Archives November 2015

So I will do my best to recap four days packed with more stuff than my memory is comfortable regurgitating.  Wednesday I left work early after reports of the mob scene at the running store with hundreds of people signing up last minute for the Thanksgiving race.  I got to the store and saw people lined up 10 deep.  There was no way I would have room to set up my laptop at the registration table so I instead went into the back room of the store and made my own desk comprised of a white board laid across two piles of shirt boxes. I worked back there on data entry non-stop for a couple hours.  The pile of paper I had to burn through during the last two days was just ridiculous.

When I got home Cindy had loaded most of the race equipment in the truck which was a huge help, allowing me to concentrate on getting  the data from the last minute entries handled.  We tried to get to bed as early as possible to be some version of rested for what surely was going to be a mentally demanding morning.

I was quite unhappy when I woke up at 1AM and rolled around unsuccessfully for 90 minutes trying to fall asleep a bit before the 3:30 alarm went off. At 2:30 I had enough, Cindy was already awake as well.  We got up and got ready to leave an hour or so earlier than we planned.  I knew the running club equipment truck was going to be there so I figured we could get a head start on the set up.  We wound up pulling into the start line area at a ridiculously early 4AM.

We immediately started working on laying out the start mats.  We had the 8 rubber mats in place and had just started laying the first cable when we saw a pair of headlights approaching.  The vehicle appeared to be approaching a little faster than it should be and we had a 10 meter coax cord loose in the road so I stood up and started waving my arms and yelling for the vehicle to slow down.  Well as the car got closer I saw the lights on the roof, it was a city cop.  He stopped right in front of the mats and started giving me shit.

He didn’t appreciate my tone of voice as I was yelling for him to slow down.  I didn’t appreciate him not appreciating it.  We had a rather angry back and forth exchange. He was quite put off that I was not nice in asking him to slow down and probably further put off that once I saw he was a cop that I did not drop to my knees and beg for forgiveness.  I told him that I had a loose cable on the ground and did not want it getting caught in his vehicle and damaging the equipment.  The cop asked where the safety cones were, which I had not grabbed from the equipment truck yet.  I guess I foolishly assumed two bodies on their knees in the middle of the street were a good sign to slow down, although I should have had cones there from the get go. I pulled the wire out of the way and told the cop he could go now.  He definitely won’t be sending me a Christmas card this year. Wouldn’t it have been awesome if the race timer got arrested?

As we were finishing up another vehicle rolled across the mats faster than he should have.  Again we yelled for him to slow down.  He thanked us for the warning with a stream of expletives as he drove away, a Happy Thanksgiving to you too buddy.  I did post about 8 cones around the start line mats, many of which adorned with SLOW signs to dissuade drivers from flying over them.  They were not successful.  When I returned to the start line later the mats were buckled and shifted from idiots going too fast over them.  I guess my ideas about leaving mats across the road prior to the race start just isn’t going to work out.

So as we started setting up the registration area other volunteers started showing up to help get everything rolling.  I had asked Chris to show up to help me handle race day registrations since I knew I had to make sure all of my timing equipment was up and running before the race started.  After I got done setting up the finish line equipment I returned to the registration area where the line of people signing up on race day had swollen greatly.  I was flabbergasted that this many people waited to the absolute last minute to sign up, especially considering the huge influx of people that already signed up the last couple days.  It was nuts.  I told Chris, who was also running in the event to just do as many as he could before he had to head to the start line.  I had to get there to get the start equipment up and running.  I told him whatever entries that were left I could enter at the finish line.

So the race start group was huge as you can imagine.  Having roughly 3000 people compacted into roughly a block of roadway creates quite the crowd.  I had to wait nearly 5 minutes until I could disconnect the start box.  I ran over to the registration desk and grabbed an incredibly thick pile of yet to be entered paper entries and the main laptop and ran back to the start.  I threw the timing box  and computer in the back of the golf cart and hauled ass to the finish line.  This race is brutal logistically because not only do I have to wait at the start line forever for all the runners to clear, the event also has some VERY fast participants.  The winning runner crossed around the 15:30 mark.  I got the finish line up and configured with literally less than 60 seconds before he crossed the finish mats.

Normally by the time I am at the finish line I am just collecting times and posting/printing them.  Because of the deluge of paper entries I instead found myself doing data entry for the majority of the race.  I had over 50 paper entries that were handed in last minute.  Chris didn’t stop keying them in until 7:23.   Almost all of these people were out of towners that I did not have in my participant database that made the process very slow, made slower by trying to publish some finisher results while getting peppered with questions from participants who assume I know everything since I am sitting behind a computer.  I did not get my last paper entry into the system until after the one hour mark of the race, utterly ridiculous.

Finally I was able to breathe and realize I was officially past the worst part of the worst race I had left to time.  I may have actually smiled just a little bit for the first time all morning.  The timing for the race went smoothly overall.  I had a couple problem times which is pretty unavoidable with an event this size.  I fixed those problems and have heard only a couple post race issues which again is great with a 3000 person 5K.

Cindy once again reclaimed her role as the event mascot, spending a good portion of the morning in a turkey suit encouraging the runners, especially the kids.  She really excels in this role. We rolled off site around 9:45 after helping to clean up the majority of the race equipment.  The DD coffee on the way home felt especially satisfying, we survived our last Thanksgiving race, the largest event I have ever been involved with to date.

There was little time to relax when we got home.  I had post race stuff to attend to, Cindy had a big Thanksgiving dinner to coordinate.  Her family was due to show up around 4.  We both buzzed around for a good portion of the afternoon prepping despite both of us having low energy reserves from the skimpy sleep followed by the race craziness.  We combated it with some afternoon coffee.  I followed up with a 5 hour energy just as people were starting to show up.

I did watch some of the Eagles embarrassment on tv during the afternoon but don’t even feel like wasting time typing about it.  It was a horrible, horrible game on a national stage.  Chip Kelly has been exposed as a miserable NFL personnel manger and a one trick pony when it comes to game plans. That is all I can say about it.

In addition to Cindy’s family, a friend of ours came over with her dog, Sage, who is a high energy labradoodle.  Before we let her into the backyard we corralled all the chickens back into the run for safety.  As we expected Sage was very interested in the chickens, running around the coop barking at them.  The chickens of course did not realize they were completely safe in there and started freaking out.  We tried to distract Sage and get her to play in other areas of the yard but her interest always turned back to the chickens so we headed back inside with her.

We had a lot of people under the roof, double digits including ourselves.  Cindy prepared a varied meal that was very tasty, she got good feedback from all.  The 5 hour energy and the natural energy from having all of those people around helped me stave off tiredness.

Kim was the last one there.  As her and Cindy talked I was hanging with Sage on the floor.  She was laying next to me and very content to let me rub her for as long as I wanted to.  It was cute.  When they left Cindy and I got most of the stuff cleaned up before retiring for a much needed night of sleep.  I slept like a rock with no recollection of the time in between closing my eyes and waking up around 7:30 Friday morning.

In the past I have messed around with the Black Friday scene, doing some occasional shopping.  This year I was not all that into it.  Cindy had her 9AM walking class to run so I used that time to get stuff done around the house outside, taking advantage of the cooler temps and lower humidity.  Once she got home we headed out to run some errands.  We took the SSR to add enjoyment to the trip.

One of the stops was Sam’s Club.  We took a look at some of the Black Friday stuff they had out.  One thing that caught our interest was an Atari 2600 package.  It’s basically an Atari looking console with some updates like wireless controllers and over 100 classic Atari games built in.  Cindy had an Atari 2600 as a kid and was very excited by it.  I never had one, opting for the more high end Mattel Intellivision as my first video game console.  I made an impulse buy and spent 40 bucks on the Atari system.  Later in the day when I hooked it up it did not take very long for me to realize that it was probably $40 wasted as any game I played normally was only briefly before I tired of the block graphics and klutzy controls.  Cindy, whose excitement was the main drive behind the purchase did not seem very excited about playing either.  Nostalgia sometimes sounds better than it actually is.

On Saturday I had plans to start with a run which were scuttled by an unsettled feeling stomach.   Instead we picked up Sadie and brought her home for a weekend visit.  We then got busy on part one of the two day Christmas decoration project.  I wanted to get the exterior decorations done on Saturday and the inside stuff done Sunday.  Our decorations got a few new additions this year with four fresh sets of colored string lights for the two front palm trees and a set of “AppLights” icicles for the front of the house, which are controlled via a smart phone.

The colored string lights are a first for our property.  Ali had a deep dislike for colored Christmas lights so as a result I bought/hung nothing but white lights during the last 15 years or so.  I continued the all white thing even after we split for no particular reason.  Well both Cindy and I were very happy with the addition of color to the holiday landscape.  It looked really cool and I suspect next year it will expand to the second set of four palm trees.

The icicle applights looked cool as well as they cycled through dozens of patterns and light combos.  When combined with our LED snowmen heads and techno LED string light tree we bought last year the front of the house is very busy.

We also got the chicken coop into the holiday spirit, stringing a long set of lights around the front of the run and roof line of the coop.  When it got dark out we walked the property admiring our handiwork, we were pleased.

Mid-afternoon I took part in an odd physical challenge.  When I posted about my shoulder issues last week an older calisthenics buddy of mind on FB who happens to be a physical therapist mentioned that bear crawling is a different type of way to help build up the shoulders.  I decided I would put that theory to the test in a rather large way.

I have done bear/death crawls in the backyard a few times.  Once I crawled out to the back fence line and back.  Another time I did it while towing the tractor with Ali steering it.  I thought I would up the stakes and crawl the perimeter of the fence line this time, more than doubling the total distance.  Of course I did it on video and had a stop watch running.  As expected the crawl got very uncomfortable very quickly.  I paused multiple times during the attempt but never let my knees touch the ground.  I returned to the start line after about seven and a half minutes, completely out of breath.

Cindy, who was filming my attempt then said she wanted to try it which I thought was a bad idea.  Cindy never has done bear crawls, to make her first one just short of a 1/4 mile seemed excessive.  When she started out her pace seemed slower than mine but she kept going, pausing much less than I did.  At first I thought she would stop rather early in the attempt.  Instead she kept plugging away and actually completed the circuit almost a full minute faster than I did.  My ego was officially deflated but I took it in stride.  It was a testament to Cindy’s competitiveness and determination.  We both have been feeling the side effects of the bear crawl since with some pretty major back and shoulder soreness/pain.

Saturday night we stayed home and watched our Netflix rental, Vacation, the reboot of the National Lampoon series I have always loved.  My hopes of it delivering the same level of entertainment as the original films was probably unrealistic.  There were plenty of laughs in the film but overall it fell pretty short of the bar Chevy Chase and the gang set 20-25 years ago.  Seeing Chevy in the film for a small cameo role did nothing but depress me.  Man, he looks just awful nowadays with no hair and an extra 100 pounds or so on his body.  Beverly D’Angelo looks like she has botox for breakfast every morning which was scary in a different way.  Overall the film was ok, I guess I can give it a B+ rating despite it failing to capture the magic of the originals.

Sunday morning we finally got that run in.  We decided to keep it simple and just run to the end of our dead end road and back, which worked out to be a bit more than 3.5 miles.  The cooler temps made the run feel more comfortable although Cindy’s GPS indicated we ran it at a slower pace than it felt.

When we got back we let Sadie out and noticed she had diarrhea going on, something that she has from time to time.  Cindy made rice to supplement her meals to help her solidify things.   Ali had told me she gave Sadie turkey from their Thanksgiving meal and we had given her left over turkey Ali gave to us.  I later found out that giving a dog turkey skin is actually a really bad thing.  The sky high fat content in the skin can cause big problems for dogs ranging from diarrhea to full blown pancreatitis depending how much is consumed compared to the size of the dog.   I asked Cindy if the turkey we got from Ali had skin on it, she confirmed it did. I was quite surprised by this revelation and amazed I had not ever heard it before in my many years of dog ownership.

After doing a coffee run we got started on the inside decorations which included setting up the tree and other decorations which have been reduced significantly over the last few years.  Cindy spent a lot of time tweaking the branches of it to make it look as full and pretty as possible.  The interior of the house looked warm and festive by the time we wrapped up around lunch time.

The rest of Sunday was more relaxing, the first real relaxing we did during the four days off.  I did still need to pay my bills which included a pretty big accomplishment, making the last payment on the SSR roughly a year ahead  of time.  Owning the muscle truck free and clear has been a goal of mine for quite awhile.  The removal of that loan payment means the only long term debt I am currently holding is on the house in the form of the main mortgage and the HELOC.  It feels good. I plan to continue adding to my car payment budget column even though I won’t be having a payment.  I figure it will come in handy when I finally decide to replace the venerable Tacoma.

Yesterday I walked into the running store expecting a mountain of work ahead of me.  My expectations were met.  I had a pile of paper registrations to get entered into the system and three pages of names of people that signed up online yesterday and picked up their packet the same day.  Each person that does this requires me to do a manual transfer of their bib number so everything stays in synch.

Managing the mix of pre-registered, walk ins, and late online sign ups requires some significant juggling of numbers and very carefully thought out steps.  The addition of two additional free events for this race further muddy the process.

I did non-stop data work for more than 90 minutes as a steady stream of race participants came in to pick up their race bib and event shirt. As always I struggled with legibility with participants scribbling on forms with no consideration that someone else needs to actually be able to read them.  I used to get really bent out of shape about this as one of the volunteer responsibilities is to make sure any form handed to them is clearly legible and complete.  Eventually I realized that I could repeat this until I lost my voice and I will still get chicken scratch, so now if someone hands me an entry with garbage writing I just take my best guess as to what is is.  If it’s wrong, tough shit, learn how to write or sign up online where penmanship is not required.

Something else I have come to realize is that most people are procrastinators at heart.  Despite various efforts over the years to get people to sign up early for events which allows better and more accurate event planning, the majority of the runners still will wait until the week before an event to sign up, despite it being the most expensive time to do so.  Much like crappy paper entries, I stopped fighting the trend.  Let people sign up late, pay the max rate, and enjoy your inflated bottom line.

I finally got caught up just as packet pick up was ending.  We had a good number of people pick up early on day one, somewhere around 900 bibs were handed out.  When I got home Cindy could see the all too familiar invisible weight strapped across my shoulders as I was constantly going through mental checklists and scenarios.  My eyes felt like they were encased in sand. I was hoping for a good night sleep last night to keep me fresh.  Unfortunately I woke up numerous times with my mind immediately getting busy when I did, making it difficult to fall back asleep.

My reward for all that work will be an even more intense day today where the hard core procrastinators will flock in, happy to hand over $30 to be mired in a sea of humanity tomorrow morning.  Despite the shit I still need to step through I still feel much better about things this year as it’s all part of the “last time I have to do…” scenario that will be repeating itself over the next two months.

After the race is in the rear view mirror Cindy has a nice Thanksgiving dinner planned with her family and some friends.  As usual she is putting an unbelievable amount of thought and planning into the occasion.  The rest of the 4 day weekend will have chores, xmas decoration work, exercise, shopping, and maybe, just maybe, some time to relax.

So yesterday began the ramp up to the Thanksgiving race, one of my least favorite times of the year.  After work I dropped off the materials needed for packet pick up and traded it for a big stack of paper race entries that I had to key in last night.  This morning instead of casually reading email and checking the headlines while I ate my breakfast I was instead sorting and massaging the participant data in order to provide a pre-registration plan/list that will be used during the two days of early packet pick up.  After work today I will be heading directly to packet pick up, which runs until 6:30, with a laptop in hand.  I will work on keying in paper on site to try to stay ahead of the data entry curve as much as possible.

Cindy and I are already looking forward to a personal celebration on Friday as it will mean we have cleared the largest hurdle on the race calendar for the last time and will be able to count our remaining obligations on one hand.

Saturday morning we awoke to thoroughly overcast skies which actually was a good thing since we wanted to get a run in.  The last few times we ran it was under a bright sun with warm, humid temps and I was sick of it.  This was the first run I have done in 2-3 weeks because of race/work that took priority.  We again decided to utilize the water park for our run but we changed the route a bit.  Instead of doing two loops around the outside boundary of the park we cut onto the boardwalk on lap two which both gave us some different scenery and cut a 1/2 mile of the distance which looked to be about 3.55 miles.  The lack of direct sun kept the temperatures down which I am sure was the reason it was my most pleasant running experience of the last 3 months.

It’s been nice being able to do stuff like get out and run on a Saturday morning instead of having to dive right into chores.  Cindy has been trying to get most of them done during the week so we have less to do on the weekends.  She even has been doing household repairs/improvements where she can.  For example this week she pressure washed, fixed some cracks and repainted some sections of the deck where the paint had come off.  It’s a huge help to me to have somebody so willing to lend a hand wherever she can.

Last week I made a list of winter projects I want to get done.  I wasted no time getting one of those items crossed off the list, generator maintenance.  I bought my gas generator back in 2005 during the horrible hurricane season and have basically not had to use it since.  Despite it sitting idle I still need to maintain/run it periodically if I want it to be viable when the time comes.  Saturday I changed the oil on it and ran it for an hour or two.  The generator still started easily and ran ok although it didn’t want to stay running in the full RUN position, I had to keep it mid-way between wide open and the CHOKE position of the lever.   Hopefully I should be good to go if we have any extended electrical power disruptions in the near future.

During the afternoon the overcast skies turned into all out rainy skies which continued off and on for most of the day.  We turned our attention inside.  Cindy was busy doing stuff where as I played some WoW, a big theme of the weekend for me.

We planned to go see the final chapter in the Hunger Games movies Saturday night.  Since it was opening weekend we made an effort to try to get there a bit earlier than normal.  When we stepped in the theater we saw our concern wasn’t merited this time around with the seats being only sparsely populated.  We found seats high up right behind the railing for the wheelchair patrons which is ideal since you can use the rail for foot support without worry of someones head being in the same vicinity.  Cindy spotted a woman with children, including an infant in a CAR SEAT a couple rows up and to our left.  She flagged them as potential problems but I waved it off, silly me.

So as soon as the previews start the baby starts carrying on periodically.  Cindy started with the over the shoulder glances.  I assumed if the kid kept carrying on the woman would simply take it out of the theater.  After all, bringing an infant to a movie theater is an acutely selfish act.  Sure, I understand you want to see a movie but if you can’t get a baby sitter do not punish the rest of theater patrons with the noises from your child.  You had the baby, use common sense/courtesy when making your choices as to what public environments you bring the kid to.

During the previews a set of teenage girls snuggled into the seats in the row in front of us along the aisle.  Their big thing was talking, a lot.  They also had this weird trait of laughing during emotional parts of the film.  Then of course there were the various notification sounds peppered around the theater from fcking morons that are too lazy/inconsiderate to simply flip off the speaker on their phone.  Both Cindy and I found the crowd extremely annoying, more so than normal.

When we talked about it later I said perhaps we need to redesign our movie viewing habits.  Since I started seeing Cindy we more often than not go out to see a movie during it’s opening weekend, something I NEVER used to do during my adult life.  I was always fine waiting a week or two to see a flick in exchange for much less populated theaters.  I think the fact that Coconut Point is usually pretty lightly attended, even on opening weekends, changed that behavior.   I think if we go back to avoiding opening weekends and combine it with being more stringent on selecting seats as far away from potential inconsiderate assholes as possible we may be able to cut down on our level of theater side annoyance.

For what it’s worth I really liked the movie, I thought it was well done in most aspects.  Even without reading a single sentence from any of the books I was entertained and into it the entire time enough to give it an A-, despite the crowd around us providing regular distractions.

On Sunday we had loosely planned to back up our Saturday run with a bike ride.  I awoke to a pretty incredible visual for mid-late November, torrential rain.  The water level in the pool looked to have gone up 3-4 inches.  The ponds of standing water that are normally reserved for summer wet season had made a return appearance.  Wow it must have poured pretty much all night long. Obviously a bike ride was crossed off the list.

My day Sunday outside of having to pay my bills, was almost exclusively about leisure.  I played hours of WoW, cycling through my various virtual alter egos getting stuff done.  I was incredibly busy in my mind without moving my body outside of my hands and fingers.  It was just one of those days where I felt like withdrawing from the world and existing in another, despite the rain breaking up and giving way to sunny skies later.

I sandwiched in watching the Eagles/Bucs game which was three hours of my life I would have preferred to get back.  It was the worst game of the year with the Eagles making rookie Jameis Winston look like Dan Marino and allowing the the Tampa Bay running back to gain a disgusting 230 yards.  The Eagles offense was not up to the task of keeping up.  Outside of a couple drives they were ineffective most of the day.   I am not sure how many times I have used the word “embarrassing” to describe the Eagles game play this season but there was never a more appropriate use of the word than this game.  The team is rudderless and Chip Kelly is the captain, a captain that despite his obvious failings prefers to point fingers in every direction but his own.

It has gotten to the point where I literally feel immune to their poor play.  I no longer react to their bad plays in any visible manner.  I don’t yell at the tv.  I just have become indifferent to the team disappointing me.  I have come to expect it which is a pretty damning thing to say about the Chip Kelly regime which I am ready to see come to it’s end.  Oh, the Eagles get to play on Thanksgiving, it should be a great way to ensure the post meal sleepiness kicks in.

My DirecTV Sunday Ticket this year has never been more worthless.  Not only has the team sucked, I think I have only watched 3-4 games on the service this year.  The Birds have had a ton of either night or other national broadcast games that black them out on DirecTV.  Paying over 300 bucks to watch this mess just adds insult to injury.

This week will be hectic with the largest race of the year going down on Thanksgiving morning.  Most of my attention will be directed to making sure my part of this equation goes down correctly, one last time.

So this morning I headed out to our branch located in Immokalee.  There was a network router installed a couple days ago that appeared to be “mounted” in a very poor spot.  I figured I could easily find a better location for it.  Well when I got into the closet I saw there was really no obvious options, the room was PACKED.  The router was replacing an older one which was half it’s size.  This new Cisco router was almost the size of a normal desktop pc.  It was mounted sideways on a wire shelf with telecom wire securing it in place.

So I scanned the room again and again, trying to use my McGyver instincts to come up with a better solution.  In the back corner there was a rack screwed to the wall that had fiber optic stuff in it.  I eye balled the top of the rack, wondering if I could put the router up there where it would be out of the way.

I did not want to disrupt the service to our office so I was trying to move the router around while it was live.  I placed the router in the new spot but the power cable was stretched to it’s max since it was attached to a UPS on the floor.   I knelt down to move the UPS closer.  As I did so I must have somehow managed to bump the cord just enough to pull the router forward past it’s tenuous balance point on the rack.  All of a sudden I heard a tremendous racket followed by pain in my left arm.  The new router had fallen off the top of the rack, smashed into another wire shelf below, ripping it out of the wall, bounced off my arm and onto the floor.

I held my breath for a second as my arm started to ooze blood from the impact.  The router still appeared to be functional and the shelf it took out did not appear to have anything crucial on it.  This room has network equipment for a ton of government agencies so I was very lucky I didn’t take out a bunch of networks.  The security guard came running in when he heard the noise.  I told him everything was fine but asked if he had any tools I could borrow to put the shelf back on the wall.

I reattached the shelf and put anything that was knocked down back in place.  The new router went right back to the place it was.  There was no way I was fcking with it further.   I thought it was going to be a super quick in and out 5 minute stop.  It turned into a two hour cluster fck, but like I said, in the big picture it could have been much worse.  It was a stupid idea for me to try to place the router in that spot.

This weekend we have stuff to do, like any other weekend.  We need to try to keep our ancillary expense down to help offset the expenses we will incur during the NYC trip so any entertainment we do until then will be on the cheap.

Last night I attended a planning meeting for next weeks Thanksgiving race which is the largest of the year in terms of attendance.  Of course things are a lot different for me this time around.  I have withdrawn myself from a lot of the details that I used to be concerned with outside of simply timing the race.  (which isn’t that simple)  Before the meeting I drove over to the course since it was changed this year.  I identified the new start and finish lines and got a rough idea of the distance between them which was just under 300 strides, a little long but since the club golf cart will be there I should be ok.  The meeting went pretty smoothly until the end where there was an awkward exchange that reminded of some of board meetings I used to attend.  It made me quite content that I was not involved in those anymore and that I was going into the sunset of my running club timer career.

So when I got home I checked my email and saw two delivery confirmations for race bibs I ordered.  I asked Cindy where they were?  She said nothing came.  I looked out the door to confirm, nope the doorstep was empty.  WTF? So I get on the phone and call up FedEx.  They confirmed the packages should have been delivered and I confirmed they were not.  They suggested I check the gates and next door neighbors as well.  Cindy and I did that and came up empty.  The FedEx rep opened a case to find out what happened.

This morning the house phone rang before 7AM, it was my neighbor ACROSS the street.  They said they had two boxes with my name on it that were thrown over their gate, how nice.  Cindy went over and picked them up and confirmed the contents inside were undamaged, mystery solved.

Last night I completed the second phase of an idea that popped into my head early in the week.  Instead of spending a lot of money on conventional presents for Christmas this year I thought it would be neat to take Cindy on a quick trip to NYC the week of Xmas.  When I mentioned the idea to Cindy she was very excited, although I had not made any arrangements to that point.

Yesterday during the day I locked in the flights and last night I reserved the hotel.  The trip is being made more expensive thanks to my commitment to time GCR races until the end of January.  There is a race in Marco Island the morning of the 19th that I have to time.  It meant we couldn’t leave until mid-afternoon Saturday with us scheduled to return on Wednesday.  If I didn’t have that race I could have shifted the entire trip back one day which would have knocked down the airfare by 200-300 dollars, which is frustrating.

Long time blog readers may recall I did a similar trip with Ali years back.  I am very much looking forward to showing Cindy the city which she has only flown through up until now.  She has such a sense of wonder and appreciation for things that it makes it fun for me to be able to show her new things.  The one thing I am not looking forward to is the possibility of BRUTAL cold.  I recall last time I went I may have been as cold as I can ever remember being. Even so, it should be fun.

My work week yesterday had a near disastrous start when one of our main servers had a severe hardware problem.  The server uses a hard drive array to provide protection against drive failure.  In was configured to use a scheme called RAID 5 which means a drive can fail without losing any data.  You are able to swap in a new drive on the fly without so much as a hiccup.

Well this server was showing that TWO drives had failed, the odds of which are very, very slim. In that scenario there is no easy recovery option with RAID 5.  My recovery plan would involve replacing both bad drives, reinstalling the operating system to a base level and the restoring the server via our backup appliance which would take hours and cause a big problem for users on the network that rely on the server heavily.

Well I wasn’t willing to give up on the “failed” drives just yet.  I did a combination of things that wound up allowing me to get one of the two drives that was failed working again.  Once I got that far I could swap in a replacement drive and rebuild it.  Once that rebuild completed I pulled the second drive that was marked bad and let it rebuild as well.  When all the rebuilding was done I added one additional drive in the remaining open slot and assigned it as a “hot spare”, meaning in the future if a drive failure occurs this drive will automatically be fired up to take it’s place.

I felt quite fortunate to be able to get the server back up without all of the hassle and time required for a full server restore.

This morning I dropped Sadie off after her four day stay.  Cindy really liked having her around during the day to keep her company since Sadie is a bit more interactive and expressive than Tuki or the chickens.  It’s always sad dropping her back off but she will back again before we know it.

My moms birthday was yesterday.  I didn’t make mention or note of it publicly.  At some point I feel like I just don’t want to keep giving myself reasons to grieve.

So of  course the world news is the terrorist attacks in France which I have some thoughts on but I wish to skip chronological order and expand on those last.

So this was declared as tree trimming weekend by myself.  The forecast low in the mid-60’s looked like the lowest temps I was going to see for awhile.  When I woke up Saturday morning I was annoyed to see the thermometer reading 71 degrees.  I wasted very little time and was outside gathering my tree trimming tools by 7:30.  I was solo since Cindy was attending a Blue Zones event in the morning.  It didn’t really matter since I was going to be doing nothing but hacking branches several hours which she couldn’t help me with anyway.

It didn’t take long for the heat to start ramping up as the early morning fog burned off.  I was sweating my ass off even though it was only 9AM.  Thank goodness as the day wore on cloud cover rolled in that kept the sun hidden for the majority of the day.

I found myself getting very frustrated due to losing things.  First I lost my machete that I normally use to hack off rotting cross thatch.  I knew I sat it down in the yard somewhere but could not find it after 10 minutes of circling.  It was found later buried under a pile of branches.   Then later I somehow lost the blade to my cordless SawzAll, it flew out in the process of buzzing off more cross thatch.  Thankfully I had a spare blade.  The lost blade was again found later, under another pile of branches.

For a couple years I have said I need to buy a taller extension ladder, the 20 footer I have just is not tall enough to safely reach a couple of the trees anymore.  Each year I don’t buy another ladder and each year I put myself into increasingly more perilous conditions to trim these monster trees.  Well this year set a new standard in danger.

To trim the tallest tree I had to stand a couple rungs from the top of the ladder and could not even use my new loppers which would require two hands.  Instead I had to trim all of the palm fronds with one hand via the SawzAll while using my off hand to hold onto the tree.  The gusting wind added tree sway into the equation. NEXT year, I am getting a new ladder.

I had an unexpected encounter when I was trimming the second tallest tree on the property.  I was knocking off loose cross thatch and all of a sudden saw a small banded snake that looked a lot like a pygmy rattler bury itself into the branches just above where I was working.  I discontinued work in that area and let the snake be.  I was very surprised to see a snake living that high up in the tree, a first for me.

Tree trimming is a physically grueling and dirty job.  Climbing up and down the ladder and working mostly over your head all day has a way of wearing you down. When I was chopping off rotting cross thatch I would periodically get organic matter facials depending on how I was positioned in relation to the gusting wind.  As I labored on I told myself several times, “you have done this many times, it always sucks, and you always get through it anyway”.

By the time Cindy got home I had four trees left to trim.  She thankfully brought me some much needed coffee which I enjoyed while sitting in a chair in front of the many piles of cut branches that littered the property.  The chickens and Sadie mulled about me in support.

After eating lunch I finished up the remaining trees and then joined Cindy in the equally arduous task of picking up hundreds of palm fronds and the big chunks of rotted cross thatch that were everywhere.

We repeatedly loaded down the back of the Tacoma with huge mountains of debris and drove it back to the fill pit for dumping.   I have a technique to expedite the dumping process.  I try to grab a couple palm fronds at the bottom of the pile and pull them out, most of the time I am able to get the majority of the pile on top of them to slide out as well.  Well during one of those trips that plan backfired.

I had my hands on three or four low fronds and was pulling hard, leaning back so my bodyweight was helping.  All of a sudden instead of the pile coming out, just the fronds I had a a hold of came loose.  The force I was applying resulted in major momentum which catapulted one of the branch ends directly into my nose at high speed.  It felt like I was punched in the face.

I expected a stream of blood to start flowing out of my nostril.  I did start to bleed but it was from the outside, not the inside.  The branch left a nice little gash on the left side of my nose.  After using my shirt a few times as a bandage I asked Cindy instead to run inside and grab me a real one to stop the slow but steady stream of blood.

The clean up actually went faster than I expected it to.  In total we ran nine pickup loads of crap to the fill pit.  By the time we got everything cleaned up it was between three and four in the afternoon, a hard day of labor.

As I surveyed the property and saw the roughly 25 trees that I trimmed up I felt a mixture of pride, relief, and anxiety, knowing I yet again accomplished one of the shittiest home chores I have but will be repeating it once again a scarce 365 days from now.

Saturday night there was no way we had the energy to go out to the movies.  Instead we stayed home and enjoyed a delicious fish sticks dinner while renting Train Wreck On Demand.  The movie was the unrated version of the Amy Schumer comedy meaning it had some very adult scenes which I didn’t think really added much to the movie.  All in all I thought the movie was an average comedy with an average amount of laughs. Amy saying very outrageous and dirty things was funny at first but grew old eventually.  It seemed to rely too heavily on it, much like a lot of Melissa McCarthy’s films.   As a result it gets an average B rating from me.  I honestly expected it to be funnier.

Sunday morning I had no interest in endurance training as I had universal body aches and pains from the tree trimming.  We needed to get to Rural King early anyway since we had used up the rest of the chicken feed.  Although I probably earned a casual Sunday I did not feel comfortable taking one.  The weed whacking had not been done for three weeks, things were looking pretty ratty so I grabbed the whacker and got busy.  My work inspired Cindy to get the mowing done as well which she had planned on doing later this week.  Putting off the chore for a few weeks and whacking additional fence line to compliment the tree trimming meant the task took longer than normal.

When I finished up I had a quick test I wanted to do with the timing system.  Setting up the mats with the MyLaps system is by far the biggest negative since I switched from an Ipico timing system.  The 25 pound mat sections have to be connected together and then have an individual wire run from each mat back to the timing box.  With two people the process can take damn close to 15 minutes if you have the maximum amount of mats laid out, which is eight.

I had a theory that because in prior testing that these mats read chips 3-4 feet to either side that I might be able to only connect every other mat and still get chip reads along the entire mat width.  So I tested it.

My test did sort of prove my theory as I was able to get reads on sections of mat that had no wire attached to them.  It did also show that you are sacrificing field strength when doing so which could be problematic in a high density situation like a start line.  The follow up test to this would be setting up two lines during a real race where the first line wires in every mat and the second line does every other.  You could then easily see if you are losing reads skipping mats by comparing the numbers between the two timing boxes.  However since I will not be using MyLaps after my running club timing stops at the end of January I don’t feel all that motivated to look into it further.  If I would invest in more timing equipment for GMT it would not be with MyLaps.  I prefer something that is reliable AND easy to set up.  MyLaps does not meet that latter criteria.

So the Eagles played the Dolphins Sunday afternoon.  The game started off with the Eagles on fire with them putting in their best first quarter performance of the year, racking up 16 points.  It looked like they were setting the stage for a blowout.  Well the wheel fells off and the team managed a measly field goal for the rest of the game while allowing the Dolphins to stay in the game long enough for a one point, 20-19 win.

Of course there were many directions fingers could be pointed so let’s start naming names.  Caleb Sturgis, why is he still on the roster?  Is there really no better kickers available out there?  This guy is pressed to make extra points, his accuracy is just atrocious.  It’s the second time this year that his miss of a short field goal turned out to be the difference between a win and a loss on the scoreboard.

Sam Bradford, statistically he had an ok day although again he displayed some of that inaccuracy I have been complaining about since early in the season.  He just misses a lot of throws, something commentator Rich Gannon pointed out as well.  He got crushed on that hit that knocked him out of the game and I wouldn’t be surprised if he is out for next week.  I am surprised he lasted this long.

Miles Austin, wtf happened to you?  I remember when you came onto the scene with the Cowboys you were tearing things up for a couple years.  As an Eagle your catch to fck up ratio is all out of whack. Not being able to drag your foot on that TD grab is pretty lame as is your route running, awareness, and ability to make a tough catch.

Byron Maxwell, you are disgustingly overpaid.  The fact that Chip Kelly thought your skillset was worthy of mega dollars in free agency is a further testament to how bad Chip is at assessing talent.  Maxwell sucks.  He gets burned repeatedly each and every game and excels at nothing but pass interference/holding calls and poor tackling.

Matt Sanchez, dude, way to waste no time reinforcing your reputation of choking when it counts, throwing yet another game killing interception in the end zone when the game was on the line.  Plus why in the world did handing off the ball to DeMarco Murray seem to be impossibly complicated for you?  They ran into/tripped one another at least half a dozen times, no joke.  Sanchez is just another non-answer to the QB position long term.

And of course Chip Kelly, your mad scientist like experiments with the Eagle roster in the off season has been a pretty disappointing failure.  I am fine calling the Chip Kelly era as officially played out by the end of year three.  Go back to college where lower talent levels makes your hurry up offense more effective.

It was a bad loss in a season of bad losses.  I expect more to follow.

Ok so let’s talk about the French terrorist attacks which of course were tragic,  As expected there was world wide support for France and social media wasted no time jumping in, making it easy for people to offer one click “support” by changing their profile picture to have an overlay of the French flag.  Also as expected, the terrorist act instantly whipped the Obama haters into a frenzy with them posting non-stop vitriol that accomplished nothing but more division, hate and prejudice.  Repeatedly I saw posts that seemed to indicate that different leadership, gun ownership and more military action in the middle east was the easy answer to these problems.  I just don’t get it.

After nearly a decade and a half of the US being mired in a “war” with terrorists it’s like the American public has learned absolutely nothing as a result.  When I read “we beat the Nazi’s, we can beat ISIS the same way” it just shows an incredible lack of understanding of the situation.  Terrorists are not a conventional army.  They wear no uniforms.  They don’t attack in battalions. They don’t fear death, in many cases they seek it out, seeing it as an opportunity to serve their God in a perverted way.  You can not bomb away this problem.  You are fighting an idea, not an army.

When I see the sweeping, Muslims are the problem generalizations roll in it again shows a lack of thinking, indicating that the radical extremists that perpetrate these atrocities are representative of  Islam as a whole.  It’s like saying the KKK is representative of Christianity.  It’s just silly.

France has reacted very strongly to the attacks, launching near immediate air strikes and locking down the country, trying to get a clear picture of all the connections the terrorists involved had.   These attacks I suppose are the start to the large cup of revenge they plan to indulge themselves in.

Listen, I understand the idea of revenge.  I know how I felt after the 9/11 attacks.  I wanted somebody to pay.  However the lessons of a decade and a half direct involvement/invasion by the US in the middle east quagmire has clearly established that our course of action was massive, incredulously expensive both in dollars and loss of life and mostly ineffective.  If anything our involvement in the region only cultivated more support for the radical Islamist movement.

If France goes in there swinging a bat wildly, killing many ISIS insurgents and innocent civilians that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time it will just pour additional gas on the fire.  The unfortunate result will be giving further credence to how the west deserves any attack upon them, no matter how senseless or brutal in the minds of ISIS and others driven by their similar, contorted religious beliefs.

Do I have the definitive answer to this dilemma? Nope, not even close.  All I know is more bombing, more military action, more of what has been tried for the last 15 years isn’t going to make a difference.  You can’t “defeat” an idea and you are dealing with an enemy that looks at death as a victory.

If you have 5 minutes take a look at this, it explains my point in a much more comprehensive and well written manner.

Also if you want a better understanding of the rat nest of players in thr Syrian conflict, take another 5 minutes and watch this.

Last night on the way home I picked up Sadie for an extended stay as Ali is out of town for a few days.  It’s always fun to have her there and today she will get to hang with Cindy all day.

I had an impressive virtual achievement last night that will mean absolutely nothing to anyone that has not played World of Warcraft.  I finished up getting my last character to max level of 100, meaning I now have a monk, mage, priest, warrior, death knight, druid, hunter, rogue, warlock, shaman, and paladin at max.  I actually have 12 100’s since I also leveled Cindy’s druid to 100, even though she doesn’t play. 🙂

Now being at max level in reality is really only the start of where the game begins for most people where you begin doing high level stuff in the quest to equip your virtual self in gear that makes you stand above others in both power and visuals.  However with this many level 100s, the time required to do this with 12 characters would literally be impossible to find so instead I will pick a few that I want to focus on from this point forward.

I announced my accomplishment to Cindy last night.  She did a good job of expressing fake excitement for me.  I love that she encourages me to participate in mindless entertainment from time to time to help balance the non-entertaining portions of life.

I have targeted Saturday as tree trimming day.  A forecast low temp of 65 degrees was the lowest I saw in the 10 day forecast so I am going all in, hoping to get out there nice and early with my brand new loppers.  Cindy has an event she is going to first thing tomorrow so that will allow me to get a good head start on the trimming and then allow me to double back and help her with the equally grueling task of picking up all the cut fronds and other organic matter to dump it in the back of the property.

The grass is overdue for weed whacking and I have a number of other ancillary chores that could get done as well.  When you have a monster job on the menu like tree trimming it has a way of sucking the energy to do much else out of you.