Archives February 2016

Friday night I said to Cindy repeatedly how weird it felt to be the night before a running club race and I have absolutely nothing to do.  No equipment to charge, sort or pack in the truck.  No registration lists to finalize and print. None of the normal stress and anxiety that would precede every single race was present and it felt odd but in a good way.

On Saturday morning I headed outside to do yard work right about the time the race was scheduled to kick off.  When I came back inside I had a voicemail and something around 10 missed calls from the club treasurer who was on site at the race.  Obviously they were having some sort of problem.

So even though I made no arrangement with the club to be the race timing support line after my tenure was complete, I called back.  The woman that has assumed timing responsibilities was dead in the water because she couldn’t get into the software that is used to pull times from the timing hardware.  Evidently in the two weeks since I turned all the stuff over after the last race she had not tried to go into this software.  Since she was logging into the race laptop under a different user profile the timing program did not have the authentication information that is required to launch it for the first time.  If the software would have been started at any point prior to the race this problem would have been able to be handled at that point instead of race day.

So luckily I had installed remote control on that race laptop before turning it over to the club.  I was able to remote into the system and figure out which password it was looking for as there were several that are associated with the clubs MyLaps account.  Once I got into the timing software I saw that the runners times were sitting on the boxes.  I quickly configured the race and exported the files needed for the scoring software.  I asked Laurie if she wanted to take it from there or wanted me to do the rest.  She chose the latter.

By this time the race was long over so I tried to work fast.  As soon as I tried to import the times I saw there were a couple of things in the race that were misconfigured, one of which would have prevented any times from  being posted.  I corrected these things and after a few clicks we had some results on screen that looked to be correct.  I asked her if she was good to go from there.  She said she was and thanked me for the help.  Nothing like timing a race from your house.

So later in the day I heard some very insulting talk was going around the race where certain board members were suggesting that perhaps I intentionally sabotaged things so there would be a problem at the race.  I could hardly believe that after almost 10 years of club involvement and my generous three month/ 8 event notice of my leaving that the very first race I am gone, people would question my integrity in such a manner.  Now of course I was furious but I only heard it from one person so I wanted to wait until I got further confirmation which I received last night.  Not only did the discussion go around the race site, it continued at party held Saturday afternoon that a number of club members attended.

Well that was all I could tolerate.  It’s very disappointing and offended me personally.  I did the only logical thing and notified a couple key people that I am permanently on the DO NOT CALL list for any future race support needs.  I am normally a pretty laid back person but if you spit in my face there are going to be consequences.

Cindy and I worked on repairing the coop surveillance system.  I discovered that I would not be able to reliably splice together the chewed apart cables because one of them is a coaxial set up.  So instead I ripped out the damaged wires and ran two new wires that I had laying around as spares.  I need a total of three wires so for now we just left the camera under the deck disconnected.  I also drove a piece of schedule 40 conduit pipe through the hole in the coop floor and ran the ethernet cable through it, hopefully protecting it from future assaults by sharp toothed rodents.

On Saturday afternoon I met up with Chris at a track meet he was timing.  I wanted to get some more familiarity with set up of the camera based timing system that is used for track meets.  I am going to be helping him out with a couple events so I need to learn the set up.  I was only there for a little more than an hour as Cindy and I were going out for an early Valentine’s Day dinner and movie.

We did not pick out the restaurant ahead of time and decided we would just wing it, a dangerous choice on a Saturday night in snowbird season.  The first few places we were thinking about looked stupidly full.  We wound up eating at a place called Rosedale Brick Oven.  It was full as well, requiring us to stand around for maybe 20 minutes until we were seated.  It was small and cozy.  Our waitress was very friendly and Cindy and I both enjoyed our meals.  I cleaned my plate and helped Cindy dust off most of hers.

We were going to see The Revenant but we decided to do so at the Paragon theater, a venue I never frequented since it was converted into an upscale theater a couple years ago.  We were quite surprised when we stepped in the theater and found it had power recliner seats, holy shit.   We both found the seating to be very cool.

So it seems like the last 6 or 7 times we have gone to the theater we have had issues with ignorant, rude individuals that for whatever reason have no consideration of other theater patrons.  We have been not going to to the movies nearly as much recently as doing so in snowbird season greatly increases your odds of being nearby such an idiot.  On Saturday night we went even further, seeing a movie that was out for several weeks already and not going until the late 9:20PM showing.  Surely we should have minimal problems. Nope.

We had two sources of irritation the entire movie.  To our left was a couple.  The woman apparently found the movie too boring to merit her attention.  Instead she spent a large part of the two and a half hours scrolling through her Facebook feed on her phone.  Behind us there was some hispanic woman in blue pants that was talking off and on at normal conversation volume most of the film as well as fcking around on her phone, including texting and taking a phone call early on.    Cindy handed out a generous dosage of head turning stink eye but it did nothing to abate the bad behavior.

I am always conflicted in these situations. Of course I want to strangle these individuals but I try to keep my cool because I know if it gets to the point where I get up and go over there it is impossible for me to be anything close to polite or nice in my request for them to shut the fck up.  I then weigh in my mind in the big picture if it is worth creating a scene or not.  Most of the times it is not but Saturday night was getting close.

Well the movie was pretty freaking crazy.  It was like a hybrid between Castaway and Rambo.  I do understand why Leonardo was acclaimed for his performance.  The movie was filled with some brutal and very raw violence, some of it involving animals which of course made me cringe more than once.  It was one of those movies you think about after you leave the theater which is why I give it an A rating.  After having yet another poor movie theater experience Cindy and I are still considering ways to go to the movies when next to no other human beings are present.

We did not get home until after midnight.  On Sunday I felt like we never got out of first gear.  I was sleepy and generally unmotivated.  Later in the afternoon we decided to go over to the swamp with Sadie for a walk.  The weather on Sunday was perfect with temps in the 70’s with bright skies and low humidity.  The swamp is no longer a well kept secret, the parking lot was FULL.  The swamp itself was also full, of water, the most I ever saw.

Very early on in the path one section of the trail was cut by a 10 foot section of running water from the high levels.  Somebody threw a relatively small and shaky branch across the area to assist in crossing but it wasn’t very effective.  I made it most of the way across the branch but still wound up with one wet foot.  Cindy decided to just bite the bullet and walk through the water in her sneakers.

We had a very cool treat, coming across a group of four full sized otters on the path.  Sadie was EXTREMELY interested in them.  As we got closer they split with two going into the water on either side.  Once we got up to them they just stared at us from the water, making odd noises.  They were very cool.  As soon as we walked further up the trail they came back out of the water and started dancing around on the path.

By the time we got back it was almost 5:30.  Cindy made dinner for Sadie and then I took her back to Ali’s while Cindy made dinner for us.  Last night we just vegged and worked on plowing through our backlogged dvr content.  It wasn’t the most spectacular Valentine’s Day I’m sure for Cindy.  She did like the Garmin Vivo HR I bought her, a real time fitness tracker that includes a wrist based heart rate monitor. You can analyze yourself to death with the damn thing.

Yesterday I called my dad, returning a call he made a couple days prior that I forgot about.  As usual we talked about various subjects, one of which included a very aggravating situation I have been dealing with where there are layers upon layers of bullshit involved.  Dad has a long and not so glorious history of bucking the system and fighting various situations where he felt he has been wronged.   Sometimes he has been successful in his cause and other times he was just successful in pissing a lot of people off, which he also considers a win.  Well in my case there is absolutely zero doubt I am being wronged.

After talking to dad on the phone for quite awhile it got me all fired up and reignited the anger I have had bubbling for going on two months about the situation.  Well that anger and frustration carried on through the night and kept me awake until after 1:15 AM where I finally forced myself to sleep after reading a book for awhile to redirect my mind.  I have a decision to make regarding this with two distinctly different mindsets.  Once choice is basically rolling over and allowing common sense  to be thrown out the window in exchange for a known quantity of result. The second choice has a much wider range of outcomes varying from better to worse but involves identifying a spade as a spade and possibly exposing myself to additional risk.  Last night I was definitely all about the latter option.  I still have some time to decide what ultimately makes more sense in the big picture.  Either way, I very much look forward to sharing full details sometime in the future.  It’s a real diamond.

So in addition to the problems with the chicken coop door we still have had problems with mice in the chicken run at night.  We spotted them on the security dvr the other night and I saw them again last night.  We started pulling the two feeders way up in the air at night, removing the food source for the mice which I would hope would convince them to move on to a new area.  On the camera last night I saw the mice looking for the food and being frustrated that it is no longer easily accessible.

So this morning I woke up and checked the dvr to see if the chicken door worked.  It did not, apparently once again falling prey to the cold temperatures.  However when I cheeked the live feed three of the four cameras were not showing video, odd.  I said to Cindy that maybe for some reason the cold temps were affecting the cameras.

So I went out to the coop with my volt meter to measure power output to the motor that runs the chicken door.  When we opened the door to the coop we immediately noticed debris inside the front door by the small holes in the flooring, something that should not be there.  At just about the same time Cindy and I realized it was from a mouse.

We quickly put together what happened.  Since there was no food accessible out in the run, at least one of the mice worked it’s way inside the coop before the door automatically closes at 8PM.  It apparently was inside when the door closed, trapping it. So the debris was from the mouse looking for an exit point.  Of course it could not dig through half inch treated plywood so I assume the mouse was still in the coop hiding in some corner which of course freaked Cindy out.

Well as Cindy was cleaning up some of the mess she saw additional debris in the front corner.  She pulled away the stuff that was stacked there and discovered the source of my camera problem.  In that corner is a 1 inch hole where the wires for the cameras and the ethernet cable enter the coop.  The hole was plugged with a bunch of foam pipe insulation, or used to be.  Not only did the mouse chew away the foam, that little fcker chewed through all three wires for the dvr cameras that are outside, disabling them.  It just got personal.

In addition to destroying the camera wires he also munched on the casing of the ethernet cable.  Luckily it appears he did not get far enough to break that connection.  If he did my anger would be multiplied many times over as replacing that cable is more expensive and labor intensive.  As is I am hoping to be able to splice the camera wires back together and then cap that hole with something more teeth resistant.

This weekend is the first running club chip timed event in more that eight years that will take place without my involvement whatsoever.  Cindy and I are both looking forward to not setting the alarm clock and waking up when our bodies tell us instead of a buzzer.  It will be interesting to see how things turn out with the race.

This weekend I will have some timing related items on my schedule.  I am going to be heading down to a track meet that Chris is timing for an hour or so to get some familiarity with the camera based timing system that is used for track meets.  There is the possibility that I may help him occasionally with these events so I need to get some face time with the equipment.

Saturday night Cindy and I are doing a dinner/movie combo as a belated celebration of my retirement from club race timing.  We haven’t been to the movies in eons, partly because of scheduling partly because of a desire to save a few bucks due to the strong flow of dollars leaving my bank account the last few months.

One of the pieces of tech we have in the chicken coop is an automatic chicken door that opens and closes on a timer, keeping the chickens safe at night.  Over the last few weeks we have had a couple instances where the door did not open in the morning.  When I would test the motor in the morning it appeared to be dead however later in the day it would start working again.

Well this morning the door was once again stuck closed and I finally recognized a common theme to the problem, it happens when it is cold.  This morning at the house it was a chilly 42 degrees.  The other days we have had a problem it was also on the chilly side.  My assumption is there is a marginal connection inside the motor unit that breaks contact when the temperature drops below a certain point.

Unfortunately this is not a quick or easy fix. The motor should be under warranty still but the fact that the problem is intermittent could make getting it replaced touchy.  It is a long process as well where I have to remove the motor, ship it to the guy at automaticchickencoopdoor.com, hope he sees the problem, and then wait for a new motor to be shipped back to me so I can reinstall it.

Cindy and I watched the second episode in the OJ series.  We seem to be finding out a lot of information that was not widely known to the public.  For instance last night it was revealed that the famous white Ford Bronco that lead LA police for an endless low speed chase was actually not OJ’s.  Yes OJ owned a white Ford Bronco but that was impounded before the chase began.  AJ Cowling, OJ’s friend and driver of the vehicle during the chase evidently owned his own white Ford Bronco that was pretty much identical to OJ’s.  That was the vehicle millions of people watched some 22 years ago.  It also appears at one point Robert Kardashian told OJ’s family that he killed himself which obviously was not the case, fascinating.

Last night after work I knocked out a total of 50 pull ups as the chickens mulled around.  I have been trying to reboot my pull up progress.  Last week I went out and did a max rep set of pull ups every night when I got home.  I currently can just barely get 20 reps, a far cry from my all time best of 30 reps I managed several years ago.

Over the past couple years my amount of time out in the bar park has diminished greatly.  Putting my finger on exactly why that is is not clear.  If I were to guess I would say that the contentment I have in other areas of my life since Cindy became a close part of it has taken some of my focus and anger that I used to fuel my calisthenics routine.  In the big picture, it’s good that I have more happiness in my life.  If it means I do a few less pull ups so be it.

I was happy to see Bernie win easily in the New Hampshire primary.  Even though he has long been predicted to win that state, to have it in black and white appears to be a wake up call for political traditionalists that assumed for the last year or more that Hilary Clinton would be the democratic nominee.  For once I hope lemming mentality comes into play where more and more people jump on Bernie’s bandwagon.  It is going to take a movement of monumental proportions to put such a non-traditional candidate in the White House.

Last night I believe I actually had one long continuous block of sleep that was uninterrupted until the alarm went off at 5:55.  That is the first time that has happened in quite awhile.   I would like to build on that.

Saturday morning it was cool outside, a forecast that looks to be the case for most of the upcoming week.  In the morning we went out to run errands.  Most of what we needed was picked up at Rural King including bird seed, top soil, and a few more odds and ends. After eating lunch I felt adequately ambitious enough to finally take on the brake shoe replacement on the rear drum brakes on the Tacoma.

I have had the new shoes at home for a couple weeks but I was in no rush to tackle the job.  I worked on the drum brakes of my Mom’s Rav 4 years ago and it didn’t go well.  I didn’t pay enough attention when taking them apart and as a result had a hell of a time getting everything back together correctly. The rear brakes on the Tacoma had not been touched for years and years.  I bet 100k miles have ticked by since they last received attention.

Recently the brake warning light on the dash has been coming on periodically and the pedal seemed to not be grabbing until it traveled a short distance, both indicators to me that the brake shoes on the back were probably ready to get replaced.  Of course I intended to video the entire job as my automotive maintenance videos are among my most popular on YouTube.  People seem to like my honestly amateur approach to the work where I am not afraid to show mistakes I make along the way so others can learn from them.

I took provisions this time to make sure I had adequate visual references.  I pulled the drums from both rear wheels so I could always refer to the other side if need be, even though it is reversed.  I also took close up pictures of each drum brake assembly to further assist me.  While this is helpful, there are parts of drum brakes that are not clearly visible when everything is put together.  Those aspects just needed to be mentally observed and noted.  As I started tearing down the driver side wheel I laid out the parts I removed on the ground roughly in their position in the brakes to further assist me in the reassembly process.

The most difficult part of getting the brake shoes off is the main long tension spring.  I used a combination of a flat head screw driver and my locking needle nose vise grip pliers to brute force the spring out of it’s mounting point.  Once it was removed the rest of the parts come off pretty easily.  The first thing I noticed on the old pads was they had more brake material on them than I expected.  After all they had been on the truck forever.  When I looked at them more closely later it appeared the pads were glazed over pretty badly which results in poor stopping power.

So once I got old shoes off I pulled out the new brake shoes I ordered online from AutoZone.  I immediately spotted a big problem, literally.  The brake shoes I just removed were much larger than the new ones I pulled out of the box.  Apparently I was sent shoes that are for non Pre-Runner Tacomas which are approximately 8 inches in length.  Pre Runners use shoes that are a little over 11 inches long.  My reaction when I see this was caught on tape and is pretty funny.

So I had no choice but to drive to the nearest AutoZone and swap out the pads.  I was worried they would not have them in stock.  Fortunately luck was on my side.  Not only did they have the pads, they were a couple bucks cheaper for some reason, despite their larger dimensions.  I headed back home with the proper part, eager to complete the project.

The 90 or so minutes it took to get the new shoes resulted in a few hiccups when I was putting stuff back together as I forgot how a spring on the back of the one shoe was positioned.  After some trial and error I got it figured out.  Getting the brakes back together was a bit of a grind, the biggest issues of course being reattaching the high tension springs which again I mostly used the vise grips to perform.  Tearing down and replacing the shoes on the passenger side went much faster after cutting my teeth on the driver side.

Drum brakes have a self adjusting mechanism.  Basically when you go in reverse with the brakes applied it is supposed to keep the brakes adjusted.  Normally you are supposed to manually adjust the shoes when you replace them so the clearance is tight and allow the self adjuster to take over from there.  In my case I only manually adjusted the brakes a little bit, hoping the self adjuster would take out any remaining slop.

I spent a couple minutes in the driveway pulling forward and backward to hopefully let the self adjuster do it’s thing.  However when I took the truck on the road in a steady rain I still felt too much pedal travel so I pulled it back into the garage.  I jacked up the rear end of the truck once again and slid underneath the wet and dripping undercarriage.  On the back of the brake assembly is a small adjustment hole covered by a rubber plug.   It gives access to the brake adjuster, you basically spin it with a small screw driver.

By this time it was dark outside so I was awkwardly trying to hold a shop light while I spun the adjuster.  Basically I spun the wheel, adjusted the gear and then spun it again.  I repeated this till I got just a little bit of resistance on the wheel.  On the next road test the brakes felt tons better, the best they have felt in years.  Sure in total I spent something like 5 hours (including drive for parts) getting the job done but it is another chapter in my growing book of successful automotive tasks.  If you have a half hour to kill you can watch the whole ordeal below.

On Sunday morning Cindy and I wanted to get out to do a run to help negate in at least to a small degree the caloric hit we were sure to take from the Super Bowl party.  I came up with the idea of running the loop down around King’s Lake, an area I ran years ago when Ali and I started running down here.  I knew the loop was somewhere close to 3 miles.  The temps were quite chilly in the 50’s with wind which I actually prefer to running in 85 degrees with 85% humidity.   The run was scenic and done at relatively slow pace but I didn’t really care.  It worked out to be a 1/4 mile short of 3 miles which was good enough for me.

We got home just shortly after Katie and her boyfriend picked up the second of my old furniture pieces.  It was the bigger sofa piece which had been sitting in the garage for the last few days.  I have been liking our new set from Rooms to Go but only time will tell how directly the correlation between it’s relatively low price and durability will work out.

Once we got home we got busy plowing into party prep.  While Cindy was inside I was outside trying to get the back yard in order.  The chickens have been on another hole digging kick recently, excavating a number of holes in the small hill by the pool border on the door side of the cage.  I bought top soil and a roll of green plastic chicken fencing to stop the behavior.  After back filling the holes I cut the fencing to length and laid it on top of the area, pinned down by heavy patio stones on either side.  It surely is not what I would prefer the hill would look like but it’s better than being filled with chicken created potholes.  I really wish we could come up with a way to permanently keep the chickens out of the pool border, they just make a mess of it.  When I see them digging around there I often will go set the sprinklers to fire off in the border to scare them off. Of course it works for a time being but in order for it to be effective we need to be more consistent so their little chicken brains associate digging in that area with getting wet.

Besides taking a brief time out for lunch Cindy and I were busy pretty much right up to the arrival of the first party guest between 5 and 5:30.  There are just so many moving parts to hosting a party for almost 20 people.  Almost everybody showed up that we expected and they did so before kick off.  In the past we had some people screw around in the back yard before the game but the cold and blustery conditions curtailed that this year besides taking a few people out back to say hi to the chickens, since they are a new addition since last year.

At the party’s peak the great room/kitchen area was packed.  In addition to the two sofas we had our portable ottomans, dining room chairs, two bean bags and a couple large floor pillows in use to provide adequate seating arrangements.  There were so many people it was difficult to hear much of what was going out of the surround system, despite me having the volume cranked pretty high.  Between the noise and Cindy and I attending to party needs we got to focus very little on the game during the first half.

One of my main concerns was managing the betting board, making sure bets like first penalty, first td, first coaches challenge, etc… were all documented properly so the winners of each bet could be identified. After half time there was a mass exodus of people as most individuals were not as fortunate as I was to have taken off Monday from work to recover.  For most the second half of the game we only had maybe a half dozen people hanging with us so I got to pay more attention to the game itself.

Of course one of my core activities during the game was drinking.  I bet in total I knocked down somewhere between 7 to 9 Miller Lites.  Of course the generous consumption of alcohol lead to me consuming obscene amounts of food.  I sampled pretty much everything in the huge spread at least once with multiple trips to several items throughout the night. It was pure gluttony.

I was happy with the outcome of the game as I was really pulling for Peyton Manning to get a Super Bowl win to close out his spectacular career.  Peyton was really a minor player in the victory, it was the Denver defense that really controlled the game, battering Cam Newton from start to finish.  It reminded me of the way the Baltimore Ravens Super Bowl teams felt.

Cam got chastised after the game for not diving on a loose ball after it got knocked out of his hand.  To me I think the criticism  is a bit overblown.  If you watch the play it seems to me Cam stopped himself from diving because he saw his offensive lineman already mid-dive in front of him.  Diving on top of your own player in a loose ball scenario rarely helps matters but evidently for appearance sake, the media thinks otherwise.

I was surprised to hear the negative backlash about the Super Bowl halftime show.  It was basically crucified but perhaps it was in a way similar to the Cam Newton thing.  Once a negative opinion gets legs  people love to pile on.  I am personally a Cold Play fan and even though I didn’t think there was anything spectacular about the halftime show I thought it was entertaining and well produced.  Apparently I am in the minority.

After the last people left Cindy and I dug into clean up duties, trying to get as much as we could done before retiring to bed.  As you can imagine there is all sorts of collateral damage when you have that many people jammed into a living space.  By the time we collapsed in bed closing in on midnight we were both exhausted.

On Monday we both hoped to have a good portion of chill time available.  Somehow it didn’t work out that way.  I rolled out of bed feeling hungover but not horribly so.  I slowly worked on breaking down the table we had in the great room to house drinks.  I then worked on emptying the coolers which included giving away large amounts of beer to two of our neighbors.  The Miller Lites I have left in the fridge would probably satisfy my drinking needs for the next 6 months or more.

We headed out to get some coffee and hit the bank.  Once we got back I had it in my head I wanted to set up my recently refurbished inflatable arch.  You may recall I sent it down to a place in Texas for them to replace some sections and rebrand it for Green Machine Timing.  Even though I saw a picture of it inflated down in Texas I had not blown it up myself since getting it back.  I am going to be renting the arch in a couple weeks for a race so I figured it would be a good idea to blow it up as practice and to see the refurbish work.

Cindy helped me get the arch up.  We both liked the new look of the arch with the new black/green color scheme with the GMT badging across the top and both legs.  I decided I wanted to pull out all of my race gear and take a few pictures that I can use on my web site to help promote both my timing services and equipment rental.  Right now I only have the stuff needed to time a small event.  My further acquisition of stuff will depend on how things progress.  I am certainly in no rush to rapidly expand my workload as for the near future I would like to enjoy not having anything race timing related to worry about or focus on.

Somehow despite our noble intentions to chill out a good portion of the day we instead kept busy for the majority of it.  I needed to tend to the automatic chicken door once again.  It was in the down position Monday morning instead of opening up at 6AM as it is supposed to.  I found out the fishing line we used to fix the door last time had snapped.  I went to the local hardware store and bought some more robust braided string to use this time around.  I think it will hold up much better.

I also gathered up all of my tax paperwork to submit to my accountant during the afternoon.  I am expecting a less exciting than normal tax refund this year because of more race timing revenue, $1000 in Google Ad dollars combined with my cashing out the dependent IRA I received as part of my mom’s estate to pay for the flooring upgrade.   I am hoping some of the additional race timing expenses I had during the year will help even things out at least a little bit.  I guess as long as I don’t have to pay in any taxes it is a win although for the last 15 years I have counted on my tax refund as an indirect savings plan that is normally used for some home improvement task/item.  Hopefully that streak does not end this year.

I had a horrible night of sleep last night, waking up first at 1AM and then rolling around restlessly for at least a couple hours.  It’s frustrating and a negative on my overall well being obviously. Despite the poor sleep, all in all it was a productive/fun 3 day weekend.  The best news is I get another one in four short days. 😉

So the Rooms to Go delivery truck showed up nice and early yesterday.  I knew about it almost the same time as Cindy did thanks to my notification from the Ring doorbell.  I watched the two delivery guys wheel both pieces up to the door.  The top half of each seat gets put together once the furniture is inside the house.  As the guys were doing that the driver noticed this gap between two of the seats.

He flipped the couch forward and immediately found the cause of the gap, the frame in that area was bent.  Apparently at some point the sofa was subjected to an impact.  The delivery guys said it was no problem, they would leave the sofa for now and deliver a new, straight one tomorrow.

I wish I could say I was surprised.   My bedroom furniture was bought from Rooms to Go some 14-15 years ago.  I had multiple pieces damaged upon delivery back then.  I also have heard similar stories from friends that bought from RTG.  For some reason they have a hard time getting stuff in the door that is not damaged.

So anyway a supervisor was supposed to call back Cindy to confirm the delivery of the replacement sofa.  That call turned into a bit of a circus as Cindy had to deal with multiple people, one of which almost pointed the finger of blame at Cindy, asking her why they left the damaged piece.  Eventually Cindy got a confirmation that a new sofa is supposed to arrive today.  She is hoping to score a delivery credit from RTG for the inconvenience of having to rope off two days to allow for delivery a second time.

Despite the damage, the new sofa and love seat look very nice in the great room, a much better compliment to the upgraded flooring we installed last year.  The dark brown contrasts nicely with light color on the walls.  Last night we did further testing how the sofa worked for our typical dinner/dvr activities.  It was comfortable and much more supportive than the well worn set it was replacing.

This weekend I get to enjoy three days off work.  I took a vacation day, something I have found is worthwhile after hosting a Super Bowl party.  Of course I plan to put the extra time to good use.  I have a list of winter projects that have not been getting crossed off as quickly as I would like due to the f’d up weather and other circumstances.  What is even cooler is I have ANOTHER three day weekend next week thanks to President’s Day, awesome.

This morning before work we did some shuffling around to prepare for the new sofa and love seat that is arriving today.  The first prep was to remove the retractable screen door hardware by the front door as it can cause tripping and clearance problems.   Second Cindy and I lugged the old sofa out to the garage so it was out of the way yet still available to be picked up by Cindy’s daughter.  The sofa was heavy and unwieldy, I felt badly having Cindy carry the one end of it.  We used the furniture sliders to get it to the front door and then brute force carried it out to the garage.

Cindy and I started watching the new OJ series on FX last night.  It has a star studded cast and based on episode one is going to be a pretty interesting series.  Of course most of us remember the OJ murder trial well, even though it went down 22 years ago at this point, which seems hard to believe.  If episode one is an indicator,  there is going to be a lot of detail about the murders that the general public may not have been aware of.  Set your DVR.

So when I got separated Ali took the sleeper sofa and oversized leather chair we had in the great room.  I wound up replacing it with a used sofa and love seat I bought from Craigslist for a whopping $200.  The set was well used and had some warts but I have been fond of it regardless as it was pretty much the first thing I bought once I embarked into post marriage life.  I have always had intentions to eventually replace the Craigslist sofas but I just haven’t pulled the trigger, until yesterday.

Cindy had mentioned how she saw some good sales on Rooms to Go sofa pairs over the weekend.  Yesterday she stopped in at the local store and checked one of them out, sending me the picture on the left.  Well seeing her happy face while reclining on the sofa was enough to trigger an impulse buy.  I told her to buy it, saying it would be nice to have the new set for our Super Bowl party we are hosting this weekend.

By the time I got home one of the two old sofas was already out of the house, Cindy’s daughter was happy to take possession of the old stuff.  She will come get the bigger sofa hopefully today.  It seemed weird to have the sudden change in seating arrangements, something that was not even in the ballpark of my intentions 24 hours earlier. The new stuff is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow.  It will be nice to have some decent furniture that will be a better fit for the massive flooring upgrades we completed last year.

Timing-wise the purchase is not ideal.  The past several months I have spent a bunch of dough.  Cindy’s daughter’s boyfriends car is getting the door fixed that I backed into as we speak and I have another potential 4 digit expenditure that is on the horizon as well.  Luckily my income will allow me to stabilize things if I can get through a couple months of normal spending.  Lately it just seems like the normal up and downstream flow of dollars has been consistently in the downward direction.

When I got home last night I was surprised to see Cindy with a head full of curls.  I know she was talking about getting a perm but she didn’t tell me she was doing it yesterday.  It looked cute on her and matches her bouncy personality.

Every night we “put the chickens to bed”.  What that means is once it is dark one of us walks out and locks the door to the chicken run.  We then go into the coop and make sure all of the hens are up on the perch.  Quite often Cutie Pie, one of the black hens, will still be on the ground, waiting for us.  She seems to prefer when we pick her up and place her on the perch for some reason.  It’s cute.

Last night I also had to place Stephie, the beautiful arucana on the perch.  Stephie seems to be the general outcast of the flock.  A lot of the other birds pick on her and quite often she is off in the yard by herself somewhere.  Of course Cindy and I feel bad for her and we try to give her special dispensation.  Stephie has learned to follow us when we call her.  Quite often if we give the other hens a treat Stephie will hang back.  Often in those situations we were give her her own individual treat out of the view of the other chickens.  It’s funny how she looks for the special attention now.

Last night was the Iowa caucus.  There was big news on both sides of the ticket.  First Ted Cruz beat Donald Trump, most likely on the backs of the evangelical vote.  A few years ago Rick Santorum won Iowa so if I was Ted I wouldn’t get too excited by the win.

On the democratic side Bernie and Hilary basically tied with something like a couple tenths of a point separating them.  Considering that when the race started, Hilary was looked at as being basically unopposed in her quest for the nomination, for Bernie to tie her in Iowa was a huge turn in momentum.  Make no mistake about it, Bernie has an uphill battle in front of him.  Without massive corporate dollars funding his campaign and the ridiculous practice of “super delegates” that are very heavily financially influenced,  he is going to have overwhelming grass roots support to make it happen.

To be honest I am more excited about the prospect of Bernie being elected than I was about Obama in 2008.  In 08 I think the idea that the country had progressed far enough to actually elect a black president was very exciting.  Although I think Obama has done a decent job in office, I still saw too much of old guard politics in play with the most benefit to those that need it the least.  Obamacare is a perfect example.  By the time lobbyists got done with it, the bill that started out as something aimed at helping the uninsured get coverage became more of a way for insurance companies to get even richer through rewrites of the plan that benefited them much more than the everyday Joe.

Bernie is a no nonsense guy and is really the only candidate that acknowledges and is willing to fight over what is depicted in the graphic to the left.  Feel the Bern.

Saturday morning after a very poor night of sleep Cindy and I drug ourselves out of bed at 4:30 for the last time for a running club event.  We got on site a little after 5:30 and started work on the start line mats immediately. Despite having cones and lights out we still had idiots that zoomed by us without even touching the brake pedal, unreal.  By the time we got back to the main registration area it was a little after 6.  One of the nice things about this race is it starts at 8AM, a half hour later than most of the club race start times.

So we got busy setting up the registration area and running power for various things that required it.  I had Chris helping me with paper registration entry.  Ever since we got the MyLaps equipment I can no longer do race day data entry due to the extra time requirements equipment set up now takes.

Laurie, who is slated to take over race timing responsibilities and myself hopped in the golf cart to get to the start line about 15 minutes ahead of the start time.  The start of this race is always problematic because of the dog involvement.  The congestion at the start leads to many tripping hazards as excited dogs inadvertently cut off people around them.  This year they tried to address it by lining up runners by expected race pace.  It didn’t seem to help much.

Because of the distance between the registration area and the start line there is always a huge number of people that don’t get to the start line on time.  As a result I am stuck at the start line waiting for as many as stragglers as possible to cross the timing mats so they get an accurate time.  The end result of all of this was me not getting back to the finish line until we were 8 minutes into the race, meaning I only had 8-10 minutes to make sure the finish line was up and running.

So runners started streaming across the finish and times were getting recorded.  I sat back and exhaled, the hard work was done and all that was left was to do a few result print outs and I was done, or so I thought.  At the finish line I normally have two timing boxes, one main box and a second one for back up, just in case.  The back up box is normally never needed because the MyLaps hardware is generally very reliable.  Well I noticed that I was accumulating more chip reads on the back up box than the main box which was odd.  At first I wrote this off as some runners that had already finished the race standing too close to the back up timing mats, causing them to get read again.  I asked those people to step back a few feet.

After printing out a set of finish results we started having some people coming up and telling us their times were wrong, off by a little more than 40 seconds.  We used the security dvr to watch footage as the first finisher crossed.  His time matched what we posted, as did the second finisher.  However when the third finisher crossed the video showed a time roughly 46 seconds faster than what was posted in the results.  WTF???

Over the years I have had situations where all runner times were off due to various issues.  This was the first time I ever just saw a few random people with a consistent time offset.  Through a hive mind collaboration between myself, Chris, and Laurie who were at the table with me we pieced together what happened.  I took a look at the raw data for one of the missed runners on each timing box.  It showed he had not been read on the main timing box but was read on the back up box.  Ok so it appears that any of the problem times were associated with runners that did not get read on the main box.

Laurie said it seemed like the time on the second box was off.  When I took a look at the box I saw we forgot to confirm the GPS time synch on it, meaning it’s internal clock was off by roughly 40 some seconds.  Now that I knew the issue I had to come up with a way to fix it.  The solution I came up with was to delete all of the race chip times and reimport the times, using only the back up box as a source.  In the timing software I was able to apply a 43 second time adjustment to all imported times which corrected all of the errors.  Whew, crisis averted, again.

This was a particularly challenging issue because it was two headed.  The problem with the main box, which after the race was determined to be a bad cable, was bad enough.  Having the time synch on the back up box wrong added another degree of complexity.  Nearly every race has some sort of hurdle that needs to be cleared, this just happened to be a pretty high one.  Having this occur on my last race timing for the club put a nice exclamation point on things.

It’s these sort of issues that are going to be particularly difficult for a novice race timer to address.  Not only do you have to be able to identify the source of the problem, you need to have the background knowledge to be able to logically arrive at a workaround for the issue, even if you have never seen it before, such as what happened Saturday.  I think there is a very bumpy road ahead for whomever assumes the timer responsibility.

The times problem put me into more of a focused haze than normal, meaning I really had no time to enjoy what makes the race so special, the dog participation.  I hardly saw or talked to anyone outside the people involved with the registration and timing parts of the race.  I heard later that everyone had a great time. It seems bizarre that I really couldn’t tell you much about the race outside of what was directly in front of me.

This race was special not only because it was the 10th year for the event but also because it was the first time the race has been held since Nicki died.  Evidently Ali said some touching words about Nicki on the PA which I unfortunately did not hear as I was in the midst of trouble shooting mode.  On the back of the event t-shirt there is a a line that dedicates the race to Nicki and will forever be in her memory.  It was both very touching and sad.

Our post race route was quite different than normal.  Instead of heading home we headed to a storage area for Laurie’s business where we dropped off all of the remaining club owned equipment.  It felt odd but refreshing at the same time to be passing the torch both figuratively and literally.  We have a whole lot more space in our spare bedroom now since I have housed running club equipment for close to a decade.

I did need to take the main timing laptop back home with me.  I used it to prepare and post my final set of results as the running club timer.  As you can imagine I have been asked a number of times how it feels to be stepping away from a role I have held for such a long time.  Of course the first reaction are words like relief and happiness.  When I announced that I was stepping away three months ago the eight events I had to plow through to get here seemed formidable.  Bearing this responsibility when your heart is no longer in it was not an easy thing.

Now that I punched my last time card I do feel that sense of relief I anticipated for so long.  Being free of the anxiety that surrounds this sort of gig is going to be very, very welcome.  Despite serving in the role that I did for so long I can’t totally get away from some feelings of guilt, as I know that in the end it is the race participants that could suffer from my absence.  They are devoid of responsibility for my decision so having them potentially be affected by it does not bring me good feelings.  All I can do is hope the club finds it’s way now that my hands have completely been pulled off the wheel.

Saturday afternoon we worked on a number of things that needed to be done.   Ali stopped by to pick up Sadie.  She actually hung around for a little bit and chatted with us which was very nice.  She was very happy about how the race went which was good to hear.

I had some ideas about going out to dinner and/or a movie Saturday night to celebrate timing my last club race.    Reality sunk in that we would be drop dead tired which would be counter to doing much celebrating.  We instead ordered a take out eggplant parm sub that we enjoyed as we watched Scorch Trials, my latest Netflix rental. I would describe the movie as long, confusing, and weird, only worthy of a B rating in my book.  Cindy rated it even lower.

On Sunday morning Cindy and I decided to do another track run, this time increasing our distance from 2 miles to 5K (3.12 miles)  The temps in the lower 60’s combined with overcast skies made for some good running weather.  I felt ok during the run however later in the day and to a degree this morning I am feeling some minor discomfort in the IT band area, the first I have felt in quite awhile.

We went straight from the run to running errands, stopping for coffee as well as Lowe’s and Costco.  At Lowe’s we got some more plants for the garden although my major intention was to get a dryer vent cover that I could re-purpose as a crude cover for the Ring doorbell I have mounted on the chicken coop run.  The vent cover will provide some degree of shade and precipitation protection for the device.

At Costco I picked up a LED garage light that was on sale.  The conventional florescent light I had in the garage had one bulb out, replacing it with an affordable and mercury free solution seemed like a good option.  I hung the new light which included cutting off the power plug and splicing it directly into the house wiring, a simple chore.  The new LED lights don’t have the warm up time the old bulbs suffered from and appear to be brighter overall.

Last night Cindy and I were passed out in bed at an incredibly early time of 8:30PM.  We both just felt exhausted.  Depsite the early bedtime I woke up this morning feeling not particularly rested due to restless sleep.  I can’t tell you the last time I fell asleep and the next thing I remembered was waking up with the alarm the next morning.  Instead my nights have been filled with sessions of waking up and then not being able to fall back asleep, sometimes for hours at a time.

I heard this morning that yet another Stern Show “whack packer” died recently, Crackhead Bob.  Bob (real name George), was a former crackhead that wound up suffering multiple strokes from his drug use.  The end result was an incredibly funny speech impediment that lead to many, many funny moments on the show.  Bob dropped off the show radar in 2007 when he moved to Texas.  He was only 56 when he died.  In the past year there have been a number of prominent whack packers that have kicked the bucket.  I suppose it is a sad reminder of the age of the show as well as a large segment of it’s loyal listener base.