Cold times, beat the system, move over Commando, track and back, shoot the sky

On Friday I left work early to get a head start on covering up the property from the cold air which was predicted to drop into the 30’s in our part of town.  My prep is less extensive than it used to be, I basically just cover the garden and move anything that is in a pot inside the shed.  Cold prep also means we move the chicken coop as close to the house as possible as well as covering it up with some old comforters to block cold air.  It turned out it didn’t get cold enough to do damage but it was good insurance anyway.

The 39 degree air Saturday morning did make it challenging to time the 5K.  Cindy and I both bundled up majorly for the event.  I had 4 layers on up top.  The race was very small, not even cracking 200 participants.  Timing the event for me went pretty much flawlessly.  The only issue I had was one older guy that crossed the line with a dead chip later in the race that I caught immediately.

The race did have one wart.  The course is a simple out and back.  Well the turnaround point was misplaced which made the course nearly 2 tenths of a mile long, that’s pretty bad.  Course measurement is beyond the scope of my responsibility however.  In the past I would have probably made a bigger fuss about it, as an accurate course is one of the basic fundamentals of putting on a race.  However nowadays I keep my concerns more focused on the areas I have direct control over and responsibility for. Cindy and I rolled out of there by a little after 9:30 and were home by a little after 10.  Much like the race itself, the post race work at home was nice and tidy, things were back to normal before we ate lunch.

Saturday afternoon we worked around the house, undoing most of the cold prep I had done the day before as well as a number of smaller to do’s.  It was Valentine’s Day after all so we didn’t want to make the labor too exhaustive, although Cindy decided that she needed to do some weight work and back yard sprints just for fun at one point.

Before we went out to dinner we exchanged our small presents.  Our big present was the iPad Air that we both will get use out of.  Cindy got me some special half gloves that are specifically designed to protect the hands from getting ripped up during bar work.  Last week my hands were hamburger from two callouses that tore open. I got Cindy a cute little necklace of two giraffes with their necks wrapped around each other in a cute way.  One has small black diamonds (me) and the other has small white diamonds (Cindy).  It just seemed like a good depiction of our relationship.

I had suggested something that may have sounded borderline insane for dinner, Carrabbas.  Surely the place would be just mauled with people on a Valentine’s Day that fell on a Saturday night.  Our plan was to go earlier to perhaps lessen the blow.  Even if it was a mob scene I was prepared to just drink beer and people watch until we got a table.

So we pulled in shortly before 6PM and were handed a buzzer with an estimated wait time of 90 minutes.  Now normally this would scare me off but like I said we were prepared for a big number.  We made our way over to the bar area and ordered some drinks.  The new layout of the restaurant has made standing around the bar pretty inconvenient.  There just isn’t room to do it with the long bar seating tables wedged in there now.  There really is no good area to just stand around in and drink.  Ironically this wound up working in our favor.

Cindy spotted two ladies at the bar getting up to leave.  Since there was no room for anyone to stand near by that meant we had a clear shot to snagging those two chairs which we did.  Neither Cindy or I minded eating at the bar.  I handed my buzzer back in to the hostess, feeling like we just gamed the system, 90 minutes turned into 9 minutes.  We had a perfectly enjoyable meal at the bar, the three female bartenders were all very personable.  We were out of there by 7:30 and on our way back home.  Instead of going to the movies we thought we could watch John Wick, which I had waiting in the Netflix envelope.

The movie wasn’t quite what I expected.  Sure I figured it was Keanu kicking ass and taking names but it got a little nuts.  By the end of it I realized that John Wick may have just knocked Commando off the throne as the most bad guys killed by a single person in a movie category.  It was like singing Old McDonald substituting “head shot” with any animal reference in the song.  It was literally a head shot here, a head shot there, a head shot everywhere.  Now thankfully they didn’t make the head shots overly graphic or dramatic, for the most part it was just CGI blood.  Still, I thought it was a little nuts.  The movie was a solid revenge themed action flick but I can’t go any higher than a B+ on this one.

Sunday morning it was once again brisk but a few degrees warmer than Saturday.  I talked Cindy into braving the cold to do the roughly 5.5 mile “track and back” run where we run from the house to the middle school track, do one lap, and return the way we came.  We both had on long sleeve shirts when we started and both took them off at the half way water stop.  I personally love running in temps around 50 degrees.  Cindy likes it warmer but she did ok anyway.  This was the first time I tried the T and B since my various knee, calf and groin problems I have dealt with for the last couple weeks.  I was happy to be able to complete the run feeling pretty good and doing so at a pace 10 seconds a mile faster than the last time.

We had some errands to go run which we did in the top down glory of the SSR.  One of those stops was Rural King for the second week in  a row.  For the second week in a row they had baby chicks there and for the second week in a row Cindy was seriously considering adopting some of them.  Once again we were able to resist the temptation and left there with just supplies for the four chickens we already have.

Cindy’s daughter and her boyfriend stopped out a little after lunch time.  They were coming to borrow the Tacoma to pick up a table.  Both Katie and Daniel have stopped smoking for the last month and a half which Cindy and I were both very happy to hear.  I also got to check out Daniel’s new 2005 350Z he just picked up.  It’s a sharp set of wheels, maybe a little too sharp for an 18 year old, hopefully he doesn’t get in trouble with it.

Sunday afternoon I decided to begin what I knew was going to be an unpleasant task, stripping out most of the mulch around the pool deck area.  My intentions were to pull out the old mulch and the old weed block beneath it.  I would then later lay down fresh block and recover the area with the shredded tire mulch that lasts forever and will not cause mulch dirt to get spread on the pool deck if the chickens dig in it.  Well this task was very labor intensive.

Normally Cindy would be right in there with me digging and carting but her lower body was very sore from the weight work on Saturday followed up with Sunday’s run.  That left me as the sole pack mule.  The mulch removal process was slow, dirty and aggravating.  I would try to grab the edge of the weed block and pull it up to allow the mulch to pile up, making it easier to shovel into the yard cart.  Each time I would fill the cart I would drag it to either the orchard or a low spot next to the garden to dump it for repurposing.  It just got to be a lot of labor.

The process was complicated by things that were buried in the mulch like long, steel cable like roots, and the old drip irrigation hose system that I used before I installed the sprinkler system.  It all had to get ripped out.  During this process I discovered that the 14 foot high cactus by the one door has INCREDIBLY long roots, some extending at least 50 FEET from the cactus.  It was pretty incredible.

As I was outside I had the chickens out of their coop as well.  However I also kept an eye on the sky.  Over the weekend Cindy and I noticed a hawk perched in the backyard with a clear eye on the birds.  It’s bad enough to have to deal with raccoons waging a ground assault on the birds, now we also have to watch for aerial attacks as well.  I had my Crossman air rifle out there with me and actually took a shot at the hawk as it was in the tree to scare it off.  I didn’t aim for the bird of course, just close enough for it to get the idea it wasn’t welcome.

The chickens loved being able to roam about although they spent most of their time nestled deep inside the one bed area, giving themselves dirt baths.  It seems clear that they are getting more used to us and don’t see us as threats.

We finished up outside around 6PM.  I was BEAT and running on fumes.  The rest of the night we relaxed and took in another “Better Call Saul” episode, the Breaking Bad spinoff.  I am quite pleased that so far the spin off seems to have a good taste of the flavor that made Breaking Bad so interesting.

Today I am enjoying my government holiday.  I hope to only have a small dose of chores/work mixed in with a big glass of just chilling.