All posts by Duf

Last night while we ate dinner I fired up Sicko, the latest Michael Moore documentary.  Sicko is about the American medical system and how it compares to the government run health programs around the world.  Wow, now I have yet another thing to be disgusted with.  I guess I haven’t given much though to health care over my life since I always have been fortunate enough to have health insurance.  There have been several episodes when I did receive medical care and was floored by the bills that were generated.

I remember when I was 30 and had the vein pulled out of my left leg, the bills were so outrageous that I refused to pay them for a very long time, only relenting just before they were turned over to a collector so I could keep my credit record spiffy.  However my run ins with “the system” were minor compared to the examples shown in the movie.

Once again, the root of this evil is big business, insurance companies whom profit by denying people health care.  Lobbyists are the minions of these companies, buying off any politician they can so they are allowed to continue their legalized rape of the American people.  Just like big oil, the insurance companies throw their money around to squash any attempts to get a national health care system in place.   Insurance companies are obscenely profitable.  The one CEO they showed had compensation worth 1.5 BILLION dollars.

They showed the health care systems in Canada, England, France and Cuba, yes, Cuba.  All of these countries have government run health care.  All of these countries see health care as a basic need/right of their citizens, just like a police force, fire departments and libraries.  For some reason in the US, our people have been brainwashed to think it makes perfect sense that only certain people should qualify for competent medical care.  Insurance and drug companies pay a lot of money to keep us thinking that way.

If you need another reason to get really angry with big business and politicians, watch Sicko.  It made me sick. Oh yea, it gets an A.

I finally got an update on the van.  Evidently the reason the rear brakes were hot was because the emergency brake cable was rusted solid, keeping the brakes applied at all times.  Hmmm that will hurt your gas mileage a bit huh?  We haven’t even gotten to the point of money/fault yet.  I will strongly offer up that this problem was present when they replaced the brakes the first time and they just didn’t catch it, since I have never used the emergency brake on the van since I have owned it. 

They also found several bushings in the front end that were gone which could be contributing to the mystery vibrations.  I talked to the owner awhile and he again said how they have been so busy and they are working the van work in between more urgent jobs.  I will call back today to see if anything more concrete comes up.  I just want the work done.

My scheduled Friday 300 workout may be in jeopardy.   I tried to do chest today and got nowhere with it.  My warm up set of dumbbell chest presses was a no go.  I couldn’t even press them up once before the pain in my shoulder deadened the arm, making it impossible to push.  Knocking out 50 push ups, holding a 135 pound barbell overhead for 2 or 3 minutes and doing 50 presses overhead just will not be possible without a rapid recovery in the next 48 hours. 

The results from the Fort Myers event are up.  The team that took first off our net won the whole thing and we beat them one game so it is a small consolation. 

They seem to have assembled a good cast of characters for Big Brother 8.  There are a few of them that stand out to me.  Evil Dick is quite the character.  He is an in your face, brutally honest, brutally paranoid type of guy.  He is a late 40’s rock band type of dude.  His daughter whom he hadn’t talked to in two years is also in the house.  Evidently their relationship has been rather explosive and they have been attempting to mend things in front of a national audience.  His daughter is very pretty but she is so thin that she looks like a poster model for anorexia.

There is a gay guy in there named Dustin that has an uncanny resemblance to our next door neighbor both in appearance and speaking style.  Then there is this incredibly annoying, incredibly vain girl named Jen.  She walks around constantly wearing shirts with her name incorporated into them with sayings like “Jensa Member”  She thinks that she is extremely beautiful, she isn’t. The black girl Jamica is extremely religious.  She walks around telling people how the result of the show is preordained by God.  When she starts on her sermons the show’s producers drop in a church music bed. Funny.  For me, Amber is the biggest emotional wreck on the show.  The girl cries constantly.  She cries for no reason.  She cries if the sky is blue.  She cries if the wind blows.  I have never seen a person cry as much as she does, it is insanity.

Yea when I lead with reality tv talk you know I don’t have much to say.

It seems poor old Mike Vick’s hole is just getting deeper and deeper.  Now one of the three people indicted has flipped over to a guilty plea in exchange for a lesser sentence.  For sure he also agreed to totally spill the beans on Mikey.  He is so f’d.  I saw on the news a bunch of idiots rallying for Vick.  I also heard the race card being played of course, saying because he is black, he is getting unfair media coverage. Yea, ok.  Just admit you are a piece of shit and enjoy your time in jail.  Talk about pissing your life away…

So I emailed my dad and step mom about the spider/mice/rattlesnake issues.  The story I got back from them was much less severe sounding than my sister relayed to me.  “Overrun with rattlesnakes” in reality was one rattlesnake.  My step mom also sent along a bunch of pictures of the place, all of which look very nice.  I think things will be fine.  One thing my step mom did confirm is there is a hell of a lot of work to do at this place, much more than was at the Gouglersville house they moved from, partly because there was too much to do. 🙂

The van repair so far is a non-story.  I called yesterday around 2 and they got real busy with “emergency” work and didn’t look at it yet.  They knew I wasn’t in a rush to get it back so that was fine with me.  The owner said he wanted to make sure to set aside time to check all the issues out which is what I wanted to hear.

I am still moaning and groaning as I get around.  My left shoulder is still very sore and the muscles in my legs and abs are sore.  The arches of my feet even feel stretched.  It’s funny that my knees actually may have come through this in the best shape they have in a while, no nasty cracking thus far. You can see the additions to my volleyball page here.  I added a couple more volleyball tips, bringing the total up to a whoopping 225! Wow I am almost back to .500 winning percentage, pretty sad…

I was sad to hear Bill Walsh died.  His run as the 49er’s coach was amazing.  He was looking pretty brittle in recent pictures I had seen of him.  He seemed like an older guy when he was coaching.  Hard to believe his 49er heyday was two decades ago… 

I am sore all over.  The soreness is from the volleyball tournament on Saturday.  Randall and his girlfriend came over to our place Friday night.  I picked up pizza for us and we ate pizza and drank.  Later in the night we sat down and watched Idiocracy again, with me proclaiming it as one of the funniest movies we ever saw.  I am not sure if Randall and his girlfriend thought it was as funny as I did, but they did plenty of laughing along the way.  The alcohol made me very tired and since we had to get up early for the tournament we packed it in before 11.

Saturday morning Randall, his girlfriend and I left a little after 7.  Ali was talking about coming later in the day after she did a class at the gym.  We got to the tournament site in about 45 minutes, a joy compared to the 2 hours it typically takes me to get to the east coast tournaments. This was a Zephyr Hills tournament which is fancier than the other tour that runs through the state.  Zephyr Hills has better t-shirts, better free hand outs and all the free water you want.  The other tour gives you a boring, white t-shirt and that is it.  The tourney shirt for this event was Eagles green, I like it a lot.

Randall and I did our typical throw the football around warm up that was implemented a decade ago by Rich and I.  Originally there were supposed to be two nets of 4 teams each.  One team was a no show so our net became a three team net.  In the past in that situation, we normally would wind up playing two games against each team in the pool instead of one game.  However the tournament organizers said we would be playing best two out of three against each team, a format I never did before in 15 years of playing ball.  Instead of being to 21 or 25 points, each game was a shorter 15 points.

We lucked out in our schedule.  We are the only team on the net that didn’t have to play back to back matches.  It was quite warm and staying out on the court for a minimum of 4 straight games with the possibility of 6 straight games, was not something I was interested in.  We played in the first match.  The team we played had one kid I remembered playing a few years back and another younger guy that was very athletic.  The guy I knew was a shot maker.  His play style reminded me of Brian up north.  He would place the ball where you weren’t and if he got a set he could hit the ball hard as well.   His partner was a bit more erratic but made up for it with rabbit quickness and a seemingly endless energy reserve.

Our first game against them was horrid.  We lost something like 15-6.  Randall and I took turns making unforced error after unforced error, mostly shanked passes.  It was not the start we were looking for.  So after only a couple minute break, we had to try to pull things together and play them again.  Game two was a different story.  We made some plays and the serving practice I did before the game was helping.  Although I wasn’t hitting the ball as hard as I would like on the serve, I was hitting it high, with some downspin that would make the ball move as it approached, making it hard to pass accurately.  Randall got his serve working that game as well.  The game was close and we managed to win the game 21-19,  well past the game to 15 format.  You had to win by two and there was no cap.

We felt much better about ourselves after that win.  Game three was tight but we wound up losing that one.  It seemed like most scrambles and lucky breaks went the other team’s way that game.  So our start was 1-2 but the good thing was that we totally controlled our destiny if we took care of the other team in our second match.

During the first match I was having way too may rants and outbursts, swearing loudly and just generally making an ass out of myself.  After the match I saw that there were two or three young kids around watching their dads play, which made me feel like a big dick.  The rest of the day I made a conscious effort to knock off the loud swearing.  I knew if I was there with my kid and heard someone carrying on like I was, I would think I was an asshole.  I managed to keep things more or less under control the rest of the day.

So our second match came up, it was against two guys in college, one named Jose the other named Kiran.  Kiran was from the UK and he is a very a good soccer player.  He only started playing volleyball this year.  You could tell the guy is a great athlete, for just starting to play, he was extremely good.  During a timeout in the match, he put on a little exhibition of his ball juggling abilities where he used his feet and head only.  It was rather amazing.  He used his soccer abilities to make foot saves two or three times, it was amazing.  If he got a good set, he could crush the ball.  As a result, the majority of our serves went to Jose.  We managed to beat them handily both games, wrapping up our playoff spot.  Randall and I played well.  I had some confidence in my hitting and as a result did a decent amount of hitting on two with success.  I even had a hit or two in my favorite spot, hard angle, short.

In between the matches Randall and I went up and took a dip in the hotel pool.  I wasn’t sure if technically I was allowed to but I didn’t much care.  I figured the worst that could happen is someone could tell me no.  The water was very warm, it almost felt like it was body temperature.  Randall joked it was from all of the pee in the pool.  Well it was wet so it served it’s purpose.

So the playoffs got underway.  We played a team with a tall lanky kid like me and a shorter skinny guy.  Again the shorter guy got the majority of the serves and again, aggressive serving worked well for us.  We won the game rather easily and were into the semi-finals.

The semi-final was against the first place team off the other net, another pair of young, athletic guys that could both hit hard.  Randall ran into Steve Sax syndrome during this match and could hardly get a serve in.  However I didn’t give him a ton of shit about it because he was trying to do hard aggressive serves which is what was working for us all day. My bump setting wasn’t as consistent as it should have been but even so, Randall managed to make some nice plays off of bad sets. But in the end we just couldn’t afford that many unforced errors and we wound up losing the semis 25-20. It was mildly disappointing but compared to what transpired at my last outing, it was a 100% improvement.

Ali never did make it to the tournament.  For some reason I thought her class at the gym was at 9:30 but it wasn’t until 10:30.  By the time she would have gotten up there, there was a good chance we would be almost done or done completely so I just told her to not bother.  She felt bad about it but it was just miscommunication.  She used the extra time to mow the grass which was cool since I certainly didn’t feel up to doing it.

We had one more game  to play, the 3/4 playoff to decide who finishes “in the money”.  Third place gets prizes, 4th does not.  We wound up playing Jose and Kiran again and again we handled them rather easily.  I was fine with a third place finish which earned Randall and I a matching set of towels that were actually pretty nice.  I was pretty beat up all over but surprisingly, my knees were not leading the way in the pain department. 

My left shoulder was hurting pretty bad as a result of my harder serving and frequent hitting.  I had a new injury I never had before.  The beefy part of my left palm looked like tenderized meat.  It was all swollen and reddish/purple.  I am not quite sure how I did that.  I am guessing it was either from catching the point of the football during warm ups or from one of the handful of blocks I had, a couple of which went off my hands rather hard.  The rest of my body just felt sort of beat up.

So we packed up our ample amount of equipment and headed home.  I hopped in the pool to get the outer layer of scuz off me.  Randall followed suit.  Then we cleaned up and got ready to go out for dinner.  I did an abbreviated icing session on both my knees as a preventative measure although in all honesty they didn’t feel nearly as bad as I expected them to.  Randall had suggested Carraba’s since he knew it was one of my favorite restaurants. 

Going there on a Saturday night meant a long wait for sure.  The girls were told an hour wait when they grabbed the buzzer.  However Randall spotted an outside table that was available.  His girlfriend and he were fine with sitting outside.  If it was just me, I would have probably opted for waiting it out and sitting inside for no other reason than I just like the atmosphere inside the place.  But Randall and I were both hungry so it wasn’t hard to convince me to skip the hour wait. 

Sitting outside wasn’t bad, the sun was out of sight and we had a noisy ceiling fan right above us keeping a nice breeze on us at all times.  The only time I felt bad about it was later in the meal when I noticed a fly/bug kept bothering Randall’s girlfriend.  The food was excellent as ever and our waiter was very nice.  Randall initially was going to pay for the entire meal which I objected strongly to.  I threw him 40 bucks to  cover our half and threw the bill on his credit card.  Although I never saw the total of the bill, so I am hoping I tossed him enough.

By the time we got back home we were both exhausted.  Nicki, who throughout the weekend would constantly cycle between being afraid of Randall to liking Randall, once again acted like she never saw him before and barked as we came in the door.  We all sacked out around 10 o’clock.

 Sunday morning I crawled out of bed feeling like a 70 year old man.  It was hard to identify any major body parts that didn’t hurt in some manner.  It wasn’t unexpected.  This is normally how I feel if I don’t play volleyball regularly.  If I was playing every other week, the aftermath would be much less severe.  I popped my two advil and started my day. 

The girls made plans to go shopping at the outlets with my mom later in the morning.  During the morning I walked around the house, slowly, doing a few things around the house.  After the girls left, Randall and I sat around like “men” and first watched 300 (although we both have seen it multiple times) followed by watching three straight hours of World Series of Poker.  Watching the poker was strangely addicting.  The interaction between and personalities of the players was very entertaining.  I definitely would like to learn more about the game although I don’t think I would be very good at it at all. 

Sitting still for that amount of time made me feel like a lazy slug, I just don’t ever do it.  Well I don’t ever do it except when I am sitting in front of WoW where my brain and hands are active at least.  The girls shopping trip went long and they didn’t get home until around 5.  Randall and his girlfriend still had to drive back across the state so they packed their stuff up, thanked us for our hospitality and were on their way. 

 Five minutes after their departure we too were on the road, dropping the party van off at the garage for it’s check up.  I am awaiting the call from the garage with anxiety.  I fully expect this to be a big bill.  I typed up a comprehensive list of the issues and stapled it to the prior bill so they could refer to what was done previously and included it with my keys.  I just want the thing to be right, as right as it can be at 14 years old with 119k on the odometer.   

My sister called me on Sunday, asking me about details of the trip out west so we can coordinate getting together.  During the call she gave me some more details about my dad’s place he didn’t mention.  Besides living in the middle of the desert with no AC, the house apparently is infested with spiders and mice/rats.  They also have a bad rattlesnake problem, they are everywhere.  Well my mom heard the same details from my sister and relayed them to Ali.  Now Ali is freaked out about staying there.  The idea of spiders under her pillow is not appealing and she is terrified of the idea of Nicki getting bit by a rattlesnake.  So I have to talk to my dad and see how bad things really are and go from there.  I reassured Ali we would “work it out” She didn’t feel reassured by my assurance. 

No 300 today, I am way too sore.

So Nicki survived being confined to the kitchen yesterday with no accidents.  Alison took her to the vet this morning.  It turns out she has a protozoa that is causing the problem.  She has a 10 day supply of medicine that should get rid of it.  Unfortunately there is a good chance she picked it up at the dog beach.  It sucks, she has fun when we go there but the last two times we went, she came back with medical issues.

For some reason, to me, the sky at night the last week or so has seemed darker and the moon and stars have been exceptionally bright and clear.  Maybe Naples rotated under a pollution free part of the atmosphere.

Yesterday I was browsing the Irobot web site.  Even though I have had a long list of issues with my Roomba, I still love it.  Right now in order to use mine, I have a bastardized set up.  The charging system on my Roomba got fried after a power surge, so I charge the battery in another Roomba that has other problems and then slap the battery in the Roomba with the fried charging system.

Anyway, I am getting the itch to get a new Roomba as well as a Scooba.  As I browsed the site, I saw how many different models they have nowadays.  The one that caught my interest most was the Roomba for Pets.  It has a different brush set up that doesn’t get as full of hair as a regular Roomba as well as having a cleaning tool that makes hair removal a no-brainer. 

They have a model called the Dirt Dog which is supposed to be for areas like garages, workshops, patios, etc…  That would be cool too!  And of course they have the Scooba which vacuums and then washes hard floors.  Irobot actually sells a package that gets you a Roomba, a Dirt Dog and a Scooba for about 600 bucks.  That would be awesome.  However, now is not the time for me to be buying one.  With the van repair bill coming up and the trip out west following shortly, the coffers will be considerably lighter already.  However, if someone else out there wants to buy a Roomba off the Irobot site, use this promo code “msport” when checking out.  It gives you 20% off the price AND FREE shipping, this is quite the deal.  The code is only good till the end of July.

After I missed the ending of Godfather 2, I hopped on half.com and bought a used copy of it on VHS.  I got around to watching the rest of it last night.  Evidently one of my biggest gripes about Godfather 2, the lack of subtitles when the flashback pieces came up where they only spoke Italian, wasn’t the case with version I was watching.  All the Italian had subtitles, making things much better to follow.  It almost made me want to go back and watch the entire thing over but I decided to just pick up where I left off.   It was very good.  Man that Michael turned into a ruthless SOB.  It makes me want to see the last one even though I heard it sucks, just to see it all wind up.

The weekend will be busy.  Randall is coming over tonight to stay over before we play in our tournament tomorrow.  It should be fun stuff.

No, I am not excited, I am giving a plug to a strangely addictive site.  WOOT is a shopping site however they only sell one thing at a time. It is sort of like QVC for geeks.  The item rotates once a day.  The majority of the stuff they sell is refurbished or re-manufactured so most of the deals on there are pretty decent as long as you don’t mind refurb stuff.

The site has a blog sort of setup where people can comment on the item being sold, both good or bad.  Reading through the comments can either really sell you on the item or help steer you clear.  My buddy at work just picked up a re-manufactured Roomba Scheduler for $139 with only 5 dollars for shipping, quite a deal.

It also kind of reminds me of ONSALE.com which was sort of the original eBay kind of site.  In the mid 90’s I lived on that site.  They sold exclusively electronics and computer stuff, they would get a limited number of a product in and then people would bid on it.  If they had 100 of an item, the top 100 bidders got it.  The interesting thing was if you played it right, you could wind up paying much less than someone above you.  You wanted to come in as one of the last bidders on the list, that meant you paid the least.  It was a cool site.  Anyway, give WOOT a look.

I have had a little spot on my nose that I first thought was a black head.  I used a Biore a couple times and it still remained.  I even had Ali try her painful black head extraction technique, nope, no dice.  It actually was bleeding around it a little bit the other night.  That’s not good.  I have a dermatologist appointment next month and I have a bad feeling that when I point this out that my nose will be getting hacked into next.

So Ali works today and we are trying something different with Nicki, we are going to restrain her to the kitchen.  We will block off both sides, pull up the rugs and pull the ottoman and one of her dog beds in so she can lay on them.  This way, if another accident happens, clean up will be much less dramatic.  Although Nicki had the accident the other day, right after Ali took her out before leaving, she hasn’t done anything overnight since we started closing the bedroom door.  This sort of makes me think it is a behavioral thing instead of a medical thing.  Regardless, she is going to the vet tomorrow to get her poop checked.  A medical reason would be the most easy to fix.  A behavioral issue could take longer to straighten out. 

I made an appointment for the party van to get worked on.  I need to get it as sound as possible before asking it to haul us 4000 miles in a month or so.  The brakes that were totally redone are messed up even though less than 3000 miles have been put on them since the repair.  I also am having the mystery vibration checked out.  After I get it back from the shop, I will be taking it to the local Tire Choice store to possibly have all 4 tires replaced.  Right now it has 3 Michelins that aren’t in great shape as well as an oddball, mismatched generic 4th tire.

The other day Ali said she was catching up on my blog.  She said she was surprised that I hadn’t mentioned her stepped up fitness routine since she became a two day a week worker.  She really has stepped things up.  She genuinely enjoys the various fitness classes at the Wellness Center.  They are hard as hell.  I am very happy to see her actively working on her fitness level.  She said she has knocked off a few pounds already.  So far, I have liked the new working arrangement for her.  The only thing to be seen is if we keep things on a similar financial level.  She submitted her first invoice last week so we don’t know how fast or slow the turnaround will be. 

This week I only will have one 300 work out.  I’m not doing one tomorrow because I am playing in the volleyball tourney on Saturday.  We are dropping back down to BB.  My last experience in A was pretty miserable.  I want to practice my serving before the match.  That is the one part of my game that used to be a force that is now an after thought.  A hard serve makes a big difference.

Pro sports in general have really taken some PR beatings.  Baseball has a massive steroid abuser about to break one of the largest records in major league history.  Football has one of their “star” quarterbacks outed as dog fighting piece of shit and basketball has a ref that was indirectly affecting outcomes of games to help the mob.  The only thing we are missing is a hockey scandal and well, no one cares about hockey anyway.  It’s a sad state of affairs but I suppose it is appropriate that pro-sports would reflect the generally corrupt state of society.

So Ali takes Nicki out before leaving for the gym, she does both, she comes home from the gym no more than 2 hours later, pile of dog diarhea on the carpet….  So now it is vet time.  I guess they will run some tests on her poop to see if there is something going on.   I also am cutting out the lunch meat I have been giving her every morning while I pack my lunches.

I think this would be the perfect 40th birthday present for me (2009 Camaro), don’t you?  I can’t think of a better way to start off my mid-life crisis.  Although if I am being honest, I probably started my mid-life crisis at about 28 or so.