Got the new plane yesterday. Spent last night decorating it with various Eagle artwork and giving it a modest paintjob. Ali doesn’t like the scary mask with eagle logo that I adorned the main wings with. 🙂 Hoping to get the electronics hooked up tonight. We are blowing off the gym tonight to check out the plant sale at Home Depot. I went (to the gym) the last 3 days, I’ll go again tomorrow, no big deal. Had the webcam pointed at the new plane today. Been working on a new flash intro with Tim for the ZM site. Looks pretty good.

Sold my JumpSoles on ebay. I try to avoid high impact on the joints anymore, not promote it. 🙂 Someone finally bought my satellite mounting arm after 2 unsuccessful tries!! Coworker sent this very funny flash movie. Check it out, you’ll laugh.

Was going to try to rescue the couple remaining catfish but it rained hard yesterday so the drainage ditch is full again. I will have to wait a few days for it to dry up.

Today I should be getting my new RC plane kit It is a step up in difficulty from my Firebird XL but I hope to get it in the air this weekend. It has much more acrobatic capability than the XL since it is a 3 channel set up. Should be interesting to see how it goes.

Got the repaired clock back for the Buick. Opened the box and everything reeked of cigarette smoke. Guess the guy likes to smoke while he works. 🙂 Also should get the new steering wheel Friday. Hopefully this weekend I will get to install both things in the car.

Last night I got the webcam setup! I am using my digital sony camcorder as the webcam device. It seems to be working well. I may also set up a 2nd cam here at work. We will see how it goes.

Last night at the gym I was talking to a guy I know that teaches 8th grade down here. He told me how sad the state of education is down here. Up till now kids were being administratively pushed through the grade levels regardless of their grades. In the next year or two they are going to use FCAT scoring as a basis for promoting students. An FCAT score ranges from 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest). You need a 2 to advance. He said he would not be surprised if HALF of his students would not be able to score a 2. A lot of his 8th graders read at a 4th grade level. It sounds like the shit is going to hit the fan once this mandatory system goes into place. You could have thousands of students being held back causing all sorts of backups in the school system. Could be a MAJOR mess. Can someone remind me of why I should want to have kids again??

More fish adventures. Last night I noticed the 2 front drainage ditches were almost dried up so I decided to be proactive and see if there were more catfish in the little water that was left. I scooped out another 6 of them! They ranged in size from 3 inches to a monster that was 10 inches long or longer. I couldn’t get the big one out he was too big for the net. I will see if I can get him after work tonight. I put the ones I DID capture into the upper part of our 2 tier pond. We have 3 goldfish in the bottom part. I am a little nervous about putting the catfish with the goldfish. We have the shell from the old pond sitting around. I will probably wind up finding a good spot to dig a hole and put the catfish in the old pond shell. After talking to some other people out in my area I found out that there is such a thing as “walking” catfish. Much in the same way of that oriental fish that was in the news, certain catfish can sort of walk and survive out of water for short amounts of time. That would explain how they wind up scattered around the yard.

Last night I was messing with getting my digital camcorder to do double duty as a webcam. It appears that I can do it, EXCEPT that when the camera is in standby mode (not recording) it shuts off in 3 minutes. I am going to try pulling the tape out of it and see how it acts. This would free me up to bring that webcam I got from the neighbors into work to set up the much anticipated FISH CAM!

Ali had me watch a show on DIYNET about Ding Darling sanctuary last night. The sanctuary is down here in our neck of the woods. The birds they showed in the show were great. However the hosts were a man and wife that were SOOOO into bird watching it almost made me embarrassed that I like birds. 🙂 Sooooooo corny.

Watched the Steelers beat up on the Colts last night. Seems they have turned things around after looking like a joke the first few games. Tommy Maddox definitely appears to be an upgrade over Kordell at this point. I watched Maddox in the XFL and he was solid. He won the championship there. Yea it was the XFL but still….

Lunch break, run to the bank and deposit 2 checks. 1 of them was for some consulting work I did for Sov. It was made out to “Duffey Consulting Services” but I thought nothing of it. After picking the slowest line in the drive up. (I ALWAYS manage to do that), the lady comes over the speaker and says they can not do anything with the check since it is made out to a business. I said huh? It has my last name in it and my address??!! Doesn’t matter. So I get the check back and then notice that instead of returning 20 in cash from the other check, she gave me 40. SO I have to go into the lobby and wait another 15 minutes to talk to them inside. Again I try to plead my case with the teller, telling her how I waited awhile for this check and how much of a hassle it is to get it reissued. No dice. So I have to get Sov to reissue a check made out to me. Wonder how long that will take. So I spent half an hour of my lunch to only get frustrated and annoyed. I already ordered that new RC plane this morning which was my “fun” cut of that check. Oh well.

Afterwards I quickly dropped off some old clothes we pulled out while we were moving our clothes to the new furniture at the donation place. Ali wanted to go through the bag and pull out the old underwear that was in it but thankfully I convinced her that the donation people will get rid of whatever they cant use. (yes all the clothes had been washed)

Whew, hot annd humid out there again. Looks like the cold front was only a tease for what will be coming. Ali laid out at our pool this weekend but wouldn’t go in the water, the water was too cold. It was 81 degrees. 🙂 Sheesh.

We got our new furniture this weekend. The only negative was one of the chests had some wood broken by the feet. They will either repair or more likey replace the chest. It looks great. Alison is very excited. We have never had a matching set of anything furniture-wise. Look for pics of it on Ali’s site soon. Found more mystery fish around the property this weekend again. More catfish but these were big ones, 5-6 inches long at least. Freaky stuff.

Helped the neighbor rip down their old antennae and satellite dish. They had 2 webcams, they only needed one. I offered to buy it from them and they said I could have it. Sweet! I am going to try setting it up at work to do a fish tank web cam. Yea, dumb but there are lotsa dumb things on the net. 🙂

Big Eagles win yesterday. The offense was hurting but they did just enough to get the job done. The defense played great. My major angina came when they started to play a soft prevent when they were only up 10. I never will understand why a team who had success all game by applying pressure on the QB all day switched to prevent at the end of a game. A good win though, it shows the Eagles belong with the upper level of teams in the NFC.

Even though we did a decent amount of work this weekend, I still sorta feel like I was a bum. Weird. Friday night was our big softball game. We played the appraiser’s office. Their team was more or less organized. Most people on their team had played before and they had mostly men on their team. Our team consisted of mostly women who NEVER played before. It was rough. I think the final score was 14-7 and they took it easy on us. I didn’t play very well. Had a couple hits but also had an embarrasing pop up with 2 people on base. I played the outfield and had to cover 2/3’s of it myself cause our girls did not know what to do. I played too shallow in the beginning and had to chase down alot of balls. It was equally frustrating as it was fun, however I would do it again under different circumstances.

Last night Ali and I worked the concession at Teco Arena for our office charity team. It was a fun time. Unfortunately the event wasn’t very well attended and we only raised 100 bucks for 3 – 4 hours of work for 12-13 people. It was interesting to be on the other side of the counter. Got home at 10:30 and crashed. A long day. Our first cool front of the fall came through last night. The temperature dropped down into the 60’s for the first time in 6 months. A pleasant change. Since moving to Fla I actually look forward to the winters. A complete 180 from living in PA where I would be depressed for the next 5 or 6 months. We did tons of outside work on the house during the past summer, sweating our asses off the entire time. In retrospect it would have been smarter to put off a lot of those ass busting projects until the winter when the environment is much friendlier!

Played some UNreal on the clan server last night. The only time I enjoy it much is when I can snipe. Otherwise you just have freaks translocating all over the place. I just strafe while firing blindly hoping it will hit someone. Just constant chaos.

2 inches of rain the other night turned our property into a swamp again. Our front drainage ditch had about 30 dead 2 inch long fish in it. Where did they come from? I can only assume from the clouds. Weirdest thing.

The Dreamcast is up for sale on ebay. I am hoping to raise enough funds from the sale to pay for a barebones Xbox system. That is the only way I can swing it with a guilt free conscience. Ordered a Canon A200 digital camera with some of our air miles yesterday. Nice little 2 megapixel camera. I finally won an auction for a GS style steering wheel for my Buick. Can’t wait to get it!

This past weekend was our big anniversary weekend. We stayed up in Siesta Keys saturday night. I booked the placed through Expedia. It was 3 or 3.5 stars on their site. After being there I’d say it was closer to a 2 star place. It was clean enough and beachfront but it looked like it was built in the 60’s or 70’s and never updated since then. It reminded me of the Beach View in Rehoboth. But still I splurged for the ocean view and our actual room was fine so it wasn’t bad, just not great. We went down to the local shopping district where they also were having an art show. It was nice but we didn’t buy anything and it was very very hot. Then we hung by the pool bar, played some shuffleboard and ate dinner at the hotel restaurant.

Sunday we played in our volleyball tournament. We didn’t manage to win a game but it was still a good time. Ali has not played hardly any volleyball in the past 3 years. I just appreciate the fact that she was willing to go out there and play with me. All of my vball info is here https://blog.duf.net/vball.htm We were done by 2 and home by 5. A quick dip in the pool and then we just relaxed watching the Rams beat the Raiders. (good for the Rams!) A busy but enjoyable weekend. It’s nice to step out of the box and do something different once in awhile. Next weekend we get our new bedroom furniture!

CBT Cafe :: Flash MX 3D Text Animation Tutorial Wow this is a cool effect, look for it to show up on one of my sites soon. 🙂

This past weekend I had an interesting thing happen. I was mowing the grass, sweating my ass off. I got up to a dug out drainage area that was almost dried up. As I walked by I noticed something moving. Upon close inspection I realized they were small catfish! I retrieved 8 of them! I put them in our small artificial pond. How they got there I have no idea. One theory is they fell out of the clouds during a storm. I have heard that fish (very small ones) can get pulled up into the clouds. Another is they were in the underground water table. One time I found a 6 inch long one in that same area that was dead already but I assumed it was dropped by a bird.

The wildlife down here has been one of the most interesting aspects of living in SW Florida. We regularly see things we never ever saw before right in our backyard.

Today is our 4 year anniversary. Dinner at PF Chang’s, some marital relations and Survivior is on the schedule. Fancy? No but we are happy. 🙂 4 years so far. We continue the celebration by playing a vball tournament this weekend in Siesta Keys. Should be fun. We watched the wedding video last night.

Only played 1 game of Warcraft last night. An ugly loss with another one of those annoying partners. You know they type that constantly bitch and spend more time telling you what to do instead of working together. I hate that shit. I am scratching my way towards being a .500 player. Need to win about 10 in a row to get there. They just released a 1.03 patch. This patch significantly lessens the powers of Shamans. Unfortunately using Shamans was one of the reasons I had been able to win a few games. Guess it is time to find a new strat.

Saw a sweet deal on Ebay on a Sony Vaio P4 2.4 ghz for $995. I’d love to pull the trigger but had to realize there are other things I need to put that money towards. 🙁