Archives February 2013

So I took Wednesday off from work because I was scheduled to have the pool deck painted.  I woke up with my normal 5:30 alarm because I had stuff to do, most importantly pull everything off the pool deck.  Certain items were difficult to get outside with one set of hands, especially the 4 person table that sits in the covered portion of the lanai.

I planned to put my time at home to good work.  I figured while the deck was being worked on I could change the oil in the party van and the Tacoma since both were long overdue.  I also had someone coming to PM the AC system, something I had not had done since it was installed a year and a half ago.

The painters showed up first and got to work on the deck, cleaning and pressure washing it.  They covered the pool itself in plastic to minimize what got into the water.

The AC guys showed up maybe a half hour later.  I showed them where everything was and they got to work.  At one point I had a total of 6 guys working around the property.  It was a weird feeling.  That feeling was short lived.

Giovanni, the painting lead, said they finished up cleaning the deck and would be back in a day or two to do the actual painting.  I told him I thought it was going to all be done in one day.  He said the deck has to thoroughly dry first, plus the weather forecast for Wednesday had a decent chance of rain. (it did actually rain a little later)  Ok, I guess I misunderstood the process.  So the current plan is for them to come back Friday to resume the work.

The AC guys were quite thorough in their PM which I appreciated.  They said the system looked great which I was happy to hear.  They rolled out, so I quickly went from a staff of 6 to a staff of zero.

I got to work changing the oil on the two vehicles.  In the span of an hour I had both of them done and things cleaned up.

I figured I should use the unexpected free time to get some things done. The theme was get things done that normally wouldnt get done.  I dumped my two full used oil containers at Wal-mart and while I was there grabbed some AV cables to connect my new Yamaha AV receiver.  I just realized I hadn’t mentioned it in the blog yet.

I used my Amazon spiff points to buy a new AV receiver to replace my 12 year old Bose Lifestyle 20 system.  When the house was built, the Bose surround system was one of the crown jewels, I thought I was really putting in a nice system.  Over the years it lost a lot of luster in my eyes.  It broke once and required a lengthy repair process.  It still works now but the LCD display no longer does so operation of the head unit is based on feel alone.

I also found the radio frequency remote really annoying. Specifically, the fact that it wouldn’t allow the surround system to integrate with my Logitech Harmony remote.  If I wanted surround sound I had to perform additional steps that were a pain in the ass and required me to use two remotes instead of one.  As a result, over the years the surround sound system wasn’t used nearly as much as I hoped it would be because it was inconvenient.

So anyway, I bought a Yamaha system to replace it.  I had read that it was possible to connect it to the Bose speakers as long as you utilized the Bose huge, suitcase size amp as well.  Well it turns out that is possible with newer Bose systems but not with my ancient equipment.  So, I then hopped back on Amazon and bought an inexpensive but highly rated 5.1 Yamaha surround speaker set.

Despite not having speakers to hook it to, I installed the receiver the other night.  It is pretty awesome.  It is network connected which allows it to do cool things like play music off my home NAS and be completely controlled by an app on my Iphone.  I think once I get it all tweaked out it will be fantastic.  I just hope I can mount the new speakers without much fuss.

Ok so anyway, back to Wednesday.  After Wal-mart I did another thing I just never seem to get around to, getting a new beach parking pass for the Tacoma.  This years sticker is a big ugly red one that can be seen from 50 yards away.

My big project of the day was kind of a strange one.  I drove down to the Naples on the Run to buy, put together and set up a desk for behind the counter.  Carl, who runs the store had been given an old chest of drawers that he was awkwardly using as a computer desk.  I had told him he needed a desk and volunteered to set it up for him, so that’s what I did.

After taking some measurements of the space I had available, I headed across the street to an Office Depot and found a desk that would work.  It was a Sauder unit so that meant assembly required, lots of assembly.  In total I probably spent over three hours until I had the new desk in place.  It looked much better and afforded Carl a spot to comfortably work on his laptop.  He thanked me for all the work.  I like Carl and didn’t mind helping him out.

By the time I got home it was after 6.  I was looking forward to watching this weeks Walking Dead when I received three emails with a ton of attachments.  Evidently the woman in charge of the race that goes down Saturday had a large sponsor want to sign up a bunch of their employees.  The way they did this was 100% on paper, having their employees fill out forms and then scan them to PDF files.  It was a LOT of registrations, somewhere around 70.

I was quite annoyed as this was the least efficient way to handle the situation.  Normally if a company is going to sign up a bunch of people, the company pays and then we give the company a code they can give to employees to sign up online for free.

So instead I got to spend close to two hours manually entering paper registrations which were filled with incomplete information and bad handwriting.  I was not pleased.

This morning I had my six month dermatologist appointment.  Everything checked out, no burning/cutting/scraping required in the immediate future.

I knew it had been longer than normal since I changed the oil on the Tacoma but I didn’t realize just how long.  I looked at my maintenance log and saw the last time I changed the oil on the truck was in mid-August at 142,000 miles and change.  I am currently well north of 151,000 miles.

Holy shit.  I have never let any vehicle of mine go 9000 miles between oil changes, typically 5k is the upper limit. The van also hasn’t had it’s oil changed since the western PA road trip so it is overdue as well.  The plan is for me to change the oil on both vehicles tomorrow during the day while I am home for pool deck painting project.

Staying in the auto maintenance field, I think I have decided to take a crack at replacing my valve cover gaskets on my Tacoma.  The valve covers on my truck have been leaking for years and are probably the prime reason my alternator failed last year.

I remember getting a quote for replacing them a long time ago and it was ridiculous, something like $500 supposedly because of all the labor involved. F that.

Well for whatever reason, yesterday I got to looking into what is involved to replace the gaskets.  With my IAC and spark plug/wire adventures I already had a decent amount of experience ripping into the engine a bit.

I found this video on youtube that did a good job of outlining what is involved to do the repair.  It has a LOT of stuff that has to come off to get to the gaskets but nothing that is outside of the range of a hack mechanic like myself.  It seems the most important thing will be organizing the parts/bolts that are removed so you make sure they go back in where they belong.

The video author said an experienced mechanic can do the job in about an hour.  He estimated a novice could do it in two, which means it will probably take me 3-4 based on my track record.

The parts only add up to $35, I’ll deal with a couple hours of greasy frustration to save $475.

The guy that made the video had 357,000 miles on his 3.4L engine.  Wow.  Although the exterior of my truck looks like shit from years in the blazing Florida sun, inside and mechanically it is holding up pretty well.

On Friday night I had a weird dream.

I found myself back in my meat cutting days at Weis Market where I worked for over 3 years in my early 20’s.  I had just got done doing something in the front of the room when my boss, Bob, told me to get something from the cooler in the back.

As I was walking back I was shocked when I saw on a top of boxes an egg crate style container that had live baby ducks in it. These weren’t tiny just hatched ducks, they were about the size of Tuki.  I had no idea why we would have baby ducks in there but the possibilities disgusted me.  Almost on queue as I was standing by the crate of ducklings, one hopped out and fluttered into my chest were I caught it.

I hugged it close to me and immediately walked out the back door as Bob was asking me where I was going.  I didn’t answer him.  I was walking through a neighborhood, looking for a safe place to release the duck to freedom.  Everywhere I looked it seemed there were gangs of stray cats that would love to take out the duck.

I walked and walked for a long time.  Finally I found myself in some remote forest with a nice stream.  Despite being held all this time the duck hadn’t made any fuss, almost like he knew I was his ticket to freedom.  I set the baby duck down in the water and smiled as I saw him happily paddle away.  By the time I got back to the meat room there were baby ducks walking around everywhere. End of dream.

Saturday morning I got up to do the club run.  My plan was to do one more 10 mile run which would be my final barometer in my decision if I was going to run the Hooters Half Marathon which is one week away.

I ran the first half 3.5 miles with Matt.  I ran the rest by myself although I did benefit from others being there.  During the last 3.5 mile segment, far ahead of me I spotted a woman that I designated that I wanted to pass.  I was making up ground on her tediously slow but the quest to pass kept my pace up.  I actually wound up running the last 3.5 faster than the first 3.5 miles.  I hit my goal when I finally passed her with about 300 yards to go till the park entrance.

I wound up covering the 10 miles, basically the same 10 miles that I felt so horrible on two weeks ago, almost 10 minutes faster, running at an average 8:47 pace, a couple seconds within what I did at last years half.  So I had no more excuses to not sign up for the half marathon, which I did later in the weekend.  It is going to be a tall order to beat my time from last year but I plan to utilize my “acquire target, run down target, acquire next target” strategy to get me through it.

On my way home from the run I picked up the dogs since Ali was working.  Compared to last weekend I had few things on the to do list.  One of them was to quickly run the tractor around the yard to mow down the few weeds that were sticking up above the mostly dormant grass.

Saturday afternoon I decided to attend a running club function at South Street.  They had a speaker from the local hospital come in to speak on achieving and maintaining better balance in your physical well being.  Of course I was already pretty well versed on that subject but the free food and a chance to hang out with some of my running club buddies made me decide to go. Plus it was a good excuse to drop the top on the SSR and go for a ride.

I had three beers during the 2 hour event and had a good time.  I was a bit surprised that out of the roughly 50 rsvp’s we received, almost 20 people didn’t show up.

I had a in home Saturday night planned since I was keeping the dogs overnight.  I had received my latest Netflix dvd in the mail, Moon, and wanted to watch it.  I had heard it recommended now by three different sources.  Moon is about a guy that lives alone on the moon in the future, running a mostly automated mining operation.  That is all I will tell you, which isn’t much.  However I thought the film was very well done, it was kind of a throwback to when sci-fi was less about special effects (SE still great anyway), and more about an interesting story.  Moon delivers, rent it.  Solid A from me.

Before bed I flipped on the bedroom Xbox and saw they were offering a free rental of a movie called Stolen, which I never heard of.  I thought it was was a bit odd I never heard of it since it was released in 2012 and it starred Nicholas Cage.  Well after viewing the film, I had a much clearer understanding of why that was, it sucks.

Normally a film with an action/revenge theme will win me over.  Well Stolen is just so incredibly stupid on so many levels it lost me very early on.  The bad guy crosses the line from evil to moronically silly so many times it makes me not care when he gets what is due to him in the end.  The casting of the daughter in the film was horrible as well.  Her attachment to Nick Cage was so manufactured and wooden I had to lol a few times.  You name it, it’s all there, bad acting, predictable plot, ridiculous scenarios, the movie blows from start to finish.  I see why they were giving it away.  My advice to you is to not watch it unless they pay YOU to do so. It gets a D from me.

So I awoke Sunday to a day that really had no major focal point.  I had the vast majority of my to do’s done.  Wow, could I actually have a Sunday where I was just lazy?  What do you think?

To get my exercise fix in I did a quick attempt at one of the BB challenges for this month.

Then later in the morning I had an odd series of events go down.  I had been seeing listings of Mitsubishi DLP’s for really attractive prices for a few weeks.  Evidently Mitsubishi is getting out of the tv business so the sets that are still left in the sales channel can be had at deep discounted prices.

You may ask why I would even be looking at a big DLP tv? I already have one, a 5 year old 73 incher that consumes practically every inch of entertainment “nook” in my great room.  Well I was thinking it would be cool to have one of the newer Mitsu’s that supports 3D, has 5 less years on the odometer and has some additional features my set doesn’t have.  Plus I could give mom my old set.  In my head, these things made sense, at least for a few hours yesterday.

So anyway, I was on slickdeals.net and saw that HH Gregg had an in store special of remaining Mitsubishi 73 inch tv’s for a great price of $799.  For reference, 5 years ago I spent well over 2k for mine.  Some stores had them still, some didn’t.

So just for the hell of it, I called our local store and was told by a guy named Chuck that they had one remaining and it was a display model.  He said that would knock an extra 10% off the price down to a crazy low $700.  Wow.  I was now in full emotional buying (like emotional eating), logic out the window mode.  I told Chuck I would be down to take a look.

I was so sure I was coming back with a new TV that I threw my ratchet straps in the back and two blankets to protect it from harm since it is a display model.  I get down there, walk in the store, and am a bit shocked that there are 7 or 8 men in read shirts staring at me, all HH Gregg staff with nothing to do.  There literally were more staff on the floor than customers.

I briefly said hi as I marched back to the tv section, obviously not requiring any assistance.  I saw the Mitsubishi sitting on a stand by itself.  It looked pretty much identical to mine albeit with some different A/V ports.  I was quickly greeted by a sales guy asking if I needed help.  I told him I talked to Chuck on the phone and would like to wait for him.  He said Chuck was helping a customer but would be with me shortly, ok cool.

I walked around the set some more checking it out, noticing how it was manufactured in October, meaning it wasn’t sitting around all that long, cool.  I thought of how it would be nice to have a fresh tv that I won’t need to be concerned about for a number of years and what a great deal I was going to score. And then it happened,  the voice of logic managed to crawl out from under the pile of bullshit reasons to buy the tv and said “What the fck are you doing?”

I started to reevaluate my reasons to buy the tv one by one.  Ok this tv has 3D support, cool.  How often do I watch 3D movies?  Not much.  When a 3D and 2D version of a movie is in theaters  I really don’t care which I see at this point, the newness has worn off and in fact 3D effects can get downright annoying at times and take away from the film.

Then I moved on to the logic of buying a new tv that is the same size of my existing tv.  There is nothing wrong with my current set.  In fact I just paid $200 a few months back to fix it.  Yes the price of the new TV was great but I could spend $700 less and still have a 73 inch great looking tv to look at, as well as not having to go through the hassle of installing it and transporting the old one by myself.

I then reminded myself that the Tacoma needs 4 new tires a lot more than I need a tv.  In fact there were countless better ways that money could be put to use.  So in the span of 60 seconds I had totally flipped my position.  Chuck had not gotten free yet and it was a good thing.  It saved me from having to awkwardly explain that I had come to my senses. I quietly exited the store, once again passing the hoard of salespeople with nothing to do, except Chuck.

I hopped back in my truck a bit disappointed that my compulsive buying itch was not scratched but at the same time knowing I would be avoiding the buyers remorse that would have been sure to follow.

So when I got home after my near miss tv purchase I was feeling conflicted.  I knew with as hard as I worked last weekend there was nothing wrong with me not wanting to do any projects this weekend.  Plus it was hot and humid on Sunday with temps crossing 85 degrees.  The project I was thinking about doing was cutting down the palmetto bush by the garden.

The palmetto bush has bothered me forever.  One time I spent a lot of time trimming it back hard to make it look a little better.  In no time it became overgrown and ugly looking once again.

So anyway, I was fighting the urge to start the project.  However I grabbed my new cordless reciprocating saw mid-afternoon and walked down to the bush.  I thought that maybe I would just try out my new saw to see how it works.  Well that was the beginning of the end.

At first I thought I would just zip off a few branches.  Well then a few became a few dozen, then after the battery died, out came the extension cord and my original sawz all.  I worked my ass off for a couple hours, sweating and cursing myself along the way for not being able to just chill out.

By the time I was finished the bush looked like this.  I am hoping to get my neighbor to help me using his large tractor to dig/rip the base of the palmetto out of the ground.  It will be a MAJOR pain in the ass to try to do that by hand.

I had some good news in my fight to cut back usage of web host resources by the Bar-barians web site.  Since I implemented a Cloudfront CDN I saw the usage numbers on the site go down dramatically.  Well my good feelings were short lived when I saw another email from my web host this morning that basically said “good, but not good enough”.

Take a look at Feb 23rd and 24th, the first two FULL days of using the CDN. (22nd had it up for part of the day)  The daily bandwidth which at some points was approaching 7 gigabytes was reduced DRAMATICALLY to less than 300 meg.

But the focus of my web hosts email was CPU time which has dropped a lot as well but still over their threshold for shared servers.

Well I noticed that actually this blog is consuming a large share of cpu minutes as well, which I never really paid attention to.  I know a LOT of people read my daily brain dump but I never thought it was enough to put a big dent in my server usage.  Well it is, using about 40% of my total cpu time.   In fact, if I do the same style of optimization on this blog as the Bar-barians site I am pretty sure I can get my overall usage back under the threshold where they will leave me alone.  That would be awesome.

The pool deck is scheduled to be painted on Wednesday.  I was undecided on what color I wanted to paint it, the wall color or the accent color.  After getting some opinions I decided I am going with the accent color.  If I used the wall color it would just be way too much with absolutely nothing to break it up.  The accent color is darker and warmer both of which will give the deck a dramatically different appearance from the off white color it was originally painted. The darker color also will not be so quick to look dirty. I think the end result will be pretty cool.

So I got a hold of Rhinoshield, the company that did such a fantastic job painting the house in March of 2011.  I wanted to get a quote from them to fix/paint the pool deck.  The pool deck looks like shit with a number of spider cracks and faded/stained paint as well, despite my psuedo regular pressure washing.  My hope was to use the tax refund to fund the project.

So I made arrangements to meet a guy at the house this morning at 8AM before work.  I didn’t set the alarm and slept until after 7.  I actually was hauling ass to make sure I was all dressed and ready to go before he showed up.  There was one problem, he didn’t.

I waited until 8:30 till I made my first call which went right to the guys voicemail.  I was pleasant enough, and asked for a call back with an eta.  Well 9’oclock hit and I was done waiting.  I called again, again got voicemail and again left a message, this time not so pleasant, letting Giovanni know I thought it was very unprofessional to not let me know he was running late or not showing up at all.

So I don’t get a call back until later in the morning.  Giovani said he had his schedule wrong and apologized.  Whatever. If I didn’t already know that they do such good work I would have told them thanks but no thanks and called someone else.

I told him if he wanted to still go out and measure the deck he could since he could get access through the gate.  He said he would and called me back.  He actually did what he said he was going to do and called me back shortly after I returned from the gym.  He gave me a number that made me wince a little bit since it would eat up practically all of what I had coming to me via the IRS.

I gave him a bit of a sob story and told him it was more than I was willing to spend right now.  I said if he could knock 300 bucks off the price I could do it. After calling someone (supposedly) he got back to me and said he could do it at that number. Great.  It is scheduled to happen next Wednesday.  Based on how the house turned out it should be a dramatic difference.

So, I have been fighting with the Bar-barians website since it launched early this month.  Specifically, I have been fighting with how many cpu cycles it is consuming.  I have done countless tweaks thus far to minimize the footprint the site has on my shared hosting.  Despite my efforts I am still consuming too many resources.  It is only a matter of time until they pull the plug on the site.

My web hosts solution is to migrate to very expensive dedicated hosting, something the Bar-barians aren’t really looking to do.  I feel responsible for somehow shoving this size 13 website into a  shoe half that size in cost since the whole framework of the new site was my idea. One of the ideas I have been working on is using Amazon Web Services instead.

I created a micro instance in their cloud and created a clone of the Bar-barians site there.  In my testing the response times seemed great, everything loaded quickly.  Today I flipped the switch and started directing the rest of the internet to the new AWS server and things went south quickly.  It didn’t take long at all until the CPU of my instance was pegged at 100%, leaving the site staggering along.  I was frustrated as hell all day.  It continued into the night as evidenced by my sugar hoarding, my emotional eating weapon of choice.  I slammed down a pack of pop tarts, a zone bar and a bowl of frosted mini-wheats as I was fcking around with settings, trying to make things better to no avail.

The micro instance is advertised as having a single cpu core but can give you bursts of two core processing power if it’s available.  Well what I wasn’t aware of is if the site gets anything over a few seconds of high cpu utilization, a micro instance has it’s cpu power hacked down severely, making it incapable of doing much at all.

Once the cpu pegged on my server it stayed there for 10 minutes until I killed the server.  It was ridiculous.  So I reversed the migration and for now have everything back to the way it was, on the same shared hosting.

Creating the new site and getting it all working was a lot of time and work, but it was also fun and rewarding.  Dealing with this shit is not fun, and not rewarding.

It seems that not only is the popularity of the site with humans a problem, fcking bots and search engine spiders can hammer the site as well as the try to load every single page that is available on the site to index for their engine.

The path of least resistance for me would be to find the magic bullet that allows me to keep the site where it is now, on shared hosting.  Any other option is going to require another round of head scratching and sugar hoarding.

I had an odd dream Wednesday night, I basically witnessed the end of the world or at least my part of it.  It seemed that it was common knowledge that a meteor was coming, there was nothing we could do about it except wait for it’s arrival.

It was sometime in the morning and I was outside with several people, the only one I remember though is my mom.  We were sitting under some sort of awning just talking, almost like Armageddon wasn’t on the doorstep.

Then all of a sudden I could feel the ground start to shake, lightly at first.  However within a few moments it felt like I was standing in the middle of the field of that vibrating football game we used to play as kids.  The vibrations rattled my teeth. Then, I saw it.

Up in the sky was a streaking light, moving much faster than the video we saw of the recent Russian meteor.  The sky lit up as the meteor smashed off in the distance, seemingly far, far away.  However an awful sound then started.  I could see the wave of earth and fire expanding outward towards us quickly.

It wasn’t until I saw this approaching that I decided to run, not that it was going to do me much good.  I yelled for mom to run as well, directing her towards a building that I thought we could get behind to protect us somehow.  The wave took mere seconds until it was upon us.  As I was running I looked back and saw mom behind me just before she was enveloped in the cloud of destruction.

As it approached me I had one last idea, that if I jumped up in the air just as the impact hit, it would somehow allow me to mitigate the blast and get carried along somehow to safety.

I jumped, the lights went out….. guess it didn’t work.  End of dream.

I have mentioned that recently there have been several instances where it seemed like stuff around the house were moved by someone/thing other than me.  You may recall how my nightstand table was moved 7 or 8 inches although that was probably the end result of the surprising pushing power of my Neato.

Well over the weekend it was quite windy.  Whenever  the wind kicks up it always blows the cheap plastic Adirondack style chairs on the dog deck off onto the grass.  The chairs were on the grass all weekend long.  I had plenty of other things going on so I didn’t really give a fck if the chairs were on the grass.

So I pull up in the driveway last night and see that the chairs are on the deck. I sat in the truck for a few moments and just stared.  I have NO recollection of putting the chairs back up on the deck over the weekend.

I get out of the truck and walk over to the gate to see if it was secured.  It was although it seemed looser than I normally would secure it.  Weird shit…..

So last night I wake up and notice the LCD on my Sony Dash alarm clock is on.  I have it on a schedule so that the LCD is turned off automatically from 11pm to 5AM to keep the room dark.  I look at the device and I see the time reads 6:30!  What the hell, I don’t recall the alarm going off?!  It’s weird that it still seems very dark outside for 6:30.

So I spring out of bed since I was an hour past my normal wake up time.  I head into the bathroom and as I am taking a leak I look at the clock on the wall and see it reads 2:15am. Argh!

I go back to bed and unplug the power cord to the Dash and plug it back in, evidently it was locked up…..

I went back to bed and tried to resume my strange dream where I was involved in making a protein shake that included a half dozen soft pretzels.

Woot off today.

I have been digging heavily into an option for addressing my hosting issues with the Bar-barians web site, Amazon Web Services.  Amazon not only is the biggest online retailer in the world, they also have developed an incredible infrastructure for allowing businesses and individuals to quickly and easily utilize Amazon’s vast resources to host their web identity.

Homey is the one that got me thinking along these lines after he attended a training course regarding AWS.  He told me how they have a free usage tier where you can get started with AWS for free for up to a year.  The pricing structure for AWS is very competitive, you pay per hour.  Your hourly rate is based on how powerful of a server you are implementing.

When you first sign up for AWS, the control panel seems very confusing because there are so many different things that Amazon can do for you.  However after a quick search I was able to find instructions that literally allowed me to get a brand new dedicated “server” online in the AWS cloud and running WordPress in about 10 minutes of time.

The flexibility, scalability and power of AWS is pretty staggering.  I strongly suggest you take a look.  Yes it is more involved than a traditional hosted web service situation but it is worth the effort.  Netflix is run on AWS for cripes sake.

So I had a lot I wanted to get done over this long 3 day weekend.  As I headed into it, my hope was to drill through it in my typical fashion, hopefully leaving a good portion of the weekend free for me to relax.  It was a lot of to do’s, to help motivate me I created the infamous list of tasks.

My Saturday started at 4:15 am since I had a race to time.  The event went smoothly with no major hassles.  I was pulling out of there by 9am which is great. Once I got home after completing my post race tasks I dug into my list at full speed.

For the second week in a row one of my tasks was fixing ripped pool screen.  I replaced two sections, one of them being part of one of the doors.  I have almost used up the 100 foot roll of super screen I bought a couple years ago at this point.  To tell you the truth, I have fallen out of love with the product.

The selling point of super screen was it is supposed to be very strong and lasts forever.  Well I have had to replace sections of screen that were already super screened, they seem just as susceptible to tearing along the spline as the regular screening it replaced.

On their website there is a picture of a section of super screen with 800 pounds of cement on it, a testament to it’s strength.  What they don’t show is how the screen looked afterward, stretched out and saggy.

Super screen stretches.  It seems every section I have installed has become loose despite being tight when it was installed.  Once this roll of super screen is used up I won’t be buying any more, it just was not worth it’s premium price.

Part of my to do’s for Saturday was to prepare for the forecast cold temps utilizing something else I bought in bulk last year, frost cloth.  For years I tried to prevent the landscape from getting wrecked by cold temps utilizing various fabrics and items with limited success.  Frost cloth is designed specifically to protect plants.

I covered the tomato and pepper plants in the garden.  I also wrapped a croton, poinsettia and the banana trees that get destroyed when temps even start to sniff 40 degrees.  The temps over the weekend touched the upper 30’s out at the house and to my surprise the frost cloth did it’s job, nothing died.

The rest of my daylight hours on Saturday consisted of more chores inside the house.  I was exhausted and actually took a nap.

Saturday night I saw Identity Thief, a comedy with Jason Bateman and the funny chick from Bridesmaids.  I enjoyed the movie, it was funny although not quite as funny as I expected going in.  I’d give the movie a B+.  I actually went to the late showing thanks to my long nap.  I didn’t walk out of the theater until well after midnight.

Sunday morning I woke up around 8.  A quick look outside and at the thermometer revealed the forecast very cold air had rolled in overnight.  The temp was 41 even with the sun well into the sky.  Despite being out late the night before, a tired body from the prior day of chores and the cold temps, I had an idea in my head that I should go do a 10 mile run just in case I commit to doing the Hooters Half Marathon. (which I still have not done)

On the plus side, running in cold temps is generally a good thing for me, the lower the thermometer is (within reason) the better I feel as I run.  On the down side, my after work 10 mile run the week before felt terrible and I was very slow.  I felt like I needed to redeem myself.

So I decided I was going to do it.  I put on my long sleeve Under Armour cold gear shirt and headed out.  I decided I would get my 10 miles via one circle around the 10K Oakes loop and then two 2 mile laps around the inside of the water park grounds.

The Oakes loop went ok, I kept what felt like a decent pace.  I didn’t look at my watch till I stopped to grab water at the truck.  It showed I did the 10K in something like 54:45 which is very close to a 9 minute mile pace.  The two laps inside the park did not feel great but at least I didn’t hit the wall like I did the week prior. My total time of 1:30:55 worked out to a 9:06 pace, probably my best 10 miles since I ran the half marathon last year. It was about 6 full minutes faster than the crappy 10 miles I pulled the previous Monday.

In an ideal world, running 10 miles would be enough physical exertion for most days.  Unfortunately in my case, this was just a warm up.

I pulled jeans over my running shorts and swapped out my UA top for a t-shirt, sweatshirt and gloves and headed to Lowes for supplies for my big project of the weekend, redoing the border around the pond.

When we first moved into the house I utilized a lot of landscape timbers to frame out areas.  They were cheap and easy to fit into various situations. Well there is also a problem with them, they rot out, especially in Florida’s hot temps, regular rain and blazing sun.

In recent years after having to replace various wooden borders several times I finally got smart, realizing that investing in borders that last forever is worth the additional upfront cost if it eliminates future work.  I am all about minimizing upkeep at this point of my life. The border around the pond was the last landscaped area utilizing wooden timbers, everything else either has a castlewall concrete border or plastic edging, both of which will outlast me.

I had heel to toe walked the perimeter of the pond to determine I needed roughly 50 stones to complete the job, I also grabbed 20 bags of red mulch to top off the area.  Just to make sure I didn’t run out of work to do, I stopped at Publix and rented a Rug Doctor.  The truck was riding very low as I pulled into the driveway.

The border replacement project took a few hours.  After ripping up the rotting timbers I used a shovel to scrape along the border, rounding it out slightly as well as getting rid of the vegetation that was pressed up against the old timbers.

I then started laying down the castlewall stones.  I put strips of weed block under them to combat the endless weed onslaught.  There was a section of the pond that was home to a nasty colony of fire ants.  Bordering that section required quick work and a lot of brushing of ants off my hands.  Despite wearing DeWalt work gloves, one them actually was able to deliver a bite through the thick material.

My crude foot measurement worked out pretty well, I wound up using 49 of the 50 blocks I bought.  After applying a fresh thick layer of red mulch I stood back to admire the fruit of my labor.  It looked much better.

I had enough bags of mulch left over to cover a few of the other smaller landscape beds on the property.  I still need to buy a shit load more to cover the orchard and pool border.

If you want to see all of the pics I took of the project go here.

I was pretty beat after the work outside.  Replacing the border required a lot of time on my knees, something that never goes over well, especially after running 10 miles in the morning.  However the list was my taskmaster, I still needed to use the Rug Doctor.

I have a Bissel carpet cleaner that I typically use to shampoo the carpet in the house.  It seems to do a decent job but I was curious to see if a Rug Doctor would deliver more cleaning punch.  The Rug Doctor is supposedly a commercial grade machine.  It is big and heavy compared to the Bissel.  It’s also a bit clumsy to maneuver, I managed gouge the wall of my freshly painted bedroom as I tried to get close.

The machine felt substantial, with a big holding tank, high power vacuum and a vibrating brush that shook you from head to toe.  The rugs looked good when I was done but to be honest they didn’t look appreciably better than when I use my Bissel.  I think the biggest difference was the Rug Doctor was able to pull more moisture out of the rug via it’s high suction.  Other than that, it wasn’t really worth the $40 I spent when you throw in the cleaning solution.

I was totally gassed by the end of the day.  The list was finally done, except for the trip I was supposed to make to my mom’s Monday morning to work on some stuff.  I vegged out Sunday night and watched my second movie of the weekend, Haywire.

Haywire stars that good looking female MMA fighter, Gina Carrano.  Her acting wasn’t bad although she didn’t have tons and tons of dialogue.  Her main role was to kick men’s asses, a lot.  She did quite a good job of doing that but the novelty of it wore off pretty quickly.  The movie ran out of steam quickly. It had an odd/annoying sound track, a convoluted plot and totally predictable outcome.   I’d give it a B-

So Monday the plan was to pick up the dogs and bring them along to mom’s place to hang out while I did the work she needed.   The girls of course were thrilled to see my mom as always.  What mom needed seemed pretty straight forward.  She had some window treatments put up recently.  They were a little low and the curtain in front of the sliding doors was dragging on the floor.  Mom wanted me to raise it a bit, ok, no problem.

So as I took it apart I saw the track holding the curtain was a mess, specifically the supports that are attached to the drywall.  One of them was broken and others were half hanging out of the drywall, pulling loose of their anchors.  At first I thought this was because of simply poor installation.  I later realized it was from excessive torque.

I took everything down, marked level, attached the brackets along the lines using fresh holes and put it back together.  When you tried to extend the curtain using the pull rope it extended with a reasonable amount of effort.  However when you tried to retract the curtain, you hit a point where everything would bind up.  The only way I could get it to fully retract was using my hand up top to manipulate the accordion style linkage.

It became clear that the brackets were pulled loose from mom pulling hard on the cord.

I was frustrated and looked for any obvious cause of the binding but came up empty.  My only diagnosis was the track is bent slightly, just enough to cause binding at that spot.  Mom was given these window treatments for free so it is hard to complain.  It’s just a shame.  So as a work around mom will only use the half of track movement that is unimpeded.

I wound spending a lot more time at mom’s than planned, I didn’t get home until after noon.  I brought back with me mom’s tax paperwork and the Magic Jack I bought her for Christmas.  She no longer has the need for it since Century Link is now including free long distance in her phone service.

My plans for a clear Monday quickly evaporated.  I managed to find things to get done like doing mom’s taxes, hooking up the Magic Jack and doing race associated homework.

Sadie made a lot of these tasks extremely smelly.  She had diarrhea the past couple days which she was now mostly over.  However she was plagued with horrific, toxic farting that she was letting rip every couple minutes.  She would rip a fart, I would pull my shirt over my nose and say “Sadie can you please stop farting!” which of course is a ridiculous request.  However my calling her name in that manner encouraged her to come sit right next to me because she thought I was mad at her, where she would continue to blast away at point blank range.

Eventually I put her outside for a period of time so I could get away from the stench.  It was truly awful.

So before I knew it 9:15 had arrived and I realized had basically blown through my 3 day weekend without any prolonged periods of my just being lazy and enjoying myself as I hoped.  Yes I got a lot done. Yes if I don’t do it no one else will. It just felt like there was minimal payoff for all that effort, which was very substantial.

This is a theme that has echoed a lot recently.   Perhaps this is just the role I am destined to play.

I am hoping to hear back some information about this years taxes shortly.  I would like to knock one of my long term list items off this weekend. The list item is replacing the landscape timber border around the small pond with landscape border stones which will outlast me.  However before spending the money, I’d rather have a number for this year’s return in hand.

It isn’t like this will cost a fortune so I’ll probably do it regardless as long as my motivation wallet doesn’t get tapped out.

I have a race to time tomorrow morning.  The forecast is looking kind of wet so that could turn the suck meter level up quite a bit.

I don’t have any defined entertainment planned for the upcoming 3 day weekend but hopefully I can work in some fun time.  I need to stop by mom’s place on Monday to take care of some stuff for her.

I am going to try to set up WordPress on my Amazon Web Services account today.  I’m looking at this as a possible solution to my hosting problem of the Bar-barians web site.  AWS is infinitely scalable and has a very attractive pricing plan where you only pay for what resources you actually use.  This should be a fun little experiment.

I don’t have much more to say, on the life roller coaster I am in one of the gulleys right now.

Well Valentine’s Day 2013 certainly is not a bright and shiny one this year for obvious and not so obvious reasons.  It looks like the weather gods have done their part, dialing up a gray, wet and dreary day to match my mood.

I am struggling to keep the lights on at the recently launched new Bar-barians website.  My web host keeps warning me about usage issues.  I continue to take steps wherever I can to streamline the site to minimize impact to the shared server the website resides on.  The latest step has been the implementation of a robots.txt file to cut down on search spiders crawling the site.

Ironically, the web hosting I pay for is described as “Unlimited” .  I guess it is unlimited until you hit the limit.

Last night I watched the premiere of Blood and Chrome.  I had to resort to watching the cut up version that was released on YouTube in bits and pieces during the end of 2012.

The 2 hour movie got me very excited for the new series.  It has all the look, feel and action of BSG which is one of my favorite shows of the last 20 years.

So the catholic world was SHOCKED by the announcement that Pope Benedict was going to step down, something a pope has not done since the 1400’s.  All popes are supposed to drop dead, they don’t retire, duh.

I have ranted about the hypocrisy of organized religion many times and specifically this clown whom looks like a spawn of Satan.  Pope Benedict has excused and covered up countless acts of sexual abuse against children by figures in the Catholic church.

His time spent as a “Hitler Youth” doesn’t help his image much either.

I personally think the man is an icon, representing what exactly is wrong with religion, “Do what I say, not what I do”.  He sucks.

The best news out of all of this, if you believe ancient prophecies,is some guy named Malachy said in 1140 that the 111th pope, the one after Benedict, will reign during the downfall of the church.  Hallelujah.

I did not see the state of the union address last night but I did see some clips of Marco Rubio presenting the Republican rebuttal after seeing FB light up with comments regarding how awful it was.

To say the speech was pandering to hispanic voters would be stating the obvious.  He may as well have been wearing a sombrero as he reached for his agua.

I think what is more disturbing for conservatives was just how poorly he came off overall since he is supposed to be one of the new hot commodities in the Republican party.

The reality, despite whatever speeches either party delivers professionally (Obama) or clumsily (Rubio), is the hope of any significant progress being made in the major issues that plague our country is very dim as long as an obstructionist attitude is present in Congress.

So I have only run after work during the week very infrequently.  When I have, it typically was a shorter three or four mile jaunt.  I got the bright idea that since I was unable to run 10 miles with the club on Saturday morning I would simply run 10 after work last night.  Sounds reasonable.

I decided to park at the running store and start from there instead of starting at the normal park the Saturday morning run launches from.  Doing this changes the dynamic of the run.  Instead of it having two water stops and being broken into 3.5, 3, and 3.5 mile segments it becomes two 5 milers.

Very early on in the run I had a couple tweaks in my knees that didn’t feel great and resulted in a slight limp for a bit.  However as I warmed up I was able to resume my normal stride.  I ran as I would on a club run morning, in the bike lane against traffic.  I quickly found that doing this in the evening is more of a pain in the ass and dangerous.

There were a lot of vehicles that were either heading off to catch an early bird dinner special or see the sunset.  I had a number of (old)people  that were riding on or over the white line that designates the bike lane.  A few of them got angry hand gestures from me indicating they needed to move the f over.

I found that running the course during daylight made it feel longer as opposed to when you run the streets well before sunrise as is the norm for our group.

The first half of the run I didn’t feel too bad.  I averaged a pace in the low 9’s which was all I was looking for.

As I arrived at the Port Royal fitness club which is our normal water stop on early Saturday mornings I walked in on busy tennis courts.  I walked my shirtless, stinky, sweaty body right past one of the multiple “Members Only” signs and grabbed a drink at one of the fountains.

There was an older couple there that looked like they should be named Mr Howell and Lovey that just stared at me as I dared to drink out of their members only water fountain.  I didn’t acknowledge them, finished my drink and continued walking through the facility.  I could sense eyes from the other courts focused on the “outsider” that dared to tread on their grounds.  As I walked past the fitness center building I did an inventory of the cars parked in the lot.  85% of them were either Mercedes or Lexus with a spattering of BMW’s and a lone Corvette.

The run back was in a word, miserable.  During the first couple miles of it I just used a slower pace.  Although my breathing never got labored, my legs were rapidly running out of juice.  The last couple miles of the run was fueled almost entirely by my mind telling my body that I was too close to quit.  My legs no longer felt like legs, they felt like two slabs of concrete.  My pace was slow and labored.

I was so annoyed when I got back to route 41 and saw I still need like .17 miles to reach the 10 mile mark.  I just wanted the discomfort to end.  I turned down the sidewalk and just kept plodding along until the GPS mercifully clicked over to 10.00.  It took me 1:36 and change to cover the 10 miles.  I did the first 5 in around 45:30, meaning the last 5 took me over 51 minutes.

Those numbers make me not want to consider running the Hooters Half Marathon in early March.  I will be doing a couple more long runs in February.  If they go like last night did I’m not going to do the race.  I’m not looking to go slower than the year before.

So I slowly walked back over to the Tacoma and released the tailgate so  I could use it as a seat.  I sucked down a Goo and gulped down a bunch of water.  I felt totally spent.  On the way home I even grabbed a coffee but even that hardly made my energy level meter tick up a notch.

By the time I got home it was close to 8.  By the time I took out the trash, made dinner, and emptied the dishwasher it was 9pm, another reason doing long runs after work is not a good idea.

I did manage to keep my eyes open long enough to catch the new Walking Dead.  Now if I can just find a place that streams Blood & Chrome.