Archives 2014

Very little to add since I did a blog update late yesterday afternoon.

I am looking to redo some things about my fitness routine, not so much changing what I do dramatically but more when I do it.  For whatever reason I arbitrarily decided to make squat/DL day Wednesdays  6 months ago when I started including it as a consistent part of my weekly routine.    However since doing this my endurance training has really suffered.

The biggest reason for this is squat/DL day has a bad habit of making my lower body very, very sore.  So sore that when Saturday rolls around, they day I used to do a long run, my legs/knees/hips still felt pretty miserable and not up to the task.  So as a result I just don’t get out much to run, well that and the persistent right knee pain I have been dealing with.

So anyway, my new plan is to move my DL/Squats to early in the week, either Monday or Tuesday.  My hope is doing so will allow my lower body to recover enough to run by the weekend.  In has been my experience that doing lower body strength work and running have been more or less mutually exclusive, at least in my world.  Either I squatted or I ran, never both on a consistent basis.

My Saturday was pretty jam packed.  I first headed outside to work the normal outdoors maintenance which was sorely needed since the last two weekends race logistics and/or Randall housing kept me from my normal rounds.  The garden was pretty messy.  I spent time removing things that were killed or severely damaged from the cold few days we had the last couple weeks.  I walked around and picked up a lot of yard shrapnel and then made my rounds with the weed whacker, something that hasn’t been done in weeks.

I then moved inside where I cleaned and did additional prep for the party.  It just felt like there was tons to do even though in the back of my mind I realized I had most of the day Sunday to prep as well if needed. I just hate procrastinating.

One of the big things I needed to get knocked out on Saturday was making my chocolate birthday cake, as it was promised as one of the features of the SB party.  I once again filmed the cake creation process, this time being much more concise in documenting it.  The entire video is less than 5 minutes.  I think this cake turned out the best of any attempts I have done.  The cake itself was super moist and the icing turned out just about perfect in flavor and texture.

Cindy and I went to see I Frankenstein Saturday night.  The movie was dead smack in the middle for me.  It was fine but would have been equally fine viewing at home and definitely was not worth the premium to see it in 3D.  It gets a B.

So Sunday morning Cindy and I tossed around the idea of doing a DD bike ride however it was really foggy early on so we scrapped the idea in favor of getting a head start on party prep.  Cindy had planned on a nice varied selection of food items so her primary job was food prep although she had really put a lot of planning into other elements of the party as well.  Most of my contribution was technical and logistical, move that, set up this, etc…

One of the ideas I had was to set up a second tv on the pool deck so people could enjoy the game outdoors if seating got to be a pain indoors.  I had bought a cheap portable antenna to pull in the signal from the Ft Myers tower.  I set the tv up, attached the antenna and had a crystal clear HD picture.    Too bad it turned out that not a single person watched the game outside, instead the game was broadcast outdoors for whatever gnats were hanging around.  Part of my Sunday also included hopping on the tractor and quickly mowing the yard to compliment the weed whacking I performed the day before.

I had to do some work on a server at work from home Sunday.  At least it was supposed to be from home.  Unfortunately something went wrong with my remote control session and I had no choice but to haul ass into work to fix it and then haul ass back out to the house to help in the final prep.

While I was in the shower Randall had shown up, fresh off his first ever half marathon in Miami that morning. (grats dude)  It was VERY hot for early February, not a good day to run at all.  I was glad to see he survived it, that is all you are really trying to do your first time.

So surprisingly people did actual start showing up around 5 to take advantage of my backyard playground. Before we long we had 10 people+ outside taking turns on the slackline, flipping tires, and messing around on my pull up bars.  It was a fun way to start the event. I was the only one to successfully traverse the line the entire distance, twice, just saying. 😉

So the party then moved indoors and the drinking began in earnest.  I had planned for people bringing a lot of their own beer in addition to the 4 cases I bought.  I turned the utility sink into an auxiliary cooler by cleaning it up, lining it with a trash bag and dumping in a bag of ice.  It worked out pretty well.

With people bringing their own  adult beverages we just had a ridiculous amount of alcohol on hand, enough to fulfill the drinking needs of a group four times the size of what we had.  We were over provisioned for food as well but not to quite the same degree thank goodness.

So the game started and the fun ramped up.  Most of the room was pulling for the Broncos, my buddy Sean was really the only person really pulling for the Seahawks, and in a very demonstrative manner at that.  He was so into it that I grabbed my ancient number 55 Brian Bosworth Seahawks jersey that I bought for some odd reason two decades ago, and gave it to him. I even personalized the jersey with his name.

The game was surprising in many ways, starting with the Seahawks scoring a safety on the very first play of the game.  If someone would have picked SAFETY as the first type of score on the betting board they would have cleaned up.  The Seahawks absolutely demolished the Broncos from start to finish.  The number one defense versus number one offense match up was a clear beat down, something like the 2nd or third biggest blow out in Super Bowl (no I am not going to say the Big Game, fcking ridiculous) history.

I thought the commercials this year were very strong although because of the noise in the room I had a hard time hearing some of them from time to time.  I won’t bother reviewing them, my general opinion follows most others in what were the best.  There was some very creative and funny advertising genius on display for sure.

A group of people had to head out around halftime for various reasons but there was still a strong core group that lasted to the end of the game. Despite our encouragement for others to take food/drink with them, for the most part we wound up keeping enough food/beer to feed a small army.

All in all I think the party was a huge success, everyone appeared to have a lot of fun which is all you hope for when hosting something like this.  Heaping amounts of credit needs to go on Cindy’s back.  She really did a hell of a job making sure people were taken care of. After everyone left it was just Randall, Cindy and I.  Randall took Monday off so he could just crash at my place.  We stayed up for awhile trying to get as much cleaned up as possible.  There was quite a bit as you can imagine.

This morning I woke up not really feeling hung over at all, just tired.  Although I drank probably a six pack at the party or a little more, I shut it down pretty early instead of drinking right up to the bell which probably helped.

When Randall got up I fired up Season 2 of The Walking Dead video game.  I had bought the game a couple weeks ago but hadn’t tried playing it yet.  I bought it on the bedroom Xbox so I had to download it to the great room Xbox before I could play.

So I fire up the game and start playing.  After maybe 20 minutes of play I zig when I should have zagged and die.  No problem, the game does auto saves along the way so if you die you can jump back in close to that point.  Well on the death screen there is a prompt to hit the A button to continue.  I hit it, nothing, oh, maybe it’s doing something in the back ground. I wait some more and hit it again, nothing.  What the fck??

Ok well it appeared obvious the game was hung.  I assumed it was just a glitch so I exited the game and figured I would be back to my last save point.  Wrong.  I launched the game and was transported back to square one, well that is annoying as shit.  I handed the controller over to Randall so he could go through it the second time.  I wrote it off to the Xbox just fcking up.

So Randall does well and gets well past the point where I died before he bites the dust.  He put in at least a half hour of time in.  Again I am presented with hit A to continue screen and again it does nothing.  What the fck??????????!!!!!!  I had no option but to again exit the game and again we lost all progress, we now had put well over an hour into the damn game and our reward was to start over again.

Well before I got on the hamster wheel on more time I decided to check online to see if this annoying problem was isolated to me or not.  The answer was not.  Evidently the problem is the end result of Microsoft’s stupid licensing restrictions.  Basically, because I bought the game on my other Xbox, it wasn’t allowing me to save the game on another one.

This behavior is annoying enough as is.  To me, if I bought a game I should be able to download and play it on any Xbox I own.  But even if you set that belief aside, allowing me to install the game on another console with no warning of any sort alerting me to the fact that I will wind up wasting tons of time if I ever die, is ridiculous.

I did find a “fix” for the behavior.  Basically you do a license transfer of your downloaded content from one Xbox to another however this is a one way trip.  Now I can no longer play the game on my bedroom Xbox and Microsoft only allows you to do a license transfer once every 4 months.  This sort of restrictive use policy is bullshit in my opinion.  If I bought a hard disc copy of the game I could load and play it on either system without issue.  Just because I buy a copy of a game that is digital only format doesn’t mean that ability should be removed.

After Randall left I still had a number of to do’s.  I ran out to get supplies to change the oil in the SSR, Tacoma and Cindy’s Miata.  All three vehicles were overdue for an oil change.  Cindy’s won’t get done till this weekend but I knocked out the SSR and Tacoma this afternoon.  I also swapped out the air filters in both vehicles.

Overall things went well before I received a dirty oil facial while working on the Tacoma.  The truck was parked in the same direction as the wind was blowing rather strongly.  Once I removed the oil drain plug the stream of warm, dirty oil was immediately misdirected out of the oil catch pan and all over the driveway and my upper body.  It was a mess.

I had some ideas of installing the auxiliary trans cooler I bought for the Tacoma but I decided my time would be better spent putting the rest of the party hangover items away.  I repacked the unused beer in the boxes it came in.  I had a full case of Michelob Ultra and nearly full cases of Coors, Bud Light and Miller Lite when I was done.  During the afternoon I was able to give  away half of my beer surplus, donating the Coors to my neighbor next door and the Mich Ultra to my other neighbor across the street.  They both appreciated my Super Bowl party surplus.

About 4PM I finally had the house more or less back to the way it was prior to the party.

During the afternoon, the sandhill cranes that up until this point had been seen exclusively in my neighbors yard, decided to come check out things on the other side of the fence.  These birds are incredibly loud when they communicate, the loudest bird I ever heard first hand.  Today the were quiet as they walked around the yard.  I hope they decide to hang out more, they are a beautiful and awesome addition to the various wildlife that hangs out around the house.  Now if they only would scare off armadillos….

Tomorrow my normal routine returns although physically I don’t know if I am quite ready for it.  The combo of squatting and deadlifting followed by a day of ass to grass squat holds has really laid me out.  Even today, some 4 days later I have some very acute soreness from it in my legs.  Getting old isn’t for sissies.

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.

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