Archives June 2004

We’ve had probably close to a dozen visitors since we have been down in Florida. Usually they stay a long weekend, 4 days or so. Other than my mom, I don’t believe anyone has been down longer than my brother and sister-in-law. They were here from Wednesday to Wednesday. In that span of 7 days or so I believe we saw them a total of maybe 5 or 6 hours. Pretty disappointing. I knew ahead of time that because of the way they scheduled to see my sister-in-laws parents the 3 days we were off work would result in us not seeing them much. I guess what really irked me was yesterday we had made tentative plans to meet them for dinner since it was their last night in Florida. I spoke to my sister-in-law in the morning and we went over several options so we could get Ali to dinner with us before she had to go to dog class with Nicki later that night. My mom and them were going to talk it over and get back to me soon. They wanted to go to downtown Naples and shop during the afternoon and then we would meet them after work somewhere. Well I never got a call back. Finally at 3 on a whim I called my mom’s place. Evidently they instead went to the beach and hadn’t even gone to Naples yet. So they would not be ready to eat dinner until late so that ruled out Ali from attending anything. I was frustrated and left it with my brother to call me back and let me know what they wanted to do. Shortly afterward my mom calls me and says they hadn’t even gotten ready yet, they ate a late lunch and they were just going to go to downtown Naples and shop and pick something up whenever they got hungry. That got me mad, first that they basically totally disregarded us and second Todd didn’t call me back, mom did. From what I gather, my brother basically refuses to question anything my sister-in-law wants because she is pregnant. She was steering the ship throughout the trip and if she wanted to do something evidently Todd felt powerless to question it.

Oh well today they fly back. I guess I am not all that surprised it all went down as it did. It’s just too bad.

My gym performance in recent weeks has been pretty anemic. I judge my entire physical strength on only one thing, bench press. I am a good 20lbs off my max of a few months ago. I am not sure if it has been my juggling of gym routines, my summertime vball schedule or just a cyclical thing that I feel off right now. It’s frustrating.

We had a new wildlife sighting this morning out at our place. Nicki was looking out the back door growling. I figured one of those bastard rabbits was sitting out there. To my surprise it was a baby fox. It was just standing about 10 feet outside the lanai, staring at me. It was very cute and no bigger than a small dog. By the time I got Ali up to show her, Nicki’s barking had scared the fox farther into the backyard so Ali couldn’t get a very good look. I heard there are a few bears out my way as well. Maybe that is next.

All weekends should be 3 days long. It just is the right amount of time. 3 days is long enough that you can do work on a weekend and still have plenty of time to relax. We need to pass a law.

On Saturday I played in a scramble golf tournament. It was hot as hell, mid 90’s and humid. I didn’t play well at all. The one enjoyment I get out of golf is hitting the ball hard off the tee. The rest of my game pretty much sucks. I hit very few clean shots all day. The few I did hit long were O.B. I hit nothing but irons at this point. For some reason I lost the ability to hit woods and have not spent the time at the range to fix it. I had a couple noteworthy moments. On a short par 3 hole, I was standing at about a 45 degree angle from the guy that was hitting, about 10 yards away. He hits and BAM, shanks the drive right off my chest! It scared me a bit but luckily he isn’t a hard hitter so no real damage was done. It was my fault I shouldn’t have been that close. Then later, around hole 16 I was just frustrated beyond words, I was hot, sweating like a pig and was just ready to get it over with. I tee’d up the ball and took an extra hard swing as a sort of stress reliever. At the point of contact, CRACK. The ball goes shooting off and so does the club head! These are new clubs, less than a year old. I didn’t drag the club on the ground, I hit it clean and it snapped clean off. The club head flew off about 50 yards ahead making a noise like a mini-propellor. It was a fitting conclusion to my golf day. No wonder I only play a handful of times a year.

On Saturday night Ali and I finally got to go to the beach theater, something we talked about doing for at least 2 years. It is located in Fort Myers beach. The reason we wanted to travel 45 minutes to go to a movie theater is because the beach theater is a movie theater/dining experience. You get to the theater 20 minutes before showtime and then a waitress takes your order and brings you your food. The theater we were in was small, maybe it held 50 people at most. There were a few tables and chairs set up in the back, then a bar-like row next and then finally a row of seats that have pull up tables like an airline seat. We sat at one of the tables in the back. The menu was decent, with food like burgers, fajitas, salads, sandwiches, deserts and even beer and wine. The food was overpriced which I guess should be expected but it was good. For the 2 of us, we spent 40 bucks not including the price of admission to the movie. Drinks were where they hammered you the worst. A pitcher of diet soda cost almost 9 bucks. However the experience was really cool. It was very different to be sitting there eating your meal, while watching a movie in a real theater. We both enjoyed it. A regular theater will forever seem shitty in comparison.

The movie we saw was Troy. It reminded me somewhat of Gladiator in the emotions it invokes. It was a well done movie that kept me thouroughly entertained even though it was more than 2 and a half hours long. My knowledge of Greek history is sparce at best so I found it very interesting to have the blanks filled in by watching the story unfold. The battle/fight scenes in the movie were outstanding. Brad Pitt’s physical transformation is pretty impressive. He always was in decent shape but he really bulked up for this role. I always hear people say that Pitt isn’t a great actor. I disagree. He has played so many different roles and I never saw him do a bad job with any of them. I think the best roles I saw him in were the 12 Monkeys, A River runs Through It and now, Troy.

On Sunday I did a bunch of stuff around the house and late in the afternoon we took Nicki to the dog beach. She did some more swimming and was spent afterward. On Monday I tried to keep it casual. We had burgers on the grill, spent some quality time by/in the pool, worked on the Vette a bit, did computer work and caught up on my magazine reading backlog.

I had a minor Tivo emergency over the weekend. My bedroom hacked Tivo popped up a message stating it only had a couple days of program data left, oh oh. Normally it has almost 2 weeks of data at all times. I jumped on a support group and found out there has been some changes that broke my setup. However after a few hours of research and updating I was able to get it functional again, whew crisis averted.

Can you believe it is June 1st already? I swear I just opened up my Christmas presents. Argh.