Shaggy, Sirius savior, Belated weekend wrap up

Wow is it Wednesday already? I’m very shaggy looking right now. My hair is probably the longest it has been in 4 years plus I have the facial hair thing going on for my holiday vball tourney this weekend. Once I can’t stand the longer hair anymore I think I will go the opposite extreme and buzz it shorter than ever before. I also have a disturbing red mark/scab between my eyebrows. I, like most men, have some hair that grows between my eyebrows. Normally, I attend to this by just taking a scissors to it and chopping it off. Well this time my wife offered to wax it for me, looks better, lasts longer. She claims that she did this area for me once before and I whined like a baby about it hurting. I don’t recall it quite that way but I agreed to let her go at it again. Evidently, her wax kit was a bit old and not functioning as it should, because as she ripped the wax off, it wasn’t getting all the hair so she would rip over and over again. It hurt but nothing worth whining about. However when she was done, the area between my eyebrows was beet red. Ali assured me it was normal and should subside by morning. Hehe. Well the repeated rips seemed to rip off a number of layers of skin as I have been walking around with this red scar for 3 days now. Hehe, nobody has had the guts to ask me what the hell happened, even though I know they want to. Funny.

Last night was another nightmare commute home. It took over an hour and a half. I turned onto our normal route home and saw it was backed up as far as the eye could see, after inching along for 10 minutes or so, I made a command decision to backtrack and go the other way home. It was more out of the way but it would beat waiting in this mess. WRONG. The other route was backed up even worse! I was besides myself with frustration. Then I remembered that Sirius had comedy channels. I asked Ali to flip it on. Within minutes I was more relaxed as I laughed at various comedy bits they were playing. It really took the edge off and made what could have been a miserable ride much more managable. Score another one for Sirius.

My weekend was more or less a total Xmas blitz. We went out and bought 2 Christmas trees, one for us and one for my mom. Mom wasn’t going to go through the time and expense of putting up a tree so we stepped in and got it for her. Mom has had a tree every year since I have been alive so I wasn’t going to let this year be the start of a scrooge-like celebration for her. After we set up hers, we went home and got ours up and into water but didn’t put ornaments on it.

Earlier in the day I had planned to hang all of the outside lights. I hung them on the trees out front first, but quickly noticed that I didn’t have nearly enough lights to string along the roofline like last year. WTF? Where are all my lights? I checked, double checked, triple checked everywhere I could think of to find the missing lights but had no luck. Damn it, I certainly didn’t throw them out. After an hour or so of driving myself nuts, I gave up and just added “Xmas Lights” to the list of supplies we had to pick up. So while I was at Sam’s, I bought 4 packs of lights, 400 per box for a total of 1600 lights! More than enough to tackle the job.

Sunday I began the house lighting. It went very well and I had extra lights to boot. I was able to do the entire front and both sides of the house as well as lighting up all the plant life in front of the house. It looked sweet. Just as I was putting away the stuff, Ali, who was busy going through the boxes of inside Xmas decorations, came out with a smirk on her face, holding a box. It was a box of Xmas lights. At first it didn’t click but then she said, here are the lights!!! “Where were they??!!” I surprisingly asked. In the one Christmas box… The same box that I had looked in 3 or 4 times during my frantic search… They were at the bottom of the box, under some other stuff. Although I could have sworn I rooted through each box sufficiently to discover the lights, evidently I wasn’t thorough enough. Dumb me. So now I have enough lights to do a whole farm of Christmas trees. I guess you can never have enough spares.

Ali and I put the ornaments on the tree. Once again, we had more than enough ornaments and some remained on the sidelines as the branches were plenty full already. The last thing to do was get out the train. Instead of doing the normal boring oval of previous years, I decided to go for a twisty turn setup. It took repeated attempts to make the various curved pieces meet up at the same place, but with some luck and a little cohersing of the track connectors I got it together.

We got it done just in time to watch the Eagles DESTROY the Packers. I never expected it to be so lopsided. I can only hope they continue this upswing. Right now it seems like they are head and shoulders over any other team in the NFC.

Oh I forgot, on Monday night we went to a house where they were selling a used pool heater that I saw in the paper. The heater is 3 or 4 years old but has seen next to no use because the guy said his kids didn’t use the pool enough to justify the heater, so he pulled it out. The heater looked to be in good shape and it saved us almost a couple grand over the cost of a new one. All we had to do was get it into the truck. Pool heaters are heavy. Originally, we planned to take it through the garage to my truck that was waiting a few feet past it. Well when we tried to get through the door, it was a few inches too narrow. So we had to carry this thing all they way around the back of the house and out the other side, probably a 300 foot trek. Did I mention this thing was heavy? I bet it was close to 300 pounds. The owner and I stopped 4 or 5 times along the way as the awkward grip I had to use on it would simply fail after a short period of time and I would have to set it down. By the time we lugged it up onto the tailgate, I was huffing like I just ran 5 miles. It is still sitting in the back of my truck, parked in the gargae until I can enlist my neighbor to help me get it down. A friend of mine does pool work and is going to help me hook it up.