Archives 2014

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.

Last night it dropped down into the kill zone outside.  When I woke up the outdoor thermometer was hovering in the 38-39 degree area.  Cindy was again off yesterday and was nice enough to cover the most sensitive things on the property.  I was amazed at how well she protected the banana trees, which are probably the most cold sensitive thing on the property.  If they die back after that sort of insulation I am just going to pull them out. Cindy did an equally good job of covering up the garden with frost cloth.

It looks like last night was probably the coldest of the next 4 cold days on tap but I am not going to pull the covers until the forecast is clear of predicted overnight lows of 45 degrees or less.

Yesterday was filled with half marathon/running club related work.  This will only intensify the next couple days.  Tonight I am heading right from work to packet pick up and then Saturday I will be spending a good chunk of my time there as well.

It’s times like these where I am glad that I am one of those no good, lazy government workers that gets MLK day off. I need a mental health day after half marathon weekend.

Unfortunately I have many matters that require my attention and focus for the next few days.  Until that time has passed any blog updates will be rather quick and to the point.

Last night’s board meeting meant I was delayed in getting home to do the prep for the first of three days of race packet pick up.  In addition I had to craft and send out a race instructions email to the 2300+ race participants.

The weather forecast for the next 5 days does not make me smile.  Tonight is promising to be another potential landscape killer with temperatures possibly dipping into the 30’s.  Cindy is off today and is going to try to get stuff covered herself although I think it will be very difficult with the gusty winds.  I will be heading home a bit early to handle whatever else needs to get covered.

Although it looks like tonight will be the coldest of the next several days, there are plenty of other mornings with lows that start with the number 4, including the day of the half marathon. It will translate into one of those miserable mornings where I feel chilled to the bone no matter how many layers I pile on.

Back to work….

So last night I had more packet prep to do.  I downloaded the names of everybody that registered for the race since Friday night and created labels for them.  I then had to affix the labels to the respective packet that just had a number on it previously.  There were more than 100 packets I had to label up.

On the way home I also stopped and bought 200 more 9×12 packets, just to be safe.  I have less than 100 to go until I hit packet number 2500.  Tonight Cindy and I will be working on creating the additional packets, fun.

I had not been doing hardly any Vining recently.  I either was lacking inspiration or just busy with other things.  Well last night I had a burst of Vines, something that seems to normally happen, you never do just one.  I think I made 5 or 6 of them.  As always they are viewable via the Vine app or my Twitter page.

Last night I also did some more messing around streaming Hearthstone utilizing Xsplit and Twitch.tv  I think it worked but nobody was in my channel to see. 🙁  Here is my Twitch channel.

Saturday morning Cindy and I were involved with a packet stuffing party for the half marathon at one of our generous board members home.  It was quite the production getting 2500 envelopes stuffed with pins, twist ties, hand outs, a race bib and timing chip.  We broke the process apart into sections where different people had different roles.  As in most things I tackle, I had a general mental framework of how I thought things would go but didn’t have anything written down.

I was primarily working on the processes where numbers mattered, as in applying numbered labels to the envelopes and then later making sure those numbered envelopes got a race bib and timing chip that matched.  Cindy played a very important role, the human sorter.  She was handed stacks and stacks of envelopes that were in order but in different numeric ranges.  She had to make sure they were in order twice, once when they left our packet labeling operation and a second time after we put the bibs and chips in them at the end.  She was on the move non-stop.

For some reason I thought the 3 hours we allocated to the project (9-12)was overly generous.  Somehow I thought it would take less time.  We used every bit of the 3 hours and then some.  It was just a ton of stuff to do, thank goodness we had upwards of 15 people there lending a hand at one point.  My dining room table now is completely covered in boxes of packets, ready to hand out.

The funny thing is I am actually going to have to make some more packets tonight.  The numbers for this years race are already 150 participants higher than last year with nearly a week to go.  I need to stay ahead of the curve.

We didn’t get home from the packet stuffing till almost 2PM.  I wasted little time before I was outside attending to outside chores.  When I was done with chores I set up the slackline again for more balance training.  I set it up between trees that are much closer together than last week.  The line was probably only 25 feet across.

The shorter line combined with utilizing some beginner tips I saw on a few videos helped me do better than the week before.   I had a couple slow and controlled steps that looked much better than the flail-fest I put on the week before. Cindy did very well too.  She discovered she is pretty adept at walking backwards on the line.  She even pulled off a couple 180 degree turns while we were out there.

Slacklining works muscles and joints in a way that I am not accustomed to.  Both of my hips are extremely sore.  Like anything else, continued practice should reduce the physical side effects. If you want to see a brief clip from our session, here you go.

On Saturday night Cindy and I saw Lone Survivor.  For the second consecutive visit, the normally quiet and lightly attended Cocounut Pointe theater was MOBBED, worse than last time.  Luckily the theater has the capacity to support large amounts of people but I don’t know why all of a sudden the movie population there has swelled so much.

My theory is that Cindy and I see a TON of movies in the theaters, way more than I ever did in the past.  I think I may have been just generally avoiding going to the movies during season in years past.  It is only now that I am seeing the belly of the beast the snowbirds bring with them.

The movie was compelling, tense and tragic.  It will give you a greater appreciation of what our troops go through in the name of service to our country, if you needed more more reason to appreciate them.  It gets a solid A.

Sunday morning Cindy and I resumed our weekend endurance training, doing the 20 mile round trip DD ride.  The ride there had some favorable wind resulting in a 20+ mph average pace.  The ride back was much less favorable but we still managed an overall pace for the 20 miles of over 18 mph.

While we were enjoying our DD coffee at the halfway point of the ride I created a FB event for a Super Bowl party at my place.  Cindy and I had been talking about it for a few days.  Ali and I did several SB parties in the past and although they were never hugely attended, everyone involved had a good time.  I would hope for similar fun levels  this time around.  I have a pretty big invitation list so hopefully a 73 inch tv with a nice spread of beer and food is enough to entice people to make the drive out to the house.  People that live more centrally in Naples view the Estates as living on the other side of the state practically.

Sunday afternoon my buddy Sean, his girlfriend and her two kids stopped out at the house.  They had been hiking at the nearby swamp where I sometimes take the dogs so I invited them over.  We had a great time with them and the kids in the backyard practicing slacklining, running the RC car / quadracopter, and messing around in the bar park.  It was a lot of fun.

Sunday evening we watched Hangover 3, something I even questioned using a Netflix rental on.  I had already heard it was lackluster at best.  The original Hangover had me laughing so hard, so many times it was hard to believe.  Hangover 2 was ok but used almost an identical storyline from the original.  With the 3rd film they at least changed up the story but it was for the worse.  Sure I laughed out loud a few times but overall the movie just wasn’t great.  Thankfully it appears this will be the last time we will be seeing the crew together. I’ll give it a B.

This week I will be mired mostly in half marathon related work.  We already have the largest field EVER for the race with a week to go.  There are so many things to do, so many T’s to cross and I’s to dot.  I hope to not run out of ink.

So yesterday I had my first firsthand experience with a Cryptolocker infection.  An end user clicked on an email attachment she shouldn’t have and unknowingly kicked off a silent, evil, background process that encrypted thousands of files both on her local pc AND on network drives where she had write access.  Once all of the files were encrypted the user was presented with a pop up window informing her all of her files were now locked and if she wanted them unlocked she had 72 hours to pay a ransom.

The ransom is paid via either a wire transfer or bitcoins, both of which allow the cyberthugs to remain untraceable.

I had read stories regarding Cryptolocker and places that had no choice but to pay the ransom since they had no back ups available.  Infections are growing by the day.

Luckily I have implemented a couple layers of back ups on the file server.  First we have the nightly back up to a tape library, however using that would mean potentially an entire day of work could be lost on any of the affected files.  Instead I used the shadow copy feature I have enabled on these network shares.  I had one that ran at noon yesterday, cutting down on the amount of lost work, especially since most of the updating of these files occurs at the start of a business day.

The person that triggered the infection did lose all of the documents stored on the local PC as those were not backed up.  Luckily, anything important was stored on the network as it should be.

Now don’t think that having shadow copies (prior versions) turned on will necessarily save you from Cryptolocker.  One of the first things it does is delete all prior versions of files on the PC it is launched on.  Luckily it can not do this to network drives.  Having an external back up drive might not save you either, as depending on how the files are stored there, they could be encrypted as well.

So all in all I spent 4 or 5 hours repairing the damage and making some changes to reduce or vulnerability to end user ignorance in the future.  This sort of attack makes options like remote cloud back up very appealing.

Last night I had a bizarre dream.  I was in my office at home and all of a sudden a red Ferrari came spinning up onto the grass in front of the window.  He did a big donut and then parked in his driveway.  He was my new neighbor.  Of course this pissed me off but he had done it before so I just let it go and continued working.

Well all of a sudden I start hearing what sounds like heavy artillery fire.  The walls and windows of my house are shaking with every shot.  The neighbor who was short, thin and bald, a real seedy looking type, was cackling like mad as he was firing towards the palm trees in my yard.  His three equally seedy friends were with him, cheering on his artillery assault on my yard.

Well I went ape shit and tore out the door.  They had turned around and were firing in the other direction by the time I got outside.  In between shots I yell at him to get his attention.  As I am about 20 yards away he spins around, drops to the ground in sniper position and fires a couple warning shots that fly by my side.  Instinctively I drop to the ground, trying to become a smaller target.

As I am laying there I yell “What the fck are you doing!?”  He stops firing and stands up, I stand up as well.  Despite just being fired at with heavy artillery my anger again boiled to the top.  I say “Two things”, as I hold up two fingers as a visual exclamation point.  “Don’t do donuts in my yard…”  Before I could continue the guy walks up to me menacingly with his 3 cronies following closely.

He says” You know why I did the donuts, because of the bucket you threw in my yard!”  I had absolutely no idea what he was referring to. “What the fck are you talking about? What bucket?” I responded, holding my ground.  Just as I was about to cover my second point, which was firing heavy artillery at my yard was unacceptable, I woke up.

This weekend will feature half marathon packet stuffing, a trip to the movies and some sort of endurance training.  The slack line will also be strung up for further adventures in balance and patience training.

Last night was on the quiet side.  Cindy was out to dinner with her daughter and Alfred so I had a nice night at home with the girls.  One of the things I did was my first indoor flight with the Phantom, I wanted to see how it’s stability would translate indoors.  The answer was, very well. I had no issue keeping the copter under control with one hand while shooting video with the other.  It would drift around a bit due to poor GPS signal but it was very easy to keep it safe from any potential impact objects, despite it’s size.

The pets were not at all happy with my indoor flight session. The Phantom is loud and pushes large amounts of air around.  Tuki hid behind the stand on the top of his cage, Sadie stayed put in the dining room and Nicki retired to the quieter bedroom.  It was fun hovering the Phantom indoors but obviously it is much better suited for outdoor flight where it has room to spread it’s wings (propellers) .

I ordered a prop balancer for the copter.  Evidently pretty much every prop you buy will be slightly unbalanced.  This causes slight vibration which can show up in aerial video.  In order to balance a prop you mount it on the balancer, turn it so it is parallel to the table and release it.  If it falls to one side or the other that is the heavy side.  You take sandpaper and sand the heavy side slightly and repeat until the prop stays perfectly balanced.  It sounds potentially tedious but everything I have read says it is one of things you really should do.

Ali flies home this afternoon.  I will be returning the dogs to her place after work.  It seems like the girls have been with me for a long time, so long that it almost felt like I was transported back to the days where the dogs lived at the house full time.

I have been fortunate to be able to accommodate them being at the house during weekdays between the kindness of my neighbor who let them out for me several days, and Cindy, who reappropriated vacation time so she could make sure the girls were taken care of.

Both of the dogs seem to have positive results from their longest uninterrupted house stay since the split.  Sadie, who has been getting increasingly chunkified has definitely lost some weight with her nearly unlimited access to the backyard, allowing her to run off some chub. Nicki’s energy level and mobility are noticeably better as well.  Watching her be able to do more than just plod along slowly has been great.  Watching her run a little bit around the shed the other day was one of highlights of the new year so far. Waking up tomorrow without them will feel weird for sure.

I am mired in a very bad losing streak in Hearthstone, which continued last night.  Strategies that were consistently working for me no longer do.  Looks like it’s time to reevaluate.

Last night I stopped at Staples to look at 9×12 envelopes.  We are planning to use these envelopes as packets to hold all of the race information for runners at this years half marathon.  Well I really didnt look into what these envelopes cost ahead of time but when I saw 16 bucks for a pack of 100 I was surprised.  If I multiply that out times 25 to accommodate the roughly 2500 runners we are expecting it added up to a big chunk of change, nearly 500 bucks just for dumb envelopes.

When dealing with a race of this size, even seemingly minor items can add up to significant expenses.  I have Cindy looking at other sources for the envelopes.  I’m hoping to be able to pick them up for less than $10 per 100.

The race size also gets big and ugly when it comes time to produce handouts for the event.  Have you ever tried printing 2500 copies of something? It takes forever, consumes over a carton of paper, a ton of toner and fills whatever area it is being printed in with enough toner dust to give you black lung.

All of this prep I am doing is for a “party” Saturday morning where a number of kind souls will be helping us create these 2500 race packets, stuffing papers, race bibs, timing chips and other accessories into each packet which then will be affixed with a label, which I also created.  This race is the most labor intensive of the year.  I have a long and detailed mental checklist of items I need to make sure I get handled.

So it looks like Ali will finally be getting back home tomorrow afternoon.  It will be weird not having the two black furry faces greeting me when I wake up or get home Friday.

I left work a few minutes early to give me some extra time to cover up sensitive stuff in the landscape.  The forecast lows of around freezing would surely wreak havoc.  Thankfully Cindy was off from work so she could help lay stuff out.  We covered almost everything in the garden which isn’t too hard.  What is hard is trying to protect the banana trees which are ridiculously sensitive to cold.

I have had these trees for at least 6-7 years and never got any fruit from them.  The reason is every time the temps even touch the 30’s the trees get destroyed, wilt back to the ground and then start to grow again.  Well last year winter they survived unscathed so I wanted to do what I could to protect them from the cold last night.

Cindy and I spent close to a half hour trying to wrap the 4 or 5 trees in a cocoon of frost cloth.  After running several strips of the cloth across the top of the trees we finished it off with another piece wrapped around the sides.  The cloth was held in place with a combination of twine and weight plates.  I told Cindy that if the trees get damaged after all of this work I am never going to bother covering them again.

Well when I woke up this morning and saw they thermometer reading 46 degrees I was relieved.  Evidently the forecasters were off 10 degrees or so in their forecast.  It was very windy, making the wind chill feel closer to freezing.  When I looked in the back yard I saw the wind had destroyed all of the work Cindy and I did on the banana trees, the cloth was blown apart.  Good thing it turned out we didn’t need it.

Of course complaining about 46 degrees sounds pretty ridiculous compared to what they are dealing with up north.  My weather magnet showed a temp of 1 degree in Reading this morning.  I heard that schools up there were closed due to the extreme cold, something I don’t recall every happening before.

Ali was supposed to be finally flying home today but her flight was also cancelled due to the brutally cold temps so I don’t know when she will actually be coming back.

This has been the longest Ali has been away from the dogs since we split, over 2 weeks.  The dogs seem to have reacclimated themselves to  being out at the house again.  Nicki in particular seemed to really improve with her extended time at the house.  Not having to deal with 2 flights of stairs definitely has been a good thing.  Last night while we were covering plants she actual ran a bit around the shed, something I haven’t seen her do in damn close to a year I bet.

She also seems more interested in play, indoor and out.  It’s been great seeing her energy level pick up.  When I see her playing I just stand there and smile.