Movies, Memorial Day, Zefrillus

We had a good holiday weekend.  And honestly, unlike most weekends, it didn’t seem unreasonably short.  I think the reason for that is we busted out pretty much all of the chores/work on Saturday and had the better part of two days to just hang.

Late last week I called mom and asked her if she wanted to go to the beach with us on Sunday.  Then Friday night I called back and asked mom if she wanted to come back to our place after the beach and stay over for Memorial Day.  Based on past history I sort of expected mom to politely decline the invitation but I was pleasantly surprised to hear her say she was into it.

Ali was off again on Friday as she normally is.  She stopped somewhere for lunch after her microderm appointment.  She thought she may have gotten some bad food as her stomach was painful.  After I got home I saw her for a bit but then she went back to the bedroom and laid down.  Our normal Friday night pizza schedule was put on hold since she didn’t feel much like eating.  So while Ali slept I just vegged and played WoW for a bit and then I cleaned Tuki’s cage since Ali didn’t get to do it. 

When we first talked about the prospect of Ali going to 4 day work weeks we spoke of how it would be a good thing for both Ali and me.  It would be a stress reliever for her to have permanent three day weekends.  It would allow her to concentrate on her fitness routines, get some things done around the house so I would have less work on the weekends and just generally contribute to an overall higher happiness level for her which in turn should be a good thing for me.

She has been on this schedule for around a year or so and it has somewhat mutated from the original blueprint.  Friday has become a day where Ali goes out and meets up with our friend Michelle sometimes, schedules her appointments, runs errands and gets groceries.  Since one of her favorite things about Fridays is the ability to sleep in, she normally won’t get started on her errands until later in the morning.  Many times these errands take up a good chunk of what is left of the day.  She winds up coming home and then is lucky to have the time to quickly clean Tuki’s cage, throw some laundry in and light a candle.  It winds up being hectic for her, just in a different manner which was not the original intention.

In my pie in the sky vision I had images in my head of coming home to her being refreshed from her morning exercise session, a good chunk of the weekend housework done and her well rested and happy to see the primary bread winner walk in the door.  Perhaps if we are able to move her to 3 or 2 day work weeks that would be more realistic.  I don’t know.  Ali has now taken up reading my blog at least once a week so she will probably take this as a swipe at her but it really isn’t.  It’s just how things have turned out. 

How did I get on this tangent anyway?  Oh yea, I did Tuki’s cage.  Even though I knew Ali didn’t feel well, I found myself being annoyed that I wound up doing it.  I knew it wasn’t nice of me to feel that way but the feeling was there.  When Ali got out of bed she could sense my annoyance.  Later I was able to turn the page.

So, even though Ali didn’t know it, I wanted to get everything done on Saturday.  Ali hates being thrust into doing stuff right away when you could put it off and do it later in the weekend.  So I plowed into things and I drug her along.  The living room cleaning project was a bit more involved than I planned and I didn’t even bother to pull down the 200,000 teddy bears from the shelf and clean them.   After that I ran the steam cleaner in the main living area and also ran it over the tile in the kitchen and utility room.  By the amount of dirt in the waste water each time I do it I always think to myself “You need to do this more often…”  You can really feel a difference on both the carpet and tile with bare feet.  The carpet feels softer and the tile just feels unblemished on the feet. 

Saturday night we watched the Good Shepherd.  It is a movie about the incarnation of the CIA.  I knew Matt Damon was in it but didn’t realize some of the other big names in it like Angelina Jolie, Robert DeNiro and William Hurt.   The movie was interesting but complex and very long, almost 3 frickin hours.  There was a lot of time line jumping going on as well as a ton of characters that you had to keep track off to make sense of it all.   It was one of those movies that makes you think a lot, which is just a pain in the rear.  There was certainly nothing upbeat about it, nothing that would remotely want you to join the CIA.  I guess I would give it a B- but I don’t know I would recommend it unless you were a big X-files fan.

So Sunday morning we got up early and went to the Wellness center.  It is a huge gym run by the local hospital.  Our one neighbor is a member and Ali has gone with him a few times to do classes there. The plan was for us to both go and then pick up mom right from there.  What sucks is they rape you to go there if you aren’t a member.  If you come there with another member they charge you 10 dollars.  If you are dumb enough to come there alone, they hammer you for 20 bucks.  It annoyed me to throw the guy 20 bucks to workout but oh well. 

So Ali went into spinning class and I walked the floor deciding what to do.  I had been to this gym a couple times.  It is huge, with a big room filled with various workout machines.  I was  looking around, trying to determine if I would be able to do a 300 workout with what was available.  The answer was not really.  They really had no space where I could do an unconventional style workout like that.  I decided to do a mutant workout.  I alternated between a few of the 300 workout exercises like pull ups, push ups, deadlifts (on the smith machine) and clean and presses.  I mixed in 45 minutes of cardio split between different machines.

The place was packed.  I couldn’t believe there were this many people on a Sunday morning.  The male/female balance is much different than my gym where guys probably have a 90/10 mix with females, higher if you eliminate women over 60.  At the wellness center there may have been more women there than men.  I think the classes they offer are a big draw for women.  As I was swinging away on one of the cardio machines I looked around at all the people.  For the amount of people there, it was strangely quiet.  Hardly anyone interacted or spoke to each other.  It was just a bunch of bodies in motion.  My gym is a dirty shithole but I actually prefer the atmosphere there.  People generally acknowledge each other and the place works just dandy for my 300 workouts.  The clanging the barbell makes as I am knocking out 30 + deadlifts would be a deafening racket at the wellness center and probably frowned upon.  I don’t think I would ever join the place although Ali would in a second.

Doing this 300 workout has really opened my eyes from a fitness perspective.  It has shown me that getting results from your exercise routine is all about intensity.  Busting your ass near your limits for 20 minutes yields far greater results than spending an hour doing conventional routines.  It’s odd that this revelation comes after going to the gym for 20 years.

Ali and our neighbor emerged from spinning class both soaked in sweat.  Ali changed and then we picked up mom.  We took the truck since it is the only vehicle I have with a current beach sticker.  Ali had to cram into the small back area with the flip down seat pad that would be barely adequate for a child.  We were going to Clam Pass, a beach we don’t hit much. 

When we pulled in the lot a little before 11 am it wasn’t very full.  I was afraid with the holiday weekend it would be VERY full.  The beach is at the end of a .6 mile boardwalk.  Some people hoof it, which I would have been fine with but Ali and mom were not real into that idea so we stood and waited about 15 minutes until it was our turn to hop in the golf cart that hold 7 passengers.  As we were waiting some old guy proclaimed how the bugs (love bugs) at the beach were quite bad.  We were not thrilled to hear that.

We got to the beach and the bugs were indeed bad, love bugs buzzing around everywhere.  Unfazed, we marked out our little spot on the sand.  I set up my cheesy 15 dollar umbrella and sat my ass under it like and old fart, my effort to not accelerate any further skin issues on my body.  The water there was much clearer than the beaches further south.  I put my foot in, determined the water wasn’t very cold and that was the extent of my interaction with the gulf.  It felt good to be hanging on the beach, for a little while, then the bug invasion took over center stage.  Love bugs are stupid and they just wildly fly around landing on anything that they stick to.  Instead of being able to sit there calmly, read my magazine and enjoy the time, I was shooing love bugs off various parts of my body every few seconds.

Ali and I both were hungry so after not very long, we decided to go up to the deck and eat.  The food stand there is run by the hotel that is nearby.  I thought the prices at the Space Center were bad.  We dropped 40 bucks on lunch!  Granted the food was better quality than the cafeteria level food at KSC but it still was way too much money.  Piled on top of the pain my wallet felt (thank goodness mom had an extra twenty to help me pay for it all) the bugs up on the deck were even worse than the beach.  We were constantly guarding our food against love bugs that would inadvertently try to become part of our meal.  It was pretty miserable.  I felt bad that the experience thus far was just not great.

So after our expensive lunch we went down to the beach once again. Now the love bugs had gained an ally in their quest to annoy people, biting flies.  I felt these little twinges of pain on my ankles and calves.  I look down at there are three flies at the source of the pain.  I try to wildly squash the bastards but they all escaped intact.  These things were relentless and it just made for misery.  We may have lasted for another 20 minutes before we all happily agreed to end our beach excursion.

Our entire time there, including the meal was a little over an hour and a half.  The line to hop a tram back to the parking lot was very long for it only being 12:30.  Evidently many others had had enough as well.  When we got back to the lot it was FULL and the line of people waiting to go to the beach was huge.  I am so glad we got there when we did.  To wait in a line like that to only be exposed to insect hell would have sucked.

As we walked back to the truck we walked by the convertible we saw on the way in.  It was A Chrysler, with the top down parked directly under a tree that was shedding all sorts of junk.  The passenger compartment was filled with the tree garbage. I saw a big splatter of bird shit on the trunk lid and would not be surprised if there was more adorning the seats.  Serves the moron right, I mean what the F are you thinking?

Well the beach visit was more or less a flop.  On the way back to our place we made a pit stop at Sam’s to pick up a few items we needed.  Thankfully that was more or less without incident.  When we got home Nicki was beyond thrilled to see my mom.  Mom hasn’t been out to our place since Christmas.  For a long time after we got back, Nicki was mom’s shadow and had a huge dog smile on her face.

We all moved out to the lanai and hung by the pool.  The screened in environment was extremely welcome after the bug ridden beach excursion.  I had the pool heater turned on to bring the 80 degree water up to 88 or 89 degrees so Ali would venture in without complaint.   We relaxed out there for a few hours, it was very nice.  For dinner we had a frozen vegetable lasagna we bought at Sam’s.  

The magazines I was reading were the backlog of Men’s Helath issues I had piling up.  I read three or four of them and that was all I could take.  They offer so many suggestions and advice about various subjects that it makes your head spin.  By the time I was done I felt like there were so many things in my life that I wasn’t doing as well as I should be.  What a great feeling.

Sunday night we watched one of mom’s favorite show’s, Extreme Makeover Home Edition.  I have seen the show in it’s entirety once or twice.  It is hosted by Ty DUI Pennington.  I knew Ty from his Trading Spaces days.  I always thought he was cool as hell in his carpenter extraordinaire role.  I can barely stand him as host of this show.  His performance is so over the top, so phony, so staged it is crazy.  Almost everything he says is yelled.  The episode we watched irked me.  The family that got the golden egg was a huge one with parents from Tonga.  I think there was a ridiculous amount of kids, like 7 or 8.  The father died a couple years ago and the family since then was struggling hard to make ends meet.  The house they lived in was a dump.  They showed clip after clip of the mother crying about making ends meet.  The mother runs a catering business and they depict it as the only source of income. 

Then they start to show the kids.  No less than 4 of them are 18 years old or older with the oldest being 22.  I get angry.  Why aren’t these kids chipping in, getting jobs, and helping out their mother that they profess to love so much?  How can they live under her roof and not contribute more to addressing the problem?  The whole show was lost on me.  To me it was just filled with all sorts of hokey bullshit that was built around the premise of helping out a family with a bunch of lazy young adults that won’t step up.  Of course they have a mansion put up and are also given a huge RV to host the catering business from as well as 275,000 dollars in scholarships for the baseball team of children.  The other couple episodes I saw a long time ago didn’t anger me like this one did.  I guess it was the combo of the casts fake antics with this family’s somewhat self created situation that poisoned it for me.   Ty is looking old.  I had no idea he was older than me until I saw his age in his DUI write up.  Big time network TV has not been kind to him. 

Our Memorial Day was extremely relaxed.  One of the funny parts of Mom’s visit was when she said her bottled Zefrillus water didn’t taste very good.  I paused for a second, deciding if I wanted to point out to mom that she was badly mispronouncing the company name “Zephyr Hills” which is a town in Florida.  I decided to let her in on it.  She laughed when she realized that she had been mispronouncing it for so long.  It was an ongoing joke for the rest of her time there.  I would work the word into sentences, using mom’s version of it.  Eh I am no one to talk with my regular butchering of the english language.

So again on Memorial day we hung by the pool for awhile and then I made burgers on the grill.  The burgers were a bit thicker than normal and the one mom got was not done in the middle.  I felt bad but mom said she would just eat around it.  Soon after lunch she was packed up and ready to go.  I dropped her off at home a little before 1.  She said she had a good time. We enjoyed having her.  I think mom sometimes thinks that if she comes over there has to be events or a firm reason.  It just isn’t the case.  I just enjoy having her out.  Even if she is outside reading a book and I am inside playing WoW.  It’s comforting to have her around.

The rest of Memorial Day was very laid back.  I played a lot of WoW and sat down to watch my 2nd movie, Good Fellas.  Even though this is one of the all time classic movies, I never saw it.  It was another very long movie filled with sex, drugs and violence, tons of violence.  The acting in it was fantastic.  I now know where the Sopranos came from, the plot lines seem cloned from Good Fellas. In fact a couple people in Good Fellas are in the Sopranos.  The wife of Henry Hill in the movie is the psychiatrist that Tony sees in Sopranos and the one kid in the gang in the Sopranos has a small role in Good Fellas where he first gets his foot shot and later the rest of him shot by Joe Pesci.  Joe Pesci is a lunatic in the movie, he does the majority of the killing.  I really don’t need to rate the movie but of course it gets an A from me.  Ali didn’t watch it. 

I woke up this morning in a bad mood, feeling shitty about stuff even though I just had a good weekend.  Full moon is almost here.

Nicki is pretty well accustomed to her dog door.  She will go through it both ways.  She definitely prefers going through an open slider though.

I went ahead and set the ball in motion to cancel our escrow and just handle paying those bills ourselves.  It makes sense on every level.  I don’t know why I have not done it sooner.