All posts by Duf

Well the physical aftermath of my volleyball experience has not been good.  Both knees are noisy and getting up from a sitting posistion results in a loud, unsettling, painful crack from my left “good” knee.  In a way I’m lucky I sucked so bad and only played 3 games else the damage would have been worse for sure.  I think when I ran my solo 2.5 mile run the week before I aggravated something in the left knee that had not healed, playing volleyball was akin to rubbin salt in the wound.  So now I am back on a holding pattern, back to not knowing if I will be able to resume what used to be normal exercise activities.  It’s frustrating.

Speaking of frustrating, I don’t know why I subject myself to watching state of the union addresses.  Those are the most annoying things to witness on tv in my opinion.  Everytime I watch one, I come away feeling worse about our government than I already do.  Seeing the congress that is 90% filled with old, white codgers that fart dust just depresses me.  How can these people be a good representation of our citizens?  They just all look corrupt and decrepid.

It was funny seeing Cheyney and Nancy Pelosi in the camera angle the entire time.  Dick basically had the same miserable, disinterested look on his face for all 45 minutes.  Nancy looked more pleasant but it was funny to see her facial expressions change when Bush said things you could tell she didn’t like.  Bush spewed his normal lines of bullshit, the same bullshit we have heard for 5 years, promising change that never comes.  I thought it was odd at the end of the speech when the state of the union turned into feel good story time with W relaying stories about a military guy, the guy that jumped in front of a train to save someone and of all people Diteke Mutumbo, the basketball player.  I just didn’t understand the point of including that in the state of the union, as it has nothing to do with it.  But after story time was done, W cleared it up by saying how these three people were good examples of what America represents and I guess, somehow he is responsible for that?  What a freak show.  The stopping for applause every 15-20 seconds is truly maddening.  Glad that’s over.  Can’t wait for W to get the hell out of Dodge so we can finally start cleaning up his mess.

The pics of the pine trees we planted and the wood stork party can be seen here.

I tried to update my blog to the latest and greatest version this morning and it blew up.  I was freaking out but luckily was able to eventually unupgrade it.  What a nightmare that would have been.  I checked the support forums for the blog software and it is flooded with bug reports.  I will steer clear for awhile.

Yesterday I took the Camry to get the integrated Sirius tuner installed.  It was done in only a few hours.  It set us back a good chunk of change.  I had no idea how Sirius was added to such a fancy stereo system as what the Camry hybrid has.  However after the install, the little piece of cardboard that had the number I needed to activate the service also had the model number.  Being the nosy type I punched it in when I got home and saw the actual unit could be picked up for around 100 bucks.  I found the manual as well and it looked like it would have been in my realm of possibilities to hook it up myself, son of a bitch.  This scenario seems to happen to me too often.  I look into things in detail AFTER I pay for them.  Stupid.  Well anyway it is awesome having satellite integrated into the factory radio.  After some fumbling trying to figure out how to do stuff, I was able to figure most of it out without a manual.

Getting the radio activated was rather annoying.  I sat out in the audio stores parking lot for a good 25 minutes till I finally got it turned on.  The first two times I called I got disconnected after waiting 5 minutes.   The third time I went a different route through the automated phone menus and got a rather unprofessional black woman who sounded like she would have been more at home behind the counter of a convenience store than as a customer service rep.  I told her I called twice before to get my radio activated and got disconnected and was not very happy about it.  She said, without a hint of sympathy or remorse in her voice, “How can I help you”  I explained that I was disconnecting one radio and activating another.  She says “Wait a minute…”  I wait and wait, probably for a good 30 seconds while I hear silence on the other end.  I finally say “are you still there?”  “Yes I am having computer problems” she says in annoyed tone and again leaves me sitting there in awkward silence until her computer responds a good minute later.  She was very unprofessional the entire call and made me feel like I was somehow putting her out by asking her to perform her job.  Finally the proper switches were flipped and I was able to get more than the weather channel on the radio.  Hurray.  I said my goodbye’s to the miserable woman and turned my attention to figuring out the radio.

The only negative that I have observed with the setup is when it displays artist and song information it will not display any more than 16 characters per line so it cuts off chunks of words which is rather annoying.  When I was doing my price check I also looked into this and apparently that is just the way it is.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense why the info could not scroll like the info on standard over the airwaves radio does.  Who knows, it is a small thing, I’ll get over it.  The car now officially has everything we could possibly want in it and we paid a tidy premium for it.  Hope it lasts for 10 years.

Wow it was a tiring weekend.  Both days we got up earlier than we normally do on a work day.  On Saturday morning the reason for the early rise was to travel to Coconut Creek on the other side of Florida to play in Randall’s inaugural King of the Beach tournament.  It turns out I was the jester of the beach.

The drive over was fine although a little longer than I planned.  I allocated an hour and a half but needed closer to two hours to get there.  Ali and Nicki came along for the ride as Randall said there was a dog park right next to the courts, cool.  The park was very nice.  I walked Nicki and Ali to the dog park area and left them there so I could get ready to play. I knew everyone that was there except two guys (8 total) 

Let me get all the excuses out of the way up front.  Yea I have not played volleyball in more than 6 months.  I’m not in volleyball shape.  I have a hard time just picking up and playing well with a different partner each game and the court was BRUTALLY tough to cut your teeth on after not playing ball for so long.  It was badly bowled out so you were running up a foot high hill on each approach and the net was slightly higher than regulation. The sand was soft and deep.  It added up to an atrocious display of volleyball on my part.  I was just terrible.  Well let me be more specific, it was an atrocious display of offensive volleyball by me.

I passed ok generally, I served ok, I made some decent defensive plays.  But I could not hit the ball cleanly over the net to save my life.  In fact I don’t think I had what I would classify as one even average hit during my brief three game stint back on the courts.  I just could not do anything.  Every single time I went to hit the ball it either caught tape and rolled meekly over the net or planted itself firmly into the net, bouncing back at me in a defiant manner.  It was downright embarrassing.  I would get some great sets from these guys, approach, jump, swing hard and blast it into the net time and time again.

All three games I played in were losses with my three different partners and none of the games were even very close.  No matter how angry I got, I just could not get out of the sand.  I tried everything.  I had more costume changes than a vegas showgirl, trying various shirts and head gear combinations all ending with the same result.  Hitting is the biggest thing in volleyball I enjoy and not being able to do it at all just made for misery for me. 

Eventually Ali and Nicki came over to watch some of my last game of futility.  The format of the tourney was everyone played 3 games, then the top 4 players played 3 more, then the top two played best two out of three for the grand prize.  Well going 0-3 and looking terrible doing it ensured I would be sitting on my ass the rest of the day.  In the final matchup the top two players get to pick their partners from whomever is left.  Of course I didn’t get picked and I didn’t expect to be picked, but not being picked made me feel like the fat kid that has two left feet that is always picked last in pickup games. I remember when I played organized indoor 6’s pickup up north, I was always one of the 4 people picked to build the rest of the teams around. The idea was you wanted to have each team have at least one good player.  Now I am the shlub.

I had ideas of leaving early but everyone else stuck around so I felt obligated to do the same.  The two guys that were in the finals would not have been whom I thought would have been in the finals before play started but that is why you play the games.  So I watched the games play out like a good soldier, congratulated the eventual winner and then took off after eating a Burger King lunch that Ali went and retrieved for us.  Even though I only played three, relatively brief games, I had a full days aches and pains. The most painful thing at the time was my neck.  Cranking my head back to track sets is a movement you just don’t do in everyday life and as a result my neck was killing me.  I had other pains in my shoulders and knees as well.  The drive back was filled with me commenting on the putrid level of my play and Ali trying to build me back up.

When we got home I buried my sorrows in icing my knee and playing WoW for awhile.  During the tournament Ali made a smart ass comments to some of the guys about my WoW playing where she said all I basically do is sleep, go to work, eat supper, play wow, and go back to sleep.  I was a bit annoyed with that remark since I do manage to bust my ass around the house quite a bit, more so than Ali does I would offer.  However, I held my tongue on the way back and didn’t mention the comment until I was going to play WoW.  I asked her if she cared if I played since she made the comment earlier in the day.  She said it was fine, she just meant that it gets extreme sometimes.  Yea well there are things she does that are extreme in my viewpoint as well.  So anyway, the issue was swept under the rug with not much further squabble.

 Later that night I watched Lady in the Water, a M Knight Shamlam (sp) flick.  I always like his stuff.  This flick was weird, even for his films.  I enjoyed it but at times things were just so silly.  The best example I can give without giving away the plot was when some little kid discovers he is “The Interpreter” he magically deciphers what all the humans are supposed to do to help the lady in the water by reading it from the sides of cereal boxes.    Crazy huh?  I guess my biggest issue was how easily all the people involved accepted this far out situation of the lady in the water.  It was sorta like if I told you that you could walk on the ceiling and you said, “I can? Cool”  I found the film entertaining for the most part but for M Knight, it was a below par effort.  I give it a B, maybe a B-.

Sunday morning we had to get up even earlier, 4:30 am, in order to get to the half marathon site by 5:45 am.  I did not feel very chipper.  The night’s sleep brought me to two swollen knees as well as joint and muscle pain all over.  I gimped to the sink, took two advil and woke up Ali.  I stopped at Dunkin Donuts on the drive in to wake up a bit, it helped.

The first thing we did when we got there was work the packet pickup table where runners would come over, show us their race number and we would give them the Velcro timing device that goes around their ankle.  It was quite the hectic scene with over 1000 runners descending on a small area.  The row of at least 20 port-o-potties was impressive in a smelly way.  This race had some elite runners, many of them Kenyan.  A few of them came up while we were there.  Some did not speak good English.  Trying to explain to them what to do with the timing device was a challenge.  When the one guy realized it went around his ankle he was not happy and gestured that he wanted to put it around his wrist instead.  I’m not sure where he wound up putting it. 

Soon we had to give up our packet pickup duties and head out to the water stop we were working.  We had some problems finding it based on the verbal directions we got, however the gps saved the day.  As we pulled up we were surprised with the amount of people there, at least 20.  I had ideas of there being maybe 5 or 6 people per water stop.  It was quite the production.  They had 4 tables setup with several big 5 gallon water coolers on each one.  Then they had bags and bags of cups piled up and at least a couple dozen 5 gallon water jugs lined up in a row.  Ali and I asked what was needed. 

I got put on cup filling duty.  The lids were off the coolers and what we would do is scoop water out of them.  However you didn’t fill the cups, you wanted them to be roughly half full.  The reason being when you are handing cups to moving runners, water is going to spill, filling them all the way is a waste since the handoff would spill half of the water anyway.  It took awhile to get the feel of what a half filled cup should be but after a few minutes I was dipping and scooping water with robotic like precision.  I even drew a comment from the girl next to me about how good I was at it, yay.

  There were almost too many people helping.  We had three people scooping water out of our cooler, placing the cups on the table and even so we couldn’t keep up with the droves of other people that were taking the cups off the table and setting them by the side of the road to be handed out to runners.  We even had dedicated water pourers that would refill the coolers as the water level went down.  It was impressive how quickly we prepared at least 2500 cups of water for the runners.  Our stop was a double, meaning it got runners on the way out and the way back so we had to have a lot of water (and gatorade) ready.

The stand was at the 7 1/2 and 10 1/2 mark on the run.  The first guy came flying towards us less than 35 minutes into the race.  It was a kenyan guy and it was amazing.  Ali and I could not believe how fast this guy was running.  His stride was long and fast.  As he approached the water line, Ali was in the front and handed him water.  It was tougher to do than you can imagine.  He was running so fast that Ali said it was almost like trying to hand something to a guy driving by in a car.  In an instant he was by the water stop.  After he passed, Ali had tears in her eyes.  For some reason, just seeing someone that could run that fast made her emotional.  It was amazing to see a world class athlete running like that but I did not well up over it like she did.

The first 15 minutes or so of handing out water did not go well for me.  I just had bad technique and runners kept dropping water I attempted to hand to them.  We also learned quickly that we needed to yell out clearly if we had water or gatorade so they could get what they wanted.  Eventually as my technique improved and the speed of the runners going by lessened a bit, I was able to successfully deliver water with minimal waste.  While it was a long time to be standing out there holding out your right arm yelling time and time again “WATER, GATORADE DOWN THE LINE!”, it was surprisingly rewarding.  I could not believe how many runners were polite and courteous even in the middle of the physical pain they were enduring.  We got thanked by them time and again for volunteering as they ran by.  I was astonished.  As we handed out the drinks we all would offer words of encouragement, making eye contact and exchanging smiles that made both parties involved feel better.  Even the slowest participants got equal amounts of support from the volunteers.  It made you feel good about the entire experience.

As you were standing there you saw all sorts of people and I got to make all sorts of observations.  Early on I noticed several men that looked like they had weird stains on their chest.  It was only till much later in the race that I realized what these were.  It was blood from their nipples.  Evidently depending on the fabric of your shirt, it can rub nipples raw to the point where they bleed, ouch.  There were all sorts of people participating from the young to the old, wafer thin to the chubby.  There were many athletic, stereotypical runners whizzing by but just as many non-athletic people whom just had determination to finish on their side.  It made me regret not being able to be part of the event from a runner’s perspective.

  There were lots of people that ran/walked the event which is what Ali would probably wind up doing. She didn’t sign up because she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to finish in the supposed 2:45 time limit.  However the last person crossed the line more than 3:15 from the start so Ali definitely would have been able to do it.  My issue would be I just would not be satisfied if I stopped to walk at all.  I would force myself to continue running until I more or less dropped or ground my knees into dust, I just know I would.   But man that would be a feather in the cap.  We got done earlier than I thought and thanks to all the hands, everything was pretty much cleaned up and ready to pack up by 10:30.  It turns out we had more refreshments than we needed as several hundred cups got poured into the gutter.  Ali and I pulled out for home, both very satisfied with our experience, even with the getting up at 4:30 am part. It was inspirational to see person after person battling through their own personal limits to complete a feat of extreme endurance.

By the time we got home the advil had worn off and I was feeling quite beat up.  However I had a  list of things I had to get done before licking my wounds for the rest of the day.  We have had no rain this week again so I had to drag 240 feet of hose around the house to water everything.  The entire time I was thinking how nice it will be to not have to do this shit anymore.  After watering I filled the bird feeders, picked some ripe tomatoes from our garden and then moved inside to do the weekly counter cleaning/floor sweeping routine.  During that time we noticed we had a huge gathering of wood storks in our backyard, at least twenty.  They just stood around back there for a long time.  I took a few pictures of them and the pine trees I planted.  I’ll post them later.

From about 3 o’clock on I was just watching football.  Both teams I wanted to win, won. I was so beat though I only stayed awake until a little after 9, so I didn’t find out the Colts won till this morning.  This mornin Buttons the diabetic cat came into the bathroom for her morning “drippies”  Drippies are what she gets after I wash my hair in the morning.  She walks around me and meows constantly while I let the excess water from my hair drip all over her.  Anyway, she comes in this morning and her back is coated in pine needles from the Christmas tree.  Evidently she walked right under the branches and got dumped on.  This is the last week for the tree, too bad, I was hoping it would make it to February.

Tomorrow I am going over to Cocunut Creek to play in a King of the Beach format tournament.  Randall is putting it together.  It actually is a very good idea.  We only have 8 people playing and each one of us chips in 25 bucks.  Since there is no overhead, all the money goes back out and the person that finishes first will pocket 125 bucks with good payouts for 2nd and third too.  It should be cool.  I have zero expectations.  I have literally not touched a volleyball since I limped off the muddy field in Pottstown in late June.  In the past, I have actually done half decent after long layoffs.  However this is going to be very different.  In King of the Beach format, you rotate partners each game so you are playing with someone different.  With my quirky style and intense dislike of playing the right side, I expect to struggle.  I am not the easiest guy for someone to just pick up and play with.  I expect it to be fun, I know about half the guys that are playing pretty well.

I’m really getting the itch to move forward with the sprinkler project.  The next thing I need to do is draw everything out and gulp, plan it.  As much as I hate drawing stuff up, it is necessary if I want the sprinkler system to work properly.  I am envisioning the day when I have it all in place and looking out across the landscape with pride as things get watered without me pulling a damn house around for an hour and a half.

On Sunday, Ali and I are getting up at the crack of dawn to help with the Naples Half Marathon.  I have spent the last 6 months or so maintaining the web site for the race as well as a spreadsheet with all of the entries.  When I turned the data over we had about 1500 runners, a huge race.  It should be a cool experience watching it unfold.  We had ideas of actually running the race 8 months ago but the reality is neither Ali’s or my knees would hold up to that kind of pounding.

America has transformed into the land of the fat asses and nowhere was it more apparent than American Idol.  You have these big fat women (and men) coming on with double or triple chins and huge guts wanting to be a pop music star.  It’s laughable.  People are so damn lazy when it comes to personal health discipline, it really sickens me.  The ironic thing is nowadays calling out a fat ass as a fat ass is almost akin to a racial slur.  Some perverse element in society wants us all to believe that being shaped like the michelin man is just fine.  It’s the person INSIDE that matters.  I love that mentality, enabling your fatness by hiding behind idealisms.

Well American Idol has returned to the airwaves with two monster long two hour shows, a bit too much Idol for me.  The shows were more depressing than entertaining.  They were filled with broken dreams and tears as the news was given to the contestants that they weren’t good enough in various cruel ways.  A lot of these people were just brutally bad. So bad that I would cover my own eyes in embarrassment for them.  Throughout the 4 hours of shows there were a very small percentage of people that were any good. 

Another thing that was very disturbing was Paula Abdul.  She was obviously chemically altered for the majority of the auditions.  How in the world she is allowed to be on the show in that state is beyond me.  It’s embarrassing for the show.  All you had to do was look at her face and you could tell she was wasted.  It’s a shame.

Our christmas tree is still hanging on although you can tell it is starting to slide downhill.  Some brown is visible and when I water it each night it drops considerable needles from the intrusion of my arm. It still is taking water though and still smells good.  I am hoping it makes it another couple weekends yet, we’ll see.  The cats still spend most of their time hanging under it.

Yesterday at the gym I was looking for something to do as a chest exercise.  I was looking around the gym and my eyes landed on the squat rack.  I decided I would do an incline one handed push up, a poor man’s version of what Rocky used to do..  So I grab the safety bar and have to adjust my body around to find an angle that worked.  So I awkwardly did 8 reps and then switched to the other arm.  I am not so sure how beneficial it was to my chest as opposed to the rest of my core.  To keep myself straight I had to strain like hell all the way down to my knees.  Well when I was in the middle of trying my second go round I felt something twinge in my hip so I bagged it.  Luckily it doesn’t hurt today.

The expansion pack to World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade hit the streets yesterday.  Although I crowed about not being willing to wait out at a store to snag a copy, I had a copy sitting neatly on my desk Tuesday morning.  My co-worker was crazy enough to get his at the stroke of midnight and he grabbed a second copy for me since he uses one of my accounts to store materials in bank characters.  So since I had it, of course I installed it.  The expansion opens up a whole new universe of things to see, explore, defeat and kill.  This game may entertain me well into my 40’s.  The new area I have seen sort of reminds you of what hell would look like, it’s barren and filled with 50 foot tall demons that would love nothing better then to mess you up. 

Hell I haven’t blogged in forever.  We had a branch open and most of my time the last three or four working days have been dedicated to that. How am I supposed to remember back that long?  Well here is what I can recall.

Last Thursday after work I went over to Sugden Park to run solo.  I didn’t have our fancy GPS watch that I have become so accustomed to.  It is awesome to know exactly how fast you are running and exactly how far you have run.  So I roughed it and used the stopwatch function on my new manly G-shock watch and the distance markers that are along the running trail.  The official measured trail is supposedly 1.25 miles so what I did was walk to the end the trail and started there.  I ran to the beginning, turned around and ran back to the end so it gave me approximately a two and a half mile run.

Running by myself is tough, much tougher than when I run with Ali.  The reason is without Ali there as my built in speed governor, I am at the mercy of my mind which tells me to push it, it’s even worse if I run a race solo.  I covered the distance at about an 8:20 somethin pace, pretty fast for me and much faster than the 10 minute miles I log with Ali.  Originally in my head I set a goal of 20 minutes to cover the run, instead I did it in a bit under 21:30.  So in my mind, I missed my goal.  Running that pace had some repercussions.  For the next two or three days I had beyond what I would call normal discomfort in my left (good) knee.  It was bad enough that I scrubbed plans to run a 5k race on Saturday.  My knees feel better now but I have to be careful, the last thing I need is a relapse.  Oh yea, I am playing in a volleyball tournament this Saturday. 🙂

The weekend had a decent amount of chores to be done.  On Saturday we planted a couple plants we got from Ali’s mom in pots and the three remaining live christmas trees got relocated.  Two of them went to two of the few remaining, open, somewhat high spots on our property and the other one got planted in a large pot and put on our lanai.  The potted one I have hopes of sometime being our Xmas tree one year.

I did some preliminary work for my sprinkler project, namely figuring out the flow rate on my well pump which clocked in at roughly 18 gallons per minute.  Depending on the type of sprinkler heads I use I can probably put 6 or 7 on each “circuit”  Right now in my head I am figuring I need no more than 4 circuits.  I only want to water the immediate mound the house is on and the associated landscaping including the orchard and garden areas.  I need to do much more planning before I do any purchasing though.

Saturday night was the big Eagles game.  It was disappointing that they lost.  However I can’t really say I felt they should have won.  Their defense was dominated by the Saints who ran the ball at will.  Even with that being the case, the Birds had a shot at the end thanks to a Reggie Bush fumble.  Then after an awesome drive extending 4th & 10 conversion by the Eagles, it was erased by a false start by some scrub offensive lineman.  Instead of going for it on 4th & 15, fat Andy decided to punt the ball away and rely on the same defense that had been pushed around all game.  Wouldn’t you know it, they were pushed around once again and were unable to stop the Saints, game over.  Of course I was angry at the end, victory was attainable even with as poorly as the D played.  However I got over it fast, reminding myself as I said before, this all has been a bonus.  The playoffs were a pipe dream 6 weeks ago. 

They have some real needs to fill next year.  On offense they need to resign Stallworth, he is a bonafide number one receiver and if he can stay healthy, a great addition to the team.  McNabb has to stay healthy but if he doesn’t keeping Garcia around would be a great safety net.  On D the needs are large.  Andy keeps drafting defensive lineman that to be honest, suck.  Well wait, Trent Cole is good but for the most part, we have gotten next to nothing out of the draft with d-lineman.  They need big strong lineman that dont get blown off the line, allowing teams to run over them at will.  They also need to address linebacker.  They just don’t make many plays, Trotter included.  And finally I don’t know if Consadine is any better than Michael Lewis, he just sucks in different areas.  We need a better safety back there and while you are at, some higher quality backups in the secondary than Assholio Hanson and Roderick Go Back to the Hood.  With the Birds out of the playoffs I am pulling for either Indy or Chicago to win it all.

On Sunday we decided to tackle our cleanup job for January since the rest of the month was going to be hella-busy, cleaning out the shed.  The shed had never been completely cleaned out since we got it four years ago or so.  It was a mess.  I brought over our big trash bin AND the neighbors who don’t live here trash bin as well as our recycle bin and pretty much filled em all.  Plus I drug a bunch of unwanted shit out to the street for the vultures to snap up.  I’d say the entire process took about 3 hours.  We gutted it, swept it out and then carefully put stuff back in, organizing along the way.  It looks way better.

Late Sunday afternoon we went towards town.  First we made a pitstop at the office so we could print out a bunch of race forms for the race Ali is organizing. While they printed we went to Olive Garden for dinner.  We had a gift card AND a three dollars off coupon, yahoo.  When we were at the bar waiting, I looked down at a blond at the far end.  She struck me as familiar but I couldn’t immediately place it.  Then I realized it was the girl whom we bowled with , along with her fiance/husband who wasn’t there (don’t remember if they were married).

  We bowled on a team with them during our first year of living in Florida. We did the bowling thing because we thought it would be a good way to meet people.  We actually got along pretty well with him/her.  They even invited us out to their family’s place for a Christmas visit.  After the league was done we invited them out to our place to watch some playoff football.  They wound up showing up over two hours late and never called to say what was up.  When they did arrive they said nothing about the tardiness and there was a weird vibe in the air like they had been fighting or something.  Anyway pretty much the entire time they were there, there was an awkward, uncomfortable feeling going on.  They left and we never talked to them again.

Well anyway, she glanced at me but I don’t think she put it together, it’s been a long time.  Well I didn’t say anything to Ali then because I know her first move would be to make an oh so obvious turn and stare.  So once we sat down I told her about it.  She did her obvious turn and stare as the woman was at a table maybe 30 feet away.  I rolled around in my head if it would be a good idea to say “Hi”.  Eh I didn’t.  The idea of crafting small talk just wasn’t what I was looking to do.  She was eating with a table full of women, wonder if her relationship status is still the same?  Guess I will never know.

After a good dinner we headed back to the office to pick up what printed and then went home.  We got home early enough to sit down and watch the second Pirates of the Carribean movie. It was a good flick.  I dunno if it was worthy of the huge box office numbers it drew but it was good.  It had a lot of “hey how did they do that” special effects and Johnny Depp is great in the role.  One thing Ali and I both noticed was there were a lot of the dialogue that we just couldn’t make out.  I’m not sure if it was the heavy accents many characters spoke with, poor dvd rip audio quality or a combo of the two.  There were many moments where we turned to each other and said “What did they say??”  It gets a solid B, I will definitely watch the third one.  It was no Rocky Balboa though. 🙂

Monday Ali was gone for a good chunk of the day leaving me at home to play Warcraft and do chores.  Early in the weekend I said something about us using this extra day off for me to do something like go to the beach or possibly walk Corkscrew sanctuary, it never materialized.  So anyway, I spent copious amounts of time leveling my paladin as well as spot choring during the breaks.  It was the sort of day that makes me feel worthless. 

 The big upgrade for WoW was released last night at midnight.  I read stories of people by the hundreds lined up to get the game, unreal.  That is one thermometer I use to gauge what is left of my sanity.  The thought of waiting in line at midnight with a ton of other WoW geeks just to have the expansion pack the minute it was available never crossed my mind.  My copy will arrive in the mail on Saturday, much more convenient. 🙂

Back to the grind, a busy few weeks are on the docket.

I have had an odd issue for the past year or so.  I have a hard time parking my vehicle straight in a parking space. Time after time, I pull in, think I have perfectly aligned myself parallel with the space stripes only to get out and see I am crooked.  I don’t recall having this issue before.  It is really odd, I bet I only get it straight 25% of the time.  It must be a precursor to total alzheimer’s.

For two years I have have had this watch on my Amazon wish list but noone got it for me.  So I used the Amazon gift cert that my bro got me to buy it for myself.  My main watch for the last 10 years or so has been a Swiss Army watch that Ali got for me early in our relationship.  The Swiss Army is nice but sort of bland for my taste and all it does is, well, tell time.  My new watch is a Casio G-Shock.  It is an awesome piece of timekeeping tech.  First, it looks substantial, it looks and feels “manly”, something I was looking for.  On top of the good looks it is chock full of tech.  It is solar powered so in theory, you will be changing batteries far less often as long as the watch sees a decent amount of light.  It sets the time automagically from the radio signal in Fort Collins.  No more setting the time.  It even has an auto backlight feature.  If the watch senses it is dark and it senses you tilt it towards your face at more than a 40 degree angle, it knows you want to read it so it will flip on the backlight for a couple seconds.  How cool is that? 🙂 

For the last couple years I have taken up the practice of applying skin cream on my face each morning before work in a futile attempt to slow the effects of time on my appearance.  I’ve used stuff from Gilette and Nivea that was specifically designed for men.  Well I was almost out so when I was at the grocery store I needed to pick up more.  I looked and looked but could not find any of the just for men stuff.  So I just grabbed something else that sounded good.  The new cream felt and looked like the other stuff I was using.  The only difference is instead of the manly, slight cologne smell of the other face cream I had, now I smell like a fresh faced young girl.  Oh well, if it slows down the wrinkles I will live with it.

I had a very detailed and realistic dream last night.  I had a new job and it was my first day.  I was in a big office building and I was meeting with whom I assume who was my boss.  This guy looked like a character out of Office Space.  He was extremely nerdy looking and had next to no forehead.  His hairline was practically sitting on top of his eyebrows.  His hair was tight curls that had a straw-like texture.  I was asking him details about the job and remember asking about how many were in the IT department.  “Just you” he said.  I looked at him in astonishment.  The company had this huge office building and I was the only one supporting it??  “We only have 63 computers” he followed.  I wondered how this company ran it’s business if only a small percentage of it’s employees had computers.

Later in the dream I was back in a cubicle area and my nerdy boss was on the phone with a bunch of employees gathered around.  He was making a phony phone call using bad impressions and ridiculous singing.  I sat there and rolled my eyes and as I did I caught the glance of a cute girl that was smirking at the boss’s stupid entertainment.  I remember thinking how the hell did I get here?  What happened to my nice, laid back, secure job at the Tax Collector?  I was confused.  I dreaded the thought of having to start over but eventually told myself that if you aren’t moving forward you just stand still.  I woke up to the alarm just then.  I was relieved when I realized it was a dream, although the feeling of being a situation new and foreign actually had some distant appeal.