It’s been a long three days getting our new branch office up and running.  During those three days there were countless little fires I had to address but as of now everything is up and running smoothly.  Yesterday was the first day the office opened it’s doors and of course right on cue, the data circuit between the branch and the office went down and stayed down until 3:30 in the afternoon.  Luckily the office only saw a few customers all day long so it wasn’t a real big deal.  The installer from the state complimented me on how smoothly things went from his perspective.  I had all the hard work done ahead of time, something that evidently doesn’t happen very often when he visits other tax collector offices.

Ali returned the BG dvd’s and immediately grabbed me Season 3.  Now I have another SIX dvd’s to view in less than a week!  So far it seems like season three are episodes I have never seen before, the first 3 sets had some episodes I saw on TV so I could skip over those.  As much as I love watching the episodes, I almost feel pressured to watch them quickly even though I know we could extend the time we have them with the library if need be.

So John McMcain cancelled the Friday debate because NOW the financial problem is important.  NOW the economy which he proclaimed as doing just fine a couple months ago is on the edge of collapse, NOW he is concerned.  Bravo.  It seems to be just more obvious posturing to me and many others. Speaking of the “bailout” it really is disgusting if you look behind the curtain.  Rewarding financial institutions for reckless, ignorant business practices seems to be a very dangerous precedent to set.  I absolutely hope the final package somehow eliminates the fattest cats at the top from receiving any sweetheart severance deals.

I finally had enough with the Littermaid “Elite” automatic litterbox. The thing is simply a piece of shit.  It’s motor was so weak that sometimes it would get stuck just raking through the box with just litter and no excrement in it.  I was able to find the old style LM700 on ebay that we had before, it lasted us 3 years plus and gave us little to no problems even with Buttons pouring gallons of excrement into it daily. I received it yesterday and immediately put it into service.  I had no sorrow as I slammed the old Elite model into the garbage can.

It seems the moment we dry out we get dumped on with more water.  Last night a little mini-hurricane blew through our area that dumped a ton of rain, I can’t tell how much because my weather center is on the fritz again.  It had to be close to two inches of rain.  All of the familiar ponds around the property have once again formed.

One of the things we did outside on Saturday was to put down a bunch of newspaper in the garden in prep for dumping dirt on top.  We held the paper in place by throwing various objects on top of it like scraps of wood, fence posts and pvc pipe.  Well the storm destroyed our work blowing much of the paper up against the side of the fence and inundating the rest under water.  That will be a pleasant mess to clean up.

Over the past few days I had been trying to send out an email to the roughly 1300 participants in last years half marathon to remind them of this years event.  I was very conscious of not getting flagged as a spammer so I broke the email addresses into groups of 200 and sent each one with a several hour gap in between.  Well evidently I still crossed the line and my account got flagged as a spammer.  All of a sudden my Exchange server was unable to send out email. 

So I get on the phone with Comcast and explain to them what I was trying to do.  They tell me that if you send to more than 99 email addresses at once or send more than 1000 emails a day or send out more than 250 meg of email traffic you get flagged as a spammer.  They turned off outgoing port 25 on my cable modem which is what blocked all of my email.  I promised to be a good boy and they turned it back on.  They also told me that Comcast email customers now are supposed to connect to their mail server via port 587 instead of 25 due to spamming.  As in many times before, Homey helped me out in both diagnosing the problem and offering a solution.  I’m now dumping my SMTP mail to his servers instead of through Comcast.

I have a new ache to report, my left hip.  I have no idea what I did to aggravate it but it is rather annoying.  Any sort of leg bending movement sends a shot of pain through it.  It almost feels like a tendon or something is pinched or caught in an odd spot.  It also would make running quite uncomfortable I’m sure.  I’m hoping it clears up on it’s own.  With me being at the new branch office quite a few days recently it means I have been missing my normal gym routine which adds to the mystery of how I hurt it and at the same time frustrates me.

Here is a quick recap.

Saturday was a bust ass day.  My neighbor gave me some scrap metal and some bonding putty to use to try to fix the hole in the mower deck.  I cut the scrap metal to size, pounded it into the hole to roughly shape and contour it and then mixed up some of the putty and rolled it out between my hands until it was a long snake.  Then I laid the bead around the hole and pressed the scrap metal on to it.  It appeared to be adhering pretty well until I got the bright idea to push on it from underneath the mower deck, just to be sure.  My doing so popped the scrap metal loose and at that point the putty had set enough that I wasn’t able to get the metal to adhere again.  I cursed myself out loud for my stupidity.

So I got a putty knife out to scrape off the half hardened putty from the mower deck and the scrap metal.  I didn’t have enough of the putty my neighbor gave me to try again so I headed out to the hardware store to see if they had something equivalent.  They had the stuff that comes in two tubes.  You basically squirt the contents of the two tubes out, mix it up and then goop it on.  It wasn’t as easy to work with as the putty but I had no choice.  I pushed out the contents on to an old piece of shelving and mixed it up quickly again with a putty knife.  Then I scooped the results up and slapped it all around the hole in the mower deck as generously as I could.  I slam the scrap metal on top and lean on it with a hammer to hold it in place.  The goop sets up quick and within 5 minutes it was hard to the touch.  There were a few small gaps that I went back and filled with silicone caulk just for fun. 

While I was letting my repair harden up I took the blades off and sharpened them with the small grinding bit I have for my drill.  It is far less than an ideal way to sharpen the blades.  A table grinder would do a much better job. ( Christmas idea!)  So after I was done grinding away I put the blades back on and reattached the deck to the tractor.  At first I had ideas of letting the epoxy harden overnight just to be safe.  I couldn’t wait. I did a short test run as I was driving back to the shed and everything seemed fine.  Later in the afternoon Ali went crazy and mowed everything, including the back yard.  The repair held up.  Here’s hoping I bought us another year or so of tractor life.  Cost of the repair, less than $5.

Saturday night we did something different and went out to eat at a fancy place where my one gym buddy bar tends.  I had a gift card to the place and he had asked me to come down a few times.  It was in downtown Naples on third street.  We ate outside on the patio, right by the sidewalk.  It was really nice and relaxing.  Thanks to the gift card and my buddy hooking Ali up with a complimentary wine or two our bill was more Carrabas like.  After dinner we walked around a bit and then headed home.  It was well deserved after busting ass all day.

Sunday is a very simple to recap cause I didn’t do much.  Besides sweeping the house and setting the Scooba loose in the kitchen, the rest of my day was just lazy.  I alternated between playing WoW, watching Battlestar Galactica Season 2 and 2.5 episodes and watching the Eagles.

Speaking of the Eagles, it was another great game that was a direct contrast to the offensive explosion the week before.  Instead this was a defensive struggle.  The Eagles beat the hell out of the Steelers, sacking their QB nine times, causing fumbles, getting interceptions and just causing general chaos.  The Eagles offense started strong but after Brian Westbrook went out with an injury things slowed way down.  It was a great win but the injury to McNabb and Westbrook does not bode well for the team next week. 

Ya know I find myself being REALLY annoyed by DeShaun Jackson.  Yea he is a very talented receiver but he also is a dumb ass.  His f up last week, dropping the ball before crossing the goal line was a legendary act of stupidity.  This week towards the end of the game when the Eagles were in clock chewing mode he catches a pass and runs it out of bounds, a cardinal sin and inexcusable if you have your head in the game.  I heard the announcers excuse it by saying “rookie mistake”.  Eh that’s bullshit.  If your IQ is high double digits you should be able to figure that one out.  Plus it seems like EVERY time the guy gets his hands on the ball his first move is always BACKWARDS.  For some reason he loves to run backwards to try to elude defenders.  It’s only a matter of time until at a crucial juncture of a game he is going to have the first down and then lose it by running backwards.  I just don’t have a good feeling about the kid.

Almost all of the standing water at our house has dried up, yay.

A big congrats to Jeremy and his wife Mandy whom delivered their first child this weekend.  Way to go!

Since my girlfriend analogy went over like a lead balloon let’s try this one. Say 8 years ago you bought a Dodge.  Over your 8 years of ownership your Dodge has gotten horrible gas mileage, been in the shop for expensive repairs on a regular basis, left you sitting on the highway multiple times and has various parts falling off of it.  Whenever you went to the dealership to have them work on your Dodge the staff there has lied to you, overcharged you at every opportunity, stolen the change out of your ashtray and chastised you when you spoke up about the bad treatment by saying you are not a “true Dodge owner”.  So finally at the end of these miserable 8 years of Dodge ownership you are ready to get a new car.  You buy another Dodge… 

I heard my mom thought I was a jerk for giving Randall a hard time at the volleyball tourney.  Now I know Randall well enough to normally walk the fine line between busting balls and just being an asshole.  This is after all the same guy that excels at trash talking.  His “are you ready to surrender?” line to the french opponent last season before our match was legendary as well as calling “good game” before serving for match point a few years back. 

 But even so, in retrospect my antics may have been a bit much.  I may have piled on too much.  Even though I sometimes still get wrapped up in the moment, that typically is all it is, a moment of anger or frustration that leaves as quickly as it comes. This tournament had no lingering negative effects for me.  I didn’t care all that much that we lost in the finals.  I remember being much more bummed out about not making the playoffs at the Rumble.

I finished off another 3 episodes of Battlestar Galactica last night putting me a little over halfway through Season 2.    

I am keeping the weekend free of major projects although I  certainly could crank open the paint can or bags of mulch and keep us rolling in work.  I kind of would like to put off most of the outside projects until we get a bit of a break in the heat here which typically doesn’t occur until mid-October.

My repair to the mower deck using four or five layers of HVAC tape has failed and we once again have a big gaping hole.  This hole allows tons of grass to fly up on top of the deck which in turn really creates a lot of wear and tear on the belts and pulleys.  It also leaves the belts open to damage from flying debris that gets chopped up which could sever a belt again.  I looked on the Cub Cadet site and I can get a new deck shipped for less than $250.  $250 is far better than biting the bullet on a $2000-$2500 new mower right now so I will probably wind up ordering it soon. 

I am not looking forward to the process of trying to transfer all of the deck hardware from the old unit to the new one.  Many of the bolts are rusted solid and the wheels on the deck are in real sad shape.  Again this is a job that would be best tackled under cooler conditions.  When I am in the middle of a frustrating, knuckle busting job, having gallons of sweat pouring off me at the same time only magnifies the negative emotions.

Man these PHISHING schemes are unreal.  Check out this email I received yesterday.  Of course I know better and the first thing I did was mouse over the link to see where it lead which was a site in Russia.  It looks totally legitimate though and I can understand why even people with average computer IQ’s could get suckered in. I dropped a bunch of spaces in to push it south so you can read it without clutter from my right sidebar. I changed the “Verification Link” just in case someone had the urge to click it.

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Ali scored me season 2 AND 2.5 of Battlestar Galactica yesterday at the library.  I dug right into it last night going through three episodes before going to bed.

I am bouncing back nicely from the vball tournament.  My right knee that was a bit swollen is almost back to normal already.  Yesterday at the gym I could touch my heel to my rear doing the standing quad stretch.  I have always used that as a measure of how much swelling is in the joint.  When it’s bad I can’t even get close to my ass. My shoulder is no worse than it was before the tournament.

The string of financial institutions that are failing is more than a little alarming.  These aren’t dot com start ups, these are HUGE, global institutions that have been around forever.  To see them disintegrate is yet another sign of just how bad times are.  It is amazing that Bush’s assessment of the situation was “the underlying economy is strong”  Brilliant George, brilliant… 

So this all just piles on to the financial nightmare the country is already in.  The government that is already TRILLIONS in debt is going to bail out these companies with money they don’t have.  We’ll just simply loan more from the Chinese.

  I read a statistic that 64% of registered voters are “uneducated”, meaning they have no real knowledge about the candidate they vote for  and instead make their choice based on email forwards,scary sounding names, their skin color or if they share common reproductive organs.  It seems the majority of voters either can’t or don’t care enough to actually do some homework on the issues in an election and base their choice on which candidate would be best suited to address those issues.  No matter who wins, they have a MASSIVE quagmire to try to clean up.  I hope they have a good supply of Red Bull at the White House.

So Saturday was my vball tournament in South Beach.  I had asked Randall if he could make sure to get there during registration so I could leave a bit later.  I left my house around 6:20 with my printed directions from Google Maps.  I had been to South Beach twice before but the last time was two or three years ago and relying on my memory would have been disastrous, haha.

So the first part of the trip I elected to take some back roads to get to Alligator Alley which cuts a decent amount of distance off the trip.  It also allows me to avoid paying the $2.50 toll to cross if you enter at Naples.  The trip was going along fine until I got to a section of the journey where there were a lot of directions in a short period of time.  I got onto the Florida Turnpike as directed.  In my directions it said that I needed to merge onto I-95 off the turnpike.  Well shortly after getting on the turnpike I saw a sign for I-95 but it seemed like it was too soon according to the directions so I continued on the turnpike south.  I had no idea I just sealed my fate as a man with no internal compass.

So I continued on the turnpike south and on and on, seeing no further signs for I-95.  The next step in the directions said something about getting off at exit 2D.  The exits were going down in number so I held out hope that I was still going the right way although logically that made zero sense.  I am not really sure why I didn’t call up Randall a half hour ago.  Finally when I started seeing signs for Homestead and the compass on my rear view mirror started reading WEST I knew I was f’d.  I called up Randall and told him where I was.  At first he thought I was kidding.  I reassured him I wasn’t.  I felt like a moron having to admit that I basically drove 35-40 miles in the wrong direction.  I turned around and Randall was able to get me some directions to get to South Beach from my southern location which was almost into the Florida Keys. 

I was starting to panic as I looked at the clock.  I had nightmares of missing the first game.  Luckily Randall told me that we didn’t play until the 3rd match which bought me some time.  As I approached Miami I started to freak out again as I ran into a horrible traffic jam as 3 lanes were squeezed down to one due to a disabled vehicle.  I sat in traffic for at least 15 minutes.  So FINALLY I whip into the parking garage, grab my stuff and start speed walking towards the beach.  It was after 9:30 by this time.

As I walk up through the park I am asked for money by one of the numerous homeless people that line the park by the beach.  I quickly dismiss him with “No, sorry dude..” and continue on.  Finally I spot Randall and his tent.  I drop my stuff and tell Randall I have to piss like crazy and would be right back.  The game before ours had started so I didn’t have much time.  I walk down towards the bathroom facilities I used in the past at 10th street. (we were on 8th)  As I approached I saw construction fencing around the area but I held out hope that the construction didn’t include the bathrooms.  Nope of course not, the bathrooms were closed.  On the building was a sign pointing in either direction to bathroom facilities at 6th and 14th street.  I was beyond crazy at this point.  I turn around and walk my ass off to 6th.  I relieve myself and then run back to the net at 8th.  Randall was standing on the court waiting for me.  So I quickly throw on my Oakleys, grab a towel and Gatorade and hurry on to the court without even putting on sunblock or doing any stretching.  I made it.

Almost instantly I could tell my left shoulder was not going to be cooperative.  My very first practice swing hurt.  I knew I had to make some adjustments to get through the day.  I told Randall I wouldn’t be swinging hard at much and I was even considering serving underhand to cut down on the use/abuse of the shoulder.  The adjustments worked pretty well.  I basically tried to keep my elbow lower and closer to the body all day long when hitting or serving.  For the most part it worked, I only tweaked it a few times.

Our first match was against my least favorite team, a father son combination.  I HATE playing KIDS, HATE IT.  Luckily this kid was still learning and dad wasn’t an all star either, so we plowed through the team rather easily.   They would normally play B but they combined B and BB at this event.

After the first match I got to goop on some sunblock and do some stretching during the break before our second match.  Our second match was against two younger athletic looking guys, they totally looked the part of skilled volleyball players.  I told Randall that this team might be more challenging than the first.  I had not seen this team play previously due to my tardy arrival.  Randall did see them and mumbled something about them not being very good.  I quickly saw my concerns were totally unfounded.  The one kid seemed to have absolutely minimal coordination when it came to passing the ball.  He would stab awkwardly at the ball and pass it all over the place.  Again the team was B level at best.  All we had to basically do was put the ball play and wait for them to F up, again a very easy win.

Randall and I developed a “tradition” of kicking sand at the other when the other misses a serve.  Well for some reason I decided to implement a new method of chastising Randall for missed serves this time around.  Each time he would miss a serve I would write the total amount of serves he missed in the sand so he had a big visual reminder in front of him.  I looked at it as a game where we would compete for the lowest muffed serves.  The game went on all day, the final score was Randall 14 Shawn 1.  I stopped keeping score in the sand around the double digit mark, I figured it was starting to become annoying for Randall. 🙂 Imagine that. 

Match three was against a team with a tall kid, taller than me and a normal sized guy. Again I would deem them as a B/borderline BB team.  They were fundamentally unsound.  We took care of them again without hardly breaking a sweat.  We were sitting at 3-0 but I didn’t feel all that great about it.  I knew that none of these teams were even close to the skill level of what we played at the Rumble.  We had committed more than our fair share of our unforced errors in these matches but it didn’t hurt us because the other teams were inept.

Our fourth match was against the other undefeated team on the net, a couple younger guys that appeared to be obvious indoor players.  They had some decent skills. We had a tougher match against them only winning by two or three points.  Still, I didn’t really feel like we had been tested up to that point.

Our last match pool play match was against a skinny tall red headed guy and a younger energetic dude that seemed to think he was a bit better than he was.  They needed to win the game to make the playoffs, we already had the pool won so the game meant little to us in terms of the standings.  It was set up as a game we could easily lose.  We almost did, the game was back and forth and close.  Our unforced errors were hurting us now.  We managed to run a few points at the end to secure the win.  Randall was very hot and cold with his serving.  He would serve out or into the net but then he also would launch some great tough serves that got us points. So we finished pool play a perfect 5-0, not bad, not bad at all.

Our first place finish earned us bye for the first round of the playoffs.  I was very unhappy to see who our opponent was for our playoff game, ANOTHER father son team.  This team obviously was much better than what we played earlier. I had watched them beat a team rather easily.  Dad was one of those dinker/dunkers that I hate to play against.  Junior was no slouch either for 15, he could control the ball quite well.

The match started close but we pulled away in the second half.  Dad seemed to be out of gas, he took every opportunity he could to catch his breath.  We wound up winning the match comfortably by 6 or 7 points, putting us into the final.  The finals were against a big older guy I have played against before named Miguel and his 27 year old son Sebastian, our THIRD father/son opponent of the day.  Miguel is a crafty played that could both hit and place the ball.  Sebastian is an athletic player that could do most aspects of the game well.  I knew that in order to win the match we would have to stop making all of the unforced errors that peppered our previous matches.  Well the match again started out close but the second half was a disaster.  Play after play resulted in unforced errors that resulted in points for them.  I was getting frustrated as we failed to make Miguel move around to get balls, his major weakness.  Randall was tired as well and frustrated as most serves came his way during their run. We just couldn’t side out.  We arrived at game point against us, Randall was serving and we were down by at least 5.  Our only chance was to run a bunch of points on Randall’s serve.  The drama never got a chance to build as Randall served into the net again to end it.  It was disappointing but not surprising to me.  I knew against this team we wouldn’t be able to play sloppy. 

The prizes weren’t great anyway, the only kudos that first place got was a small trophy which would have been kind of cool to snag.  I grabbed a Zephyr Hills back pack as my prize, a pretty cheap prize considering the steep 75 dollars we paid to enter the tournament.  If you place I think you should get a prize at least = to what your entry fee was.

During play I did get a bit vocal/expressive of my frustration.  I remember after a set went over the net me pounding the sand aggressively.  Randall also was pissed at me for a bit when I gave him shit about not getting to a bad pass of mine.  He had sprinted after the ball but was losing traction as he did.  The ball landed right over his shoulder and could have been popped up if he had his arms out.  I don’t think he realized how close he was to the ball because he was running like mad and the ball trajectory was coming from behind him.  Randall immediately bit back saying he couldn’t get traction.  I offered up that he was right there but didn’t realize it.  I immediately felt bad that he was angry about it and tried to lighten the mood by saying “you should know better than to expect me to pass accurately”.  He was probably already pissed at me for the visual serve missed counter game I was playing.  After the game I apologized and told him I wasn’t really pissed that he missed it, it was more funny than anything to me.

Physically besides the sore shoulder I felt good through out the day.  A recurring theme for my 2008 volleyball season as short as it has been (three tournaments), is my endurance level is way above what it used to be.  Once again on Saturday I NEVER felt tired in the least which is an awesome thing.  I remember very clearly in seasons past just DYING out there feeling drained and exhausted.  I can only attribute the change to my 300 routine and the associated physical changes that resulted.

The South Beach beach was in much better shape than I remembered from the past.  The last time I played the sand was rock hard and filled with concrete, glass and other debris that made just walking across the court dangerous.  The sand was very dirty as well, I remember being gray from the waist down.  This year I had no complaints about our court, the sand was pretty much debris free and cleaner.  

South Beach is an incredible place to people watch.  Of course there are lots of good looking women wearing next to nothing but there are also just tons of bizarre people all around.  Right by our court was a group doing Cross fit training.  They did various exercises utilizing barbells and big medicine balls.  It looked tough, even tougher doing it out in the blazing sun. 

The various pull up bars were right by us as well.  I saw countless guys doing pull ups, some of them were freaky.  There were guys that would take a wide underhand grip and explode upward pulling themselves up to the point where the bar was below chest level.  We saw others doing pull ups into press ups (muscle ups).  If I wasn’t playing I would have liked to go over there and give it a shot.

There was a brown dog sitting out by the bathrooms all day long.  He had a collar but appeared to be unattended to.  I walked past him several times while going to the bathroom.  Sometimes he would be laying down sleeping in the shade, other times just sitting there looking around.  I felt bad for the dog.  Late in the day I went over to try to interact with him.  Just as I was going over some old cuban guy on a bike came over and was petting the pooch.  I gave the dog a little pat on the back while telling the old guy the dog was there all day.  I don’t think he understood english.  He kept asking the dog for a  “beso” (kiss). 

So we packed up our junk and walked back to the parking garage.  I know Randall wasn’t feeling great about his play but I really didn’t care that we lost in the end.  It was fun to get out there and play and that is what matters at this point to me.  The drive home thankfully was smooth and I pulled into the driveway in less than 2:15.  Ali was proud of our efforts even though I gave her the disclaimer about the generally low skill level of most of the teams we played. There are new tips and nicknames on my volleyball site related to the weekend.

Randall had given me the advice to get the Battlestar Galactica prior seasons from the library, a free way to absorb every minute of the saga.  Ali picked up season one for me during last week.  Since then I have been ripping into it.  I finished up the five DVD set on Monday.  I can’t tell you how good this show is.  Yea it has big movie style sets and special effects but the storyline is the compelling part of the show.  Seeing the initial four hour mini-series that started it all really helped tie a lot of things together for me.  Ali is going to try to score me Season 2 today, I can hardly wait.

Ironically I received the new Magellan Maestro 4040 GPS I ordered yesterday, a few days after it could have saved my ass from my driving adventure.  I ordered this the other day when I saw the special from Tiger Direct.  No I don’t really need a gps in my truck but what I have wanted for awhile is a hands free bluetooth rig for the phone.  I can’t tell you how many times I find myself swearing loudly as I try to dig my cell phone out of my front pocket while driving.  To make matters worse it is almost impossible for me to get it out of my pocket without inadvertently hitting a button that hangs up on the caller.   

Well this GPS unit incorporated a hands free, bluetooth speaker phone, shazam!  What sold me was the incredibly low price, $99!!  Yea it’s a factory refurb but who cares?  I ripped open the box yesterday and had it set up and configured in no time.  I also discovered that it is a hackable device that runs Windows CE.  The 4040 has the ability to be unlocked to enable voice commands, of course they charge you a tidy $99 bucks to unlock it.  I put the unit through a quick test run and liked what I saw.  The only negative was the inability to easily add just phone numbers and names for the phone part of the unit.  It seems all phone numbers have to be affiliated with an address. Unlike the Garmin Quest that I have that can only load a limited amount of map data into 256 megs of memory, the Maestro comes preloaded with maps of the continental 48 states which is nice.  I have now maxed out all of my DC connections in my truck between the Sirius radio, the radar detector and the Magellan.

I had another hack problem with my site over the weekend.  Somebody had dumped phising files in the upload directory of my blog.  I had 777 permissions on that directory as it is the only way the picture upload function would work.  Well after getting notified by my host of the problem I deleted the files and changed the permissions.  Either no more uploaded pics or I find out why it doesn’t work with 755.

Last night was almost the perfect scenario, the Eagles almost won in a barn burner.  It would have been perfect because my Cowbuys fantasy football players ripped it up and pushed me to an easy win AND top points for the week, thank you for the $50! 

 It was a good game marred by DeShaun Jackson pulling a total moron move that luckily didn’t cost the Eagles points.  How difficult is it to make sure you hold on to the ball until after you cross the goal line? F’ing moron.  McNabb had a great game until the pressure was on.  The Eagles were in perfect shape to win the game at around the 50 yard line with plenty of time on the clock.  It’s the type of situation that QB’s like Tom Brady and Peyton Manning normally convert into wins much more often than not.  Well McNabb crumbled under pressure taking two bad sacks while hopping around in the pocket like a bunny.  The game ended on a stupid hook and ladder play that had next to no chance of getting the first down. I was disappointed but not crushed.  The Eagles showed they are for real.

This weekend Randall and I took second place in our vball tourney.  It was a good finish but the majority of the teams we played weren’t great.  Only one or two were comparable to what we played in the Rumble.  I have some new funny tips to add and the story of my debacle to get to South Beach should be entertaining.  The drive that should have take a bit more than 2 hours took me over 3 due to a short circuit in my internal navigation system.  I surely lost many man points along the way.

Details to come.

I found out the other day that Ali has the hots for Gordon Ramsey, the famous Chef known worldwide.  She didn’t out right say she had the hots for him but she did have a dream that involved him.  I can read between the lines. 🙂

 After work last night I snagged another 12 bags of mulch to finish up the orchard.  When I got home after dinner I went outside and spread it out.  I actually had enough left over to do the small mulched areas around the palms out front as well.  The final result looks quite nice in my opinion.

Yesterday I got a postcard about a lawsuit filed on behalf of people that got charged a flat termination fee by Verizon regardless of how far into their contract they were when they cancelled.  I miscalculated my contract expiration by a few weeks and got shafted with that fee.  I’m more than happy to sign on as a member of the class action suit to get some of that money back.  Serves the greedy bastards right. 

I really don’t feel very chatty right now.  This weekend will fly by for sure with my Saturday being enveloped by the volleyball tournament in South Beach and then Sunday catching up around the house.

It’s been 7 years since the attacks that dramatically altered the course of American history.  It seems hard to believe that it’s been that long ago.  The days events can still replay in my mind like they just happened.  9/11 created a short time period of American unity, American pride and American promise as everybody came together against a common enemy that dared to take a shot at us on our own turf.  It was a special few months.

Since then it has mutated into a cancerous scar.  For the first time in our history we became invaders.  We stood at the border of Iraq and took it over based on intentionally deceptive intelligence information.  Iraq was invaded based on this falsehood and “defeated” in short order.  Of course this defeat was actually only the tip of the iceberg as we opened up a can of worms that we are still trying to figure out how to get the lid back on to.

Then the disturbing facts and countless coincidences regarding the 9/11 attacks and the days leading up to it started to see the light of day.  It indeed seemed to be a case of where there is smoke, there is fire.  The movie Loose Change was released that exposed many of suspicious aspects of the 9/11 attacks.  Although some of the material brought up in the series of films can be discounted or explained in logical terms, there is still much that holds water.  I found this site which does a very credible job of both debunking certain aspects of Loose Change while absolutely confirming that we have been lied to about certain aspects of 9/11.  There is no way you can digest this information and come away from it thinking everything is above the table. 

The events after 9/11 ironically transformed the country that was united and the world that was united behind us into the exact opposite.  Never before has the political rifts been greater at home nor has our support from our allies been weaker.  It’s a big mess.

Regardless of who knew about 9/11 ahead of time, who exactly was responsible for it or whom tried to cover things up after the fact, the losers are the thousands that lost their lives both during the attacks and in the subsequent military actions.  It’s a national tragedy that will go down in the history books on the same scope as Pearl Harbor, just like the Project for a New American Century, hoped it would. Take a look at this brief summary of the bullshit we have been fed.

I wanted to take a closer look at the poll results earlier in the week showing a large swing in white female voters to the McCain camp.  The story indicated the majority of these women were formerly Hilary Clinton supporters.  Now I would argue that whether you are a republican, democrat or something in between and have a functioning brain, you would find these poll results somewhere in the range of hilarious to disturbing.  I mean think about it, these women have basically identified themselves as voting for a candidate solely because they share a gender with them and nothing else. 

There is no other logical explanation.  Politically, Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin could not be more opposite.  They don’t remotely share any common ground besides their sexual organs.  What that translates into is the STUPID women that have said that adding Palin to the ticket swapped their vote are basically admitting they have no knowledge or concern about the issues the election is about, they just want a woman in there.  Talk about simplifying things to a ridiculously low level.  I am dumbfounded by this turn of events.  I thought women were always supposed to be the “smart” ones?

Now let’s move on to an even greater demonstration of stupidity.  Obama was speaking about McCain’s war policy and how McCain refuses to admit that a plan of withdrawal sooner rather than later is what the majority of Americans want.  Obama used the old phrase about putting lipstick on a pig, with the pig being the Iraq war.  It’s an obvious, simple reference.  Well somehow this statement got interpreted by some morons as him indirectly calling Sarah Palin a pig with lipstick???? WTF????????????  How in the world would this conclusion be reached?  It is almost too ridiculous for me to even contemplate yet I see that apologies are being demanded for this comment that CLEARLY had no malicious intention.  What the f is wrong with people?  Along with obesity, has idiocy also taken over as a condition the majority of Americans suffer from?  I mean give me a break, this is just sickening.