Archives 2004

It’s odd how strength cycles, since I did 265 on my bench a few months back my strength tailed. Then today for some odd reason I felt like I could do more. I slapped 260 on and was able to do it with relatively good form. The body is a weird thing. 265 next week?

A holiday weekend. I never was much into Easter. As a kid the Easter egg hunts, easter baskets and stuff, while nice had nowhere near the punch of Christmas. However Easter did mean a couple days off of school. As an adult there are no associated days off with Easter so it is more of a pain than anything. You have your Easter stuff on Sunday and then right back to the grind Monday. Just basically shortens your weekend.

Our plans are nothing special. We are going to go out to dinner with Mom. Possibly our neighbors and some of their relatives may join us. Afterward we may go hang at the beach a little bit. Perhaps it is still a hangover from my earlier in the week melacholy spirit, but I am about as unenthused about Easter as you can imagine. Don’t color eggs, do baskets or even eat easter candy anymore.

Well the attempted soiling of my blog has continued so I blocked some more ip addresses and more importantly, disabled automatic linking of web addresses so even if they try to post web addresses, they won’t be active links which defeats their purpose. F those punks.

Just heard the William Hung CD. Wow, it is entertaining. Nothing but William crooning some of your favorites like Hotel California, Rocketman, YMCA and many more. (of course she-bang too) 🙂

My sleeping pattern is still whacked from the time change. I have been staying up past 11 for the last 5 days and it is taking it’s toll. I wake up feeling like a zombie. For some odd reason, I am staying up late trying to get through Waterworld on the Tivo. That movie wasn’t as horrible as advertised if you ask me. 🙂

My moods have been pretty horrible recently too. It seems that many times they coincide with a full moon, not sure why that is. My mom always said my dad would go nuts around then so maybe it’s just the way I am wired. Monday after work I felt miserable. Down about everything. I feel a bit better today.

They began work on the lot next to us. The wall of stickers and shrubs that we thought would always offer us privacy has been flattened by a bulldozer. The new house looks to be closer to ours than we thought it would be. Awhile back I actually found the owner of that property, an old couple from up north somewhere. I called them, seeing if they would be interested in selling the lot to us. The wife grumpily said no and hung up on me. I followed up the call with a letter to them, nicely asking that if they decide to sell the lot to please give us first crack at it. So I was quite pissed when I saw the realtor sign go up on it a year or so ago. Old jerks.

Yea if you don’t have XP (auto resizes) some of these pics will seem huge, sorry. Some of the pics from Ding Darling are here.

Some cute dog pics have been added.

Remember that gator I caught? Here is a great pic of him.

Some more pics were added here as well, look at the bottom.

And finally some more cruise pictures were found. In my opinion th best ones yet. The images of the super bright blue water still amaze me to this day, check em out at the bottom of this page.

It seems somebody from overseas sees the ability to post comments as a method of posting weblinks for all sorts of shady websites dealing with stuff like warez, porn and the sort. For the last month or so I have been seeing these comments pop up. I diligently go in and delete them. The offender continues his games so I have started to block ip ranges to disallow posting from certain areas. Get a life doods….

Last week was a training week, a nice break from the routine. Windows Server 2003 has some cool new stuff, the coolest to me being shadow copy where you can automatically have recent versions of files backed up so if someone fat fingers it you can hop right back to the prior version of a document. Pretty cool admin tools have been added as well. The downside is to do a lot of the cool stuff, all of your DC’s need to be Win2K3 which at least in our case, isn’t going to be happening anytime soon. The class inspired me enough to take the 2 tests that are required to get my MCSE 2003 cert to go along with my NT4 and Win2K cert.

This weekend FLEW by. Saturday I cleaned while Ali got caught up on some Pampered Chef stuff. Then we were out most of the afternoon hitting 4 or 5 different spots to pick up assorted household items. Then in the evening we were watering, weeding, planting stuff in the garden, doin laundry, blah blah, throw in the time change and we didn’t hit bed to close to midnight.

Sunday Nicki woke me up at her normal time, evidently she doesn’t care if I go to bed at 10 or midnight. I loaded up the truck with our bikes after giving them a scrub down to wash off the spider webs and put air in the tires. We went to Ding Darling Reserve in Sanibel. Sanibel is a contrast from the beautiful but mostly man made landscaping in Naples. Sanibel is more or less in it’s natural state with dense native foliage everywhere. It is a very small island with only one way on and off of it. The Ding Darling reserve is a huge park that takes up a good chunk of the island. It has a cool 5 mile trail that you can walk, bike or drive through. The area is full of wildlife like birds, fish, gators and we even saw our first manatee. It is really a great place. I went through the park with my mom a while back but we drove through. Riding a bike was definitely the way to go. By the end, in total it is an 8 mile ride so our rears were a bit sore but it was worth it. We got a bunch of great pics, many of which I will be posting online in the next day or so. By the time we got home it was after 5.

We still had a shitload of stuff to get done so we spent the rest of the weekend vacuuming, doing laundry and cleaning cat puke. Speaking of which, our one cat is starting to push me into the territory where I am considering my options with her continued existence. She has diabetes so she gets a shot everyday. We have to give her special food and recently she has been on a vomitting spree. If you have cats, they vomit, there is no way to avoid it and she always has been a puker but this has been excessive. She pukes, goes and stuffs her face and pukes some more. I find myself getting infuriated with the cat even though logically I know she isn’t purposely turning our carpet into a brown stained wasteland. The turn for the worse seems to coincide with some hairball and tartar control treats I had been giving them. So I have discontinued that in hopes things that will settle down into a more normal 2 or 3 pukes a week pattern. If it doesn’t get better, I suppose a trip to the vet is in order but I already know that there is no way I would shell out big bucks if the problem would turn out to be serious in nature. Just not worth it to me, no more cats for me, ever.

Vette update, got a bit of time in. Totally scrubbed and cleaned out the fusebox with electrical cleaner, finally installed a fuse panel door, replaced the 2 front speakers so now I have 4 working again and and reconnected a vacuum line that was disconnected. I took the Vette to class Friday. It was great fun to cruise the highway in, definitely a joy at 70mph+. Discovered this morning another issue, no heat. A minor issue in Florida but something I need to look at just the same. I have a detailed page of the projects on the car here.

There were tons of other thoughts that I marked as bloggable in my brain during the past week but can’t recall them all right now, hopefully they will come to me.

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.