Archives March 2004

This story sickens me. We free the country from a brutal dictator and they thank us by continuing to attack us? Sure, most of the attacks are probably from remaining hard liners, taliban and al Qeda members. But these were just normal citizens that formed a mob, drug these murdered people around the street and hung them up like a grotesque prize! Although I realize it isn’t PC, isn’t christian and won’t happen, it’s moments like this that I sincerely would like to see that area just flattened. It seems impossible to try to deal humanely with those that are blinded by their faith and their hatred of the US. Does anyone think for a moment that the SECOND we pull out of there they will not simply revert back to chaos? It is practically guaranteed.

I took some more aerial pictures this evening. I got the plane up higher and got some great shots. This is my new favorite. Peruse all of the aerials here.

I also had the good fortune of actually fixing some things on the Vette. I finally got around to applying “no-sieze” to all of the lug nuts to prevent further knuckle busting stripped lug nuts in the future. I also replaced the front emblem as well as got the power seats working! Wow, some progress, it feels good.

After much tweaking and waiting, I found some time this weekend to get my aerial photo rig up in the air and working. My favorite pic of all of them is this one. The quality with this new setup is much better than the stuff I posted before.

If you want to see the rest, check them out here. More to come.

The weekend with our friends from PA was fun. We went out to dinner, played golf, watched some movies and DRANK. We drank a lot. I had beer, zima, hard lemonade and even the combination of vodka and red bull. I drank more than the last few months COMBINED. I am tired. Friday and Saturday I didn’t get to bed until after midnight and of course Nicki won’t allow me to sleep past 6:30 am. The post weekend fuzziness is worth it. It was good to see them. We haven’t had any guests down (besides my mom) since last June, too long. Memorable moments included shooting a 101 on the golf course, Cheryl and I passing a mexican taking a piss facing traffic and the in-house Connect 4 tournament that I finished last in.

This week I am in Windows 2003 server training. I was surprised to see I recognized my trainer. He was my trainer 2 years ago when I took a MSFT course through another company. That company went out of business, he went elsewhere and now has wound up at this new company. I had mixed feelings about having this guy again. On the plus side, he moves along quickly and we normally get out of class early. On the downside, part of the reason it goes so quick is because he does little more than read from the book, verbatim. He offers next to no additional insight beyond what is printed in the training manual. I felt last time as I do this time, that I could simply buy this book, go through it and get exactly the same out of it as having the trainer there. He just doesn’t offer any additional value. He’s a nice guy and all, just not a great trainer. He drank about a half dozen cups of coffee at least and seems to be a heavy smoker as well, a nervous type of chap. 4 more days to go. Our “class” is me and one other guy. The training business is tough nowadays.

Usually when you think of typical Florida residents you think of old people and hispanics/immigrants. There is another major percentage of the population down here that I wouldn’t have imagined until I moved here, the rednecks. Or as they are known in some parts down here, the Florida crackers. Out in the rural areas we live in they are very common. Today while I was at the grocery store picking up a few things a perfect example stepped into line behind me. The older looking gentleman had nasty blood shot eyes, skin that looked like you could make a pair of boots out of and hair that looked like he just got done with a photo shoot for Drunks n Rednecks magazine. His items on the conveyor belt were 2 cases of Budweiser and a 10 pound bag of ice, nothing else. His 2 sons were with him, one of them was bare foot. All types…..

A little while ago I mentioned how I almost hit my fitness grandslam. Well this week I did it, 5 days at the gym with monday night volleyball and friday running thrown in! Well if I am being honest, I can only give it a 9.5 out of 10 because two nights this week I didn’t get in my evening miniworkout of pushups, situps and curls. But it’s damn close enough. I was motivated to get it done this week because next week I will see ZERO gymtime due to being out of town.

Our guests arrived safe and sound last night. As expected, Nicki is freaked out by them and did nothing but offer barks and growls most of the night. She’ll get over it. Tomorrow I am playing golf for the first time this year. We also may hit the beach as well as dinner out every night over the weekend. A nice change from the routine, but wait… I like my routine. 🙂

One of the small items I could use for the Vette is a new shifter knob, the exisiting one is pretty marked up as it is 16 years old. Well for curiosity sake I looked up the price from one of the prominent Corvette parts suppliers. 90 BUCKS!!!!!! You have to be joking. It appears that it is common practice to absolutely rape Corvette owners on part prices for no other reason than the part goes on a vette. 90 bucks….. unreal.

Finally we have a face to put with the annoying gnome who enjoys disecting my blog entries on a regular basis!!

I got a replacement hood emblem for my Vette yesterday. The one that is on the car is badly sun faded. I figured I would take 5 minutes last night and throw on the new one. Of course it couldn’t be simple. The studs on the back of the emblem are buried in 2 holes on the back of the hood that requires a deep socket to reach. It’s also positioned so I need to remove the air filter and more or less lay across the engine to get to it. Well it was more than I felt like tackling last night so the emblem went back in the box waiting for another day. Sigh…

Thanks to Joe for this one. Go to this site, and then punch in my blog address in, https://blog.duf.net/weblog . Presto, instant funny blog. 🙂

Haven’t felt much like bloggin. Every night this week is full, last night we got home at 6:45, ate dinner, then cleaned the birdcages up so we wouldn’t have to do it when company is down, watched the 2 hour American Idol (sans commercials thanks to Tivo) and called it a night. Tonight I have to get my groceries for the next week and a half and then we need to do some more cleaning at home. Our guests fly in tomorrow night, leave Monday morning and then all next week I will be away at Windows Server 2003 training.

Our dog is very odd. She has some very odd elements to her personality. She is very scared of anything new whether it be people, other dogs, the venetian blinds, anything. She refuses to drink water out of a bowl. She only wants to drink out of the bottle mounted on her crate or lick water off the shower floor. Every night we have to play these silly games so she will eat her supper. Normally dogs are bottomless pits and will eat everything you throw at them. Sometimes Nicki will skip a day with eating, and often she won’t eat until 10 or 10:30 at night. We have to use tricks like jamming dog treats into her supper, covering it with dog gravy or picking up the plate and acting like we are eating it ourselves. (oh yea she won’t eat out of bowl either, has to be a plate) She has some sort of compulsion to find rabbit turds in the lawn and attempt to eat them. She doesn’t think I should be allowed to sleep past 6am in the morning. Most of the time she will follow us around like a shadow, always having to be in whatever room we happen to be in at the time. Even with all of her quirks she is the star of the house. We both love her a lot. I feel badly for the other pets, they are lucky if they receive 5% of the attention the dog does.