Recap, WTC, Spiderman 3, Todd & Margot

All in all the weekend had a nice flow to it.  On Saturday morning I took apart the pressure switch on the well so I could try to try to remove the cracked reducing fitting.  Once I took the switch off and put a pliers to the nut, it just broke apart more, evidently it is glued in place instead of threaded.  So now the job got a bit uglier.  I was going to have to cut out the entire fitting, put a new T in place and attach the valve to it. 

So I went to Lowe’s first since I struck out at a Home Depot earlier in the week.  I walked circles around the aisles trying to come up with what I needed, a 1 inch T that reduces to a threaded 1/2 inch, a 1/2 threading fitting that reduces to 1/4, and a 1/4″ riser to attach the switch to.  I stared at those shelves forever but could not find all the stuff.

Dejected I decided to go to the nearby Home Depot.  This was the main store in our area, bigger than the one I was at earlier.  Again I walked and walked and could not find the stuff.  Finally, as a last resort I talked to an employee and described what I needed.  He marched me right over to the adjacent aisle.  The fittings that were in place were all pvc, the parts he showed me were brass fittings.  For some reason I had it in my head that I couldn’t mix the two but when I asked him about it he said it was no problem.  So I had the three parts I needed, finally.

Installation of everything went pretty well although it was a bit hairy.  Since the T was going in between two pipes already attached to something else there was little room for error.  I had to quickly swab glue on both sides of the T and shove it together.  I wasn’t able to turn the fitting a 1/4 turn like they recommend with pvc fittings.  It was a long 2 hours waiting for the cement to cure.  I was very concerned that once I applied pressure to the joint I would see leakage.  Thank goodness the connection was dry, problem solved.

For a good chunk of Saturday we were outside doing various other chores like mowing grass, weeding, weed whacking, and spraying.  We are at the time of year when weeds seems to be the worst.  I hate weeding.  The most annoying thing of all are weeds that spring up in spots were you purposefully engineered things to eliminate them.  All around the house we have a foot and a half or so wide border of stone with weed block underneath.  I put huge sweat equity into getting this set up and the primary reason I did it was to eliminate having to weed the area.  Well despite my best efforts, weeds still manage to grow among the rocks and right now is the worst of it.  Even though there is only a tiny bit of dirt on top of the weedblock from decomposed grass and junk, it is plenty for certain weeds to live on.  Removing them is a rather large pain in the ass as you have to move the rocks out of the way so you can grab the weed at it’s base to get the root, otherwise you will just pull the top off which will grow right back in no time.  Of all the outside jobs, I hate weeding the most.  Bending over for all that time does not agree with my tall frame.

Ali went to a make up party the neighbor was having and I just relaxed and played some WoW.  After she got back we had dinner and finally got around to watching World Trade Center, which I downloaded months ago.  I remember when I heard about this movie coming out in theaters it seemed like it was too soon.  5 years wasn’t long enough.  This was probably also why I was in no rush to see it at home.  It wasn’t quite what I expected.

I was interested how they would handle the story since it is such a touchy subject.  They never show the planes hitting the buildings but they use plenty of the real footage we saw after the impact.  The movie was focused solely on a small group of NYC port authority police that went into the building.  The two that wound up being left were trapped under one of the collapsed concourses.  I don’t think the movie needed to be made after seeing it.  A big chunk of the flick was nothing but a close up of Nicolas Cage’s face as he had dialogue with the other cop that was alive in the rubble.  The rest of it was about the families and their fear of what had happened to their loved ones.  The movie just offered nothing that I needed to see.  We all went through 911, we all saw first hand the tremendous human suffering that was involved with it.  After the movie I said to Ali how it is strange that in some ways, the pain and sadness of 911 feels like it just happened yesterday but in other ways it seems almost ancient history, if not fictional.  I think back about how after the tragedy the world all mourned with us, were all behind us and how our country was united unlike anything I ever saw in my lifetime before.  That time period today seems so distant as we are now despised by more people abroad than before 911 and are now mired in a never ending, unwinnable conflict that had no connection to the original 911 events.  Well at least big oil and Haiburton are happy about it.  Anyway, the movie to me was an effort that didn’t need to be made, just restating what we all already knew, C+.

On Sunday we planned to go to a matinee of Spiderman 3.  Before that I went out back to the pit and excavated some more sandy fill.  The first couple loads went into Nicki’s area.  The fill that we had dumped in her area to raise it was top soil sort of stuff.  When she digs in it she gets very dirty.  So I filled the big hole she has dug out with nice clean sand, hoping she can get her digging fix without becoming a dirtball.  The other two loads went to fill in another small area between her play area and the house that normally floods out during wet season.  Then I went inside to do a quick vacuuming job.  I didn’t want to have housework to do once we got back from the movie.

We got cleaned up and headed out.  We stopped for lunch and then went to Petco and Home Depot to look at patio door pet inserts.  These are panels you install that allow your dog to go in and out as they please through a flexible door with a magnetic catch that closes it.  We thought it would be nice for Nicki to not have to rely on us to let her in and out all the time.  Petco’s doors were expensive, $230 bucks.  Home Depot had a shitty selection of only doors sized for medium dogs, although they were about half the price.  We decided to check out Lowe’s after the movie.

As we were walking towards the theater in the parking lot we heard a big crunch off to our left.  Ali spotted it sooner than I did.  Some dumb ass woman was backing her full size SUV out of a space and turned it too hard too soon and raked the side of a minivan next to her.  This actually happened probably 200 feet away from us.  We stopped and looked as the SUV stopped, the woman got out, went over to the side, witnessed her carnage and then brought her hands up to her head in dismay.  I said something to Ali asking if she thought we should go over and make sure the woman doesn’t hit and run.  We didn’t go over, I figured that other people much closer had to see/hear it as well.  However Ali kept looking back the entire time we were standing in the ticket line to see if she saw the bad driving offender cruising out.  We talked about how incredibly pissed off we would be if that happened to our car.

The ticket line was very long, unexpectedly long for a matinee.  It was annoying because they have 8 ticket windows but only had two of them manned, contributing to the problem.  We spent 10-15 minutes in line so my annoyance meter was already on the rise.  When we got in the lobby Ali asked if I wanted her to go get seats awhile since we were close to the start time.  I told her to go while I would get us a drink.

I have an uncanny ability.  It is the ability to always pick the slowest moving of equally numbered lines.  Whether it is the toll booth on the highway, the drive up teller at the bank or in this case, the snack line at the movie theater, I will ALWAYS pick the line that takes the longest.  It’s a gift.

Well after waiting in the ticket line, waiting in this line was more annoying.  It wasn’t that long as they had a bunch of people on the counter.  Each line was maybe 4 or 5 deep, I took the line that had a woman and 4 kids with her.  My thinking was that these five would all order at once, removing the majority of the line in one swipe.  It didn’t work out.

The people in front of the fivesome were slow or the kid that looked like he was 12 behind the counter was slow.  Several times I looked longingly at the other lines around me, realizing that most of the people that I started out equal with were already at the counter ordering food.  I had that moment we all get where you weigh the prospects of jumping to the back of a faster moving line instead of waiting in your tortuously slow one.  I decided to stay put, relying on my original hope that the 5 in front of me would order and leave very quickly.  Boy was I wrong.

This woman looked like she was in her 40’s.  The kids around her all looked to be 10 or younger.  Finally they got to the counter and the ordeal began.  Perhaps it is just me, but I felt it was reasonable for people to have a basic idea of what they were going to order during the 10 minutes they are waiting in line.  This concept was foreign to the group in front of me.  First off, the two boys ordered separately, even though the mother was paying.  I guess it was an exercise in them being “big boys” who can order their own food.  However they didn’t know what they wanted.  “Um, I’ll take this, no that, oh can I also have this, oh and also that…”  Finally the boys finished and moved 3 feet to the left so mom could now order with a little girl and little boy.  She was even worse.  Again, no one knew what the F they wanted and when mom ordered she would say one thing at a time, the kid would get it, come to the register to ring it up and then mom would say “and I want this” and then “oh and that…”   By this time I was in disbelief.  The woman had to feel the searing daggers shooting out of my eyes burning into the back of her incredibly oblivious skull.   Finally, after what seemed an eternity at the counter, this incredibly annoying woman and her pack of little indecisive minions were gone.  I ordered my drink and Reese’s peanut butter cup and was off the counter in 30 seconds.

It took me so long at the snack stand that I walked in after the previews started.  I told Ali how I was delayed but didn’t get into the details.   Oh well it was behind me, I was ready to enjoy the movie.  Right before the movie started a group of maybe 6 or 7 young boys scurried in front of us and then sat in the row behind us.  Immediately the chatter begun.  I knew this could be an issue but I hoped they would settle down once the movie started.  Ok well let me just deal with the movie first.

In a nutshell, it didn’t live up to the hype for me.  Sure the action scenes were great, the special effects are top notch and there were many memorable moments during the film.  However, for me, there was just too many things going on.  Harry hates Spidey, likes him, hates him again, Sandman comes around and is tied into Spiderman’s life, Spiderman becomes what you think is Venom and then another dude becomes Venom,  Mary Jane ‘s up and down professional career to go along with her hot and cold relationship with Spiderman.  It was just too much.  It was kind of a jack of all trades but master of none situation. The movie didn’t focus on anything long enough to develop it.  There also were some really dumb parts to it that didn’t seem like they fit in like when Peter Parker becomes John Travolta junior strutting down the street.  Eh it just didn’t work that well for me.  I’d give it a B+ and sadly I think I enjoyed the other two movies more.

During the movie, there was another side show developing.  These kids behind us were just annoying.  They were talking, laughing at each other, throwing shit and spitting spitballs.  I tolerated it for about the first half of the movie, hoping they would settle down.  Ali thought that one of the parents of the kids was a few rows down sitting by himself.  She was more annoyed than me at the kids and after she did one of her patented “turn around and look menacingly” moves I turned around and said in a polite but stern voice “Hey guys, can you please keep it down?”.  They said sorry.  They turned it down a notch but still were annoyingly loud. 

A little later, a woman and two children come walking up the steps.  Ali and both looked and wondered what the hell she was doing.  Why would you be walking into a movie that is already half over?  They happened to walk down our aisle and I almost died when I saw it was who else but the f’ing annoying woman that was in front of me in the food line!  How appropriate.  As they shuffled in front of us, we were looking at them in disbelief.  The woman mumbled something about the kids decided they wanted to see Spider man…  Unreal.  Not only could the kids not decide on food choices, they also could not decide on a movie.  I imagined the conversation this woman had with her little darlings.  “You don’t like this movie honey? Ok let’s walk around the theater and you point to one you want to walk into, ok?  Whatever you want….”  Even though I know nothing about this woman, I have extreme dislike for her at this point. 

So the movie ends, the lights come up and Ali is annoyed.  She was so annoyed at the kids behind us that she wasn’t even thinking about the movie.  She starts with another one of her common moves, talking loudly about people around us that are annoying her without talking to them directly.  Ali was ranting about how ridiculous it was that a parent was there and yet the kids were allowed to be rude and loud.   I told Ali that we didn’t know if the guy was a parent but she said she saw one of the kids behind us go down to the guy.  As we funneled out the exit we wound up behind stupid snack line lady with her little flip flopping kiddies.  Ali was still ranting loudly saying something about “… I guess it is normal for kid’s today….”  The woman said “well you obviously don’t have kids…”  As we got out into the hallway Ali said “if I had kids they certainly wouldn’t be bratty ones…”  The annoying woman was heading for a different exit and stopped and said “Excuse me??!! My children were not the ones misbehaving…”  I gave the woman a look of disdain and Ali just ignored the comment as we walked away.  In that moment, even though I thought this woman was a dipshit, I felt like a jerk as well.  I felt like Ali and I were Todd and Margot from Christmas Vacation, the yuppie couple that looked down upon Chevy Chase’s wacky family. It wasn’t a feeling I liked.

As we walked out I tried to temper Ali’s anger.  I pointed out that if you stick 7 or 8 young boys together in a  theater unsupervised, they are going to act like that.  Ali’s point was that she was sure a parent was there.  I said he may have been but the woman that we had words with was not the mother of all of them (although I think two of the boys were the ones with her)  I dunno, I just had the feeling like afterwards I was the asshole.  Although I am not quite sure  how to handle the situation better.  Should I bite my lip and let the kids carry on however they see fit.  Should I threaten them into silence?  I don’t know, it was a no win situation.  Just another reason to watch more movies at home I suppose.

After the movie we went to Lowe’s and were pleased to see they had panels for large dogs, in white (to match our patio door) and they cost 90 bucks less than the Petco model.  We paid for it and after some manipulation, were able to barely fit the box into the Camry through the fold down seat.  Once we got home we immediately jumped into installation.  It was pretty straight forward although we had to do some ad libbing along the way to accommodate the alarm system that is installed on the sliders.

We got the door installed and then went about trying to train Nicki to go through.  Like anything she hasn’t done before, she was scared of it.  Ali and I were on opposite sides encouraging her.  We taped the flap up and she went through it.  We praised her loudly and gave her treats.  Then we tried progressing to her going through with the flap down.  That didn’t go so well.  She wouldn’t go through on her own.  If we lifted the flap part way she would go but she wouldn’t initiate the act herself.  Plus the noise the flap makes as the magnet locks it back into place was scary to her.  We worked with her for awhile but couldn’t get past her going through without us assisting in some manner.  Hopefully she works through it.  We are thinking about having the neighbor’s dog Zoe over to demonstrate for Nicki since she already has a dog door of her own that she zips through constantly.

The rest of the night was low key.  We both stayed up too late and are both tired this morning.  Long entry….