310, wet and wild, non-stop, faced
The weekend was hella-busy, even with my efforts to defuse the work by mowing grass on Thursday night. Saturday morning I was outside by 8am doing yard work. After weeding I needed to go around and weed whack the property since I ran out of daylight on Thursday. You may recall that when I weed whacked a couple weeks ago my forearm tendinitis immediately flared up after being dormant for months. Well I bought some stuff to come up with a redneck way to address the problem, some pipe insulation and duct tape.
I bought the thickest pipe insulation I could find at Home Depot and cut sections that fit the grip areas on the weed whacker. I then wrapped the insulation securely with duct tape, viola, instant padded grips. So far, it appears that my rig job helps. Today my forearms feel just fine.
I agreed to go with Ali to her swim lesson Saturday morning. Ali asked if I could tape her lesson so she could get a better perspective of what she is doing right and wrong in the water. I charged up the camcorder and off we went. When we pulled up the parking lot was rather full, evidently they were in the middle of an informal practice kids swim meet. Luckily it was wrapping up.
I got to meet Ali’s swim instructor, Jen. I had heard Ali speak glowingly of Jen up to that point so it was nice to put a face with the name. Jen looked like she was 20 something, cute and built like a swimmer, appropriately. Once her and Ali got in the water I manned my camera and shot a bunch of footage. I walked up and down the length of the pool, trying to keep Ali in frame.
For someone that couldn’t jump into a pool without holding her nose a few weeks ago, Ali has made great progression. She looked smooth in the water, utilizing good form as she free styled up and down the length of the pool. Her lesson went for 75-80 minutes. At the end of it Ali did a couple hundred meters of swimming in rapid succession, she was breathing hard. Swimming is tough work, especially when you aren’t used to it.
On the way home from her lesson we stopped at Walmart. I had the battery from the Tacoma in the trunk, it was dead. I the battery had a 3 year warranty on it. However I wasn’t sure when I bought it and the manufacture sticker on the battery said 01/07 so I was few months out of warranty I assumed. When I plopped the old battery on the counter the guy asked if I had my receipt, I told him I did not. I figured that was that and I would be paying full price for a new battery.
Well imagine my surprise when I brought the new battery over and the same guy tells me I have a $60 pro-rated credit for the old battery! How in the world…. Hey I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, I simply said “Awesome!” Evidently he ran the serial number of the old battery and that is what he came up with. I appreciated the effort. He could have simply taken the old battery and not looked into it any further. In fact, I expected him to do just that, it is Walmart after all. I walked out of there surprised I was just treated to a favorable customer service experience at the big W.
Saturday afternoon I decided to do a another short work out video. Lately I have been incorporating dead lifts into my routine. I thought I would try to break the 300 pound mark on tape. I knew I had to video it if I wanted Jeremy to accept the accomplishment as fact. Here you can see the results of my efforts.
Sunday was a killer day. We had a big race to time which meant another dreaded 4am wake up call. We had roughly 900 entries for the race, making it the second largest race we ever timed. This race was to benefit the Naples Philharmonic. It was unique for a couple reasons.
The 10K distance is one that is rarely seen in our area, a 5K is the distance of choice nowadays for most races. The race featured live music performances by philharmonic members both at the start and along the course which added a cool twist. The timing process went smoothly with the normal amount of problems caused by human error. Ali ran the race as well, turning in a good time for the distance.
After the race we had to go directly to my mom’s place to get her moved. Ali dropped me off so she could go home, let the dogs out and then come back. By the time she got back all of the big/heavy items were moved. Mom had a co-worker and her boyfriend help. Luckily mom didn’t have tons of stuff to move. She has been working on getting smaller items moved for the past week or so. We had the big items moved in not much more than an hour. It was sort of strange being able to move somebody by simply carrying items across a parking lot. We didn’t use any carts or dollies, we just carried the stuff.
Shortly after the stuff was moved the skies opened up. It rained hard for quite awhile, we were lucky we got done when we did. After the stuff was moved I turned my attention to getting stuff hooked up/put back together. I hooked up mom’s tv’s, computer, phone and put the day bed back together. By the time we left, mom’s new place didn’t look too bad at all considering she just moved a couple hours prior. Sure there are lots of little things to unpack and put away but she had all the core items up and running to be able to get by. It was the first time Ali got to see mom’s new place in person. She agreed with me that it was a definite upgrade.
On the way home from mom’s Ali napped in the car, she was exhausted. As soon as we got home she retired to the bedroom where she napped for two or three hours. Although I could have certainly used a nap as well, I had too much to do. I had to perform all of the typical post race duties which includes producing results, updating the web site, perform a timing chip inventory and organizing and putting away the bins that hold various race components. As Ali caught up on her Z’s I muddled along, moving on to more housework like sweeping the kitchen, cleaning the counters and pool maintenance.
Sunday evening I was working on processing some of the pictures of the race to upload to the web site. As I did I noticed that Picasa was doing some sort of processing in the background. When I dug into it I saw the program was doing face mapping. It was going through my 9,000 pictures and grabbing faces out of each and every shot. It was pretty amazing how accurately it could crop out faces from shots, even grainy or large group shots. Once it cuts out faces you can start naming the individuals. Picasa will then group the photos by person, allowing you to easily show you all the pictures that have that face in it. It’s pretty cool stuff, especially for absolutely free software, Thanks Google!