All posts by Duf

Wow for whatever reason, this weekend seemed like it had a ton of shit packed into it.  There were a couple real good blog thoughts I had over the weekend that I can’t for the life of me remember right this second. Let’s starts with some pictures, everyone likes pictures.

This is a picture of the palm tree off the corner of our pool cage.  We grew this from a coconut.

Here is a cute picture of Nicki and Buttons napping in close proximity.

I laid out the workload for the weekend to be split between both days.  Normally I wouldn’t prefer this, I’d much rather knock it all out at once.  However we made plans to go out to a place we had a coupon for out of the entertainment book and we invited my mom to come with.  We were going to pick her up a little after 5 so it would have made it tough to get everything finished.

By the time Ali got out of bed and we started on the kitchen it was maybe 10 or so.  The kitchen cleaning didn’t go too bad.  After the initial cleaning last year, everything else should pale in comparison since only a year has passed instead of 5 years.  We pulled stuff out of the cabinets, cleaned and sorted.  We had a big pile of pots and pans that we threw in the trunk of the Camry so my mom could see if she needed any of it.  The cleaning was pretty thorough.  I even climbed a ladder and pulled down the cover off the big fluorescent light in the kitchen so we could clean the bugs and dust out of it, something that has never been done.  We took a break for lunch and then finished up by around 2:30 or so.

We had a couple hours to kill.  I jumped on WoW for a bit while Ali did whatever.  Then somewhere around 3:30 Ali said to me “Oh I forgot to tell you, the dryer won’t turn on”  I thought this was an odd thing to forget to tell me.  When she said it, I thought back to Friday night when I smelled something hot in the utility room.  So I hoped that it was as simple, of course it wasn’t. (oh I just remembered one of those forgotten blog topics)  So I opened and closed the door a few times, pushed the timer on a few times hoping I could pull a Fonzie and have it magically start up. No dice.

Now if this was 15 years ago I would have found the manual like I did this time and would have thumbed through it looking for troubleshooting info, which there was minimal amounts of.  For my symptoms the advice was “make sure the door is closed” and “check the circuit breaker box”.  Beyond that the advice was to call for service.  15 years ago that is probably what I would have done.  However with the internet, almost any individual can almost instantly find information to do almost anything themselves, from diagnosing a health problem , to making a bomb and even fixing your dryer.  So after a bit of digging I had the basic direction I needed to pop the dryer apart and be able to diagnose the problem, all before I had to get ready to pick up my mom.  It appears the thermal fuse blew.  When that blows they recommend you also replace some sort hi-temp thermostat thing which I located as well.  Besides dropping one of the screws into the dryer, the disassembly went fine.  I figured after dinner we could stop at Home Depot, surely they would have these components.  So anyway, my point is, the internet is cool and makes all of us seem much smarter than we really are.

So quickly I showered and got ready to go.  The restaurant we were going to was called Noodles.  Mom had heard some good things about it ahead of time from a co-worker.  Our early arrival translated into lots of free seating which was nice.  The restaurant was very hip and trendy with very modern decorations.  It seemed very nice.  After a short while our waiter David arrived.  He did what a lot of places do , wrote his name on a napkin and sat it on the table.  He was polite but extremely dry, as interesting as toilet paper. He gave us our menus and headed off.

The menu selection seemed good however Ali saw that they actually had bread dipping sauce as an item you paid for.  That was sort of cheesy but oh well. After a rather long wait, David comes back and takes our orders.  Being the man, I order last and ask for the Chicken Marsala.  After an awkward pause and strange look, David asks me if he can make a recommendation.  Puzzled, I say, “Ok…”  He said that it is unusual to say this, but he did not recommend the chicken marsala.  He said that he has had a number of people complain about it in the 4 months he has been there.  The complaint was it was “bland”.  I thought it was quite odd for the waiter to tell me this, however, I followed his recommendation and ordered Chicken & Broccoli instead. “Ah, a good choice..” he said with approval.  After he walked away, the three of us all said that was very strange.  However Mom and Ali said it was good that he told me that so I wouldn’t be disappointed.  It was the last positive thing that would be said about David the rest of the night.

When Ali ordered her dish, she asked if they could put artichokes in it.  David said he wasn’t sure but he would ask.  Um, ok..  A few minutes later he came back and said they could put artichokes in it, he just wanted to let us know it would be an extra $1.50.  Um, ok, fine.  Again another cheesy move in my book.  I don’t enjoy being nickled and dimed at a restaurant. 

In between the time where our order was taken and the food arrived, David wasn’t very attentive.  I ordered a refill on my diet pepsi (which I am sure I paid for) which took a very long time to come out.  David also didn’t care to ask my Mom or Ali if they wanted refills on their empty wine glasses.  The situation was made worse by the sounds of David socializing with some of the people in another booth.  For some reason he was guy friendly with them and Mr Snooze with us. Whatever.

Mom had ordered mussels as an appetizer, again based on a recommendation.  She wasn’t impressed, she didn’t like them very much, especially the sauce they were swimming in.  I tried one and had no desire to grab another.  The meals arrived and although all of us had pretty different entree’s, none of us particularly liked any of them.  Again mom didn’t like the sauce and Ali and my meal were both very bland, just like the chicken marsala I was advised to not get.  Ali’s food was so bland that she actually salted it, something she rarely does.

After not seeing him for a good 15-20 minutes (other guys served the food), David came back to ask how things were.  Instead of making a scene and telling him the food wasn’t good, we all just said it was fine.  At that time he was fishing for a bigger bill and asked us about deserts and made some more “recommendations”.  We told him we would think about while he boxed up our leftovers.

Well it was already a bad experience, none of us really liked the restaurant but now it was about to become worse.  Ali said something about how we could walk to Baskin Robbins and get ice cream which drew eye rolls from me immediately, it’s a reflex reaction.  Well for whatever reason, Ali decided this was the proper time and place to take me to task for my viewpoints about eating.  She started making smart ass comments about how she wasn’t going to get desert because she knew I didn’t want her to.  My anger started at a simmer and by the end it was boiling.  She was making it sound like I lock her in a cell and shove bread and water under the door once a day.  It was ridiculous.  The fact that she was doing it in front of my mom, in a restaurant, made it worse.  It was extremely awkward.

Then, my mom piles on.  She started in about how strict I was about eating.  It was now a tag team against me.  I tried to remain as calm as I could.  Ali was firing off sarcastic barbs while my lifetime smoker mom was telling me how it was somehow bad to eat healthy.  Just as the last exchange was fired, David returned.  I flipped the switch and said very calmly “Um no, we decided to not have desert…”  It was crazy. 

Before David brought the check he told us about the comment card he was going to bring and how he would like us to fill out, yea sure David, glad to.  The rest of the time at the restaurant was very uncomfortable.  Mom and Ali had conversations that I didn’t even listen to.  I was too busy trying to bring down my blood pressure.  Mom felt bad as she knew I was pissed off by my short answers peppered into generous amounts of silence. 

David brings the bill and comment card.  It was like 75 bucks for the three of us before the 10 dollar discount.  It certainly wasn’t worth it.  I could have a much better time and much better food at Carraba’s for the three of us for 25 dollars less. The comment card was open ended, not one of those things where they give you categories and you rate them 1 to 5 or whatever.  All it had was a space for your name, email address and comments.  I left the top portion blank and entered a short comment. “The entire experience was exceptionally average…”  I thought it made the point.  I don’t anticipate frequenting Noodles again.

So before the meal I told mom we wanted to stop at Bed Bath & Beyond and Home Depot afterwards.  I was obviously still angry but did my best to not focus on it.  Mom had never been to Bed Bath & Beyond before so we took the time to walk the store so she could look around.  She insisted on buying us some super duper rug cleaning stuff to help in my battle against pet excrement.  I also bought some sort of fancy comb thing that is supposed to really help with animal shedding.

I was disappointed to find that Home Depot didn’t have any appliance repair parts.  I asked the guy in the appliance section if they had any.  He flat out said no and gave me a card with a number I could call to order parts.  I didn’t believe him and spent 15 minutes combing through the electrical aisle anyway, sure that they had to have these things. Nope.

I asked mom if she minded if we stopped at Lowe’s quickly as well.  Again I struck out, no parts.  We did however pick up a couple “Knockout Roses”, a variety that is supposedly extremely hardy and disease resistant that we saw on a gardening show we watch.  We dropped off mom a little before 9.  Again she said she was sorry for the argument but I dismissed it as just one of those nights. 

Originally I had planned to just freak out once we dropped mom off but enough time had passed that my anger was down to a dull ache and instead of dredging it up again and starting the cycle over I just shut up about it.  What was the point? It would accomplish nothing. 

Saturday night had another fight on the schedule anyway, the UFC was doing a free pay per view from England,   three hour party of violence.    I started watching it but was too tired to get very far.  The headliner fight was Mirka Cro Cop against some guy I never heard of before.  I planned to watch the rest of it on Sunday.

I finally got the old Tivo out of our bedroom.  I was waiting for Ali to give me the all clear, meaning she watched anything she wanted on it.  Her only complaint was there was an episode of Will and Grace on there she wished she could keep.  Being the people pleasing person that I am, I tried to satisfy the request.  Tivo 2’s can easily transfer between them.  The original Tivo’s do not support it.  So what I wound up doing was configure the new Tivo to think it had a satellite box on one of the inputs and then connected the old Tivo to that input.  Then I told the new tivo to tape a program off the “satellite” and played Will and Grace instead.  It was a rig job but it worked.  The only downside is the Will and Grace episode now lives on our Tivo 2 under some spanish title, the name of the show the tivo thought it was taping off satellite, oh well you can’t have everything.

Sunday morning was outside work day.  Again we started around 10.  I cut down the rest of the tree/shrubs growing out in the pit, Ali planted the two roses, I went around with dirt and filled in around any sprinkler heads that were protruding so they would be flush, I sprayed the orchard and garden with an oil to fight insects and then took the weed whacker around while Ali mowed on the tractor.  Thanks to the sprinklers, our landscape is looking better than it ever has in April.  Normally it is a brown, dead wasteland this time of year. (the end of dry season)

I was really hoping to score the dryer parts on Saturday night so I could fix it on Sunday.  Instead I went online and ordered the parts.  They should be here Tuesday or Wednesday.  The parts were only 25 bucks but I paid an additional 20 bucks for expedited shipping, oh well.  It still is way less than I would have paid a repairman to do it.

The rest of Sunday was pretty laid back.  It was beautiful so we had the slider to the pool way open.  I played some WoW, Ali read.  Instead of having Ali cook we ordered pizza.  While we ate it we watched another movie I have had on my pc for awhile, Firewall.  It is a movie where Harrison Ford is a high ranking IT executive for a bank.  It was good, better than I anticipated.  Even though Harrison is light years removed from his days as Han Solo or Indiana Jones, he still holds up well in action flicks.  The movie was very entertaining.  It would give it a B+.  I wondered why I waited so long to see it.

Later that night I finished up my UFC viewing.  The headliner match was shocking.  Cro Cop is known as being one of the world’s best strikers.  He has legs the size of tree trunks and punishes the hell out of people with kicks.  The guy he was fighting I never heard of before or seen fight.  Supposedly he had a 3-0 record in the UFC.  He was primarily a grappler guy.  Well the fight started and Cro Cop got one hard kick in before he was taken to the ground.  Once he was there he could not do a whole lot and was being pretty much controlled by this guy, eating enough elbows and punches that you knew this guy was for real. 

The only reason Cro Cop got back on his feet was because Herb Dean stood them up.  There was a little bit of time left in the round.  To this point the new guy definitely had won the round.  Then all of a sudden the guy throws up a right kick that hits Cro Cop on the side of the head.  He drops like a sack of lead, his entire body went limp.  The way he landed, his right leg and ankle was pinned grotesquely under him, it looked hideous.  It was a scary scene, you literally had to worry for his life.  Cro Cop was a huge favorite going in, for him to be knocked out like that was shocking.  He was on the ground for a long time but eventually came to and actually walked out of the ring on his own legs, which is amazing.  The way his leg was bent, I was sure he had to tear up stuff in multiple joints.  I felt bad for the guy. 

This morning I got up and after doing my normal routine, pulled back the blinds on the slider to take Nicki out. I was startled to see the image of our little, cherub faced, vomiting, ass dragging across the carpet little feline, Buttons, meowing frantically from the other side.  Evidently she ventured outside on Sunday and got locked out without our knowledge.  When we are getting ready for bed, Buttons location is not on our mind.  It was chilly outside, 60 according to the thermometer, but she seemed to be no worse for wear.  She scampered in and headed right for the utility room where the food and litter box is located.  It was funny.  I wonder what she did all night?

Episode 6 of the 300 workout went down today.  The good news is I crossed the 190 total rep line, scratching out 191.  The bad news is I am hitting a plateau of just how many reps I can do of certain exercises.  The idea that every few days I can increase my number of reps on each exercise is fading fast.  My 18th pull up today was more like a half pull up.  To hit my 46 push ups and 23 box jumps I had to take mini-breaks towards the end of each set to take a breath to finish up.  I was looking at my platform for my box jumps, thinking to myself “Damn this thing looks high, it has to be more than 24 inches”  so I walked over to the counter and asked the owner if he had a tape measure, which he did.  I walked back into my little room and measured the height, expecting it to come in anywhere between 24 and 28 inches.  My mouth almost dropped open when I read 20 1/2, the step is actually 3 and a half inches short of “official” height.  Damn that was a bit of a bummer.  here I thought I was actually going above the bar on that exercise. 

  I finally hit 20 reps of the floor wipers.  Even though I try to eat my lunch early, a full hour before I hit the gym, every time I do the floor wipers I feel sick to my stomach.  By the time I hit 20 my hands, wrists and chest is starting to burn from holding the 135 pounds above me.  How a guy does 50 of these things is beyond me.  Anyway , I survived…

My job is normally pretty low key and not overly busy however the past few days have been rather hectic.  We have all sorts of projects hitting the ground simultaneously.

Hmmm so what has been going on?  Well after work on Tuesday I followed Ali while she ran on my new rollerblades.  They definitely felt better than my old ones but there is an issue I think no skate will fix.  There is something different with my balance point on my right foot versus the left.  My left skate feels perfectly centered under my foot and leg.  However my right one feels like the skate is too far to the inside, making it feel like my right foot is hanging over the side.  I don’t know why this is.  Maybe my right foot is deformed somehow that I am unaware of.  I had this same feeling with my old skates.  The only way I have found to compensate for it is to make the right skate VERY tight which results in it hurting for different reasons.

Even though my knees have held up well to my 300 workout that contains 30 deadlifts and 20+ box jumps, pushing around the park on my rollerblades sent little sparks of discomfort through them.  Afterwards, both of my knees felt a bit tender.  Right now they feel ok but I won’t know for sure until I put them to the test at the gym today.  Damn it, it is frustrating.  My theory is the movement the legs make to propel you forward on rollerblades puts some sideways forces on the knee that don’t agree with me. 

The zoo following the VT shootings has been predictably insane.  I shook my head at the endless attempts to find someone to “blame” for the killings.  The kid was f’ing crazy and had no fear of dying himself, you can’t prevent a person like that from killing people since he has no fear of the consequences.  Sort of like what we are dealing with in Iraq, you can’t win. 

Sanjiyah finally got voted out of American Idol.  I never jumped on the vote for Sanjiyah bandwagon but enjoyed the freak show of seeing him continue on week after week.  The show will definitely lose something since he is gone.  Of everyone that is left, I like Jordan the most, she is an incredible singer and I can’t believe she is 17.  She is a very pretty girl and if she spends a little more time in the gym and a little less time at the dinner table she would be smoking.  I can’t believe the bald guy is still there.  He sings ok but he has such an image problem.  I am very ready for Lakisha to leave, she believes the hype people have said about her.  We already have plenty of fat black women singers with big voices, step aside.  Blake is a cool dude but I don’t think he will win.  The other ones I don’t really give two shits about.  Melinda is a good singer.  She has a 3 inch neck that is freakish. Since they gave her some hair extensions it has helped hide it. 

The big deal they made , saying that Simon was rolling his eyes about the VT tribute the one kid made was ridiculous.  Anyone paying attention could tell he was rolling his eyes because the kid was arguing with Simon about the critique of his performance.  It was so stupid.

This weekend we plan to do April’s cleaning project, the kitchen.  The kitchen is a surprisingly large undertaking.  It is a relatively small area but by the time we clean out and organize all the cabinets, the pantry and the fridge it winds up taking a long ass time.   I also want to give the grass a trim and cut since it has been growing since it started getting regular watering.  I also need to hit the newly planted vegetables with this oil stuff that is supposed to keep the bugs away.  Even though they have been in the ground less than a week I can already see what looks like bug chewing damage.

On Saturday night we are going to go to one of the places that we have entertainment book coupons for, Ali’s choice.  It will be cool to go somewhere outside of our inner circle of restaurants.

My 6th 300 workout hits today.  Hope I can keep incrementing. 

During the few days I wasn’t blogging I had various things that went in and out of my head as good subject matter.  Unfortunately I can’t recall it anymore.  I did have a co-worker that guess my age at 30 earlier in the week which was refreshing.

 Drawing a blank right now.

I saw the headline about 22 31 33 people getting killed on the VA Tech campus and hardly flinched.  I don’t know if it is the daily headlines outlining continuous death in Iraq that has made me almost immune to it all.  I mean is it somehow worse if college students die as opposed to soldiers or women and children?  I don’t think so.  I remember when Columbine happened, that hit hard.  I feel very little now. It is just yet another horrible story further demonstrating what a piece of shit the world is turning into.

The weekend which I thought would be relatively busy was instead relatively lazy.  I got home a bit late on Friday night because after work I stopped at a doctor’s place to set up a printer/fax for him.  He is pretty much the last person I do on the side work for.  I used to eagerly pursue on the side work but it just turned out to be more hassle than it was worth.  Many people seem to think once they pay you to work on their computer that you are now have also enlisted as their 24/7 free tech support line.  It just is a bad deal so I try to avoid doing home user work like the plague.

Later Friday night I hooked up my Vonage rig, the box came earlier that day.  Wow it was soooooo easy.  I basically plugged it into my internet router, plugged a phone into it and BINGO it worked.  I then tested my whole house theory by unplugging us from Sprint outside, plugging the vonage phone line into the wall jack and BANG that worked beautifully as well.  Awesome.  I had to reverse it though because our home number won’t be transferred to our Vonage service until the last week of the month.  So right now just the phone and fax in the computer room is on Vonage.  I did some test calls that sounded just fine and Ali called her brother last night on it as well while I was playing WoW.  What cool tech.

On Saturday it was hot as hell, it felt like summer with highs in the 90’s and high humidity.  Late morning we headed out and stopped at Sports Authority before going to Home Depot.  I was finally getting around to replacing the hard plastic skates that have haunted my feet for the last 15 years.  It was a good thing Ali was around.  If it wasn’t for her presence I would have walked out of there with the first pair of skates I tried on.  That first pair was the cheapest pair of Rollerblades they had.  They felt comfortable enough, certainly way better than what I currently had.  They were 99 bucks and I was ready to pay and bolt. 

However Ali advised me to try on some of the other models, even though they were more expensive.  They had a surprisingly decent selection in size 13 skates.  I think I tried on 5 or 6 pairs, ranging from the 99 dollar cheapies to the 240 dollar high end Rollerblades model.  The high end model had this wild tightening system where you just pulled on one handle and it tightened the entire shoe.  However the system looked like it would be prone to failure so I steered away.  I was surprised with what my final selection was, a set of K2’s.  The boot was nice and soft and felt like it had the most comfortable padding in the base of the skate.  They were profiled a bit lower than the Rollerblades which made them feel a bit more stable.  They were 179 bucks but I think in the long run they extra money will be well spent if it allows me to roller blade without foot pain.  I will put them to their first real world test tomorrow when I accompany Ali on a run.

After the skate purchase we headed to Home Depot to stock up for that day’s project.  We grabbed some more mulch, a bunch of dirt to refresh the garden and some vegetables to populate it.    By the time we got back and ate lunch it was around 1.  I put on my work clothes and headed out.  Ugh it was pretty miserable.  The thick humid air paired with my jeans just sapped the energy out of me.  I dumped the mulch and then tilled the garden after pulling on the tiller for 10-15 minutes to get the damn thing started.  Then we dumped the new dirt and I tilled that in.   We had some good dirt.  The planting of the vegetables I left to Ali pretty much as I just observed, feeling pretty miserable.  We planted three different types of tomatoes, a white eggplant, a cucumber, a honeydew melon plant and a cantaloupe (I think)  Stuff usually grows well in our garden, the problem is the bugs get to it.  I am going to try to be vigilant with spraying the garden with an oil that is supposed to keep the little bastards away.

On Saturday night we watched the movie that I downloaded off Amazon the prior week, The Illusionist.  It was a different type of flick than I would normally watch.  It had a good plot with lots of twists and a surprise ending.  The only thing that sort of bugged me is I never knew exactly if everything he did was actually an illusion or supernatural.  The guy brings ghosts back.  Kind of hard to fake. I would give the movie a B.

 On Sunday a front blew through that brought lots of wind and a decent amount of rain.  It swept away the mugginess and instead brought in nice dry air that was more in line with April in Florida.  Sunday was a very lazy day by my standards.

The day started extremely early as we had to get up at 5 am to go in and help with the Beach Bum race.  When we got to the race site it was still dark.  Ali managed the pre-registered registration table while I did various grunt work from setting up tables to filling up the water bottles, with a hose (I cringed).  I didn’t envy anyone running the race.  It was very windy and still very humid since the front didn’t come through.  Just like last year, there were a number of people that did not realize the race was literally held on the beach.  It was a tough race, the finishers looked exhausted and I heard story after story about horrible wind, wet, sandy feet and minimal patches of packed sand to run on.  Yuck.  That is one race I never want to run again.  We had everything cleaned up by around 9 and were back home around 10.

With in 15 minutes of getting home, Ali was back in bed, which is where she stayed until around 12:30.  She asked me to stay quiet so I just played Wow and little else until she came out.  The only “work” I did the rest of the day Sunday was to vacuum the house.  Ali had four days off but didn’t wind up doing the cleaning she had planned until the last afternoon of the last day she had off, something I would cringe at.  I would so much rather get that shit out of the way first.  She is just a natural procrastinator.

Anyway, after my sweeping I decided I would watch some movies that I downloaded that Ali had no interest in seeing.  So I settled down and watched Snakes on a Plane and Children of Men.  The first thing I want to point out about Snakes on a Plane is it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting it to be. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t a good movie and if you have a fear of snakes you definitely do not want to see this flick.  They show people getting killed by snakes in every horrible method you can imagine and some you haven’t ever imagined.  It was borderline gruesome at times.  It was strange because mixed with these nasty snake attack scenes are these funny slapstick moments.  The best thing I can say about the movie is I wasn’t bored. I’d give it a C+.

Children of Men was something I never would have watched if I hadn’t read a blurb somewhere about it being an update version of Blade Runner.  Blade runner was a movie I never saw but always heard was good, so that was reason enough for me to download Children of Men.  The premise of the movie is very intriguing.  It is set two decades in the future.  For some reason mankind has the lost the ability to procreate, everyone is infertile and the youngest person on the planet is 18 years old.  There were no more children.

The movie makes all sorts of interesting statements about life both in the future and now.  Imagine a planet where everyone on it was going to die with no one to replace them?  The film is extremely dark with very little positive to say about where man is going except for one little glimmer that the film is centered around.  It was really intriguing and made you really think about things.  There is one strong moment in the film where the main character asks a rich relative of his what the point of having all his material riches when there would soon be nobody left to enjoy it since everyone would be dead?  His answer was that he simply didn’t think about the future.  That was how he got by.  Man, how prevalent is that thought in today’s society? Very. I would give it a B+.

I am not sure when the last time was that I watched three movies in a weekend.  I also actually fired up the Xbox to play a few games.  I found that frustrating. In some ways, games are too f’ing complex and realistic for their own good.  Granted, since I don’t have the instruction manuals for these games, it makes it tougher but hey, I am reasonably intelligent, I think I should be able to figure out the basic controls for a game without much difficulty.

The first game I tried was LA Rush.  It is a racing game.  The graphics and action are great except for one flaw.  If you aren’t great at the game you only get one stinkin type of car to drive, a rice burning Nissan 240sx.  It is maddening.  The only way to unlock the other couple dozen cars is by winning street races which is damn near impossible.  I have played these types of games before and they normally at least make the first few races pretty easy so the player can at least get some sort of progression going.  Not this game, I challenge someone to pick it up and get through the first race without finishing dead last the first 10 times you play it.    It frustrated the hell out of me.

Next I figured I would fire up Baseball 2k6 since the baseball season just started.  Again, the controls for doing simple things like pitching and batting are so overly complicated it sucks the fun out of it.  Sure the graphics look like you are at the ballpark but shit, in my first half inning of pitching I gave up 10 runs on 9 hits.  When it was my turn to bat, I hit every f’in button on the controller but couldn’t get the damn guy to swing.  Again a manual would help but it shouldn’t require a manual to do the most basic aspects of a game.

I played Superman Returns for 10 minutes.  Again, the controls were so complex I spent all my energy trying to remember combinations of key presses to perform abilities instead of just having fun using my super powers. (they need to talk to the developers of Hulk Ultimate Destruction)

Finally I tried Tiger Woods PGA golf.  Once again, I couldn’t get it to do the most basic part of a golf game, swing the f’ing club!  I could rotate through clubs, adjust angles, slice, hook, camera angles, but not swing the club.  It was so stupid.  Maybe I am just too dumb to play today’s video games.

My 4th 300 workout Friday went ok although it is getting tougher and tougher to up my reps for each exercise.  I did increase my total reps by like 10 or so, totalling 176.  Hitting 200 will be a big number, hitting 300, if it ever happens will be a near miracle event.

Thanks to Sir Randall  for the link to this You Tube video.  It is a clip he saw mentioned in Men’s Health.  It is a four and a half minute clip of a chubby chick complaining how it is so expensive to be thin.  In it she lists the price of healthy foods as a primary reason why people (her) are so fat.  She says that the unhealthy stuff is just much cheaper.  Of course this theory is ridiculous and is just another way for this person to justify her state of being.  Vegetables are cheap, plain chicken breasts are cheap, water is CHEAP, speaking of which, the girl needs a big glass of water thrown in her face. 

People just don’t want to take a personal responsibility for their weight.  They want to eat as much as they want and exercise as little as they can and still somehow remain thin.  It isn’t reality.  Unfortunately no magic food, no magic exercise machine and no magic pill is going to make one bit of difference if the person isn’t personally motivated to set a goal and work towards it with consistency.  It’s hard work, no two ways about it.  Hard work is good for you.  The sad thing is this girl’s opinions and attitude are probably more prevalent than people with more healthy dispositions.  The world is just so f’d up on so many levels. This is the trickle down affect of corporate greed, marketing, stationary entertainment, and human gluttony/laziness facilitated by a country of convenience. 

This weekend I plan on finishing up the mulching project, adding dirt to the garden and tilling it down, taking a loppers out to the pit and chop down all the mutant tree weeds, setting up my vonage rig and performing normal weekly house duties.  I may be stopping at Sports Authority to look at a new set of roller blades.  I have hopes of getting a pair that doesn’t punish my feet like the hard plastic ones I have owned for 15 years.  The idea is if I get back on roller blades I can accompany Ali once again on her runs.  It seems without me present, her running program has shrunk down to minimal levels again.  Her interest in running is minimal nowadays and she is all about ballet.  Unfortunately ballet doesn’t provide nearly the cardio kick that a 3 or 4 mile run at a 10 minute mile pace does.

On Sunday morning we are volunteering at the Beach Bum race.  That was the race last year that was a mess, probably my least favorite run ever.  Before we ran it, we thought, “How cool, running by the water!”  The reality was it was an injury waiting to happen.  A big bunch of runners trying to share a 5 foot wide swath of compacted sand that was pitched at a twenty degree angle.   That race was the start of my knee woes last year.  This is one time I am glad to work the race instead of run it.

Today is episode 4 of the 300 workout.  Yesterday my legs felt a bit tired.  I am hoping it doesn’t carry through to today.  I am hoping to keep increasing my rep numbers, very slowly.

I think American Idol has jumped the shark last night when they had Jennifer Lopez on singing a song off her all spanish album.  Now even American Idol is catering to the Mexican invasion.  It was just stupid.  Haley went last night.  She was the last female contestant with a BMI that would have fallen in the healthy scale, too bad.

I finally saw the credit for the Camry extended warranty hit our account a few days ago.  It felt good to turn that knife into the dealers wallet, although I’m sure it is a barely a pin prick in reality.

Ali has had a nice week.  She had Monday off, worked Tuesday and Wednesday and now is off again until Monday.  She was caught up with her work so she took today off.

I got a call from my sister the other night.  She called and identified herself as “Ahmed”, she thought my account of Ahmed the Mad Jump Roper as very funny.  We talked for awhile.  In most extended conversations I have with Torrin she tells me how I should have a kid.  Each time she normally gives me different reasons to do so.  This time she said if I had a kid I could stop worrying about becoming old and senile since when you have a kid you have no time to focus on anything other than the kid.  It wasn’t a convincing argument. 

My Vonage equipment is supposed to arrive tomorrow.  Hopefully by the end of the weekend I will be totally free of the evil Sprint Local Telephone empire!

I wish I could totally let loose in here and post my absolutely no holds barred account of things.  Of course if I did I would probably get myself in trouble on multiple fronts.  It would make for some damn good reading though.