Guardians, Garage, Good

Friday night Cindy and I met up with friends of ours to catch Guardians of the Galaxy.  We caught a relatively late 7:45 showing.  Originally my lack of knowledge about the Guardians of the Galaxy comic books made me not all that interested in seeing the movie.  However Sean was able to fill in some of my gaps and spark more interest in the film for me.  I was glad he turned me around. The movie was funny and entertaining throughout.  I really enjoyed it, enough to hand it an A rating.  Go check it out.

It was weird enough for me to be going to a movie on a Friday night.  The odd behavior vaulted over the line when we went to dinner with Sean and Kim after the movie at 10PM.  I never, ever eat dinner that late.  We went to a nearby place called the South Fork Grille.  Cindy and I munched down on a couple appetizers since we had a light meal right after work.  The four of us had a good time hanging out, hopefully we get to do it on a more regular basis.

On Saturday we allowed the dogs and chickens to have their first coop free interaction.  I had the chickens out while I was weeding the property.  When Cindy got back from a DD coffee run with the dogs I had her bring them out back.  We put Sadie on her leash as she definitely could view a fleeing chicken as a big dog toy.  We left Nicki off leash, since she doesn’t have any chicken chasing speed left in her legs.  Surprisingly the interaction was rather boring.  Neither the chickens or the dogs got overly excited, it was more like a “hey, what’s up?” sort of thing.  Despite Sadie being very chill about the chickens I still can’t ever trust to let her out there with them free ranging.

A good portion of Saturday was spent finishing up the garage painting project, something Cindy already had put a lot of sweat equity into during the week.   She literally did ALL of the painting, my role was to take stuff down and then reassemble the space.  I also did a lot of organizing, sorting, relocating, and throwing out of items that live in the garage.

The Eagles Midnight Green accented by silver obviously makes the previously boring builder’s white garage look a lot different.  I actually cleared enough space that the SSR and Prius can comfortably both fit in the garage.  I used to have the SSR and Camry in the garage but it was very tight and required me to back the SSR into the garage in a very precise manner.  Since the Prius is much smaller I was able to pull both vehicles into the garage in a normal front first manner and still have room to get out of the door without requiring contortionist-like moves to get out.

I am happy with the garage outcome.  It’s the second space in the house that Cindy pretty much painted single handed.  She just loves to get things done.  This crosses a long term to do list item off the list that has existed for several years.  Finally, after 13 years in the house, every interior space has been painted.

On Saturday afternoon we piled the girls into the party van to head to Rural King.  On the way there we did something else nearly as rare as a 10 PM dinner, we stopped for ice cream.  In Bonita there is a cool little ice cream place in the shape of a cone, it reminds me of the same looking structure back in my Wernersville living days. I enjoyed a small cone of cookie dough ice cream while Cindy opted for one of her favorites, mint chocolate chip.

On Saturday night we enjoyed another great home cooked Cindy meal while watching Heat, a Netflix rental that has been laying around for a couple weeks.  It’s a comedy with Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy.  The “fat woman saying fck” humor wore off on me after hearing it the first 50 or 60 times.  I fell asleep for the majority of the second half of the movie so I will have to take Cindy’s word that it was ok.  I guess that means it gets a B rating.

On Sunday morning I had ideas of running 4 miles around the water park before swimming.  Cindy dissuaded me from the plan after I complained of some GI issues and the idea of only starting to run at 9:15 AM, well into the broiler part of the day this part of the year.  Instead I decided I would just do some extended swimming instead.

We arrived at the park a little early, early enough that we got a head start on our 1000 rep video series. Cindy is working towards completing 1000 push up reps and I am grinding towards 1000 pull ups.  I struggled to get 15 reps on the fat and slippery high bar on the playground equipment.

I had an odd incident while swimming my 1600 yards.  I was on my third 400 leg in the pool.  I was in one of the two lanes, the other lane was unoccupied as Cindy couldn’t get her hair wet after just coloring it.  As I am making a turn around I see at the opposite end some Hispanic looking guy sitting on the edge in my lane with his feet hanging in the water.  My initial thought was, “Why would this idiot decide of all places to hang his feet in, he would do it in the lane I am actively swimming in??”  Well I assumed by the time I got to the end he was at he would get out of the way.

Well when I closed in on the wall I still saw two feet hanging in the water in front of me, dead center.  As I veered to the side  to touch I popped my head up and barked out “Dude, move over!” and continued back the other way, assuming he would heed my warning.  So as I reach the other wall to turn around I see has the guy has moved, about 12 inches to one side, still sitting in my lane.  WTF!!

So this time when I get to the side he is sitting on I pick up the aggression in my stroke.  The increased speed and impact with the water was intended to throw a second wet warning to the guy to go find somewhere else to dangle his feet, there is literally 1000 other feet of pool border he could have utilized.  So the next time I come up his way he has finally moved over to the unoccupied lane however I could see he was watching me intently.  I wasn’t sure if he was pissed because I told him to move and was giving me stink eye.  Well I knew for sure I was pissed so if he wanted to get into it I was ready.

So I am on final lap of my third set of 400’s.   Just before I hit the turn around the hispanic guy hops in the lane he was dangling his toes in and breast strokes to the opposite end, completing a gruesome 25 yards in the pool.  He was standing in the water at my end point.  Again, my assumption was he wanted to get into it about me telling him to move.  I angrily stroked into the wall, stood up and ripped my goggles off, ready for the argument to begin.

The first thing he says in his heavy accent is “Swimming is hard.  You swim for long time”, with no hint of anger or malice in his voice or on his face.  I was completely thrown off as I was fully prepped for conflict.  Instead I said awkwardly “yea, it’s good exercise”  Well that was all it took, the guy went on a 10-15 minute, mostly one sided conversation where he told me all about how he used to swim a lot in the open water in his home land of Puerto Rico.  I also found out that the water he swam in occasionally had sharks, that he used to sometimes ride to the beach to swim on a unicycle, and some guy that used to teach him about swimming could climb a coconut tree like a monkey.  After scaling the tree and getting coconuts he would use them as part of a protein drink he made on the spot for energy for the long swimming sessions.

The guys accent made it tough for me to follow along very well and I really had no interest in what he was saying anyway.  I tried to display my eagerness to get started on my final 400 repeatedly by reinserting my ear plugs and strapping my goggles onto my head.  None of it mattered, he just wanted to keep on talking.  Finally some woman came over and asked if she could share one of the lanes for swimming.  Thankfully I used that as a wall to stop the mudslide of words coming out of the guys mouth.  I told him I was going to finish my last set and swam off.  Thankfully by the time I finished up he had moved out of the area.

When I emerged from the pool I described the incident to Cindy.  She hadn’t seen him hanging his legs in the pool but she did hear the extended conversation pool side.  She was 100% sure the guy was hitting on me, something that never entered my mind until she said it.  I didn’t get that vibe in the moment but from a Monday morning QB viewpoint, I suppose that was a possibility.  Whatever the root cause, it was a very weird and unexpected interaction.

On Sunday we collected our 5th egg of the week.  It seems like Betty likes to crank one out mid-late afternoon.  We hard boiled two of them to test them out.  They both looked and tasted good which should give us the green light to use the eggs for other cooking and baking needs.

Cindy and I both did a bunch more sets of push ups/pull ups respectively during the afternoon.  I am up to 200 pull ups so far, Cindy has 225 on film.

I tried the dog whistle I bought for Nicki and the Iphone dog whistle app.  Neither one seemed to illicit any reaction from her.  The only thing that seems to get her attention is very loud noise like aggressive clapping or thunder.  Her vision is impaired as well since her nearly incessant rubbing of her eyes has pulled her eyelids down.  To see stuff she needs to cock her head upwards.  It’s depressing watching the little puppy you knew 12 years ago transform into an old girl with all of these ailments.  I still feel guilt that Nicki’s health problems came on very quickly and drastically once I got separated.  Up until that point she was pretty much fine except for her lifelong itchy ears.