  My face is already sporting a good bunch of hair and I started my modified diet plan this morning, substituting the morning bowl of cereal for some egg beaters and a small glass of juice.  At the grocery store I also loaded up with a bunch of low fat cottage cheese, carrots and fruit which will be another major staple in the routine.  I found that the eggs and juice were not quite enough.  I need to add something else in as I was already hungry by the time I hit the office.  Don, my buddy from work who has been serious and strict about his fitness/diet forever said he has some toast with peanut butter in addition to the eggs.  Yea I may have to add that in.  I am hoping that my attempts to cut a significant amount of carbs (aka sugar) out of my diet for the next month will make it possible to transition to keeping that change in place after the contest. We’ll see. After this weekend, some diet discipline is welcomed.

I have a plug in for my blog that protects against spammers that like to put links to things like penis stiffening drugs, porn and casino web sites into the comments of my posts.  It’s amazing how many attempts are made as you can see from below:

Akismet has protected your site from 26,598 spam comments.

Last night I watched The Bionic Woman.  Growing up I was a HUGE Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman fan.  I used to think how amazing it would be to have bionic limbs.  It was another way to become a super hero, what I always aspired to be, just like most little kids.  Well, welcome to the 2007 version of Bionic Woman.  I liked the premiere.  I thought the groundwork that was laid will make for an interesting series.  This Bionic Woman has more of a hard edge, more of a bad ass attitude which plays out better in today’s day and age.  If you like super hero stuff at all, I would recommend the show.

The contract on Ali’s Treo 650 with Verizon ran out this month and I have been looking around for deals to replace it.  I was surprised when viewing the “deals” Verizon offered to renew, they just weren’t good.  They basically knocked 100 bucks off the phone price.  The 650 uses the Palm OS which is simple to use and has tons of applications available for it.  However the main thing Ali needs to do is sync her email, calendar and contacts with our home email which I run with Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2003.  The Palm OS is buggy at best when doing this.  So for her new phone I was looking into one of the newer Treo’s that run Windows Mobile OS which is has much more seamless integration into and Exchange/Outlook environment.

I stumbled across a deal on ATT/Cingular’s site on a refurbished Treo 750.  I could step into that for only 99 bucks.  It runs Windows Mobile 5 and supposedly a free upgrade to Windows Mobile 6 is being released any week now.    It also supports the higher speed 3g network which will result in much better wireless browsing speeds.  The monthly charges were inline with what we are paying now through Verizon.  After checking briefly with Ali whom didn’t really care what she got as long as it worked better.  I started the purchase process.  Shortly after I started, I stopped when I saw the little box to enter a promotional code.  My online buying experience has taught me that promotional codes are often quite easy to find and are normally quite a good deal.  Hell a simple code saved me 100 dollars and got me free shipping on my Scooba.  So I opened a new browser window, did a quick search for “att promotional codes” and within seconds found a code that knocked an additional 50 bucks off the price!!  Sweet!  So if I bought this phone brand new, with no plan it would cost upwards of 500-600 bucks.  Getting a refurbished model with the code I paid 50 bucks for it.  I mentally patted myself on the back for that one.  It should show up on our doorstep Monday, I’ll have a full review next week.

Irobot, the company that makes the Roomba and Scooba robots that I love so much has recently announced two new robots to add to their line called the Looj and the Connectr.  In my opinion, they missed the boat with both of these.  The Looj is a gutter cleaning robot.  It basically will creep back and forth along a straight section of gutter (no it doesn’t do turns) and flip stuff out of it.  To me, gutter cleaning, unlike floor sweeping/cleaning isn’t done nearly often enough to justify using a robot to do so.  Plus you still have to get the ladder out, throw it in there and move to various straight sections of gutter, not a massive time savings either.  I think this thing will sell very poorly.

 The Connectr looks like a Roomba with a webcam attached to it.  They are pitching it as a home surveillance/ virtual visiting robot.  At first glance it seems cool.  The unit will allow you to wirelessly monitor or communicate over the internet via this bastardized Roomba, kind of nifty, until you start seeing the numbers.  They are talking about $500 dollars for this doodad but that isn’t all.  It will only work through Irobot’s proprietery VPN which you get free access to for the first year.  Although they haven’t announced it, it is assumed that after that they would charge you a fee to use this network. Nice try, thanks for playing.  It seems that every company is all about dipping into your pocket on a monthly basis after the sale somehow.  If the unit was a couple hundred dollars less and I was able to tie into my own home WLAN with no strings attached it might be a viable purchase.  Being able to drive the robot over to Nicki or Tuki at home while I was at work and being able to talk to and see them would be kind of cool.  But I’m not going to pay a monthly fee to do so.

I think they really shit the bed with these two offerings.  I would much rather see them crank out robots that wash carpets or mow grass.    

This weekend will be busy with working house chores around visiting with my sis as well as me driving out to the middle of nowhere Sunday morning very early to help with a 20k race.

I was typing in a URL to my site yesterday and fat fingered it.  I was very surprised to see a page load that looked like an Adware site.  Here is what you see.  I was like WTF??  So I email support and reported it, worried that there was something awry, that somehow internet crooks had hijacked my site.  Well after a lengthy delay, I got a response back from “Yaroslav Udovenko” saying that  “We’ve created new error pages for all our customers to make their sites look more professional” Haha.  No they set it up so error pages on customer sites load adware that generates additional revenue.  I do have the option to change my error pages so they don’t display that junk.  I will be doing that later today.

Well after not seeing my sister for around a year, I will be seeing her for the third time in a month or so.  She is flying in with my bro-in-law, my niece and my bro-in-laws parents.  They are staying at a timeshare in Fort Myers his parents arranged through, gulp, RCI.  They aren’t going to be here that long, they arrive late tonight and fly out Tuesday so I expect we will see them a couple times over the weekend.  I can’t quite remember if Torrin has ever been in our house before.  It will be cool to have everyone in our neck of the woods.

I now have my sights on yet another robot to add to my electronic cleaning crew , the Bissel SpotBot.  I read someone singing it’s praises on a Roomba enthusiast site I frequent often.  It is an automatic spot cleaner.  Supposedly this thing does a fantastic job, even on set stains. Animal excrement cleaning is a nearly daily job in our house and sometimes despite our best efforts it isn’t very successful  depending on the organic compound we are trying to clean. (shit versus vomit versus bile versus …)  You basically set this thing on top of the spot and let it scrub, spray and vacuum the hell out of it.  I don’t think it will be very hard to talk Ali into this one. It could ALMOST make it fun if Nicki shits on the floor.

I heard about Facebook awhile ago.  When I did I went on, set up an account, poked around a bit and then forgot about it.  Well Jeremy, my vball buddy got me to go back there and dig around some more.  To me it’s like a sophisticated version of Myspace.  Facebook has an open API that allows anyone to create Facebook “applications” which can do an endless amount of things.  It is quite cool.  I was surprised to find that quite a few of my friends were on there already.  I even found my brother Pat.  If you want to see my Facebook persona, you can see it here. Nothing too thrilling although my blog entries get imported there and installed a few applications such as one that displays my WoW characters (chicks will dig that!) as well as one that allows you to pick football games and compete against other users.  If you have a sec, check it out.  Punch in someone’s name, you may be surprised to find them on there.

So I sat down to watch Dancing with the Stars with Alison.  They are already overdoing it, splitting the men and women apart in two different shows, plus a result show.  I’m not watching 3 shows a week. The cast has a bunch of no names on it.  So anyway I sat through the entire women’s show.  Here are my observations.

Again they have allowed people in that should not be allowed in.  The Chubby Cheetah Girl and the Spice Girl both have done plenty of dancing, just not ballroom.  When they allow people like this in the show it invalidates the competition in my mind.

Marie Osmond is a mess.  You can tell she is uncomfortable with her physical appearance and she tries to cover it up with constant joking.  Man I used to think she was mega-hot back in the Donnie and Marie days. 

Jane Seymour is ten years older than Marie but is holding up much better in my opinion.

Josie Moran is an uncoordinated weakling.

Jenny Garth is holding up incredibly well considering she pumped out three kids.  Have to admire that.

The mens show was on last night.  I told Ali she could watch that one, I didn’t care enough to watch it.  I saw two of the men perform at the end, Mark Cuban and Wayne Newton.  Cuban was ok, better than I expected, throw in the fact that he had a hip replaced 7 weeks ago and it was quite the achievement.  Wayne was horrible, embarrassingly bad.  What was more embarrassing were the judges kissing his ass, acting like it wasn’t bad.  It looked like an old guy getting danced around the dining room at a nursing home by the activities coordinator.

I will watch the show a bit but I really don’t care about it.  Ali finds it compelling and extremely entertaining.  I can understand why she enjoys it so much because of her interest in dance.

Last night Ali said I was being grumpy because I indicated something she said made no sense to me.  Ali was saying how she wouldn’t be able to get to one of the aerobic classes at the gym because it fell right in the middle of Nicki’s poop schedule.  She said that Nicki liked to poop around 8am and 10:45 am.  Ali was afraid that if she wasn’t home at those exact times, Nicki would crap on the rug.  I told Alison it was silly to not go to the gym because of the dog.  If she is that worried that Nicki can’t hold it then into the kitchen she goes. It isn’t that hard to handle.  Of course anytime I suggest that a thought process Ali has is flawed, I am the asshole.

While I am on the subject of the dog.  I was thinking last night as I was preparing her supper how it is funny that much more work goes into the dog’s supper preparation than ours.  This is what I/we do every night to prepare Nicki’s meal.

Into a big stainless steel bowl we dump a cup of dry food. Then we carry the dry food and a basket in the pantry that contains all of the add-ins.  Then I retrieve a can of wet cat food and a can of Nicki’s wet dog food.  This isn’t just any dog food, this is Merrick dog food.  This dog food is better than what many humans eat.  Ali pays two dollars a can for it (although she could get it cheaper elsewhere) and Nicki never has the same thing on consecutive nights.  There are literally over a dozen varieties.  So the wet dog food is dumped into the bowl.  Then we hit the basket.  I cut a Benadryl in half and throw it in, that is to help alleviate some of her itchiness problems. Then whole flaxseeds are added.  These are to help with emptying anal sacs, yes anal sacs.  Then I put in a couple spoonfuls of some stuff that is supposed to be good for the joints and finally I add a couple dollop’s of plain yogurt to help settle her digestive system.  This concoction is then mixed up with a fork and then I get out a spatula to push it on to her dinner plate (not a bowl).  The spatula is used to make sure all of the flaxseeds get scraped out of the bowl.  Once the plate is presented to Nicki on her raised dining table that I made, I take over the wet cat food and mash a couple forkfuls into her food.  She views it as a condiment.

If you would have told me before we adopted a dog that I would be willingly going through all this bullshit to feed it I would have told you that you were insane.  Look who is the insane one now.

Well I firmly stepped into my commitment for the Spartan Halloween contest by ordering my costume today.  The costume is only one part of the prep.  Starting next week I plan to begin my all October long ritual of not shaving.  I also plan to make a significant reduction in my carb intake to lean out as much possible as well as pick up the intensity on my non-300 workout days.  I need to get the abs showing as much as possible since I’m not going to develop tree trunk arms in 30 days. Yes I know, there is no real point in all of this, no real payoff except whatever self satisfaction I derive from it.  Sometimes that is enough.