Archives 2003

I was walking the dog this morning and in the middle of the yard was another one of those mystery catfish. Not near any standing water. It rained a decent amount yesterday. So either this dropped from the clouds or was dropped by a bird. Never thought I would have fish in the yard. So odd.

The past 24 hours has been a traffic nightmare. On my way home last night our main road was blocked by an oil spill and related accidents, I got redirected 3 times to get around it, a 30 minute trip took 75 minutes. This morning for no apparent reason other than the fact the road was wet, the morning commute took 75 minutes. It’s really wearing thin on me. I find myself cursing out total strangers in other cars for no other reason than they are contributing to the gridlock that is making me miserable. Of course I know it’s silly but I do it anyway. And don’t get me started on dump trucks, those god damn dump trucks@!!!!! HATE THEM.

We rushed home to prepare for trick or treaters. Last year we didn’t get a lot, maybe a dozen, but still we wanted to be prepared. We(I) actually put out Halloween decorations this year. We carved the pumpkin. I put away the groceries quickly and then lit the pumpkin and waited for the kiddies to arrive. Perhaps our pumpkin wasn’t sincere enough (Charlie Brown fans understand) At 10 pm I blew out the candle in the pumpkin with a grand total of ZERO visitors. Disappointing. Our street and connecting side streets has over 200 homes on them, many, many kids live in them. Oh well. Perhaps in today’s fear filled world, coventional trick or treating is seen as just too darn dangerous. Sigh…….

Alison had to work on Saturday so you would figure I would enjoy the time to myself, do something fun. Of course not, instead I spent most of the day cleaning the house and doing chores. I had some screw off time where I watched an episode of Playmakers and some other stuff but basically I hustled most of the day. Not really complaining because if I didn’t do anything I’d feel like a bum.

Our pool is still green although a light shade of it. We have thrown enough chemicals in it to kill a small army but it still isn’t totally clean. I’ve had to clean out the pool filter 4 times clearing out all the junk that is in the water. Hopefully it will be cleared up this week.

This weekend I relocated 3 pygmy rattle snakes as well as spotting 3 black racer snakes. Ali HATES snakes, they freak her out. She hates them enough that she actually talked about the idea of moving to a development. I was never determined to live out where we do, that was much more of her thing, she wanted the space. I’ve always been open to living in a more community type area (development) but for totally different reasons than her. She would want to do it because of snakes and having sidewalks to walk the dog. I would want to do it to be closer to work and “stuff” as well as relieving myself of the financial and labor responsibilities of living in a single familiy home with almost 3 acres of land. However in reality, I doubt that it would actually happen. I have so much invested in that house emotionally, financially and sweat, it would be very hard to walk way from. If the house would ever be up for sale it won’t be for any of the reasons listed above.

The Eagles won again. As bad as things have been, they are 5-3 halfway through the season. The offense actually performed well, albeit against one of the worst defenses in the league. Maybe there is hope yet. I will see my team first hand this upcoming monday night at Green Bay. One of those once in a lifetime things that I’m sure many stories will come out of. I leave early Saturday morning and return Tuesday.

I’ve been slowly working on getting a model Cessna RC airplane ready to fly that my buddy Mike gave me before he shipped out to Colorado. He painstakingly built it from scratch. It’s very realsitic and even includes working marker lights. I finally have all the components I need to get it in the air, however I am very nervous to fly it. I will feel like shit if I crash the thing and it is so light, it needs to be flown in near zero wind conditions. It was too windy to fly it this weekend. I’ll take the plunge soon. Instead of flying the Cessna I threw my flying wing in the air. It is literally a bat out of hell. I take it up a thousand feet and power dive it and then pull out low. It sounds so cool as it screams overhead. I buzz the surrounding houses. It’s fun.

My buddy Chuck got me a copy of Max Payne 2. I put in a few hours with that as well over the weekend. If you liked the first one, you’ll like the second one. It is basically the same thing with enhanced graphics. Personally I never get tired of shooting lots of baddies so I am enjoying the game.

My old server went for 336 on ebay. 3 dollars less than the BUY IT NOW price I started it at. I’m happy with getting that for it. Shipping that beast will be a challenge.

Somehow, believe it or not, I know there are other things that I thought about the weekend that would make good blog material but it escapes me now. I seriously have some sort of issue in my brain that is going on. Makes me speak poorly at times, forget shit that I should easily remember. Sometimes I even “misspeak” while typing, scary. I hope I kick the bucket before I can’t remember what day of the week it is. How miserable.

I set a new non-creatine bench mark today of 260 at the gym over lunch hour. It felt like I could have even gotten 265 possibly. I haven’t heard any new bench highs coming from the yard gnome lately so I am assuming that he has not passed me yet. Pip squeak.

There is a regular gym goer that I see quite often. He is stocky, not huge, not ripped but he’s strong. He has very odd workout routines. He will do the same exercise repeatedly with very high weight, very limited reps (1-3) with very long rest periods in between (5-10 minutes) It’s very odd and would seem very difficult to complete in under 2 hours considering the hour I was there he was doing the same exercise for all but the last 5 minutes. Today he was doing I guess what you would call a dead lift, except he wasn’t picking it off the floor, he was picking it off the squat rack. In total he wasn’t moving the bar more than 6 to 8 inches. Granted he had 5 or 6, 45 pound plates on either side of the barbell but still he was moving it such a short distance I was speculating if I could do the same feat. Last night there was some old man that used horrible form on every machine he was on, pulling the lat bar down to his knees, using the tricep machine as a modified ab exercise, crazy stuff.

Remember I said I had a snake in my water equipment? Here is a pic of it.

Here is a pic of my Audrey set up on our kitchen counter. Speaking of the Audrey, I added further geektronics last night. Now when a phone call comes in, not only does the caller id come up on the Audrey, it also flashes up on my PC. How cool huh? 🙂

Survivor this year is just flat out great. The most entertaining stuff on tv right now in my opinon. How great was it that they brought back all the kicked off people and let them compete against the remaining people??? The fact they won was even better. Again, like almost every other Survivor a black contestant made a very poor showing. I’m no racist but for whatever reason, almost every black contestant on Survivor has come off very poorly whether it has been through editing or reality. However in this case there was no sugar coating it. Osten, the most fit looking contestant of this show’s cast basically quit. He asked his team to vote him out. He basically was ready to quit a few days in but they refused to vote him out at that time. This time they granted him his wish. At tribal council Jeff probst basically embarrassed him. Osten expressed how he was just done and wanted to leave. Jeff simply asked the others if they agreed he was going to go. They all said yes, no official paper ballot vote was taken. Jeff said, fine, Osten came up and Jeff put out his torch and said go home. Jeff laid his torch down on the floor, no parting words were shown by Osten, he was just gone. This has never happened before in Survivor. What an embarrassment. Osten is a schlub.

Last night we carved our pumpkin. Instead of putting it outside it went into the fridge so it keeps for today. My mom didn’t understand but I explained how quickly a pumpkin rots in the Florida environment once you carve it, plus it would have been filled with frogs, insects and God knows what else if we left it outside. Tonight we have nothing big planned besides hanging out for the handful of trick or treaters that we will get.

The pool is slowly recuperating. It went from cloudy green mess to clear but it still has a light green color to it. I will blast it with muratic acid and chlorine this weekend to kill whatever is in there yet.

This weekend we have a lot of home stuff to do. Clean the inside and mow outside. At least we can get away with mowing every other weekend now. Next weekend I will be in Green Bay with Keener at Lambeau Field watching the Eagles. It will be wild. I have to scrape together whatever semblance of winter clothes I have left. It is going to be cold.

Damn I wish I had a video camera and editing software growing up. This kid is quite funny.

I’v been dumping different images on my Audrey the past couple nights. I think I finally settled on one. Last night I was listening to internet radio on it, playing mp3’s and using it as a digital picture frame. It’s way cool.

Last night Ali and I watched the Charlie Brown Halloween special for the at least the 20th time. It’s amazing how it never gets old. Still makes me laugh.
I love when they are going trick or treating, “I got a candy bar, I got a quarter…… I got a ROCK” 🙂 Love Charlie Brown.

Last night when we got home we found out we had a nearly empty pool filled with well water. We had a crack in the finish and called in the repair. However we had no idea when they were coming. So the crack is fixed but now our clear blue water has been replaced with murky green water. It will take a couple weeks until we get it cleaned up.

Even though I have been down in Florida for over 3 years, I have been able to stay more or less current with my buddies up north thanks to using instant messenger. It is super convenient and helped keep my day moving along. Recently, Sovereign Bank (where I used to work and where most of my buddies are) declared instant messhenger stuff as a security risk and banned it from desktops. As a result my contact with those people is much less frequent. Bummer. 🙁

I had one of my more laid back weekends of recent memory. No grass mowing, only minor housecleaning and no real “projects”. On Saturday we went to the state park with the intentions of renting kayaks to tool around on. The rental place we remembered from the last time we were there was no longer there. So we decided to just hang at the beach. This beach is very natural and has the clearest water of any of the beaches in our area. Lots of fish, shells and natural beauty. It was very peaceful, very relaxing and once again reminded us of why we moved to Fla. Late October, relaxing on the beach with the sounds of surf and birds to put you to sleep. We really enjoyed it. Down the beach a bit, outside the state park lines we found a rental place that wanted 25 bucks for a hour rental of a kayak and you were limited to paddling in a small rectangle area. No thanks, we wanted to take it down the inlets.

Saturday night I totally forgot about the World Series game and tuned in just as the celebration was taking place. What a great performance by the Marlins. Talk about a dark horse, noone would have given them a shot to win it all in the beginning of the year.

We took my mom out to dinner at Romanos Macaroni Grill. She has been very negative and we hoped a dinner out would help change that. Great food, so so service. I can see where I get some of the negative part of my personality from. Mom seems negative about most things and is scared to do most anything outside of her “box”. After dinner she was ranting about her windshield wipers and their poor performance. I just replaced them a month ago. She was happy that with the time change she could wake up to sunshine. However that evening, she complained about it getting dark early. I know I complain more than the average Joe I’m sure, but I hope I don’t get that bad.

On Sunday we went for a walk/run of 3.2 miles, the distance to the end of our road and back. It was quite warm and humid. We both were sweated through our clothes by the end. We went through our closets and cleaned out a shitload of stuff we didn’t wear or didn’t need, about 5 trash bags full. I am making a trip to the donation store at lunch.

The rest of Sunday was filled with football, some rc plane flying and video game playing. The Eagles won and looked better than they had the prior weeks. However they were playing the 2-4 Jets so they SHOULD look better I guess.

A good weekend for sure.

I am not sure if I mentioned this before, but if you can find Windy City Heat on Comedy Central, tape, tivo it. It is REALLY funny. It is basically a movie about playing a prolonged practical joke on some schlub. I laughed my ass off.

You may not get a laugh out of this if you don’t play video games but maybe you will. Last night I decided to throw in NFL2K3 on my Xbox and go online to play with the XBOX Live service. Live is a service that allows you to play people worldwide and also has cool features like letting you talk to your opponents as you play. So I find a game. I haven’t played NFL2K3 in at least 6 months so I will suck for sure but I just wanted a casual game. We get to the team choice screen. I say HI. No response. I say helllllllo. Nothing. Evidently this player does not care to speak. (it can be turned off) Ok no big deal. He picks the Eagles as his team, oh well that is my team normally but I don’t mind playing as someone else because it’s just for fun. I pick the Rams and then wait. I watch him goin through dozens of screens customizing his roster, play selections, selections, everything….. What the hell, I say, even though I know he isn’t listening. Evidently this guy takes his NFL2K3 seriously. Still I laugh it off. Finally he is done tweaking his team and we start. I win the toss and receive. On my first possession I go 3 and out and gain like 1 yard. I punt to him. On his first play he throws a 65 yard touchdown pass! Grrrr. Then after the play he pauses the game goes into the stat screen and highlights his passing statistics and keeps flashing the screen. He was basically talking smack without speaking. It didn’t take me long to figure out he was trying to punk me. I was laughing still but I also wanted to give some pay back. Soon I remembered enough about playing that I was able to score and tie it up. I returned the favor by bringing up the stats screen and highlighting my stuff. 🙂 We went back and forth till halftime. Him flashing stats, showing me replays and just generally being annoying. By halftime I think he was ahead by a touchdown, 28-21 or something like that. Regrettably I had to flick it off at that time to go catch Survivor. Funny stuff. Had to see the non-verbal taunting to appreciate it. 🙂

I am a Marlin backer. Even though they bumped my Phillies out of the playoffs, it’s hard to not like this team. Basically a bunch of younger guys just playing their asses off. Although I haven’t seen any of the series games to their conclusion due to sleepiness, I have watched the majority of all the games. It made me remember why I enjoyed playing baseball. The one on one confrontation between pitcher and batter is what I miss the most. The Marlins closer has a great name, Ugeth Urbina. Perfect name for a closer.

Tomorrow we plan on going to the beach and renting ocean kayaks. 3 years ago we were going to do it and didn’t with the idea that we would do it soon. Well 3 years isn’t soon but better late than never. My mom cleaned up the house yesterday on her day off so that was a nice surprise, less for us to do this weekend.

Have you been wondering about details regarding the Kobe case? Me either, but if you want to see the girl involved and some explicit details, look here.