Archives January 2009

No I have not abandoned my fabled 300 work out program.  It just has been back burnered because of my tendonitis.  Although I still have the tendonitis, it is somewhat less severe. So I figured i would give a partial 300 a try.  I added the 50 dead lifts back into the rotation, giving me a total of 200 reps.  It felt good to be working hard at the gym, really hard.  The pull ups and clean and presses are still MIA.  I’m not quite sure when I can add those.

Ali’s race is going to be huge. She has well over 500 people already registered.  Randall and his new girlfriend are coming over tonight and will be at the race as well as hanging for most of the weekend.  Jeremy may grace us with his presence as well.  It will be fun.

These clips are great.

Nicki and Ali were on the local Fox morning show and did an OUTSTANDING job of promoting and talking about the race.  I’m proud of them.  Ali is a much better speaker than I could ever hope to be. I can’t embed it for some reason so here is the link.

So we headed over for the Eagles concert on Monday night.  We made good time by going the “back way” which involves going out Oil Well Road onto Route 29.  Taking this route shaves at least 20 miles off the trip.

We got there in plenty of time for the 8 o’clock show.  We were at the front doors by 7:15.  Out front they had one of those Smart Cars they were giving away.  Ali and I signed up for it.  Once we got inside we grabbed a big diet soda and soft pretzel.  Neither of us had a drop of alcohol.  My reason was very practical, drinking makes me tired.  I didn’t need to be more tired for the drive back across the alley.

I had ideas that maybe since the concert was on a Monday night it might not be that full.  I was wrong, it was packed.  Looking around it was also obvious we weren’t there for a Britney Spears concert.  The crowd was primarily baby boomers.  I was surprised at the amount of older women there that were holding it together pretty well.  They definitely for the most part did not represent the typical American physically for their age group. You could have had a great time just people watching.  The outfits that some people chose to wear were very interesting. 

We found our seats and talked to the couple behind and to our right, they both seemed nice.  Even though I bought my seats the first day they were available we still were pretty far away.  Thank goodness they had two giant screens on either side of the stage that allowed you to see close ups of the band.  The show started a little late, maybe 8:15 or 8:20.  The band sounded great.  They sounded just like they have for the past 30 years.

It didn’t take long for Ali and I to notice another couple behind us.  The man was chubby with a buzzed head and a bald spot, his wife/ girlfriend was a chunky blonde.  This guy was just plain annoying. 

We noticed him because we kept hearing what sounded like a train whistle behind us “WOO! WOO! WOO!”  He would repeatedly make this sound, typically during quieter parts of songs, perhaps in an effort for the band to hear his screams of pleasure from the second deck.  After a few of the WOO’S, I turned around to see what the hell was going on back there.  It was just insane.

Not only was the guy yelling, he was CONSTANTLY in and out of his seat.  When he stood up he started gyrating his arms almost like he was trying to conduct the band.  The funny thing was the guy looked like Steve Martin in The Jerk.  He had no rhythm.  Instead it looked like he was having seizures.  Like I said he was no small man so each time he flopped back down onto his seat he was bumping into the woman of the nice couple we talked to before the show.  We felt bad for her.  The guy had to be seen to be believed.  During the intermission the crazy guy went down for refreshments.  The woman behind us joked “We’ll give you $50 to switch seats….”  Yea the guy was that annoying. 

All of the performances were good.  They played both Eagles songs and various songs that were produced solo by Glenn Fry, Don Henley and Joe Walsh.  I never really knew just how huge their song library is as well as the diversity of it.  Some songs sounded country, others pop/disco and others that were pure rock.  I found that I enjoyed the performances that featured Joe Walsh the most.  He is just a bizarre guy that looks equally strange while singing.  The crowd seemed to agree with me, they went nuts for Joe.

The band did the silly move where they act like they are done, leave the stage, the crowd yells and they come back.  I never understood that.  The evening was wrapped up with Don Henley singing a great rendition of Desperado.  There was no mistaking when the band left for good, they jumped into an SUV and drove out one of the access ramps.

Getting out of the event wasn’t too bad.  The drive back was a bit brutal though.  About half way into it I was really struggling to stay awake.  Ali helped by smacking my leg and pinching my arm.  We pulled into home about 1:15 am.  It was a great show, we both had a lot of fun.

I took yesterday off because I knew I would be wiped.  I still had to get up though to take my mom into work.  When I got back I was able to quickly wash the Camry before Ali went to work, it was coated with bug remains from the drive across the alley the night before.  For the rest of the day yesterday I did a few things around the house and relaxed. it was nice.

This morning Ali and Nicki had their TV appearance.  Ali said it went well.  I can’t wait to see it on the Tivo.  The race is blowing up, there are over 400 people registered already, at this point having 500-600 runners seems to be a sure thing.

To perfection, click to lightbox the image in all of it’s greatness.  Thank God I burned all of my perm pics.

I am having a hard time remembering much about the weekend except the last part of it.  I guess that’s because there wasn’t anything all that exciting going on.  On Saturday we got to do a full survey of the damage from the frost.  It was more extensive than we first thought. 

Initially Ali thought just the Noni tree in the orchard and the one poinsettia took a beating.  Some of the stuff did not immediately wilt from the frost.  However a couple days later it was obvious that more plants were damaged.  The banana trees all were destroyed.  I cut them down to the ground.  They will grow back but the next time it gets cold they will simply die again.  Other landscape items that took damage were the areca palms, crown of thorns, elephant ear, and most of the plants in the butterfly garden.  In the garden the corn got wrecked, as well as the pepper plant with some damage also taken by the squash and tomatoes.  Hell the frost even instantly killed a bunch of the grass. Cold weather in South Florida just is never a good thing.

I spent a lot of the weekend just f’ing off between playing WoW and Field Runner, the addictive game for the IPhone.  Ali said that for some reason she is much more annoyed by me playing the Iphone game than WoW.  My WoW resurgence has to do with a bunch of the guys I used to play with getting back into the game now that the expansion came out.  It’s been great being back among familiar names.  It makes the game much more social than it has been for a long time.

Sunday afternoon my mom came over.  She was nice enough to watch Nicki for us while we go to the Eagles concert on the east coast tonight.  Shortly after she got there a guy we know from the running club came over.  He is going to help us out with data entry at the race next Saturday and we needed to give him some hands on training before the event.  His name just happens to be Sean as well.  Sean is a real nice laid back guy who is close to my age.   Not only do we share a name (in sound at least), we also share some other similarities as we both have been divorced once and neither of us have kids. 

Sean brought over his big lovable dog named Tundra.  Tundra made his mark on the house right away as I watched him go over and take a leak on the storage box by the pool.  Of course this instantly caused me panic when Tundra moved inside the house and disappeared around the corner.  I had visions of him systematically “marking” each and every room of the house.  I went inside and tried to calmly bring him back out to the pool deck with us where I could monitor his activities.  I don’t think he did anything inside. 

Surprisingly Nicki had very few issues with Tundra being there.  In fact she almost immediately tried to engage him in play.  Having my dad’s dogs around must have opened her up a bit.  Tundra wasn’t all that into running around since he is 11+ years old and has hip dysplasia but he engaged her a bit.  It was cute. 

Sean joined Ali, my Mom and I for dinner as well. Sean is the type of person I typically get a long well with, a good talker.  Since I am typically such a rotten conversationalist, someone that loves to talk takes a lot of stress off of me.   We got to learn a lot about him.  During our long dinner conversation mom finished up and got up from the table.  I think she felt somewhat like a third wheel since a lot of the conversation had to do with various people in the running club.  When I got up from the table I saw that she had already went back to bed.  I was worried that her feelings were hurt or something.  I poked my head in twice to see if she was awake but she apparently crashed.

After dinner and desert brownies, Sean took me on in a bit of Wii Sports.  He has a Wii at home himself.  I handled him in tennis although some of the matches were real close.  We wrapped it up with a best two out of three boxing match.  We split the first two games and then in the third match he dominated me, finishing off the fight in spectacular fashion with a crushing over head right that smashed me to the ground.   He headed out around 10.  We had a good time with him and Tundra.  Hopefully we get together more often.

So tonight we head over to the east coast for an Eagles concert, Ali’s big xmas gift. Ali loves the Eagles.  This will be my third concert I have attended in my life. The first one was White Snake in my early 20’s and then Don Henley with Ali maybe 5 or 6 years ago down here.  The concert starts at 8, ends somewhere around 10.   I took tomorrow off in anticipation of getting home hella-late.  I was up till after 11 last night, probably not a great idea with the long day ahead of me.

I forgot to mention that I did later see Obama’s speech at his inauguration.  As expected it was powerful, thoughtful and well executed.  The time for talk is over.  So far he appears to be digging right in and making stuff happen, I love it.

As historic as that day was, it was almost overshadowed by Aretha Franklin and her God-awful hat.  I didn’t hear her sing but I heard the performance was not very strong.  She later blamed the cold temperatures.  Maybe the weight of the hat was making her head tip to one side, constricting her vocal chords.

I heard she paid $500 for that hideous thing.  I also heard that the manufacturer is making it available to the general public as well at the super discounted price of $175

I love this picture.  You would think that it was some professionally done shot.  Nope, my step mom shot it during their travels out west.  It is currently the background on my desktop at work.  Click it to “lightbox” the image.

Ali and Nicki are soon to be tv personalities.  To help promote Ali’s upcoming race, Nicki and her are going to be appearing on the local Fox morning show.  It’s a really cool thing.  The race has been getting more press this year.  As a result it appears that participation this year is going to smash last years number.  She already has almost 300 runners pre-registered for the run.  I’m going to tape their segment on the Tivo, I’ll get it ripped for public viewing.

I don’t feel like doing a weekend preview, I’ll tell you about Monday.

Well we just had our once a year deep freeze. This morning the weather station read a ridiculous 27 degrees.  The weather sensor attached to the outside of the house read 36 degrees.  I figure the actual temp was somewhere in the middle.  The truck showed 32 when I stepped in this morning.  There was frost on the windshields, roof and the grass. Regardless of the number it felt frigid. 8 years in Florida has made my resistance to cold next to nothing.

I am hoping that our crop in the garden will have survived the freeze.  Most of the plants I covered with empty pots.  The rest was covered with a combination of weed fabric, burlap, grill covers and whatever else I could find. And no, I did NOT wear a coat to work.  I refuse to.

Ali isn’t happy with my latest Facebook Friend, Sal from the Stern Show.  Sal is very funny although at times he does it in ways that Ali finds rather disgusting and offensive. I  also added Jason Kaplan yesterday who is one of the producers.  I heard them talking about their Facebook accounts on the show so I figured I would see if they would accept my friend invites.  I was sort of surprised they did.  Sal uses it to promote his comedy stuff he does on the side.  He has nearly 2000 “friends”.  Jason has a more conservative 500 people on his friend list.

I don’t think Ali has to worry. I doubt Sal and I will be sharing a beer anytime soon.