Archives 2014

So finally, finally, finally, my DB driven websites came back online early yesterday afternoon after being down since early Sunday morning.  Since I have had a presence on the internet in the 90’s, I have never had my content be down this amount of time.

To have this type of outage in 2014 is even more incredulous since high availability technology has improved so much in the last 5 years.  IX really has managed to set the bar to a new low.  I am pretty sure no major webhost in the last 5 years has had an outage of this duration.

The official description of the incident was IX’s RAID 14+2 SAN had a drive fail, and then as a hot spare was being swapped in, another drive failed which put the entire SAN into a failed state.

I have questions about why this would happen as the SAN was described as actually being 5 storage arrays, each one with 14 drives  in it.  I don’t follow why a failure of two drives in one of the 5 arrays would bring down the whole shebang.   If a massive array of 90 hard drives was toppled that easily then there was some poor engineering/planning/configuration utilized.

Last night I received an email from Faithi Said, the CEO of IX, declaring the recovery process was now officially complete with a promise of a full investigation of the circumstances that lead up to this mess.  Noticeably absent from this email was any mention of compensation for this clusterfck.  Many, many people literally lost thousands of dollars as a result of this outage.  A simple “sorry, our bad…” just isn’t going to cut it.

Last night on the way home I picked up a Craftsman tractor shade at the small Sears location in Bonita Springs.  I bought it online.  I had the option of having it shipped to a store and picking it up for free or paying almost $70 to have it shipped to my door.  It was a pretty easy decision to go pick it up.

The store appeared to have exactly one employee in it, at least while I was there.  It seemed pretty representative of the dire situation I read that the Sears family is in.  As I was waiting for the guy to be free I walked around the store, mostly looking at kitchen appliances since I have plans to update my set sometime in the future.  I was surprised at just how expensive most of what I looked at was.  There was a fridge sitting there tagged at $3600, wtf??  Sure it was big, something like 33 cubic feet but still it gave me sticker shot.  The floor was littered with high priced appliances, tons of them $2k or more.  Obviously Sears is not looking to be a low price leader, sheesh.

So the guy retrieves the box and asks me if I have the confirmation email on my phone.  I realized I did not.  I ordered the canopy the same day my IX servers went down.  The email confirmation was one of the casualties as initially IX f’d up and had things configured so people sending email to me would have gotten an undeliverable bounce message, meaning a number of emails sent to me in the first 24 hours vaporized in the the internet bit bucket, including the Sears email, great. Luckily he was able to confirm my order using some other method.

I actually have thought about getting a canopy for my yard tractors for years, ever since I saw my old neighbor Rick tooling around his yard on his sun shaded John Deere.  With my skin cancer history, avoiding unnecessary sun exposure is a smart move.

The addition of the canopy will make certain tractor maneuvers no longer possible under low hanging objects but I’ll trade that inconvenience for a less UV intensive and 10 degree cooler mowing experience.

This weekend we have a BIG movie to see, the sequel to 300 comes out.  As silly as it sounds, the original 300 really had a big impact on my life.  It was that movie and the published 300 workout that the actors on the film used that transformed my fitness routine.  Up until that point in my life my gym routines were pretty static, routine and yielded no real results beyond maintaining my current level of fitness.

The 300 workout is a brutal circuit that really pushed my mental and physical endurance boundaries.  I was REALLY into it.  I even have two pages dedicated to it the description of the workout and my log of 300 workouts which I maintained for 2-3 years.  When I did 300’s I had no real concept of the difference using full ROM and good form made.  Looking back now, with many of the movements I used poor form.

My 300 workouts eventually morphed into my current day calisthenics/bar focused exercise regimen that I have been doing for most of my 40’s.  So the point is, to me a new 300 movie is a big f’n deal. Cindy is a big 300 fan as well so we both are very excited to go see the film in 3D on Saturday night. I HOPE it lives up to epic-ness of the original.

I am planning a double endurance training weekend with hopefully a 5 mile run tomorrow backed up by a bike swim/brick on Sunday.  We also might be doing more work with getting the house ready for a full time second occupant.

For the last two days I have spent time in my underwear in front of two medical professionals.  Yesterday I had a physical required for my insurance coverage.  Because of my age the physical had the requirement of a DRE (digital rectal exam) aka. finger up the ass.  Thankfully my health advocate waived that requirement for me when I told her I just had a full man part exam late in 2013 as part of my visits to the urologist.

My physical went fine except for one thing, my blood pressure readings were on the mildly high side.  They actually took it twice, once at the start and again at the end of the visit.  The first numbers were like 140/76 and the second reading was 145/85.  I attribute the high numbers to slamming my customary large cup of coffee prior to the office visit and the involuntary anxiety any visit to a medical office invokes for me.

Despite these explanations, I was given a portable BP machine to check my readings the next two weeks just as a precaution. Both my mom and dad have high blood pressure, although I think theirs has as more to do with lifestyle choices.  When I checked it late afternoon the numbers had dropped to 123/80 so I feel confident coffee and nerves were the real catalyst.

My email services for my internet domains were restored yesterday, unfortunately my DB driven websites are still dead in the water.  They should hopefully be up and running within the next few hours.

The president of IX, Faithi Said, posted a more technical explantion of the hardware failure, claiming the array that failed utilized RAID 14+2, meaning it could tolerate a maximum of two simultaneous drive failures.  Supposedly one drive failed and then the drive that was actively being swapped in to replace it had a failure as well.

I am quite interested in seeing what sort of compensation will be offered to IX customers after this mess.  It seems surreal they have servers that are down for going on their 5th straight day.

Last night Cindy’s daughter stopped out with her Mustang.  The passenger side mirror had been broken for quite awhile.  She bought a replacement which I offered to put back on for her.  Replacing the mirror was extremely easy, little more than removing a trim piece and removing and replacing three screws.

While she was there I looked at some other cosmetic issues the car has like two damaged wheel wells and a missing front air dam.  Cindy’s daughter can be tough on things she owns, espcially vehicles and smart phones.  I think she has gone through 9 phones in the last three years. Afer doing the repair Katie and her friend hung out with us a bit which was nice, I don’t see much of her normally.

This morning I was once again in my boxers in  front of the dermatologist.  I got a clear screening for basal cell activity but got some cream for a rash that I have had for quite awhile.  Apparently I am not treating it long enough.  I have hit it with cream until it stops but then it will return.  The doc said I need to treat it a solid week or two beyond being symptomatic to make sure it is gone for good.

So I have been wearing my new Gunnar computer glasses all week at work.  As advertised they make things on my screens look cleaner, crisper and larger thanks to the slight magnification.  However there is something else going on, my eyes feel worse after wearing them all day.

One of the things that Gunnar users typically report is wearing the glasses eliminated the eye strain, dryness and headaches they were experiencing previously.  Although I don’t have headaches, my eyes feel MORE tired wearing the glasses then when I go at it naked.  They also feel dry, very odd.

A recurring message in reviews of the glasses is you need to give your eyes an adjustment period to get used to them so that is what I am planning to do.  I am just a little freaked out that I am developing symptoms that Gunnars are supposed to help correct.  If this is still the case a week or two later then I will have to reevaluate.

Here I am day 4 of no blog. IX webhosting is STILL in the process of recovering servers.  A four day outage is like years in internet time.  It will be quite interesting to see what sort of compensation plan they come up with for customers that haven’t already jumped ship. On a positive note, my email server was restored early this morning so at least that avenue of communication is once again flowing.

Over the weekend Cindy and I had a discussion about living arrangements.  The lease on her apartment is up soon.  The talk was about the idea of her moving in with me at the house.  To some it might sound like a big leap but for those that are more familiar with the situation it really isn’t that much of a stretch.  Cindy already spends a good chunk of time each week at my place.  We have spent plenty of time going through day in and day out together, enough to know there are no major personal obstacles/problems with living under the same roof .

Sharing the living expenses would be a major financial plus for both of us and Cindy is always eager to help me out at the homestead with whatever needs doing.  Really my only two concerns were not being able to my own thing and lack of space.

Cindy has never been the demanding type, just the opposite really.  She loves to do things with me but is fine doing her own thing if I want to do the same.  Space-wise she actually doesn’t have all that much stuff.  Getting her “moved in” really shouldn’t be that involved at all.

So anyway we decided to move ahead with the plan.  I think it will be a good thing for both of us.  It should be complete by this time next month.

So I arrived at work pretty early this morning, before hardly anyone else was there.  As I walked in the door I spotted some movement on the ledge in front of the windows.  As I focused I saw it was a small bird.  The bird looked wobbly and weak, having a hard time standing up and not moving much as I got closer to it, not a good sign.

I went inside but I quickly returned outside with a small box.  My office has about a half dozen feral cats that hang around, the little bird was sure to be killed by one of them if I let it be.  I wasn’t sure what I was accomplishing by bringing the bird inside, perhaps only giving it a quiet place to die.  It allowed me to pick it up and put it in the box with little fuss.

The bird was small and almost looked to me like it could be a baby mockingbird.  He didn’t seem to have a broken wing as he did move around a bit and was able to keep both of his wings tucked back in what looked like a normal position.

I wondered if it was a baby that dropped out of a nest.  I went back outside and looked at the nearby trees, seeing if I could spot a nest.  I saw none.

I got my hands on a plastic cup that I cut the sides off to create a makeshift water bowl for the bird.  I showed the bird to my boss.  She brought in some small pieces of bread in case it was hungry.  The bird didn’t show any interest in either although he did make some noises when I tried to move him around.  The noises sounded like something a baby bird would make.

I told Cindy about my office guest.  She said the wildlife conservancy located near the main post office would be the logical place for the bird to go, if it was a youngster hopefully they could feed it until it was ready to go back out in the wild.  I asked Cindy if she would mind picking it up since her work was nearby, she was fine with it.

So as I worked I would check in on my little feathered friend.  He seemed to just be resting but when he noticed me he seemed more alert than when I first found him.  I had the top of the box open since it seemed obvious he was not old enough to fly.

Cindy told me she was in the parking lot so I walked out with the bird in the box, showing some co-workers along the way.  I found Cindy in the lot and showed her the bird.  Just as she was saying how cute it was the bird took off and flew to a set of trees 100 feet away.  My mouth dropped open as I looked at Cindy.  He can fly!  I was surprised and relieved that the little guy apparently was ok.

I thanked Cindy for stopping by and went back inside with my now empty box.  I guess the bird did actually fly into the window and was just dazed/woozy.  I’m still glad I took him in as I am pretty sure one of the cats would have finished the little guy off without a second thought.

It’s always nice when an animal in need story has a happy ending.

Here I am going on my third day of internet darkness.   In a way I feel somewhat lucky that none of the sites I run/maintain are used for a real business.  When I read the comments from IX customers that are literally losing fistfuls of money and customers from this outage I feel badly for them.

This outage reenforces my dislike of MASSIVE consolidation of server resources, at least for things I manage personally.  Sure it’s really cool to have 10 servers shrunk down into one server, however if something just happens to go haywire with that one server, 10 servers go down with it.  That is why for mission critical things in our environment I use a traditional server model with individual RAID protected storage.  Call me old fashioned but I just don’t feel great having too many eggs in one basket.  I like my castrophic failures to be contained in nice little pockets of chaos instead of network wide.

The status blog for IX Webhosting is lit up with over 1500 comments from customers that are besides themselves about the slow recovery from this failure.  I find myself chuckling at the pleas to DO MY SERVER FIRST!  This is probably the longest outage I have had of my internet presence since it was implemented back in the 90’s.   Yes it isn’t good to be cut off from email for this long since it is my most heavily used and preferred vehicle of communication, but there is literally nothing I can do about it at this point.

Well this is an unusual occurrence, doing a blog posting in Wordpad.  I will be outlining the reason for this later in the entry.

I got home Friday night and noticed the pool cage rescreening job had been completed.  My eyes were immediately drawn to the two corners of the cage which had small wrinkles in the screen.  Other than that the rest of the screen looked really good.

We had a beautiful morning for the race I timed Saturday morning.  The turnout for the event was very small with somewhere around 175 people signing up.  This race takes place on the same weekend as a large half marathon in Fort Myers so it is set up for failure.  It really needs to be moved to some other weekend in the future.

The race was so small that I was able to shoot some aerial video with the Phantom as finishers streamed across the finsih line.  Both spectators and participants were fascinated by the buzzing, 4 bladed camera platform above.  The video I captured turned out pretty well.  I hope to be able to do this more often in the future.

On Saturday afternoon after finishing up post race work I went to pick up the dogs.  I told Ali I could keep them overnight.  It worked out well since she was one of those people running the Fort Myers race on Sunday.

Cindy and I decided to spend Saturday night at the house instead of hitting the movies.  I had a fresh Netflix rental to watch anyway, Rush.  Rush has the guy that plays Thor in it but if you ask me, the story, at least the more compelling part of the story is about Nikki Lauda, Thor’s nemesis in Formula 1 racing.  I remember hearing Nikki’s name growing up during ABC Wide World of Sport broadcasts but I had no idea he went through the hell depicted in the film.

I found the movie to be good, quite surprising since I could care less about racing in general.  I’d give it a strong B+

Sunday morning started off slow, it was very damp and foggy.  We scrapped another biking/swimming brick for another run around the track instead.  I was surprised that simply moving from lane 1 to lane 2 on the track added nearly a 1/4 mile to the total distance according to my GPS.  My Garmin said we covered 3.37 miles at roughly an 8:30 pace doing 12 laps around the oval.

The girls had fun hanging out at the house as usual.  They just love being able to walk around outside without any major obstacles.

The pool screen guy stopped by Sunday afternoon to collect the balance of the payment.  I pointed out the screen wrinkles.  He said he was hoping a day or two in the sun would have smooth them out. (really?)  He said he would be back on Monday to take care of them.

While he was there I asked him  about the technique used in rescreening an entire cage.  Since I have spent many irritating hours replacing screen panels I was curious to hear how you do it on a large scale.  He said they attach one end and then unroll the screen to cover an entire row of panels, they pull it tight, drop in the spline and then cut the screen.  It saves a whole bunch of cutting and measuring.

On Sunday evening Cindy and I watched Inequality for All, a film produced by Robert Reich, a name/face you may recognize.  Robert’s most famous position was as labor secretary under Bill Clinton. In recent years he has been popping up all over the place making commentary on the growing wealth disparity in the United States, both why it has been accelerating the last 30 years and why it is a huge problem.

The documentary, which is available for streaming free on Netflix was 90 minutes of some stuff I already knew and a lot of stuff I didn’t.  The start of this canyon size gap of wealth disparity started pretty clearly in the late 1970’s when the wages for the majority of the population stopped following the same general upward curve as the economy.  Wages flat lined while the economy continued to generate more and more revenue.  The overwhelming percentage of that additional revenue went directly into the pockets of an amazingly small amount of individuals.

The film will do a much better job of explaining the issue than I will regurgitating the facts here but let me simply say that any logical human being should see why this trend is unsustainable and self destructive in the long term, unless the goal of our country is to exist in a feudal society.

Once the ultra-rich cross a certain point of control in politics, reversing that trend becomes a task of monumental portions.  How do you change policies that benefit massive corporations if the massive corporations have bought enough influence in Washington to ensure nothing gets done?

Despite Roger’s small stature, I don’t think he is even 5 feet tall, he has a big voice on this subject.  I have followed him on Facebook for quite awhile and generally find myself shaking my head in agreement to most of what he says.

He does have some ideas that seem a bit far out there, even for me, like wanting to raise the minimum wage nearly 50% beyond the new levels Obama had mentioned ($10 and hour).  Robert wants $15 an hour as the new minimum hourly wage.

Robert says without a strong middle class, the country will rot from within, as it is the middle class that does the majority of the spending that drives consumption of products and services in our country.  His thinking is if people make a higher minimum wage, more of that spending can occur.  Of course there are counterpoints to this theory such as increasing the minimum wage could cause even greater unemployment or drive up inflation.

I did find it quite interesting that the one woman featured in the documentary was a Costco employee,  a big chain that sells goods warehouse style like Wal-mart does with Sam’s Club.  The retail market for the most part has been operating under the guise that there is absolutely no way that a retailer can offer employees decent wages and still be profitable.  Well Costco is a huge middle finger to that concept.  The woman was making $21+ an hour.  It can be done.

Please take an hour and a half out of your life and check it out.  I guarantee regardless of your political inclination you will get something out of it. It will give you a reason to really think about what sort of society we are becoming.

So sometime yesterday I noticed a flood of error messages hitting my email.  They are messages that mean that for some reason my local server was unable to pull mail from my host, IX Webhosting.  This happens from time to time.  Sometimes the issue is local, sometimes the issue is at IX but typically it doesn’t last very long so I just ignored it.

Well when I checked back on my mail later I saw I had 300+ of these error emails so I figured it was time to see what was up.  Evidently my good pals at IX, whom I have had various issues/rants about over the last 5 years had a major hardware problem.

The way it was described was they had “multiple” drives fail simultaneously in their SAN (storage area network)  This SAN evidently was shared storage for 150 or more servers at IX, meaning every single one of these servers was now dead in the water.

In IT it is quite common for hard drives to be built in such a way thet they offer redundancy since they are the most failure prone device in a system.  Tiny platters spinning at 5000-15000 rpm’s 24 hours a day, 7 days a week are going to die sooner or later.

To combat this, RAID was invented (redundant array individual disks).  In layman terms, you tie several hard drives together in such a way that if one fails your data is intact, you simply replace the failed drive and all is fine again.  The most common level of RAID is RAID level 5 which is what I just described.

However in a huge ISP RAID 5 is simply not enough protection since data storage is so critical.  There are higher levels of RAID.  Level 6 allows for up to two drives to die at the same time, something which is statistically minute however an ISP needs that level of protection just because the hard drive arrays are depended on by literally thousands of customers.

Well in IX’s explanation of the failure they used the failure as “multiple” disks.  I would like to know what multiple means. Because if multiple means two drives failed at the same time, which as I said is very, very, rare, that means they had their SAN only using RAID 5, which is very irresponsible and poorly designed.  Of course they would never admit that publically.

So anyway, every single thing in my personal internet web sphere has been offline for 24 hours and counting.

The IX status page has been DESTROYED by customers bitching non-stop about the outage as you can imagine.  I saw no need to pile on, since being in IT I can sympathize with the engineers that are trying to get this data disaster monster back in it’s cage.  It doesn’t make me any happier though about IX overall as a web hosting company.

Time and time again they have let me and many others down.  The only thing that has kept me there is the massive task I would face relocating my earth mover sized pile of content to another web hosting provider.  Depending on how much longer this drags on, the effort/reward formula to move my sites might just tip the other way.

I got my new Gunnar computer glasses on Friday.  I wore them during the weekend while I was on the computer and brought them into work today.  So far I like them.  They are so light I hardly know I am wearing them.  Visually, they brighten, focus and slightly magnify the images on the screen.

Things just look better through the Gunnars.  I plan to wear them full time at work.  I won’t be able to give a full report card until I give my eyes time to adjust.  I am hoping that my distance detail vision slowly will come back around.

So the re-screen on my pool cage is not yet complete, despite the original timeline that would have had the job completed on Wednesday.  Yesterday they got the side panels on the cage done but the roof of the cage is still wide open.  My quick walk around inspection looked like they did a nice job on the panels that were done, they looked tight and clean.  I talked to the installer on the phone last night.  He assured me they should be done today.

This weekend I have a small 5K to time on Saturday morning, after that the weekend has a more or less normal format planned with chores, exercise and movies all being part of the equation.

I had something that floated through my head within the last 24 hours that I wanted to expand on.  Unfortunately it appears to have floated out of it already.

I have always been intrigued that I have gone through my adult life with good vision.  The reason is both of my parents have poor vision and have worn glasses most of their lives.  My sister also has bad vision.  Somehow my brother Todd and I wound up with a decent set of eyes.

As I was in my late 30’s I started getting the predictions from those older than I am, “Just wait till you hit 40!  Your eyes will go to shit.”  Well 40 came and went without my noticing any significant change in my ability to see.  Somewhere around 2-3 years ago that started to change.

My job, which puts me in front of two computer screens for the better part of 40 hours a week, obviously requires non-stop focus on items that are relatively close to my face, roughly two feet with my desk layout.  My vision at my job has remained rock steady, I have no problems reading, close.

However what has started to happen is I struggle reading/focusing on things that are further away.  Reading small text on the bedroom tv that is 10-12 feet away is a challenge.  The most difficult thing for me to read are LED’s at a distance.  If I try to look at the clock on the microwave from more than short distance away it all fuzzes into a green blur.

I HATE to admit to any age related degradation taking hold of my body so I have just dealt with it.

Well yesterday I took a small step to hopefully address the issue, buying a pair of Gunnar glasses.  Many geeks have known about these glasses for awhile, I just heard about them a few days ago, despite being a pretty big geek myself. These are glasses that are designed for people that sit behind video screens for significant portions of a day.

The description for the glasses is full of neato buzz words like, “i-AMP lens technology”, which is designed to help prevent DEF (Digital Eye Fatigue) and CVS (Computer Vision Syndrome).  They also are tinted yellow which blocks “harmful blue light”.

Sure I love tech so tech computer glasses sound cool to me but the only reason to buy them is if they work.  As I looked through the large amounts of Amazon reviews on the glasses the overwhelming opinion on Gunnars is, they work.

I read many accounts of people suffering from tired eyes, eyestrain and headaches prior to getting their Gunnars.  The glasses in most cases significantly improved the problem.  The glasses focus the digital images and also offer slight magnification.

Well this is all well and good but I can still see my monitors just fine and I don’t have any noticeable issues with eyestrain.  However the reason I decided to try a set were a few reviews that talked of similar problems to mine where distance vision was suffering after looking at screens all day.  These people found Gunnars helped that condition as well.

I used my Amazon spiff points to pay for the majority of the cost of the glasses so I had little to lose by giving them a shot.  If they help me read the microwave better down the road, cool.  If they just ramp up my level of  geekiness that is fine as well.  Maybe they will make me at least look intelligent.

Somehow I have managed to find my way back to playing some WoW in recent weeks.  Not only am I playing, I am enjoying playing the game, an accomplishment for a nearly 10 year old game.

So I got a report from my one retired neighbor during the day that she did not see anyone at my place doing work on the pool screen.  This concerned me since the screen guy said he would be starting with the screen removal and cage washing yesterday afternoon.  When I pulled in the driveway last night the first thing I did was take a walk out back which confirmed nothing had been done.

Anyone that has read my blog for a period of time knows how I feel about businesses (or people) that do not do what they say they are going to do.  Even worse is when they don’t show up and don’t at least call you to let you know they will not be showing up.  I received no call yesterday.  I have had incredibly poor luck since moving to Florida with dealing with the service industry.  It seems underpromising and overdelivering is a concept foreign to most Sunshine State business owners.

I let out a long sigh before dialing up the installer, I hate having to deal with this shit time and time again.

So I get the guy on the phone and he is immediately apologetic.  He said the job he was supposed to finish up Tuesday morning ran long.  He said he did not have my phone number with him to let me know and he planned to call me when he got back.  The excuse loosely held water since I had him scribble down my cell phone number the day before, I did not call him from it so it would not have been in the phone already.

He apologized several times and assured me they would be out at the house today to begin the work.  I accepted his excuse.  I did not immediately take an agitated/combative stance towards the guy.  He gets one strike before the gloves come off.

Last night I clumped all 146 of my 6 second long Vines into one almost 15 minute long compilation.  It’s an amazing collection of moronic behavior.

The rest of my evening was mostly spent puttering around in WoW and reading a couple more chapters of Inferno.

My neighbor across the street had his pool cage re-screened a year or so ago.  I asked for the guys name that did it since he was reasonably priced and did a good job.  The installer stopped by shortly after I got home from work.  The estimate number he gave me was more than what the neighbor paid but my pool cage is a lot bigger so I expected that.  It was still reasonable.

I was surprised when he said he could actually get to work later this afternoon.  The guy does the work with his son.  Today they are supposed to be removing all the old screening and pressure washing the cage frame.  Tomorrow they will be installing the new screening.  I like that he includes a 10 year warranty on his panels considering the original screening started ripping a couple years after installation.

As the guy and his son walked the cage they were commenting on the installation of the existing screen, some of which was original, some of which I had replaced.  They were pointing out how some panels weren’t done very well, probably the ones I replaced.  Of course I didn’t feel the need to fess up to it. The work will consume the majority of my tax refund but it’s something that needs to get done.  Much like painting the exterior of the house, it’s a job that I think I am better off paying someone else to do and to do it right.

Yesterday Cindy was nice enough to stop by my mom’s place to pick up her fake Xmas tree for storage in one of my sheds.  She also grabbed mom’s tax paperwork so I could do her income taxes.

I decided to not waste time and did the taxes online last night using TurboTax just as I have for the last several years.  In less then a half hour I was done, with mom getting a refund similar to last year’s amount.  On the plus side mom made more money this year.

I was surprised to see my Google ad revenue that goes directly to mom totaled up to more than $700 for the year.   In 2014 I am pretty sure the ad dollars for the year will easily break 4 digits.  When you combine the slight bump in income with the huge chunk of money mom has been saving since giving up cigarettes in early January, for the first time in a long time mom has a little more room to breathe financially.

I really enjoyed my long three day weekend following the fun road trip into frozen western PA.  I tended to most of what needed to get done on Friday, leaving the other two days of the weekend to do what I wanted to do instead of what I had to do.

One of the things I got done Friday was picking up a new box spring for the king size gel infused foam mattress I bought off Woot last week.  The bed is for the guest room, replacing the too small for two people queen bed, that was graciously donated to me by Jeremy after I separated.

The foam bed came shrink wrapped and rolled up like a burrito.  It also appeared to be vacuum sealed with all of the air sucked out of it.  The bed came shipped to me in a huge, heavy duty drawstring bag that may be repurposed for other use in the future.

I lugged the bed on top of the box spring and started cutting away.  Once I punctured the plastic seal it was pretty cool how the bed “inflated”, sounding like one long inhale.  In a couple minutes the mattress had fully regained it’s original shape, looking like a regular mattress.

I had to give the mattress a quick test run.  The foam felt firm but soft at the same time as it conformed to my body shape.  I think future house guests will be quite happy with the bedding upgrade.

I also was very fortunate to have the old queen bed set out of the house before 5PM.  My neighbor that will check in on Tuki and the dogs when I am away, knew someone that was looking for a bed.  They came and grabbed it late afternoon.

The one thing that was not quite so enjoyable about the weekend was the temperature.  It seems pretty strange to be complaining about it being too hot after shivering in 1.5 degrees less than a week earlier.  But hey, it’s too fricking hot for February.  My thermometer read 86 degrees on Saturday afternoon.  The temps included high humidity as well adding to the irritation.

On Saturday morning Cindy and I got up early to go run at the local track once again.  It was VERY foggy.  As we ran circles the moisture on our face/bodies was equal parts fog and sweat.  We put in 3 miles at a slower pace than a couple weeks prior but it just felt good to get out there and move.

Cindy worked on Saturday.  I had a few things to get done around the house but it was all very minor.  I headed out to Home Depot to grab some vegetables for the garden, hoping to replenish it from the cold weather damage.  I loaded up on a big variety of crops, grabbing spinach, tomatoes, eggplant, broccoli, peas, and banana peppers.  When I got home I prepped the raised beds, pulling out the two sections of bolted lettuce and turning over/raking a number of other empty beds.

Of the pre-existing crops, my kale is doing the best, I have 7 or 8 healthy plants.  My swiss chard, which was getting devoured by insects is making a comeback presumably from my treating it with insecticidal soap.

By the time early afternoon rolled around I had everything I wanted done, done.  I decided to take the opportunity to totally relax the rest of the afternoon.  I played a couple hours of WoW and then dug further into Inferno, the Dan Brown book I started reading in PA. It was very nice to just relax.

Saturday night Cindy and I went to see the new RoboCop movie.  I looked at no reviews of the film ahead of time but figured it had the potential to be a clunker just like so many movie franchise reboots are.  I was pleasantly surprised.  I really liked the movie, I think it actually was neck and neck with the original Robocop in my book.  I give it a solid A-, we both thought it was good stuff.

We started Sunday morning once again with exercise.  I had forgotten that the waterpark reopened this past weekend.  I figured the near summer-like conditions would lend themselves to getting some swim time in.  We decided to pair it up with a bike ride to make a training brick, something I haven’t done since the waterpark closed for the season last September.

The ride was short compared to the 20 and 30 mile routes we have done in recent months but it was tough none the less.  Cindy was really having a hard time with her breathing due to the VERY heavy pollen count in the air right now.  She had a tough time keeping pace which for her is very unusual, normally it is me sucking wind to keep up with her.

Her breathing was too bad to try to swim however she hung out while I put in two very tough 400 yard segments in the pool.  The first 400 actually felt worst than the second.  The first time back in the pool after a long lay off always feels that way so it wasn’t unexpected.  I emerged from the water feeling like my first 2014 training brick had whacked me in the head like a real brick.  I was really pooped.

After the park we had a nice lunch at Panera before heading into Target to get a new comforter.  The comforter that has been on my bed actually is the one that used to be in the guest room and is more of a match for the colors in there.  I was buying a new one for the master bedroom. We wound up finding a decent set on clearance, the $30 price tag made it very appealing.

The rest of my Sunday was pretty laid back and enjoyable, just as the rest of the weekend had been.

The Winter Olympics are over, bummer.  I watched a decent amount of coverage but not a ton.  I didn’t catch one second of curling which is disappointing.  Unfortunately it is normally only televised on NBC’s cable channels.

Since I finished watching Sopranos I hooked into a new HBO show, True Detectives.  It caught my eye when it was being promoted because it had two actors that you normally only see on the big screen nowadays, Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey.   Cindy and I got through the first three episodes yesterday.

It’s a good show with a very dark tone to it.  Woody and Matt’s characters are both very interesting and well written.  I find McConaughey’s character fascinating.  Some of the lines he uses to describe his overall negative but honest viewpoint of the human race and religion are brilliantly stated.  I wish I had thought of them.  If you have access to HBO you should be watching this show.

Inferno also is based around a very negative premise, how world overpopulation is the TRUE source of so many things tagged as worldwide calamities like ozone depletion, global warming, water/food shortages, pollution, and animal extinction.  All of these problems are actually symptoms stemming from the incredible population growth of human beings in the last 200 years.

Any logical individual should be able to see a chart like this and realize something has to give. Despite this, the majority of the world gives no thought to the the meteoric rise of population and the inevitable end results if it continues unabated, the collapse of civilization as we know it. As long as we can get our McDonald’s food and Iphones the world must be ok.  The discussion of the function of human denial in the book is one I find myself shaking my head in agreement with quite often.  The big picture often is just too scary/overwhelming to look at so instead we just look away.