More hahha
Damn I wish I had a video camera and editing software growing up. This kid is quite funny.
Damn I wish I had a video camera and editing software growing up. This kid is quite funny.
I’v been dumping different images on my Audrey the past couple nights. I think I finally settled on one. Last night I was listening to internet radio on it, playing mp3’s and using it as a digital picture frame. It’s way cool.
Last night Ali and I watched the Charlie Brown Halloween special for the at least the 20th time. It’s amazing how it never gets old. Still makes me laugh.
I love when they are going trick or treating, “I got a candy bar, I got a quarter…… I got a ROCK” 🙂 Love Charlie Brown.
Last night when we got home we found out we had a nearly empty pool filled with well water. We had a crack in the finish and called in the repair. However we had no idea when they were coming. So the crack is fixed but now our clear blue water has been replaced with murky green water. It will take a couple weeks until we get it cleaned up.
Even though I have been down in Florida for over 3 years, I have been able to stay more or less current with my buddies up north thanks to using instant messenger. It is super convenient and helped keep my day moving along. Recently, Sovereign Bank (where I used to work and where most of my buddies are) declared instant messhenger stuff as a security risk and banned it from desktops. As a result my contact with those people is much less frequent. Bummer. 🙁
I had one of my more laid back weekends of recent memory. No grass mowing, only minor housecleaning and no real “projects”. On Saturday we went to the state park with the intentions of renting kayaks to tool around on. The rental place we remembered from the last time we were there was no longer there. So we decided to just hang at the beach. This beach is very natural and has the clearest water of any of the beaches in our area. Lots of fish, shells and natural beauty. It was very peaceful, very relaxing and once again reminded us of why we moved to Fla. Late October, relaxing on the beach with the sounds of surf and birds to put you to sleep. We really enjoyed it. Down the beach a bit, outside the state park lines we found a rental place that wanted 25 bucks for a hour rental of a kayak and you were limited to paddling in a small rectangle area. No thanks, we wanted to take it down the inlets.
Saturday night I totally forgot about the World Series game and tuned in just as the celebration was taking place. What a great performance by the Marlins. Talk about a dark horse, noone would have given them a shot to win it all in the beginning of the year.
We took my mom out to dinner at Romanos Macaroni Grill. She has been very negative and we hoped a dinner out would help change that. Great food, so so service. I can see where I get some of the negative part of my personality from. Mom seems negative about most things and is scared to do most anything outside of her “box”. After dinner she was ranting about her windshield wipers and their poor performance. I just replaced them a month ago. She was happy that with the time change she could wake up to sunshine. However that evening, she complained about it getting dark early. I know I complain more than the average Joe I’m sure, but I hope I don’t get that bad.
On Sunday we went for a walk/run of 3.2 miles, the distance to the end of our road and back. It was quite warm and humid. We both were sweated through our clothes by the end. We went through our closets and cleaned out a shitload of stuff we didn’t wear or didn’t need, about 5 trash bags full. I am making a trip to the donation store at lunch.
The rest of Sunday was filled with football, some rc plane flying and video game playing. The Eagles won and looked better than they had the prior weeks. However they were playing the 2-4 Jets so they SHOULD look better I guess.
A good weekend for sure.
I am not sure if I mentioned this before, but if you can find Windy City Heat on Comedy Central, tape, tivo it. It is REALLY funny. It is basically a movie about playing a prolonged practical joke on some schlub. I laughed my ass off.
You may not get a laugh out of this if you don’t play video games but maybe you will. Last night I decided to throw in NFL2K3 on my Xbox and go online to play with the XBOX Live service. Live is a service that allows you to play people worldwide and also has cool features like letting you talk to your opponents as you play. So I find a game. I haven’t played NFL2K3 in at least 6 months so I will suck for sure but I just wanted a casual game. We get to the team choice screen. I say HI. No response. I say helllllllo. Nothing. Evidently this player does not care to speak. (it can be turned off) Ok no big deal. He picks the Eagles as his team, oh well that is my team normally but I don’t mind playing as someone else because it’s just for fun. I pick the Rams and then wait. I watch him goin through dozens of screens customizing his roster, play selections, selections, everything….. What the hell, I say, even though I know he isn’t listening. Evidently this guy takes his NFL2K3 seriously. Still I laugh it off. Finally he is done tweaking his team and we start. I win the toss and receive. On my first possession I go 3 and out and gain like 1 yard. I punt to him. On his first play he throws a 65 yard touchdown pass! Grrrr. Then after the play he pauses the game goes into the stat screen and highlights his passing statistics and keeps flashing the screen. He was basically talking smack without speaking. It didn’t take me long to figure out he was trying to punk me. I was laughing still but I also wanted to give some pay back. Soon I remembered enough about playing that I was able to score and tie it up. I returned the favor by bringing up the stats screen and highlighting my stuff. 🙂 We went back and forth till halftime. Him flashing stats, showing me replays and just generally being annoying. By halftime I think he was ahead by a touchdown, 28-21 or something like that. Regrettably I had to flick it off at that time to go catch Survivor. Funny stuff. Had to see the non-verbal taunting to appreciate it. 🙂
I am a Marlin backer. Even though they bumped my Phillies out of the playoffs, it’s hard to not like this team. Basically a bunch of younger guys just playing their asses off. Although I haven’t seen any of the series games to their conclusion due to sleepiness, I have watched the majority of all the games. It made me remember why I enjoyed playing baseball. The one on one confrontation between pitcher and batter is what I miss the most. The Marlins closer has a great name, Ugeth Urbina. Perfect name for a closer.
Tomorrow we plan on going to the beach and renting ocean kayaks. 3 years ago we were going to do it and didn’t with the idea that we would do it soon. Well 3 years isn’t soon but better late than never. My mom cleaned up the house yesterday on her day off so that was a nice surprise, less for us to do this weekend.
Blogging is minimal this week due to it being tax bill season. During this week we print, burst and mail some 250,000 tax bills. A big task made easier by high speed processing equipment. This is the busiest week of the year for us back here.
Last night I decided to hammer out mowing the back yard since I got my replacement battery. 2 hours later I was covered in sand and grass shrapnel but mission was accomplished. I wanted to clear that job out so we would be able to go rent ocean kayaks this weekend at the beach and putz around.
Whitey, my other beta fish appears to be on deaths door. 🙁 If he goes I am going to sterilize the tank and go with some conventional little fish.
Here is some more flash sillyness, very funny if you are 30 somethin like me and remember boss hog and the gang.
After the gym I quickly stopped at Walmart to pick up another case of dog food for our 2 can a day puppy feedings. As I walked in, they had the back end of the store all decked out for Christmas, including an almost life size singing, dancing Santa Claus. As I tried to leave, cradling the box of 24 cans in my 2 arms, my path was blocked by 2 old ladies and an even older man getting funky with Santa. The old ladies were dancing and singing along with Santa while the old man just stared with a grin on his face. They were so involved with the robotic Saint Nick that they didn’t even notice my prescence. I politely said excuse me and they left me pass. They giggled as I think they were embarrassed that I witnessed their dance routine. I hope I’m that giddy when I’m old.
As I went out to the lot I noticed a big full size Ford truck did the lazy man parking job, you know the type where the person makes zero effort to park in the lines and instead parks at a 45 degree angle across them? The truck was proudly adorned with two bumper stickers. One said, “I’m not speeding, I’m qualifying!” the other said “I’m not tailgating, I’m drafting!” Yahooooooo. Giddy up.
I felt down most of the weekend. I must have enjoyed the cruise because a spent a lot of time recollecting what I was doing last week at this time on the ship. So I think that bummed me out somewhat. Also, Ali is considering quitting her job because of issues with her boss. I told her I support her if she wants to do so, but this weekend I was dreading the financial impact it would have. If we weren’t in the process of paying for our braces it wouldn’t be so bad. Doing so right before the holiday crunch is another daunting idea. We talked about it a little bit and she may try to hang in for a little. I guess it all depends if there are any more incidents.
Saturday was chore day, we mowed and cleaned up stuff inside. It was a 3 snake day. As I was going to inspect our water cleaning equipment I saw a snake head pop out of the top of the cleaner and retract back in, nice. A 6 foot long black racer snake had got in there. I carefully popped the lid off and scared him away. Later, while weeding, I was about ready to pull some clover from around the base of some decorative grass. I saw a curled up pygmy rattler! Upon further inspection, I saw another one! After some careful work with a broom and a flexible rake I relocated the rattlers across a trench. It’s a jungle out there.
Our office has been a disaster area for the past few weeks. I had cords, boxes and computers everywhere as I have been working on getting my new server up and running. On saturday night I was ready to finalize the switch over so I pulled everything out and relocated it. What a mess. It took awhile but the final result looks much better. So I will be selling my Dual P3 750mhz 2U server with a half gig of ram on ebay shortly. It looks like if I get 300 for it I will be lucky, a bit disappointing as I originally imagined I could get 400 or so for it.
I did some more tweaking on my Audrey as well. I have most hacks that I need, done on it. It looks good on our counter. It makes a great caller id box and it’s very cool to check the weather on my way out the door and use it as a mp3 player while we are working around the house.
On Sunday I had planned to mow the back area of our property but was derailed when the battery for the tractor decided to die. So we planted our new garden where the compost pile used to be. Broccoli, tomatoes and eggplant are our crops of choice.
We watched the Eagle game. In one word, pathetic. The defense and special teams saved them again. The offense and Donovan McNabb was terrible again. Terrible just as they have been every single game this season. I really hope they sit McNabb, it’s time. 64 yards passing, horrible.
This weekend we experimented with letting the dog in the bedroom at night. It didn’t go very well, Friday night I heard her collar jingling so it woke me up multiple times, Saturday she decided to wake us up at 6am and last night she licked my face at 2am and my feet at 4am. After both times I couldn’t fall asleep for a good hour afterward. I think she will be moving back to the crate tonight. I feel bad because I know she likes being in there with us but I just can’t take being woke up 3 or 4 times every night. I wake up rather easily, where as Ali can sleep through gunfire. The puppy sheds like crazy now, a day after vacuuming the entire house the floor is covered with her black hair again. Add in 2 hairy cats and you have a pet dander nightmare. It amazes me how much hair accumulates in the vaccum after a single session. Pets…..
Another high mark on the geekometer. I just got an email from my Audrey indentifying I got a call from the pool company. Quite convenient since by the time I would have gotten home and got the message they would have been closed. Geek power.
The Cubs and Red Sox are chokers, curse or not. They both had firm control of their destiny and just swallowed hard and gave it away. Pathetic.
Happy Birthday Keener. I ‘ll get you one of those devices that scans a room for wireless cameras. Should set your mind at ease.