Category Fitness

So last night on the way home from work I stopped at the Auto Zone near my work to pick up a set of valve cover gaskets for the Tacoma.  Well evidently they recently sold their last set but a quick check of inventory showed the store located on Pine Ridge had them.  I redirected my normal home route and picked them up.

I inadvertently secured myself a 10% discount from this chain of events and realized it is something anyone can do with a little planning.  AutoZone has a policy that if one store doesn’t have an item and you have to drive to another AutoZone location to get it they knock 10% off the price.  This is the second time they have done this for me.

The way you could manufacture this discount is to check their website ahead of time which has pretty accurate real time store inventory.  If you see two nearby stores and one has the part and the other doesn’t,  you simply stop at the store that you know doesn’t have the part first.  They will give you a little print out that you take to the second store, instant 10% discount.  Now of course this would only make sense if the item you are buying costs more than a few bucks and if the stores are close enough together.  In my case both of these criteria were met.

So yesterday I got another email from IX.  It was from somebody in the Ukranian part of their help desk had responded regarding my CPU utilization issue.  The email made no sense.  The person said my account was still using too much CPU time but the stats she included for each day had no numbers and the scripts listed had small CPU usage numbers.  I was pissed and immediately called them up.

I told the guy this email made no sense, stating I was still using too much CPU time but the stats in the message did not back that up.  He did some quick checking of my CPU usage and he saw that for the past two days my CPU use has been well below the threshold. (thanks to the wonders of CloudFlare)  He said he was not sure what his Ukranian counterpart was looking at.  He marked the ticket as finally being closed, after more than a month of my scrambling to get out from under the problem.

When I got home last night I decided I wanted to try to beat my pull up reps max.  I did a strong set of 23 at the gym over lunch and I thought I might have a shot at at least matching my improbable 30 reps I nailed down last October.  I wound up a little short, bailing after rep 28, my grip was burning.  It would have been cool to hit the magic 30 rep number again.  It’s coming.

Last night Tuki made me snap for a brief period of time.  Tuki does a lot of things that are annoying, like screeching when I go into certain areas of the house, trying to attack me when I do stuff like change his crocks and clean his cage.  He also likes to fly off the top of the cage when I have him out as I walk by, giving my head a fly by.  99% of the time I just ignore his antics since it is well established the bird doesn’t like me.

Well last night I was carrying laundry back to the bedroom and Tuki was on top of his cage.  As I walked by he launches himself and bangs into the side of my head during one of his flight loops.  Well that flipped my switch instantly.  I get within 6 inches of the bird and scream “Do NOT fly into my head!”  I follow it up by smashing my fist on the top of his cage several times for emphasis.  I think I got my point across.

This weekend I would like to tackle the valve cover gasket replacement on the truck.  I am a bit hesitant to embark on this repair as it requires a LOT of disassembly, more than any Tacoma work I have done thus far.  I need to allow myself an entire afternoon to do the work to accommodate the hurdles I always manage to hit.

I’m hoping to rack up another training brick Sunday morning as well.  For entertainment I always have 4 more Walking Dead the game episodes to play through and Abraham Lincoln:Vampire Hunter sitting in a Netflix envelope on my counter.

I am annoyed that the opening game for the Florida Tarpons, the arena football team that I bought two season tickets for this season, has their opening game on Monday night.  Monday, wtf?  Last night all the home games were on a Saturday night but one.  I need to find someone to go with me.

So my first day of utilizing CloudFlare on the Bar-barians web site has shown some promising results.  It filtered out a massive 62% of the traffic hitting the site that was bot related.  It also identified some malicious traffic originating from China, Japan and the UK that was hitting the site which it also filtered out.  I haven’t heard updated CPU utilization numbers from IX but they have to be way down since that 62% of traffic never even touched their servers.

Although all these issues with keeping the BB site up and running has been frustrating, I sure have learned a lot how to reduce the impact of a WordPress site in a shared server environment.

Last night I headed out back to my bar park to do something I haven’t done in a long time, muscle ups.  My long road to accomplish a muscle up is well documented through out this blog.  In total I worked on getting my first one for at least two years, getting on top of the bar for the first time in September of 2011.

Once I got my first muscle up I worked the movement a lot, building up to a max of 7 reps after a few months.  I was really into it.  However then a weird thing happened, I stopped doing them.  Well not totally, but muscle ups took a back burner in my bar work.  Part of this was because of some injuries, aches and pains in my wrist and elbows that made a muscle up very painful to do.  Part of it was because I directed my calisthenic gaze in another direction.

So anyway for whatever reason I decided last night I wanted to do some muscle ups.  It had been quite a while since I did a bar muscle up so I wasn’t even sure of my ability to still get over the bar.  Luckily my muscle memory had not gone senile and I was able to knock out a few small sets.  In total I did 10 reps.

I had forgotten the auxiliary benefits of doing muscle ups, at least for me.  It makes you feel powerful.  There is something about pulling yourself up and over the bar that is hard to explain until you accomplish it yourself.

I felt really good after swinging down from my last rep,  good enough that muscle ups will be back on my regular calisthenics menu indefinitely.

So my weekend had no outside obligations so I decided to fill it up with internal things.  I woke up Saturday morning with a spring in my step.  The bright sun and cool, crisp temperatures seemed like an ideal scenario to get stuff done.  I was outside and weeding by 7:30.

I decided I wanted to get the rest of the landscape beds mulched on Saturday.  After weeding was done I pulled out in the truck.  I made a pit stop on my way to Home Depot at mom’s place.  She was at work but had asked me if I could take a look at her noisy toilet.  I also dropped off a bunch of stuff I harvested from the garden for her.

From my years of yard maintenance I know that the back of the Tacoma will hold about 30 bags of mulch. I also knew I would need more than 30 bags to finish the job which included the orchard, the border around the pool and the two raised areas around the palms in the front yard.

I also made a pit stop at the pool store.  When I went to flip on the pump Saturday morning to run the pool vacuum I got nothing, the pump acted like it was dead.  I smelled an electrical burn that concerned me.  The last thing I needed was to have to replace the pool pump after all of the money I have spent on other home repairs/improvements the last few weeks.

Well after verifying that there was power going to the pump I jumped on the internet to get some guidance.  Maybe it is something I can fix easily myself.  Thankfully it was.  There is a large capacitor that can go bad on a pool pump.  The only thing I had to verify was that the motor was not seized up.  Luckily on this Pentair pool pump that was easy to do.  There is a plastic cap that covers the shaft of the motor. After removing the cap, a quick grab and twist verified the motor itself was spinning freely.

The local Pinch a Penny had replacement capacitors as this is a pretty common failure.  I was a bit surprised that it cost $43 but I was still way ahead of the $500 I would have potentially spent if I didn’t do any homework and just replaced the pump.  The replacement of the cap was easy.  I was quite relieved when I threw the switch and the pump came roaring back to life.   I taped the process just in case there are others on the internet looking into replacing their own pool pump caps.

So as I was spreading my first 30 bags of mulch I found myself kind of enjoying it.  The labor was steady but not brutal, the sky was bright blue, humidity low and the temperatures perfect for working outside.  I could hardly believe the orchard consumed almost the entire 30 bags of red mulch.  I knew I would be heading back out for another load.

I decided to grab another 30 bags although the rough estimation in my head told me I probably could get away with only 25.  I figure it is better to figure a little high than go low and wind up having to go back out once again.

By the time I was almost done spreading the mulch the lustre had worn off the joys of yard work.  Ironically, the sky by that time had become overcast and looked like rain could be looming around the corner.  Just as I was in the homestretch of ripping open the 30 additional mulch mulch bags I was startled by the sound of a voice behind me saying “Excuse me, sir”..

I jumped a little bit as I spun around.  It was a young guy, a younger looking guy and a young girl.  They were people that lived up the street that said they were interested in the garage fridge I was giving away for free.  I had posted it on the community Yahoo groups email list I started several years ago.

In the ad I said that if needed, I could help deliver the fridge in my truck although I was hoping to not have to follow up on that offer.  When I saw their mid-size sedan in the driveway I knew I would be put to work.  I backed the truck up to the garage and with the help of the two young guys hoisted the original fridge that came with the house into the bed of the Tacoma.

I haphazardly used one of my ratcheting straps to keep the fridge from rolling anywhere.  Luckily I only had to go a few streets up the road.

The house the young couple lived at was at the very end of the street.  The house was WAY off the street and required traversing a twisty, bumpy sand driveway to get there.

The house was interesting.  You could tell that when it was built there was some real thought and effort put into it.  However it looks like at one point it probably became when of the many foreclosure casualties in my area.  The young couple obviously didn’t have the means to keep the place well maintained.

We guided the fridge inside using my hand truck.  It felt kind of weird leaving it at a strangers place after being under my roof for over a dozen years.  Oh well, it freed up room in the garage and hopefully will serve it’s new family well.  The young couple thanked me for my efforts.  I headed home and resumed my labor.

In addition to the mulching, I grabbed some additional stuff at Home Depot as improvements to the yard and garden.  For the garden I grabbed a tray of a different kale variety and cauliflower.  Both will be great home grown food additions if they flourish.

For the yard I bought an avocado tree and a coconut palm.  The avocado tree was planted up front in the spot the remains of the frost murdered plumeria resided.  In the past year I discovered that I like avocado.  It just happens to be a GREAT super food.  It would be awesome to be able to eventually grow my own.

The coconut palm was planted where the palmetto used to be.  The coconut palm that is planted off the corner of the pool cage is probably my favorite tree on my land.  That actually started as a tree of roughly the same size as what I bought.  It’s now probably 30 feet high and has fronds that are 12 feet long.

I just happened to have enough castle wall stone left to make a small border around the palm tree. I weed blocked and mulched the area for aesthetics.  I am crossing my fingers it takes hold and flourishes.

By the time the last tool was put away I was thoroughly spent.  I had managed to fill pretty much the entire day with various work although I did like the fruits of my labor.  The landscaped areas look much better with their new thick coat of mulch.  You can see all the pictures from the day here.

Saturday night I made the mistake of downing a couple Bud Light Platinums on an empty stomach compounded with a dehydrated body, I hardly drank any water all day long.  The end result was my getting buzzed extremely quick.  While buzzed I went on a Facebook posting spree, throwing up a bunch of random, mostly stupid things.  Moral of the story, don’t drink and post to Facebook.

On Sunday morning I got off to a late start thanks to the clocks jumping forward this weekend.  My planned brick at the waterpark didn’t get started until shortly before 11.  I had a surprisingly decent bike ride, averaging  18.5 mph on the 12.5 mile ride.

Ali showed up to join me for the swim portion of the brick.  I put in 800 meters at the pool, the last 400 were at a fast (for me)  8 minutes.  It was really surprising because my swimming endurance felt pretty damn awful.  I felt gassed after the first 200.

The was my first brick of 2013.  Hell it was my first swimming since last September and I don’t think I have done any fast biking in almost as long.  It felt good to get out there. I hope to reestablish Sunday bricks as part of my normal fitness routine.   I just need get them done earlier in the day.

On my way home I stopped at Ali’s place (she was not home) to get a book case she no longer needed since the Ikea additions to her place.  Once verifying it was the correct width to fit in the vacated fridge wall space, I loaded it into the truck.  Doing this myself was tricky.  I carefully slid the shelf down the carpeted stairs which include a 180 degree turn and then awkwardly hoisted it on to the tailgate.

It fit the wall perfectly although a finished wood shelf may not look very stylish in a garage setting.  It gave me a lot of functional storage space over the fridge, which had become a one shelf storage area in the past year.

The SSR got a needed bath Sunday afternoon.  It has had a bug facial since the SSR meet up.  I never get tired of washing the truck.  I love the way it looks when I am done.

Sunday night Ali and I went to go see the Great and Powerful Oz.  Since neither of us had plans we figured we might as well go together.  Ali is a huge Wizard of Oz fan so the idea of a prequel to one of her favorite films of all time was appealing to her.  I went to get out of the house, I don’t share Alison’s love of OZ.

The movie wasn’t bad although I was fighting a severe case of drowsiness throughout.  Ali thought it was really good which isn’t surprising since she loves the story so much.  Personally I’d give it a B or B+ but if you love OZ you will be into this film for sure.

So once again I had IX Webhosting turn off the Bar-barians web site.  I am finding myself thoroughly annoyed at the way they have been handling the issue of CPU utilization.  When the new BB site first launched in early February I had no idea it would get as much traffic as it has.  In 30 days it got somewhere around 2 million hits.  Hits are page views, not 2 million unique visitors.  That is a lot.

I have been really working hard at getting the site as optimized as possible by doing things like utilizing W3 Total Cache, implementing a CDN via Amazon Cloudfront and making dozens of little tweaks to minimize the load on the shared server.  My efforts have gotten CPU usage down significantly but IX still says it is too high.  Ok fine, I understand the need to keep utilization down.  What I don’t understand is how poorly IX is at handling the situation professionally.

Each time they turn off the domain I have to call them, let them know I was going to do additional tweaking and then they would turn the domain back on.  In the support ticket it always says they will check usage again in 48-72 hours to see if my changes helped.  Well what has happened each time is this recheck date passes, the domain is still online, so I assume what I did worked.

Well instead what happens is a random amount of days after the stated recheck someone actually does it.  When they do, instead of notifying me of the new usage numbers, they just shut the domain off again without notifying me first, requiring me to start the process all over again.

There are several problems I have with the support I have gotten on IX on the problem.  First, nobody “owns” my ticket.  Each and every time this happens I have dealt with a different person, none of which has a grasp on what has been going on.  It’s very annoying that they don’t assign tickets to individuals so they work with customers to resolve them completely.

Second their repeated pattern of letting their own recheck dates pass seems crazy and piles on to the frustration.  In this latest incident, I was told the domain was going to be rechecked on March 6th.  It actually wasn’t checked until FOUR DAYS LATER.  Since I had not been contacted on the 6th I assumed I was in the clear.  BAM, nope, you are dead, again.

Third, IX does not give their customers a way to check their cpu utilization themselves.  It requires one of their network administrators to pull a report.  This means there is no real time way for me to know how much of an impact the changes I am making are helping.  I make a tweak and then basically know it didn’t work when they turn off the domain again.  It is VERY inefficient.

So I am done trying to shoehorn the Bar-barians web site into my current hosting account.  I have several options.  The cpu usage on my account looks like if I split the BB web site onto it’s own shared hosting account it would fall under the CPU threshold at IX.  However after all the aggravation with the way IX has handled the issue I don’t really feel like rewarding them with more of my business.

I could move the site to shared hosting with a different provider, one that has a reputation of being more friendly to WordPress hosting and has better tolerance of the demands WordPress hosting can put on a server.

Finally I could look again at moving the site back to the Amazon cloud.  However I am not sure what size instance I would need to run the site efficiently.  Depending on the size I would settle on (a micro instance was woefully underpowered) I could wind up with a sizable hosting charge.   I am also not sure how keen I am taking on the responsibility of administering the virtual Linux server from floor to ceiling since I only have very limited knowledge of the environment.

So anyway, this week I will be looking in earnest at new home for the Bar-barians site, I need this Groundhog Day scenario to come to an end.

I picked up Patrick from the airport mid-day Friday for his surprise last minute trip to SW Fla.  I had seen Pat back in mid-January when I did my western Pa road trip to my dad’s place.  I picked him up in the SSR since Patrick had never been in the truck before.  I did a few hard and loud accelerations for fun.

On Friday evening I suggested to Pat we head down to Zookies for dinner, the place I hung out with my dad a couple times during his visit.  When dad and I went, the parking lot looked pretty full yet there was still a decent amount of tables available as well as space at the bar.

When Pat and I pulled in the parking lot looked quite full and this time the inside was packed as well.  There were probably 20 people waiting, there was not an open table or bar stool available.  Pat said he was fine with just eating at the bar as was I.  Eventually a single seat opened up in the one corner of the bar.  We grabbed it and then a second one came open maybe 15 minutes later.

As we scanned the place it was wall to wall old people, next to Patrick, I may have been the youngest patron there.  We were after all there at prime old person feeding time, 6pm.  We had an older couple to our left that we had some conversation with.  We found out the husband was retired from Raytheon and was an electrical engineer as Pat is.

I noticed the wife had band aids on her one ear, I asked her if she had some skin cancer cut out since I am familiar with the signs.  She said she did indeed.

Pat and I were keeping the conversation alive with them when we ran into an awkward/uncomfortable moment.  The woman was describing something and came out with the phrase “n-word babies” (no I am not a fan of the term).  Instantly it was like a big wet awkward blanket was thrown on top of Patrick and I. He feels the same way I do about people that throw that word around as a normal part of their vernacular.  We sort of each gave each other a quick “did she really just say that” glance, and clammed up.

You could tell the woman picked up on the fact that her racist adjective did not sit well with either of us.  She tried to change the subject and restart the convo in another direction.  Pat and I kept most of our responses down to a few words from that point on.  I was relieved when they packed up and left.  Nothing will turn me off more to a person than if they pull back their veil and show me their inner racist. Well, animal cruelty is at the same level I suppose.

Pat and I had identical dinners, enjoying the Friday night special fish dinner.  We both opted for the much healthier blackened version instead of deep fried.   We also both imbibed  on the same draft beer, called Zookies Red.  The first few sips were a bit rough on my taste buds but after that it smoothed out enough that I had a total of three.

It seemed all in all, despite the unwelcomed racist bar conversation, Patrick enjoyed the Zookie’s experience.

I told Pat ahead of time I had a race to time Saturday morning.  I gave him the option to just sleep in as opposed to rolling out the door with me at 5:30 am.  He was fine with tagging along, Patrick is much like me in that he isn’t real comfortable just sitting around.

When we got on the race site it wasn’t long before our volunteer coordinator scooped Patrick up and put him to work which he didn’t mind.  First he got to work the timing chip hand out table and then he was out on the course being one of the traffic control volunteers.  My part of the race went smoothly, there weren’t any major timing snafus.

When we got home I had all of my post race crap to do.  I asked Pat if he ever saw Walking Dead before, he hadn’t.  Well I had a treat for him.  I fired the show up on the Xbox via Netflix.  We wound up spending a large part of the day watching WD episodes, they are so good I didn’t mind watching them again.

I had asked Pat if he minded helping me with ripping the remains of the palmetto bush out of the ground.  To most people this would seem like a ridiculous request, having family down to visit for a couple days and enlist them to do a home project.  And normally I would agree, but not with Pat, he likes to do stuff, even if the stuff is physical labor.  I am much the same way, I have pitched in with projects that my dad has multiple times during my visits to his various homes the past 6 or 7 years.

Thankfully, my neighbor had agreed to come over with his large tractor to assist in the removal process.  His tractor has a front shovel and a box blade in the back.  When he first hit the palmetto roots, they hardly budged.  I was worried that the tractor wasn’t going to be as much help as I hoped.  However my neighbor doesn’t give up easily and he also has a lot of tractor skills.

He used a lot of back and forth action as well as using the hydraulic lifting power of the bucket to rip the huge  root system out of the sandy soil.  The 4 wheel drive tractor was digging into the yard deeply, leaving huge ruts as the tires tried to get traction.

The bush was right near the fence line and one of the buried sprinkler lines.  As my neighbor was rocking the tractor back and forth he was getting close to both.  I had visions of the box blade ripping through the fence line or one of the huge rear tires snapping a pvc pipe.  Luckily neither situation occurred thanks to his tractor handling ability.

It took a long time but after close to an hour of tractor work my neighbor had the stumps torn out.  We loaded up the bucket with the remains and he drove the tractor back to the fill pit to dump them.  I thanked my neighbor for all the work and promised a case of beer for his efforts.

After he left Pat and I got out the hand tools to smooth out the area.  As we did we noticed some hard spots just below the soil.  Evidently there were a few rogue roots lurking under the surface.  Well there were actually quite a few subterranean roots.  Pat and I utilized a shovel and post bar to get them out.  It was tough as hell getting them to release their grip on the soil.  I could not imagine what I would have gone through if I tried to pull out the entire root system by hand.

I was a bit annoyed that during the digging process I tweaked my bad right knee while trying to drive a shovel into the ground with my foot.  I could feel some swelling in it Saturday night, not exactly what you want with a half marathon scheduled for the following day.

Earlier I had picked up the dogs and brought them out to the house to hang with me and Uncle Patrick.  They had fun hanging outside while we worked.  Ali came out later to pick them up and downed some pre-half marathon pizza with Pat and I.

So for the second day in a row Pat and I rolled out of bed super early.  As predicted, the temps were cold, in the upper 40’s.  We got up to the race site around 6 about an hour early.  Patrick, despite running in much cold weather in his native Pittsburgh, was quite cold, just like me.  When he runs up north he has a lot more clothing on than he had on Sunday morning.

After getting our numbers which I thought were kind of interesting, 696 for me and 878 for Patrick, we headed back to the truck to hang out.  We saw some of my GCR buddies there and I introduced Pat to them although he met a number of them helping out at the race we did on Saturday.

About 20 or 25 minutes from the race start Pat and I did a couple laps around the parking lot to try to loosen up a bit.  Even Pat’s parking lot warm up pace was tough for me to maintain without considerable effort.  With about 10 minutes to go we merged into the river of humanity that was heading towards the start line.

The PA system they had at the start line was woefully underpowered.  Despite being only about 10-12 people away from the start line, I could hear nothing.  I didn’t even notice someone was singing the national anthem until the last verse.  After some more talking by someone I could not hear, an air horn started the race.  At least we could hear that.  I wished Patrick good luck as we took off, knowing he would soon be well out of my sight.

I stripped down to shorts and my long sleeve Under Armour cold gear top to run.  Although it was cold, at least the rain that was in the forecast never developed.  That would have been pretty damn miserable.

Early on I tried to keep my pace decent but I was very conscious of having a lot of miles in front of me.  Since in my training the most I ran was 10 miles I was even more worried about bonking if I went too hard too fast.  Early on in the race there is a lot of changing of the human scenery.  I was passing a lot of people and a lot of people were passing me as runners got established in their pace groups.

After about a mile or so the deep chill I was feeling had subsided as my internal furnace was now cranking away.  I checked my pace occasionally as I went along, for the most part it was around 8:30 which would easily put me below my goal of beating last years time of 1:55:17.

I took a little different approach to the water stops this year.  In other races I never would allow myself to stop for even a split second to drink, I always tried to awkwardly continue to run slowly while drinking.  More often than not that results in my choking and getting very little of the water into my body.  This time I decided that getting hydration was worth the 5 second pause it required.

I knew overall my pace during the first half of the run was pretty strong however I was surprised when I saw my half way split was 56 minutes flat.  This was nearly three minutes faster than I did the first half of the race last year.  If I could maintain that pace I would finish in 1:52 which would be incredible (for me).

Well shortly after the halfway split you get to tackle the toughest part of the race, the back and forth trek over a long, high bridge.   The bridge was not fun.  The optimism I felt after the halfway split was soon replaced with frustration of the painful and slow climb over the bridge.  I saw Patrick pass me as I was heading out (he was coming in) and yelled whatever supportive words I could between my gasps for breath.  That bridge sucks.

So as I finally hit the last downhill on the bridge I knew this was the grind time.  I had roughly 5 long, flat and straight miles to go till the finish.  Shortly after the bridge I felt a bit of a second wind, inspired that the most physically difficult portion of the run was behind me. However now I had the most mentally grueling portion staring me in the face.

The past two years I did this race I had managed to latch on to a couple of fast women to help pace me during this part of the run.  This year I never managed to find that pacer and it definitely put me at a disadvantage.  Last year it seemed like by the time we hit the second half of the race I was hardly passed at all, I did almost all of the passing.

This year it was much different.  I was passed, a lot, during the last 5 miles and I didn’t like it one bit.  It made me feel slow and frustrated.  I glanced at my GPS periodically and most times it showed a pace right around 9 which wasn’t going to get me home ahead of last years time.

With about 3 miles to go I was at about 1:25, I knew I needed to go if I wanted to cover the last 3.1 miles in less than 30 minutes.  I was now in no man’s land, farther than any training run I did.

I used every trick I could think of to take my mind off the physical discomfort.  I got my pace down to the high 8’s but still felt like I needed to go harder if I was going to beat the clock.  The last mile seemed to go on forever as we looped around the Edison Mall parking lot.  My legs didn’t feel like they could move any faster so I just tried to make my stride longer taking advantage of my very long legs.

As the finish line and clock came into focus I saw it had just crossed 1:54.  I pushed the pedal down as far as I could and “sprinted” to the finish, crossing the line right around 1:54:45, around 30 seconds faster than last year. Whew.  As I leaned down my head to receive my finishing medal  I came within an inch or two of inadvertently using the Hooters girl’s bosom as a pillow.  My balance was shaky.

I was thoroughly exhausted.  I went over to a nearby temporary fence and leaned on it, trying to catch my breath.  Patrick found me as I was gasping for air.  I asked him how he did.  He killed it, running a lightning fast 1:33, wow.

I quickly made my way to the stands to grab a bottle of Gatorade and a couple bagels, I felt like I needed to eat something asap.  Pat had finished long enough ago that he had moved on to the complimentary beer and even tried some of the free wings.

We had a funny moment when we headed over to the finish line to see if we would catch Ali finishing.  All of a sudden we hear the PA announcer call out “Patrick Duffey from Pittsburgh” , we were like, what the f?  We wondered if there was some sort of timing device mix up where someone else got Pat’s bib?  Then a few seconds later, the PA announcer says in a confused voice, “Patrick Duffey, again?”

Then it hit me.  We were standing about 15-20 feet away from the timing mats used for the calling of names.  Normally that is far enough away to not be read, but for whatever reason, Pat’s timing device must have had a longer than normal reading range and was getting picked up.  We stepped out of the area. 🙂

We actually missed Ali’s finish, she had come across around the 2:08 mark, shortly before we headed over there.  We caught up to her and others in the running club group to hang out.  We saw in the results that Pat was like the 50th overall person to finish, wow.  Later I went back up to check the results, I thought that Pat might have placed in his age group.

According to what I could determine, he looked to have gotten 3rd place, quite the accomplishment.  I told Pat the news and said I wasn’t 100% sure but based on what I saw, he would be getting up on the stage.

It turned out he did indeed net 3rd.  Ali and I cheered for him as he got his award of a stuffed Hooters Owl and a cool inscribed glass beer stein with his 3rd place accomplishment.   Although Pat isn’t one to admit it, I could tell he was proud that he placed as was I of him.

After getting his reward we said our goodbyes to the group and headed out.  Pat’s flight back was mid-afternoon so we didn’t have much time to spare.

As I reflect on my race I am proud that I beat last year’s time by 30 seconds but I was a bit frustrated by how I got there.  Last year I ran a negative split, running the second half of the course faster than the first.  This year I ran the first half significantly faster than the last.  I could look at several things as the reason for the second half issues like not having a running partner to keep me on point or perhaps the 8 or 9 extra pounds of body weight I am carrying around this year compared to last.

In the end the goal, was to improve my time, which I did.  You can’t ever argue with setting a PR, at 45.

Ali hitched a ride with us back to her place.  She gave Pat a quick tour of her apartment which he thought was very nice.  He then helped us walk the dogs a bit around the lake.  Despite Ali and my marital status it didn’t really affect the interaction between anyone which was cool.  Pat gave Ali a hug and the dogs a goodbye pat on the head.

By the time we got back to the house Pat had time to shower, eat lunch and take in one more WD episode before we shoved out in the SSR to the airport.  I thanked Pat for coming down and again congratulated him on his race result.  I told him he was always welcome to visit.  He’s such a good kid.

Sunday night I watched my first dvd utilizing my new Yamaha surround system.  It sounded great, too bad the movie I was watching was not, Men in Black 3.  I heard from many sources the movie was bad, the latest of which was Pat.  Despite the warnings I threw it in my Xbox.  The movie was just dumb.  I found myself totally uninterested in what was going on.  I had no issues pausing it repeatedly to attend to household chores.  It is time to let that franchise die. I’d give it a solid C.

I am pleased how I came out of the half marathon physically.  I am walking without a limp although of course I can feel a degree of soreness and stiffness in my right knee.  It’s a way better aftermath than the Tough Mudder that left me with an immobile right leg for several days.

Today the pool deck is finally supposed to be painted.  Friday was scuttled due to the rain earlier in the week putting the painters behind schedule.  I am hoping the payoff will be worth the wait.

So my Yamaha speakers showed up yesterday.  I wasted no time getting busy in getting them hooked up.  The first order of business was pulling down the Bose cube speakers which was easy.  I was worried that the mounting holes that were already in place would not line up with the new universal speaker brackets I bought, luckily they did.  The only thing I had to do was carve out a little drywall to allow the speaker wire to sit underneath the new brackets.

Installing the new speakers wasn’t hard, it just took some time.  I had to drill two new holes for one of the surround speakers as the old ones were pulling loose.

So now I had the speakers in place I had to work on getting the wires attached to the new receiver.  I had bought a digital optical audio cable to connect the receiver to the tv.  I was pissed when I discovered that my tv uses the older, coax digital audio connection, meaning another trip back to the store.

The Bose utilized a single coax style connector that incorporates both the positive and negative speaker wires.  To connect the wires to the Yamaha I had to cut the end, split/strip the wires and connect them to the + and – connections for each speaker.  Again, not hard, just a bit tedious.

  So I finally had everything hooked up.  I held my breath and hit the power button, hoping I would hear something out of the speakers.  At first, I didn’t.  I had the radio tuned to a station with poor reception.  Evidently once signal level drops below a certain level, the receiver just mutes it.  I flipped to another station and the system sprung to life, filling the space with sound.

I spent the next half hour playing with the system, trying different audio sources.  The system sounded great.  I loved being able to control everything from my phone.

I have a lot of tweaking to do yet but it can’t begin until I get the correct digital audio cable to connect the tv to the Yamaha.  My end goal is to program my Harmony remote to seamlessly incorporate flipping on the surround sound system whenever the tv is turned on.

If you want to see all of the pictures from the install go here.

While I was in the middle of the AV install I got a call from my younger brother Patrick.  He had been loosely talking about coming down to run the half marathon with me on Sunday but because of his work schedule he was unsure if he could make it happen.  I sort of assumed he wouldn’t.

Well yesterday he emailed me saying that he thought he would indeed be able to come.  He snagged a last minute flight on Priceline and will be flying in at noon today and then right back out Sunday afternoon, a few hours after the race.  It will be a brief but busy visit since I am timing a 5K tomorrow.

The deck painting has once again been rescheduled, this time for Monday.  They are behind because of the rainy weather.

My goal for the half marathon is very simple, improve.

On Friday night I had a weird dream.

I found myself back in my meat cutting days at Weis Market where I worked for over 3 years in my early 20’s.  I had just got done doing something in the front of the room when my boss, Bob, told me to get something from the cooler in the back.

As I was walking back I was shocked when I saw on a top of boxes an egg crate style container that had live baby ducks in it. These weren’t tiny just hatched ducks, they were about the size of Tuki.  I had no idea why we would have baby ducks in there but the possibilities disgusted me.  Almost on queue as I was standing by the crate of ducklings, one hopped out and fluttered into my chest were I caught it.

I hugged it close to me and immediately walked out the back door as Bob was asking me where I was going.  I didn’t answer him.  I was walking through a neighborhood, looking for a safe place to release the duck to freedom.  Everywhere I looked it seemed there were gangs of stray cats that would love to take out the duck.

I walked and walked for a long time.  Finally I found myself in some remote forest with a nice stream.  Despite being held all this time the duck hadn’t made any fuss, almost like he knew I was his ticket to freedom.  I set the baby duck down in the water and smiled as I saw him happily paddle away.  By the time I got back to the meat room there were baby ducks walking around everywhere. End of dream.

Saturday morning I got up to do the club run.  My plan was to do one more 10 mile run which would be my final barometer in my decision if I was going to run the Hooters Half Marathon which is one week away.

I ran the first half 3.5 miles with Matt.  I ran the rest by myself although I did benefit from others being there.  During the last 3.5 mile segment, far ahead of me I spotted a woman that I designated that I wanted to pass.  I was making up ground on her tediously slow but the quest to pass kept my pace up.  I actually wound up running the last 3.5 faster than the first 3.5 miles.  I hit my goal when I finally passed her with about 300 yards to go till the park entrance.

I wound up covering the 10 miles, basically the same 10 miles that I felt so horrible on two weeks ago, almost 10 minutes faster, running at an average 8:47 pace, a couple seconds within what I did at last years half.  So I had no more excuses to not sign up for the half marathon, which I did later in the weekend.  It is going to be a tall order to beat my time from last year but I plan to utilize my “acquire target, run down target, acquire next target” strategy to get me through it.

On my way home from the run I picked up the dogs since Ali was working.  Compared to last weekend I had few things on the to do list.  One of them was to quickly run the tractor around the yard to mow down the few weeds that were sticking up above the mostly dormant grass.

Saturday afternoon I decided to attend a running club function at South Street.  They had a speaker from the local hospital come in to speak on achieving and maintaining better balance in your physical well being.  Of course I was already pretty well versed on that subject but the free food and a chance to hang out with some of my running club buddies made me decide to go. Plus it was a good excuse to drop the top on the SSR and go for a ride.

I had three beers during the 2 hour event and had a good time.  I was a bit surprised that out of the roughly 50 rsvp’s we received, almost 20 people didn’t show up.

I had a in home Saturday night planned since I was keeping the dogs overnight.  I had received my latest Netflix dvd in the mail, Moon, and wanted to watch it.  I had heard it recommended now by three different sources.  Moon is about a guy that lives alone on the moon in the future, running a mostly automated mining operation.  That is all I will tell you, which isn’t much.  However I thought the film was very well done, it was kind of a throwback to when sci-fi was less about special effects (SE still great anyway), and more about an interesting story.  Moon delivers, rent it.  Solid A from me.

Before bed I flipped on the bedroom Xbox and saw they were offering a free rental of a movie called Stolen, which I never heard of.  I thought it was was a bit odd I never heard of it since it was released in 2012 and it starred Nicholas Cage.  Well after viewing the film, I had a much clearer understanding of why that was, it sucks.

Normally a film with an action/revenge theme will win me over.  Well Stolen is just so incredibly stupid on so many levels it lost me very early on.  The bad guy crosses the line from evil to moronically silly so many times it makes me not care when he gets what is due to him in the end.  The casting of the daughter in the film was horrible as well.  Her attachment to Nick Cage was so manufactured and wooden I had to lol a few times.  You name it, it’s all there, bad acting, predictable plot, ridiculous scenarios, the movie blows from start to finish.  I see why they were giving it away.  My advice to you is to not watch it unless they pay YOU to do so. It gets a D from me.

So I awoke Sunday to a day that really had no major focal point.  I had the vast majority of my to do’s done.  Wow, could I actually have a Sunday where I was just lazy?  What do you think?

To get my exercise fix in I did a quick attempt at one of the BB challenges for this month.

Then later in the morning I had an odd series of events go down.  I had been seeing listings of Mitsubishi DLP’s for really attractive prices for a few weeks.  Evidently Mitsubishi is getting out of the tv business so the sets that are still left in the sales channel can be had at deep discounted prices.

You may ask why I would even be looking at a big DLP tv? I already have one, a 5 year old 73 incher that consumes practically every inch of entertainment “nook” in my great room.  Well I was thinking it would be cool to have one of the newer Mitsu’s that supports 3D, has 5 less years on the odometer and has some additional features my set doesn’t have.  Plus I could give mom my old set.  In my head, these things made sense, at least for a few hours yesterday.

So anyway, I was on slickdeals.net and saw that HH Gregg had an in store special of remaining Mitsubishi 73 inch tv’s for a great price of $799.  For reference, 5 years ago I spent well over 2k for mine.  Some stores had them still, some didn’t.

So just for the hell of it, I called our local store and was told by a guy named Chuck that they had one remaining and it was a display model.  He said that would knock an extra 10% off the price down to a crazy low $700.  Wow.  I was now in full emotional buying (like emotional eating), logic out the window mode.  I told Chuck I would be down to take a look.

I was so sure I was coming back with a new TV that I threw my ratchet straps in the back and two blankets to protect it from harm since it is a display model.  I get down there, walk in the store, and am a bit shocked that there are 7 or 8 men in read shirts staring at me, all HH Gregg staff with nothing to do.  There literally were more staff on the floor than customers.

I briefly said hi as I marched back to the tv section, obviously not requiring any assistance.  I saw the Mitsubishi sitting on a stand by itself.  It looked pretty much identical to mine albeit with some different A/V ports.  I was quickly greeted by a sales guy asking if I needed help.  I told him I talked to Chuck on the phone and would like to wait for him.  He said Chuck was helping a customer but would be with me shortly, ok cool.

I walked around the set some more checking it out, noticing how it was manufactured in October, meaning it wasn’t sitting around all that long, cool.  I thought of how it would be nice to have a fresh tv that I won’t need to be concerned about for a number of years and what a great deal I was going to score. And then it happened,  the voice of logic managed to crawl out from under the pile of bullshit reasons to buy the tv and said “What the fck are you doing?”

I started to reevaluate my reasons to buy the tv one by one.  Ok this tv has 3D support, cool.  How often do I watch 3D movies?  Not much.  When a 3D and 2D version of a movie is in theaters  I really don’t care which I see at this point, the newness has worn off and in fact 3D effects can get downright annoying at times and take away from the film.

Then I moved on to the logic of buying a new tv that is the same size of my existing tv.  There is nothing wrong with my current set.  In fact I just paid $200 a few months back to fix it.  Yes the price of the new TV was great but I could spend $700 less and still have a 73 inch great looking tv to look at, as well as not having to go through the hassle of installing it and transporting the old one by myself.

I then reminded myself that the Tacoma needs 4 new tires a lot more than I need a tv.  In fact there were countless better ways that money could be put to use.  So in the span of 60 seconds I had totally flipped my position.  Chuck had not gotten free yet and it was a good thing.  It saved me from having to awkwardly explain that I had come to my senses. I quietly exited the store, once again passing the hoard of salespeople with nothing to do, except Chuck.

I hopped back in my truck a bit disappointed that my compulsive buying itch was not scratched but at the same time knowing I would be avoiding the buyers remorse that would have been sure to follow.

So when I got home after my near miss tv purchase I was feeling conflicted.  I knew with as hard as I worked last weekend there was nothing wrong with me not wanting to do any projects this weekend.  Plus it was hot and humid on Sunday with temps crossing 85 degrees.  The project I was thinking about doing was cutting down the palmetto bush by the garden.

The palmetto bush has bothered me forever.  One time I spent a lot of time trimming it back hard to make it look a little better.  In no time it became overgrown and ugly looking once again.

So anyway, I was fighting the urge to start the project.  However I grabbed my new cordless reciprocating saw mid-afternoon and walked down to the bush.  I thought that maybe I would just try out my new saw to see how it works.  Well that was the beginning of the end.

At first I thought I would just zip off a few branches.  Well then a few became a few dozen, then after the battery died, out came the extension cord and my original sawz all.  I worked my ass off for a couple hours, sweating and cursing myself along the way for not being able to just chill out.

By the time I was finished the bush looked like this.  I am hoping to get my neighbor to help me using his large tractor to dig/rip the base of the palmetto out of the ground.  It will be a MAJOR pain in the ass to try to do that by hand.

I had some good news in my fight to cut back usage of web host resources by the Bar-barians web site.  Since I implemented a Cloudfront CDN I saw the usage numbers on the site go down dramatically.  Well my good feelings were short lived when I saw another email from my web host this morning that basically said “good, but not good enough”.

Take a look at Feb 23rd and 24th, the first two FULL days of using the CDN. (22nd had it up for part of the day)  The daily bandwidth which at some points was approaching 7 gigabytes was reduced DRAMATICALLY to less than 300 meg.

But the focus of my web hosts email was CPU time which has dropped a lot as well but still over their threshold for shared servers.

Well I noticed that actually this blog is consuming a large share of cpu minutes as well, which I never really paid attention to.  I know a LOT of people read my daily brain dump but I never thought it was enough to put a big dent in my server usage.  Well it is, using about 40% of my total cpu time.   In fact, if I do the same style of optimization on this blog as the Bar-barians site I am pretty sure I can get my overall usage back under the threshold where they will leave me alone.  That would be awesome.

The pool deck is scheduled to be painted on Wednesday.  I was undecided on what color I wanted to paint it, the wall color or the accent color.  After getting some opinions I decided I am going with the accent color.  If I used the wall color it would just be way too much with absolutely nothing to break it up.  The accent color is darker and warmer both of which will give the deck a dramatically different appearance from the off white color it was originally painted. The darker color also will not be so quick to look dirty. I think the end result will be pretty cool.

So I have only run after work during the week very infrequently.  When I have, it typically was a shorter three or four mile jaunt.  I got the bright idea that since I was unable to run 10 miles with the club on Saturday morning I would simply run 10 after work last night.  Sounds reasonable.

I decided to park at the running store and start from there instead of starting at the normal park the Saturday morning run launches from.  Doing this changes the dynamic of the run.  Instead of it having two water stops and being broken into 3.5, 3, and 3.5 mile segments it becomes two 5 milers.

Very early on in the run I had a couple tweaks in my knees that didn’t feel great and resulted in a slight limp for a bit.  However as I warmed up I was able to resume my normal stride.  I ran as I would on a club run morning, in the bike lane against traffic.  I quickly found that doing this in the evening is more of a pain in the ass and dangerous.

There were a lot of vehicles that were either heading off to catch an early bird dinner special or see the sunset.  I had a number of (old)people  that were riding on or over the white line that designates the bike lane.  A few of them got angry hand gestures from me indicating they needed to move the f over.

I found that running the course during daylight made it feel longer as opposed to when you run the streets well before sunrise as is the norm for our group.

The first half of the run I didn’t feel too bad.  I averaged a pace in the low 9’s which was all I was looking for.

As I arrived at the Port Royal fitness club which is our normal water stop on early Saturday mornings I walked in on busy tennis courts.  I walked my shirtless, stinky, sweaty body right past one of the multiple “Members Only” signs and grabbed a drink at one of the fountains.

There was an older couple there that looked like they should be named Mr Howell and Lovey that just stared at me as I dared to drink out of their members only water fountain.  I didn’t acknowledge them, finished my drink and continued walking through the facility.  I could sense eyes from the other courts focused on the “outsider” that dared to tread on their grounds.  As I walked past the fitness center building I did an inventory of the cars parked in the lot.  85% of them were either Mercedes or Lexus with a spattering of BMW’s and a lone Corvette.

The run back was in a word, miserable.  During the first couple miles of it I just used a slower pace.  Although my breathing never got labored, my legs were rapidly running out of juice.  The last couple miles of the run was fueled almost entirely by my mind telling my body that I was too close to quit.  My legs no longer felt like legs, they felt like two slabs of concrete.  My pace was slow and labored.

I was so annoyed when I got back to route 41 and saw I still need like .17 miles to reach the 10 mile mark.  I just wanted the discomfort to end.  I turned down the sidewalk and just kept plodding along until the GPS mercifully clicked over to 10.00.  It took me 1:36 and change to cover the 10 miles.  I did the first 5 in around 45:30, meaning the last 5 took me over 51 minutes.

Those numbers make me not want to consider running the Hooters Half Marathon in early March.  I will be doing a couple more long runs in February.  If they go like last night did I’m not going to do the race.  I’m not looking to go slower than the year before.

So I slowly walked back over to the Tacoma and released the tailgate so  I could use it as a seat.  I sucked down a Goo and gulped down a bunch of water.  I felt totally spent.  On the way home I even grabbed a coffee but even that hardly made my energy level meter tick up a notch.

By the time I got home it was close to 8.  By the time I took out the trash, made dinner, and emptied the dishwasher it was 9pm, another reason doing long runs after work is not a good idea.

I did manage to keep my eyes open long enough to catch the new Walking Dead.  Now if I can just find a place that streams Blood & Chrome.

So this week I tried to do another squatting followed by running brick.  My three rounds of light but deep squats were going well.  As I was coming up on my final rep I did it with a little extra thrust.  Well as I racked the bar I felt a bad stabbing pain by my left scalpula.

I felt like I could hardly move, any attempts to move my arms to stretch it out were met with some serious pain.  I just walked around slowly and kept trying to stretch.  I assume somehow I pinched a nerve.

I was skeptical I would even be able to run.  Eventually the pain level started to go down although the first mile or so on the treadmill was still painful.  However by the time the 2+ mile mark was reached the pain had disappeared.  I am hoping it stays that way.  It was pretty severe.

There was a woman at the gym today that was drawing a lot of stares, surely as she hoped.  She was decent looking but had a very fit body.  However the reason she was getting stares was her choice of outfit.  She was wearing white, thin, short shorts along with a top made out of similar material.

She chose to pair this with dark thong underwear that was clear as day.  There was absolutely nothing left to the imagination.  I had to laugh as I saw pretty much every man in the gym walk by her as she was on the prone leg curl machine, which put her rear end front and center.

It just so happened that the machine she was on was right in front of my treadmill. 🙂

The Hooters Half Marathon is quickly approaching and I haven’t firmly mentally committed myself to doing it yet, which is much the same situation as last year.  Yesterday I took a step towards it by doing some running at the gym.

My running program is ridiculously light compared to “real” runners.  If I am not training for a race I’ll try to run maybe 3 or 4 times a month, normally doing a middle distance run sometime on a weekend. (4-7 miles)  If I am training for a race, I will try to back that up with one shorter run on the treadmill during the week during one of my lunch gym sessions. I also will try to stretch that weekend run to 10 miles.

My short run yesterday was more difficult than it normally would be because I did three sets of deep squats beforehand.  My legs felt stiff, tired and heavy when I got on the treadmill and felt like stopping after the first 1/4 mile.  I struggled along and managed to put in two miles.  I am hoping to get 10 miles in on Saturday.  I never know how my knees are going to react to increasing their workload.

Last night before heading to yoga class I had some time to kill so I stopped at Lowes.  I wanted to grab a couple more LED bulbs to replace some CFL’s that are used in the house.  I prefer the clean, cooler color of the LED bulbs and like the fact that they don’t contain mercury or throw off huge amounts of EMF (electro magnetic field) like CFL’s do.  They do cost a lot more money up front but they are also much more durable than CFL’s.

Yoga class was good.  It was me and 7 or 8 very fit women.  I sweated my ass off as normal and struggled trying to get close to where I should be with certain holds.  Some movements are impossible for me with my flexibility limitations.

I came away from the class feeling more content and peaceful.  I find the owners voice and demeanor very relaxing.  Although most of the spiritual aspects of the class floats right by me I still appreciate the calm it provides others in the group.

I need to get all of the tax info together and sent off to the accountant.  I have several things I am hoping to get done depending on what my share of the tax refund is.  They include having Rhinoshield fix/paint the pool deck, replace the worn to shit tires on the Tacoma and buy the materials to replace the border around the small decorative pond in the backyard.

Today is my step mom Teresa’s birthday.  She has had a rough past 12 months.  I hope this upcoming year is much better for her.

Saturday morning I left the house at 5:20 AM to go do the club run.  I was a bit nervous leaving Nicki home that early in the morning even though she took a dump before I left.  The morning is Nicki’s witching hour when it comes to defecation.

Even though the purpose of the club run is to run with other people, I actually ran the first half of the 7 miles by myself.  After my fastest ever 5K I wanted to try to keep pushing the pace.  As I was approaching the 3.5 mile halfway water stop I passed a big pack of people (mostly speedy women) that are all typically faster than me.  I never passed any of them before, ever, in any situation.

Of course in order to do so I had to be doing my all out race pace, while the pack of people I passed were firmly in their training pace, able to hold casual conversation among them.  I on the other hand was barely able to grunt out a word as I passed them.  Still, it felt good to actually “beat” them for once.

I covered the first 3.5 miles in 29 minutes. I had pretty much blown myself out and was looking for someone to run back with at a slower pace.  After a drink and stretching I hadn’t seen a suitable candidate so I started heading back again on my own.  I just happened to emerge out on the road the same time as another guy was passing by.  I didn’t recognize him from a distance but he yelled back to me “You coming?” like he knew me. I quickly caught up to him and said hi.

This was actually some guy I never met before named Bob.  Bob was just an avid runner that would rather run with someone than alone.  It also just happened Bob was getting over a cold and running at a more casual 9 minute mile pace which was about perfect for me for the return trip.

Bob was an older guy in his early 60’s but he still is very, very active.  He has run 10 marathons and even was in an Ironman triathlon although he had to drop mid-race due to injury.  Despite his age he isn’t slowing down, something I obviously admire.  He is signed up to the Disney Goofy, a very appropriate name for a race since you have to be goofy to do it.  You do a half marathon one day and then do a full marathon the next.

I enjoyed my time running with Bob and thanked him as we pulled back into the parking lot.  The conversation made the last 3.5 miles go by quickly.

I pulled back into the driveway worried I was going to be entering a house smelling ripe with dog shit.  I was quite happy Nicki held it.  It’s funny as I walked the house going room to room Nicki followed me around with a smile on her face that seems like she is saying “look I was a good girl! I didn’t shit in the house!”

Once I got home I ripped into housework.  In order to keep me on point I brought back “the list”.  For years, every weekend I would create myself a to do list of things I wanted to get done.  I found it was a great way to keep me motivated plus the act of scratching an item off the list gave a nice little shot of satisfaction.

Alison HATED my lists.  She felt they put undue pressure on her opportunity to enjoy weekends.  I eventually stopped making the lists to appease her, instead trying to rely on mental checklists which I found to be less effective.  There is something about drawing a line through a list item that scratches an itch.

Well anyway, I have been complaining about feeling like I am behind the curve in things I want to get done.  I figured reviving the list is one step in getting that feeling alleviated.  When the list is done I can officially relax.

So after scribbling out the list I got busy on completing it.  The house needed a thorough cleaning.  Since being on my own and having the dogs under a new roof most of the time I have found the old every other week cleaning schedule not all that crucial.  If I stretch it to 3 weeks or even 4 most people would not be able to tell.  My Neato running 3 times a week keeps the floor surfaces looking fresh and I do daily minor upkeep that keeps things looking decent.

It had been a long time since I did a full cleaning which included the bathrooms, counters, dusting, full house sweeping and Scooba hard surface follow up. I figured since my Dad would be accompanying me back from PA it made sense to give the house a thorough once over now.

After the cleaning was done I pulled the van up to the garage to give it a bath.  I am not sure why I do this since the van is sure to get quite cruddy after a 2400 mile trek to the cold north and back.   The inside is what really needed attention.  The seats and carpet had bushels of dog hair.  I spent a good 20 minutes with the shop vac de-hairing the interior.

I did a couple other things like top off the coolant and windshield washer fluid reservoir.  I’ll check the oil disptick and tire pressure before pulling out as well.  I am crossing my fingers the trip is void of mechanical issues, I have not been very lucky with that with my last few road trips.

Ali is nervous about the trip, worried about me trekking that distance by myself with the dogs.  It will be my first major road trip solo.  Doing so while wrangling the two dogs will be a challenge for sure but nothing I can’t handle.

My last list item involved doing some additional testing of the Ipico bib chips we are using for this year’s half marathon.  I am a bit nervous since we never have used the tags officially in a race before.

I turned the pool deck into a makeshift finish line complete with both timing boxes, a laptop and two timing mats.  I had to laugh when both girls decided to use the one timing mat as a resting spot.  They remained there for awhile as I walked bibs across the mats.

I tested over 100 bibs and got a read every time except when I had 4 of them piled on top of each other which wouldn’t happen in a race anyway.   The test made me feel better about using the bib devices for the race.  Here is a video of some of the testing.

My Sunday was pretty chore free thanks to my efforts on Saturday.  I still managed to keep busy and spent some of the afternoon helping my boss set up a cable modem and wireless router at her condo.  She signed up for the Blast internet package which is SUPER fast.

It made me want to upgrade my service.  As a cost cutting measure when we separated I downgraded my Comcast internet down to a slower, less expensive speed.  The utilities budget column has enough of a pad in it that I should be able to bump back up to faster service without feeling much of a pinch.

I spent a good portion of the day working on various computer related tasks like updating websites, doing half marathon related things and some work on another web site I am revamping.

As I was plodding away I was thinking about how odd it is that I feel like I have such sparse time to do brainless entertainment items like playing WoW or the Xbox. I imagined that once I was on my own I would have tons of time to indulge any and all entertainment my heart desired.  It just has not been the case.  I haven’t logged into WoW for at least 2 or 3 weeks and the way the rest of my January is shaping up it may be February until I get to drop into my virtual home once again.

I will have a very busy two days ahead of me until the party van leaves the dock in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.