All posts by Duf

Oprah sucks……

Dr Phil blows too….

This weekend had it’s ups and downs like most but I enjoyed it. Saturday morning I was woken abruptly at about 6:20 am by the dog scratching and whining at the door. It startled and angered me. So I shot out of bed told the dog to be quiet and then found my mom outside smoking. I asked her if she could keep an eye on the dog if she is going to let her out so she isn’t waking me up on a weekend. My mom was a bit mad at my mini-tirade but I tried to reason with her that if I saw the dog carrying on at her dor and she was asleep I would do something to either quiet the dog or stick it outside so it isn’t such a bother. After that the rest of the morning I was in a pretty bad mood as we had to do the house cleaning. I helped my buddy move his stuff to an extravagant storage unit for a few hours. After that, it was pretty much raining all day off and on so we weren’t missing a lot by staying inside.

Late in the day I asked Ali if she wanted to go to dinner at PF Changs and meet my mom there. She agreed and we went down to meet mom. Well she was in the middle of a big sale. Her biggest sale since she started her job. We didn’t mind waiting and walked the store for awhile. She finished up and we had a nice dinner. If you never had lettuce wraps, you should try them, VERY good. PF Changs meal prices are very reasonable but their alcohol prices are not! 2 glasses of wine and a light beer set me back 17 bucks, sheesh! Mom’s mood was noticeably better and more upbeat the rest of the weekend. I guess making a big sale will do that for ya.

We held off on mowing the grass Saturday because we wanted to see if some of the water would dry up so we could do it all on Sunday. No such luck, as a result of the Saturday rain it was actually more of a mess on Sunday. We mowed anyway, mowing equal parts water and grass. The mower looks like it was 4 wheeling after a session like this so I gave it a bath afterward. It wasnt that hot on Sunday (mid to upper 80’s) but the humidity was off the charts. I was simply walking around with the weed whacker and literally had streams of sweat coming off me. Very muggy even by Florida standards.

I crashed not one but two of my airplanes yesterday. First I was bringing in my SW400 for landing. I wanted to land it close to me because of standing water on my property and didn’t want get it wet. So I am bringing it in close to me, I am facing it, get disoriented and take a direct hit on my shoulder as I duck out of the way! 🙂 It bounces off of me and dumps into the trench filled with water! I quickly grab it. It landed battery side down so the electronics appear to be ok. Grrrr. Have a black & blue mark where I got nailed.

Later I take my bluecor beast out to give it a whirl with a different prop. Hmmm a bit windy but what the heck? I toss it up and everything is fine. The the wind kicks up. My low tech tape down equipment door blows upen and I start getting glitching. It goes down out of my sight in front of the house. I cut the power and hope for the best. I heard the big thump as it hit down. The walk of shame wasn’t bad. The motor released from it’s tie wrap mount and there was some minor foam damage, nothing bad. Closer inspection revealed that one of my servos apparently died in the crash. Oh well. One of these days I will learn, one of these days….

The rest of my Sunday was primarily a geek fest with me playing close to 20 games of Frozen Throne. I got tired of getting slaughtered so I put some effort into at least playing competitively. It paid off sort of with my record now hovering close to .500 or so. I really enjoy the game.

Tonight the Eagles have their first preseason game. I hope to catch at least the first part of it when the first teamers play a series or two.

A quick 3 day week, I could get used to it. Last night I put my homemade plane back in the air. I found out through some RC message boards that I had the propellor on backwards! Reversing it made a big difference in it’s flying capabilities! Much better. It’s very cool since I can build one for about 5 bucks in materials. (plus electronics) I hope to do more tweaking this weekend.

My slate is full this weekend as there is a long list of things to do. Ali always hates it when I have a long list. I tell her to not worry about it, that I will do it all. She refuses to take that answer since she feels guilty when I do nothing but bust ass all weekend. Leads into all sorts of other issues, argh.

I caught the puppy in the act of attempting to start yet another hole in the vinyl floor last night. I snuck up behind her and wailed her on the ass and screamed NO! She yelped and ran away. Ali thought it was extreme but obviously her method of firmly scolding was not registering with the dog. Hopefully my method works. A little fear is a good thing in a pet / owner relastionship in my opinion. If they don’t respect your discipline they have no reason to heed it.

Mom has almost 2 weeks under her belt at the new job. She seems to be slowly getting accomodated. She complains but not as bitterly as early on. I hope she sticks with it because in the long run, the benefits this place offers could really be helpful to someone in her position.

My left shoulder is still sore as hell from playing volleyball. I flat out can’t do a lot of stuff at the gym I normally do and my evening push up regimen is on hold till this thing gets better. I was dumb and did chest exercises on Wednesday even though it was painful to do so. Probably did more harm than good.

Watched some preseason NFL football last night! Love it, can’t wait for the real deal to start. Go Eagles!

Woops, I forgot to mention when I was waiting for my flight on Saturday, who was sitting right across from me in the terminal but Judge Judy. She lives in Naples. She was with her grand daughter. It was kind of weird to be sitting right there next to her. I didn’t say anything to her. I am surprised more people did not notice. Wild.

I have been slacking on taking pictures of my projects so I finally snapped a few. Here they are.

I had another whirlwind trip up north to play in a vball tournament. I flew out Saturday morning and was back by Monday at lunchtime. On Saturday after I got up there I went right to Gary’s place for an informal cookout. Within the first 5 minutes of me being there I was in the pool with everyone playing pool volleyball. It was very weird, like I was never gone and stepped right back into the crowd. It’s nice to have friends that you can be that comfortable with. I drank quite a bit and played some non-jumping volleyball in their sand court. It was really a fun time for me. A reminder of how I miss those hang outs more then most things from PA.

On Sunday we were out early to our tournament. It was Rich, me, Sue and Jonna. It is the first time we played a quads tournament with 2 girls. We played relatively well all day and were in position to go into the playoffs when it started to rain, HARD. A Florida-like deluge that turned the field into a muddy, slippery mess. People left in droves and so did we. It wasn’t worth risking getting rained on more and/or getting hurt slipping in the muck. So, we piled our drenched muddy bodies into Rich’s truck and left. It was a bummer, almost like reading a good book and then not getting to read the ending. The rotten PA weather strikes again.

Saturday night I hung with my bro and sis-in-law (beat him 2 out of 3 in NFL blitz) and then I was out at 5:45 am to drive to Harrisburg. When I got to the gate I saw they were looking for volunteers to get bumped for a free ticket anywhere. YES! I checked and would get into Fort Myers at 5:30 instead of 12:30. A pain in the butt but I could deal with it for a free ticket. I frantically tried to call Ali at home (left for work) and on her cell phone (no answer, right to voice mail) DAMN IT! I debated if I should just do it and let her know after the fact. I finally decided to not do it since I couldn’t reach her and the idea of spending 4 hours sitting at the HBG airport was going to be miserable since there is NOTHING there to do at all. It pissed me off that Ali didn’t have her cell phone on. It turns out that she said she did have it on and she would have been ok with me letting her know after the fact. Oh well, guess I know for the next time.

The flight home was annoying. It was a late departing and arriving, the planes that US Airways uses are all old, I was stuck next to a 300 pounder on the one leg and the luggage took a good 20-30 minutes to hit baggage claim. After flying other airlines recently like Continental and Delta, US Airways is at the bottom of my list.

I picked up a Wired magazine at the one airport. I love that magazine. It is the only magazine that I read almost every article. It has the kind of info I find interesting. It’s great.

I was off from work Monday and Tuesday. I spent that time doing little house things but spent most of the time working on my home built plane and playing Frozen Throne on the computer. On the plane project, I actually got it into the air and flying. It gave me some satisfaction to see something I totally built from scratch flying in the air, albeit very slow and clumsy. Now I just need to do some design tweaks to see if I can get some better performance out of it. It’s a real pig in the air. My video game playing was probably a good 8 hour chunk out of my day yesterday. Yea that’s excessive but I was in one of those moods that wasn’t very pleasant and sometimes I deal with that by burying myself in a game. I think I was still bummed out about the unnatural end to the volleyball competition and some other little things.

3 day week. Like it.

Has ANYONE ever seen ANYONE use those phones that are built into the headrest of airplane seats EVER? Every plane has them. I can imagine they cost mega dollars to implement, and NOBODY ever uses them. Wonder who got canned for that one?

Tomorrow at this time I will be up in PA again! My friends up there are doing a casual cook out thing which should be a great time. Sunday we play, Rich and I are teamed up with 2 of our female friends. They are both good players so it will be a lot of fun going up against all men teams and giving them a run for their money. The forecast may be a little wet but nothing terrible.

My homemade plane project is progressing along nicely. I hope to have it in the air within a week. It isn’t very pretty but I think it will at least fly.

I have to admit I am watching ONE reality show with regularity right now, Paradise Hotel. Yea it is plenty dumb but it gives me some good chuckles. I was happy to see Zack, otherwise known as Mr I am Smarter, Better Looking, Better Built and Harder Bodied than all of you, get the boot. It took balls for Keith to send him packing, the fireworks were great and the aftermath will continue for awhile.

The puppy got into trouble the other night. She was back in the bedroom like she normally is and was laying in the bathroom. We saw her get up and start acting like she was digging. Since she was on the vinyl in there we thought no big deal and pretty much ignored it. Well a few minutes later I see her chewing on something. The little sh&thead dug a hole in the vinyl floor! After a harsh scolding she was thrown out of the bathroom. We covered the hole with a bathrug for now. I caught her trying to start up again last night and immediately screamed at her. I hope this isn’t a continuing habit. It could necessitate our moving to ceramic tile sooner than we planned.

I love animals. I am very compassionate towards animals. If I catch a spider in the house I trap it in a little device I have and throw it outside. When I find a snake, I relocate it instead of chopping it in two with a shovel like many do. Last night I opened the garage door to pull the car in. I noticed a toad sitting in front of the garage door. This happens all the time as the spotlight draws them in to try to catch bugs. Like I always do, I gently shooed it with my foot. Instead of hopping off to the side it hopped under the car. Great. So I pulled the car backwards so I could see where he went. Evidently he went right BEHIND A TIRE! It made me sick, I squashed the poor guy. Felt like a heel as scraped him up. I tried to do the right thing, really. Really made me sad.

Won’t be back until Wednesday.

I had a very nice weekend. A good mix of doing chores around the house yet still having plenty of time to relax and do what I wanted to do. We went out to dinner on Saturday. I had a lot to drink by my standards, (7 beers) but we had fun. We watched Old School with the couple we went to dinner with. Good thing I was drunk. It had a few funny moments but had one of the dumbest plots I ever had seen. Thankfully it was short movie.

On Sunday we finished up a project with landscaping the front of our house. We have spent 95% of the time landscaping and working on the back of the place since that is where we spend most of our time. Consequently, the front has looked rather bland and untouched. We wound up putting in a river rock border with a couple topiary’s and plants. It’s nothing fancy, but it looks way better than it did. Pictures soon.

I finally embarked on my home made RC plane project. I got pretty far but found out some of the foam I bought tears when you try to cut it. So, I need to find a suitable replacement. I’m looking forward to seeing if it will fly. If so, it will mean I can make 3 dollar RC planes 🙂

Bob Hope died today at 100. It makes me sad to see another childhood memory bite the dust. Granted, his last 10 years or so have not been worth living if you saw the same tabloid pictures of him that I did. Old age is brutal. Just think of poor President Reagan. Can’t remember his own name and craps in a diaper. What a way to go.

Speaking of morbid, depressing things, Fishy may be on his last legs. He is the first of the 2 male beta’s that I have. From what I read, fish only have a lifespan of a couple years. I think his time is coming. He hangs at the bottom and when he tries to swim it seems, wild and uncontrolled. I have been trying to treat him as I did before but it doesn’t appear to be helping this time. I hope he makes it.

After nearly 3 months down here, my mom starts her job today. She is nervous about it but I think she will do fine. She is a very good sales person and has the gift of gab. Crossing my fingers. She is bummed about not having all the pool time but she was bummed about having too much pool time too. 🙂

My mom has been living with us since the beginnig of May. She intentionally did not look for a job when she first came down because she wanted to relax. Well after 2 and a half months of being unemployed she was going pretty crazy. The idea of doing nothing but sitting by the pool everyday may sound enticing but even that gets old in no time. Well she started seriously hunting maybe a month or so ago. She got a job offer from one place that was way too far away and didn’t pay enough. She got a snub from another place that she thought she would have liked. But she finally landed a job with Haverty’s which is a large chain furniture store. This was the closest of all the places she looked into. They offer strong benefits and more competitive pay. She starts on Monday. It will be good for her to get out of the house, she needs to do something.

We saw Terminator 3 last night. It had great effects, a decent plot and lots of great Arnold action. I enjoyed it very much. 2 thumbs up.

We got 3 inches of rain yesterday. Our land looks like a Chinese rice field again.