Archives January 2015

Last night after work as I was doing chicken maintenance I actually worked a total of 50 pull ups in as well.  You may recall last week that when I tried to do pull ups at the gym it reaggravated my back spasms.  I was quite happy to get through 50 reps last night with no reoccurrence of the pain. So far I am carefully optimistic about how my first week of workouts have been going in 2015.  I have been doing some more extensive and targeted treatment/maintenance to address some of my problems that plagued me below the belt in 2014. It seems to be helping.

I ordered a few Green Machine Timing shirts yesterday online.  Of course when you are ordering in tiny quantities your per unit cost is sky high.  I figured it was an investment.  I bought high quality, tri-blend shirts that someone would actually want to wear which hopefully results in free advertising for me down the road.

As the half marathon nears my anxiety starts to build.  I need to make sure I do everything possible to make the the event run well in the aspects that I am in charge of.  This morning I decided I want to put a label on each runners bib which will include their information as well as a custom QR code they can scan to go straight to their results online after the race.  It will require affixing a label to well over 2000 race bibs but I think the race participants will appreciate the effort.

Yesterday we had a very inefficient evening of driving.  Cindy and I carpooled yesterday.  I picked her up after work and drove home.  After no more than 30 minutes at home we got back in the Prius and drove back to Cheesecake Factory which is right across the street from Cindy’s workplace.  The nearly 50 miles of extra driving was a combination of wanting to tend to the chickens while navigating scheduling to meet up with Cindy’s daughter for her birthday dinner.

Katie is a big fan of Cheesecake Factory.  I am not.  I think prior to last night I had been there two times in my life.  There are a number of things that bothered me about the place.  The Egyptian style decor inside is bizarre and makes no sense to me.  I am not sure if this decor is unique to the Naples location or chain wide.  The lack of any sort of queuing system for people waiting to be seated is annoying, forcing you to have to huddle nearby the hostess area, waiting to have your name screamed out by staff. Finally the food never seemed good and they doubled down by giving you too much of it. But who knows, maybe things have changed.

Cindy and I lugged in Katie’s presents into the restaurant.  Cindy’s mom was already there waiting. As is customary Katie and her boyfriend were last to arrive.  Katie’s cousin Stephanie was also there to help celebrate which was cool.

I used a couple huge 22 ounce Miller Lite drafts to help take the edge off. I wasn’t in a fantastic mood entering the festivities so the alcohol helped mellow me out a bit. Katie had her first legal drink, ordering a pina colada for her 21st birthday, a big moment for young adults.

For my meal I ordered shrimp tacos off the “skinny” menu, trying to avoid one of the typical CF monster meals with 4 digit calorie penalties.  The tacos were only ok at best and the side of vegetables it came with were pretty much inedible.  It was a cold vegetable “salad” with some sort of seasoning I could not identify but had no desire to ingest anytime in the future.

It seemed like the others, especially Katie, enjoyed their meals which was good.  My lackluster meal was made better by the key lime cheesecake Cindy and I split for desert.  The waitress brought out Katie’s desert with a candle on it which we accompanied with a Happy Birthday rendition.

Katie opened all of her presents but mine in the restaurant, the box was too big to accommodate in a cramped booth.  She already knew it was a SpotBot, something that will come in quite handy in an apartment with two young dogs.

By the time Cindy and I got home I was quite tired.  I think once I closed my eyes in bed I was out in 60 seconds.

So on Friday two large boxes showed up at my door, they were the two Polywood lounge chairs I bought from Amazon.  Picking up one box let me know the chairs were substantial and well built.  The box was HEAVY.  After we devoured our Friday night pizza I got busy with assembling the chairs.

Really the only negative we read about the chairs online was the assembly was a pain for some people.  Well there were less than a dozen parts so I didn’t understand the complaints.  Once I started to bolt things together I got some appreciation.

If you use the two included allen wrench tools I  can see where it could be a pain.  The holes you were inserting the bolts into were in positions where you couldn’t get full turns.  Since most of the bolts were relatively long that meant you would be turning, pulling out, inserting, and turning some more quite a bit which would get tedious.  Of course if you have a cordless drill with allen wrench inserts things become stupidly easy.  After trying the manual method for a couple minutes I quickly grabbed my power tools.

Cindy of course was my assistant in the process helping hold and align pieces where necessary.  The chairs felt sturdy and looked great, well up to the task of surviving their incredible 20 year warranty. I also loved that they are made in the USA, such a rare thing with most material goods nowadays. Over the weekend Cindy scored some inexpensive cushions to complete the look.

The chairs were part of completing the pool deck repaint/renovation project.  The black chairs went well with all of the other old furniture that Cindy renovated with some black paint/stain.  The project was more involved than I anticipated but we both are very happy with the fruits of our labor.

Putting the pool deck back together was part of what was an unbelievably laborious Saturday.  I started work around 8:30 and put in a full blue collar day, not finishing up until after 5.  I could not even attempt to list everything that was attended to but I would not surprised if it added up to a couple dozen things.

Of course Cindy was a big part of getting things done, including taking down the interior Christmas decorations.  De-christmasing always brings it with some degree of unavoidable melancholy for me.  I wasn’t as bummed out as I have been other years but it still was a downer.

During the day Saturday Cindy’s daughter and her boyfriend stopped by to pick up my old recliner which I told her she could have for her apartment.  This is the recliner that my mom bought for me for my 30th birthday.  It is oversized and designed for a taller/bigger person.

Over the years the ironic thing is other people used the chair more than I did.  Despite it being supposedly made for tall people, the leg rest hit my legs in such a way that just wasn’t all that comfortable for me.  Since Cindy and I pretty much exclusively use my $200 Craigslist sofa set for seating the recliner has seen even less use the last few years.  I even offered it back to my mom when she said she was thinking about a recliner last year.

Well when Katie was over last she said how she loved sitting in it so it was a no brainer.  I was happy to have the chair go somewhere it would be appreciated and used heavily instead of gathering dust.  I think mom would have felt the same.

With the chair out of the great room there was suddenly a large open square of floor real estate open that had not been before.  It felt weird being able to shortcut trips back to the bedroom.  Eventually I would like to put a large pit sofa in the great room but that will be something down the road a bit.

One of the other big projects of Saturday was cleaning all of the floors in the house, dirty from dogs and holiday foot traffic.  I let the Scooba handle the kitchen while I vacuumed the rugs first with the Dyson before hitting it again with my carpet cleaner.  The gallons of dirty water going down the drain made the endless back and forth strokes feel worth it.

On Saturday night Cindy I decided to rent The Interview since it’s bizarre online/theater re-release after it was initially cancelled due to the hacker threats.  It was cool to see a movie that was just released from the comfort of my home.  The movie itself was ok but I thought it relied too heavily on dirty humor and also had some silly gore that made no sense.  Even though I fully support our right to see any movie regarding any subject matter, producing a movie that is based on killing a present day ruling dictator wasn’t a very well thought out plan in my opinion.  I think Cindy summed up The Interview for me when she said “at least it wasn’t Into the Woods”.  I personally would give the movie an average B rating, not really worth all the controversy.

Sunday morning, despite a long day of work the prior day we decided to get out for a run.  Cindy had suggested just running 60 minutes regardless of pace/distance.  I told her I was scaling back my time goal to 45 minutes since I haven’t done more than a half hour of running in months.  I wore my Garmin to check after the run but did not look at it during.

Early on my back, which had be troublesome for nearly a week, was not enjoying the up and down pounding however after a mile or so I warmed up enough that it subsided.  The pace we ran was slow and steady, just at or below the 10 minute mile rate.  Despite the slow pace, as the clock advanced my poor cardio endurance was more and more of a factor.  I finished up 45 minutes   with 4.61 miles covered according to my Garmin.  According to Cindy’s newer Garmin I covered less. Regardless I was pooped, it felt good to start 2015 with a run longer than I covered for most of 2014.

The rest of my Sunday was pretty slow paced, especially in comparison to the non-stop pace of Saturday.  Cindy however kept herself quite busy as I spent time in WoW accomplishing virtual tasks.  Despite working myself hard on Saturday and starting Sunday with a run, the net result was with me feeling lazy at the end.

I forgot to mention on here that I stopped buying/consuming cow’s milk this past week.  Although I have known for years the negatives of consuming cow’s milk I have continued to do so in smaller amounts.  My entire life I have always been a heavy milk drinker.  I will be replacing cows milk with almond milk instead.  I have been drinking the unsweetened almond milk variety (make sure it doesn’t have carageenan) with my lunch for awhile, I will be drinking the 60 calorie variety as my cow milk replacement.  I don’t think it will be that hard of a change to make, despite nearly a half century of drinking the bovine stuff.

So as is often the case when I try to recall too long of a time period into a blog entry, I forgot a few things, like two movies that we saw over the 6 days off.

On Sunday night we went to see  Unbroken, a pretty amazing true story about an Olympic athlete that was stranded at sea for a month and a half while serving in the military during WW II only to be captured and tortured by the Japanese.  I don’t know how much embellishment was put into the movie version of the story but if it was mostly accurate, it was an incredible demonstration of human willpower.  To endure what that man went through is simply incredible and makes me want to punch myself in the face the next time I complain about a stubbed toe.  It was an inspirational movie that depicts both the worst and best parts of human beings at the same time.  I give it an A.

I also neglected to mention we saw November Man, a Pierce Brosnan action flick.  Overall the movie was enjoyable but there were these odd, awkward, and unnecessary insertions of close up violence like extreme head shots or a guys head crunching on the pavement after a fall.  There also were these scattered uses of slo-mo where it made no sense, it had both Cindy and I scratching our heads.  Despite these oddities, overall the movie was a fine B+ action rental.

Ok fast forward to New Years Eve.  Cindy and I didn’t even speak a word about New Years Eve plans until the day itself.  I saw on the blog that last year we went to the movies on New Years so I asked Cindy if she wanted to do it again.  I figured with my screwed up back sitting in a movie theater was about the only thing I could tolerate.  We decided to see Into the Woods, the previews looked cute although they totally hid one crucial bit of information about the film, it’s a musical.

I pretty much universally HATE musicals, so once the movie started out singing, I was internally saying “oh, no….”  I tried to remain upbeat for as long as I could but the 3 sung words for every spoken word ratio slowly was driving me insane.  On top of that there were some creepy and outright disturbing parts of the movie that didn’t seem like they fit in a Disney produced fairytale flick.

If I was alone, I would have walked out of the film halfway through, I was that sick of it.  However I assumed Cindy was enjoying it somewhat since she is a female. Well it turns out she thought the movie was as awful as I did and she would have been totally down with leaving early.

The movie sucked so bad it inspired 3 or 4 Into the Woods themed Vines on my twitter feed. This doesn’t happen often but I give the film a D, don’t see it unless there is a gun to your head.

After the movie neither of us had any desire to go somewhere to grab a drink to watch the New Year flip over. My back pain removed absolutely any need for alcohol.  I just wanted to crash in bed, luckily Cindy felt much the same.

Now I have never be one that really cared about partying on New Years or any other day for that matter but I have pretty much always at least seen the ball drop on TV to ring in the year.  Well that streak ended Wednesday night, once I laid in bed I dozed off probably 20 minutes till midnight, the excitement of a new year could not overcome the exhaustion I felt.  Cindy didn’t make it to midnight either although she probably lasted 10 minutes longer than I did.

On New Years Day Cindy and I headed down to the two events the running club puts on, a free 5K and a Polar Plunge.  My back was starting to feel better yesterday but I was still in no shape to run.  Instead I set up my GoPro at the finish line so the runners had some documentation of their finish since it is not a chip timed event.

Cindy and I did participate in the Polar Plunge although jumping into 71 degree water is hardly worthy of the name.  Cindy only went waist high since she is just coming off illness.  I did the full deal, diving into the Gulf of Mexico for a few moments.  In total I was probably in the water for less than two minutes.

When we got back home we worked some more on getting the pool deck back together, moving the freshly hammered black painted metal furniture onto the lanai.  The stuff looked good.

The painted furniture should complement the two PolyWood chaise lounges that are supposed to show up today.  They are replacing the cheap metal lounge chairs that I have now bought twice from Bed Bath and Beyond.  The metal chairs dont last all that long, either the webbing dry rots and/or the frame rusts.  This last pair had an additional very annoying problem of spilling rusty water onto the pool deck.  Somehow their design allowed for water to accumulate inside of the frame.

These Polywood chairs which are a mixture of plastic and wood composite should literally last forever.  The material is very similar to the composite lumber you see in a home improvement store.  They were expensive but thanks to the points my Amazon credit card accumulated over the Xmas shopping season my out of pocket expense was about what one cheap metal lounge chair would cost.

We had a spur of the moment visit from Cindy’ daughter, her boyfriend and their two young dogs. Hell one isn’t young, it’s still a puppy, only a few months old, it’s a catahula mix named Bowser.  Well as you would expect mixing in the two young dogs with my dogs was quite a handful.  At first Sadie was running around the yard with the two youngsters however it didn’t take long till she tired of their non-stop hi-jinx.   She growled and showed her teeth more than once, she wasn’t thrilled with sharing her living space with the pups.

Of course another issue with young dogs is housebreaking.  Evidently both dogs are still works in progress in this regard.  Bowser did a number one and two indoors while Tank took a leak a few inches behind where I was standing which I subsequently stepped in.  It was fun times.

After they left Sadie completed the excrement cycle by throwing up while laying in our bed.  She was so casual about it.  She was asleep on her side when it started.  She never moved off her side during the expulsion.  She threw up and didn’t move an inch.  She would have been content to just lay in front of it.  Even as Cindy performed clean up duty on the comforter and Sadie herself, she did not move an inch.

I watched my first college football of the year yesterday.  First I saw Baylor totally collapse at the end of a game to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  I then saw a good portion of Oregon dismantling Florida State, an outcome a few of my FSU alumni friends are surely not happy about.

I complete my two day work week today followed by another two days off.  This is a work schedule I could surely get used to.  The dogs go back to Ali today after her extended PA holiday visit.  As usual after we have the dogs for awhile, the house will feel a little bit empty tonight.  This weekend we will de-Christmas the interior of the house and work on a lot of loose ends that feel like are hanging out.