Archives October 2006

I haven’t had much time to blog.  Ali made an emergency trip up to PA on Monday because her grandfather is not doing well.  She flew out at 4:45 Monday and at this point she is not sure when she is coming back.  Pop pop is hanging in there but the outlook isn’t promising.

We are in the middle of printing over 250,000 tax bills at work so everyone is rather busy.

I thought I missed Shamrock / Ortiz 3.  It showed for free on Spike TV last week but for some reason my Tivo missed it.  Thankfully they rebroadcast it and the tivo snagged it this time.  Once again Tito dominated, leaving no doubt who was the better fighter, stopping Ken in the first round.  After the fight Tito did his normal grave digger routine and then flipped Ken off with the double bird as he approached him.  However Ken was trying to come over to make peace.  Eventually Tito realized it and they shook hands and hugged.  It was a cool way for it to all end.  Tito apologized for his antics and Ken gave Tito props as being the better fighter.  I wonder how a 10 year old younger Ken would have faired, after all he is 42.

So my immediate day to day routine is up in the air as a lot depends on how things go up north for Ali.  I am holding down the fort, driving home everyday at lunch to let Nicki out, and manning the homefront.  I am taking the week off from the gym, partly out of necessity because of having to drive home at lunch, partly just to give my body a week to heal some of the aches and pains that have been haunting me.

I have been going back and forth with the local Toyota dealer for awhile about the Camry hybrid.  We talked about going in to test drive one for awhile but our schedules have never meshed.  Well I got a call Friday from the sales guy saying they got 3 of them in and we set up an appointment for Saturday morning.  I wasn’t looking forward to stepping back into the car sale circus but it is a necessary evil.

I sold new cars for about 16 months in my early 20’s so I know how the whole game works.  I know all about back ends, padding interest rates, selling you unnecessary insurance and warranties.  I took part in the exhausting back and forth negotiations that take place in car sales.  I TO’d (turned over) customers to my sales and finance manager, I told lies, I manipulated people with subtle mental tricks as I was taught to do.  It was my background in car sales that made me so angry with the purchase of our 2003 Sentra where I basically ignored all of my knowledge and allowed us to to get rammed into a vehicle on terms that were unfavorable to me in the long run.  After that experience I swore no more new cars, well unfortunately the Camry Hybrid is pretty much only available as a new car.

So anyway, we pull into the place and see the swarms of sales people coming out the door, moving cars out onto the grass for hopefully a busy Saturday.  They had 30 sales people on the floor, a huge number.  At Hyundai the most we ever had on at once might have been eight.  We met our sales guy at the door.  He was a personable guy named Tony.  Tony had a Camry Hybrid pulled out front, all ready for us to test drive.  Tony had another new sales guy named “Mack” by his side.  He explained Mack was new and still in training.  Mack was from Bangladesh, I don’t believe that was his given name.

Tony gave the car sales standard walk around on the vehicle.  It is something I knew well.  You literally walk around the vehicle and point out features as you circle around.  It is designed to impress the customer.  Tony’s walk around wasn’t all that impressive, mine used to be much more thorough.  Luckily it didn’t really matter because I did plenty of research online and I probably knew more about the car than he did.  He told us Mack would go out on the test drive with us and we were off. 

Mack directed us around the standard test drive route.  He was chatting it up the entire time, spewing out things that were supposed to sound important.  Very little of it interested me.  I tried to tune him out and focus on the car.  Man it drove nice.  It was silky smooth, spacious and had plenty of power.  I really liked it.  I pulled over and let Ali drive it a bit as well.  She liked it too but in typical Ali fashion, she was bummed out about a small detail, the sales guys told us the Camry didn’t have the hybrid monitoring system available on the big LCD in the center (like the Prius), only in the speedometer cluster.  It turns out the sales guys were wrong about this as well.  We pulled back into the lot and went back in and talked to Tony some more.

Within a few minutes we found out Tony and I had quite a few things in common.  We both love dogs, he has a black lab, I would guess he is around my age and he has played a lot of beach doubles volleyball.  He seemed like  the type of guy I would like to hang with but it never left the back of my mind that his ultimate goal was to seperate me from as much cash as possible.  We told Tony that we liked the Camry a lot but also still were considering the Prius.  He said they had some 07 Prius on the lot too so we hopped in one of them with Mack and took it out.

This was a base model Prius touring edition.  I didn’t bother to drive it since I drove one for 600 miles out in California. Sitting in it was like night and day compared to the Camry.  Ali immediately noticed how my seated posistion was much more cramped than the Camry.  Ali prefers the Prius if it was just her but she conceded that the Camry would be a better fit since I drive 80% of the time.  The Prius seemed sort of very much like a econo-car after driving the Camry.

During the second test drive, Mack opened up a bit more about his personal history.  He has beein in the US for the past 5 years and for 3 and a half of them he was driving a car without a driver’s license.  It was an odd thing for him to reveal.  He said he was legal now as though that made it all ok.  I also did a little probing of Mack regarding the ridiculous addendum stickers they slapped on their cars.  The Camry had a 3000 dollar “Market Value” adjustment on it, the Prius had an obscene FIVE THOUSAND dollar market adjustment.  These adjustments totally negate any savings you could hope to have with a hybrid vehicle over the life of the car and are just pure unadulterated profit for the dealer, all of which you immediately lose in resale value.  When I asked Mack about it he gave some rehearsed speech about the cars being in high demand, blah, blah.  I didn’t continue the line of questioning as I knew Mack had zero to do with what we would wind up paying.

We came back to the dealership and sat down again with Tony and established what we wanted to work numbers on, a Camry Hybrid with the navigation system and cloth interior.  Ali has a hang up with leather seats because of her pro-animal stance.  Don’t get me wrong I am all about animals as well but I pointed out to Ali that the leather is a by product of the animals being killed for food, they aren’t killed for the leather. Plus we have leather furniture at home.  Well anyways, cloth and navigation it is.  We told Tony about our trade as well.  A 2003 Sentra with 67000 miles on it isn’t a big draw but even with the miles, I got online values ranging from 6k to 7k as a trade in value.

Before we got into numbers, Tony TO’d us for the first time to the F&I (financing guy).  It was annoying because the guy basically asked us all the stuff we just got done explaining to Tony.  He was trying to establish if we were buyer or strokers.  We explained to him more than once that if we can agree on numbers, we were buyers, plain and simple. This guy was the only person I dealt with that I had an immediate distaste for.

The process was long, we did a LOT of sitting around.  Mack’s job during this process was to bring Ali and I Diet Coke’s.  Eventually they looked at the Sentra and Tony came back with the initial numbers.  They were laughable.  They low balled the trade and didn’t discount the car one bit.  They appraised the Sentra at 4k.  With the price of the Camry and what we owed on the Sentra they showed a total of 41k!  I immediately called shenanigans on the appraisal.  I told him it was 50% lower than the lowest appraisal I saw online.  I said the number on the Camry with the market value adjustment on the sticker was crazy and I offered that we appreciated his efforts but we didn’t want to waste his time, we were so far apart.

Well Tony remained calm and started probing us for what we wanted.  I told him that with the trade and a certain amount down where we wanted our payment to be.  I told him I ran the numbers online and it is realistic, but not at what they are trying to sell the car for and giving us on the trade.  I said we were like 10k apart.  Well he wrote down what we were willing to do and then drew a line and said sign here if you agree to buy the car at these numbers.  Ali and I looked at each other.  We had been here before, it is a common salesman tactic to make you feel like you are committed to buying.  After some discussion with Tony I said fine, I signed it.  After a few minutes the next TO occurs.

The sales manager, Manny sits down.  He is a a nice guy as well.  He started going into a big speal.  Right away I saw his paper he had in front of him that showed a monthly payment 80 bucks a month higher than we agreed to and included an additional 1500 of up front money.  So I let him ramble on, telling us how our trade is a tough sell and I once again explained that I took into account mileage and location when I got the appraisals.  Eventually he got around to officially showing us the paper and we told him that it still was not close.  Once again he asked what we would agree to.  We both liked the car so we showed our hand a bit and moved up on what we were willing to spend per month by 20 bucks.  Once again, he asks us to sign the paper that we would be willing to buy the car at that number and shakes my hand.  He said he was going to see if he could get more for my trade.

Manny came back in only a few minutes and said he was sorry, the best they could do was coming within 40 dollars a month of our number.  Well we were disappointed because he acted like it was doable but we certainly were not going to give any further.  He apologized, shook my hand once again and we were out the door.  The bottom line was they were not willing to discount the car much because they assume someone else will be willing to overpay for it. 

 The entire affair took over 3 hours so it was a bit of a bummer to spend that much time and not get something but Ali and I both felt good about holding the line and not jumping into something that was going to cost us a lot more than we were willing to budget for.  The Sentra will have to do for now.  I did however contact the dealership in Fort Myers this morning.  They are a huge high volume store and have a reputation of being much more willing to deal than the Naples dealership.  I don’t know if they are trying to price gouge people on hybrids too but it is worth looking into.

We got home early Saturday afternoon. Ali had to pack up and go to some event where she was trying to pitch Pampered Chef.  I was outside pretty much the entire time she was gone doing chores.  After watering the still thirsty landscape, I turned my attention to the party van.  My sour attitude towards it has softened a bit and Ali and I have even been talking about taking it out west to see my sister and dad.  So I addressed a few things on it.  I removed an auxillary braking thing the prior owner put in it for his geriatric dad.  It was a hand held trigger that was used to apply the brakes.  I had a theory that this sytem may have been contributing to the braking issues and since I never used it I cut, unscrewed and yanked the sucker out and threw it away.  Next I removed the cradle for the satellite radio units I no longer own.  Finally I tackled the most challenging job, fixing the inside rear door handle that refused to open the door. 

I fought with that sucker for awhile, after disassembling the door panel I saw the problem.  The plastic sheathing that kept the cable in place was deteriorating, allowing too much play in the cable so it wouldn’t trip the latch.  I tried various rig jobs like using tie wraps to apply additional torque, using a small hose clamp to apply additional tension to the wire, none of it worked.  Finally I wedged the wire into the latch in such a way that it tripped the door.  I triumphantly closed and opened the door from the inside, it was a nice little victory.  The sticking door was one of the little van annoyances that bugged me for a long time.

For the grand finale I gave the van a much needed bath.  I pulled out the vacuum and swept the inside as well.  The good feeling was short lived as I came around to the passenger side with the shop vac.  As I opened the passenger door a full size adult tree frog hopped out from uder the door sill, onto the passenger side floor and instantly hopped up the foot well to somewhere up under the dash.  I was pissed.  The f’in frog is going to die up there somewhere and stink the van up for weeks.  I hopelessly started banging on the heater box and the dash, thinking that just maybe the racket would drive the frog out.  I turned the blower on high, thinking maybe that would do the trick.  I jammed my hand up behind the dash, hoping to feel something slimy that I could forcefully extract.  I struck out all around and left the frog in the van to die and rot.  Most of the times the frogs are cute but when they do this sort of shit I just want to squash em. Well regardless the van looked decent after it’s bath and I made a mental commitment to try to take it to work once every week or two to try to keep it in good running shape. 

Saturday night we watched another flick I dl’d, Click, starring Adam Sandler.  It was a light hearted comedy that at the end flips over to an emotionally painful film which I didn’t appreciate.  It basically was a non-Christmas version of Scrooge.  I would give it a B-.  Adam’s wife in it is the woman that is in Underworld, she is hot.

We got some bad news on Saturday that Ali’s Pop Pop had a stroke.  The good news is it happened in the dining room of the nursing home so he was attended to right away.  Ali talked to him on Sunday.  He is still suffering some of the affects of it but hopefully he is out of the woods as far as immediate danger.  It really upset Ali.  She will be going up in early November to see him again. 

On Sunday morning we kncoked out grass mowing even though only a few spots on the property had grass of considerable length.  As Ali finished mowing on the tractor I moved inside to tackle what I deemed a necessary chore, steam cleaning the carpet.  I do it every 2 or 3 months, I should do it more.  It gets put off because it is a pain in the ass.  After thoroughly vacuuming, I go back over all the carpet with the steam cleaner.

 Calling it a steam cleaner is misleading because it doesn’t use steam at all.  In fact the water is only as hot as what you get out of the faucet, it does no additional heating which is lame.  Running the cleaner is a chore because you have to go over each spot several times, once to apply the solution and then several more passes to suck up as much water as possible.  Each time I emptied the tank the water was very dirty so it at least made the effort feel worthwhile.  By the time I was done my shoulder was burning from pushing the machine back and forth a few hundred times.  The carpet looked pretty good by the end.  Late in the day I almost strangled the f’in cat when she once again used the now clean carpet as toilet paper.  I chased her around a bit but Ali called me off her and she cleaned up the shit, saying the cat knows no better.  I offered up that slamming her off a wall may help the learning process.

The Eagles game was a disappointment.  They once again let the game they were in contol of slip away.  It was just sloppy on multiple fronts, most notably special teams and defense.  The special teams were bad all day long, leading directly to Saints points.  The defense allowed the Saints to hold the ball the last 8 and a half minutes of the game, kicking a field goal with 3 seconds to play to end it.  It was embarrassing as the Saints were able to kneel down the last 2 minutes of the game before kicking the field goal.  Once again, the Birds wasted time outs early in the half because they couldn’t get plays called in time.  Michael Lewis has distinguished himself as a true liability in pass coverage, he once again blew a big play that allowed the Saints to score a quick touchdown.  He made similar f ups in the Giants and Cowboys game.  He can’t be trusted back there, pro bowl quality player my ass.  Hank Baskett came up lame.  He had a couple opportunities to make some big catches and came up with iron hands everytime.  Asselio Hanson (or whatever his name is) doesn’t belong out on the field.  The defense in general just did not assert itself.  The unit has shown a disturbing tenedency to not be able to make a stop when it needs to.  It was a bad game.

Around 5:15, I was playing WoW and out of the blue I asked Ali if she wanted to go run a quick mile with me at the track.  I was in a bad mood from the Eagles game and I thought a quick run may help my mood.  I hadn’t run with Ali outside in a long, long time.  We ran the mile at a quick pace, quicker than Ali is used to now.  Running outside was a lot different than the treadmill work I have been doing.  You actually use your legs to propel yourself forward.  When you are on the treadmill, the movement of track moves your leg back for you.  I felt what has become the normal little twinges in my knees so as as precaution I iced and Aleve’d afterward but they both feel ok today.  It was good to get out there and it did help my mood a bit.

Ali sent me this link.  It is a cute little thing where you answer some questions and it will approximate what age you could expect to live to.  I clicked in at 89.  Eh I doubt I would want to live that long.  Try it out.

For the longest time, we have had a shitload of watches with dead batteries.  They have been piling up as they kick the bucket.  I have been intending to take them to a place and have the batteries replaced.  For whatever reason, it hit me this past week that is is asinine to pay 10-20 bucks each to have these batteries replaced when I can easily do it myself. 

I fixed my first two yesterday.  All it took was a little patience and care.  It certainly was no tougher than the laptops I disassembled and reassembled for years.  Each battery cost me like $2.50.  Ali gave me her other 4 watches which I will fix today.

After this weekend, the following 4 weekends are going to suck.  Our offices are getting new motor vehicle equipment and the installs start on Fridays and go through the weekend.  In some cases I will have to be on premise and at the very least always available to come in if need be.  It’s a pain in the ass.  The timing is bad because this is also our normal busy time of the year as our department has to print out over a quarter million tax bills.  October, November and December are when we earn our money.

The weekend has no major things on the docket.  I have a number of things that need to get done sometime like changing the oil in the Sentra, some work on the van and our carpet could use a going over with the steam cleaner.  We’ll see how motivated I feel.  We still have gotten no rain so I will have to water the landscape again.  Stuff is looking droopy and sections of grass are already browning out.

I have been trying to plow through my “sell on Ebay” pile  for a few weeks.  I actually managed to sell one of the beanie baby things we have.  I have tried to sell these before with no success. Noone wants em anymore.  Well the good news was I sold one, it was one that McD’s sold a few years back, the bad news is it sold for 1 dollar.  Big woop.  After shipping I make less than a dollar on the deal. Eh, one less “thing” I suppose. I packed it up in a padded envelope and shipped it out promptly the day after the auction closed.

Well I was checking out my feedback rating today and I see one of my recent feedback’s was neutral instead of positive.  WTF, I have a sterling ebay feedback rating so seeing this really annoyed me.  What annoyed me more is it was from the f’in guy that won the 1 dollar Beanie Baby.  Evidently it was damaged during shipping and instead of telling me, he just leaves me a nuetral feedback.  What a f’in idiot.  If I knew there was a problem I would have just refunded his stinking dollar.  So I called him out on it.  I sent him a message saying it was very uncourteous to leave a non-positive feedback without giving the seller a chance to address any problems he has.  His reply follows:

“As a professional business man, I approach each transaction with proper effort and diligence to ensure my customer’s experience is a positive one. The fact that you merely stuck a collectible item into a bubble envelope tells me that customer satisfaction is not important to you. As opposed to conducting your business dealings in a professional manner, you would rather play games with feedback commentary. If you want to modify the rating that you gave me on the transaction, that is your perogative. You do what you can live with. In the end, you and I both know that the manner by which you shipped the product was unprofessional and not deserving of positive feedback. Perhaps you should take the time to do things correctly in the future instead of complaining when someone calls you on it.”

Keep in mind again, one dollar item here.  So of course his arrogance infuriated me and I replied back to the pompous ass with this:

Good luck with your future ebay transactions bud.  Anyone who takes such a posistion on a 1 dollar item and then does not allow for the seller to address any issues will be nothing but trouble. Please never contact me again. Your reputation will quickly grow.

I would have liked to be far more viscious but in the big picture it would only hurt me by doing so since these messages went through the official ebay message system, with no real benefit.  This tard only had a  19 feedback rating and looking through them I saw other examples of him leaving bad feedback without allowing for resolution.  I hate dealing with noobs…..

Last night Ali and our neighbors went up to Fort Myers to the Barbara B Mann theater to see Kathy Griffin.  We have always thought she was funny and we catch her reality show from time to time.  We had never been to the B B Mann but it is the big spot where a lot of acts perform.  Well my first impression of the place was that traffic management was not ever considered.  To get into the parking lot we had to make a left turn which was governed by a green arrow.  We were 20 minutes before the event and there were tons of cars trying to make the left. The arrow stayed green for no more than 10 seconds, allowing at the most 2 or 3 cars through, it was crazy.

Well once we finally got in the lot we headed inside, it was a sold out show so there were a lot of bodies in there.  Kathy Griffin has a huge gay following so as a heterosexual male, I was in a huge minority.  Our seats were 2nd row from the top, it was all Ali could get, but I figured even top row would give you a decent view of the stage.  I was wrong.  We were up HIGH.  The seats sloped down steeply at more than a 45 degree angle.  People down on the stage looked tiny.  That’s fine if you are watching a football game, when you are viewing a comedy show it isn’t good.  The show started about 8:05.

Kathy came out and the only thing you could make out clearly was her bright red hair.  She went through a 2 hour long set which was filled with tons of funny stories. impressions and jokes, but I didn’t laugh out loud once.  Why?  I was too busy squinting to try to see her, straining to try to hear her clearly, sweating from the uncomfortable warmth in the venue and squirming around trying to get comfortable.  Since we were so high, we had to lean forward and look down the entire 2 hours, try leaning forward in your chair for two hours it, you won’t like it.  Like I said, Kathy was very funny but she also is very hard to follow, she has serious ADD.  She jumped around from story to story, often not finishing the story she was on, coming back to it later.  It became laborious to stay with her, especially when it was hard to hear in the first place. It was too bad our seats were so bad, if we were down low or were watching the show on TV I am sure I would have enjoyed it much more.  If I ever go to another show at the Mann, and the only seats available were up in that section I simply would not go, it was just way too distracting from the performance.

Getting out of the parking lot was a DISASTER.  As bad as it was to get into the lot, getting out was 10 times worse.  The place just is not designed for the amount of people the theater holds.  You have streams of cars coming from literally 6 or 7 directions all merging into 1 single lane to get out.  It took at least a half hour to leave the lot.  We got home late and didn’t get to bed until after midnight, needless to say my ass is dragging today.

Yesterday I did a quick mile on the treadmill over lunch.  I didn’t have the time to increase the distance and I really didn’t want to anyway since I had a negative reaction last week.  Well today I feel more or less fine, no knee pain at all really.  That’s a positive sign. 

I did my after work cardio session yesterday.  As I was on the treadmill I spotted a funny scene.  There was a big beefy guy on the bench press, he had 225 on the bar and a couple 25 pound plates leaning on the bench on the floor.  He was in between sets so he was walking around a bit (like I do sometimes) All of a sudden an older guy comes over and plops down on the bench with 2 ridiculously light dumbbells.  He sits on it and starts some funny looking bicep routine.  He is bouncing the weights up and down, his elbows never going beyond 90 degrees.  Up and down, up and down he goes, very fast and then after that he puts the weights over his head and rotates his wrists back and forth .  It looked like a pom pom routine. 

Well anyway the beefy guy sees the old wanna be cheerleader sitting on his bench doing this funny routine.  He doesn’t say anything but instead just continues to circle.  The old guy does a full 3 sets of this silliness before getting off the bench.  I guess all those plates loaded up on the bar weren’t enough of a hint that someone was using the bench.  The big guy never said a word, I am surprised.

After my bad van experience, I called up the garage and told them the brakes still didn’t work right and made an appointment for today.  So we got up early to get out the door.  I drove the van, Ali followed in the Sentra.  Shortly into the drive I am noticing that everything feels fine.  Hmmm maybe it just needs to warm up a bit until it f’s up.  So I keep jabbing the brakes and they keep feeling fine.  So after we get about 5 miles out from our house, I make a sudden left onto a side street and tell Ali the brakes feel fine.  Maybe something really was just rusty from sitting for over a month?  I don’t know but I turned around and took it back home and parked it. Weird.  I need to drive it more often, once a week would be good.

Today is my 8 year wedding anniversary.  It’s hard to believe it’s been 8 years.  It seems to have gone fast but at the same time a lot of things have happened over that span of time.  Out of my side of the wedding party, the only person I have regular contact with is Rich, yea I don’t talk to either of my brothers much at all.  We relocated 1200 miles south, have a house and solid careers now.  We’ve done good. Ali and I have been together for over 10 years, wow. 

Last year we took our California trip as our anniversary celebration.  We have no such big plans this year.  As a matter of fact tonight, our big deal will be getting take out from Olive Garden and watching dancing with the Stars on TV. 🙂  Tomorrow night we are going up to Fort Myers to watch Kathy Griffin with the neighbors, it should be fun.  I told Ali that in 2007 we will head off somewhere on either another cruise or some other spot that we never visited before. 

Weekends always go fast but this one seemed to go faster than most. The weather in our area is really weird.  We went from getting dumped on daily with rain to nothing, just like that.  We literally have had zero rain for over 3 weeks.  The good news is the grass growth is nill so we didn’t have to mow, the bad news is I had to pull out the hose and water the landscape and fill the pool.  It’s way too early to be watering already.

  On Saturday afternoon we took the party van out to Lehigh Acres to put for sale by owner signs on both of our lots.  I hadn’t driven the van in quite awhile, a month at least and I hadn’t driven it over 5 miles since we got back from PA in June.  In true van tradition, it exhibited problems on the way.   The first thing that happened was a strong front end vibration that would suddenly appear and then go away depending on the speed we were going.  It was strong enough that I pulled over to make sure I didn’t have a flat tire, nope all the tires look fine.  The other issue was violent shaking when applying the brakes at anything firmer than a baby’s touch.  It was one of the things that I paid 1600 plus to have fixed.  The van got us out there but it was very annoying. 

We had overhead pictures of our lots and even with them it took some thorough examination to make sure we were putting the signs in front of the correct lots.  We decided to just put our phone number on the signs with no price, it gives you more flexibility as a seller.  There were A LOT of lots for sale and seeing them all certainly didn’t make us hopeful of having anything happen quickly.

The one lot we own on Genoa Ave is a nice lot that is basically clear and has an orange grove behind it so you would not have to worry about anything coming in behind you.  However the location is not exactly close to modern conveniences.  The Bell Blvd lot is in a much better location, only a minute or two from the supermarket and auto part store, but the lot itself is much more grown over and less visually appealing.  Man it would be an awesome surprise to get those sold before the end of 2006, although I have no disillusions about the probability of it happening.

While we were in Lehigh Acres we stopped for gas and were shocked at the price of it.  At $2.34 a gallon it was a full 30 cents a gallon LESS than what we are paying in Collier County.  Through a combination of expensive county gas taxes and just plain greed, people in Collier pay the highest price for gas in the state.  It’s f’in annoying. 

On the way back we made a detour and swung by the location where they are building Ave Maria, the first new catholic university in 40 years.  It is literally out in the middle of nothing.  It was quite odd seeing these huge, impressive structures rising out of the middle of nature.  We couldn’t get real close but we saw enough.  I just wonder how the area is going to handle having an additional 10,000 or so people plopped out in the sticks.

Saturday night we watched a flick called Iraq for Sale.  It’s all about the big business of war.  It was really eye opening.  It was all about how all of these private corporations are so deeply involved in the war effort.  Their bottomline is all about the United States being actively involved in wars.  Their leadership is chockful of former government officials that use their influence to gain these multi-billion dollar contracts on a no bid basis.  They explained how employees from these corporations are deeply involved in every facet of the war over there.  They were involved in Abu Gahrib, the majority of the “interrogators” are employed by these corporations as well as many of the security personnel.  The “linguists” that are used to interpret over there are almost exclusively privately employed by these corporations.  

The hideous abuses of our tax money by these companies was infuriating.  They went into detail about how Haliburton has what is deemed a “Cost Plus” contract which basically meant the more money they burned through, the more they get paid.  They told story after story of how if something broke down like a truck getting a flat tire, instead of fixing it, they burn the entire truck up and replace it with a new one.  They provided top of the line Ford Expeditions for all the Haliburton managers over there.  Each one was on a 2000 a month three year LEASE. So each one cost the taxpayer  72000 dollars and at the end of the three years they didnt own them.  Haliburton charges the US government 100 dollars for each load of laundry that they do.  The examples were endless, it was just heinous abuse of our tax dollars.  Viewing the film made it crystal clear that there is a huge, dirty element that yearns for the US to be in war, it benefits them tremendously.  The one CEO made 42 million dollars personally in one year (2004)  The worst part is the people that run these companies have deep ties to the government officials and clearly pull strings as they see fit.  If you need any more convincing about how f’d up the entire Iraq situation is, take a peek at this flick.  It is disgusting.   

Sunday morning Ali and I took Nicki out on her walk.  It wasn’t much fun.  As we walked by one house, we spotted a dog standing loose 50 or 60 feet off the street.  We hoped he would stay put so we kept walking but as we looked back we saw he was prancing down the street after us, great.  So we stop and he comes over to Nicki, he seemed very friendly towards her.  He looked young, less than a year old.  We hung out a bit with the pooch and then walked back, hoping he would wander back into his yard or we would see someone outside looking for their dog since we had no idea which house he actually came from.  He had a collar but no tags, almost a sure sign that he was owned by Mexicans.  He was friendly but at the same time when I tried to pet him he jumped away from my hand, a sign that he is probably used to hands smacking the shit out of him.

So we meandered around, looking at houses, hoping to see someone.  Finally we saw a woman outside.  We took a few steps up her driveway and I yelled up “Is this your dog?”  She yelled back NO.  I asked if she knew where he was from, and she said she didn’t know.  We were getting frustrated.  The dog was very interested in sniffing Nicki’s privates and Nicki was getting annoyed with it, so was Ali.   Ali said we should just take him back to our place and call domestic animals.  I said that there is no way I would be ok with trying to get him back to our house unleashed.  Once we got back onto 47th Ave, there is far too much traffic to be strolling around there with a jumpy young dog.

I said we need to ask around some more.  So we walked up the next driveway.  It was a nice big house, I told Ali I highly doubted the dog was from there but we went up anyway and knocked on the door.  A woman answered the door with a surprised look.  Before we could even get out the entire “Is this your dog ?” sentence, she blurted out it wasn’t her dog but she knows who’s it is. It was from the house next door.  She said the dog gets loose all the time and it drives her dog crazy.  You could tell she held her next door neighbors in low regard.  We thanked her an walked over to the next yard.

This house fit my picture of the poor dog’s owner to a T.  It was a small little house, with shit strewn all over the place.  We saw the dog’s accomodations.  They had a big steel cable attached between two trees and attached to the cable was a chain that slid back and forth along the cable.  At the far end was a shabby loking doghouse and a piece of plywood out on the ground as a bed.  Ali was disgusted already and then she saw an upside bowl on the ground which evidently was the dog’s water source.  She wanted us to just leave with the dog and call Domestic Animals.  She said these people didn’t deserve a dog.  I was torn.  After a pause I said I didn’t feel right about taking the dog if we knew who he belonged to so I walked up to the door with the intention of alerting the people about their dog.

I was at the door, had my fist made, inches from knocking at the door and I stopped.  I looked around as I saw the empty six pack of coronas on the front porch, the flip flops propped on the outside window sill and the seed spreader sitting in the middle of the yard along with the other junk. I didn’t knock.  I said to myself, this house is filled with mexicans that either aren’t going to understand me or will understand me and will beat the shit out of the dog for getting loose once we leave.  I turned around and walked back down to Ali. 

Once again she said she wanted to just take the dog with.  The entire time the dog is bouncing around, happy as can be.  We came up with a more workable plan.  We would hook the dog back up and got the home address to call into domestic animals.  Having a dog tied up without water is illegal.  I flipped over the water bowl and filled it with the water we brought for Nicki, the poor guy drank the entire thing in a matter of seconds, he was dying of thirst.  Eventually I was able to snag his collar and hook him up.  Once he realized I wasn’t going to hurt him he allowed me to pet him.  We felt terrible as we walked up the street after memorizing the number.  As we looked back, the dog was repeatedly running toward us, only to have his attempts snapped back by the chain.  He obviously wasn’t used to people treating him well.  We felt very angry and depressed as we walked back towards the house, and then…

As we are back on 47th, we are close to our house and Ali spots a pekinese in the driveway of a house on our left.  She sees a big fat mexican woman sitting on a fold up chair by the garage and watches as the dog comes prancing out across the road to interact with Nicki.  This dog didn’t even have a collar.  The big fat mexican woman didn’t even make a move to stop the dog and in fact was talking on a cell phone the entire time, she could care less.  Well Ali was furious, especially considering what just happened a few minutes ago.

I was out in the street with Nicki and the dog, traffic was coming so I pulled Nicki far off the street so the little dog would follow.  Ali went marching up fattie’s driveway.  Fattie’s hispanic next door neighbors were outside as well, holding their dog in place by it’s choke collar.  Ali angrily says something to fattie about her dog and how she needs to be collared and restrained.  The woman doesn’t understand english (or at least acts that way) so the neighbor translates.  Ali repeats that she can not just let her dog run loose and how it was out in the street.  The neighbor translates this to the woman who has her cell phone on her hear the entire time.  By this time I had come across the road with Nicki to lead the little dog back to safety.  The lard ass comes over and picks up the dog and holds it awkwardly under her blubbery arm.  The translator said fatty basically said “you can’t tell me what to do” Ali shot back that that it’s against the law to not control your dog and she would be happy to call it in.  The translator woman seemed sympathetic towards Ali and as she translated the last part, the disgusting woman waddled off inside the garage.  Ali took note of her address as well as once we again we headed back down the street towards our house.

This woman was the poster child for why certain people just should not own animals.  She was a big, fat, ignorant slob with a little baby in a stroller and evidently another bundle of joy in the oven.  These are the type of people we don’t need reproducing.  I talked to Ali about some of the benefits of moving to a place where we don’t need to be shoulder to shoulder with this sort of bullshit.  Montana or Idaho should be safe.

When we got back, Ali backed up her statement and called in the abuses.  Who knows if anything will be done.  Sadly it is a very common thing for mexicans to tie out their dogs and treat them like shit.  It’s what their culture is used to. I am sure the authorities get a ton of these type of calls. 

Wow this is long already but I have to get into the best part of the weekend, the Eagles win.  It was a roller coaster of emotions.  There are two really bad moments that I need to get out of the way.  What the F was LJ Smith doing when he made the lamest tackle attempt ever when he couldn’t tackle the lineman that scooped up the fumble.  It looked like he actually pushed him ahead instead of trying to tackle him, it was just horrible.  I was screaming my ass off at the tv.  Luckily he atoned for it with the huge pass play during the Eagles next possession.   The other incredible f up was at the end of the game when the Eagles had the Cowboys dead to rights at 4th and 18.  Somehow with 8 players back in coverage they allow Terry Glenn to get behind them and Michael Lewis commits a stupid pass interference penalty.  At that moment I had nightmares of the Giants game repeating itself.  Luckily Drew Bledsoe threw the game ending interception to save the day for the Eagles. 

The game was great, The Eagles applied pressure to Bledsoe throughout.  TO was basically a non-factor.  Fox took every possible opportunity it had to zoom in on TO to catch his little sideline rants.  It was funny to see him bitching at his coaches once again.  If the Cowboys are not winning consistently TO will decay that team as well, I can only hope.

  The Eagles offense has been very strong.  Donovan is having a big season.  I would still like to see him run a bit more to make defenses think about his legs more but hey, they are 4-1. They can’t run the ball all that well but with their passing game, it hasn’t hurt them all that much. At the end of the Cowboys game when Bledsoe threw the pick, I went crazy.  I jumped up and was screaming at the TV “F you Bledsoe, you suck!” “F you TO!” “F YOU Parcells!”  It was just “F, F, F” I was delirious with excitement.  It was a great win, the best win since the 2004 championship game.  After the game I got a surprise celebratory call from Rich, he shares my Eagles dedication. 

I had a good week on the fantasy football front.  Even though this week a lot of my regular starters had BYE’s, my patchwork lineup that included 2 guys I just picked up off free agency, took down a team that was previously undefeated.  I have them beat already and have Jamal Lewis and Derrick Mason still to play tonight.  I sit at 2-3, not great but far better than the 0-6 start I had last year.

My Friday morning started just wonderfully.  We have one of those automatic cat litter boxes that scoops itself.  The way it works is 10 minutes after an electric eye in the box is tripped, a rake comes through and dumps the gunk into a rectangular plastic container.  It was designed that you use one plastic receptacle each day, thus ensuring a constant revenue stream for the company by people buying piles of thes plastic bins.  Well not only did I frown upon the expense of doing that, it also was very enviromentally unfriendly.

  Well my solution to both issues is to simply take those plastic grocery bags and line the container with them.  Each morning I simply pull the bag out and reuse the container, a good solution if you ask me.  Well this morning I was pulling the bag out like every morning.  Evidently the bag was pinched a bit so as I pulled it resisted and then sprang loose, shooting used cat litter all over my face…. Some got in my eyes as well.  Needless to say, I was not pleased and I just added it to my mental list of “Things I will not miss when the cats are dead” list.

I used to watch South Park weekly when it first came out, I thought it was some of the funniest shit I ever saw.  Over the years I drifted away from it for no particular reason, it always is funny.  Well last night they had a new episode that was about World of Warcraft.  It was so damn funny.  It was the hardest I laughed in a long time.  Ali watched it with me and was laughing a lot too, probably because she could identify some of the things they portrayed in the episode in me.  For someone that plays the game it was even funnier, they were very accurate with all of the references to the game.  Whomever wrote the episode plays the game, no doubt.  I ripped it off my Tivo and will keep it in digital format.  Even if you never played World of Warcraft, you need to see this it is so funny….   Thanks to You Tube you can see it here, at least for now, hurry up!

As I am on the way back to work on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store is an older black man, closer to 50 than 40, with shit stompers on his feet, pants rolled halfway up his calfs and a red t-shirt pumping out push ups right by the shopping carts.  I admire the dedication, question the location.

I hit the treadmill again last night for week 2 of my running comeback.  I added one more lap to the run to bring it up to a still measly 1.25 miles.  I felt pretty similar to last week, a bit cranky at first but as I warmed up it felt better, in fact for the last lap I increased the speed from 6 mph to 6.5 mph.  Well when I got home I had some discomfort in both knees.  Last week my left knee felt unscathed and my right one was the problem.  This week my left one was probably more uncomfortable than the right, I could feel a pain deep in the knee which from my vast prior experience felt like meniscal pain.   So I popped my Aleve and iced both knees extensively. 

This morning neither knee felt great but I could walk normally and they don’t feel swollen.  I will have to see how I recover over the next week.  I certainly don’t want to take one step forward and five back so I will be very conservative. It’s not the type of thing I can afford to ignore. I also have some sort of pull / strain in my lower left side in an area that I would imagine hernias could be.  When I do abs I feel it pulling there to a point where I stop.  I looked it over to make sure I didn’t see any weird bulge developing.  I’m running out of fingers to plug all the leaks in the levy.  When one body part feels better, another flares up.

Ali and I decided we are going to put for sale signs on the two lots we own in Lehigh Acres to see if we can get lucky and sell them.  The market is soft but we may be fortunate and find someone that really is interested in one of them.  The prices for the lots have leveled off and in many situations dropped dramatically.  My theory is all the old people that have been holding onto the lots for 20 or 30 years have been getting these new huge tax bills just like I have and are deciding to bail.  I see quite a few sales in the 20-30k range.  So my hopes are not high that we will get the 50k plus that we would need to sell them but who knows.  If we manage to sell them we would be able to pay off the equity line and step into a hybrid without taking a loan if we wished.  Those two things would knock over a grand off our monthly expenses which would make a huge difference.   

The blog just turned over 18 thousand hits during the past day.  In internet terms, 18,000 hits is small and insignificant.  But for me it’s not bad for an unadvertised blog that is normally just stumbled upon by surfers.  I appreciate the few that stick around and come back to visit.