Soda as window cleaner, Farkle you!
Friday after work instead of our normal pizza and Tivo session we instead met up with our ex-neighbor and his partner for dinner at Carraba’s. We went to my favorite Carraba’s although it is consistently losing a bit of it’s charm every single time we visit the place. There have been a lot of changes at this location over the past several years and I can honestly say I haven’t liked a single one of them. The latest changes again were unwelcomed. They removed the deep, dark wood bar top and replaced it with a much less appealing marble unit. They also decided that the darker, warmer colors that adorned the walls were no longer welcome, they painted the majority of the walls boring white! I mean wtf are they thinking? They have wrung just about every ounce of charm out of that place, it’s a shame.
Well despite the changes to decor we enjoyed a nice dinner with our friends. After dinner at home I cracked open my PC and threw in the 2 additional gigs of ram, bringing me up to 4. The combination of new video card and additional memory has helped the pc performance in line with my expectations. I love it when things work out as projected.
So the plan for this weekend was first to not paint. Second we wanted to go to the beach on Sunday so to me that meant I needed to bust my ass on Saturday. Bust my ass I did. I worked non-stop on chores/projects until late in the afternoon.
One of the things I did was wash both the truck and the car. After I washed the truck I decided to tackle an impromptu item. I have Sirius in my truck. To have satellite radio you have to put an external antenna on your vehicle. The antenna looks like a little mini-hockey puck and it is magnetized. They do this to make it easy to attach to the roof of your vehicle. Well they don’t mention the negative aspect of this. Over time the antenna which has metal in it obviously starts to rust. This creates a nasty looking rust outline on your roof! On a white truck this looks particularly shitty. Well I decided to do something about it.
I removed the antenna from the roof and instead mounted it on the top corner of the windshield using double sided tape. I picked up that trick from the Camry Sirius installation that was done by a professional installer. I was able to route the cable behind the windshield molding and then cut across the door jamb into the passenger compartment. Now I had to address the hideous rust outline on the roof. To do this I pulled out the unopened bottle of Scratch X, a product that was recommended to me by an ex-coworker and neighbor of mine as a miracle product when it comes to getting stains off of paint. I originally bought it to remove the staining from the tree that later took care of itself.
So I grabbed an applicator, squirted some of the stuff on the pad and went to work. Scratch X performed as advertised. After a few minutes of elbow grease the rust mark was completely removed and the area had a nice bright finish, awesome. Sometime I need to getting around to buffing out the entire truck in in a similar manner.
At our dinner on Friday the neighbor was talking to Ali about how he loves some of the Facebook games, two of which are called Farkle and Bejeweled. Well Ali generally tries to avoid these type of games because she has the ability to get locked in addicted in a very short time period. Well Ali tried these games and in short order got hooked. I could care less if she played games, hell I wish she would play more games with me, however Farkle and Bejeweled have one big drawback, incredibly annoying, repetitive sound effects. They were so annoying I found myself slapping on my headphones to muffle the madness. The very word “Farkle” is silly to me. At one point when Ali was immersed in one of the games I was running around the house using farkle in various phrases. It’s a word that can mean absolutely anything since it means absolutely nothing.
So our Sunday morning started a bit slow until we headed out for the beach. I loaded the mountain bikes in the back. We were going to go for a ride near the coast before hitting the beach. Even at 10am it was already quite warm. After our 10.5 mile ride both Ali and I were covered in sweat. Ali, who was lukewarm about the whole bike ride idea initially admitted that she enjoyed it more than she anticipated.
We spent a couple hours at the beach. I spent the time under an umbrella. You know you are old when an umbrella is standard beach equipment. With my skin cancer episodes, lying out in the sun baking myself is just a stupid thing to do. As we were laying there Ali commented how nice it was that she didn’t smell any cigarette smoke. Almost on cue a couple to our left lit up, annoying Ali instantly. Ali was also annoyed by the countless cigarette butts nestled in the sand. She picked a bunch but it was only a symbolic effort at best, it’s like shovelling snow with a spoon. It really is sad that people are too damn lazy to at least dispose of their butts in the trash. It’s sad but not surprising since the majority of the human race sucks.
While we were eating lunch at the beach Ali mentioned something she heard Rachel Ray say. She said that when you are done with a soda and have a bit left instead of throwing it out you should do something useful with it like use it to clean your windshield, as soda is a good bug remover. I immediately told Ali that may be one of the stupidest things I ever heard. I said it was akin to saying that after wiping your ass with toilet paper you should rip off the clean sections to blow your nose on. Ali was grossed out by my analogy but I think it made the point. Rachel Ray is now officially a dipshit in my book.
After the beach we had another stop to make. We wanted to measure the Run for the Paws course. The course layout has to shift this year and we wanted to see if we could work it out so it was a true 5k instead of a 3 miles and change race. Initially we thought we would use the club measuring wheel for the job but since I had the GPS watch with we decided it would be easier and faster to just use that while riding our bikes. We figured that if the start line was moved .12 miles down the road we could have an exact 5K at the new finishing point, cool.
On the ride home we stopped for a rare treat, Coldstone. Ali mentioned they had her favorite flavor last time we were there, Watermelon Sherbert (yuck). So we stopped, hoping she could get some as a refreshing summer treat. I was hoping to get some light fruity flavor like raspberry or blueberry. Unfortunately they didn’t have any of those flavors and we instead both got the regular packed with fat and calorie variety, me opting for cheesecake and Ali for Nutter Butter. The ice cream tasted fine but even a small dish of it was too much. Eating something that filled with fat and sugar makes me feel shitty physically and mentally.
The rest of the day was laid back. Besides dinner and some laundry Ali and I both spent the time at our computers, her Farkling and me on WoW. The lazy Sunday erased most sense of accomplishment from a very busy Saturday, it’s just the way things roll with me.
I think we are out of the woods with the Spook starvation watch. Once we kick started her eating by hand feeding her and using different color plates/bowls she has eaten much more. I’m relieved. Hunger strikes are stressful.