Archives January 2008

W salutes you…..

That is my current Wii Fitness age.  With the Wii Sports game there is an overall fitness test you can take that tests you in 3 different areas.  The first time I took it I was tested out at a Wii Fitness age of 46!!!  I was appalled.   You can only take the test once a day and it mixes up the tests each time you take it.  I was happy to clock in last night at a Wii Fitness age of 32, shaving 14 years in 3 days.  Bowling and tennis challenges are my forte’, boxing is my achilles heel.

I haven’t talked much about the presidential candidates to this point.  To be honest I haven’t spent tons of time researching all of their views on the important issues but I wanted to share my feelings at least at this point.

I am surprised how the democratic race has gone so far.  Like most people, I kind if assumed that Hilary would be the front runner with Obama a distant second.  John Edwards is an afterthought, he just seems so fake to me.  It seemed like getting Hilary would almost be like having Bill run again which at least to me, is a good thing.  It seems that Hilary has a real image problem.  She appears to be very polarizing.  People don’t simply dislike her, a lot of people hate her although I am not quite sure why.  To be honest I would be ok if Obama or Hilary got in.  I like the fact that Obama is a fresh face that hasn’t been in politics that long.  He is a powerful speaker whom is obviously very smart.  What a refreshing change that would be.

On the Republican side I of course would not vote for any of them, except one maybe, Ron Paul.  His viewpoints on things seem pretty in-line with mine, unfortunately, for whatever reason he appears to be in the back of the pack.  Gulianni is a weasel.  If you do a little digging into his political career you see that he isn’t the sort of guy you want as president.  I always liked John McCain however the way he caved to George Bush and kissed his ass after Bush did a smear campaign on McCain never sat well with me.  On the negative side he thinks we should continue on in Iraq which I could never support. Plus the guy is just so damn old.  Huckabee is a joke to me.  He is simply catering to the religious right since no other candidates have chosen to do so.  He once compared being gay to necrophilia. Yea, that is what we need in the White House.  Mitt Romney reminds me of a car salesman, very smooth, very polished and very willing to tell you just about anything to get what he wants.

I can only hope whomever gets into the White House is willing to take on the huge task of cleaning up the disaster that has been implemented by the Bush administration.  It will take 4 years just to dig out from under the rubble.

 I totally forgot the BCS championship game was last night.  I forgot last year too.  I’m really into college football, can you tell? 

This was one of those weekends where I felt like a shlub because it seemed like I didn’t do anything.  I cleaned the pool, took down the outside Christmas lights, trimmed the topiary out front, washed the bed sheets and covers, ran the roombas on the rugs, the scooba on the tile and the dirt dog on the lanai and picked up and organized a bit.  It seems like a decent sized list but in truth in total it took me two or three hours to get it all done which in the span of a 48 hour weekend is nothing. 

As I walked around the property this weekend I had constant visual reminders of the results of my ill advised sprinkling during the freeze.  I was so pissed at myself.  I got annoyed with Ali while we were taking the outside lights down.  I told her I was so angry at myself because the sprinklers did more harm than good.  She said something like “… well that is why I have kept quiet…”  Translation – yea that was stupid.   I immediately was annoyed by this.  I told her that she didn’t offer any strong opinion about the sprinklers.  She was acting like she warned me not to run them.  We had a bit of an exchange back and forth about it.  What annoyed me the most was I know if the situation was reversed and Ali confessed she was feeling bad about a decision she made, I would try to console her about it not stomp on your foot and rub it in, whatever.

So anyway I hooked up the Wii Friday night.  As soon as you grab ahold of the controller and have your hand movements mimicked on screen by a little blue hand you are intrigued.  I fired it up and started digging in.  I called Ali over to watch and participate in the fun.  We played with all of the games on Wii Sports that comes with it as well as most of the games included in Wii Play.  We played with the damn thing till almost midnight.  As I hoped, Ali found the interactivity of the experience fun.  At times she was more into the action than I was.  She actually did quite well, beating me in more games than I did her.  She also was the first one to come down with a Wii injury.  After she beat me in boxing she threw her hands up wildly in celebration.  As she did the cord connecting the controller to the nunchuk flew up and hit her in the eye.  Luckily it was only a surface wound.

Ali also found the world of Mii’s fascinating.  Mii’s are the little cartoonish characters you can create to represent yourself in the games.  She had a lot of fun creating them and also going online and looking at other people’s Mii’s they have created.   At first you would think from looking at the Mii creation interface that you were pretty limited in what you could create.  However after seeing what other people did, it became obvious that you could do much more with some tweaking.  Over the weekend Ali made Mii’s of Father Time, a Fortune Teller (for online Mii contests) as well as one for Nicki and my mom.  We also downloaded extra Mii’s to our system  I grabbed Beavis, Butthead, Darth Vader, Charlie Brown and Snoopy.  Mii’s are fun.

Let me review the different games I played.

Tennis – probably my favorite game of the lot.  I always have liked video tennis games.  The Wii version is incredibly simplistic yet realistic at the same time.  The only gripe is you can’t do an 1 on 1 match, only doubles although you can control both players on your doubles team.  There is something very satisfying about the quick flick of your wrist resulting in a smash cross court.  The built in speakers in the controller adds to the realism as the swoosh and impact of the tennis racket is played through them.

Bowling – my second favorite game.  This is probably the most realistic of all the games.  They have the physics perfectly simulated. It is a lot of fun.  My best game is 201.

Baseball – very simplified version of the game which is basically stripped down to hitter versus batter.  Hitting is all about timing.  Again, it is very realistic in the physics of the game.  I found myself posing after hitting a ball deep.

Golf – again, great physics, very pretty scenery.  It is a bit too simplistic and putting is a bit frustrating.

Boxing – I played this the least.  It is basically a spastic flurry of movements that require no real skill.  Offers the best workout of all of the games.

A lot of the games on Wii Play were more annoying than anything.  Out of what we played, my two favorites were billiards and shooting gallery.  The other ones either were too tough to control or just not that much fun.  The Wii Play games are sort of designed to demonstrate all the different ways the Wii controller can be used and it does a good job at that.

The Wii features Wi-Fi connectivity which is very cool.  Once connected you use it to open up even more Wii goodness.  You can go online and download more stuff for your Wii.  Some stuff is free, some stuff requires “Wii points”.  Wii points are obtained by buying them.  Each Wii point is like a penny.  2000 Wii points costs $20.  The downloads cost varying amounts of Wii points.  I bought 2000 Wii points so I could grab a couple things.

One of the things they have available are old games for various consoles.  I snagged myself an old favorite of mine, Punchout for the NES.  I used to play that thing forever when it first came out.  I was a bit rusty and was only able to get to the second round of Bald Bull.  I’ll get all the way back eventually.  You have to be really quick on the controller as you get far into the game.

The other thing I downloaded was the internet browser for the Wii.  It is surprisingly good.  Apparently it uses Opera which is one of the favorite Linux browsers.  It was cool to browse the web on the 61 inch TV.  Everything displayed properly, even videos on You Tube, very cool.  By the end of the weekend I was a bit sore from the Wii activities which is a good thing.  Getting some exercise while playing video games is a great thing in my opinion.  The Wii get’s two thumbs up from me.  Over time I will snag some other games that further display the power of Wii.  Right now what I have will be plenty of fun to keep us busy.

When I wasn’t playing with the Wii I was buried in WoW.  I have another virtual goal that will require a lot of puter time.  It results in me running the same thing over and over and over again until I acquire enough “honor points” to buy what I crave, a 118 dps weapon! 

To add on to the shlubby feeling I didn’t eat very clean this weekend.  I had fun over the weekend but I felt guilty about it.  Our next month or so will probably make up for it with the Naples Half Marathon and Ali’s race following in short order.  There will be a lot to do.

Well the annual migration of snowbirds to SW Florida seems to be complete.  This is confirmed by the increased traffic filled with cars with out of state license plates.  These same vehicles can also normally be seen driving 10 mph under posted speed limits as well as performing dangerous lane changes and turns without any sort of signaling ahead of time.  The snowbirds can also be spotted outside my gym everyday as they anxiously await the doors to open to the matinee playing on the theater a few doors down.  They also like to congregate in grocery stores and local eating establishments.

Well I managed to snag a Wii.  Earlier in the week I had asked a clerk at one of the local Wal-Marts to take my name and call me if they got a shipment in, not expecting them to actually call.  Well wouldn’t you know it, I get a message that someone from the store called while I was at the gym, damn it.  I call back and the woman was at lunch, the clerk I talked to said they were all gone. Shit. Well I thought that maybe, just maybe other stores got some today so I made some calls.  I was floored when the clerk at another store said they had ONE left.  “Wow, can you hold it for me for 15 minutes? I’ll be right there”  “Sorry we aren’t allowed to hold them” she said.  Damn it, ok, I told her I would be over asap. So I fly out of work and get there as fast as I could.  As I was quickly walking in from the parking lot I saw another guy in his 20’s walking in.  I wondered if he was also coming in to claim the last Wii???  Just to make sure, I walked even quicker, making sure I had a good 50 foot lead on him by the time I hit the front door.  I walked back to Electronics and found a young girl that worked there.  I told her I just called about the Wii, it was the girl I talked to.  “Yep we still have it” she said.  My face must have lit up like a 6 year old on Christmas morning.  They didn’t even have it out in the case, rather tucked away for safe keeping behind the counter.  I felt like I was cashing in a lotto ticket.  I happily paid for my Wii and had a very happy drive back to the office with it.  I’ll have all the Wii details on Monday, Yipeeee…

I sent my one picture into the the local paper website and they posted it.  My sprinkler game plan definitely was a disaster.  The stuff that wasn’t exposed to the sprinklers actually did better than what was.  I was very angry at myself as I saw all these plants that looked on the verge of death after being covered in ice.  Stupid.   It seems like all the stuff I covered with pots or other containers fared just fine. 

I had a weird dream last night.  Alison and I and two friends of ours were in the Gouglersville house.  I looked out the window and saw massive tornadoes all over the place.  Even though Pennsylvania typically doesn’t have palm trees, the view outside looked like it was Florida during a hurricane.  I yelled for everyone to take cover in the basement because of the tornadoes however the basement was fully flooded from all of the rain.  Then as I am looking outside the tornadoes are getting closer and closer but then something bizarre happens.  Palm trees start flying towards the house, not like they were uprooted but intact in the ground, but moving towards the house at a very rapid pace. A few of them just missed the house to either side but then I saw one coming right for the front porch.  I braced for impact as it barreled down on the house.  It crashed into the house with amazing force, breaking through the porch roof and shaking the entire house.  The tornadoes were almost right on us by this time.  I remember frantically trying to come up with any escape options and realized there were none.  The dream ends before the tornado rips the house apart.  I can still feel the panic from that moment.  Last night Ali was watching a show on storm chasers.  I didn’t watch it but I guess just seeing it in passing was enough to plant the seed in my head.

This weekend we are going to be pulling down the outside Christmas lights along with normal chore duties.  The cold weather will be an ancient memory with predicted temperatures back up around 80.  Of course the various damaged and dead plants will be a reminder of our latest brief visit with true winter like temperatures for a time to come.

My body feels like it has almost completely recovered from my impromptu 5k on New year’s Eve, a pleasant surprise.

Wow is there anything hotter than a woman walking towards you with three equal  bulges.  One for her breasts and the other two created by her tight pants pinching her fat roll in the middle.  Makes me want to buy a set of Michelins.

Well I think it is official, I am a southerner, at least in terms of my tolerance for cold goes.  I remember the first few years after moving here I would laugh at the people that acted like they were in the arctic if the temperature dipped below 65 degrees.  My co-workers would stare at me in disbelief if I came walking in the door with no coat when it was 60 degrees outside.  Well sometime over the last year or two my blood has thinned or maybe it is just my advancing age, but I am just a wimp when it comes to cold.

When I got home after work it was in the low 50’s.  I wanted to go around and cover up a bunch of the smaller plants with empty pots and bins we had in the shed.  I put on an insulated sweatshirt and zipped it all the way up.  It had a hood and I pulled that up over my head as well.  I was fricking freezing.  To be fair there was a steady wind blowing that added to the discomfort.  So I covered up what I could and took most of the potted plants we had and put them inside the shed for safe keeping.  Then I set the sprinklers to run overnight starting at 3am.  I don’t know if that was such a great idea after walking outside this morning to 31 degree temperatures.

The area that was hit with sprinklers was encased in ice.  Now in theory, they say that this prevents the temperatures that hit the plant from going below 32 degrees.  I however have a feeling I did more harm than good.  When I took Nicki out this morning she wanted to come right back in.  She didn’t like walking on the crunchy, frozen grass.  Oh well, later today things will warm up and we will see what the damage is.  It got as cold if not colder than the last cold snap we had that wrecked a bunch of our stuff.  Seeing ice in Florida is a surreal sort of thing…

On my phone I found a few pics I snapped on Fremont street in Vegas, nothing awesome but here they are.

You may remember in the past I blogged about Heavy Breather Man.  He is a guy that I first saw at JFZ and later followed me to Powerhouse.  His thing was always breathing loudly along with always sweating like a pig.  Well I hadn’t seen this guy for a long time until he resurfaced a few weeks ago, transformed.  Heavy Breather Man looks like he has either been popping roids or been spending a fortune on supplements.  He looks like he packed on a good 20 or 30 pounds of pure muscle.  Now in addition to heavy breathing, he does copious amounts of loud grunting as he is working out.  the sort of grunting that makes you stop and look, even if you are all the way on the other side of the gym.  He still doesn’t talk to anyone and is still as sweaty as ever.  No, he never wipes down equipment and no, I still haven’t ever seen him carry on more than a one sentence conversation with anyone.  He’s a weird dude but at least now he is BIG and weird. 

Our New Year’s celebration was rather mundane and I was quite fine with it.  I made burgers on the grill and we watched the ball drop in NYC on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin eve.  I don’t really know why I watch the broadcast for several reasons.  First the format of it bothers me, I don’t like that they mix in pre-recorded segments shot from the West Coast.  Why can’t they have life performances going on??  The commercials are not only far too numerous but also far too repetitive.  Every 2 minutes we were subjected to the same set of commercials, most notably some vaccine that is designed to help prevent some sort of female vagina issue.  That one and some commercial with a woman that had way too much forehead pitching some sort of skin cream.  In the half hour we watched the show we probably saw these same commercials at least 5 times if not more.

I was hoping that poor old Dick Clark would finally agree to sit in the background and not subject us to another year of him struggling to spit out a coherent sentence.  I feel for the guy, I understand he may feel like he is trying to make a point by appearing on camera after having a stroke.  Ok fine, you did it two years ago, there is no need to keep doing it.  Why would he want to be remembered that way?  It was like someone flipped a switch and turned the eternally youthful looking man into an old crypt keeper looking geezer overnight.  One thing Dick should do, fix the teeth.  I mean he has more money than God, get a set of veneers or dentures.  It looked like he has a mouth full of fangs.  Maybe before he had the stroke when he talked it did not expose his teeth the way it does now when he struggles mightily to spit out every syllable.  Poor Dick, go enjoy retirement.

The show also had live performance by Carrie Underwood and some young kids that remind me of a 2008 version of the Hansons.  Carrie wears so much make up her face looks like it was bleached out.  You see no contours on her face at all.  Even with the extra pounds, I’d rather hear Kelly Clarkson sing. 

So Dick does an agonizing countdown from 20 as the ball drops and it’s over, thank goodness.  I went back to the bedroom and got a call from Todd wishing me happy new year.  He clued me into an event going on on ESPN with a guy jumping a football field with his motorcycle, the long way.  Wow that was something, he went 322 feet in the air, twice.  After he jumped the first time he wasn’t happy with the distance so he went again.  During the first jump it seemed for a second like the bike was nosing down, I was nervous he was gonna eat it.  It was quite amazing to see.

So Nicki had no pity on me and woke me up at 7am New Years Day.  I crawled out of bed, still very sore from my 5k on Monday.  We had no big plans for the day so I let Ali sleep while I played WoW.  Once Ali got up she looked out the window and informed me that our mailbox was lying on it’s side. What???  Yep it was totally snapped off.  In addition our neighbors to our left had their recycling can slammed and had stuff strewn across the ground and our neighbors to our right also had their mailbox hit.  It looks like some f’ing drunk couldn’t drive a straight line after their New Years celebration, how nice.

So we called the neighbors to let them know their can was hit but no one was home.  We didn’t want them to not have their recycling picked up so we went out and picked all the shit up just as a light, cold rain started to fall.  Next I went down to the neighbors on our right and fixed their mailbox since they live in Michigan. Then I finally started to attend to my mess.  They had to really plow our box because I had the post anchored into a 5 gallon bucket filled with concrete.  They snapped the 4 x 4 clean off.  My plan of action mutated several times during the day.

Initially I thought I would just drive in the metal post box mount I used for the For Sale sign on the one Lehigh lot and then temporarily attach the mailbox to it.  I tried driving it in several spots but none of them allowed me to get the post as deep as it needed to be.  While I was toiling away my neighbor across the street came out and brought his post hole digger with him (I already had one but didn’t mention it)  He said he was glad they didn’t hit his brand new Green Bay Packers helmet mailbox he just put up last week.  I told him how I was just trying to rig something temporarily because I had the 5 pound bucket buried underneath.  He suggested I just relocate the mailbox a bit to either side.  After some thought I agreed and decided to do that. 

Initially I thought I would just move it a bit but keep it inside the border I had built around it.  However doing so would have made it off center in the border.  When I mentioned the idea to Ali I could feel her mentally cringe with the off center suggestion.  So instead I decided to knock the border apart and pull the small plants that were planted there and relocate them.  Getting the border out was more of a challenge than I expected.  I had secured two sections of the box to the ground with rebar, the one section with a massive 4 foot hunk of it.  Getting that sucker out was a bitch.  I beat it with a sledge to loosen it up for awhile and then just pulled with all I had.  It felt like I was moments away from popping something in my back as I pulled.  Thankfully it finally started to give.  The other section that was attached with rebar was easier.  It used a smaller 2 foot piece and I got smart and used the metal mail box post as a pry bar, wedging it under the wood.

So once the border was out, I popped out the plants and assigned Ali the job of replanting them while I got the mailbox back in the ground.  Thankfully I had everything I needed to perform the repair.  I cut off a leftover piece of landscape timber for the mount and used the neighbors post hole digger to go a two or three feet into the ground.  I reattached the mailbox structure with some long screws and washers and then put the pieces of the mailbox back together that broke apart.  Luckily it is made of some sort of pliable plastic that gives instead of cracks.  When it was all done I actually preferred it without the junky looking border that had been there for years.

During the day we also tackled taking down all the indorr Christmas decorations.  We didn’t put much up this year so it wasn’t too bad putting it all away.  The only thing left to do is pull down the lights this upcoming weekend.  I felt no real remorse putting the decorations away as Christmas didn’t hold much sentiment at all for me this year. 

I got done in time to help Ali put most of the plants in the ground.  The spot around the pond that we put them was filled with the roots from the palm bushes in the same area so digging was very tough.  Eventually we got them all in and they looked better there than they did around the mailbox.   Ali and I both were happy that we repaired the box without spending a dime.

Ali did call the police in the morning to report the incident.  Not that we thought it would do much good but at least we would have it recorded so if it would happen again we have proof of it.  A real cop didn’t come, instead one of the community volunteer cops.  They don’t carry a gun but do a get a police radio and get to drive a sheriff owned vehicle.  He gave us a card with a case number and said he would drive the rest of the street to see if there was any more damage.

The New Year is going to bring some very cold temperatures that could hover right around the freezing mark tonight.  Ali and I are not happy about it.  The last time it got that cold we had heavy damage to a bunch of the landscape even though we tried to cover a lot of it.  This time instead of covering stuff I am considering running the sprinklers for the hours when it is supposed to be the coldest.  First the water from the sprinklers will be much warmer than the air and second the process of freezing water actually emits heat that could possibly help the plants survive better.  We just have too much to cover and since it didn’t seem to really help last time we don’t feel like it is worth the effort.  The one good thing is it supposed to be rather windy the entire night so that should help stem the formation of frost.  I think no matter what we do we are going to get hammered again.  Oh well….

They wasted no time getting another season of Biggest Loser cranked up.  Only a week or two after the finale of last season they are already launching the next, this time a couples challenge.  Instead of two or three teams, they have 10 teams of couples that get weighed and eliminated together.  Last night was the first episode where you get introduced to the latest cast of fatties.  Once again it is impressive just how far these people have let themselves go.  As always the show was filled with sound blurbs of the contestants repeating the same thing over and over again, either “I didn’t realize I was this heavy…” or “I didn’t realize I was in this bad of shape…”  It makes me laugh every time I hear that.  Either these people don’t have mirrors or just just don’t open their eyes.  Yea it’s good they are finally trying to do something about the results of their years of gluttony and laziness.  Ali and I wondered if the show actually motivates other fat asses to do something about their weight or if it just entertains them as they dig their hand into the bag of chips like a backhoe?  Oh well, it’s good fun to watch .  Ali asked me which trainer I would pick between Jillian and Bob.  I said they were both good but would probably pick Jillian because I would appreciate her hard ass way of training.  Plus it would be hot to be trained by a woman (didn’t mention that part).  Of course Ali said she would rather have Bob.

Warning, WoW blurb that will make no sense to non-WoW’ers.

After fixing the mailbox and putting away decorations, I spent the rest of the day mostly playing WoW.  I ran out of rested XP for the two characters I have left to level, my shaman and paladin so I decided to go into the Alterac Valley battleground or “AV” for short.  I don’t do much player versus player stuff because, well, I generally suck at it.  I do like AV though because it pits you on massive 40 players per side team so I can hide amongst the masses a bit and pick off horde selectively.  There was a time when AV games could go on for along time as a back and forth struggle.  Games of an hour or more were not that uncommon.

Well over time Blizzard changed the rules of AV and now instead of an epic battle between the two sides it is instead a quick race to see how fast you can kill the other teams general.  Both sides more or less ignore each other and instead just rush to the other’s town where they have to kill a few super high level computer controlled characters.  The games sometimes can be less than 10 minutes long.  This strategy has been adopted by players because it is the fastest way to generate “honor” which in turn is used to buy higher level equipment in the game.  It may generate faster honor but it has sucked most of the fun out of the AV experience.

Later I lead a group into Dire Maul to help a guild member complete the quest chain to his epic warlock mount, the Dreadsteed.  Over a year ago I had an online buddy of mine run me through this quest.  He knew where everything was and everything that had to be done to complete it and I just sort of came along for the ride.  Well I wished I had paid more attention.  We spent over two hours wandering through the place.  I was trying to follow outlines of what to do that I found online but the instructions were not precise enough and we wound up wasting at least an hour going wrong ways and engaging in fights we didn’t need to. I was really losing patience with it. However the guy that I was helping, helped me get my paladin Charger mount so I was obligated to see it through to the end.  Finally we managed to get through it, he got his fire breathing horse and all was well.  It felt good to do a good deed for someone else, virtually….