Wow what a ceremony. It’s hard to believe that after being on Earth some 36 years I never saw a presidential funeral. I guess when Nixon died, they didn’t do anything this elaborate since he was impeached. It’s hard to imagine they would do the same for Ford when he goes. Poor Nancy looks so sad.
Wow just saw in the church, Clinton, Ford, Carter, and Bush senior all sitting in the same row. Wild.
Well the good news is I didn’t have to get reproximation done. The bad news is, that is because I still have the same set in up top and went back two on the bottom. Argh. Evidently there is one tooth on the the bottom that needs to be rotatated and isn’t moving as it should. So the ortho came up with a different course of attack. I was on tray number 14. We went back to tray 12. He took tray 12 and did some monster garage type of modifications to it. He cut out at a few places and then attached a metal “button” to the tooth that isn’t turning. So now I have a rubber band that hooks to the aligner and attaches to the button in order to provide more torque. At least he is trying something different. It is a bit of pain in the ass because everytime I take out the aligners to eat I have to change the rubberband as well. I have a feeling Alison will be in for something similar when she goes back next week. What orignally seemed like a no brainer treatment plan is getting to be more and more complicated and lengthy.
After the ortho I stopped at Sam’s club to pick up some groceries. We had also talked about picking up a king size mattress there before my brother-in-law comes down next weekend. So although I was by myself, I decided to get the mattress while I was there since I had the truck. Big mistake.
Let me digress for a second to mention how annoying and idiotic I find it that when you leave Sam’s they have a peon at the door checking the receipt against what you have in the cart. When it’s busy, this causes a huge logjam at the door and is a huge waste of time. I really feel like walking right past and saying, “If you think I stole something, call the cops”. One of these days I will. It’s total BS.
Anyways I get past the exit door monkey pushing a regular shopping cart and pulling a mattress cart with a king size mattress, 2 box springs and a bed frame. I slowly make my way to the truck. I look at the skies out towards our house, gray and dark, very ominous. Oh well, it’s too late now. I figured everything is wrapped in plastic, it should be ok. So now I begin trying to get everything in the truck. It takes me forever to get everything in the bed. If you have never attempted to get a king size bed set into a pickup truck yourself, I don’t recommend attempting it. I was getting really pissed because I see person after person walking by, obviously seeing me struggling to hold the mattress upright while attempting to pull the box spring into the bed. Not one person offers to lift a finger to assist me. A-holes. So after about 10 minutes of struggling I got it in. I pin it all down with bungee cords and begin my drive home.
About a mile later I run into a wall of rain. Water is streaming off the stuff but again I am confident the plastic will protect it. As I get up to about 45 mph I notice the mattress is moving and shifting more than I comfortable with. I start looking for a dry spot to work on it. No such luck, the best I could do was to pull up next to back of the grocery store which offered me partial cover from the roof overhang. I jump out of the truck and adjust the bungees as I am getting soaked and progressively more angry. Back on the road, I decide to throw on the 4 way flashers and didn’t crack 45 the rest of the way home. I backed the truck into the garage to get the bedding out of the elements.
Then they real work began. My dad comes down today so there was a bunch to do already not even counting the new bedding I just delivered home. I began operation “bedding rotation” It went like this. I disassembled the day bed in the 2nd guest room and removed it. Then Ali came home so she assisted in the rest. We disassembled the daybed in the 1st guest bedroom and moved it to the 2nd guest bedroom. We set up the new bedframe I bought at Sam’s in the 1st guest bedroom and then took apart our bed and moved it to that room. Finally, we brought the new bedding into our bedroom. However when we removed the plastic we found that the plastic had some ventilation holes in it which also allowed some water to get in. The bedding wasn’t drenched but pretty wet in certain parts. Alison was mad I had the bug up my ass to bring it home myself and when it was obviously going to rain. So I brought in the fan from the shed, propped up the mattress and turned the fan on it full blast to assist in drying it out. I also cranked the AC to help pull the moisture out. While we were cleaning I snapped at Ali and made some dumb comment about her vacuuming the “lazy way”. It was just a result of me being frustrated about the way things were going. I apologized shortly thereafter, it was a stupid thing to say.
The rest of the night we pretty much ran around non-stop cleaning things up, putting things away, making beds, doing laundry, cleaning and organizing in order to have the house in decent shape. My dad could care less about that stuff but still I want the place to look somewhat organized. By 9:30 the bedding had dried out enough that we could put it back down and make the bed. A very busy Thursday evening. Dad will be here around dinner tonight and he leaves sometime Sunday, a quick visit. He has some conference in Orlando, Monday.
Rainy season appears to have arrived. What that means is almost everyday we can expect to get some downpours during the afternoon. A side effect of this is I can’t take my Vette to work. It’s a bit of a bummer. I would have loved to take it today but since the weatherstripping along the roof panel is deteriorated, it leaks badly during hard rain. I need to get that fixed.
Nothing much going on, at work I have started studying for the second test I need to take to upgrade my MCSE to 2003 status. This one is filled with all sorts of questions regarding features of Windows 2003 that pertain to mostly large enterprise installations. So basically I will memorize the crap for the test and never use it again. I am having a harder time studying for this one, it seems more boring than the first. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
I am leaving for the day because of an orthodontist appointment. It will be a relatively long one because we have to do more “reproximation” on my upper teeth. (file between them so the teeth have more room to move) I also may have to have an attachment ground off and then reglued. I can hardly wait. Plus we will be discussing the progress (or lack there of) of Alison’s treatment. I forgot to mention that during my last visit, the ortho pulled out the new aligner for the top teeth and gave it to me. It was really tight and didn’t fit well. 3 weeks later when it was time to switch I found out why. I was supposed to be on tray 16, he gave me 17, so I have been wearing the same set up top for a month and a half, doh!!
Michael J Fox is 43 today. Damn…… I was just watching Back to the Future III last night too.
I remembered some more details I wanted to relay as well as a very odd thing that happened this morning.
I forgot to mention some displays of bad sportsmanship that occured at the tournament. The first one was by myself. During the first game we had a huge lead and blew it. During the downslide we had a long back and forth rally that ended with me diving for a ball and not getting it. Instantly, I yell F*CK, really loud. I mean I am sure anyone within 50 yards heard it. I was embarrassed. It was just a reflex but still, I hadn’t gotten mad enough in a match for years to have yelled that. I apologized to the people that were sitting in our immediate area.
Incident two occured on the court right next to us. A player was very pissed and yelled the same thing, possibly a few decibels louder then me. He wasn’t satisifed with that. On gamepoint after they lost, he ranted some more and then pulled down the net.
Finally the last incident occured on our net. One of teams had a brazilian guy on it. He was about to hit a set when a ball rolled on the court from another court so we all yelled BALL, meaning to stop play since there was another ball on the court. In a flash, he stops, turns, and kicks the ball as hard as he could. It rockets off and barely misses hitting someone. He apologized afterward saying it was just a reflex thing. He was damn lucky he didn’t nail someone with it or we would have been pulling guys off of him.
The weird story from this morning is a keeper. As I am walking into the building, lunch pail in one hand, gym bag over the other shoulder. An older guy, maybe in his 50’s stops me and asks if I was going to work out. I mumbled something like “Yea, maybe later…” Instantly, this guy went off into a bizzare story. To be honest I wasn’t listening very closely but the parts I got were something like this. Some general was working out on a ship, Mike Wallace interviewed him and asked him why he ok’d spending an extravagant amount on something years ago. The general got angry and told Mike Wallace he authorized that and many other expenditures and did not have to answer to him. He told Mike Wallace to F himself. There was much more detail he threw in there but like I said I was sort of dumbstruck that he was telling me this in the first place. When he was finished, I nodded my head in approval and said something like “Yea that is amazing, wow….” as I backed away. He looked like he was satisified by telling me the tale and continued on his way. I don’t get it….. how do I get myself into these conversations?
There are some additional captures I ripped off the Singer Island video. Here are some captures off the brief video from Deerfield Beach.
I already posted my wacky dream and that is on top of an already busy weekend. Let me first mention that I am glad Ronald Reagan finally passed away. His last 10 years were an Alzheimer’s hell that he didn’t deserve to endure. He was the first american president I remember that actually got my attention and made me care about things. He served us well. Rest in peace.
This Saturday I again traveled to the east coast for another volleyball tournament. This time it was Deerfield beach, maybe a half hour away from Singer Island. Again the sand was dark but it was less coarse than Singer so it didn’t rip the feet as much but it was even hotter. When the heat of the afternoon arrived, I STILL felt the heat even through my sand socks. I had some minor blistering, nothing nearly as bad as Singer Island. It was a great beach with nice facilities. We played right next to the fishing pier. Our pool was tough, probably the toughest we have played so far. Our first match was over an hour long. We played younger guys. We were up 13 or 14 to 7. (game to 15) The final score of the game was 16-14. We barely hung on. In a nutshell they wore us out, it was 10 am and already hot as hell.
After the game I heard thunder and looked back towards the shore. There was a HUGE gray cloud forming right off the beach. One of the residents referred to it as the “Deerfield Dome”. Luckily the shore breeze kept it inland and we only got a little rain out of it. I have some pictures of it that I’ll post soon.
We had a 4 team pool so only 3 games were played. Our second match was another marathon where we got down big early to a couple of 16 year olds that were high school indoor players on their state champion team. They both could hit, dig, set, and pass with hardly an error. They were very tough. We battled back slowly and lost what turned out to be a tight game 15-13. So it came down to our last game, if we won we were in the playoffs, if we lost we might be out. We played a team that had a brazillian guy that wore speedos to play, it was visually disturbing but he explained that is the way everyone plays in Brazil, it was no big deal. Well we played well that game and took it. We were in the playoffs.
Our first playoff game we played a team that had one blatantly weaker, shorter player. We served him almost everytime. Plus, they served me a lot which helped us. We hammered them 11-2 in about 15 minutes. We felt confident and strong for the next game. Our semi-final put us back against the high school kids. Again we got down big early, and this time there was no come back. They killed us 11-2. I hardly saw any serves and my partner and I took turns making unforced error after unforced error. That trend continued in the 3/4 playoff game which we again lost badly 11-4 or 11-5. It was a disappointing way to end it but still 4th place wasn’t a bad finish out of 19 teams, can’t complain much.
Afterwards we grabbed a burger at a beachside grill and watched the Belmont. Everyone was shocked that Smarty lost. My partner noticed that down the stretch, Smarty’s jockey wasn’t whipping Smarty at all where as the horse that won was. Hmmmmm conspiracy theory creeps into my mind. There was so much money on Smarty, there was a fortune to be made if you bet against him. Who knows?
The drive back to the west coast was very scenic. Coming back across Alligator Alley there were huge thundercaps scattered across the horizon with various holes in the clouds that allowed all sorts of light to poke through. With the sun setting it threw all sorts of colors up into the clouds making it look as beautiful as any picture I have seen. One of those “I’m glad I live in Florida” moments.
Sunday, Nicki woke me up early as normal. I used the early start to knock out some of my to do list. We wanted to go see Shrek 2 in the afternoon, but there was a bunch of stuff that needed to get done before we could go. Before Ali rolled out of bed I had several things taken care of already. I was feeling a bit sore from playing the day before but not as bad as I thought I might. By mid afternoon everything was taken care of so we cleaned up and headed to the theater.
Shrek 2 was cute. I enjoyed it, some good moments but nothing that stood out from the original. The previews showed a number of animated flicks on the schedule. They all look very entertaining. I want to see The Day after Tomorrow and the new Harry Potter flick in the near future.
On Friday we picked up a used elliptical exercise machine from some rich lady that advertised it in the paper. It’s a nice Nordic Track unit. It takes up a good chunk of our bedroom but it will let us do cardio workouts while catching up on our Tivo recordings, kills 2 birds with one stone.
I actually think there are a few other things I wanted to mention that are escaping me at the moment. Look for some pics later.
Nicki woke me up a few minutes before the alarm went off, I was in the middle of a wacky dream that I wanted to record before I forgot it. It went something like this.
First part I remember, some old pristine muscle car I had (think it was a Nova) was sold to some guy by me. For some reason I was back at this guys garage. He had transformed it into a freakish ugly contraption. It was now 3 colors, had 2 mototrs inline towards the back of the car. One of the motors was not complete and was just sitting there but it did have a dual carb setup. The car itself looked like it came from a junkyard. The guy made more modifications like where the wheels used to be, he welded on some homemade supports and had mini spare tires on some shafts and one wheel was actually made of wood branches tied together into a wheel like thing. I think the car had 6 wheels altogether. He had added one thing that I did like. On the trunk there was a button you could press to make the trunk open and another one to press to make it close. The trunk itself was filled with a bunch of junk spare parts. When I sat in the car I noticed that the odometer had been changed. I confronted the guy and asked him if he switched odometers, he sheepishly said yes. I said “Ah so you are are trying to cover up the fact that it had a salvage title…” Then I drove the car a little bit while the guy was walking beside me. The car ran like an out of tune tractor. I got out and again made mention of how shady it was to switch odometers. The guy asked me if I wanted to buy the car back. I scoffed at the idea at first. But then thinking how the guy paid me 5 grand for it, I threw out a number in jest. 500 bucks, I offered kiddingly. “Ok” the guy said. I was astonished he accepted. I looked at Ali (who just showed up somehow) She shook her head no. She said “200” The guy heard it and came back and said I’ll do it for 300. Deal. I had my old Nova back now with 2 extra wheels, a mid-dual engine design, a wood wheel and an automatic trunk. Scene 2
I am in my 6 wheeled Nova with a friend of mine, I can’t quite place who he is. The car feels very unstable because of the wood wheel so I am driving very slowly. We are on a high mountain road that is narrow and twisting. I tell my buddy the car has the wood wheel and feels unstable. Shortly afterward a blue chevette and some truck come rolling down the mountain and just miss hitting us as they roll over the guardrail and down the hill. I went even slower then. My friend and I agreed that for 300 bucks it was still a good deal. We could take the car down to the Immokalee drag strip and beat the hell out of it.
Scene 3
I am back in high school, not my high school but some high school. It is the first day of school. For some reason before school even starts, I am in the gym locker room getting ready. Everyone else was there too getting ready. I showered and put on an oversized Denver Broncos football jersey and a pair off zoobas pants. I didn’t shave and also put on a baseball cap down low over my eyes, gangsta style. I drove the Nova to school. I was running late and couldn’t find my homeroom. I was walking the halls by myself looking at a map. Finally I found a list that had my name listed. I was on the 4th floor. I quietly entered homeroom. The woman teacher chastised me for being late. I found my seat and was seated next to an attractive girl. She immediately started talking to me. She said that I had really changed and looked cute, she said I looked real “sporty” She then said her name was Helen I think. She said I probably didn’t recognize her from last year because she had plastic surgery over the summer. I told her that it turned out well cause she looked hot.
Scene4
Somehow next I am in the school auditorium watching some sort of talent show. The first act I see is a bunch of guys wearing matching purple outfits with hats dancing and singing around the stage. I focus in on a couple of them that are really bad singers and have no rhythm and think to myself how karaoke is best done in groups because you can hide how bad you are easily.
Nicki wakes me up, end of story. No analysis necessary, just wanted to share. 🙂
This weekend I am again traveling to the east coast to play in another tournament. It would be nice to go over the night before again but that would get too expensive if I made it a regular habit. I picked up my sand socks so I should be able to avoid frying my feet this time. The forecast calls for very hot and humid conditions with a good chance for thunderstorms so I may get a bit wet as well. Even though these tournaments take up half of my weekend and cut into my ability to get stuff done around the house, I really enjoy playing them. Probably the biggest reason for that is I know there is a train at the end of the tunnel coming in regard to my ability to keep playing. So I appreciate playing more now than in the past. It would be sweet if we would be able to win it all once this season. After this weekend, the next 2 weeks we have visitors, then up to PA to play in the Rumble.
I never did get a callback from the idiotic dog owners. However I did notice last night after work that the dog was not outside which rarely occurs. So maybe my call was enough to let her know that others are paying attention to her BS. We’ll see.
Our neighbors, 2 doors down are assholes. When we first moved in we tried to befriend them and realized over time they are just basically strange losers, ESPECIALLY the wife. They have had several dogs since we moved in. The first one basically was kept tied to something inside the garage 24 hours a day. They would have the garage partially open so it could go inside and out but it stayed tied up always. The poor thing would bark and carry on all the time, I felt bad for it. Thankfully they got rid of it (hopefully they put it up for adoption) Then these idiots decided to sort of adopt these little dogs but didn’t restrain them at all and simply let them wander about where we eventually found them and turned them to domestic animal services. We told these losers after we found the dogs that we had them and where the dogs were and they didn’t bother to go get them. Just as well, I wouldn’t want any animal to live with these morons anyway. Then a few months ago, what do I see? Another f’in dog at their place!! Great. This is what I am imagining is going on down there. The 2 kids want a dog. The idiotic mother doesn’t want a dog and in order for them to have a dog it has to stay outside. But this dog they don’t bother to restrain either, I see it walking all over the place, on our next door neighbor’s property, near the road, ON the road. However I never have seen the parents our kids outside when the dog was roaming freely so I was giving them the benefit of the doubt and figuring that maybe the dog is just mischevious and keeps getting out accidentally. Well last night I could not believe what I saw. The wife and the son walked out of the house, the dog was sitting right in the middle of the next door yard. The woman clearly saw it and got in her jeep anyway. Then, the dog sees them and runs over to the jeep all excited and is following the car as it is going out the driveway. The woman sees this clear as day as she is going slowly to not run over the dog (surprising) Then she is out on the STREET, as she is driving away, the dog is in the MIDDLE OF THE ROAD, running behind the Jeep, I can see her watching the dog in her rearview mirror as she is pulling away. She LEAVES. The dog is in the middle of the road. I was by my truck, with my eyes locked on her as she drove by, hoping she would look at me so she could catch the laser beams that were coming out of my eyes. I was furious.
I had their phone number from way back when we were trying be good neighbors. The first number I had was disconnected. So I looked online for it. Another weird thing, I found their listing. It was for their address, their last name but both of the first names were different than what they told us their names were. What the F? Well anyway, I call the number, get one of those generic answering machines with a robotic voice. I leave a nasty message, repeating what I just saw and how I wanted them to call me to let me know what the deal was. I said I couldn’t believe they would exhibit such blatant disregard for the dog’s well being. Of course I did not get a callback. So the next time I see it happen I will walk the dog down there myself and confront them in person. If that doesn’t change things I’ll have them warned by domestic animal service. It is just insane that these people have a dog.
Our invisalign experience has soured. My wife has had the same set on for at least 2 months and everytime she goes back the ortho puts some more dimples in the aligners and tells her to come back in another 2 weeks. Alison’s supposed 18 month treatment plan will now be at least 2 years since she is so far behind. She went back today and again, more dimples, back in 2 weeks. She was very upset. So I called and talked to the guy. I basically asked him when do we get to the point where we stop doing the same thing repeatedly and try something else? He said if there is no progress at the next visit he thinks they will have to do something different. Something different means first recasting her teeth and sending out for an entire new set of aligners which will add at least another 6 weeks to the plan where nothing is happening. If that fails she could wind up with metal braces. But if it gets to that point her treatment plan could be extended even further. It really is becoming a fiasco. Luckily mine haven’t been as troublesome but I have been held back a bit on my plan as well.
There has been a wildfire burning out of control for about 5 or 6 days down here. It is close enough that at night I can see the orange from the flames lighting up the smoke. On the way home last night I had a flake of something land on my windshield, odd. As I continued there were more and more. I soon realized what was falling was debris from the fire. It’s a bit unnerving. It has been super dry down here. Luckily, the next 4 or 5 days have a good chance of rain. Most of our lawn is straw at this point.
