Finishing touches, 300, Triple Tivo

On Saturday, Ali and I worked on cleaning up the loose ends on the sprinkler project.  We did a little detour project first.  We brought up four loads of fill from the pit to raise the area outside of the flower bed next to the shed.  During the heart of rainy season, this area becomes pond-like and as a result, the bed gets flooded out and kills pretty much anything planted in it.  We are hoping the slope we built around the low end will help that problem.  I plan on pulling more fill as I have energy to slowly raise various low spot on the property.  It is hard work but not excruciatingly hard.  Here is a pic of the raised area.

After we got done by the shed, we moved over to the area in front of the distribution manifold.  In order to build the system, I ripped out the landscape timbers and patio stones that were in place there.  Ali and I rebuilt the area carefully and in not too much time I had it reconstructed.  The area is longer than before but looked good.  We needed some additional stone to fill it in but we planned to get that at Home Depot later in the day.

Then we focused on the huge dug out area in front of the manifold, we filled in the low spots the best we could.  It still was basically a large open sandbox. 

 After lunch I stuck Ali on a project should would excel at and I would despise.  Counting and organizing all of the left over pieces from the project to return to Home Depot.  She did a great job and in short order had all the parts separated into their own bag with a little slip of paper in each bag that contained the count of that type of part.  She was a bit annoyed after she got done separating and matching the parts to the various receipts, when I pointed out we had a few small boxes of parts out on the lanai as well.

We gathered all the returns into one big box and headed out to the store.  Ali’s organization made the return process go much quicker than if we just walked in and dumped a huge pile of pvc parts on the counter.  All those parts added up to a tidy 100 bucks we got back.  Ali did some figuring later in the day and came up with a grand total of $1400 we spent on the project, probably less than a third of what we would have spent to pay someone else to do it.  After we returned the parts, we headed out to the outside area and grabbed 10 bags of stones, some weed and feed and a few plants.  At the last minute I spotted a pile of cut sod pieces.  I thought that would be perfect to fill in the big sandy area in front of the manifold.  I snagged twenty pieces.

It was late afternoon by the time we got back but we wanted to get everything knocked out since Ali had to work on Sunday.  We dumped the stone in quickly, it really filled out nicely as you can see from this picture.  We put the sod in place and we were done with that area.  Ali and I quickly planted a flower and rose plant that she bought.  I turned on the sprinklers to water the areas where the sod and plants were placed.  The sprinkler project is officially complete in my book.  All that is left is for mother nature to fill in the dirt with grass growth.  Without a doubt it was the largest scale project we ever tackled.  It really turned out well.  The complete progress picture page can be seen here all 100+ pictures worth.

We were both pooped from a very laborious Saturday and relaxed by watching 300.  Not to say 300 was a relaxing movie, it was just the opposite.  300 is the ultimate guy movie, it is chock full of violence, glorified, blood spewing, head chopping, body piling violence.  Almost every single character in the movie was ripped to shreds physically, it was amazing.  I suspect that the wall to wall six pack abs were somewhat digitally enhanced.  I was surprised Ali stuck through the whole flick as violent as it was.  Needless to say, I enjoyed it, the action was pretty much non-stop, the special effects were very impressive and who can’t get behind a 300 versus a million storyline?  I would give it a B+.

Ironically, on Sunday when I was out in Nicki’s area reading my Men’s Health while she played, the cover story was about the guy that was the main character in the movie.  I hardly recognized him.  I was surprised to read he was only 37, he came off as older in the movie.  Although he was still in good shape, he was nowhere near as big and ripped as he appeared in the flick.  They described the workout routine the guy followed to prepare for the flick, it was staggering.  He did this transformation in four months time.  The routine went something like this (I may have the order slightly messed up), each exercise was one after another with no rest period.

25 pullups, 50 pushups, 50 deadlifts with 135 pounds, 50 wipes (a bizarre move where you lie on the floor, holding a 135 pound barbell overhead and then lift your legs up and touch the plates on each side), 50 one arm overhead lift and presses with a 36 pound kettle ball, 50 more pushups and then finish off with 25 more pullups.  I may have missed something in there but as you can see it is beyond grueling.  After shooting the movie, the guy was so broken down from the workouts and other training he had to do for the flick, he didn’t workout for 8 months straight.  He has ADD that makes him go hardcore on something and then just as suddenly go equally hardcore off.  Anyway, it was very interesting to me to see how hard he trained for this flick.  Next month I may try to do a much less impressive cycle, mimicking what he did to a much lesser scale, talk about shocking your body.

On Friday I received my new dual tuner Tivo and had it hooked up the same night.  I had some initial problems with the unit seeing the other Tivo on the network but that was fixed the next day after it took a software update.  So now I can browse the recordings on the bedroom Tivo from the sofa and browse the living room from bed.  Watching recordings from a different Tivo takes some planning.  What happens if you choose to view a recording on a remote Tivo, it actually transfers the show to the loal Tivo.  So once you initiate the transfer, if you don’t give it a few minutes to get ahead of your viewing, you will wind up not being able to zip through commercials because you will constantly be catching up to what is transferred so far.  (it allows you to watch the show as it is being transferred)  It’s a minor quirk.  

Right now in the bedroom, I actually have two Tivos piled on top of each other.  The reason is the original bedroom Tivo is a Series 1 model that doesn’t have the ability to communicate with the newer Series 2 models.  So the old one will stay in place until we view whatever is left on it that we wanted to see.  After that it will be wiped and sold on ebay.

My Sunday was pretty laid back.  Ali had to work so I hung out, watched some TV, played some WoW, played with Nicki and did some housework.  I did Mom’s taxes for her on Sunday.  Ali picked up her stuff on Friday for me to do it.  Mom was pleased with her refund, more than 4x what she got back last year.  there’s nothing like unexpected money to put a hop in your step.