Archives 2010

Yesterday at the gym I intended to try to do a max speed mile.  I am normally doing my running somewhere between an 8 and 9 minute mile pace.  I set the treadmill at 9 mph with a 1% incline which translates to a 6:40 mile pace.  A few months ago I successfully did a mile at 8.6 mph and barely survived it.  I had my new running sneakers on, this would be the first actual running I did in them.

So after walking a 1/4 mile to warm up I stretched a bit and then fired up the machine to high speed.  The first feeling I got as the belt accelerated was that it felt very fast.  It seemed like if I slowed down even a moment I would be ejected off the belt.  Even so I was able to maintain the speed.

I had my headphones on and ESPN on the LCD tv that is built into the treadmill.  I needed it to help divert my attention from the discomfort of moving that quickly. For maybe the first third of a mile I was chugging along ok.  My breathing was under control and I felt decent.  However from that point on things degraded quickly.

After the half mile mark I started feeling physically woozy.  I had a tingling sensation on either side of my chest that was odd.  My stride became increasingly labored.  I relented and hopped off at the .75 mile mark, one lap from the finish line.  I was pissed but I really felt like I was pushing into a dangerous area.

After gasping for air for a few moments I slowed the speed down 1 mph to 8 and finished off the mile.  Since I failed at my original goal I figured I needed to do more so I did a couple half mile intervals at 8mph (7:30 pace) just for good measure.

Even though I failed at my goal it gave me something to shoot for next time.  I have NEVER run a mile in 6:40 in my life.  I should be pleased that I am attempting to set PR’s at 43 (almost).

I did have some success in the evening when I equaled my all time best in full range of motion pull ups on the Iron Gym with 15.  I made sure to throw the effort on justin.tv for Jeremy to digest.  Less than two months to go until our epic pull up competition takes place.

I got the new Despair.com catalog in the mail the other day.  I have always loved their stuff.  Their skeptical, cynical spin on those motivational posters that came to be in the 90’s just makes me smile. If you want to see this years collection head over there and take a peek.

I have ordered a lot from proflowers.com over the years.  They sell high quality flowers and plants that always arrive on time. But let me tell you, they really annoy me with their bait and switch sales technique.

I received an email yesterday for them listing some of their specials.  They had a miniature Christmas tree listed for $24.99  I thought this would be a nice gift for my grandmother who is in a nursing home (who has no idea who anyone is anymore)  So I follow the link in the email and begin the ordering process.

I pick out Grandma’s address and am quickly delivered to the order summary page.  Look at how $24.99 magically more than doubled to  $61.43!

The candy cane tin that they are charging me an extra $10 for was what was displayed in the email for $24.99.  Then I get charged $10 TWICE for delivery, once for “standard” delivery and once for “priority” delivery?  WTF is this?  When I picked the delivery date on their calendar I picked a day (the 16th) that was tagged as standard delivery yet I get double dipped on shipping? Then we have the lovely profit padding “care & handling” charge.

Like I said, I have ordered from proflowers many times so I am familiar with their bullshit pricing policy but this case seemed especially egregious.  I ordered this at 5:30 this morning and was too tired to cancel the order and pry into the issue further.  The conversation in my head went like this “F’ing proflowers, I should just cancel the order……….  Ah damn it, it’s for Grandma, they already have all of her info.  Just eat the $20 bullshit charges and move along.”  I clicked the PLACE ORDER button even though it pained me to do so.

It may however be the last dealings I have with the company.  I am sick of getting bent over by them time and again even if they do sell a high quality product.

The first part of my evening last night was rather annoying.  My drive home was held up by an accident about 4 miles from my house.  What made it annoying was the stupid way the police were handling the traffic situation.  They basically only paid attention to the cars out on Immokalee Road and totally ignored us poor saps on Wilson Blvd.    They let vehicles turn left off Immokalee onto Wilson but basically stonewalled cars on Wilson wanting to turn right onto Immokalee.

I consumed all of my available patience after about 10 minutes of watching this bullshit.  After that I was unable to control the obscenities coming out of my mouth regarding the apparent lack of traffic control skill exhibited by the deputies.

Once I finally got home the frustration did not end.  Tuesday and Thursday are Roomba days.  I found the one Roomba stuck after it ingested the Christmas tree skirt.  I found the other one spinning around stupidly under the hope chest where  the one charging base is.  It evidently had been stuck in there for almost an hour.

We had a box out front.  It was the Peanuts xmas yard decoration we ordered.  We saw it in a catalog and thought it would be a nice little addition to our Xmas display outside.  We paid like $40 for this thing.  I think we overpaid by about 30.

As soon as I slide the thing out of the box there is also a landslide of little pieces that slid out as well.  You were supposed to be able to just unfold the two halves of the thing, stake it into the ground and plug it in.

Well the front of the display is attached to the back of it via a series of plastic standoffs that are secured with plastic push pins, standard shitty Chinese quality.  Well a bunch of these stand offs had fallen off during shipping which allowed part of the front to just dangle.

I spent a good 15 minutes “fixing” our brand new item.  Not only did I reattach the missing stand offs, I also pushed on the ones that were still in place.  Each and every one of them was loose.  I finally got all the parts back in place and grumpily lugged the decoration outside to hook it up.

I plugged it in and was underwhelmed.  The lights in the decoration shine much brighter than what you see in the catalog picture above.  They diffuse so much that from the road you can’t even tell what the hell it is.  It just looks like some glowing shape.  Needless to say I was not pleased with our purchase.

Eventually my evening settled down.  Ali and decorated the Christmas tree and we sat out some stuff.  We did not put out all of what we have.  It is probably the least amount of decorations we have ever put out although you wouldn’t think so if you looked around.  Each year the motivation level at Christmas seems more difficult to cultivate.

I have been messing around with making some running club shirts on http://logosoftwear.com.  A lot of the current merchandise just is not all that appealing.  I ordered myself a shirt that I thought was cool, I always liked “property of” shirts.

As I was digging on the site I saw that I could quickly and easily set up a “store” that will allow people to buy GCR merchandise directly.  Basically I set up a few items and then people can peruse them, customize them and order them directly.  After setting up the designs we don’t need to do anything else. Logosoftwear.com handles all of the rest and cuts the club 15% commission on the sale.

The set it and forget nature of this store is pretty nice but there is one disadvantage, price.  Ordering custom shirts/clothing items one at a time translates into premium pricing where as if we ordered a number of the same items at once we would get bulk discounts.  However then the club has that up front expenditure and the hassle of managing inventory.

I figure we have nothing to lose by offering this option to runners.  It costs us nothing and allows people to order custom merchandise that they can tweak so it suits them exactly even if it does cost a few bucks more.  If you want to see the store go here.

Last night I had some weird dream, it seemed like an episode of a tv show.  There was a bad guy that sort of looked like Dean Cain. Early on in the show I had a MMA style fight with Dean and he beat me pretty easily.

Dean had evil intentions.  He had a plot to turn a small sleepy town into a huge tourist trap.  I was intent on exposing his plan.  I managed to get ahold of a secret blueprint that showed Cain’s plot to turn the center of the town into a large parking lot for bus parking.

I held up the blueprint for the town folk to see.  Dean tried to discredit my evidence and was trying to talk his way out of it.  As he was blabbing away I slipped behind him and tried to apply a rear naked choke, complete with a body triangle.

After a brief struggle I found myself standing above Dean and I started kicking him violently.  After three or four fast hard kicks I woke myself up and realized I was kicking SADIE!  The poor dog was sound asleep down by my feet and all of a sudden found herself getting pummeled.  She jumped off the bed, surely confused and scared by what happened.

Of course I felt terrible and went down and petted her to let her know she did nothing wrong.  I coaxed her back up on the bed and had her lay on me where she feel back asleep.  She stayed away from my feet.

This doesn’t happen often but I have had several violent episodes while sleeping.  One time I smashed my fist through a glass table by the bed.  I have beaten the hell out of a few pillows too. Ali has been lucky enough to not receive anything but glancing blows up to this point.

Our Thanksgiving weekend kicked off with the annual holiday 4 mile run.  Of course since we are board members we couldn’t just show up and run.  Instead we got on site around 5:30 for the 7:30 race to help set up and manage the chaos.  It was indeed pretty chaotic.

The race had a HUGE swell in numbers this year.  It was already a big race, last year pulling in more than 1500 runners.  Well this year the number was closer to 2500!

As you can imagine, having this many people descend upon a rather small area in a short period of time is a recipe for disaster.  The race director Matt did a good job trying to alleviate some of the crush of humanity by encouraging people to carpool, take the trolley to the site or ride their bikes there. Even with his efforts it was tough.

The freshly purchased walkie talkies came in handy.  When the full force of the crowd came on site background noise made it pretty difficult to hear though, something headsets would address.  Despite the madness, it was great to see the huge turnout since the majority of the dollars go to a local homeless shelter.  I am not sure what the final dollar figure was but it should have been pretty massive.

So finally race time approached so Ali and I abandoned our posts and moved to the start.  There were far too many people to fit on the road.  Ali, Christie, Michelle and I stood back in a driveway and only got onto the road well after the start command was given.

I broke away almost immediately from the girls who indicated they weren’t interested in pushing pace.  I told them I would see them at the finish.  It was a huge mess for the first couple miles of the race.  There were simply too many people for the width of the road.  I was juking and jiving constantly to try to advance my position.  I can’t tell you how many 18 inch spaces I squeezed through during the first half of the race. I saw a woman get tripped up and fall flat on her face.  With as crowded as it was I am surprised she was the only one I saw first hand.

I wanted to run a decent race.  I knew that all of the traffic I had to get around the first half of the race was going to hurt my time so once I had some free space around me I tried to pick it up.  During the entire run I was only passed a few times and I was the passer hundreds of times.  This happens when you start way in the back.  The nice cool temps made the effort much more bearable.

My legs had felt pretty stiff and heavy early in the race but by the end they were carrying me along pretty well.  As the finish approached I picked a couple targets that I wanted to pass.  One was some gray haired guy that was chastising a young kid for walking.  He said something like “Don’t let an old guy beat you!”  He wasn’t that old, if I would guess he was 40 something like me.  Well I didn’t want to let him beat me either so I passed him with about 200 yards to go.

I turned the corner into the finish line and stopped my watch at 34:28 for the 4 miles.  It was a decent time, a 8:34 per mile pace which was respectable considering the log jam during the first half of the run.  I didn’t see Ali and the girls finish but I later found out they crossed right around the 40 minute mark.  It took me quite awhile until I found them in the huge crowd mulling around the finish.

We didn’t get off the race site until all of the runners had long gone since we helped clean up afterward.  It was the biggest race the club has ever been involved in.  It was a cool way to start off the holiday.

After the race we headed to pick up mom with a brief pit stop at Dunkin Donuts to pick up some go juice.  We loaded up Mom and her delicious pineapple side dish into the party van and headed home.  The dogs were thrilled to see both us and my mom of course.

Mom and Ali got cracking on preparing the meal while I flipped on the tv to catch a small amount of the Macy’s parade.  Our meal this year was once again totally vegetarian consisting of asparagus, the pineapple filling, sweet potatoes, rolls and Tofurkey.  I have really come to like tofurkey believe it or not.  I know it is almost sacrilegious to have a turkey free Thanksgiving but it really doesn’t bother me in the least.  Like most changes, they become easier to swallow over time.

We also gave mom her belated birthday present, a Shark steam mop.  She had told me that she would really like one.  Evidently some of her friends have them and are quite pleased with their performance.  Mom can not tolerate being on her hands and knees to scrub floors at this point so the Shark is a nice alternative.  I got her the “deluxe” model with three different cleaning heads, woohoo.

After pigging out on the tasty meal we cleaned up and relaxed for a bit.  I watched some Thanksgiving football and mom read a book for a bit out on the lanai.  I knew the clock was ticking in her head and she would ask me for departure times sooner rather than later.  Mom always is in a hurry to get back home.

We left our place around 2ish. Mom had a few things she wanted me to do at her place like swap out some florescent lights, look at her running toilet and set up her artificial xmas tree.  I tore through her list quickly.  I asked her if she wanted to test out her Shark while I was there but she said the testing we did at our place was good enough.  The next time I’ll probably see mom is over Christmas where she actually seemed open to staying two days or more!!

To be honest, I don’t recall what we did the rest of Thanksgiving evening but I am pretty sure it wasn’t much besides watch some more football and screw around on the computer.  Ali and were both pretty spent from starting the day at 4:15 am.

On Friday Ali went to work while I was off.  I decided to go check out a few stores based on perusing the ads I saw in the newspaper.  I didn’t do anything crazy like stand at the door at 6am.  Instead I set out on my adventure between 8 and 9.  Most of the things that interested me weren’t really gifts but stuff I could use.  The thing I really wanted was a 2 terabyte external hard drive I saw advertised at Target for a pretty amazing $79.

There are two Targets in my area and I visited both, striking out both times.  Evidently that was one of those deals you had to be waiting at the door for, damn.  OfficeMax had another decent deal for an external drive but they too had sold them all.  I did pick up a sweet deal on a P-touch labeler.  It included two tapes and was only $10.

I went to Home Depot where I wanted to get a few plants as well as some LED Christmas lights.  Last year I was so frustrated by f’ing around with lights I wanted to just get new ones that worked.  I also like the fact that led lights use about 25% of the power of regular lights. (of course they cost 4 times as much) Unfortunately they did not have any of the white variety so I wound up getting the lights at Sam’s.  Their lights actually came on a spool that was designed to be reused for storage which was a big sell for me instead of using cut up pieces of cardboard to haphazardly wrap light sets around. On the way home I stopped to pick up groceries so that Ali wouldn’t have to bother with it.

I busted my ass the rest of the day mowing the property, planting the stuff I got and tending to various chores.  I also took a few minutes to take some pics in my new Crossfit Clitheroe hoodie that my buddy Lee sent me from the UK. He asked me to take a picture wearing it to post to the CC Facebook page.

Of course I wanted to use pictures that were appropriate so I headed out to my pull up station and shot some video with my Flipcam and then pulled some stills off of it. Even though it was 80 degrees and humid I pulled on the sweatshirt and my Adidas training pants and did some brief bar work.  In addition to shooting very high quality video, the Flipcam lets you pull off crystal clear stills as well which is nice.

Friday night I felt in a bit of a bad mood.  This happens a lot when I am home and Ali is working.

Ali was up very early Saturday morning to meet up for a club run.  Instead of staying in bed I found myself up and about at 5:30 am.  I had plans to tackle the other big project on my immediate to do list, trimming the palm trees, all 20 of them.

This is a huge job and I have tackled it various ways over the years.  A couple years ago I bought one of those long pole saws but I found holding and manipulating this over my head for hours and hours was pure shoulder and arm torture.  Last year I went out and bought a 20 foot extension ladder with a high leverage loppers which would allow me to get right up into the tree tops so I could cut the branches up close and personal. Of course being that high up on the ladder has increased the danger coefficient of the entire process as well.

The job has two stages, cutting all the branches and then collecting them all off the ground and depositing them in the fill pit at the back of the property.  I have done this job entirely solo a few times and it is just brutal.  I had asked Ali to help me with it but she wasn’t expecting to be back until around noon.  I figured I would just go around and do all the cutting first and then go back around when she gets home to collect all of the stuff.

Well I was surprised when Ali pulled in earlier than expected.  I told her she could take a nap first if she wanted and I would keep cutting away.  She said she was ok to come out and help.  Having Ali help made what would have been a grueling task only mildly horrible instead.  I would trim up one cluster at a time and then use the back of the truck to haul the branches to the pit.  Ali also used the yard cart attached to the tractor to increase our yard waste transport capacity.

We worked tirelessly for several hours into mid-afternoon.  I was tired, bruised, scraped and bleeding in various spots from the effort but it was finally done.  I told Ali I never trimmed that many trees in a day and thanked her repeatedly for her assistance.  It was hard labor.

Ali looked at me in disbelief when I told her I still wanted to get lights on the tall tree out front.  I said I already had all the stuff out to do it.  She reluctantly came out and helped me wrap the new LED lights around the two trees.  The LED’s emit a different, very bright sort of light that really looked nice when the sun went down.

Ali laid down for a brief nap late in the afternoon.  I figured I would surprise her and set up our Xmas tree while she napped.  I just set up the bare tree, decorations will have to come some other time.

Despite our bust ass Saturday, there was still plenty of stuff I wanted to get done on Sunday.  Ali had already told me she had a lot of her infamous “computer work” to get done so I had already planned to do most of it myself.

One of the things I did was work on two more of the club’s time clocks.  One was a newer model that also needed replacement batteries.  Replacing the batteries was much easier as this clock was more solid state and less mechanical.

The other clock was just like the original one that I ripped apart only to find that the batteries were fine.  Well this time the batteries were actually dead.  I was able to find a replacement set on the internet for $85.

Shortly before lunch I asked Ali to come out and assist me with a Bar-barian forum video.  I never ask Ali to participate in these, in fact I typically shoot them when she isn’t home.  However due to the nature of this challenge I needed her help.  This two month challenge involves doing six different exercises with pyramid rest periods in between.  In order to be an “official” effort the break times had to be kept accurately and that was where Ali came in.  I gave her a stop watch so he could countdown the breaks for me.

The actual challenge was much more difficult that I anticipated, mostly due to the very short breaks that range from 30 seconds to a minute.  One of the exercises were parallel bar dips.

Since I hadn’t built a dip station (yet) I improvised and used two fold up saw horses each weighted down with a 45 pound weight plate.  Doing dips on this set up was very uncomfortable.  I had to contort my body and lift my legs awkwardly throughout the movement which surely cut down on my total by several reps.  I need to find an alternative there.

I squeaked out a total of 92 reps between the six exercises which  were hand stand push ups, bar dips, pull ups, push ups, chin ups and bench dips.  You can hear how badly I was sucking wind during the quick 6 minute session.  It was brief but very intense. If you want to see the effort and Ali’s excellent time keeping you can see it here.

We got to watch most of the frustrating Eagles loss to the Bears.  We didn’t see it all due to an unexpected deluge of rain that knocked out our satellite reception for an extended period of time.  The Birds made a decent comeback at the end but were unable to dig out of the huge hole made by shitty play from their defense and special teams.  The Bears made big play after big play effortlessly against the Eagles, it was so frustrating to watch.  Many of the big plays were set off by Eagle defenders slipping and falling on the terrible surface at Soldier field.  I would have thought the team would be better prepared for the sloppy conditions with longer spikes.  They were falling down left and right.

We don’t have much time to dwell on the loss since the Birds play Thursday night against the Texans.  I will have to utilize my ultracool website running on a laptop connected to my bedroom tv to catch the game.

I played around with my 360 a bit over the weekend.  I used up the 800 credits that were left on the previous owners account and created my own Xbox Live gamertag.  GreenMachine769 if you are interested.  I’ll add anyone to my friend list since I currently don’t have any.

My day yesterday was pretty ho hum until late in the afternoon.

Ali called me earlier in the day telling me about an annoying situation at work.  They told her they needed her to relocate her office and her new space would be ready at a certain time.  So Ali packed up all of her junk and was ready to move.  The problem is the maintenance guy didn’t have time to set up the new space.  So Ali has been in limbo with most of her junk in boxes, making getting anything done quite frustrating.

Well she had a bit of a meltdown yesterday and the maintenance guy responded by at least getting the counter top that was going to be laid on top of filing cabinets and supposedly cutting them to the correct width.  However in order to put the stuff in place the old furniture in the new office had to be pulled out which he did not have time to do.

So anyway Ali called me close to 4 asking if I could possibly come over to help her finish the set up process.  I told her I arranged to pick up an used Xbox 360 after work and the kid was only going to be around until 6 so it would be tough.  You could hear the disappointment in Ali’s voice.  I asked her if there were any men over there that could help her for 15 minutes but it seemed as though there wasn’t. Well it turned out I could leave work a bit early so I called her back and told Ali I would come over to see if we could get it set up quickly.

So I quick step back to the area for Ali’s new office and got busy.  With Ali’s help we dragged all of the old furniture out behind the building and dragged in the filing cabinets and counter tops.  It was a whirlwind process that we got done in less than 25 minutes.  The counter tops unfortunately were not cut quite short enough, we needed about a half inch less length.  We wound up just setting the one up where Ali will work and propped the other one on top of it.  At least Ali now had a space to work.  She was grateful for that.

So I didn’t have much time for kudos, I shot right back in the parking lot to meet up with my 360 guy.  I saw his ad on Craigslist earlier in the day and emailed him.  He was selling a 360 that was only a few months old.  It included two controllers and a 60gb hard drive.  He had it listed for $150.

I negotiated the price over email to $125 which he agreed to.  He then asked me if I was interested in two remaining xbox games he had, Halo Reach and some driving game.  He said he would throw them in for $15.  That was fair since Reach costs $60 alone,  I agreed to that as well.

Unlike the shady guy I negotiated with over the weekend this kid had no problem telling me his contact info and location.  I pulled up to his apartment complex and he had me follow him through the gate in his Mercedes convertible!  His dad is a lawyer and the kid just happens to be going to law school in Naples.

He was a nice kid and lead me up to his apartment.  He hooked up the 360 and turned it on to show me it all worked.  His apartment was a geek’s nirvana with a PS3, a Wii, big flat screen tv and several computers.  We did some geek speak talking about the latest in torrent downloading as well as other gaming related subjects. After verifying all was cool I handed over the cash and was on my way.

When I got home I had a few things to do before I could play with my new toy. One of those things was to do another test of my weighted pull up progress. The last time I strapped on the 50 pound weight vest I only got two reps.  I was pleased to double that total this time around.  At this rate by the end of January Jeremy may just immediately start chugging the milk and skip the actual pulling altogether.

Finally I got to dig into the 360.  I hard wired it to the second network drop in our bedroom. (yes I have CAT5E throughout the house)  Within a few minutes I was online and playing around, man did I like what I saw.

Having the 360 in the bedroom allows me to enjoy it in my most comfortable position, laying in bed.  Playing in bed has always been my most preferred location in my three plus decades as a gamer.  The wireless 360 controllers make this even more enjoyable.

It didn’t take me long to see just how flexible and powerful of an entertainment option the console was.  On top of being able to play incredible games it serves as your entertainment hub.  You can use it to serve up video, music and pictures from your local network.  You can also do the same thing online using the Zune application as well as Netflix.

The main reason I got the 360 however was for it to be my playon.tv portal.  Up until this point I have used both my Wii and Ali’s Ipad for this.  The Ipad experience with playon has been good.  The experience with the Wii has not for several reasons.

The interface for navigating playon.tv with the Wii is just clumsy, requiring you to to point to buttons on the screen to navigate.  Response is slow and the video streaming is not all that great due to Wii only having a wireless internet connection.  On the 360 it is like night and day.

The hard wired connection provided much better performance as does the built in 360 interface for browsing media.  I could zip through the playon tree structure effortlessly.   Having the 360 connected via HDMI versus the composite only video of the Wii doesn’t hurt either.

I loaded up several shows on various “channels” and had good results consistently.  I then spent some time dabbling around the other screens on the console.  I was really impressed with the navigation system. It was extremely easy and intuitive.  I was still signed in as the former owners account on Xbox live.  He actually has some unused Xbox credits that I plan to use up before I create my own account.  Those credits can be used to purchase any number of things.

Before going to bed Ali and I watched a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving on the 360, via Hulu, via playon.tv.  It was just like watching it on regular tv.  I am quite pleased with my cable tv free existence at this point.  To be honest, I really haven’t had to sacrifice much of anything and in some ways have actually been opened up to a whole new world of video content where the majority of what you want to watch is available 24/7, on demand, for free.

I didn’t like many aspects of living in PA but today is one of those days I wish I was back at my old stomping grounds.  It is the day of the Turkey Bowl.  The Turkey Bowl is something a bunch of us came up with when I worked at Entre/Ameridata/GE Capital.  It was a two hand touch football game that we would do the afternoon before Thanksgiving.

We had good participation in the game always and the stakes were always high, bragging rights and such.  Even though the game was supposed to be two hand touch there was always plenty of contact.  I’ll never forget when I got spiked in the head (yes one guy actually wore spikes) while laying on the ground.  I am sure I had a mild concussion.

Luckily we captured one of the best moments ever in Turkey Bowl history when one of the network techs that did a lot of bragging before the game got absolutely faked out of his jock by another guy that was at least 15 years older than him.

I really miss the camaraderie that I enjoyed during that 10 years of my life working there.  Since moving to Naples there has been next to none of that.  I now have very little interaction with fellow employees outside of the work environment.  I was happy to hear however that the Turkey Bowl tradition has lived on without me and the game will once again be taking place today. Of course if I WAS there you know it would be streaming on justin.tv 🙂

My extended Thanksgiving weekend will start off with a 4 mile jaunt at the Thanksgiving day run tomorrow.   There will be close to 2000 people there, it will be utter madness.   I still don’t feel 100% recovered but I should be ok to at least do the run, just not at top speed.

After the race we will be picking mom up for a Thanksgiving visit/dinner.  During the rest of the three day weekend I would like to get the trees trimmed and maybe even some decorations out, who knows?  It would be nice to have it all handled.  Yea maybe even some xmas shopping too, we’ll see.

Yesterday we harvested items from both our garden and our orchard.  I grabbed about a half dozen huge Myers lemons as well as a single, bright orange tangerine.  We also snipped lettuce and swiss chard from the garden.  So far the crops in the garden seem to be progressing nicely.

Last night I got a box from Amazon.  Inside were 6 two way walkie talkies.  I ordered them for use by the running club at our races.  They are Motorola radios with a range of up to 35 miles (if you have no line of site issues).  Even in an urban area with large buildings you should get a couple miles of range.  I am hoping in flat, sleepy Naples we can get somewhere in between the two numbers.

I unpacked the radios and tried them out with Ali.  I walked to the back fence line and she could hear me clear as day inside the house.  By the end of the night Ali was a bit annoyed with my continued testing while she was trying to catch up on Dancing with the Stars.  The radios will be put into use for the first time officially on Thanksgiving day for the Gobble Gobble 4 Miler.

I am still feeling like my energy level and stamina is low.  I recall having something similar a year or two ago that dragged on for a long time.  I am hoping to shake this much sooner rather than later.  It is not the the way I like to feel day in and day out.

How long do you think it is before North Korea does something really stupid? Sure seems like it is only a matter of time and not that much of it.

Saturday morning Ali and I headed out early to go to the running store to get sneakers.  Ali has been buying a new pair of running sneakers every few months, probably even before she hit the magical 300 mile mark.  I don’t subscribe to the same time frame for running sneaker replacement.  I think my current pair of New Balance are somewhere around 5 years old.

The store is run by George, one of the big wigs at the runner club.  I went in there with one request for a sneaker, max shock absorption to protect my fragile knees.  For some reason I thought the process would be much more consultative with George maybe measuring my foot, looking at the arch etc.  Instead George seems to go more on what feels good, giving me about half a dozen different sneakers to try on and simply asking me how they feel.

Of course walking around a store is a lot different than running mileage in a shoe so I wasn’t really sure if I was making a good choice or not.  I went with a pair of Nike’s that definitely felt like they had the most cushion although they didn’t feel as supportive as my NB’s through the arch. George put a different insert into them to give some additional arch support.  The real test will come when I run, whenever I am well enough to do it.

When we got back Ali had to pretty much pack up and go to meet Christie for their ride up to St. Petersburg for their half marathon. I wished her good luck.

I had already done the normal outside chores I had to get done.  Ali had done weeding earlier in the week when the cleaning was going on which saved me time.  I had a couple big projects to get done before the holidays, pressure washing outside and trimming the palms.  I opted to do the pressure washing.  The tree trimming would be greatly enhanced by Ali’s second set of hands.

So I was outside for almost 6 hours with the pressure washer, enough to go through four tanks of gas.  I did the pool cage and lanai first, the largest pain in the ass.  I still was feeling under the weather so manning the high pressure wand and all that comes with it felt more physicaly demanding than normal.

Once I finished there I headed to the back yard.  Before blasting the two sheds I turned my attention to several other wooden items in our landscape.  On the east side of our house we have several things made out of pressure treated lumber.  These items routinely get sprayed with the raw well water in the sprinkler system and also get only half a day of sun.  As a result they were completely covered in black mildew.

The pressure washer excels in addressing this situation.  It made short work of the black coating of gunk.  When I was done it was like the wood was dipped in the fountain of youth.  The difference in appearance was remarkable.

So I by the time I finished cleaning both sheds daylight was pretty much exhausted as was I.  I put all of the equipment away and called it good for the day.

After I made the dogs dinner I quickly grabbed the clippers and went to town.  I didn’t make this head shaving session an internet spectacle, I just wanted my hair shorter and didn’t feel like bugging Ali to do it.  At first the plan was to just do 1/4 ” all the way around but I found that that length on the sides just doesn’t look great.  I grabbed the 1/8″  attachment and did the sides and the back of my head looking in a mirror which was a challenge.  I THINK I did a decent job of blending it in.

Saturday night I watched my latest Netflix DVD, Wolfman.  I had already confirmed with Ali that she didn’t want to see it.  She frowns upon scary, violent movies.  This flick had healthy doses of both.  I enjoyed the remake of the old horror classic but even I cringed at some of the gore.  I may have witnessed even more than those that saw it in the theater since I chose the unrated version. If you ever need to find out the meaning of “eviscerate”, watch this.  I’d rate the film an A-

After the movie I was so tired, I considered going to bed even though it was before 9pm.  I decided against it and played some WoW pvp for an hour or so.

I woke up Sunday morning feeling like I sort of relapsed with my illness.  The incessant runny nose had slowed down but I had a new and different bad feeling in my throat as well as a steady feeling of lethargy.  Luckily I didn’t have much to do on Sunday and I took advantage of it.

I spent the day doing as little as possible.  I just felt very rundown, unmotivated and melancholy.  Being ill usually brings those feelings around.  Being ill over a full moon amplified those feelings I’m sure.

Ali texted me that she finished the race and turned in a PR, beating her previous half marathon best by around eight minutes, a great job by her.  She didn’t get back home until around 4.  As expected she was wiped out and took a nap after filling me in on her race which sounded pretty nice.  I found out she got to run on the field of the Tampa Rays stadium which was cool.

I “cooked” dinner.  To be more accurate I threw the frozen eggplant parm into the oven and set the timer.  I also did something similar with the garlic bread.

I really don’t like prime time Eagles games, especially when I am already sleepy before kick off.  We watched the game in bed.  Well I didn’t watch most of it.  I inadvertently passed out somewhere early in the second quarter, I just could not keep my eyes open.

In a stroke of good luck I magically awoke with 5 minutes left in the game, just in time to see the Eagles almost put it away, almost choke and then put the game away for good.  I could not believe that Samuels fumbled.  As soon as he grabbed the ball I said to myself “Just don’t fumble!”  When I saw him aggressively trying to gain yardage I was like WTF?  When I saw him get drilled and lose the ball I silently screamed “You f’ing IDIOT!” since Ali was still asleep.

It seemed like the Birds were setting themselves up for another colossal collapse when they let Manning scramble for a first down however this time they benefitted by a bone headed play on the other side.  Instead of safely sliding for the first down, which he had made easily, Manning dove forward and as he hit the ground the ball popped out.  Since he had not been touched by an Eagle the ball was live and it was a fumble which an Eagle grabbed.  Wow, now that was some true luck, the kind of luck a team needs during a season to get somewhere.

So even with the fumble the Giants had a chance to get the ball back since they had all three timeouts.  I totally figured the Eagles would run the ball ineffectively three times and have to punt the ball away, giving me more unwanted drama.  Instead McCoy broke a huge run that put the Eagles into field goal range that allowed them to tack on three points to win the game.

It was a great win.  It sounds like it was a good thing I fell asleep when I did to miss the Giants marching right down the field twice in short order to score two TD’s.  I never expected the Birds to be at 7-3 10 games deep into the season but I’ll take it.  Bring on the Bears.

I have been monitoring Craigslist for a decent deal on a used Xbox 360.  On Sunday I saw one that had potential, a Xbox 360 Pro console.  It was just the system with one controller and the AV cables, no games.  When I compared it to other 360’s I had seen posted in the last couple weeks I thought the $140 asking price was a little high which I told the seller via email, he had no phone number listed in his ad.

He responded back to me that he would do $110 if I could do the deal today which I initially agreed to.  I told him to call me and let me know where he lived and I would pick it up.  He didn’t call, instead he responded back saying he didn’t have a phone and that the money from the 360 sale was to help him buy another one. He wanted to meet me in the parking lot of a Taco Bell.

Well all of a sudden this raised a red flag for me.  Sure meeting in a parking lot isn’t that uncommon for CL transactions, most people would prefer to not have random people on the internet showing up at their door.  However the lack of phone contact even after I offered up my number smelled fishy.   It felt like the guy was trying very hard to minimize my ability to contact him after the sale just in case he was pulling a fast one.  I decided to walk away from the deal and emailed the guy back saying thanks but no thanks.

It was a decent deal but there are plenty of used 360 fish in the sea.  I’ll keep fishing.

So last night I did another electronics project, replacing the guts on a couple Roomba battery packs.   It’s a procedure I have done many times in the past.  Even with my past experience I had some difficulties.

Typically when I do these swaps I just cut the wires of the old pack and solder it to the wires of the new pack so I don’t have to f with soldering the connectors onto the ends of the wires.  Well for some dumb reason last night I thought I would try to solder the connectors on. Well that proved to far more troublesome than necessary.  After unsuccessfully trying to get the wire position right on the connector at least 10 times I bagged it and went back to my “just solder two wires together method”.

This expedited things greatly.  Because of my initial blunder it took me nearly 90 minutes to complete both packs which is very slow.  I wrote the date on each pack so I could track just how long they last before dying this time,  something I should have started doing years ago.

After I cleaned up I planned to watch this week’s Ultimate Fighter using my Playon.tv set up.  I fired up the app on my PC and the Wii, the two parts of the equation.  Using the Wii to navigate the Playon menu is a bit annoying.  Instead of allowing you to use the crosshairs on the controller to drill down the various trees you have to point to arrows on the screen with the controller to do all of the navigation.  It quickly gets tiresome.

I navigated to the Ultimate Fighter module and was frustrated when I couldn’t load this week’s episode, it would just sit and spin.  After farting around for awhile I loaded up the web only TUF Aftermath which gives commentary on each week’s episode.  It was there I saw a crawler that said that they release the show on the web Saturday’s at 11pm, a few days after it is broadcast live, explaining my problem. From watching Aftermath I found out who won and who lost, I’m not sure if I will even bother to go back and watch the actual show.

I followed it up with catching an episode of Ice Road Truckers.  It was quite cool to be able to still be able to watch cable only shows without paying for cable tv.

Of course there are some trade offs.  As I mentioned, the interface for playon with the Wii leaves something to be desired.  Also I need to have my pc up and running if I want to watch a show in this manner.  The video quality is not very good.  A video that looks good on a 22 inch computer monitor looks significantly worse when blown up to 73 inches.  I have become accustomed to the crystal clear HD broadcasts the tv normally delivers so stepping back to poor video quality is a bit annoying.   Even with the trade offs required when watching TV in this manner, I am quite happy so far with my decision to cut expensive cable tv from my life.

I currently don’t have a way to watch playon content back in the bedroom.  I am thinking about snagging a used Xbox 360 off Craigslist for that purpose.  It seems there are a ton of people selling their old units right now as they upgrade to the newer slim model or the Kinect bundles.  If I could score one for $100 that would be a nice score.

I didn’t see Ali at all yesterday besides the kiss goodbye in the morning.  She worked until I’m not sure when.  I fell asleep at 10 with Sadie in her spot.  That theme is going to continue throughout this weekend.  Ali is running a women’s only half marathon in St Petersburg with Christie.  She has been training very hard for the race and I expect her to do well.  I am pretty sure she will post her best half marathon time ever.

Yesterday instead of going to the gym, since I still am feeling tired and wiped out from the cold, I went to my buddies place over lunch.  He showed me his temporary pet, a squirrel.  This squirrel was found by a buddy of his on the ground as a baby, a hairless, defenseless baby.  He took the squirrel in and took care of it which included feeding it via bottle.  As a result this squirrel looks at humans as it’s parents.

My buddy took over care of the squirrel a week or so ago when his friend had to go out of town for a couple weeks.  He has the squirrel out in a decent size cage on his lanai.

When we got there he called the squirrel out, he was sleeping in his box.  He was a little slow until he woke up but once he did he was a non-stop bundle of energy.  He let my buddy handle him like you would handle a normal pet.  It was the first time I ever saw a tame squirrel.  He even would wrestle with my friend’s hand and play like a kitten with a pine cone.  It was very cute. The little guy even warmed up to me after a little while sitting on my leg and running up on my shoulder.

Now my buddy has no plans to keep the squirrel long term, it’s actually illegal to do so.  His idea originally was to release his little buddy in a few weeks into the wooded area behind his house once the squirrel is weaned.  However he has had some second thoughts now.

He has become attached to the squirrel and he is worried that if he released it near his house he could become an easy meal for predators.  So instead he is thinking about taking the squirrel to the local conservancy so they can finish the process of getting the squirrel ready to go live in the wild.

I asked him if he was going to be sad when it was time to part ways with his squirrel buddy and he laughed, trying to portray that it won’t be that difficult.  I don’t believe him.

This weekend I need to get cracking on some projects that need to get done before the holidays, trimming the cabbage palms and pressure washing the sheds/lanai/pool cage.  I have no delusions of getting it all done, the tree trimming alone is a huge ass job.  I am hoping my energy level improves a bit.  The idea of taking these tasks on right now doesn’t sound appealing at all.

You may remember back in September when we got our AC replaced I mentioned a big part of why we decided to do it when we did was because of government incentives to do so. There is a federal $1500 tax credit and was a $1500 REBATE from the state, along the same lines of the appliance rebate program a few months prior.

The Florida program had 15 million dollars allocated to it, money that was supposedly from one of the national stimulus plans.  Well less than 10 days after the program launched, they suspended it, saying there was some sort of technicality that was holding up the funds.  At the time I was told by our AC contractor the delay should be a few days.

Well the program remained on suspension.  Of course I was annoyed.  That $15 million was earmarked for this program for 6 months or more.  Somebody really f’d up.  So earlier this week I get a call from my AC sales rep.  She said they FINALLY got around to deciding what to do.  The politicians were much too concerned with getting reelected the last 3 months so it got back burnered.   What they came up with was they were only going to honor installations that happened during the first two weeks of September.  They are only putting $2.5 million into the program now and supposedly are using the rest to pay out funds on solar rebates that they somehow f’d up as well.

I asked my sales rep when our install date was, she said it was the 13th of September, just barely under the deadline.  So now I have to gather my considerable amount of documentation and mail it in asap to get the rebate.  I am just hoping I have everything up to snuff.

I was given one of the running club’s older time clocks to take a look at.  I was told that the batteries were dead and the clock was inoperable.  Since I have a history of ripping into electronics I said I would be ok with taking a look at it to see how tough it would be to replace the batteries.

In the past when the batteries died the club would have to ship the clocks out to California to have the batteries replaced. It cost a lot of money to do so. The clocks were so old now that the battery replacement service was not even available any longer.

So I set up the folding table in the garage and plopped the big clock on it.  I grabbed my drill and started removing screws.  I threw the event on Justin.tv and was surprised I had as many as 3 people following the broadcast as it went on.

Getting the clock apart was easy at first and got progressively more challenging as I got deeper into it.  This clock was old, when I got into the guts of it I saw it was manufactured in 1994.  The clock’s numbers are mechanical and are powered by a bunch of large IC’s, and capacitors connected together with tons of wires.

Inside I found two battery sticks, each consisting of eight 1.2v batteries connected in series.  As I pulled the box apart I inadvertently disconnected the batteries from the system board and I wasn’t quite sure where they were connected to.  Once I broke the box down further I was able to split the clock into two sides and got easy access to the board.

Once I saw where the battery connections were I thought I would hook up one of the batteries and turn the unit on just for the hell of it to see what happened.  I was very surprised when the clock reset to zero just like it is supposed to.  What the hell, I thought it was supposed to be dead?

I continued the testing, attaching the keypad and was surprised again when it started keeping time just fine.  Hmmm of course I was cursing myself for not flipping on the clock before dis assembly to verify the problem.  I just assumed it was dead as I was told.

I wanted to make sure that the batteries were indeed in good shape so I found my voltmeter and measured each pack.  Each one read within a few point of 10.3 volts, a very healthy number for a 9.6 volt pack.  Well I wasn’t going to fix what wasn’t broke so I started the reassembly, hoping I could do so without breaking the clock in the process.

Putting everything back together took awhile and involved a lot of trial and error.  I had to make sure I didn’t inadvertently cut one of the hundreds of wires that fill up the interior of the clock.  Eventually I got it all together and once again hit  the switch to make sure all was still working, it was.

I hooked up the clock to it’s charger overnight and checked on it this morning.  It indicated a full charge and worked just fine still.

There is a second club clock that supposedly is also dead. (same model)  I will be seeing if I can bring that one to life.  Of course it goes without saying that this time I will turn it on BEFORE ripping it apart just to make sure.

Tonight I have another home electronics project scheduled, replacing the guts of two Roomba battery packs.  Be sure to tune in.

So I trudged through my day at work, filling my trashcan with tissues and feeling worn out.  I actually SKIPPED the gym yesterday, a true indicator of my state of well being.

Yesterday was our initial appointment with the cleaning service.  They did the initial “deep cleaning”.  Ali was home all day so she could handle the dogs while they were there.  She put the dogs out on the lanai.  Nicki and Sadie were not thrilled with being banished to the outdoors.

The three woman crew cleaned our house like it has never been cleaned since we lived there.  When I got home everything looked fantastic.  Ali described the process which sounded pretty comprehensive.  Needless to say she enjoyed having the house thoroughly cleaned while she kept busy doing other things.

Originally Ali planned to leave when I got home to go to spinning class.  I was happy she reconsidered and instead made me a nice cold battling meal of tomato soup and grilled cheese.

I was in bed early again and fell asleep pretty quickly after catching this week’s Event episode.  Today I may have a bit less of a runny nose but I still am feeling quite lethargic.  The timing is not great, I have pull ups to do damn it.