Archives January 2014

So throughout my life, like most people, there are lots of times when I have made poor decisions.  Last night was another shining example of that talent.

After work I met Cindy at Sam’s to pick up a bunch of stuff for the SB party we are hosting Sunday.  The cart was fully loaded down with party supplies including a case of water along with 4 different cases of beer.  Cindy was going out last night so I unloaded the stuff at the homestead myself.

I decided to use the storage ottoman in the corner of the kitchen as a stacking point for the beverages. Since the crate of water was the biggest item that went on the bottom.  The four different types of beer were stacked on top.  I recall thinking when I stacked it up “Hmmm will the water bottles be ok holding this weight? Sure, they have pallets of water bottle cases stacked on top of each other much higher.  Good to go.”

So later after attending a number of chores I finally settled down to play some Hearthstone.  As I was in the middle of a match I heard a very loud impact coming from the kitchen that included the sound of broken glass…. NO……

I shoot out of my office chair and into the kitchen.  On the floor is every box of beer and a quickly growing pond of beer.  I grab a towel from the closet and throw it in front of the beer river just before it made it’s way to the carpeted area next to the kitchen.  I see brown and green broken glass on the floor as well.  While leaving the towel in place to block the beer I grab the two cases of beer that had bottles, the Bud Light and Stella.  I carry the leaking boxes out to the recycle bin in the garage and throw them in.  I was thrilled to have destroyed two perfectly good cases of beer.

I return to the kitchen to further assess damages.  The two cases of beer that were in cans, Miller Lite (in a retro can) and Mich Ultra appeared to have survived the impact intact.  In the beer that was still puddled on the floor was a LOT of glass shards.  I used the big towel to sop up as much as possible before shaking the glass shards out of it outside and then throwing the towel in the washer.

The rest of the clean up involved a lot of wiping with wet paper towels to pick up as much glass as possible followed by a pass over the area with the Dyson.  The final step was a full run with the Scooba, first using a vinegar/water solution followed by straight water.  The entire time I was cleaning up I was mentally kicking the ass of the idiot inside that stacked the beer.  Dummy.

So I actually managed to do a full 30 minutes yesterday of the A2G challenge, holding a deep squat position 1 minute at a time until it added up to 30.  I only had two minutes left to do at home last night.  Late in the day the holds had swung back to the more and more difficult variety because the soreness from my squats and dead lifts the day before was settling in.  The last two holds at home were very painful.

Today I woke up with a lower body that is incredibly stiff and sore, the opposite of what you would hope happens after a day of stretching.  Today my ass wont be going anywhere near the grass.  It will probably stay chair bound all day until the pain subsides.

On my way in today I grabbed a coffee at DD.  I handed them my DD loyalty punch card which rewarded you with one free medium coffee after you buy 7 at regular price.  The clerk told me the punch card was being replaced by a new electronic loyalty program, DD Perks,  where you carry around a card, similar to the rechargeable DD card I use to pay for coffee.  Each time you buy stuff they swipe this card and you accumulate points.

Ok that’s fine, I’m all for doing things in a more efficient manner.  Well it wasn’t fine once I saw the point system.  They credit you 5 points for every dollar you spend at DD. To get a free coffee costs 200 points.  Let’s do some quick math.

In the past, 7 medium coffees would qualify you for a free 8th cup.  A medium coffee is roughly $2, meaning that spiff would hit after approximately 14$ of spending with the old system.  With this new system, that $14 only equates to 70 points, a third of what you need to get a free coffee.!!!! What the fck….

So hidden in the ruse of efficiency, they basically chopped the customer loyalty reward by two thirds.  What a crock of shit.  The only people that could possibly break even with this new plan are those that buy a shitload of donuts or food at DD since with the old program those sort of things were not included in the spiff.  But for those of us that use Dunkin Donuts almost exclusively for coffee, we got the long, hard, dry shaft.  I have to find someone at DD to hear my rant. Greedy bastards.

This weekend I will be quite busy doing prep at the house for the party.  I need to clean the inside of the house, manicure the outside and tend to the numerous details associated with hosting such an event.  It looks like we may have as many as 15 people show for the party, it should be fun.

I proactively took Monday off to allow for a full day of recovery from whatever goes down Sunday.  Go Broncos.

So last night my new GoPro camera showed.  Thanks to a glutton of Amazon spiff points from my online Xmas shopping I wound up paying a lot less than retail. (love my Amazon Rewards card) The box included a ton of parts utilized for the vast myriad of mounting options for the camera.  I am pretty amazed they can jam optics that good along with copious amounts of tech into a camera that is so small and light.

The cam comes with a slick remote control which allows you remote access to the camera even if it is far away from you.  However what I really like is the GoPro app which allows me a near real time view finder and remote control of the cam.  This will be awesome for Phantom aerial videos as I will be able to see exactly what the camera is looking at. (as long as I stay in wi-fi range) I look forward to giving the camera extensive testing soon.  It should up the video quality of everything I shoot considerably, even boring pull up videos.

I was multi-tasking last night working on other things as well, including getting my paperwork together to send to my accountant for taxes.  To be honest, now that I am single I don’t know that I really need to be having the accountant do them, Ali’s business was the primary reason we did it.  With just myself to account for there is only my W-2, a 1099, my mortgage interest and property tax bill to send off.  Still, I have used them for so long it’s like a security blanket so I shipped the papers off this morning.

Ever since Ali became a contractor we benefited tax wise since a lot of things could be written off as business expenses.  We have had pretty big tax refunds most years.  This year I really have no idea what to expect filing as single for the first time in 15 years.  Hopefully I can get a few bucks back to put towards some repairs/improvements I have in mind for the house.

I also edited the GoPro video Randall shot of our ride out to Ave Maria, condensing it down to a nice and tidy 7 minutes.  Check it out if you like.

Several of my calisthenic FB friends have been posting pics of themselves in deep A2G (ass to ground) squat position as part of some challenge called 30/30.   I finally looked into what it is all about.

The 30/30 challenge is to spend a total of 30 minutes per day in the A2G squat position for 30 days straight.  The benefit of doing so is multi-faceted.  This hold will help open up your hips, knees, and overall flexibility.  Since my lower body is quite stiff these benefits would be something I could really use.

So I got down into as low of a squat position as I could manage and held it.  Almost immediately I felt very uncomfortable pressure and pain in my twice operated on right knee.  My hips did not feel very happy either.

I wound up doing a total of 6 minutes of hold in squat.  Each time it felt slightly, and I mean slightly better.  I have 3 minutes today, two of them in my office.  I am hoping to be able to just drop down for a minute randomly throughout the day.

Here is the promo for the challenge and here is a link to the FB page for it. How low can you go? (and stay there)

Last night after work I headed outside to do the pull up version of this month’s BB challenge, something that is more feasible to do since days are staying lighter a little bit longer.   You can watch the fun here. Once it was dark outside I took the Phantom out for some nighttime flying, it just looks so cool at night, total UFO.

As I was flying Cindy pulled up.  We made plans to watch the last Batman movie, something I saw in theaters but Cindy never saw.  It was good so I had no problems watching it again.  Watching the movie reassured the A rating I gave it before but it also reenforced the one glaring weakness in the story from my perspective, the way Bane goes out. SPOILER ALERT

The entire movie he is the ultimate bad ass and center stage as THE villain.  He kicked Batman’s ass all over the place.  Then he gets a couple tubes on his mask bent up and he turns into a quiet, meek, beaten man. All of a sudden they try to thrust the woman into the spotlight as the one we should really care about being the bad guy.  It doesn’t work.

Yea I get it that they were trying to be slick, throwing in a plot twist at the end.  Cindy said she knew something was up with the woman from the get go.  It was a wasted twist, I would have much rather seen the story start and end with Bane, including a much more in your face payback for him in the end instead of an “oh by the way” blast to the chest from “Cat woman”.   Still, even with that misstep it’s hard to not give the film an overall A rating.

Obviously watching Batman a second time took preference to watching the State of the Union, an event that I don’t enjoy watching no matter the party affiliation of the current president.  The partisan clapping, the carefully crafted words and general bullshit aura that surrounds the speech is just something that annoys me more than anything else.

I spent the vast majority of last night breaking the two big files I captured on Randall’s GoPro  in the Phantom into four YouTube videos.  Two of them were the aerial slackline footage and the other two were the footage shot while I was several hundred feet in the air.  Check them out on my YouTube channel.

The video demonstrates just how stable the Phantom is.  I am pretty sure I could hover the quad in a good filming position, set down the transmitter and step into the shot without worry of the copter going anywhere.  It’s that easy.

I heard that Florida is officially going to put legalization of medical marijuana on the ballot for the next election thanks to a Supreme Court ruling.  Simply putting this to a vote has been fought against fanatically by those that profit from pot being illegal.  Personally I am quite glad it will be finally put to a vote.

Despite never being a marijuana user and my personal opinion that being a pothead is closely tied to doing precious little with your life, I don’t view the drug as any more dangerous than alcohol.  The amount of money we spend policing, convicting and incarcerating marijuana users is absolutely ridiculous.   When you team the money saved by no longer having to do these things with the revenue from taxing marijuana sales it is a HUGE swing to the WIN side.

If people want to smoke pot, let them.

Randall had originally predicted an arrival time Friday night of about 7:30PM.  I know Randall well enough that I immediately dismissed that time as being accurate.  He rolled in about 8:30 which was fine since I had plenty to keep me busy with prep for the race.

Once he showed up Cindy, Randall and I hung out for a little bit but we didn’t want to stay up too late since the plan was for a very early 4:30 AM departure the next morning for the race.  Luckily the forecast for the morning had moderated somewhat, from the low 40’s to the upper 40’s which is still cold but more bearable.

In the morning I dressed warm but not with quite as many layers as last week. We got on site right around 5AM, there was already a lot going on as Humane Society staff had showed up even earlier.  Randall and I hung parking signs, dropped off the equipment for the start line and then headed back to the registration area.  Once we were there we set up everything we could until the GCR truck showed up a little before 6.  It felt cold but tolerable, especially as we were moving around constantly.  By the time the truck showed up we only needed a few things to complete the registration area.

As the sun started to rise the participants and their dogs started to show up.  Having nearly 200 dogs participating meant for a VERY busy and fun registration area.  Prior to the race I sent out an email to all participants warning them that they needed to pick up their packets early to avoid long lines on race day.  My warning seemed to work as somewhere around 75% of the people did pick up early, however another problem arose.

People that picked up early still had to pick up a timing chip on race morning.  Well evidently a lot of pre-registered participants didn’t show up until around 7:30 (race at 8) .  In a very short period of time we had a MONSTER line of people waiting to get their timing chip.  It made it pretty clear that using disposable timing devices for next years race would make more sense where people could pick up their timing device early as well.

Once daylight hit Randall jumped from equipment set up help to his event photographer role, shooting hundreds of pictures using Ali’s nice camera.  I was basically overseeing the day of race entries as we had two other people doing them to free me up.

About 7:45 I told Ali I was ready to head down to the start line, I was taking the Tacoma to make my commute to and from the starting area as fast as possible since the distance between start and finish causes me logistical problems.  As we were on the road I swore loudly, I forgot to grab the laptop I use to pull the timing files from the box, shit.  Ali called back to Christy who was in the registration area and asked her to run the laptop down to me, thank goodness.

I had the club’s new portable PA system in the back of the truck for Ali to make announcements.  One of the important things to announce was people with dogs were supposed to be at the back of the start line group and that they were supposed to wait to start, so non-dog runners had a chance to get ahead.  Unfortunately the crowd size and noise made it impossible for people towards the back to hear.  We wound up having to try to stop a few people with dogs that shot off with the main pack of runners.  It was a bit of a mess.

Even with driving back to the start line I still had precious little time to get everything set up.  Luckily this year the first place runner was slower than years past, clicking in a little after the 18 minute mark.

Timing the event went smoothly except for a power malfunction.  As I was sitting there I heard the motor for our blow up finish line cut out.  In a split second I shot out of my chair and started sprinting towards the building where we were tapping power from.   I instantly suspected the two coffee machines that were tapped into the line as being the problem.  I quickly unplugged those and then ran into the building with an extra extension cord I grabbed.  I hooked it to the existing cord and plugged into a jack on a different wall, hoping it was on a different circuit, it was.  As I walked back outside I saw a number of people standing under the finish arch, supportting it as it was half deflated.   It started to slowly rise, crisis averted.

The rest of the event went well, lots of smiles of both the human and canine variety were seen everywhere.  I got off site between 9:30 and 10. Ali thanked Randall and I for our contributions to the race which clicked in with 750+ participants, the second highest amount ever.

On the way home we picked up some DD coffee to help stave off the inevitable drowsiness that comes with such early morning alarms.  I spent a couple hours working on stuff after the race.  After doing so Randall came with me to go pick up the girls at Ali’s place.  They were quite excited to see Uncle Randall as always.

We both agreed that taking a nap would be a wise decision.  Randall headed into the bedroom around 2:30.  I wanted to quickly uncover all of the landscape stuff that was wrapped in cold protection cloth since it looks like the short term threat of cold was over.  Well it took longer than expected, I didn’t get into the bedroom to shut my eyes until 3:30.

I told Randall that we could nap until around 4:30 since we had tentative plans to go to the movies Saturday night.  I set my alarm and got up at about 4:45 even though it felt like I could have slept much longer.  When I came out Randall’s bedroom door was still closed.  I knew he said he didn’t sleep great the night before so I just let him go.

It turned out that Cindy was stuck working too late to make going to the movies viable so I continued to let Randall slumber.  He didn’t come out until around 6:15PM.

We spent some time outside with the Phantom.  After I got the quadracopter in the air I handed the controls over to Randall to let him see just how easy the thing is to fly.  Randall was amazed at just how easy it was.  Within a few minutes of flying it he said he would definitely be getting one.

Instead of hitting the theater we had a good in home night.  We drank some beer, enjoyed a fantastic grilled cheese and tomato soup dinner Cindy prepared, played some Xbox Kinect Sports 2 and then watched the latest Riddick movie.

Randall and Cindy were surprised that I never saw the first two Riddick installments, it seems like the type of movie I would like. I don’t think coming in late really affected my digesting the movie much.  The flick was pretty good.  I was not a big fan of the animal violence, especially the dog like creatures.  The action through out the flick was steady otherwise and delivered a solid B+ viewing experience.

Our Sunday morning started on the slow side, with everyone sleeping in somewhat.  Sadie was the alarm clock when she started whining to go out.  We had plans to go do the long Ave Maria ride but were in no rush to start early, hoping the pretty chilly temps in the low 50’s would go up a few degrees.

Cindy and Randall really bundled up for the ride.  I did not, wearing just shorts and a t-shirt.  Although the air felt chilly, the sun felt warm so I thought it would be ok, it was.

The ride out there was not easy, it felt like we were working into a moderate head wind for a most of the way.  I was looking forward to having that wind push us on the way back in.  Randall had brought his GoPro with and had it mounted to his handle bars.  It made for some interesting perspective when we watched it back.  The wide angle and superb video resolution really makes for some sharp video.

Randall had also used the GoPro for some mountain bike riding, I was surprised how relatively smooth the video was just using the stock GoPro mounting system.  I had plans to later try the camera on the Phantom.

After fueling up at the Ave Maria with chocolate milk we headed back home.  I was quite disappointed when I turned back onto Oil Well Road and felt like I was still working against a head wind. Damn it.  We let Randall pull for awhile.  On the ride back we encountered riders doing an organized event, some of them riding as far as 100 miles total, no thanks.

Cindy hit something on the way back and got a flat tire which we fixed by the side of the road.  She wanted to do as much of the repair herself as possible, she just likes to fix things herself if at all possible.  She had a tiny, sharp metal shard in the tire that Randall discovered when it pricked his hand. For the 30 miles we averaged a very tough 17.5 mph.  My legs felt pretty dead by the end of it.

After eating lunch we headed outside to play around some more.  I took out the Phantom and attached Randall’s GoPro to it.  I shot in total something like 20 minutes of video.  The quality of the video was much improved over the rigged FlipCam video I shot before.  There was some of the “jello” effect which is common with aerial video but not enough to be too distracting.  It cemented my desire to get a GoPro of my own.  I’ll be posting the edited video of the flights this week.

I also tightened up the slackline so Randall could take a shot at it.  Cindy, Randall and myself took turns crossing the line.  As expected, Randall struggled mightily at first and got better as time went on, even getting almost all the way across on one attempt, albeit in a mad dash manner. Cindy’s daughter and her friend stopped out during our session as well.  Unfortunately we only could get Cindy’s daughter up on the line for a single attempt before she called it quits.

Randall had mentioned he wanted to head out sometime during the afternoon but he also wanted to stock up at the local Trader Joe’s before doing so.  I suggested it would be a good excuse for he and I to take the SSR out.  We both filled up our respective carts with TJ goodies and had to make an auxiliary stop at Publix for me to grab a few other items.   On the way back I gave Randall a demonstration of the SSR’s burn out ability.  It was a pretty good one.

Once we got back Randall had to pack up and head east.  It was a fun weekend. The fun may be repeating next weekend since Randall is going to try to head back over for the Super Bowl party I am hosting.

Last night was a continuation of what my day yesterday was mostly filled with, running club related work.  I spent hours getting things ramped up for the races we have coming up through the beginning of April.  The half marathon sort of stole pretty much all of my focus for the last month or so.  It’s amazing just how time consuming it all can be.  I am quite glad that after this weekend I have a solid month of race free weekends.

I did manage to have some time to play Hearthstone and once again streamed it on my Twitch channel.  Cindy was trying to watch it but said she was not getting any sound on the feed.  I told her sound should be working and to demonstrate that you can watch the 4 minutes of footage below from a game.  Yes, when I am playing games weird things happen.

Watch live video from Fragu67 on TwitchTVThis morning I stopped for coffee at DD on my way in.  The line was long, the longest I had seen at the relatively new location on Davis Blvd.  I was listening to a Hearthstone podcast so I didn’t get bent out shape.  As I was sitting there I noticed the car in front of me, an older Hyundai Sonata, was driven by what looked to be an attractive woman.  I noticed the transaction when she was up at the window seemed to be more involved than normal.  She finally pulled out and I pulled up.

The girl in the window said the person in front of the woman that was in front of me paid for her order, so she in turn paid for my order. Wow.  Ok well I instinctively said “Well I guess that means I should pay for the order behind me” which I did.  The clerk said she threw a few extra punches on my free coffee punch card as a thank you.  I never had anyone “pay it forward” to me before.  I guess all people aren’t assholes after all.

Tomorrow is Ali’s Run for the Paws race to benefit the local Humane Society, a cause I obviously strongly support.  It’s hard to believe we are going on the 8TH year of the race, it seems impossible that so much time has elapsed.  This years race is promising to be one of the coldest ever with temps well down into the 40’s.  Yay.

Once again Randall is coming over to assist and will be reprising his role as event photographer for the second year in a row.  Jeremy was the photographer for several years but has since moved onto bigger and better things. Once the race is out of the way I am hoping Randall and I get to enjoy the rest of weekend as it should be, with beers, bike riding and slacklines.

I sometimes find myself thinking about the comparison between my life as a man in my mid-40’s to my life as a young adult.  To me it is interesting how unidirectional my perspective was on things as a young man.

It seemed like I had absolutely no concerns about what was going on around me in the world. I didn’t give two shits about taxes, politics, foreign policy, social issues, corporate greed or other big picture problems that annoy me current day.  All of my problems at that age, and there were a number of them, believe me, had to do with three people, me, myself and I.  I simply had no concerns about the rest of the world around me outside of my small circle.

I wonder what causes the transformation in people when they age where they become more and more concerned, annoyed, interested in what is happening  on a larger scale.  Is it because by middle age you have normally slogged through all of the career building process, family starting, house procuring and are now mired in a daily routine that allows for more time to focus on other things?

How many 21 year olds do you see ranting about Obama or any politician for that matter? They just don’t care, they have tweets to post, Instagrams to take, Vines to make, and parents houses to live in.

Even myself, who is extremely dedicated to being as immature as possible, (see above for proof), still falls into the old person mold of caring/complaining about the world much more.  I don’t use the phrase “back in my day” very often but I do refer to people in their 20’s as “kids” a lot which is a dead giveaway that I am well into old fartdom.

This is a thought that if I put more time into it, I could develop further.

So when I got home last night I headed back outside to recover the garden from the latest blast of cold air.  When I woke up this morning it was 39 freaking degrees outside.  What makes it more aggravating is when I look at the forecast for the next few days I see lows that are dancing right along the edge of dangerous, meaning a slight mis-forecast could mean more landscape carnage if it isn’t covered.  So at this point ti looks like I am just leaving everything bundled up until the weekend, f it.

So the other day I got a comment on one of my Tacoma repair videos, thanking me for making it and saying how it helped them replace their own valve cover gaskets.  The commentator added that if I haven’t already done so, I should perform a transmission cooler bypass.   I replied back to him for details.

Evidently there is pretty common problem with this generation of trucks where the transmission cooler, which is embedded inside of the main radiator fails/ruptures.  If this occurs, the transmission fluid becomes contaminated with anti-freeze and will fail in short order.  Replacing a transmission is a major and VERY expensive repair.

The proactive way to prevent this is to install an auxiliary transmission cooler, bypassing the internal trans cooler.  When I saw I could buy a trans cooler kit off Amazon for $40 with free Prime shipping it was a no brainer.  I’ll trade 40 bucks and a couple hours of driveway labor for a $1500+ transmission replacement down the road any day.

I found out today that my mom has not smoked a cigarette in two weeks.  I had no idea she was going to be trying to stop (despite my decades long encouragement to do so), but I was thrilled to  hear it.  Mom said her primary reasons for doing so were financial, eliminating cigarettes from her budget is akin to giving herself a big fat raise.  In only two weeks she has saved a big chunk of cash.

Although I welcome the positive financial impact it will have on our life I am even happier that it will be a positive influence on her health.  Quitting smoking is not for wimps.  I am quite proud of mom for taking it on.

Last night I went home early to cover the landscape again.  I had seen a predicted low of 40 degrees for Wednesday.  Well when I looked again at the hourly forecast and saw the predicted low for Wednesday morning was actually in the 50’s.  The super cold blast of air hits THURSDAY.  I was already home so I recovered the banana tree although not nearly as expertly as Cindy did a few days prior. I figure tonight I will pull stuff back over the garden as well.

Speaking of the cold temps, Cindy’s massive blanketing of the banana trees did actually save them from a frosty death.  The uncovered banana trees in the back of the yard were mushy brown lumps after Sunday morning’s cold temps.   The covered bananas were showing some signs of stress but nothing that looked fatal.

The garden took some hits.  The huge eggplant that has never produced anything was shriveled up and will be cut back hard.  The tomatoes, that were covered with regular frost cloth took some major damage.  The tomatoes that were covered with an old curtain actually took less of a hit due to the thicker material. The lone pepper plant isn’t looking too happy either. The kale, cauliflower and lettuce crops don’t seem to care much about the cold temps.

Unfortunately the next several days of forecast lows are below 45 degrees, meaning I will probably just be leaving everything covered till the weekend.  I love Florida winters until they get to be a little bit too much like real winter, like the northeast once again experienced yesterday, sheesh.

Last night I got some Hearthstone time in.  I also live streamed some of the play, including me playing Cindy a few games. You may find it interesting or fcking stupid.  Yes when playing Hearthstone I often partially cover my face with my t-shirt.  No, I don’t know why.

Watch live video from Fragu67 on TwitchTV

I realized I totally omitted a very fun part of my weekend, a visit to Captain Bryan’s Comedy Club in Marco Island on Friday night.  When we were invited to attend as part of a birthday celebration for my buddy Sean I was really not that thrilled just because of the timing of it all.  I was at packet pick up till 7, had to shoot straight home, throw some food down my throat and then we headed right back out to Marco, a 45-60 minute drive depending on traffic.  Plus I was already yawning on the way there, it had been a long, long week.

Well it turns out I was glad I went.  Cindy and I had a good time with a good group of people.  In total we saw three comedians.  The first one was not all that funny but number two and the headliner were freaking hilarious.  The last comedy show I attended was Kathy Griffin eons ago.

It was a very unconventional Friday night for me which didn’t see me closing my eyes until early Saturday morning but in retrospect worth the sleep deprivation.

Friday night after work I headed directly to the running store which was hosting packet pick up for Sunday’s Half Marathon until 7PM.  I brought an extra sweatshirt along since I planned to sit outside on the patio of TGIF’s to do my data entry, it was rather chilly with temps dropping through the 60’s. Packet pickup was steady but not horribly busy.  I was able to enter any paper entry forms on the spot so I wouldn’t have to mess around with them after I got back home.

On Saturday I planned to once again go to packet pick up but not until early afternoon, I had some stuff I wanted to get done around the house in the morning.  After getting the weeding done around the house Cindy helped me take down the outside Xmas decorations.  Originally I had ideas of leaving the lights up and on until the end of January like I did last year, but for whatever reason that idea no longer seemed like a good one.  The lights had been turned off a week ago.

Removing the lights required use of my extension ladder and extendable pool skimmer pole.  I was the primary remover, especially of anything above 7 or 8 feet high.  Cindy was the designated light wrapper, a role she excelled at.  After maybe an hours work the exterior of the house was officially undecorated.  Usually taking down Xmas lights will bring with it substantial feelings of melancholy for me.  There was some of that this year but not to the degree I have felt it in the past.

When I got back down to the running store I had a bunch of paper entries waiting for me.  It seems odd to me to wait until the day before a half marathon to sign up for it but if people are willing to lay down the extra dollars for their procrastination so be it.  There was a lot of complaining regarding the race shirts given out this year.

The race director decided to go with a different source for race shirts and it turned out to be a poor decision.  Not only were the shirts lesser quality than what runners had experienced in prior years they were sized HORRIBLY.  It almost seemed like the manufacturer mislabeled a truckload of shirts and sent them to us.  A small shirt was the size of a regular medium or even possibly a large shirt.  The medium shirts would pass for XL, it was pretty embarrassing. They also had absolutely no fit to them whatsoever, they seemed patterned after a potato sack.

Because the shirts were so mis-sized, tons of people were exchanging down in size from what they signed up for.  This started a chain reaction of bad things.  The monster shirts resulted in the smaller sizes, Xtra Small and Small being exhausted quickly.   This resulted in anyone that came to pick up their race packet after 2PM of having no choice but to receive at the smallest, a medium shirt (the size of a BIG large shirt).

Some people didn’t care but most of them were not happy and I didn’t blame them.   A 1/2 marathon race shirt is something that a lot of people want to wear with pride, as running 13.1 miles is a major accomplishment.  If you hand them a low quality, oversized, white shirt you are blemishing that opportunity as a crappy shirt is less likely to be worn.  As I said, I felt embarrassed to be handing runners these shirts but I had no choice.

There was a good turnout on Saturday, we started with 11 boxes of packets and were able to condense that down to 4 by days end which was my hope.  The less people that need to pick up stuff on race day, the better.

Once I got home from packet pick up I had to dive headfirst into final race prep which included printing, packing, loading and going over mental checklists repeatedly to make sure I had everything I needed for the race.  The forecast for race morning was quite cold with temps predicted in the low to mid 40’s. I decided to leave anything with a battery in it inside overnight so it wouldn’t have it’s capacity knocked down by the cold temps in the van.  We got to bed as early as possible, lights out around 9:30.

The ridiculously early 2:30 alarm was hated but necessary.  Not only did I have to load the remaining stuff on the van before heading out, Cindy had to to do prep for the race since she was volunteering AND running in it.  As I stepped outside to load the van the air felt quite cold as expected although the 4 layers I had up top and two on the bottom half of my body felt sufficient.

We got on site a little before 4AM.  I immediately dove into the long list of things that needed to get erected, dropped off, set up and configured.  The cold temps almost felt bearable because there was a lack of wind to push them against any exposed skin.

Pre-race set up went smoothly.  We had the registration area all set up and ready to rock well before the official 5:45AM open to race day registration.  Once runners started flowing in things were quite busy but flowing in an orderly manner.  We actually had 6 or 7 people walk up the morning of the race and plunk down $100 to participate, funny.

About 15 minutes before the race start I headed to the start line to set up the timing equipment.  Doing so with a couple thousand people mulling about is always interesting.  I had everything up and ready to go with about 5 minutes to go.  With a race this size it takes a loooong time until the last runner crosses the start mats, this year the last person hit the mats 3:30 after the start of the race.

So as soon as I was done at the start I had to head right to the finish line to get cracking.  Normally you would think roughly the hour I had before the first runner comes across would be plenty to get everything up and running at the finish.  Surprisingly I used almost every minute allocated to me.

You see this race has a TON of extra moving parts.  I set up two timing boxes for redundancy at the finish line and a third box that is used by the race announcer to call runner names as they head to the finish.  There is a lot of additional tweaking that needs to be done to make this happen plus I was running into technical glitches with one of the boxes.  Finally, with about 5 minutes to spare, I THOUGHT I had everything ready to roll.

So the race winner comes blazing down the road, crosses the announcer mats and no name pops up, just a code.  When the runner crosses my finish mats I see his time pop up but no name, wtf?  I hoped this was just a weird  anomaly, it wasn’t.  As subsequent runners came across the announcer was seeing nothing and I was seeing no names on their finish times.  Houston, we have a problem…a BIG problem.

I handed the handheld Time Machine to someone so they could hit the button each time a runner crossed so I would at least have some sort of times to reference if this was some sort of mega-disaster.  Of course my first thought was “oh shit, the biggest race of the year and I am not going to have results” but that quickly was shoved to the background, I needed to figure out what the fck was going on.

After doing some looking at runners in the system I noticed I only had timing chip id’s assigned to the first 2500 numbers.  That makes no sense, I individually scanned all 2750 timing chips to make a chip to bib mapping file.  I was sure after doing so I applied the new chip id’s to the race however what I was seeing showed I hadn’t.  What I realized was the race was loaded with the chips used in last year’s race, oh man…

Ok so now that I identified the problem, I had to figure out how to fix it.  I was scrambling to remember where I dumped the new chip file I created.  I looked on the laptop and even remote controlled to my server at home, looking to see if I put them there.  Finally after some frustrating memory failures, I found the files.  I had indeed forgot to apply them to this years race, great.

So after some mad scrambling I was able to apply the correct mapping file to both the announcers laptop and my timing laptop.  Finally, names were being associated with times after a VERY tense 20 minutes.

Our announcer did a good job of improvising while I was scrambling.  Since he had no runner info he simply stood by the finish line and acted like an amplified cheerleader, “Good job! Way to go! (whoever you are)”  The sigh of relief when I got everything back in order was quite large.  Rest assured that will never happen again.

To the runners that finished after the problem, things were status quo, in fact I don’t think many race participants even realized there was a problem at all since live results, although slightly delayed were flowing normally.  After that cluster fck, the rest of the event timing went smoothly.  The shoe timing chips we went back to this year, although slightly less convenient than race bib timing solutions, proved to be rock solid reliable.  I had hardly any racing time misses outside of a few missed start times, something quite impressive with an event this size.

For Cindy this was the first time she ever ran a stand alone 1/2 marathon.  She had covered the distance in her Half Ironman triathlon a year ago but never as a solo event.  She hadn’t been able to train as consistently or as hard as she would have liked to going into the race.  She was doubtful she could break the 2 hour mark, despite my assurances she could.

She proved me right, covering the distance in less than 1:56, only a minute slower than my best 1/2 marathon time.  Her levels of determination and competitiveness really shine through when it comes to race day.   It was a great run by her.

We didn’t get off site until way after 11.  Once I pulled into the driveway it was another 4 hours plus of working on race related items including an unexpectedly miserable job of emptying unused race packets.  We created 2700 packets for the race, we had roughly 2100 finishers.  That meant there were HUNDREDS of packets left.  Each packet had stuff in it that could be recycled or reused in the future, a timing chip, safety pins, twist ties and the 9×12 packet itself.  Cindy and I spent at least a couple hours alone dumping these out and sorting the contents.  I quickly discovered that paper hand outs, paper race bibs and feather light twist ties do not always come out of a packet easily.  It was pure drudgery.

On Sunday night I made the suggestion we watch my latest Netflix rental, Now You See Me, back in the bedroom.  Well considering we both had been up since 2:30 AM that was a pretty dumb idea.  I wound up dozing off for more of the movie than not.  However I think it was a good thing.

You know how speed readers say they only read parts of the page and are still able to get a decent comprehension of the material?  That was how this movie was.  Even with only seeing small chunks of it I could tell it was fcking stupid.  This was one of those movies that depicts the characters as just too clever and slick to be remotely believable, these geniuses would confuse Einstein.  At first I considered if I should re-watch the movie to see if my first impression was unfair.  I decided to go with my gut, it’s stupid. C rating.

I was quite thankful I had Monday off to recover from race weekend.  Cindy and I enjoyed a very laid back day that featured beautiful weather.  I went and picked up the dogs to enjoy the day with us since Ali had to work.  Enjoy it they did.  Both Nicki and Sadie seemed to love hanging outdoors as much as possible.

Cindy and I spent a lot of time on her slackline.  We both are getting better.  I actually made it all the way across without falling, a first.  We then moved it between two slightly further apart trees and I again was able to complete the entire span which surprised the shit out of me. Cindy completed the span as well several times but also did some impressive backwards walking and 180 degree turns on the line that I didn’t even consider attempting.

We both had some falls.  Cindy fell while I was recording, landing forcefully on her butt/lower back.  I fell off twice.  The first time landing on my knees in a less than pleasant way. My second fall was more serious and ended my slacklining for the day.  I slipped off the line and fell in a way that compressed my bad right knee much further than it will go on it’s own.  It was very similar to what I did coming off the 1/4 pipe obstacle at the Tough Mudder. When I first got up I had an awful limp that subsided after a few minutes but today that knee is swollen and stiff, great.

I’d like to say that I have a nice break from the stresses of race timing but this weekend I roll right into Ali’s Run for the Paws race which not only is our 2nd biggest 5K of the year, it’s also one of the most logistically challenging.

The start and finish line for the race are very far apart, making it extremely difficult for me to start the race and get the finish line up and running before the first runner arrives.  To assist me this year I plan to drive my truck to start line and use it to shuttle me back to the finish as quickly as possible.

This morning I got an EXTREMELY annoying email from LogMeIn, the providers of a free remote control solution I have used for nearly a decade.  The email said the free service level, which allowed you to handle up to 10 computers was being terminated IMMEDIATELY.  Yes as in ZERO notice.  In addition to the pay option being your only avenue they are only giving you the ability to control TWO computers for the base level of paid service.  What the fck?

This was total and utter bullshit and I have no idea what the deciders at the company were thinking.  I can understand wanting to move more people towards the pay model.  Perhaps further limit the free options of the product or if you are no longer offering a free version of the product, make the paid version able to at a minimum handle the same number of computers you could for free previously.  And of course, this change should have been announced with a lead time, allowing users of the product to evaluate other solutions if they were not interested in paying for LogMeIn.

Instead they did none of this.  From my perspective (and many others if you look at reaction on the net) this was almost a ransom attempt.  You pull the rug out from your free user base with no notice and then tell them their only option is to fork over cash for a decreased level of service, what a brilliant marketing plan.  Did they not see what happened to Netflix?

So anyway, I will be among the thousands jumping ship from LogMeIn probably heading over to TeamViewer, another remote control product that is free for personal use.

I would be highly surprised if within a short time LogMeIn doesn’t reverse direction (Woops we’re sorry for being assholes) and step back from their initial stupid plans to something more moderate.  Unfortunately a huge chunk of their user base will have already sailed off, never to return again, including myself.