Archives 2010

Saw another first at the gym today.  There was an older guy with a big round upper body, skinny legs and shorts that were too short on the cable machine.  He was doing one arm curls while talking on the phone.  Now I have seen inappropriate phone use at the gym many times but normally that is just people walking around talking or sitting on equipment talking.  Doing a set of curls and talking is a new one for me.

I saw a story that talked about how some Redskin fans are already giving McNabb a hard time at training camp.  Evidently McNabb’s relocation down I-95 hasn’t cured him of the his regular diet of errant passing. Here is a quote from the article. Have fun with your new QB Skins fans. This was pretty funny too.

On the first day of Redskins training camp, a heckler stood near the front of the crowd and criticized every bad pass, every bobbled ball and pined out loud for the return of departed quarterback Jason Campbell.

“Must have been a great catch,” the fan yelled after McNabb completed one pass, “because it couldn’t have been a good throw.”

McNabb, a six-time Pro Bowler who spent 11 seasons with the Eagles, was traded in April to NFC East rival Washington.

As training camp continued, other fans might have felt that the heckler was on to something. McNabb seemed to be getting intercepted more than he should. He was throwing behind receivers, and earlier this week he unleashed a wounded duck downfield that was picked off easily by Carlos Rogers.

Yesterday at the gym I did another lunch time brick.  I expanded my last gym brick effort by running a 1/4 mile further as well as running the last half mile at an 8:30 pace.  I was extremely sweaty, thank goodness for the spare t-shirt, deodorant and Shower to Shower I keep in my office.

After work I decided to work on putting the Moto Guzzi back together.  I reattached the carbs and dumped some 93 octane gas in the tank.  I hit the starter and was pleased to hear the bike start right up.  I let it run for a little while since it has been dead as a doornail for 5-6 months.

I actually had been in contact with a Moto Guzzi dealer in Missouri that I found on the internet.  I was asking him about what I could get for the bike based on it’s current condition/mileage.  I am looking to simply sell it and use the proceeds to pay back my dad for the money he spent getting it running and maybe cover the few hundred I spent titling/registering it in Florida.

I came up with the idea of not only taking pictures to send to the dealer but also shooting some video of it running and throwing it up on YouTube. I figured that would be a good way for him to assess the bike beyond pictures. He had mentioned that he could be interested in the bike himself to fix up and resell.

I sent the guy the video and pictures and to my surprise he was interested.  He offered me $1500 for it plus paying to ship the bike to him in Missouri which will probably run around $500.  To be honest I was surprised  he offered that much.  Sure if he fixes it up back to top notch condition maybe he could get $4k for it but that doesn’t bother me at all. I would have the cash to pay back my dad, cover my costs and free up the room in the shed, a triple win.

We haven’t discussed any details and I haven’t even formally accepted his offer but it looks promising.  I think dad would kind of like the idea of his old bike heading off to the midwest to get restored and cherished by someone else.

Last week my mom forwarded me an email that recapped some points Bill Gates made at a graduation ceremony about the world today.  It illustrates something that is described accurately by Bubba the Love Sponge as the “pussification of America” .  We are raising children to be unable to deal with the real world and instead coddling them in a make believe place where there are no winners, no losers and any and all problems you have can be blamed on something else. Personal responsibility is almost looked upon as unfashionable.  Read on, I agree with Bill 100%.

Love him or hate him , he sure hits the nail on the head with this!
Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1 : Life is not fair – get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world doesn’t care about your
self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6 : If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault , so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7 : Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now.. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10 : Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11 : Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one. 

Yesterday at the gym I tried a new move I saw called Skin the Cat or also a German Hang.  You grab a bar with a normal pull up grip and then pull your feet up and through your arms and continue rotating backward until you are turned inside out, hanging.

This move put all sorts of tension on my shoulders in a way I never experienced before. It really torques both your shoulders and chest as you use them to lower yourself down in a controlled manner.

The first few times I just got myself into the hang position and held it for awhile.  As I continued I extended into the hang and then was able to reverse the movement back into pull up position. I would imagine doing a set of that movement back and forth would be a good way to work the muscles used for front and back levers.  I can really feel that stretch in my upper body today.

Ali returned from PA yesterday bearing gifts, shoo fly pies to be exact, lots of them.  She brought back enough pies to open a store.  She plans to hand them out to various friends, co-workers, neighbors that have heard us speak of magical PA dutch pie but never experienced it themselves.

Ali was very glad to get home.  The dogs gave her a very enthusiastic greeting and were all over her most of the night.  We celebrated her return with a non-microwave prepared dinner and a couple episodes of Big Brother on the Tivo.

My dad called me to just shoot the shit yesterday.  I mentioned to him how I am training for a triathlon and how swimming is the most difficult aspect for me.  My dad did a lot of running for awhile when he was younger and he has always liked to swim and is actually pretty decent at it. It’s probably the one athletic endeavor he could still best me at.

Dad described some of the swim training he did and offered me some tips.  As recently as a year or so ago he was swimming a distance of about a mile in the pool in less than 45 minutes.  It felt funny to be getting swimming advice from dad.  It almost made me feel like I was 11 again.

Last night the phone was ringing off the hook.  Thank goodness for caller id.  Every single one of the calls was one of those automated political solicitations.  I have no idea what the hell these candidates are thinking.  How does annoying voters with recorded messages on their home phone at night do anything positive for their campaign? Personally when I saw the voice mails show up and listened to them any candidates name I heard immediately went down a few pegs in my book.

It’s lemming mentality.  One candidate is stupid enough to send out these robo-calls and then the others think they are somehow losing ground if they don’t do the same. Monkey see, monkey does.

News flash, if you DON’T call me at home I will think better of your campaign.

We have a bunch of standing water again after a few sessions of intense rain.  Every time these miniature lakes appear I get motivated to bring in some more fill to raise those low spots.  Then in a few days the water goes away and I lose the motivation.  It’s a better winter project anyway.

I received my replacement track pants from Zappos, trading in the way too big XL’s for mediums.  I was relieved to see that the mediums fit fine, I was worried they would be too short in length.  I will be wearing these hard.  I got a pair of Adidas and a pair of Nike pants. I will offer a comparison after a few uses.

I pick up Ali after work today from her nearly week long trip to PA.  It sounded like she was looking forward getting back on her home turf.  I know two black furry beats that will be ecstatic to see her.

So my weekend of solitude started off a bit silly but settled down as the weekend progressed.

The first thing I wanted to get done Friday night was my first attempt at the August Bar-barian challenge which is max continuous push ups.  I’ve done a lot of push ups in my life but in retrospect a lot of them were only partial reps.  The motion in this video had to be full up and down with no pause at the top.  I managed to squeeze out 35 although a few at the end didn’t go as high as I would have liked.  For reference there are people on the forums that have done as many as 60.

Once that was over with it was time to crack open my first of 8 Bud Lights. I planned to shave my head and I thought doing so after drinking a few beers might add to the experience. I wanted my second head shaving video to be somewhat different.  In addition to being somewhat drunk when I shot it I also went to a shorter cutting attachment for the process, 1/4″.

The head shaving task went more or less smoothly.  Thankfully I did notice before work today that I had a crop of 3 inch hairs shooting out the back of my head.

After the head shaving was done and the video posted I spent the rest of the night drinking beer and playing games on my pc, harmless fun.

I woke up Saturday feeling a little fuzzy and dehydrated from my night of drinking alone. Regardless of how I felt I wanted to get pretty much any and all housework done during the day.  I plugged away throughout the day and got pretty much everything done that I wanted to, well at least I tried.

Two of the things I worked on was the Moto Guzzi and the one weedwhacker.  My neighbor said he would look at the carbs on the Moto Guzzi for me if I pulled them off. While I was working on it I once again hooked the battery back up to see if I could get it to crank.  Even if the carbs were adjusted, if I couldn’t start the bike I would never be able to test them. I hooked the cables back up, hit the key and nothing, dead as a door nail.  Argh.

After removing the carbs from the bike I turned my attention to the weed whacker.  My neighbor said that there is a rubber diaphragm, which if it had a hole in it, could cause the symptoms I was seeing.  I pulled the carb off the whacker and got access to the diaphragm.  It looked fine to me. While I had it apart I sprayed some carb and choke cleaner inside.

I put everything back together, laid the weed whacker on the ground and gave it a pull.  It fired right up but as soon as I tried to move the choke off the FULL setting the motor would die, the exact same problem. F. I angrily tossed the weed whacker back in the shed.  I hate when I fail.

Well I asked if I could drop the Moto Guzzi carbs off.  I went next door around 4:30.  My neighbor came out and inspected the carbs.  He said they basically looked clean so he focused on the float adjustment.  After he got done tweaking that he said I should put the carbs back on and see how it acts.

I told him that I can’t test them since I can’t get the bike to turn over due to the weird electrical issue that developed since I got a new battery.  He said he would come over and look at it.  He grabbed his multi-meter and we headed to the small shed.

He did a few checks for voltage.  He pointed to a secondary cable near the battery that I forgot to hook up.  I told him that was hooked up to the negative battery terminal before.  I reattached it and still, the bike was dead.

I pulled out the shop manual that my dad included with the motorcycle and showed it to Neal.  It included a schematic of the electrical system that I couldn’t make heads or tails of.  After looking at it briefly he said “according to this that second cable is supposed to be attached to the positive terminal”  We switched the cable, hit the key and BAM, everything lit up. I was both happy that the bike had juice again and angry at myself for such a stupid blunder.  Evidently when I pulled the old battery I didn’t pay close enough attention to what was connected where, dumb ass.

I thanked him for solving that mystery and asked if he minded taking a quick look at the weed whacker while he was there.  Again we pulled it apart and he verified the diaphragm looked ok.  He said he would take the tiny carb over to his place to clean it out.  He was over there for quite awhile.  I went over to check on him, he was sitting in a plastic adirondak chair in the driveway still working on it.  He said he some of the same gunk that clogged the fuel filter was inside the carb and he was able to clean it out.

I took the carb back over to my shed and installed it.  The weed whacker fired right up and for the first time in months was able to keep running at something other than FULL CHOKE.  It had a high idle speed but that didn’t really matter to me.  Nice, two for two.

I asked Neal if he wanted to come inside for a quick tour of our house.  After the tour was done he sat down and we talked for awhile.  He told me about various aspects of his life.  Let’s just say he has been through an incredibly rough last 8 years or so.  I don’t think I would be able to endure what he has.  It gave me both a better appreciation of him and made me thankful that I haven’t had to undergo something similar, knock on wood. After we were done shooting the breeze I again thanked him for all of his help and offered mine if he needed it for anything.

I started off my Sunday with a training brick.  I wanted to get on the road early to beat the heat and humidity somewhat.  I also caught a break as it was mostly overcast in the morning.  Of course my goal was to beat my time from last week.  I had just received a handlebar mount for my GPS so I could have the numbers right in front of me which I found was a good way to keep pushing.

On the ride out to Publix I made some good time.  On the long 5 mile straight away I paced pretty solidly around 19 mph.  On the way back my pace dropped somewhat as it always does from headwind/fatigue. I was probably right around 17mph on average.

During the last half mile or so I hit a STRONG head wind that knocked me down in the 15’s.

I clocked in at 59.11 which is around 20 seconds faster than last week.  In reality it was a better improvement than it seems.  Last week I hit almost every red light which resulted in me stopping and starting the clock several times.  Those stops and starts result in lost distance.  Last week I showed 17.29 miles, this week it showed 17.41 since the GPS and clock was running the entire time except the short water break at the halfway point.

After the ride I stripped down to just my tri shorts, ate a small granola bar and hopped on the treadmill.  I am not sure if the small intake of sugar helped me but for the first time I was able to log the three miles on the treadmill instead of two after a Publix ride.  I felt pretty decent.

I followed up with a full swimming session where I did 50 laps in the pool (sets of 10) which put me somewhere in the 1/4 mile range.  The swimming while still very hard for me went better endurance wise.  I emerged from the pool having completed my longest brick ever. I was pretty beat but felt like I accomplished something.

After I was done and chilling on a chair by the pool I assumed I would physically crash later.  I crashed last week doing much less.  Imagine my surprise when I didn’t feel the need to nap the rest of the day.

I made a quick run to Home Depot, I had a few small items I needed to pick up. There was a weird moment. When I was ready to check out I was behind two people.  The first was some pissy looking guy that was paying with a check.  There was obviously some sort of difficulty as in total it took him at least 5 minutes to finish the transaction. I mean who pays with checks anymore, it’s so 1989.

Next was  a couple that I let in line ahead of me because I was feeling generous.  They had a lot of stuff in their cart, much more than me but I insisted they go ahead.  The cashier gets done ringing them up and THEN says if they open a Home Depot charge card they can save 10% on the $600 purchase.

The woman decided to take him up on the offer.  So now myself and the growing line behind me waited until the application process was over.  Then, the clerk had to ring her stuff all over again so it was applied to the HD card.

All of this bullshit wasn’t the weird part, my reaction to it was.  Normally I would be crawling out of my skin in this situation.  I’d be cursing myself for once again picking the line that was the most annoying as I always do.  But instead I was calm and couldn’t care less.

On the way to HD I had grabbed a cup of coffee.  I am not sure if sipping the coffee relaxed me, I was too spent from my brick to care or the knowledge that all of hard work for this weekend was behind me, but I was just as mellow as you could be. Hell I even said to the woman, “I don’t blame you, $60 is worth doing it for” Weird, very weird.

One of the items I got at Home Depot were a few clamps to make a dragonflag anchor point.   I wanted to attach this to my pull up station so I could easily do the exercise outside.

All I did was cut a piece of schedule 40 pvc and mount it inside three clamps.  The clamps aren’t super heavy duty so I was a bit concerned about their ability to hold up when my body weight is pulling against them.  Just to make sure I did a three rep set of dragonflags after I was done and it felt just fine.

I watched The Messenger on Sunday.  It’s a movie regarding the people that notify families about their loved ones being killed in battle.  It stars Woody Harrelson and was nominated for some academy awards I think.  As always Woody did a great job in the role.  He always excels in playing a character that is somewhat eccentric.

The movie itself was good but not great in my book.  There were a lot of powerful scenes and good moments but as a whole there were some things that just didn’t make a lot sense to me like why the one messenger fixated on one of the widows he delivered a message to. It still was worth seeing and I’d give it a B+.

I finished up my weekend by playing some more Starcraft 2.  This game is mind blowing.  It is like being part of an epic movie.  The cut scenes and plot are so well done.  The actual action is amazing.  Many times you can have hundreds of units on screen blowing the hell out of each other in incredible detail.  It’s such a good game, even if you don’t normally play RTS games you may want to give this one a chance.

I am FINALLY done with 1983 V.  It had some of the corniest acting and fight scenes I’ve ever seen.  I made myself finish the show just to say I did  for no real good reason.  The current version of V on ABC is miles better IMO.

Ali flies back home tomorrow.  The funny thing is she might be coming BACK from PA with a tan.  Normally you go to Florida to work on that however she has logged large amounts of time at the pool with my nieces during this trip.

There has been a lot of talk about Republicans having a chance to reclaim some of their political clout in the 2010 elections due to thier unrelenting spin machine and Obama’s inability to cure all of the country’s problems in the span of less than two years.  We are a quick fix society after all. Well one place I don’t think they will make any head way is in the Florida governor race.

The republican candidates in the primary are named Rick Scott and Bill McCollum.

The two of these guys have been in a bitter campaign battle where the amount of mud slinged back and forth has reached mountain-like proportions.

Rick Scott is the guy on the left.  The first thing I feel when looking at the guy is dishonesty.  He looks like he has many dark secrets hiding behind those little beady eyes.

One thing he wished was secret was the fact that he is basically a crook.  He was in charge of a hospital association that was fined 1.7 billion, yes BILLION dollars for Medicare fraud. That’s a lot of fraud and he was the guy in charge when it all went down.

You may ask how would someone like this even consider running for governor?  The answer is simple, money and lots of it.  Scott has thrown incredible amounts of cash into this campaign in an effort to get his name and disturbing face in front of as many eyes as possible.  His plan is simple, establish name recognition over anything else to grab all the dummies that go into a voting booth and decide their vote based on whose name they have heard and little else.

I think his plan is flawed because, well he has a disturbing face.  It may not be so good for so many people to see it.  He is very simply trying to buy the office, to hell with 1.7 BILLION in fines.

McCollum suffers from an image problem as well.  He looks as interesting as curdled milk.  He would make Mr Rogers look bad ass.  He also is a career politician, something that is not looked upon very highly this day and age.

Anyway these two have done such a good job at discrediting the other I don’t think either has a chance to beat Alex Sink (a woman) in the real election.

Last night I thought my mowing grass plans would be a wash out.  On the way home I drove through heavy rain, some as close as 5 miles from our house.  However when I pulled into the driveway things looked damp but not soaked.

After making the girls supper I surveyed the skies.  There were all sorts of menacing clouds around but the rain above our property had not materialized so I went out and hopped on the tractor.  I stayed dry.

I had a bit of a scare during the session.  When I started on the second mowing quadrant the blades all of a sudden stopped turning.  WTF?  Instantly the worst case scenario came to mind, now something else broke, something expensive for sure…..

After disengaging and engaging the PTO clutch several times I could tell that was still functioning.  I turned off the tractor and hopped onto the ground to take a look.  I immediately saw I had no tension on the belt that goes around the spindles.  The belt was still on the pulleys so initially I was like WTF?  After some more inspection I saw the culprit.  The spring that applies tension to the idler pulley broke at the one end.

Ok so this wasn’t a disaster but if I didn’t address it immediately I would be unable to complete the task.  I drove the tractor up to the garage and manipulated the spring with various tools.  Eventually I managed to bend it in such a way that I could once again attach it.  Of course I knew if the metal was fatigued to the point where it snapped I knew my rig job could snap as well.  I just hoped it held until I was done mowing. Luckily it did. I ordered a replacement spring later as well as a couple other small parts that could use replacement.

I got done mowing around 7:15. Normally getting the mowing done on a weeknight would be enough but since Ali isn’t home I wanted to get ahead of the curve as much as possible.  I quickly formulated a grocery list and headed out to Publix.  I was back home with the groceries unpacked by 8:45. I was pleased with what I accomplished.

I was watching part 2 of V the Final Battle last night.  This episode featured a lot of Faye Grant getting tortured by Jane Badler. Grant is probably tied as the most attractive female in the series with the woman that plays the Star Child. Unlike most of the female leads she doesn’t have huge hair or a huge ass.

In last night’s episode Faye is getting tortured by the Visitors as they try to “convert” her. For the session Faye is wearing a body color, spandex like, full body tights thing.  It was pretty steamy.  Her acting during the torture session was downright funny.

My bachelor weekend has nothing very concrete on the calendar.  I have various small projects to do around the house, I need to shave my head, do the August Bar-barian push up challenge and do a training brick.  What fills in the blanks around that is unknown at this time.

I dropped Ali off at the airport yesterday for her nearly week long visit up to PA.  My first night alone was uneventful.  I tried to get a bit of a head start on my weekend work by knocking out some laundry last night.  Tonight I am hoping to mow the grass as long as the weather cooperates.

I think I may do the grocery shopping at the Catholic Town (Ave Maria) Publix this week.  The store is always empty and the food should have a high blessing content.

I just realized last night that I was watching the 1983 V series in the wrong order.  I watched the two part mini-series first.  Then I recently completed the 19 episode season and I was keeping V: the Final Battle for last.  It seemed like that was the logical sequence.  Well it isn’t.

When I started watching the 19 episode season I noticed there seemed to be a break in the time line from what I saw in the first two episodes.  Well last night I realized that break is filled in by V the Final Battle.

It’s a bit anti-climatic to be watching this out of chronological order but I will watch it all the same, I’m this close to seeing it all I might as well finish the book. Thank goodness it only ran for one season.

So the well in the gulf is supposedly plugged after an excruciatingly long cluster f of misstep after misstep.  I also saw a headline yesterday that said that 75% of the oil that leaked into the water is gone from the combination of dispersants, burns, skimming and the natural processes in the water that break down oil.  How exactly do they determine that?

I always am skeptical when big shiny numbers are thrown out there based on what has to be fuzzy math at best.  How can they tell what is under the surface of the water?  I don’t think they can.  I think that number is more spin control than anything, an effort to lessen the perceived damage this mess has caused.

When we were over at the neighbor’s house she told me about how she has been selling all sorts of stuff on Amazon.  I hadn’t realized that individuals could EASILY sell on Amazon.  When she described the sales model to me I liked it.

Instead of the Ebay format, Amazon uses something similar to what Half.com does.  They don’t hammer you with as many fees as Ebay does.  In fact you don’t pay anything to list items, Amazon takes a cut only if it sells.  Their percentage seems reasonable.

With Ebay if I was to list something I would pay a listing fee, then if it sells I pay another percentage fee based on the selling price and then I get banged again when Paypal takes a cut on the back end.  With Amazon two levels of those fees are eliminated.

I am definitely going to give it a try.  Amazon at this point reaches millions of potential buyers.  I know it is always one of the places I look for stuff.

As I was looking up info about selling on Amazon I also saw they have a trade in program.  Basically if you don’t feel like waiting for someone to buy your stuff you can send it to Amazon and they will give you Amazon credit in return.  Now of course you won’t get top dollar this way but the convenience factor may equal that out in some situations.

If you have a bunch of stuff to sell you may want to give Ebay the hand and throw them up on Amazon instead.  My neighbor has had GREAT success selling stuff there.