All posts by Duf

Our weekend was planned out, go to Daytona, do the timeshare thing early Saturday morning, go to the Kennedy Space Center, come back Sunday. A nice little trip that shouldn’t cost a lot of dough. None of it happened.

We were on our way up to Daytona on Saturday when we realized that due to traffic we would not get there by 3pm as we were supposed to. So we called the resort to let them know we would be a bit late. Sorry, they are having Black College Reunion week in Daytona, the streets are closed and there are no rooms available, call your agent that booked it. What????????? Ali called the travel agent, they said they just found out about it that morning and had tried to call us. We we didn’t leave until 10 am and there was no message left on the machine, but yea ok, you tried to call us. So now what? They said they would find us another place to stay around Orlando. They called back and redirected us to a place called Celebration World Resort. No additional costs but we still had to sit through their timeshare presentation. We found the place and unloaded, then thought about what our new plan should be. We came up with, let’s go to Universal Saturday after the presentation and then Sunday go to the Kennedy Space Center. So we still had some time to kill on Friday so Ali suggested we go find downtown Disney since we didn’t get to see it the last time we went up to Orlando in December. We stopped at one of those tourist info/ ticket agent places that you see every few hundred yards in the Disney area to ask how to get to DD. While there I asked the lady how much the Universal tickets cost. 58 a piece but hey, if you want to sit through a timeshare presentation, you can get 2 tickets for 45 bucks!! Another one??? Hmmm I thought about it for a second and figured it was worth 60 bucks to me to sit through another sales pitch. So now our Saturday had TWO timeshare pitches on the schedule!

We found our way to Downtown Disney. In typical Disney fashion it was grandiose, beautiful and CROWDED! The first thing Ali saw there was that Cirque del Soliel runs a nightly show there, she loves Cirque del Soleil. She wanted to find out info. They had no ticket prices posted so that was an immediate red flag for me. Then I watched in horror as a gentleman paid over 400 dollars for tickets but I wasn’t sure how many he bought. We eventually found out the tickets started at 70 bucks for the bad seats and went up. OUCH. I was able to negotiate with Ali that the next time we come up we can schedule to go to a show and that dropping 150 bucks out of the gate like this would not be a good way to start our supposed inexpensive weekend. We saw the sights, went into stores and took in a great meal at the Rain Forest Cafe. It was a jungle type atmosphere inside complete with a jungle canopy, animals, fish tanks and even a pretend thunderstorm every half hour. We didn’t get back to the room until around 10:30. We were quite tired and had to be at our first timeshare presentation by 7:15 so we had to hit the sack.

After a restless nights sleep I got up unwillingly at 6am. The first presentation was fine, very similar to the one we attended the last time we were in Orlando. The concept of the timeshare was a good one to us but money and the fact that the resort didn’t allow animals killed the idea for Ali. We collected our voucher for Universal and headed back to Celebration to attend presentation number 2. Again I figured, more of the same, blah blah, blah. Well this plan was different than the others we saw. It was a point system that allowed you a lot more flexibility than the other options we saw. In the other plans, you had a week at the resort that you could use there or you could trade to use for a week at another resort around the country or around the world. (with a small charge for the trade) With this plan, you used the points in the same manner but you also have the option to use the points to pay for other aspects of a trip like car rental and airline miles. That sparked our interest. We saw the model rooms and they were quite nice, not extravagant but brand new, well maintained and clean. Then Ali saw in the information that the resort was pet friendly. That really sparked her interest. The idea that she could bring Nicki with was very appealing to her. That idea although not as exciting to me was a selling point. Finally we got down to the dollars and cents. We opted for a plan where we get point allocations every other year. This allowed us the flexibility to take as much as 2 weeks of vacations every year while keeping the cost down. We were close to making a decision and then had to work out the final price. We negotiated it down to a number where we could simply pay it in full without financing. That was the only way we would do it. Yea, I know, timeshares, they often come with automatic negative feelings. But in our case it should more than pay for itself in 5 years. However there is no way in hell I thought there was anyway I would have signed up for one before Saturday.

All of this action on Saturday and we still didn’t even go to Universal yet. On the way to the park I was already feeling some buyer’s remorse, I think it is pretty normal to feel that way after dropping large amounts of money but still I was feeling rather down. The park was full, not packed but full. When we got there we had a decision to make. Universal has this thing call the Express pass. It is a ticket you buy in addition to the regular admission that fast tracks you on all of the ride lines. It is like Disney’s Fast Pass except you can use it on EVERY ride but only 1 time. However Disney’s setup is free, Universal’s pass costs and additional 31 DOLLARS PER TICKET. Well we decided since we got the tickets at a discount we would splurge and get the express passes. In retrospect, a wise move. We waited no longer than 15 minutes for any ride, while the “regular” people waited an hour or more. It helped us get through the park much quicker. My favorite rides were the Hulk Roller Coaster and the Spider Man simulation ride. the funniest moment of the day was when we rode the Jurrasic Park water ride, we were seated behind a man who was visibly drunk and his family. Before the ride started the attendant told the man he had to take off his hat. He drunkenly whipped it off his head and in the process forgot his expensive sunglasses were up there as well. The glasses flew into the water. The guy just shrugged his shoulders, smiled and slurred “Oh well 150 bucks, no big deal…”

By late afternoon I was feeling pretty crappy. The combination of the timeshare purchase weighing on my head, some nausea from the rides and the unrelenting hoardes of people were pulling down my mood considerably. We were going to head out but decided to walk over to NBA city and the Hard Rock. In NBA city they had hand prints of many famous players, it was fun to compare hand sizes. Kobe had one of the biggest hands there, my hand looked childlike in comparison. Surprisingly, my hand was almost the exact same size as Grant Hill’s. Inside they had some basetball games of skill, including shooting things, dribbling things and even a machine to test your vertical. I was tempted to test my vert but shyed away when I saw it was 6 bucks and knowing that if I wasn’t loose my vert would suck anyway.

Then we hit the Hard Rock, it was awesome inside, with a huge pink cadillac spinning above the bar. We weren’t going to eat anything but then decided to plop down at the bar anyway. I had a couple beers and we both ordered salads. It relaxed me a bit. The alcohol alleviated some of my ill will and we checked out a few more areas of the park until we left at about 7:30. I enjoyed Universal much more than the Magic Kingdom because it is much more geared towards adults. However I still got real sick of the crowds real fast. I asked the bartender at the Hard Rock when the slowest times are. He said May, September, November and early December, mark that down. I also don’t like the feeling when I go to the parks that I am hemmoraging money. Everything is sooooo expensive it’s just ridiculous. At the end of the day I am afraid to look in my wallet to assess the damages.

We got back to the room at a reasonable hour and relaxed. I had another restless night’s sleep. We packed up and had a very quick 3 hour trip door to door. My mom stayed at our place to watch the animals so that made it very easy for us. She was surprised about our timeshare news but I didn’t expect anything less. All of the pictures from the weekend are here. Some funny stuff in there. Also some more vette stuff is up. Our recent spending habits has made me declare a moratorium on any and all unnecessary spending. The vette will remain in it’s present state for awhile.

Some observations from the weekend:

Kids are fat. I saw countless young girls with big rolls of fat spilling out from their belly shirts and tons of young men of the same rotund build. I think more kids are fat than not anymore, a disaster in the making.

You can average 80 mph between here and Orlando with little worry of being pulled over for speeding because cars are passing you.

The average amount of time the initial excitement from entering an amusement park mutates into annoyance with the entire scene is roughly 2 hours

The idea of self service lockers where they ID you by a scan of your fingerprint sucks and does not work

Old people(like me)can’t go on rides continuously without feeling sick…….

Last night at 8:45 there was a rocket launch at the Kennedy Space Center. We were able to go out in our backyard and witness it! It was pitch dark so it was very easy to spot it. With a pair of binoculars you could see the rocket in great detail. It was odd to observe the trajectory. From our vantage point it looked like the rocket ascended at about a 40 degree angle. I’m sure it has to do with the fact the KSC is some 300 miles away. Regardless, it was awesome to see. Within a couple minutes the rocket looked like just another star in the sky.

When we bought our last car, the 2003 Sentra, I was really dumb about it. Incredibly dumb if you factor in the fact that I sold cars for over a year and a half so I know about how it all works. We bought the car on a whim and basically just went in and looked to be at a certain payment amount, a cardinal mistake but I figured that the dealer wasn’t going to be able to do it. Well they did and we happily signed the papers and went on our merry way. The entire deal left a bad taste in my mouth for several reasons but this week I found one more thing to be pissed off about. On a urge I called NMAC to check the interest rate the loan was at. 7.5%!!! With today’s low rates, 7.5 was close to being highway robbery. Those son of bitches, of course I really can blame noone but myself. Well I promptly called the credit union and refinanced the car for 3.9%, saving me a couple months on the term of the loan as well as dropping my payment 25 bucks a month. Now those Nissan creeps won’t be making any financing or service dollars from me. Although I have been generally pleased with the Nissan’s I have owned over the last 5 years I won’t ever buy another new one as a result of the BS I have had to put up with from the 3 different Nissan dealers I have had to associate with.

You know when I first saw manufacturer’s putting DVD players in vehicles, I thought it was incredibly cool. Watch a DVD while in a car, how great huh? I wanted such a vehicle for a short while even though the reality that I drive 99% of the time when we go anywhere, which would mean that I would never actually be the one to watch anything. They are commonly used to pacify children. Throw in the Lion King dvd and let the kids mindlessly stare at it while mom drives to her errands. I must be getting old fashioned but something about this bugs me. Why do kids need to be entertained every waking second? Whatever happened to staring out the window, daydreaming, taking in the sights, and just wondering about stuff? I know many parents that use the TV as their baby sitter. While this is convenient, it certainly is not an ideal way to raise a kid in my opinion. I know it is odd to hear such an opinion from someone that watches more than his share of TV but I’m an adult, right? 🙂

I saw about half of GW’s news conference, that was enough. It was more of the same with the normal share of George stumbling and bumbling for answers and falling back on the old stand by’s like “Stay the course….” Wait, didn’t his dad use that line too? It was funny when he was questioned about why he and Cheyney are going to appear together in front of the 911 commission instead of separate like was requested. I joked to Ali that George would say “It’s because Dick is a much better talkerator…” The classic Bushism for the night was “…you got me under the spot.” Hey I don’t think I would be able to answer questions off the cuff in an intelligent manner either, but this is the President we are talking about here. For me, the entire event just further reenforced my desire to get rid of this guy, soon.

I found an interesting study in human behavior that I passed on to Keener. He duplicated the experiement in his work environment with staggering results. The experiment is very simple. Take the bottle of handsoap from the sink in the company lunchroom, put a sign on it that says DO NOT REMOVE, and put the soap dispenser in the fridge, yep in the FRIDGE. This is a test of common sense versus the urge to do what a sign tells us, no matter how non-sensical it is. There is no logical reason to leave soap in a refrigerator, right? Well the soap has been in there for almost a WEEK! Evidently the urge to follow a sign is greater than the implementation of common sense. Try this experiment in your workplace and report your results.

Wonder where the blog gnome has been…..

Even though I had a terrible attitude about Easter on Friday, it turned out to be a nice holiday all the same. On Saturday we had chores a plenty to get done (what else is new) Since we are going to be gone this upcoming weekend we had to knock some stuff out ahead of time. My mom is going to be house sitting for us and she loves to use the pool so I have been doing battle with some stubborn algae that keeps clouding the water. I hammered the water with enough shock to strip paint as well as replacing the main pool filter and the mineral cartridge. The water is better but not good enough, hopefully I can get it all straightened out by this weekend. Saturday night we watched the “It’s the Easter Beagle Charlie Brown” special. Although it doesn’t pack the same punch as the 3 classics (Christmas, Thanksgiving & Halloween) the Easter special is still a favorite. Unlike the others, I have probably only seen this one 2 or 3 times in my lifetime.

On Easter I hid a basket for Ali in the microwave. It was equipped with some Peanuts Easter treats as well as the customary Peeps (one of Ali’s favorites). Then instead of someone working 3 or 4 hours on a meal that will be consumed in 15 minutes, we decieded to take my mom to Carraba’s for Easter dinner. They opened at 12 and we got there shortly thereafter. I was sure it would be a mob scene but surprisingly we were able to sit right down and were out of there in less than an hour and a half. We went back to Mom’s place where she asked me to rake up some leaves from a huge tree that is dropping leaves like it was fall. She said something about they were blowing around the neighborhood and she didn’t want to be a bad neighbor or something like that. She said she couldn’t rake leaves because of her bad shoulder. Mom has a number of things wrong with her. Her method of handling her ailments doesn’t make much sense to me. She hurts herself doing something, then she is scared to do anything so she restricts her activity, her muscles get even weaker so she is more susceptible to injury, and so it continues to spiral downward. It frustrates me to see her in such shape and I have repeatedly encouraged her to do some sort of regular exercise. (along with quitting smoking) But for whatever reason she fails to do so. So I have adopted the “Can lead a horse to water…” attitude. She has to do it because she wants to, I can’t make her. Mom also has some sort of weird crusade about air conditioning. She wears the fact that she hasn’t turned her AC on yet like a badge of honor. It was 88 and humid yesterday, yet she had her windows open. She said there was a great breeze blowing through the house. Yea, a hot, humid, sweaty breeze. 🙂 Weird.

Anyways, after the leaf raking we walked down to the beach and spent some quality time there. Even though we were only there maybe an hour and a half, I was toasted. The highlight of our stay was me stepping in to try to help a young boy retrieve a kite that was at least 500 feet in the air. He was trying to reel it in and wasn’t having much luck. The string was hooked around some tree tops so it was angled low to the ground so people kept walking into the string and in the process almost falling over themselves. (the beach was very full) I thought I could save the day. Well during the 15 minute reel in process I came to learn that this kid was the 4th or 5th owner of the kite that day. Evidently some older guy put the kite up, got tired of it and then gave it to a kid. That kid got tired of it and gave it to another kid. This process evidently continued for awhile until we got to junior here. So I tried to hurriedly reel it in but quickly noticed that the kite was not breaking free of whatever it was hooked on in the tree tops. When I got it as far as I could without pulling the kite into the tree I told the kid I can either yank real hard and hope it breaks free or just leave it. He didn’t say much so I decided to pull like hell on it. The string broke but the kite remained tethered to the tree tops. Oh well, sorry kid. He still didn’t say much. I asked if he wanted the string, he shrugged and said I guess. About that time his FATHER comes up and consoles him, saying it wasnt a big deal. I am wondering to myself “Why am I the one trying to retrieve this kite for this kid when dad was right there?” Dope, help your kid.

The gulf water was pleasant, around 75 degrees. The wind was really gusty so it whipped up some waves making the beach sound more ocean like. It was relaxing to just sit back and enjoy. We hoofed it back to mom’s and headed home in the Vette.

There was some minor work on the vette done this weekend. I got my replacement shifter knob. Remeber 90 bucks new? I got one used off ebay for 18 bucks that looked brand new after some leather conditioner was applied, a nice find. I really need to get down and dirty and tackle some of the bigger issues soon. I think I need to replace the intake gasket on it, a huge job for someone with limited experience ripping apart motor components. I once replaced the intake on my 71 Chevelle but that was a hell of a lot simpler. While I have the intake off there are probably other things I should do while it is apart. I am a bit scared to do it because once I have it ripped apart , there is no return. If I mess something up it could be a real PIA to get it working correctly. So many bolts, brackets and other parts have to come out to get it off. I also need to replace the transmission fluid, a potentially VERY messy job.

This upcoming weekend we are heading to Daytona Beach for a little mini-vacation. While up there we plan to go to the Kennedy Space center. Outer space was one of my first fascinations I can remember growing up so I am really pumped to see the KSC. I checked out the web site, tons of things that look interesting to me. Should be a blast.

It’s odd how strength cycles, since I did 265 on my bench a few months back my strength tailed. Then today for some odd reason I felt like I could do more. I slapped 260 on and was able to do it with relatively good form. The body is a weird thing. 265 next week?

A holiday weekend. I never was much into Easter. As a kid the Easter egg hunts, easter baskets and stuff, while nice had nowhere near the punch of Christmas. However Easter did mean a couple days off of school. As an adult there are no associated days off with Easter so it is more of a pain than anything. You have your Easter stuff on Sunday and then right back to the grind Monday. Just basically shortens your weekend.

Our plans are nothing special. We are going to go out to dinner with Mom. Possibly our neighbors and some of their relatives may join us. Afterward we may go hang at the beach a little bit. Perhaps it is still a hangover from my earlier in the week melacholy spirit, but I am about as unenthused about Easter as you can imagine. Don’t color eggs, do baskets or even eat easter candy anymore.

Well the attempted soiling of my blog has continued so I blocked some more ip addresses and more importantly, disabled automatic linking of web addresses so even if they try to post web addresses, they won’t be active links which defeats their purpose. F those punks.

Just heard the William Hung CD. Wow, it is entertaining. Nothing but William crooning some of your favorites like Hotel California, Rocketman, YMCA and many more. (of course she-bang too) 🙂

My sleeping pattern is still whacked from the time change. I have been staying up past 11 for the last 5 days and it is taking it’s toll. I wake up feeling like a zombie. For some odd reason, I am staying up late trying to get through Waterworld on the Tivo. That movie wasn’t as horrible as advertised if you ask me. 🙂

My moods have been pretty horrible recently too. It seems that many times they coincide with a full moon, not sure why that is. My mom always said my dad would go nuts around then so maybe it’s just the way I am wired. Monday after work I felt miserable. Down about everything. I feel a bit better today.

They began work on the lot next to us. The wall of stickers and shrubs that we thought would always offer us privacy has been flattened by a bulldozer. The new house looks to be closer to ours than we thought it would be. Awhile back I actually found the owner of that property, an old couple from up north somewhere. I called them, seeing if they would be interested in selling the lot to us. The wife grumpily said no and hung up on me. I followed up the call with a letter to them, nicely asking that if they decide to sell the lot to please give us first crack at it. So I was quite pissed when I saw the realtor sign go up on it a year or so ago. Old jerks.

Yea if you don’t have XP (auto resizes) some of these pics will seem huge, sorry. Some of the pics from Ding Darling are here.

Some cute dog pics have been added.

Remember that gator I caught? Here is a great pic of him.

Some more pics were added here as well, look at the bottom.

And finally some more cruise pictures were found. In my opinion th best ones yet. The images of the super bright blue water still amaze me to this day, check em out at the bottom of this page.

It seems somebody from overseas sees the ability to post comments as a method of posting weblinks for all sorts of shady websites dealing with stuff like warez, porn and the sort. For the last month or so I have been seeing these comments pop up. I diligently go in and delete them. The offender continues his games so I have started to block ip ranges to disallow posting from certain areas. Get a life doods….

Last week was a training week, a nice break from the routine. Windows Server 2003 has some cool new stuff, the coolest to me being shadow copy where you can automatically have recent versions of files backed up so if someone fat fingers it you can hop right back to the prior version of a document. Pretty cool admin tools have been added as well. The downside is to do a lot of the cool stuff, all of your DC’s need to be Win2K3 which at least in our case, isn’t going to be happening anytime soon. The class inspired me enough to take the 2 tests that are required to get my MCSE 2003 cert to go along with my NT4 and Win2K cert.

This weekend FLEW by. Saturday I cleaned while Ali got caught up on some Pampered Chef stuff. Then we were out most of the afternoon hitting 4 or 5 different spots to pick up assorted household items. Then in the evening we were watering, weeding, planting stuff in the garden, doin laundry, blah blah, throw in the time change and we didn’t hit bed to close to midnight.

Sunday Nicki woke me up at her normal time, evidently she doesn’t care if I go to bed at 10 or midnight. I loaded up the truck with our bikes after giving them a scrub down to wash off the spider webs and put air in the tires. We went to Ding Darling Reserve in Sanibel. Sanibel is a contrast from the beautiful but mostly man made landscaping in Naples. Sanibel is more or less in it’s natural state with dense native foliage everywhere. It is a very small island with only one way on and off of it. The Ding Darling reserve is a huge park that takes up a good chunk of the island. It has a cool 5 mile trail that you can walk, bike or drive through. The area is full of wildlife like birds, fish, gators and we even saw our first manatee. It is really a great place. I went through the park with my mom a while back but we drove through. Riding a bike was definitely the way to go. By the end, in total it is an 8 mile ride so our rears were a bit sore but it was worth it. We got a bunch of great pics, many of which I will be posting online in the next day or so. By the time we got home it was after 5.

We still had a shitload of stuff to get done so we spent the rest of the weekend vacuuming, doing laundry and cleaning cat puke. Speaking of which, our one cat is starting to push me into the territory where I am considering my options with her continued existence. She has diabetes so she gets a shot everyday. We have to give her special food and recently she has been on a vomitting spree. If you have cats, they vomit, there is no way to avoid it and she always has been a puker but this has been excessive. She pukes, goes and stuffs her face and pukes some more. I find myself getting infuriated with the cat even though logically I know she isn’t purposely turning our carpet into a brown stained wasteland. The turn for the worse seems to coincide with some hairball and tartar control treats I had been giving them. So I have discontinued that in hopes things that will settle down into a more normal 2 or 3 pukes a week pattern. If it doesn’t get better, I suppose a trip to the vet is in order but I already know that there is no way I would shell out big bucks if the problem would turn out to be serious in nature. Just not worth it to me, no more cats for me, ever.

Vette update, got a bit of time in. Totally scrubbed and cleaned out the fusebox with electrical cleaner, finally installed a fuse panel door, replaced the 2 front speakers so now I have 4 working again and and reconnected a vacuum line that was disconnected. I took the Vette to class Friday. It was great fun to cruise the highway in, definitely a joy at 70mph+. Discovered this morning another issue, no heat. A minor issue in Florida but something I need to look at just the same. I have a detailed page of the projects on the car here.

There were tons of other thoughts that I marked as bloggable in my brain during the past week but can’t recall them all right now, hopefully they will come to me.

This story sickens me. We free the country from a brutal dictator and they thank us by continuing to attack us? Sure, most of the attacks are probably from remaining hard liners, taliban and al Qeda members. But these were just normal citizens that formed a mob, drug these murdered people around the street and hung them up like a grotesque prize! Although I realize it isn’t PC, isn’t christian and won’t happen, it’s moments like this that I sincerely would like to see that area just flattened. It seems impossible to try to deal humanely with those that are blinded by their faith and their hatred of the US. Does anyone think for a moment that the SECOND we pull out of there they will not simply revert back to chaos? It is practically guaranteed.

I took some more aerial pictures this evening. I got the plane up higher and got some great shots. This is my new favorite. Peruse all of the aerials here.

I also had the good fortune of actually fixing some things on the Vette. I finally got around to applying “no-sieze” to all of the lug nuts to prevent further knuckle busting stripped lug nuts in the future. I also replaced the front emblem as well as got the power seats working! Wow, some progress, it feels good.