Archives August 2008

It’s hard to believe but we are still seeing rain from the bands of Fay.  In the past 24 hours we saw another 2 inches of rain out at our place.  That means that since Monday night we have had over a FOOT OF RAIN.  To put this into persepctive, an inch of rain translates into a foot of snow.  So if it was below freezing we would be sitting under 12 feet of snow right now.  Needless to say our property is soaked.

Last night after work I wanted to address the one screen panel that was totally blown out.  My repair using fishing line and duct tape had failed.  I went out there with my new screening tools.  I ripped out the screen and reattached it along the top and left edge holding it in place with the spline.  However since the screen was ripped along the edges it is a bit too short to cover the opening so I once again used duct tape to block those areas.  It should do until I get to work on it in earnest this weekend. After I was done with the screen I worked on getting the large insects out of the pool area.  I safely recovered 3 dragonflies, two huge moths and one gigantic bee. 

As usual I have a bunch to do this weekend.  It’s a bit worse than normal because Ali has worked the past three days so not much has gotten done around the house.  Is there ever a weekend when there isn’t much to do?  Doesn’t seem so.

I wonder who the VP candidates will be?  I heard that McCain is now ahead in some polls.  That is amazing and sad.  It looks like his new campaign slogan is working, “I’m John McCain and I’m white.”

Last night after work I stopped at Home Depot to check out screening supplies.  They had plenty of them, further assuring my feeling that my pool cage tearing was out of the ordinary for the strength of the winds in Fay, otherwise the store would have been cleaned out of screens.  Anyway I was able to pick up supplies to replace the panels and spent a measly $44.  I have heard that installers charge upwards of $100 a panel to replace them so I am willing to attempt the repair myself if I can spend 10% of what a professional would charge me.  I did some research yesterday and I don’t see any reason why I couldn’t replace the screens myself.  Hell I’ve installed, fencing, a sprinkler system, and ceramic tile.  The screen should be a walk in the park.

I’ve really enjoyed the Olympics, I watch some of it every night.  In fact I almost feel guilty I don’t get to watch it more, there is just so much going on.  I seem to be enjoying it more now than ever before.  Maybe it is the impressive venues in Beijing or maybe NBC is doing a better job with the coverage or maybe it just looks so damn good on my 73 inch HD TV. It doesn’t seem to matter what sport is on, I enjoy watching the competition.  It made me think more than once that maybe I should have concentrated more on being an olympic athlete instead of a baseball player.

Of course with me when I am watching the female athletes I am instantly evaluating and categorizing them in terms of their appearance.  On the low end of the scale have been the olympic swimmers and the women marathoners.  The lookers are few and far between in that sport.  On the top end of the scale has been the women volleyball players, and topping all of them has been the team from Poland surprisingly.  Every single woman on that team was very attractive.  The 110 meter hurdler from Sweden that fell down in her race was top notch as well.   Regardless of their looks, I admire the hell out of any woman or man that is competing in the Olympics.  To push yourself until you are competing at a world class level in any sport is something to aspire to.

Below is a picture of the new front door before and after painting, I also added a few pics to the end of the Fay page that shows a bit more of what I painted.

My sister Meg snapped a few pictures of Randall and I at the Rumble.  You can see the rest of what she took here.  It is the only currently available media of my 2008 Rumble appearance.  I have two camcorders full of video at home that I have not been motivated to rip yet.  It has sat dormant partly because of me being busy with other projects and partly because our end result was not very spectacular.  I will get around to it someday.  I can put lipstick on any pig.

Speaking of the Rumble, I still have a chronically sore left shoulder since the event nearly two months ago.  Lately it feels sore almost all of the time.  Now I know I have aggravated it a few times at the gym as well as just doing labor around the house.  Playing extended amounts of Wii when my bro was down certainly didn’t help things along either.  I am making a concerted effort to not aggravate it now so it can heal up.  Ironically doing most conventional shoulder exercises at the gym don’t bother it at all.  It’s when I do pressing chest exercises where it starts to burn, especially the flat bench variety. I was hoping to get a few more vball tournaments in this year but doing so at this point would be like hacking off my left arm with a chainsaw. 

This week I have jumped right back into doing multiple 300’s even though I had a 12 day layoff due to the family visiting.  I have two under my belt this week and I am considering knocking out a third on Friday which would give me a nifty 900.  Ironically as physically demanding the 300 is, I have hardly hurt myself at all doing it over the past year and a half.

No that isn’t a duck on a lake.  It is a duck in our back yard.  If my rain gauge is accurate, we got almost 10 inches of rain in a 24 hour period.  Here are some pictures of the result.

The storm itself wasn’t as scary as Wilma since the wind gusts probably topped out somewhere in the 60’s but it still did a pretty good job of messing up or property.  The combination of massive amounts of rain that soaks the ground combined with high winds is a recipe to knock down trees/plants.  Both of our oak trees up front have slight leans to the south.  The trees in the orchard, the banana trees, the tree on the corner of the house mound and the huge cactus took more of a beating. 

We also had more pool cage problems.  The cage was intact but 1 screen panel totally blew out and four others (that I can see) ripped along an edge.  This really pisses me off.  Remember I had the pool cage guy come out to replace the one panel that had a tear from just normal wind?  Well all of the panels but one that ripped were along the same back side of the cage.  I wouldn’t be so bent out of shape about it if both of our neighbors cages had some damage as well.  The one house had ONE panel knocked out and that was a panel that the owner replaced themselves.  Otherwise both of their cages survived Wilma AND Fay without losing screens.  My $17,000 cage, supposedly built to the latest code was the only one to have such amounts of damage. I had half a mind to call up the pool cage guy again and bitch him out but I know it would accomplish nothing and I don’t want the guy even touching the cage at this point.  For what we paid I expect that cage to be bullet proof.  I think I will write him a letter though letting him how I feel about the quality of his work.

I was positive we would lose power during Fay, we always lose power during major storms.  We had tons of quick power hits where the house would go dark.  Each time it did I held my breath, knowing if power didn’t kick back on within a few seconds we would be dead in the water.  Amazingly, it stayed up the entire time.  Stranger yet was our neighbor across the street and the neighbor next door lost power for a good portion of the day.  There must have been a very isolated local problem on their circuit.  The only thing we did lose was cable/internet and that was only for a couple hours until it came back.

Once internet came back up I waited out the rain by working on getting my web site repaired.  My attempts to have IX web hosting help me were pointless and a waste of time.  Since they only keep a back up a week max and flush their server logs daily there was no way to recover via their back up or find out exactly what happened since I didn’t notice the hack in time.  I was at my wit’s end on how I was going to fix it all.  Luckily I had a back up of my duf.net stuff on my D-link NAS from early July so I started the LONG process of uploading that back up to my host.  There were over 30,000 files to upload. However I still had a bunch of stuff that would need to be manually cleaned.

As I was searching the internet for some way to automate this process and having little luck, I saw Charlie was online.  Charlie is a programmer by trade and he has helped me out many times before with various issues.  I wasn’t really sure if he could help me out in this instance or not.  I described to him what the hack did, namely inserted code to display links for viagra and other limp dick products into ALL of my html and php files.  I sent him some examples of corrupted files.  I was floored when he said he thought he could whip something up to fix the files in a batch manner.  Wow. 

The next morning in my email I had the program and did a small test.  It worked!  All I had to basically do was download my hacked files from my web host to my pc, clean them and then reupload them to the host.  All of the transferring back and forth took a lot of time but it took a fraction of what I would have spent manually fixing everything.  Huge kudos go out to Charlie for saving my ass once again.  He rocks.

Once the rain finally stopped we went outside to clean up a bit and put most things back in place.  I wanted to address the damaged screens so our lanai didn’t become a mosquito haven.  The panels with only 1 side ripped were patched up decently with some duct tape but when I tried to duct tape the totally blown out panel in place it failed shortly.  I went out again and strung some fishing line through the top of the screen and attached the line to some of the bolts on the cage and then hit it again with more duct tape.  As of this morning it is still in place.  We have a real redneck looking pool cage right now.

I uprighted the huge cactus by the lanai and secured it to the metal pole next to it.  I couldn’t believe how much the sucker weighed.  It was tough to push back to the upright position.  I tried to straighten up a few of the other leaning trees but the ground was too saturated so it was wasted effort.

The newly installed, painted front door passed with flying colors.  No water found it’s way through and the paint looks unscathed on both the door and stucco trim.  There is still more clean up for us to do.  I am debating if I want to try to repair the pool screen myself.  I think it is at least worth a try. 

I was not in a great mood yesterday due to sitting through another near hurricane and it’s end results as well as the huge mess I was dealing with with my web hosted files.  Ali tried to soften the blow by making me THE chocolate cake, the one my mom makes.  It turned out great and did make me feel better.

That is the report for Fay.  The house is on a lake but we never lost power for more than a few seconds, a minor miracle.  Charlie performed some programming magic to allow me to recover from my hack, he is a life saver.

This is going to be brief as I have my own data hurricane to deal with.  Evidently whatever happened to my hosted web files that reset all of their permissions also went in and appended bullshit code to all of my .htm/.hml files as well as many of my PHP files. I am not quite sure how I am going to fix it all.  It is a f’ing mess.

The weekend was extremely busy.  Even though Ali really helped out by knocking out some of the chores early, I had other things to do to replace them.  After weed whacking Saturday morning I headed to Home Depot to buy paint for the door/trim as well as some other stuff.  On a whim I thought I would look at lawn sweepers since this time of year every grass cutting results in huge piles of cut grass piled on top of the thick sections of our lawn.  I was amazed when I stumbled across a John Deere Lawn Sweeper that normally sells for $299 marked down to $175.  It was meant to be.  After getting the green light from Ali I loaded the huge box onto a flat bed.

I then headed over to the paint department and got a quick lesson in paint.  Originally I figured I would be getting one can of paint to do both the stucco trim on the front of the house and the door since they are painted the same color.  I also figured I would need primer for the door part of the job.  Well I was wrong on both counts.  I wound up getting special masonry/cement paint for the stucco that is designed to cover up hairline cracks and stretch to prevent them from reappearing.  Then I got a small can of paint for the door area that had the primer built into it which eliminated the need to primer separately.   My biggest concern was having the two different paints match but the clerk said it should match just fine.

Once I got home I dug into assembling the lawn sweeper. Whew, it was a long process that seemed longer as I was doing it in the middle of the driveway, baking in the sun.  It probably took me and hour and a half to get it all together.  Once it was assembled I had Ali come out to do the first test run.  It worked GREAT.  It ripped through the clumps of grass with no problems, throwing them into the big catch bin.  It’s a cool design that allows you to empty it without even getting off the mower.  We had a couple near disasters during the testing where Ali didn’t think of the dangers of running over the extension cords we have down in the grass.  In a split second the sweeper had sucked up the cord and wrapped it around the brushes.  That took awhile to sort out.   The bottom line is it is an awesome tool to help our lawn look nice.

My Sunday was filled with painting, lots of painting.  I put 3 coats of paint on the door area and two on the stucco.  When I started painting the stucco I immediately noticed that the paint was considerably lighter in color than what was there even though we matched up the existing color with a swatch of color.  It was light enough that it was hard to discern the difference between the bare walls and trim.  Thankfully after two coats and allowing it to dry it darkened up enough to again see a contrast.  The stucco paint also did a great job of masking any cracks that were present.  It makes me anxious to repaint the entire house with the stuff.

I was involved with the painting for the majority of the day.  After that we did some hurricane prep, picking up loose items and cleaning off the patio.  Even though our neighbor across the street put up his shutters we elected not to.  The forecast track for this thing has shifted left and right a number of times and depending on what the final track is, we could have some substantial wind or wind that is on par with our summer thunderstorms.  I just hope I am not being overly optimistic by not putting up the shutters.  2005 proved to me that hurricane forecasters really are just making semi-educated guesses.  We also could get lots of rain with Fay.  If we get the 4-8 inches they say is possible our entire property minus the mound the house is on will be underwater.  I’m sure this will be 24 hours of drama. Yay.

Since I had my issue where all of the files on my host were set to 400 permissions (read only) my WordPress blog had been acting weird, specifically I could no longer use the WYSIWYG editor.  I knew it had to be related to the issue I had earlier but could not find the cause.  Well today as I was digging around I noticed that my wp-config.php file had a huge chunk of code on the end that seemed to not belong.  The function started with ‘tmp_lkojfghx’.  Well evidently this was part of whatever occurred that reset permissions.  This chunk of code looks to try to refer web visitors to a Viagra site.  The problem is tracking down where this all originated.  From what I read this could have come from something on my site OR anyone else that hosts on the same server that got compromised.  IX, my host doesn’t seem very interested in finding out what exactly happened.  I am turning up the pressure on them.  Well anyway, I removed the malicious code and my blog editor now works again as it should.

Ali and I Tivo’d the Olympic opening ceremony since we knew we couldn’t watch it with company over.  Wow that was some amazing stuff.  The scale of the performance was mind blowing and a bit scary.  The thousands of Chinese all performing moves with robotic precision was incredible.  I wouldn’t want 1.3 billion of them pissed off at us.  It seems like when they have a stated objective, they will move relentlessly towards it with an iron, icy, ruthless manner.  They almost remind me of the Borg.

On Wednesday I decided to go to the county clinic for my eye.  Even though the pain from light had subsided, the eye was still very red so I figured I better have it checked out.  The PA at the clinic couldn’t determine much either and referred me to an opthamologist whom I visited yesterday.  I sat down in the chair and went through a series of exams.  They dropped some yellowish dye into my eye to help them determine if there were any scratches.  I stuck my head on what looks to be a modern torture device so they could look even closer.  One of the things that Ali always told me sucked about eye exams was when they blow a quick blast of air into your eye to measure pressure.  Well the doctor mentioned something about pressure and moved some device real close to my eye.  I instantly panicked and figured he was going to hit me with a blast.  I started to sweat profusely in anticipation of the unpleasant experience.  Well the blast never came, whatever he was doing didn’t involve any air.  So anyway they did not find anything definitive but prescribed me some generic antibiotic/steroid drops that should wipe out whatever is going on.  By last night my bad eye looked almost clear although I was a bit distressed to see that this morning it was a bit red again.

There is a bunch of stuff I want to get done this weekend and I tried to get a head start by knocking out the mowing last night.  I started at about 6:30 and figured I’d have time to mow and weed whack.  Well I miscalculated when daylight ends.  I wound up mowing the last section of grass by tractor headlights.  Ali came out wondering why the hell I was mowing in the dark.  I told her I wanted to get it done so we had one less thing to do over the weekend. 

The weekend will be busy, plain and simple.

It’s hard to remember all that went down in the past 5 or 6 days so I’ll dump out what I can remember and try to fill in the gaps as I can. I was off Thursday even though everyone didn’t arrive until late in the afternoon. I was busy all day getting things ready around the house but the big project was shampooing the rugs. In retrospect I’m not sure what the point was because it’s already hard to tell I cleaned them after having people over for a few days.

So I headed out to the airport to pick up my brother Todd and my four year old niece Caroline. I was surprised when I got a call just as I pulled into the cell phone lot. Todd said their flight landed early, they already had their bags and were ready to go. So I immediately head over to the terminal and pick them up. As we were pulling out Todd tried calling my sister who was supposed to land a half hour before him to see where she was. She said they were just leaving the airport as well and they were in a black Jeep. Todd turns around and notices there is a black Jeep behind us. Yep, it was them, funny stuff. So they followed us back to mom’s place where a big dinner was planned.

Mom has not seen Caroline since she was a tiny infant. I’m sure it was weird for her seeing her grandaughter in person. Caroline was a bit shy at first but loosened up quickly. Caroline also had never met her 2 year old cousin Emily. She quickly warmed up to her as well and immediately tried to engage her in play. It was cute. We had a belated birthday party for Caroline, her birthday was the day before. She ripped into her presents within minutes of us arriving. About a half hour later Ali showed up after work to join the fun.

Having two little kids in a house quickly transforms it into a crime scene. Stuff gets scattered about in a very rapid fashion. I knew that it would be tough for mom whom has lived sans kids for nearly two decades. I had already prepared myself for the chaos and embraced it. I knew things would be crazy but it was only for a short time and I viewed it as a positive thing since it is an extremely rare situation to have the three original Duffey kids together with mom any more.

We all sit down to dinner at our fold up table I had brought over the weekend before. The eight of us fit, barely. We enjoyed our meal but then the true star of the show came out, the birthday cake, Mom’s famous chocolate birthday cake. I love this cake. The icing is sinful and the chocolate cake itself is moist and wonderful. Two of the main ingredients are butter, lots of it and coffee. It is probably my favorite desert on the planet. Mom passed the recipe to Ali which I am grateful for although we don’t make it much due to my dietary desires. Well anyway the cake was top notch as always. Mom’s friend and co-worker, whom also lives in the same complex came down for cake and to see the kids.

We hung around mom’s for awhile, mostly watching the kids play. It was cool to see the girls getting along. Eventually we packed up and headed back to our place with Todd and Caroline. Ali and I were quite tired. Todd told me that he was surprised when Ali and I packed it in around 10 or so. He let’s Caroline stay up late when she is on vacation, she didn’t go to bed until 11:30 or so.

So Friday was planned out to be a beach day. In the morning while we were waiting to go I showed Todd the Wii. That was the start of many hours of Wii battles over the 5 days which were mostly dominated by me of course. Mom wanted us to go to a beach we never visited before, Barefoot Beach which is right on the northern Collier County border. It’s a county park. I was annoyed to pay 6 dollars to park there since I didn’t have a beach sticker on the party van. We took the van so we didn’t have to crud up the Camry with sand, salt and sweat.

Barefoot beach is a natural beach with minimal amenities. The beach wasn’t very full at all. The girls headed straight for the water. We all joined them for periods of time. I spent time playing with both of the girls, helping Caroline mix up her sand soup and keeping an eye on Emily to make sure she stayed out of trouble. Somewhere during that time Emily held her hands up to me motioning she wanted me to pick her up. Once I had her she plopped her head on my shoulder and seemed to be totally at ease. It was the start of what was a bizarre phenomenon over the next few days. She wanted me to hold her all the time. If I tried to put her down she would grasp on tightly around my neck. She just loved being with Uncle Shawn for some reason.

A couple hours at the beach are all that is required to get burned badly in the intense Florida sun so we packed up and got ready to head out. Our crew headed back to our house after stopping at the grocery store while the rest headed back to Mom’s. We decided to just do our own thing for dinner that night. Our thing was grabbing pizza at Publix. My mom, sister and brother-in-law ran to Applebee’s. Friday evening Todd, Caroline, Ali and I spent a lot of time in our pool. Ali bought a bunch of additional pool toys for the occasion and Caroline put them to good use. She loved the pool and was a whirlwind of wet energy, jumping, swimming and splashing non-stop for a couple hours.

One thing we had to get used to was the rapid fire stream of questions a four year old child can generate. I guess there are lots of things to learn at that age. Most of the questions were directed at Todd but I fielded my fair share and didn’t mind. I was just happy that Caroline was comfortable enough around us to ask us stuff. When we saw her in June she was very shy around me.

I had floated out half jokingly to my brother-in-law about possibly helping me install a new front door since he builds houses for a living. He was all gung-ho about it and said it isn’t a big deal and should only take a couple hours. I wasn’t going to take him up on it originally but when Saturday morning came around I changed my mind and figured I would ask him if he was serious about his willingness to help me do it. The plan already was for the girls to go out shopping at the outlets anyway while he was coming over to hang out with Todd and I and play Wii. So I called him up and asked him again if he would be ok with helping me. Again he enthusiastically said he was cool with helping and again he said it shouldn’t take that long. In my mind I figured two hours to do the door and then we would play Wii for the rest of the day, awesome.

So I go pick up Damon and we head to Home Depot. He knows exactly what is needed for a door installation which is very helpful. I already knew the door I wanted to get. It wasn’t fancy or expensive but it matched our existing windows. The only other thing was I wanted to convert from an inswing door that we currently had to an outswing door which is what current code requires because it is much stronger when it comes to hurricane situations. Damon picked out a door that seemed to be be the best of the bunch and after grabbing the other supplies we were on the way back to the house.

The first thing to do was demolition. Originally Damon said we may be able to keep some of the existing parts of the door like the interior trim and the exterior brick molding. However after some of the pieces broke that plan was scuttled and we just started ripping and prying. Todd jumped in and helped as well. Removing the old door wasn’t too bad of a job. There were a couple screws that had to be cut with my big sawzaw. Ripping out the old door revealed how badly it needed to be replaced. Much of the wood near the lower hinge was wet and rotted from the bad installation. There were various bugs scooting around in the multiple gaps around the door seal. It was just a mess.

Damon laughed at some of the tools I presented him with, namely my little 2 foot level and 25 year old utility knives. I explained I fixed computers for a living instead of building houses, my tool collection was not bad for a computer geek. A lot of my time was spent retrieving various tools that Damon needed for various aspects of the job. One of my main contributions was wiring the security system back up to the new door. We got the new door in place but it became apparent that we needed a few other things from Home Depot to complete the job , so out the door we went and headed back. It had already became very apparent that this was not going to be a two hour job.

At Home Depot our plan morphed a few times. It was apparent that trying to use brick molding with the new installation was going to be problematic so instead we got some cedar instead to go around the outer edges of the exterior door frame. Cedar is a hardwood that is rot resistant, a perfect fit for the weather conditions it will be exposed to. We got back as storms were getting ready to roll in. We did a bit more work but then took a break to play some Wii since we knew once the girls got back Wii playing would be hard to come by.

Todd, Damon and I had a blast playing Wii sports. We played and drank beer for a couple hours until the shoppers got back. Once they got back Damon and I started on the door again. It was a bit tough because we also were doing a cook out for everyone and one of my responsibilities was to cook the food.

So I fired up the grill and then went back to check on the door progress. I could tell the women were getting annoyed that we were still f’ing around with the door as it approached 6pm. I went back to check on the grill and saw the temp gauge had not moved. I was out of propane, shit. So I told Damon I had to run to get propane. He said it was no big deal and he should have the outside framing done by the time I got back. He wasn’t kidding, when I pulled back in the driveway the framing was up and caulked. The one mitre joint had a space in it from a slight measuring miscalculation but the gap could be easily caulked to hide it’s existence. All that was left was to put up the new pieces of trim on the inside of the door.

Todd offered up that he could handle the grilling responsibilities while I helped Damon finish up which was a big help. We got the trim up just in time to eat. Evidently Todd had a fire flare up on the grill because I had all three burners turned on which made it very hot. The burgers and dogs were all WELL done. 🙂 After dinner and hanging out at our place for awhile my mom, sis, Damon and Emily packed up and headed home. Both Ali and I made sure to let both Todd and Damon know how much we appreciated their help in the door project. If I would have tackled the project myself as I planned, I’m sure I would have screwed it up.

So we made plans on Sunday to have a full pool day out at our place. In the morning Todd and I played the Wii as well as watch some of the Olympics. We watched a lot of the Olympics while they were here, we enjoyed it. So everyone showed up and we simply ate the leftovers from the day before, which there were many of. We had fun playing in the pool with the girls. We decided that we would go out to eat that night, our only night out to eat during the entire trip at Carraba’s.

It seems every time I go back to my favorite Carraba’s I get more disappointed. They keep removing aspects of it that made it unique and interesting for me. The last time we went I noticed that they no longer played “Learn to speak Italian” in the bathrooms which was a bummer. They also severely cut down on the selections on the menu. This time I noticed that they removed all of the fake vines they had in the trellis over the booth area as well as trellis and vines that used to be over the main dining area. They also used to have dividers between the main sections of the room that helped break it up a bit. That’s all gone. It’s just one open, boring space now. I’d love to know who’s bright idea that was. Well at least they still make good food.

During the afternoon on Sunday I developed a bizarre eye problem. All of a sudden bright light was causing me all sorts of pain in my right eye. Going outside and looking anywhere near the sun was impossible, I had to look down and shield my eyes. I didn’t recall doing ANYTHING to my eyes to cause a problem. Nothing dropped in them, I didn’t scratch them and it didn’t feel like I had anything stuck in them. It just hurt like hell to look at bright light. My right eye also started to become very bloodshot as a result of whatever was causing my issue.

On Monday our plan was to go to the water park. The weather for most of my family’s visit had not been very cooperative. Instead of the normal brief afternoon thunderstorms, we were getting substantial storms rolling in mid-morning which was screwing up our outdoor activities. Well Monday was no exception. The park opened at 10 and we arrived right on time to try to snag a primo spot under an umbrella. Well on cue it started to rain hard as we approached. The water park did not open because of the storms. They said they could open later if the weather cleared up. So now we had to formulate a new plan. We wound up going down to Loudermilk Park to hang at the beach a bit, hoping we could still hit the water park later.

By the time we got to the beach the rain had stopped. The sand was nearly empty which was nice. My mom wasn’t thrilled about coming to Loudermilk but my sister said she thought it looked really nice, which it is. I only waded into the water up to my knees, I didn’t feel like getting all nasty since we had the Camry. Mom, and Ali stayed out of the water as well. We ate lunch there and then I called the water park for a status update. I was happy to hear they were now open. We piled in the car and drove north again.

As I mentioned before, my niece Caroline is always full of questions. One of the funniest ones is the “are we there yet?” one that starts no longer than 30 seconds after putting the car into DRIVE. A 15 minute ride in the car is an eternity to a four year old. Especially a four year old that is used to watching dvd’s whenever she is in a vehicle.

So we arrive at the water park and head up to the front gate. We walk up in the middle of a tirade by some chubby British woman that is screaming at the young girl at the desk about something. The girl at the desk got fed up and dropped her shade on the woman when she had enough. Eventually a “supervisor” came up and the woman started in on him. We got our tickets and headed in. Because of the bad weather earlier in the day and because it was Monday, the place was not full at all which was a bonus. It didn’t take long for the girls to head over to the kiddie pool area.

There was lots of fun to be had. The girls were too small to do the water slides but there was plenty of other stuff to keep them occupied. During our time there I spent a lot of time holding Emily. Over the course of their visit Emily became more and more attached to me. She was constantly wanting me to hold her. When I was holding her and someone else offered to come up and take her she would clutch onto my neck and yell “No!” It was very cute.

There was one annoying moment at the water park when Ali and I waded into the pool that is designated as the up to 12 year old area. Todd was at the far end playing with Caroline and Ali and I were heading up to hang up with them so we step into the pool and head that way. The kid lifeguard stops us and says that the only adults that are supposed to be in this pool are parents directly helping younger kids to swim. I immediately assured the kid that we were only going up to the far end to be with my niece. Well evidently this was still taboo. I found the whole situation annoying and absurd but I didn’t feel like making a scene so I just said “Whatever….” and exited the pool and walked along the edge.

During the visit to the water park I had my sunglasses on the entire time to shield my eye from the bright light. At some point I noticed that the light didn’t seem to be bothering me much so I took off my glasses and looked around. The searing pain was gone, wtf?? I theorized that my pain was caused by something that was in that eye and that in the course of splashing down in the water park I may have dislodged whatever it was. It was the only thing that made sense.

My sis and their crew packed up and headed out earlier than we did. They were worried about Emily getting sunburned since they had a long flight on a plane the next day. Todd, Caroline, Ali and I stuck around for another hour or so. Ali watched Emily while Todd and I got to try out each of the water slides which was cool. Todd and I had many memorable trips to the water slides in Rehoboth growing up, it brought back some of those memories.

After our water slide rides we enjoyed some ice cream and then packed up and headed home. Mom once again was preparing a big send off dinner. We headed there Monday evening and once again crowded around our fold out table for a good dinner. After dinner I went with Damon to Target for him to pick up a portable dvd player as well as stop for him to get his ice cream fix. We hung out at mom’s until close to 10 before heading out. We said our final good byes to Torrin and Damon as they had an early flight out Tuesday morning. I again was holding Emily for most of the evening and she was not very happy when I had to put her down to leave. I heard her blood curdling scream a good 30 feet outside mom’s closed front door. I felt bad.

So Todd’s flight didn’t leave until around midday Tuesday. Tuesday morning he packed up and then we just farted around a bit. Caroline and I bonded some more as she helped me fill the bird feeders and then played played big bat baseball with Todd and I. Then right before we were ready to go I had a 15 minute session of doing nothing but picking her up and throwing her into a pile of pillows on their bed. She found this game to quite enjoyable. We loaded up in the car and I dropped them off. Caroline was quiet when I picked her up and gave her a kiss on her forehead goodbye. I think she was a bit sad and didn’t know how to express it. Todd said he had fun. I hope they come down more often. I think Todd now realizes it isn’t that big of a deal to come down for a long weekend. He said something about maybe coming down over the winter which would be fun too.

After I dropped them off and pulled away I felt a bit sad as well. It was one of the few times I felt a negative about living in Florida. It would be nice to be a regular part of my niece’s lives. The weirdness continued when I got home to an empty, quiet house, something it hadn’t been for the past 5 days. I thought the visit was great. Sure there was stress from everyone being together and the conflicts that are generated when you try to mesh various routines. However I really made an effort to let that stuff slip off my back and just appreciate that everyone was together. I think I did a surprisingly good job of doing just that, something I don’t normally do very well.

A few notes about the visit.

Todd’s hair is very long and very blonde. He swears he isn’t using Sun In and that it is just the result of Caroline and him going to the pool regularly. I still don’t believe him. I told him it was ok, the one summer I used Sun In I didn’t fess up to it either.

I don’t think anything makes a woman think you are a nicer guy then when you hold a baby and don’t appear to mind doing so.

Mom smoked like a fiend during the visit. The stress of having her routine smashed was very apparent.

Todd smokes as well unfortunately.

Nicki was very freaked out by the visitors, especially initially. However by the time they were ready to go she warmed up to everyone, including Caroline. Since they left I have caught her going over towards the spare bedroom looking for them.

The Olympics look GREAT in HD. Todd and I watched a lot of it. I saw the first games of Hand Ball of my life. What a bizarre sport that is.

The site is a bit screwy right now. Somehow file permissions on all my content was set to 400 permissions which has screwed up a number of things. It appears this was triggered by some malicious PHP script, unfortunately my web host is unable to assist me in any way as far as tracking down where it came from.

Hopefully soon I’ll start recapping the family visit.