Category Movie Reviews

Excessive is how I would describe several aspects of my Thanksgiving 4 day weekend.  Let me see how much detail I can pull out of my cranium.

Wednesday night was just crazy.  I went straight to the running store after leaving work early where packet pick up for the race was going on.  There was a huge stack of paper entries waiting for me to key into the system as well as endless emails on my phone notifying me of each online sign up.

When I got home I knew I was going to have to do some creative data entry.  I ordered 3000 bibs for this race, a number I thought was overly generous since last year we had around 2250 people in the 5K event.  Well when I got done putting everyone in I had 2992 people signed up for the 5k race, leaving me no extra bibs basically for walk up entries.

Luckily I had about 150 bibs left over from last years race.  I had to do a lot of tweaking of some numbers and moving blocks of people around to make it all work but finally a little after 9pm I had the data side of things straightened out.

I was utilizing the recently repaired van for hauling the equipment because I had more with me than normal plus we were picking up the dogs on the way home since Ali was flying up to PA immediately after the race.  I had a tough time falling asleep as mental checklist after mental checklist was dancing through my brain, trying to make sure I had everything covered.

Even though the alarm went off at an awful 3:30 AM I was up and out of bed with no delay, I felt like the countdown timer had started as soon as my eyes opened.  Cindy and I were in downtown Naples well before 5AM unloading equipment.  The temps were on the chilly side in the low 50’s but not as bad as last year where it was downright cold.

So early on things were going smoothly.  We had gotten there early enough that we had everything set up and ready to go well in advance of the huge crowd of 3000+ people.  However when it was 6:45 AM and there still weren’t that many people on site it became a problem.  It was almost like knowing a tsunami wave was coming.

Well the wave hit and it hit hard.  All of a sudden there was a sea of people converging on the registration area.  Ali was having endless paper applications apps thrown at her which I tried to assist on as much as possible.  The line of people to pick up their race packets all of a sudden became close to a 100 people deep at one time.  We had a problem.

When these race day situations pop up it’s all about how you react to them.  Well we didn’t handle this situation as well as it should have been, the pre-registered line just was not moving like it should have.  Things were so backed up that we actually delayed the start of the race by 12 minutes.

The scene at the start line was pretty insane.  There was a massive lake of humanity extending hundreds of feet behind the timing mats as well as hundreds more people on either side street.  Trying to funnel this many people into  roughly 25 feet of start line is not easy.  I had to stand as a human barricade in front of my timing equipment to prevent it from being run over.

In the middle of the the start a bad situation developed.  One of the start mats got kicked which folded up it’s lead edge.  Within seconds this fold increased as people repeatedly hit it with their feet, it looked like a half rolled burrito and was a major tripping hazard.  I really can’t believe nobody went down.  When the crowd thinned just a bit I dashed into the oncoming bodies and tried to flatten the mat out.  The one bystander watching saw my attempt and afterward told me I was risking my life doing so.

So I had another issue to deal with.  There were so many people in the race it literally took 5 minutes till they all cleared the start.  However I knew there were also some VERY fast people in the event, fast enough to complete the 5K distance in close to 15 minutes.  I decided to leave the start line up and running as I ran down to the finish line to get it up.  After setting up the finish I ran back to the start line which was a couple blocks away to collect the time file.  By the time I returned to the finish line the top runners already had crossed the lines, I hoped I would see their times on my monitor screen. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw they were.

Cindy was a very integral part of the event as she reprised her role as race mascot, complete with her turkey costume.  It’s a role she was made to do, she absolutely loved interacting with people in a goofy and friendly way.  Her contribution really added extra smiles for many, many people at the event.

For my part, I thought timing the race was going well.  I had two timing boxes running at the finish line to ensure I had reliable reads, one of them being the timing box I just bought.  The first issue I had wasn’t a data related problem, it was a physical one.  One of the mats with the used system I bought had a small tear towards the back end of it.  Well after thousands of feet running across it this small tear developed into a large tear which I did not even see until a spectator pointed it out to me.

My first attempt at remediation was to fold the mat under at the tear location however it was unsuccessful.  After a woman actually tripped on the mat and fell I ripped it off the course and disconnected it from the timing box.  At first I thought maybe the torn area could be repaired but closer inspection revealed the mat was just worn out.  The areas that weren’t ripped looked thin enough that they could tear easily  as well.  I guess I will be buying at least one new mat soon.

So once the physical issue was resolved some data issues started to pop up.  With this many people I already expected some issues related to the human error that invariably occurs when dealing with these numbers.  The first few problems I encountered were exactly that, somebody was wearing the wrong bib or got their bib swapped with somebody else.  However I then started getting more worrisome issues.

I had people coming up reporting the didn’t see their name on the results I posted on site.  I looked them up and they had a chip start time, when they crossed the mats at the beginning of the race but no time when they ran across the mats at the finish.  My first thought was maybe their race bib chip malfunctioned which is rare but can happen occasionally.  My concern increased when I took the bibs of a couple of these problem finishers and ran them across the finish line, they read just fine.

After the race the scale of this scenario became clear, there were over 200 people that I had a start time for but no finish time.  That’s just great.  To have this scenario with two timing boxes up and running seemed nearly impossible.  When I started with my corrections I did notice a pattern, it seemed the period of time where all of the failures took place was during the very busy finish segment where there were a non-stop flow of people crossing the mats simultaneously.  My assumption was that for whatever reason, the high volume was causing reads to be dropped.  I have reached out to several sources, including the manufacturer of the timing equipment looking for answers.

Other than my personal timing related issues the rest of the event went well. I saw lots and lots of smiles that helped to counteract my personal fatigue.  I do think that the number of people that were in the event were problematic and if the club wants to continue to allow the event to continue with an uncapped participant level there will have to be several logistical/equipment changes made to better accommodate these numbers.

After the race we had to reload the van in a way that allowed for a small section of unused fold down bed space for the dogs to utilize.  I’m not quite sure how but we managed to get everybody in there.  When I think about getting rid of the party van I rarely think about these situations.  I literally would not have been able to get all of the stuff, dogs, and us into any other vehicle outside of a large van.

When we got home Cindy and I both had a ton to do.  Cindy’s family was coming over for Thanksgiving dinner so she had lots of prep to do.  My mountain of work was all post race related which included posting results, fixing results, updating the club web site and working on processing the finish line video I collected.

We were both buried in work right up until people started showing up.  In total we had 8 people over for the meal, the most I have had under roof for a Thanksgiving dinner in my house ever.  We had a large selection of good food to choose from.  Cindy’s two nephews that were over were big fans of the chickens.  It looked quite funny watching the chickens follow them around the yard.  I think everyone had a good time.

When the last person left the second quarter of the Eagles/Cowboys game was starting up.  I had so many other things to be concerned with on Thanksgiving that the Eagles playing on Thanksgiving was a minor side show.  With that being said I was still thrilled with the end result.  To have the Eagles lay a beating on the Cowboys, in Dallas, in front of a national Thanksgiving audience was a perfect way to wind down the day.

On Black Friday Cindy had to work which left me alone to toil as I saw fit.  I did do some minor Xmas shopping at Sam’s while I was buying other grocery items but the majority of my day was consumed just doing more work.

I wanted to get the majority of the house chores done so our weekend could be relatively work free (lol to that), because I wanted to get the Xmas lights/decorations up on Saturday.  I also took the time to replace the driver side mirror I broke earlier in the week like a moron.  Of course I had to make a video out of it.

On Saturday before tending to the lights we had a weird shopping trip at Home Depot.  We were there to pick up some other items but out of the blue I pulled Cindy back to the cabinets area.  The idea had popped into my head about setting up a corner floor cabinet in the unused corner of the kitchen, between the dog eating platforms.

I was surprised when I saw a corner floor cabinet with a lazy susan inside of it could be had for around 200 bucks with the 15% discount HD was running currently.  When I mentioned the idea to Cindy she was very into it as the idea of additional counter and storage space in the kitchen was something she talked about in the past.  I completed the impulse buy with no clear plan of how it was going to all work, just a general confidence I would figure something out.

Getting the cabinet into the side door was very difficult, requiring me to remove  one of the rear captains chairs and awkwardly wrangle the piece into the van with an assist from a Home Depot employee.  Evidently sometime during this process I hurt my left shoulder, an injury that appears to have grown in severity over the last couple days.

When we got the cabinet in the house the wheels were spinning in my head as Cindy and I worked on setting up both the exterior and interior Xmas decorations.  As is often the case with my projects, they are organic and mutate as ideas develop.

Cindy and I talked about what to use as a counter top for the cabinet, I said possibly we could find a small piece of granite similar to what the rest of the kitchen is surfaced with.  There was potentially high costs associated with that option.  Yes it would be ideal to have the counter for the corner match but I am not OCD enough to care that much.

We then talked about the idea of adding a second cabinet on the right, utilizing still available wall space.  The idea quickly transformed into reality as we made out second trip to Home Depot of the day.  We were confused at first.  The corner cabinet was only 16 inches wide but all of the regular floor cabinets were 24″ wide.  When we looked a t a cabinet planning flyer we discovered that the corner pieces are designed to have an 8″ gap from the wall when mated to other cabinets, why that is I am not sure.

Cindy and I decided for the top we would take a shot out of making it out of some hard wood stained a dark color.  We found some nice looking poplar boards that seemed really cheap, we saw 10 foot long, 10-12 inch wide boards with a price tag of less than $6, what a deal!  Well when we got to check out our board pricing ignorance was revealed, the price was the PER FOOT price for the wood.  The wood that I thought was only costing us $20 instead wound up costing well over $100.

When we got back we pushed and piled stuff into their estimated position and liked what we saw.  When finished we thought it would be a great addition, now we just had to figure out how to get there.

On Saturday night we took a break from the cabinet project obstacle to watch The Purge sequel.  I went into the flick assuming it would not be as good of a film as the original which wasn’t fantastic but interesting.  The idea of a 12 hour annual period of government endorsed lawlessness is an intriguing concept for sure.

Well Cindy and I both were surprised that we thought the sequel was actually slightly better than the original.  There weren’t any big name actors in the sequel but I found it to be able to stand on it’s own feet without them based on story and action.  It gets a solid B+ from me.

So Sunday morning we were out the door very early.  I had determined that in order to cut the boards as they needed, I had to use a table saw, my circular saw would not give a straight enough rip.  A table saw would have been a good thing for various projects I have done in the past so I saw this as a good excuse to finally get one.  Of course the cheaper Skillsaw unit I had targeted was sold out at Lowes, I wound up getting Kobalt saw which was more money but had the nice feature of folding up for storage.

Once we got home of course the first job was putting the saw together which took a little longer than I hoped but was pretty straightforward.  The majority of the rest of the day was consumed with the kitchen corner project.

I left Cindy mostly in charge of getting the top laid out and stained after I cut the boards to size.  At first I concentrated on getting the base cabinets attached to each other and set in place.  My goal was to not make the cabinets locked in place permanently.  I screwed them together but don’t plan to attach them to the wall.  Their size and weight should keep them in place but if for some reason we need to move/change something about them it is doable. The inconsistent kitchen floor made using a shim under the back corner necessary to eliminate wobble.

As far as attaching the boards together that would make the top the ideas there changed several times.  Cindy originally thought gluing the boards together would work.  I did not, assuming the one inch thick boards simply did not have enough glue-able surface area to be strong enough.  After putting our heads together we decided to utilize bottom support pieces screwed across the joints to hold everything together.  This presented it’s own challenges.

I did not have wood screws that were short/small enough.  I went to the near by hardware store but the smallest I could get were 1 and 5/8″ long.  If I drove it through the support piece fully the point of the screw would pop out the top of the surface which obviously is not good.  I came up with an unconventional solution to the problem.

I got my washer collection and put three of them onto each wood screw, effectively shortening the screw by around a 1/4″ or so.  I carefully secured close to 10 supports on the bottom of countertop using this method.  When we flipped it over it felt relatively secure.

However after we cleaned up, leaving the top outside to dry I realized I had created another issue.  The clearance on the top of the corner cabinet was just deep enough for the bracing boards I was using.  However the screw offset exceeded that clearance, not allowing the top to sit flush on the cabinets. Great.

The day had many on the fly solutions to problems, some of them actually worked like my attaching a series of 2×4 pieces to create an axillary support for the smaller board that was on the wall side of the counter top.

We wrapped up the day of labor very tired and slightly frustrated but both still optimistic that the final outcome will be a great addition to the kitchen workspace.  My current plan is to spend my lunch hour getting some thin plywood to use as bracing and team that up with shorter wood screws that won’t need spacers.

The reason I am willing to use my lunch hour to do this instead of going to the gym is my shoulder.  I awoke this morning with pretty severe pain doing most left arm movements.  I seriously could not imagine much exercise I could do at the gym that wouldn’t hurt so I figured I may as well get more kitchen corner project materials.  Of course the costs for the project have grown beyond my original expectations but that is pretty much always the case.

If you want to see the pictures from the project take a look here – https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10153376100572841.1073741879.504877840&type=1&l=0afe926580

Thank goodness I had Cindy to help me shoulder the load throughout the weekend, it was a tough four days.

Randall and Lily weren’t supposed to arrive until early afternoon on Saturday.  That meant that I felt the need to get everything done chore-wise during the morning.  From the first step into the early morning dripping wet humid air, I knew I did not have a fun few hours ahead of me.  The heavy summer rain has kicked weed growth into overdrive, it took me close to the double the time it normally does to just get the weeding done.    I was already dripping with sweat.

The next task was weed whacking.  After starting the whacker it ran for like 2-3 minutes before shutting off.  Despite countless, hot, sweaty yanks on the starter cord, with each pull being more aggravated than the last, the damn thing would not start.  The last thing I felt like doing was screwing with weed whacker in the heat.  I first popped off the air filter to see if unrestricted air flow would help, nope.  Next I got my can of starter fluid/carb cleaner and sprayed it inside the intake and the exterior of the carb.  The whacker spun to life for a few moments as it combusted the starter fluid but then once again was dead.  Damn it.

I was about ready to say f it, and let the weeds win until I had time to do a more thorough analysis in more pleasant weather conditions.  I tried one more thing before giving up.  I pulled both of the fuel lines that run into the carb and then shot a bunch of carb cleaner into the inlets.  I assumed there was some sort of fuel blockage from the behavior I was seeing.  I didn’t expect what I did to be sufficient to correct the problem, thankfully it was.  After putting it back together the whacker started and kept running.  My reward for the effort was to sweat through both my shirt and my shorts as well as coating my shins with a heavy layer of grass clippings.

While Cindy and I were outside we had the chickens outside free ranging.  Cindy was giving the coop a thorough cleaning.  The chickens as always loved the unrestricted access to the backyard.  It’s very funny how they now will often follow Cindy or I around the yard, hoping that at any instant one of us will drop some cracked corn.

When Randall and Lily showed up Cindy and I were half asleep on the couch after eating lunch, we were both pooped.  The two of them showed up with a bunch of Trader Joe’s grocery bags, where they stopped on the way to the house.  The groceries were both for Randall’s pantry at home and some to be utilized Saturday evening as Randall had offered to prepare a shrimp dish for dinner.  Randall had prepared meals a couple times in the past for me, he is actually a good cook.

It didn’t take long until we took Randall and Lily out back to meet the latest additions to the family, the three chickens.  We had some left over pasta to feed them which rivals cracked corn as their favorite treat.  Both Randall and Lily got a kick out of how “friendly” the chickens were, even if most of their affection is tied into whatever food you had in hand.  One of the chickens, Betty has actually started allowing us to pet her freely.  When you reach out to pet her she will sit and let you rub her back and neck without much fuss.  Wilma and Pebbles do not share this trait and will only allow you to touch them briefly if they are in the middle of actively eating.

I pulled out my portable ping pong set and transformed the dining room into a sports arena.  Despite the table being more narrow than regulation it still was good enough for a bunch of good quality, highly contest matches where all four of us played each other.  Both Cindy and Lily have real good hand/eye coordination and were tough players.  Lily was funny to listen to as she played.  She was as vocal as a pro tennis player when she lost a point.  Every match we played was tight, but of course the only person to emerge undefeated was me.  I used a boring but consistent play style to rack up the wins.

The plan was to eat at home and then head out to catch the 7:55 showing of Lucy at Coconut Point.  Randall’s shrimp pesto pasta dish seemed quite involved to prepare.  The end result was really, really good.  All three of us greatly appreciated Randall’s efforts.

So after cleaning up we had to hustle to get out the door to the movie.  We walked into the theater about one minute before the official start time, luckily, as is almost always the case, late arrival has no seating choice penalty.  The theater had less than 50 people in it.

Cindy and I had been looking forward to Lucy based on the previews we had seen.  The movie started out well, it was exciting and cool.  Unfortunately the last two thirds of it pretty much fell apart.  Randall, Cindy and myself all struggled to keep our eyelids open during parts of the film.  The story was just weak and predictable.  It’s nothing more than an average B to B- movie, suitable for a Netflix rental but certainly not the effort/expense to see in a theater.  My opinion of it was shared by everyone else. By the time we got home we were all pretty damn exhausted, we retired to bed without much further delay.

On Sunday morning originally Cindy and I were targeting to go on an Ave Maria bike ride with Randall and Lily.  Unfortunately Cindy has been diagnosed with a probable hair line fracture in her left foot, meaning torquing the foot on a road bike was on the not allowed list of activities.  So while Lily and Randall did the ride Cindy and I went to go pick up the dogs for a day trip at the house.

When they returned from the ride the dogs were quite excited to see Uncle Randall again.  Nicki fussed for a couple minutes because she never saw Liliy before but soon mellowed out.  Old age has made her not be so fussy about who is in the house anymore.

Cindy made a nice omelet breakfast for Randall and Lily to help them refuel from their very warm and calorie consuming bike ride.

I unwrapped the reusable hanging rubber bottle shooting target I bought at Rural King a few weeks before.  I figured BB gun target shooting would be a different type of activity for us.

I was out by myself at first.  I set up the target maybe 30 feet away.  I discovered that the rather hard rubber the “bottle” is made of has a bad trait of making bb’s bounce off of it instead of absorbing the impact.  When one of my shots hit the target and then bounced off the metal picnic table I was leaning on I knew it needed to be further away.

I moved the target all the way out next to the small shed, figuring that was well out of rebound range.  Unfortunately having it that far away made hitting the bottle much more difficult.  You see the sight on the $30 air rifle I bought for myself two Xmas’s ago is not accurate.  To hit what you want you need to aim right of your intended target and even when doing so, it’s still a crapshoot.  When the others came out to join me they were surprised to learn you had to pump up the air rifle after every single shot which is a physically demanding task.  The pump on the Daisy gun requires significant amounts of power to get it going.

Hitting the bottle at long range was too hard.  I had Cindy bring out some additional things to shoot that would not rebound bb’s and were bigger like an empty Bud Light box, a tissue box and an empty one gallon water container.  These items were placed closer.  I liked hitting the water bottle the most.  It gives no doubt about it feedback when you hit it.  The cardboard boxes did not flinch a millimeter when the bb’s sailed cleanly through them.  Cindy was actually the only one to hit all four targets, including the rubber bottle.  She was deservedly proud of her accomplishment.

All of us were pretty warm after hitting the backyard shooting range so we decided a little pool time would be appropriate.  Sadie was quite pleased with our decision as Randall and I took turns splashing her.  She was totally soaked and very tired by the time we got out.  Even Nicki participated in her normal, not too close, way.

Sunday afternoon was filled with various things.  One of them was me working through (with a little help from Randall) episode 4 of the Walking Dead game.  I finished the episode, leaving only one more left to complete the series.  It really is like being a first person participant in the show.

We also took in about 2/3 of Interns which was playing on HBO.  I wonder how much money Google laid out to have a movie that was like one big commercial about their business.  I just have a hard time enjoying anything with Owen Wilson in it.  Despite not seeing the entire movie I feel qualified to rate it, giving it a Lucy-like B- rating.  It has a few laughs and a story structure you have seen 1000 times before.

Randall and Lily stuck around for dinner.  Cindy made a combo meal of black bean burgers and crab cakes.  She did an experimental desert, something she never tried before, lemon meringue pie.  Unfortunately the healthy ingredient substitutions she made did not work out great.  It seems that baked goods are less forgiving than cooked meals when it comes to tweaking the recipes.

We left the house last night the same time Lily and Randall did as we had to drop the girls back off at Ali’s place.  They thanked us for the hospitality and pushed off for the other side of the state.  It was nice seeing Troy and Randall on consecutive weekends, something I don’t think has ever occurred before. The stretch of time leading up until the road trip looks to be more conventional, allowing me to keep plugging away at the endless must/should do’s at the homestead.

Over the weekend a good exercise themed video was suggested.  I plan to try to “pull” it off although it is going require large amounts of both physical and editing effort to complete.

I had a busy, busy Saturday.  Outside my first waking hour spent playing some Hearthstone the rest of my day was spent with the foot on the gas pedal.  After weeding the property and filling the bird feeders I hopped in the truck.  I needed to pick up some stuff at Home Depot and Rural King.  One of the things I was hoping to get was some new chicken wire to redo the top of the run where the plastic coated chicken wire is starting to break.  I was surprised that all Rural King had was plain old galvanized chicken wire.  I wound up ordering some pvc chicken wire with Amazon on my phone as I walked out of the store.

When I got back I hopped on the mower to complete the now necessary weekly grass trimming.  I was very thankful for my mower canopy as it was around 1PM and broiling hot outside with stifling humidity.  There was not a cloud in the sky to provide even momentary relief otherwise.  I was then doing work on the west side of the house, the sunny side,re-securing the sprinkler control box that was pulling loose from the wall.  The sweat was rolling off me non-stop as the sun baked me twice, once on my back and then again on the face is it bounced off the wall.  It was miserable, I felt like a piece of a meat in the broiler.  I had to go in several times to gulp down water as it felt dangerous to not do so.

I then grabbed the container of Thompsons water seal I bought at Home Depot and got busy with my annual protection of the bar park and other wood objects in the landscape.  This time I didn’t get the plain water seal, I got stain/sealer, the color was listed as redwood.  The stain made everything look a different shade. I think it looked the best on the bar park support posts and the worst on the border around the dog deck.  I was out there till almost 6PM brushing the stuff on.  My lower back was pretty much locked up by the time I was done after painting the ramps for the two sheds.

Cindy and I had plans to go see the new Transformers movie Saturday night.  My non-stop work day made me doubtful of my ability to stay awake for a nearly 3 hour long movie, especially with us not being able to get there until the 8PM showing.  I took a shower and we headed out anyway.

I had expressed my thoughts on prior Transformer movies in the blog last week.  Those feelings were not lessened by several HORRIBLE reviews forwarded to me by my buddy Sean, who was unable to see the movie with us.  I told Cindy about the horrible reviews but she said she doesn’t like to pre-judge a movie by others opinions.  Granted, there have been movies I have enjoyed that some critics said were shitty so surely I am a supporter of forming your own opinion.  However since I had already formed an opinion on the previous Transformer films, seeing more bad press didn’t give me much hope.  I did hope that adding Mark Wahlberg to the cast and eliminating Shia LeBouf would make a significant difference, it didn’t.

After watching a ridiculous 24 minutes of previews, the movie starts up.  The first 30 minutes or so was fine but then things went right down the established Transformers path, horrible writing, ridiculous, awkward insertion of one liners, and explosions exploding on top of explosions.  In my conservative estimation, at least a 100,000 people would have died in the collateral damage from these robots gone wild.  Marky Mark takes on almost Superman-like aura as the film progresses.  By the end of it he is somehow able to go toe to toe with an evil robot that is 100 times his size.  At times I had to hide my face in embarrassment for the actors on screen, it was soooo stupid.

Cindy thought I was overly harsh in my criticism of the film.  SHe wrote off much of the stupidity with “It’s Transformers!”, meaning that the series is supposed to have a lot of stupidity in it. After the movie I commented that I felt like I lost IQ points watching it but to be honest, I think I felt the same leaving the theater after all Transformer movies.  Transformer movies make tons of money despite their plentiful idiotic aspects.  People like robots that turn into cool looking cars and explosions.  If it isn’t broke don’t fix it I guess.  Personally I give the film a C.  If you saw the other films, you saw this one.

Originally Cindy and I discussed getting up and going running Sunday morning however the late movie, “sleeping in” until 7:30, already warm/humid weather and both of us feeling sore and stiff discarded that plan.  Plus we had a lot of things we wanted to get done.  We did our coffee run followed by a trip to Target where we saw some good deals on clearance patio furniture.  We talked about coming back later to pick up a cool heavy metal picnic table and 9 foot umbrella to restore some functionality to the dog deck.

While we were out I got a call from a woman I spoke to earlier in the week regarding buying the original chicken coop I bought.  She actually is up in New Jersey right now but is moving down to Cape Coral in about a month.  She had chickens before and is looking to pick up 3 hens when she moves back down.  She really liked my coop, especially for the money.  She had made arrangements for her ex-husband to come pick up the coop for her by proxy and he was available to do so that moment.

I told the woman that was fine but I had wanted to use the animal safe wood sealant I bought on the coop.  Since her ex was coming from Cape Coral as well which is a pretty long haul, I figured I would have time to get it done before he arrived.  As soon as Cindy and I got home I cracked open the can of sealant and got busy.  I was in the full sun the entire time and despite it still being relatively early, I was drenched in sweat in no time at all.  Just as the guy backed his truck into the driveway I was finishing up.  The coop looked very nice when I was done, despite it’s lack of structural integrity.

The guy worked in farming all of his life and definitely looked the role.  In addition to the wood coop he was transporting I showed him my chicken tractor out back. He thought it was really cool and took down the web site address to show his ex-wife, perhaps she will be upgrading to a tractor down the road. We loaded the wood coop on the back of the truck and I collected my two $100 bills.  I felt a big sense of relief as the truck pulled out, meaning my initial purchase had at least not been a total loss and that the large section of garage floor space it was consuming was now available once again.

Speaking of the garage floor, Cindy made a rather disgusting discovery Sunday morning, maggots crawling around on that same floor.  I found the corpse of a dead frog nearby, I assume that is where they came from.  There were a ton of them up and down the side of the garage that leads to the house.  I used the shop vac to eliminate them, it was really gross. In general, the flies have been very oppressive the last couple weeks.  I was happy to eliminate at least a few dozen potential flies from reaching adulthood.

One of the things we wanted to get done on Sunday was cleaning out the smaller shed to utilize it more for chicken accessories.  I had not gone through that shed thoroughly in years.  As a result I wound up pulling out a ton of stuff that I no longer wanted/needed.  Most of it went out to the road to hopefully be adopted by a local pack rat, the rest went in the trash.

The chickens got their first taste of true freedom yesterday as wel let them loose while we were doing work on their housing.  As we expected they were scared at first but it didn’t take long for them to take advantage of their freedom.  They started scratching the ground repeatedly, something they can’t really do in their coop/run because of the safety wire that is on the bottom.  Before long all three of them had dug little holes in the ground and were comfortably sitting in them.  Cindy and I were concerned the chickens might be all over the yard and require close supervision. It seemed our concerns were overinflated.  The chickens pretty much stayed within a 30 feet square area behind the pool cage.  They enjoyed both the shade that area has and the mulch which they loved digging through.

While the chickens were having fun Cindy and I were making additions to the chicken run.  I added one of Tuki’s old bird toys with a bell, a pvc chicken swing and an old perch which I haphazardly screwed into the half bike frame.  Cindy made her own chicken swing using a different design.  Thus far I haven’t seen any of the chickens use either swing as they are intended to be used. I also set up a hanging feeder instead of the ground based feeder we had before.  The chickens seemed to be big fans of eating at a higher elevation and the feeder is protected from the elements this way.

Cindy’s daughter stopped out for a couple hours on Sunday to see the chickens.  She thought it was cool how inquisitive they were.  We bought two new treats for the chickens over the weekend, cracked corn and dried mealworms.  Surprisingly the mealworms didn’t seem to go over that big with the birds but they went nuts for the corn.  We limited how much of the corn we gave them, according to the instructions the corn consumption needs to regulated.

Getting the chickens back into their housing wasn’t as troublesome as we anticipated either.  We had visions of having to chase chickens all over the back yard.  Instead Cindy was able to calmly grab each chicken and pet them as she placed them back into the coop.  You could tell that the girls were not thrilled returning to captivity after getting a taste of freedom. Shortly after the chickens were put back in some VERY severe thunder storms rolled in, unleashing torrential rain and brutal lightning and thunder.  Cindy felt bad the chickens had to be out there in such conditions.

We were trying to watch my latest Netflix rental, Pompeii, in the middle of the storm.  I say trying because the power went out four times during the movie.  Each momentary blackout required me to go through an annoying process to get back to where we left off.  It was REALLY annoying when literally 15 seconds after getting the film rolling again the power again flicked off. I thought the movie was good, sort of a hybrid between Gladiator and Armageddon (in an ancient Roman way).  Getting obliterated by a volcano is not for wimps. I’d give the movie a B+ and would take it over any Transformers movie to date. It was odd seeing Jack Bauer play the head bad guy in the film.

We did go back to Target later in the day to grab the picnic table and umbrella.  Cindy is supposed to assemble it today sometime during her day off.

Friday afternoon work was pretty quiet so I asked if I could head out a bit early.  I had a bunch of stops to make and I also stopped at Ali’s new place to get a few more things accomplished.  Even though she has a ton of stuff to unpack, her garage has enough room that she can actually park the Volt inside so she can recharge it nightly.  I got a good chunk of things done.

Friday night I was quite pissed off at myself when I knocked a Mexican Coke off the counter and had it explode all over the kitchen floor.  Somehow the exploding Coke bottle shrapnel managed to cut my left ankle as well.  Cindy handled the lionshare of the clean up duties.

On Saturday morning I was up and working outside early wanting to get a jump start on the day.  I knocked out at least a half dozen tasks before 10AM.  One of those tasks was especially disgusting.  I have an LG front loading wash machine that I like.  For a little while I have had an issue where the laundry sometimes had a bit of an unpleasant smell to it, despite my effort to always leave the front door of the unit open when not in use to make sure it drys out to prevent mildew. There is another maintenance task that I have not been doing, cleaning the pump screen.  I last did this 2-3 years ago at least.  Cleaning the pump screen is an easy task but one I have let slip, perhaps because when I checked it before it was fine and didn’t need any cleaning.

Well for whatever reason I finally decided to pull out the pump screen Saturday morning.  As I loosened the fixture a small amount of water started to spill out which is normal.  What wasn’t normal was the stench that hit my nostrils.  It was like I pulled the plug on a septic tank, the smell was that bad.  I threw a towel on the floor to catch the disgusting water.  When I pulled the filter from the body of the washer the true horror show began.

The plastic filter body was covered in some some of slimy substance that instantly turned me into a mouth breather to keep me from vomiting.  I had no idea what type of organic matter I was looking at, I just knew I was looking at the source of my stinky laundry.  I took the filter to the sink and blew off the slime with hot water and then sprayed both the filter and the the hole in the washer it resides with bleach.  I reinstalled the now disinfected filter into the washer with a new mental commitment to clean it monthly.  I noticed the laundry that was done over the weekend was missing that tinge of sewage stench.

Once I got all of my home chores done I was once again off to Ali’s new place to get her computer equipment back online.  Ali was told by Comcast that her service was all migrated to her new address and all she should have to do is plug stuff back in and it will work.  Well of course this was not the case.  A call to them was required to get Ali’s cable modem working again at it’s new location. Ali’s computer stuff is temporarily housed on top of a folding table until she is able to buy an Ikea computer desk to match the Ikea shelves she already has in her new office.

Almost everything is out of Ali’s old apartment at this point.  Sometime this week she should be handing in her keys and will be 100% moved.  It will be awhile until everything finds its place at the new townhouse.

After getting done at Ali’s I headed down to the running store to handle the race entries that came in that day.  I had the laptop with me so I could do it on the spot instead of having to do the data entry at home later.  I got there earlier than I needed to so I had more sit around with nothing to do time than I prefer.  Saturday night race prep ensued culminated with setting the alarm for 3:45 AM Sunday morning.

So Cindy and I were the first ones on the race site Sunday, a little after 5AM.  We immediately spotted a big problem, there were no port-o-potties on site.  Port-o-potties are a pretty crucial part of any race as most runners want to make sure the tank is empty before hitting the road.  A text to the race director indicated this responsibility was not supervised as it should have been and instead was assumed to be handled.  You can not make assumptions in this role.

So now we had to come up with some sort of alternative.  Cindy scouted the area and identified a 7-11 two blocks away and the public bathrooms at the Naples Pier three blocks away that could be used.  Yes it was incredibly inconvenient for runners but it was the only solution we had.  To try to head off a million “Where are the bathrooms?” questions we printed out a bunch of signs that indicated the two options and posted them around the registration area.  I was surprised that the signs actually did seem to work for the most part.  I didn’t hear much public griping about the huge hole of no on site restroom facilities although I am sure nobody was happy about it.

This was the first race that I was utilizing the new equipment I bought, three laptops and a new printer.  I had set up everything at home but did not totally simulate race day conditions which was dumb.  As a result I had a couple issues on site that I had to work around unexpectedly.  A lot of them turned out to be related to the way Windows 7 will automatically restrict communication when you don’t define an  IP address as non-public.

After overcoming those early issues the race timing went smoothly. We once again used the race bibs with an integrated timing device  and once again they performed very well.  Utilizing this type of timing device adds cost to every race but it streamlines the process greatly for both us and the runners, making it an overall win.

Cindy ran the race in addition to volunteering beforehand.  Despite her predictions of a poor performance ahead of time due to her lack of consistent running lately, she got third place in her age group. She was only 10 seconds behind the second place finisher and only a couple seconds off her personal 5K best.  I told her ahead of time she would do well, her competitive nature really helps her in a race environment.

When we got back to the house I had an hour or two of work doing post race processing and figuring out the issues I had on site with the laptops.  After I got that handled Cindy and I headed outside for some tandem gardening.  I had picked up some stuff for the garden at Lowes on Saturday, some basil, spearmint and two red peppers.  In addition we had the mail order sweet potatoes to get in the ground and a couple climbing plants that Cindy bought a couple weeks ago.

It was very relaxing and enjoyable to work together getting stuff in the ground.  For the sweet potatoes I dug a trench through the middle of two raised beds to create two raised mounds along either side.  I put 6 or 7 plants in each bed.  I have grown regular potatoes before with varying success but never sweet potatoes.  I am hoping they do well.  One thing that is doing well are the Cubanelle peppers, we have harvested at least a couple dozen so far and there are a bunch more in the pipeline.

Cindy and I went to a late afternoon showing of Spiderman 2.  Well it’s actually Spiderman 2 2 since this is the second iteration of the rebooted Spiderman series.  It was funny that as we were getting our tickets. our friend Deb from the running club walked up behind us with her daughter to see the same movie.  They wound up sitting with us to watch the movie.

I liked the first Spiderman reboot movie(which I saw by myself), more than I expected.  From the previews of Spiderman 2 I was worried the series was fast forwarding to the original Spiderman 3 which jumped the shark for me.  Spiderman 3 had just too much shit going on.  Too many enemies, too much ridiculous heroics and not enough story.  Well unfortunately I think Spiderman 2/2 has already reached Spidey 3 status.

The movie had several things that bugged me, too campy, too far outside the boundaries of remote possibility , and too predictable.  The efforts to log jam in a second arch enemy followed by an oh by the way third just didn’t work for me.  The main villain’s hatred of Spiderman didn’t hold any water either to be honest.  The movie was entertaining but not great.  For instance I think the recent Captain America was a lot better.  I’d give Spidey 2 a B+ rating.  I would be fine if they phased the current iteration of the franchise out.   After seeing all 5 Spiderman movies I am quite positive I prefer the Toby McGuire version of my favorite childhood superhero.

After the movie Cindy and I grabbed dinner at a nearby restaurant.  As we enjoyed our meal I witnessed a phenomena that was depicted brilliantly here in this video. The subject was how the world now spends a ridiculous amount of time looking down, at their smart phones.  It is something I notice all the time and something I find myself doing more often that I like.  At dinner there were two women and a young boy eating outside.  The two women spent the vast majority of their time at the table with their faces buried in their smart phones.  The little boy was standing behind the one woman, who I assume was his mother, looking somewhat sad that his mother was ignoring his existence, preferring to scroll through endless status updates of people she rarely if ever sees in real life.

The developed world really has become a slave to their phones.  It is morphing adults into iZombies and inflicting a permanent disability  on today’s youth who will be void of the ability to communicate conventionally, relegating them to communicating in electronic acronyms, incomplete sentences and “likes”.   Children are being turned into “screen addicts”, not being able to go on a 10 minute car ride without having a video screen of some type in front of them to pacify their raging ADD.  Simply looking out the window at the passing scenery is treated like minor child abuse.

If you step back, put down the phone and think about the path this is leading to it is easy to see what is so wrong about it.  Yet we all continue down this path, not thinking about the eventual outcome of it all which can be nothing but bad.

So the next time you exit the movie theater, are stopped at a red light, or sitting at the dinner table, suppress the urge to check in with your connected device that disconnects you from the world immediately around you.

So I told Ali I would try to help her move on Saturday.  I was unsure how my ab pain would be by then.  Luckily the pain seems to now be present only if I press on the area above my belly button.  I’m not sure if that is a good or bad thing.  Also the closing on the new place did not come through, meaning we would be doing a half move, from Ali’s apartment into the back of the moving truck, a less than ideal scenario for sure.  I also brought the dogs out to the house so they could stay there while Ali’s living arrangements are in limbo.

I picked up Ali so we could go grab the moving truck.  I told her I could drive it since I have long straight body truck experience.  The 17 foot U-haul truck wasn’t huge but hopefully big enough to get the job done.

When we got back none of the recruited help was there yet so Ali and I started moving the dozens of boxes down into the garage, making room for the big furniture items to get moved out.  Some of the additional people showed up so we got busy.  I wanted to get the sleeper sofa out of there first as it is probably the biggest and heaviest item there was to deal with. Once that was out of the way I figured it would be downhill.  Getting the sofa out was a challenge but successful.

The crew we had there worked diligently for maybe 90 minutes getting all of the furniture items out of the apartment and into the back of the truck.  Once they finished up everyone enjoyed the coffee, donuts and bagels Ali bought before they headed out.  There was still a lot of little items scattered about but that wasn’t the type of thing they could help much with so they headed out.

I could tell Ali was feeling burned out from the process so I tried to come up with a plan to get things to more manageable state.  First we totally cleaned out her office so she could sweep it out.  We then moved the bed pad and topping to the office so she could use it as crude sleeping quarters temporarily. We then cleaned out the master bedroom so that could get swept out as well.  We moved pretty much everything besides the clothes and shoes in her closet to the landing area by the steps.

Christy showed up and helped Ali sort and box up some of the remaining loose items.  My job was to take all of these completed boxes and storage containers and fit them into the truck Tetris style, trying to get as much in while keeping the load as stable as possible.  By the time the last box was in place the truck was pretty much filled floor to ceiling, front to back.  There are still things in the apartment that need to come out but it’s pretty minor compared to where we started.

The game plan now was to leave her stuff in the truck and as soon as the bank is ready to close on the new place, try to get her moved that evening.  The problem is there is no firm date for that to happen, quite annoying considering Ali was originally told her closing date would be 4/15.  I left her place around 2PM.  Ali was very thankful for my help.  It was a lot of work to be sure but I’ll be glad to see Ali established in her own place and don’t mind helping her get there.

Saturday evening I was quite beat as you can imagine.  Cindy and I stayed in.  She made a great dinner which included eggplant that came from the garden.  She is very good at improvising meals.  We watched Dallas Buyers Club Saturday night, the movie Matt McMconaughey won an Oscar for.  Wow his frail, gaunt appearance in the movie was very disturbing but lent credibility in his portrayal as a man with AIDS.  The movie was very well done and shined a light on the lunacy of medicine in the United States.  I’d give it a solid A.

Sunday morning, despite busting ass the day before, was designated to be a training brick.  Cindy and I headed to the waterpark to do a bike/swim brick.  We had done neither training discipline in quite a long time, 4-5 weeks at least.  The bike ride was difficult with the typical headwind when riding south but we maintained an average of 18.7 mph which isn’t bad at all.

I was worried that the swimming movement would aggravate my abdominal thing but I was able to get 1200 yards without feeling pain.  I was surprised I was able to keep my 400 yard segments under 9 minutes.  In fact I did a negative split for all three legs. (8:55, 8:40, 8:35) On the way home we grabbed some well deserved DD coffee as well as making a few other stops.  The girls greeted us like we had been gone for weeks of course.

My Sunday afternoon was mostly consumed by another Tacoma maintenance project. redoing the front brakes/rotors.  The brakes on the truck have been pulsating pretty badly for quite awhile.  I ordered the parts online from Autozone last week.  I went this route instead of simply going to the store to score two $25 AZ gift cards which I still have not located.

I had replaced the rotors on the Tacoma several years ago so I didn’t bother doing any refresh on how to do it, I figured it would come back to me, which it pretty much did, however it didn’t take long until I had my first issue.  The brake pads that AutoZone sent me were the wrong ones.  My Tacoma is the Pre-Runner variety which has upgraded brakes with different pads.  So I had to waste 90 minutes running to AutoZone to return what was sent to me and get the right type.

Doing the actual work wasn’t too bad.  I did take the pins that the brake pads slide on and throw them in the vice.  I used a paint stripper attachment in my drill to remove caked on gunk from the pins that was surely making the old pads get hung up, probably contributing to the old rotors getting warped.

While I had the hood up I did a partial brake fluid swap, sucking out the reservoir of the coffee colored brake fluid with a turkey baster and refilling it with fresh synthetic fluid.  I also replaced the air box for the second time in roughly a year.  The replacement air box I installed a year ago broke in exactly the same manner as the OEM box it replaced.  This time I bought the new airbox from AutoZone so I am hoping it holds up better than the first one which came from Ebay.

When I road tested the Tacoma the brakes felt smooth and strong, just as I hoped.  Feel free to spend 13 minutes of your life watching how I did it.

This morning I had a good report from my dentist.  Unlike the rest of my body, my teeth seem to be the one thing that has actually gotten better with age.

I have been a Tivo customer for a long time, since I had a DirecTV receiver with integrated Tivo back in 2000/2001.  Tivo was a revolutionary product when it came out, allowing customers to no longer be chained to their televisions based on a programming schedule.  Instead I could watch a show whenever it was convenient to me. On top of that watch it in 2/3 of the time since I can fast forward past commercials in a few seconds. The way Tivo would learn your viewing habits and make recommendations for other shows based on them was pretty cool as well. Being able to pause live tv was sweet.

The Tivo interface was always intuitive and user friendly, far ahead of the boxes that cable companies offered which were slow, clunky and ugly.  Over the years Tivo added features to keep up with the times, again being a ground breaker in many areas like allowing you to schedule recordings remotely from the web and be able to take recorded content from the Tivo and play it back on other devices.

I was very satisfied with my Tivo service for a long time.  At one point I had one in the main room and the bedroom.  Well over the last few years that satisfaction has been waning.  The decline started when I ejected Comcast out of my house for cable TV and switched to my OTA HD antenna for live tv.  Doing so cut down the amount of programming available to feed my Tivo dramatically.  Most of the time my box was sitting around less than 10% full.

The shift to streaming delivery of video was another big change that lessened the Tivo’s value to me.  I wound up using the Xbox 360 as much if not more than my Tivo to watch stuff.  Tivo did have it’s own set of apps to watch various online streaming content like Netflix, Amazon Video, etc… but I think they kind of suck.  The apps were slow and annoying.  I found the experience on the Xbox 360 apps to be much better. These factors plus the greatly improved Xfinity X1 hardware and software made paying $15 a month for Tivo service not make sense anymore.

They don’t let you cancel your service online, it requires a call so their “retention experts” can try to change your mind.  During the 15 minute call to Tivo I politely rejected various offers.  The guy even suggested that I should consider buying the lifetime subscription for the Tivo I am getting rid of to increase it’s resale value.  They put you on hold for like 5 minutes so they can “finalize” the cancellation.  Cut me a break, cancelling is probably one or two mouse click on their end.  Save the drama for your mama.

The call finally ended.  I have officially broken up with Tivo.

Last night I took the girls back to Ali’s place after another fun four day visit.  It’s always a bit sad for all parties involved since the girls seem to enjoy being at the house so much.

So last night as Cindy and I were watching Paranoia (B+ rating), I started to feel sharp pain in my abs.  My first thought was the pain was from my stomach.  I asked Cindy if there were any different spices in the food she made.  She said it was all stuff she has used before.  I wasn’t sure what was going on but it was pretty painful.  At the gym I had done some heavy deadlifts, after work I did a circuit that had me straining to get some push up reps out but I don’t recall any specific ab pain during either session.

Sleeping last night did not go well.  The pain in my abs woke me up several times.  Laying in certain positions was impossible.  When the alarm went off I had to struggle to get out of bed, certain angles would make me just wince.  I immediately took two Advil which took the edge off the pain enough that I could function.  The fact that Advil helped pretty much confirms that I just strained something in there.

So it was quite weird having a Friday night that was devoid of pizza and Mexican Coke.  I instead continued my bland meal plan I used most of the week which included items like toast, rice, applesauce, and boiled potatoes.  It was a bummer.

On Saturday I woke up feeling physically better.  My energy level was improved and the sweats/chills had left me alone since some time on Thursday.  My bathroom frequency had at least fallen back into the normal range.  By the time I went into the bathroom Saturday morning it had been almost a full 24 hours since the last time I did anything.  The end result was better but nothing close to what I would call normal.  I suppose with what I have been consuming that isn’t surprising.  At least I wasn’t getting blown off the seat.

So during the Saturday I needed to do SOMETHING productive.  I got outside and did the weeding.  Just something this simple felt fatiguing.  After I was done I saw one of the huge seed branches on the coconut tree needed to come down.  I was able to hack it down with the pole saw but the idea of picking it up and dragging it to the trench or pit sounded like it crossed the line of what I could hack.

While I was outside weeding I took a good look at the avocado tree.  I was quite happy to see what appears to be dozens of small avocados starting to form.  I only planted the tree post separation, I was surprised it would start bearing fruit already.  It would be AWESOME to have our own personal supply of the superfood in the front yard.

I also spent a lot of time backfilling numerous armadillo holes.  My yard has been plagued by these annoying animals for years.  I have tried unsuccessfully live trapping them but for the most part I have just been angrily undoing their work.  Well this time I was annoyed enough that I bought some armadillo repellent.  You basically spray this stuff with a hose end sprayer in areas armadillos are frequenting and it is supposed to make them move on.  I really hope it works.

After doing this minor yard work and feeling fatigued I found myself feeling angry.  I was annoyed my body had not yet recovered from whatever was going on after nearly a week.  I went over to the pull up bar and did 10 slow dead hang to neck pull ups just to prove to myself I still had some semblance of strength left.  After completing the reps for some reason the pressure in my head was further elevated.  As I walked by the corner of the shed I smashed the siding with a straight left jab.

I’m not sure what punching the shed accomplished but I did feel a bit of steam being released after impact.  The only other time I beat up the shed was after Google cancelled my AdSense account a couple years ago.

I moved inside and got some less physically demanding things done.  It at least felt good to be doing something worthwhile instead of laying/sitting around 90% of the day.  I also said goodbye to my much longer than normal hair on Saturday.  I imagined the piles of hair on floor contained whatever toxicity that has been in my body for the past week.  Of course I had to video the event since head shaving videos are among the most viewed on my YouTube channel for some weird reason.  I used the GoPro this time, my first time doing so.  It provided a different type of perspective.

Saturday night we watched my Netflix disc, Percy Jackson – Sea of Monsters.  Evidently this was the second installment, I hadn’t seen the first so there was some storyline that I was in the dark about.  I thought the movie was simply average.  There was too much stupid cheesiness wedged in and I found myself simply not caring for most of it.  It gets a B from me.

On Sunday morning my energy and wellness level felt like it crept up a couple more notches.  My bathroom effort was better than the day before which was encouraging.  I went and picked up the girls so they could spend the day at the house.  Ali had the vet give Nicki a cortisone shot last week to address the extreme itchiness that was causing her to go after her ears and eyes almost incessantly.

Even though receiving a cortisone shot is never a good thing, there was no arguing that it had at least a temporary major positive effect on how Nicki was feeling.  In addition to the itchiness it looks like the steroid helped her joint pain as well.  She seemed much more mobile than normal.  It was great seeing her feel less encumbered.

I did a decent amount of physical work yesterday including trimming up ALL the seed pods on the coconut tree while on the extension ladder.  The cordless sawzall is a great tool for this job.

Cindy positioned some of the seed pod casing to form a big crucifix, it was her tribute to it being Palm Sunday.  The rest of the day we kept busy while also taking time to enjoy the nice weather with the girls outside.

I also set up a set of 8 new solar lights I bought at Costco.  They are a much higher quality than the lights I had in place.  I think they look sharp during the day and even better at night, throwing an absolutely awesome light pattern on the ground.

On Sunday I gave my guts a couple tests.  I had a small cup of DD coffee and Sunday night I took in the pizza and Mexican Coke.  None of these items evoked a negative gastric reaction.  I can only hope the upswing continues.

Simply trying to sit here feels like work so this wont be long.

Saturday morning was another race morning, meaning it started around 3:45 AM with the alarm.  I wanted to get on site by 5AM to get the registration area set up.  I was the first one on site by about 20 minutes.  I had some glitches to deal with while timing the race but none of a major variety.  I even managed to get my Phantom up in the air to shoot some video briefly.

I went straight from the race to one of our remote offices as it was getting it’s equipment upgraded.  I had a long day there not getting off site until 5PM.  One of the guys I was working with was sick.  My assistant network admin was sick on Friday as well.

Saturday night I was beat as you could imagine.  We stayed home and watched Prisoner, my latest Netflix rental.  It was a really involved, really emotional and really long movie.   I’d give it an A-.

Sunday morning I headed outside early to take care of the chores that were unaddressed.  During the tail end of the roughly 2 hours I started feeling odd.  I was feeling tired and weak.  My first thought was I was just dehydrated but even after downing a bunch of water the feeling didn’t go away, it actually got worse.  It was like someone pulled the plug.

Well we had made plans to go do see Captain America at 4:20, even though I knew something was not well I wasn’t going to miss it.  Simple tasks like driving the SSR and even walking sounded like challenges.

When we walked in the theater at 4:15 I could hardly believe it, it was 100% empty.  Sure they were showing the movie every half hour because it is opening weekend but I could not believe we were the only ones there.  After the previews started I think one other couple walked in, so there were 4 seats filled of the roughly 500 available, wow.

I thought the movie was really good, maintaining the standard we have come to expect of Marvel superhero films.  The only thing that kept coming to mind was why the rest of the Avengers weren’t there with something this big going down.  It gets a solid A.

Sunday evening my symptoms started ratcheting up. Diarrhea was added to the symptom list. I felt like I was burning up and then shortly afterward I would be freezing.  All I wanted to do was lay down. I had absolutely no energy.  This lead to a very unrestful night’s sleep Sunday where it felt like I was waking up constantly.  I went to bed with the covers pulled up to my neck and wound up later on top of them stripped down to just boxers because I was sweating.

Now normally I would have called off work on Monday feeling as I did.  Unfortunately the hardware project required someone to be there at the start of business to make sure everything was running smoothly.  The other guys in my department were at two other locations that were also upgraded so I really had no choice but to go in.  I talked to my boss and told her my ailments.  She didn’t really want me to have to go in at all but I told her I would make sure the branch was ok and then pack it in.

I took a couple Advil and got through the morning, leaving the branch around 11:30. I went directly home and into bed.  I felt awful.  What made things worse was I couldn’t really sleep, it was more like micro-sleep.  I might half doze off for a couple minutes but then I would wake up feeling hot, cold or like I needed to go sit on the toilet again.  Despite not being able to sleep, any other option like watching tv or getting on the computer just felt like monumental tasks.  So I just continued to lay in bed all afternoon long, not pulling myself out until damn near 6PM.

I ate a dinner of tomato soup and jello, both of which Cindy prepared for me.  No food really sounded appetizing at all, I just wasn’t hungry.

Despite being in bed a good portion of the day I found myself back in there before 9PM.  I desperately hoped I would pass out and after a good night of solid sleep wake up feeling better this morning.  Unfortunately that wasn’t the case.  Instead I had another night of micro-sleep dotted with several cases of hell spawn diarrhea.  I chugged some Pepto to get through the night but it didn’t help me sleep any better. I woke up today feeling just as awful if not more so than the day before.

Thankfully today I did not have to be at work.  It’s a good thing as I have already had four five absolutely awful bathroom visits in the two hours I have been awake. I’m still sweating, still feeling weak, and still feeling like walking all the way to the master bathroom to brush my teeth is just too much to ask right now.  Yes, this sucks.

So on Saturday it was very dreary with off and on rain.  I delayed my normal morning outdoor work so I could instead help Cindy do more work cleaning out her old apartment. We brought the girls with so they could hang out.  They both enjoyed chilling out on the third floor lanai.

Once again the massive pile of things that are her daughters remained untouched, scattered around her bedroom.  Seeing this aggravated both of us but we had plenty of other things to do, too much to spend time worrying about it. Cindy worked primarily on cleaning and sorting.  I worked on repairs/painting.

We grabbed some cheap “country white” paint at Wal-mart on our way there but it turned out it was too yellowish.  I wound up heading over to Lowe’s and bought some white “ceiling paint” figuring that would be a close match to generic apartment white.  It was a better match but not perfect.  I also had to repaint a door and some other stuff that wound up getting damaged during the past year.  The point of the work was to make the apartment presentable but not perfect.  I assume before it would be rented again the owner will more than likely have painters blow through there with spray guns and turn it all white again.

We spent several hours there.  By the time we left the apartment was pretty much cleaned out besides Cindy’s daughters bedroom and a line of items along the wall.  It finally felt like the finish line was in sight.

When I got back home mid-afternoon I headed outside to quickly handle the chores I put off from the morning.  We had made plans to go to dinner and then see Noah Saturday night, a movie I was indifferent on seeing but one Cindy wanted to check out.

When we headed out it was almost Noah-like weather conditions with a very uncharacteristic March strong thunderstorm with gusting wind, lightning, thunder and near blinding downpours.  The SSR remained safely in the garage and we instead took the trusty Tacoma ark out into the elements. We had an enjoyable dinner at Stir Crazy, bypassing the line at the door by utilizing bar seating which was fine by both of us.

The movie wasn’t bad.  With my very sparse religious background I knew little more of the story behind Noah outside of animals, the ark and a lot of rain.  The movie filled in a lot of white space although from what Cindy said, some of the depictions were not accurate translations according to Bible gurus.  The thing I came away with is Noah turned into a pretty ruthless prick eventually.

I thought the film was pretty slow at points but I would never describe myself as being officially bored.  The visuals of the end of the world by water were quite impressive visually although not very believable.  I would give the film a “fine to wait till Netflix” B.  I was surprised that Cindy was actually more negative about the movie, initially only giving it a high C rating that she later revised to B status.

On Sunday morning we planned to hit the apartment one more time to get the few items that were either getting donated, thrown out or relocated to the house.  Those plans got delayed when Cindy wrenched her back, badly.  With Cindy’s activity level you might think this happened doing some sort of athletic endeavor.  Nope, she was bent over at the fridge.

All of  a sudden she had a shooting pain in her back that immobilized her.  For several minutes she remained stationary hanging onto the fridge before I helped her get down on the floor.  It was sort of scary at first, she literally couldn’t move her right leg for quite awhile.  After a long period of time on the floor stretching and laying on the heating pad she was able to get up but her body had perma-lean to the right from whatever spasmed in her back.  She was able to walk slowly but anything requiring bending over was out of the question.

So we got a late start to the apartment, luckily there wasn’t much left to do.  With Cindy hurting I was the designated pack mule, shuttling things down to the party van.  It was a challenge  trying to load the van while leaving space in the back for the dogs in the bed.

After fully loading the van our next stop was my mom’s place.  On the way there a big mirror that was in the back shifted sides, bumping Sadie who was in one of the captain chairs in the rear.  Cindy turned around to move the mirror back.  Sadie saw this as an opportunity and squirmed her way onto the front seat and promptly laid across Cindy’s calves, pinning her in that position.  I had to wait for a spot to pull over so I could come over to lift Sadie so Cindy could escape.  It was pretty funny.

So I was dropping off my 32 inch Sony TV at my mom’s place to replace her ancient 19″ tube tv that was in her bedroom.  Mom was working but I figured time-wise we would catch her after she got out.  It turns out my recollection of her quit time was inaccurate.  I thought she worked till 2.  It turns out she didn’t get home till after 4.  When I realized my mistake we rolled out somewhere around 2:30.

After mom’s we stopped at Goodwill to drop off some of Cindy’s unneeded stuff and two full bags of clothing I filled earlier.  I had not done a good clothing evaluation in quite some time, it felt good to get rid of a bunch of stuff that hasn’t seen the light of day in years.

When we got back to the house we worked on unloading the van.  A couple things from Cindy’s place were nice additions to the decor of the house.  One of them was a big floor vase with 3 huge pieces of bamboo that went into the dining room.  The large mirror that shifted in the van went into the master bathroom above the tub.  It’s addition made the already large bathroom seem even bigger.

On Sunday night we watched my latest Netflix rental, Machete Kills (Again).  I loved the original Machete, it was just plain dumb fun, a movie so silly violent that it makes fun of itself.  Well I found the sequel even more entertaining, a rarity nowadays.  The ways that Machete finds to eliminate bad guys is just hilarious.  Evidently other well known actors like being in on the joke as the cast had a lot of big names like Jessica Alba, Antonio Banderas, Mel Gibson, Cuba Gooding Jr, Charlie Sheen, and even Lady Gaga.

I laughed out loud a ton.  I am giving this an A believe it or not.   The good news is it looks like Machete 3 is in the works.

It was quite the laborious weekend.  Friday night I was at work until around 7PM for the first stages of a hardware refresh in our office.  Roughly 25 systems were being replaced.  The only reason I left at 7 was because I had to head home to do prep for the race I was timing Saturday.

So my day of labor on Saturday started at 4:45 AM.  This race we used to chip time for years, this was the first time we did not.  The reason is the race is entirely run on the beach.  Subjecting the timing equipment, computers and timing chips to the elements of the beach is never a good thing.  Instead this was timed as a fun run where we have a timing clock at the finish line and people just take a glance as they cross. Chip timing it always seemed like a waste since the distance for the course is not accurate and the terrain makes for times dramatically slower than a runner would normally register anyway.

I used the extra time to put the Phantom up for some more aerial video.  I got one of the video files processed and have one to go.

Flying at the beach was a bit more challenging but the Phantom’s amazing stability was able to compensate for the gusty conditions.

I got off site a little before 9AM and headed directly into the office to resume work on the hardware refresh.  The crew that remained Friday night did a good job getting all of the new systems physically in place, we now mostly had to do a lot of configuration and testing.  It took about 10 and a half hours till we finally had things to a point I declared as good enough.  I knew there would be lots of minor tweaking to still be done on Monday but nothing that would prevent clerks from taking care of customers.

On Sunday I would have loved to have a day to chill but there was another front that required work.  Although Cindy has been moved in with me for a couple weeks her apartment is not cleaned out by any means.  Her daughter still had a ton of stuff there and has not been very diligent with addressing it.

Well she was available yesterday so Cindy and I wanted to not waste that opportunity.  We worked mid-morning till late afternoon getting stuff moved around.  We made some major headway, getting the majority of the bedroom furniture out and some other items relocated as well.

Unfortunately there is still a lot of things, mostly small things like housewares/clothes to be pulled out of there.  The remaining large furniture items are going to wind up going into a yet to be secured storage facility.  By the time we got back to the house on Sunday I was beat….

One of the things Cindy brought back from her apartment was an old Keurig machine that she said stopped working.  I tesed it out and saw it would not pull water from the reservoir.  I pulled the bottom off and looked around but didn’t see any obvious reasons for this.  I then followed some steps I found online to prime the machine.  After doing this I was able to get it to pull water through the Keurig and dispense it in the cup as it should.

Unfortunately there is an additional problem.   I noticed as I was dispensing hot water into the coffee cup a puddle of water was slowly growing from underneath the base.  Each time I went through a brew cycle the puddle swelled in size.  I noticed on the bottom of the Keurig a small rusty spot, presumably because this problem has been going on for awhile.

A quick search online revealed this is a pretty common issue and is not one that they suggest you try to fix.  So the new plan is to call Keurig and see if they will at least give us a deal on a replacement as I heard they will do.

Sunday night Cindy and I finally got to relax and watch a movie.  Unfortunately it was a movie that was not very relaxing, The Counselor.  It had a very strong cast and was directed by Ridley Scott so I expected a quality film.  It was a quality film, it just wasn’t one that would make you feel very good about life.  Don’t expect to come away from The Counselor with a spring in your step and a big smile on your face.  It’s dark, brutal and in your face.  More than likely you will not be very satisfied with the final outcome.  The end result did not seem proportionate to the crime.  B+