Crash N Burn Vista, plenty of pipe
The weekend went as planned except I threw one curve ball in there, I decided to give upgrading to Vista a shot on my pc, more on that later. Ali was back and forth about running in the Swamp Stomp during the prior week. Her running has not been very consistent at all in the past few months for various reasons like work issues, commitments for the Run for the Paws race, and a few nagging injuries. The Swamp Stomp is the race that is in that town in the middle of nowhere, LaBelle. The race is held the same day as the Swamp Cabbage Festival parade and finishes along the parade route. Late Friday Ali decided she would run it and I would come and watch, along with Nicki. Later Friday night I was doing some pointless running around the house to determine if I could possibly run the race. Of course, I can’t go out and jump right into another 5k, I still have little pains in my knees that have kept me from doing anything as mild as running on the treadmill.
So Saturday morning we got up nice and early to shove off for the race. Before we left, I fired off the the Windows Vista upgrade. I did a complete system backup the night before onto my external hard drive to be safe. We got to Labelle in a little less than an hour. The town literally has one traffic light. We got there about an hour early so we had a lot of time to kill. We saw the guy and his dog that ran the race last year. The dog is a black lab that looks very much like Nicki. The dog wanted to interact with Nicki but she of course was scared and ran in fear.
We killed the time walking up along the race course which took you back into a very remote looking area. I took a decent amount of pictures while we were walking. There were wild grapefruit trees clustered within the very dense vegetation. It was cool. This race, like Ali’s race, benefited the Humane Society, this time for the Caloosa county division. We both have a different perspective of races since Ali organized hers. We are always looking for things that other races do better or worse than what she did. Most of the things at the Swamp Stomp were done better by Ali.
For example, the logo for the race is a very simplistic and unprofessional looking gator with running sneakers. It is in one color and looks like it was drawn by a 6th grader in art class. The t-shirts themselves were odd. They were camouflage. When Ali picked up her shirt, I told her to get an extra large, (my size) since she obviously would never wear it. We got back to the starting line maybe 5 minutes before the race start. Nicki and I saw Ali start and then we eventually made our way towards the finish.
As we walked back to the car during the race to put some stuff in the trunk, I saw this dog in the back of a pickup truck in a crate. I went up and interacted with her. She was probably a little bigger than Nicki but was in a cage that was much too small for her. It was so small, she couldn’t lay down, instead she had to stay propped up on her two front legs. To make matters worse the truck was parked on a hill and the crate was pointing down the hill, making it even more of a pain in the ass for the dog. As I talked to the dog she didn’t make any noise but just wagged her tail. She looked so miserable. I went back to her three or four times, wishing I could just let her out.
So Nicki and I walked towards the finish area which was about a mile away from where the race started. We saw the leaders go by us, surprisingly the first two runners were both up there, probably pushing, if not older than 50. Good for them. As we got closer to the finish, we had to cross the street, across the running course. I waited for a nice gap in the line of runners and scooted across. I was startled when one of the old coot volunteers that was helping with the race, yelled at me to “Hurry up, hurry up! Get out of the way for the runners!” I was nowhere near any of the runners and this guy was trying to exert some sort of power over me. I was very close to making a smart ass remark to the old fart along with a “go f yourself” look, but I didn’t. What was to be gained? It turns out the old jerk was one of the lead organizers as he handed out the awards. It was still an asshole move.
Anyway, eventually we spotted Ali running towards us. At the end of the course you run up to the traffic light, turn around and then head back to a right turn that takes you into the home stretch. I could tell Ali wasn’t burning up the course, but she was running. Last year, this was the first race where she didn’t better her previous race time. This course has a long gradual rise in the beginning and a small bridge towards the end so it isn’t an easy course. Even so, last year, she covered the course in 28:20 something. She just missed out in placing with that time. This year, she ran it almost 3:30 slower, a little over 32 minutes but she wound up getting second place. Her prize for second, a Swamp Stomp visor with 2nd place printed on the back, oh yea, it was camouflage as well, yeeehaaaa!
As we were sitting there we again were comparing notes. One thing they did that was not a bad idea, was giving out something different for 1st place. Instead of a medal or trophy, they gave the top finishers, beach chairs, again with the Swamp Stomp logo screen printed on them. Ali’s giveaways and food spread were much better however. Ali did manage to win a 30 dollar gift cert off a pair of running shoes. The one food item they had out that was good idea was oj, prepoured in cups.
While we were waiting for Ali to get called to get her award, we witnessed a bizarre scene. Ali got my attention and said “I think that man is crying” Huh? I looked in the direction Ali was and saw this grown man, hispanic and probably 40+, crying as he was looking through the pockets of some clothing. He was crying at a little girl, it was bizarre. He was saying stuff like “I can’t believe you did this!” as he choked on his tears. We had no idea what was going on. The little girl looked all upset. Ali and I speculated what happened, did she lose his wallet? Even so, does that warrant a full bore meltdown??? They walked away, with him crying and ranting the entire time, the little girl kept looking back at where they came from. Then all of a sudden she turns around and comes back to where she was while the sobbing maniac stayed where he was. She is looking around at the ground. Ali asks her “Is everything alright??” The little girl said, “my dad gave me some money to hold and I lost it” Just then, Mr Hysterical called his daughter, through the tears and they went off. We were shell shocked. I mean how much money could he have given the girl to hold, 25 bucks?? What is the big deal? It was unreal. We felt terrible for the little girl, imagine what that car ride home was like. It was like she was the adult in the situation, even though I doubt she has reached double digits in age. What a freak that guy was.
Ali collected her award, tried it on for size and we headed back for the long walk to the car. The sidewalk was packed with anxious Swamp Cabbage parade onlookers, but the parade didn’t start yet so we just walked out in the street. As we did, dozens of kids said look at the doggy! Nicki wanted nothing to do with these little terrors on two legs and steered way clear of any attempts to socialize with her. We finally got back to the car and headed back for the long drive home. We had to go a different direction than we came in because the road was now closed for the parade. The detour added another 20 minutes at least to the trip home.
Ali was very tired so shortly after we got home, she went back to the bedroom to take a nap. I saw that my Vista upgrade was done but when I tried to log into it I kept having some issues. I f’d around with it for awhile but then decided to take a break. I did a few more things around the house and then decided to start on the garage. One of the first things I pulled out was the generator. I hadn’t run it for awhile so I decided to fire it up and run it for a bit. I also turned on the radio in the garage to give me some background noise as I worked. Well maybe a half hour into my project, an angry looking Ali came out and scolded me. She said the bedroom was right next to the garage and she could hear everything, like the radio, the generator and the chime from the door every time I went in and out. I wrecked her nap. Well I didn’t respond well to the attack. I told her to go into the guest bedroom on the far side of the house and nap then. She said she was awake now. So she came out and manned the shop-vac as I made sure everything was pulled out. She had an obviously big chip on her shoulder.
My main role in the garage clean up was removing all the junk and putting it back in. Ali did a very thorough vacuuming job, which took awhile, so while she was doing that, I would shoot inside for short periods of time and work on my Vista upgrade. I could not get away from the blue screen errors I was getting so I decided to just punt, meaning reinstalling XP and restoring from my backup. I was rushing through this process since I was sort of juggling two things at once. So I put my XP Cd back in and get to the prompt where you have to pick where to install it. The partition info looked screwy. I couldn’t just install onto the existing partition so I decided quickly just to delete the partition and recreate it, end of problem. Well little did I realize that my external USB drive was what partition I was actually looking at and was what I deleted. Yes, the same drive that had my system backup, I just wiped it out. WTF.
I had no idea why my external hard drive would show up as the primary drive with the reinstall. Keep this in mind if you ever find yourself in this scenario, disconnect your external drive first! Now, if I wasn’t rushing and would have thoroughly thought out my options, I probably would have been able to log into safe mode of Vista and maybe do an uninstall of it, or at the very least, salvage my critical stuff like my documents, internet favorites and pictures that all resided on my C partition. However I made a quick decision and just blew away the C partition and install XP so I could then install Vista from scratch. In retrospect, it was dumb to rush through this when I had so many other things going on but hey I am famous for making such judgements, why change now? So anyway, installing a fresh copy of Vista worked just fine. All my personal documents and pictures were history, although the pictures mostly are duplicated elsewhere. The data on my D and E drive was intact, which was a minor victory. Losing that would have meant I lost all my WoW custom configs as well as all of my video work from the last dozen years. So all was not lost, but a hell of a lot was, unnecessarily. Even with the data carnage, I am enjoying running Vista, it looks sweet as hell and it feels good to be running an OS on the bleeding edge. Of course there is the downside that some stuff doesn’t work on Vista yet and possibly never will. It is the trade off that you have to deal with.
So anyway, Ali finished up with her garage sweeping and I put everything back in. It wasn’t very disorganized to start with, so putting stuff back was a snap. There are just no more cobwebs, spiders, dead leaves and frogs scattered everywhere. I can walk out there in bare feet again and not worry about junk sticking to my feet.
I spent the rest of Saturday night recovering what I could for my computer. Downloading applications, setting icons back up, doing the best I could recreating what I had. The bad part is there are going to be times, many times, when I won’t realize what I lost till I go back to use something I knew I had and realize it was one of the casualties of my upgrade. Damn it.
On Sunday I decided to go and get all the materials we would need to finish out what is turning into a huge project, the sprinklers. My shopping list looked something like this:
80 – couplers
20 – 90 degree elbows
40 – 90 degree 1/2″ threaded reducing elbows
39 – sprinkler heads
40 – 1″ T’s
Lots of PVC cement
100 – 10 foot sections of pvc pipe
It was a huge list and it took me at least a half hour of counting and separating at the store. I put a big dent in Home Depot’s 1″ pvc parts supply. I slowly pushed my lumber cart full of stuff to the register. As I waited in line, a guy behind me commented on how much shit I had. He joked how I would be busy for awhile and he hoped that I also planned to rent a ditch digger. I assured him I was. The cashier looked at my collection unexcitedly. At first she started to actually try to count all the pipe I had loaded. I told her there were a 100 pieces. That was good enough for her. She took my word for all of the components I bought. She would take one out, I would tell her the number I got and she would enter it in and dump the fittings in a bag. I was a bit surprised she trusted me to give her the numbers, that’s nice I guess. Finally she rang in the last part. The bill came to a whopping 700 bucks, about what I expected I guess. I slowly lug the cart outside and barely manage to jam all 100 pieces of pipe in the back of the truck. I was thinking at first I could just dump the pipe outside but thought better of it. I imagined how pissed I would be if some bastard stole it during the week. So I dumped all the stuff inside the shed for safekeeping until my dad shows up later in the week and we get down to business. When it is all said and done, we will have put more than 1200 feet of pipe in the ground. I can only imagine what this would cost to have someone do for you.
I have a lot of time off the next two weeks while my dad is down. I took off, this Thursday, Friday, next Monday, Tuesday and Friday. I plan to use no more than two or three days of that time on the sprinklers. If it doesn’t get done in that time period, so be it. I don’t want to have dad busting ass for that majority of his time here, we have several fun things we want to do while he is here. Wow another long Monday entry. You would think my life is exciting, yet it feels mundane.