Category Anything and Everything

Long weekend = long entry. I am using up left over vaca time before my year rolls over in mid-august. On Saturday it was a workfest, we cleaned up the house because Alison’s friend was coming down for the weekend. After the indoor work concluded we moved to the outside. Alison took to the tractor while I tackled weeding, pruning, pool maintenace and various other tasks.

On Friday the pool looked like hell, it was all cloudy from algea that I had been battling for awhile. Since company was coming down I was desperate to clear it up. So I dumped a shitload of shock into it, brushed the sides down and left the pool cleaner running in it all night to keep the algea from settling on the bottom. To my surprise, when I woke up Saturday morning it looked tons better, very cool.

Alison admitted that mowing the grass isn’t as much “fun” on the new tractor since she has to change gears now. I offered the “fun” of operating the weed whacker instead, I think she will stay on the tractor. I tackled a few jobs that have been on my mind forever but for whatever reason I had been putting off. I had the pressure washer out and finally blasted the stone and sand out of the bed of my truck that had been sitting there for months. Then I went crazy and got up on the one side of the shed roof and blasted away the mildew that was on the non-sunny side. The interesting/stupid part of it was I was too lazy to put on appropriate footwear to do this so I was up on the wet vinyl siding roof with flip flops. I was constantly aware that I was one slip away from surely breaking something. I was even thinking about how I would explain why I would be dumb enough to tackle this job in flip flops. Luckily my balance remained steady and I finished the job without a 12 foot fall. So much for not worrying about things that noone else will notice but me, huh? Roof looks better though.

Saturday evening we watched a funny movie, think it was called About Polly or something like that. It had Ben Stiller, the chick from Will & Grace and Jennifer Aniston in it. Lots of laugh out loud moments in it. I got my high capacity cell phone battery(s) from a seller on ebay from Hong Kong. It took about a week to get it. As a bonus, the seller accidentally sent me 2 batteries even though I only paid for one. It was funny seeing something from Hong Kong show up in the mail. I kept the envelope to show Ali. If the guy wants his 2nd battery pack he can fly over from HK to get it. 🙂

On Sunday, the girls were going shopping so it was my day to do whatever. First I went out early to Wal-mart and Sam’s club with the intention of picking up the supplies needed to perform the maintenance that was suggested by Nissan as well as some tools and supplies for the other vehicles as well. I also intended to pick up a DVD/VCR combo player at Sam’s since our VCR died. When I hit Sam’s club I got a bit side tracked and also purchased a “SkeeterVac” to replace our broken “MOsquito Magnet” The SkeeterVac is different as it uses more lures and is cordless. It uses the propane to do more than generate heat, it also operates the fan unit.

So I took all my toys home, set up the SkeeterVac and then got ready for part two of Shawn’s day of fun, a trip to the dog track! Well it turned out to be anything but fun. On Sundays, there is no live racing, only simulcasting. The clubhouse level where I always go is closed and instead you have to go to the grandstand area. The grandstand level isn’t nearly as nice. I waited to eat until I got there, a big mistake. Unlike upstairs where they serve good food, downstairs my only option was food from a one person food stand run by an old lady that didn’t care much about sanitary food practices. She would work the register, handle money, prepare the food and take smoke breaks without ever washing her hands in between. I got a shitty burger, shitty fries and bad tasting diet coke from her and tried to balance everything with my simulcast book as I looked for an open place to sit. It was extrememly annoying as I looked for a spot and realized that many people where spreading their books over 2 desks to artificially create the illusion that someone was sitting there. After seeing no open spaces and getting increasingly annoyed, I finally asked one of the guys with such a setup if there was anyone actually sitting there and he reluctantly admitted that noone was. Yay, I sat down and piled my food and betting info into my small workspace.

I decided to keep it simple and just bet the dog races at one remote track to keep my betting regulated and to avoid having to scramble and make picks without thinking. As I started eating my bad food, I also realized that it was hot in there and where I was sitting there was no hint of any moving air, making me feel cramped and uncomfortable. The guy on my right was maybe 50, with his young kid on his right. This guy was one of those guys that said everything he was thinking. At first I thought he was actually speaking to me, I soon realized that he was just talking out loud. He was very verbal as his races were running. He would snap his fingers, encouraging his horses to move up, he would curse the horses that he didn’t have money on that were ahead and generally was just annoying. I didn’t think it was very cool for him to be dropping the f bomb regularly with his 10 or 11 year old son sitting there. To my left was an inidian man that said nothing and simply stared at the betting books and his tv, I could never tell if he was winning or losing his bets. Behind me where some funny sounding koreans. It was amusing hearing them cheer their horses on with their accent.

So as I was trying to throw down my crappy lunch I looked over the lineup at the track I was betting at. I did my normal analysis and placed my bets. Loser! In total I bet 9 races and lost everyone but 1. It was a bad day. By the end I was in a pissy mood. Pissy enough that I didn’t even bother cashing the $1.40 credit slip I had left, I just threw it out and walked out. In total I lost about 45 bucks, a mild hit but losing so consistently really sucked the fun out of it. I doubt I will ever do the simulcast only days again, it was miserable.

Sunday evening I felt like crap from eating that junk at the track, so much so that I begged out of going to dinner with Ali and her friend, so they went by themselves. I used the time to play a new game I got for the XBOX, Top Spin Tennis. The game is awesome. The graphics are so realistic it is scary. Plus you can create a player from scratch, having total control of their appearance. My first character I made insanely ugly as well as huge. He was 6’9″ and 288 pounds. An impressive physical specimen, but I soon learned that his body type didn’t work too well on a tennis court. So I recreated my character this time making him much smaller but just as ugly. The game even allows you to taunt, encourage and even throw temper tantrums as you see fit. I usually only used the temper tantrum option, I enjoyed watching my guy slam his racket on the court in disgust and then kick it. I went online a little bit and played a handful matches and got destroyed in every match except one. Evidently before you go on XBOX Live you need to train your player so he has the maximum skill possible in the game, otherwise you have no shot of being remotely competitive online. I’m working on it.

Monday I played auto mechanic in the morning. I did all the maintenance that the Nissan dealer recommended for the Sentra. What probably would have cost me well over 100 bucks at the dealer was accomplished for 10 bucks in parts and about 45 minutes of my time. Then I tackled replacing the passenger side door lock motor on the Vette. It was a bit of a challenge but I got it in and working. As a bonus, when I put it back together, I took some time and actually got the door panel installed correctly so it doesn’t sound like your are rattling a tin can full of screws when you close the door anymore. So far I have fixed at least a dozen little things on the Vette and it feels like I have only put a small dent in what needs to be done. The rest of Monday I spent a lot of tennis time, and cursing my UPS’s that have bad batteries that kept clicking off during play, causing me to lose my progress. That is on the short list to get fixed.

We had a lot of rain this weekend, we have standing water all over the property again. I took some pictures of recent projects/purchases that I will be adding soon. I didn’t shave all weekend so I had some considerable facial hair action. I decided to go with a modified goatee/ beard thing for this week for fun. Alison said I look like Abe Lincoln, haha.

It’s somewhat ironic that I would hate the profession that employed me for 14 months in my early 20’s but I just can’t help it. I bought my first new car back in 96-97 and have replaced it with another new car ever since. I can’t recall one of these dealers that I had a pleasant experience with. The upfront process of actually buying the car is filled with so many half truths, deception and outright lies it is sickening. However today my thoughts aim at the other half of the rip off, dealer service. When I first started with new cars I used to take it to the dealer religiously for service. Since I never had new cars before, I wanted nothing but the best and only the dealer could provide that, right? Dumb. Well after one sour experience after another mostly related to the obscenely high labor and part prices they charge, I wised up. The other part is the BS the service employees pull on you, trying to sell you additional maintenance at ridiculously inflated prices and then acting as if you are ignorant for not wanting to pay them this ransom for their service.

So, I am at the point that I will only take the car to the dealer if I need to and it is warranty work that shouldn’t cost me anything. Well I have had an issue with the Sentra now for awhile that I had been ignoring, the trunk leaks. I already bought one replacement trunk floor because it was warped from the leak, the replacement is also warped so I had enough. I took it in today, I also asked if they could change the oil while it was there. So I get call late in the morning, “We can’t find the leak” I wasn’t surprised to hear this but still a bit annoyed. My annoyance grew as the girl continued telling me there was lots of maintenance that should be done to the car. We got no further than her first recommendation. Your tires are starting to show feather wear, they should be rotated. “How much does that cost?” I ask, “50 dollars” she replies. WHAT? Hehe “No thanks” I replied. 50 dollars for what may take 15 minutes if the guy works slowly. What a f’in ripoff. So we went back to the leak issue. She said that the guys were spraying it with a hose but couldn’t find the leak. She said maybe I could bring it in on days where it is supposed to rain and they could check it out. “That’s not very convenient” I replied. So I asked her if they pulled back the carpet that lines the sides of the trunk and looked there? I explained that the water seems to be seeping in around the edges and it makes sense that it is running down behind the carpet liner. She wasn’t sure if they checked that so she said she would get back to me. Haven’t heard back yet but I am 90% sure I will get a call later saying they couldn’t find anything. Dealers just suck. I have no plans to ever buy another new car again. They depreciate like they fell off a cliff and the hassle a dealer provides outweighs the fleeting joy I get from driving something brand spanking new.

2 more gems

NUmber 1

Number 2

I serve 2 basic functions for Nicki. I am her protector when she finds herself in a situation she finds scary and I am her entertainment when she wants to roughhouse and play. Well last night we were playing, she was rolling around, trying to tackle me and use my arm as human chew toy. She was sprinting around and made a sharp cut and all of a sudden started crying in pain and pulled up her one back leg and couldn’t walk on it. She managed to get up on the sofa but was still wailing in pain. Ali and I immediately feared the worse, did she break it, tear something, screw up her hip? We sat with her for a few minutes and she stopped crying but was still holding the leg up and didn’t want it to be moved in certain directions. We decided to take her to the emergency Vet (the same ones that wanted to charge me my first born to treat the diabetic cat) So Ali called them to tell them we were coming in. Of course the first thing out of their mouth is “…minimum 69 dollar charge…” By the time we were ready to go, Nicki was again walking on the affected leg. She was favoring it a bit but could walk and was able to jump up into the car herself. By the time we got her to the vet it was hard to tell there was anything wrong with her at all. But we were committed at this point and Ali wanted to make SURE she was ok. So we spent about an hours time and 89 bucks for Nicki to have her heart rate taken, a thermometer stuck up her ass, have the vet move her leg around and give her a shot of some anti-inflammatory stuff. He couldn’t really detect exactly what happened, just that whatever it was it couldn’t have been too bad if she was almost back to normal already. I guess it was better to be safe than sorry. I felt bad that she hurt herself while playing with me. You always hear stories about how couples with no kids almost literally view their dog as their kid, we are definitely a prime example. Alison loves this dog like she gave birth to it. I don’t think I am to that degree but it is hard to imagine that I actually wanted to turn her back in in the beginning. I was wrong on that one.

When I was up in PA for the Rumble, they had a raffle to win a new Geo Tracker, 5 bucks a ticket. I felt lucky so I bought one. The drawing was July 5th. I am still holding on to the ticket for some reason just in case they haven’t gotten around to calling me yet. Silly.

Ebaum is truly a wonderful web site, here is just one of the many reasons why…

I was doing work at someone’s place last night. I ran across one of the kid’s PC’s that was a spyware/adware/pop up nightmare. It was basically unuseable as when it came up you were immediately deluged with an endless array of pop up windows and an always busy hard drive. I was able to get some anti-spyware stuff installed after some prolonged effort. A scan of the system revealed over 1500 spyware components on the system! Oh my. After multiple clean attempts both in regular and safe mode with both spybot and adaware I was able to get it under control. But there was still something lurking that I couldn’t get rid of. When I would try to run spybot or even regedit while booted up normally they would not start. By the time I got to this point it was late, almost 9pm so I wrapped it up for the night. This morning I researched it and found out that on top of all that spyware, the computer was also infected by the Bagle virus. What a mess. Evidently the computer is used a lot for chatting, downloading MP3’s via peer to peer networks and other activities common for teenager run puters. Parents don’t let your kids have free run over their computers unless you are ok with reformatting them every couple months.

I have had a bunch of stuff for sale on half.com for over a year. I sold a bunch of stuff off of it, mostly old cd’s from Ali’s collection when she was younger. In total I think I made almost 500 bucks selling stuff on HALF. Ebay is phasing out half.com so it is trying to push half.com sellers to move into an EBAY store. The first month was free so I decided to give it a shot. I already sold one thing out of it so that was cool. Check it out, it’s ultra cheesy but if you are looking for early 90’s cd releases I may have you covered.

I left the alarm set at it’s normal time so I could get up Saturday morning to make the trek up to Tampa to pick up the new mower. I had my old mower loaded up in the back of the truck which would make the truck significantly less aerodynamic going 80 mph up interstate 75. I was considering bringing along a tarp in case it rained but I figured what the hell, it hardly ever rains in the morning down here. Of course, it rained. Other than the rain, the drive went ok as I covered the 180 miles in around 2.5 hours. The guy selling it lived in a development filled with large houses on small plots of land. I was wondering to myself how this guy has all this mower stuff in a house like this. Once I looked in his 3 car garage I saw how. It was basically packed with stuff almost floor to ceiling with little pathways to walk through. The stuff consisted of basically tools, mowers, mower parts and car parts. Evidently the guy has a mower shop as well but the garage just stored the stuff he wanted to keep close by. Wow. One thing I immediately noticed that wasn’t mentioned on the ebay ad was the mower was a 6 speed. My old mower was a hydrostatic automatic which meant you simply had a foot pedal to go forward and backward. The 6 speed requires you to stop the mower everytime you change gears. It wasn’t a huge deal but still I wished I knew about it upfront. When I mentioned it to the guy he said “I didn’t have that in the ad?” Yea, ok. We unloaded my mower and then were ready to pull the new one onto my truck. It didn’t turn over and just hummed. Oh oh. Multiple tries and the same thing happened. It was raining again and before I got there he had hosed off the deck to clean it up a bit. After some troubleshooting he determined that it had to be the the solenoid that controlled the starter. Perhaps it somehow took on some water. So what we wound up doing was pulling the solenoid from my old tractor and threw it into the new one. Not an ideal way to have things go with my NEW tractor but after the swap it fired up just fine. As part of the deal I also snagged a spike aerator to help bust up some of the thatch that plagues our lawn. By the time I left the rain had stopped, cool. Of course, halfway home it started to rain again. 🙁

I unloaded the new tractor and mowed a small patch and then hooked up the aerator just to tool around and watch it poke holes in the ground. Simple fun. It mows well, it’s new and I have an aerator for 400 bucks out of pocket so I can’t complain too much. By the time I parked the mower it was around 2:30. Alison had to work on Saturday and wasn’t going to be home until around 4:30. In the next 2 hours I did a housework blitz in order to alleviate Ali from having to help with these chores later. In the space of 120 minutes I did the following:

Cleaned both bird cages
Cleaned both bathrooms
Dusted around the house
Did 2 loads of laundry
Pulled out our defective VCR from our AV shelf
Hung up some dog thing on the wall
Cleaned all the kitchen counters
Swept the kitchen and utility room floors
Swept the rest of the house

As I was vacuuming Ali came home. She didn’t believe I was cleaning everything after spending 6 hours driving earlier. I couldn’t quite understand it myself. I think part of the reason I do this kind of stuff is I want to make the weekends easier for Ali just because that is my nature. I think another part of it is to demonstrate to Ali what can get done in a short amount of time with concentrated effort. There are many days where I may be out doing something on a weekend and Ali is home all day and she will do one or two things around the house in the span of 8, 10, 12 hours. I have to admit it frustrates me because then even though it isn’t her intention, I immediately take on the responsibility of knocking out the chores asap so I can relax and do what I want the rest of the weekend. Her preference is to relax first and then get to the chores as she feels inspired (which sometimes never comes) , my preference is to bust ass and get the stuff done right away so I have uniterrupted free time the rest of the weekend. Our contrast on this issue causes conflict at times and my approach to resolving it is that I just do things and if she helps that’s great if she doesn’t oh well. I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t get to me sometimes but I mostly just grin and bear it. I also have been trying to cut back on the frequency and rigidity of certain chores so that has helped some.

After I got done vacuuming I took Ali out to show her the new mower. She mowed a patch out back. She isn’t thrilled with the 6 speed but otherwise reported it as a success. The built in fender cup holder scored brownie points. After her mowing test I pulled out the aerator and hooked it up. I stood on it as she drove so my weight assisted in making the aerator really work. I’m sure it looked pretty funny to drivers as we tooled around the front poking thousands of holes in the grass but hey it worked great, I don’t care if I looked dumb.

That night we went to one of Alison’s favorite restaurants, Iguana Mia. It is a mexican Chi Chi’s stlye restaurant on a smaller scale, without the big chain feel. They are really quick with service and our waiter must have asked us if there was anything we needed 10 times. Courtesy of an Entertainment book coupon, we got out of there with a 16 dollar bill. Can’t beat that.

Even with my efforts on Saturday we still had a substantially full plate for Sunday. The grass hadn’t been mowed in 2 weeks because of the mower failure 2 weekends ago. Our lawn looked like a wheat field with tall shoots of grass poking up everywhere. Alison rode the tractor while I weed whacked, weeded all the landscaped areas and filled the bird feeders. It was hot as hell, 94 and humid. The reported rain that was due to come in was only a few light showers in our area. By the time we got done with the outside stuff it was around 1. We ate lunch, watched an “I Love the 90’s” episode on Tivo (great show) and then came up with a great idea, let’s get more stuff at Home Depot so we can do more work!

So we cleaned up a bit and headed out. On the way we stopped at Blockbuster and picked up 2 movies. At Home Depot we snagged various things like some bolts, a replacement for the diseased topiary we had in front of the house and out of the blue we grabbed a 15 foot tall Jacaranda tree. Getting the tree home was a chore as it was very thin and wispy so we were concerned about branches breaking. I drove 50 mph on I-75 which is a dangerous manuever, but the reduced speed allowed us to get home with the tree intact with no damage. So we got home and did another work session planting the jacaranda, the topiary, 3 crown of thorn plants and some cauliflower we bought for the garden. The tree looks great where we planted it, at the spot where the broken mosquito magnet once stood. If the tree thrives it will be awesome because they are beautiful trees when mature.

The remaining hours of our weekend were taken up mostly by watching one of the movies we rented, The Big Leibowski. We rented it because of some funny clips we saw in the I love the 90’s show. It looked very funny. It was very funny in a whacked out weird way. A very different kind of movie that I enjoyed. The diverse cast of characters in the movie is really out of the ordinary. Jeff Bridges, John Goodman and the guy that played Jesus the ace bowler were the funniest characters in the flick. I’d recommend it. Another movie we saw in the show was Slingblade, I want to rent that one later as well, looks good.

Yesterday I came into work and immediately noticed that our email server was dragging it’s feet. Emails took forever to come up and in many instances I would get the waiting for server dialog box. I immediately started listing things in my mind that have changed recently. Hmmmm. Well I installed MSFT’s latest critical updates on Wednesday, it shouldn’t cause that sort of issue but you never know. So I began researching everywhere I could. I found several things in our configuration that could be possible issues but they were configured that way for a long time, nothing new. I spent the majority of the day tweaking, changing and rebooting the server with little or no improvement. Damn it. Late in the day I get a notification about the main back up job failing. When I looked at the log it all became clear, the email server was being backed up that entire time which was causing it to drag. Evidently there were some problem messages that were making it go very slow.

In retrospect it wasn’t such a bad thing for me to have to go through all of that as it uncovered several things that needed to be fixed anyway. However my failure to check the simple things first resulted in a whole lot of frustration.

This weekend the big event is my trip up to Tampa to pick up my replacement mower. I’m excited to pick up my new tool of yard mastery. I am also getting several accessories that will allow me to expand my grass maintenance capabilities.

One thing I forgot to mention regarding the MLB All-Star game. I found it ironic and a bit annoying to see George and Barbara Bush in every close up batter shot during the game. They were sitting right behind home plate. It seemed like George was pigging out most of the time he was on camera.

Even though I hardly follow baseball at all anymore besides following the Phillies scores, I decided to tune into the All-Star game. I only made it to the 3rd inning or so. A few brief observations. Fantasia’s rendition of the National Anthem wasn’t great and it was made worse by the fact that she messed up a few words. Come on, if you are going to sing the national anthem in front of a nationwide audience, LEARN THE WORDS.

They pushed out Muhammad Ali to be involved in the first pitch ceremony. It literally made me cringe. Why do they do this to the guy? He has non-stop severe tremors that just are so disturbing to watch. To see a man that was such a master quick wit be relinquished to being a silent, shaking figurehead really bothers me. I love Ali, that is why it hurts so bad to see what has happened to him.

When they announced the rosters I knew maybe a third of the all stars. Years ago I would known every single player on every team. It just doesn’t hold my interest anymore. I got to see the first inning slaughter of Clemens. It was unfortunate that what may be his last All-Star game went down like that. He looked real bad. It was very ironic to see him throwing to Piazza as the catcher, since Piazza basically hates Clemens and vice versa.

The most exciting moment of what I saw was during pregame when the middle aged fat guy was able to throw 5 balls through a hole in 30 seconds to win a million bucks. Number 5 bounced through the hole just as time expired.

Ali comes back from her conference tonight. It will be good to have her back. The dog has been moping around the house ever since she left.