I serve 2 basic functions for Nicki. I am her protector when she finds herself in a situation she finds scary and I am her entertainment when she wants to roughhouse and play. Well last night we were playing, she was rolling around, trying to tackle me and use my arm as human chew toy. She was sprinting around and made a sharp cut and all of a sudden started crying in pain and pulled up her one back leg and couldn’t walk on it. She managed to get up on the sofa but was still wailing in pain. Ali and I immediately feared the worse, did she break it, tear something, screw up her hip? We sat with her for a few minutes and she stopped crying but was still holding the leg up and didn’t want it to be moved in certain directions. We decided to take her to the emergency Vet (the same ones that wanted to charge me my first born to treat the diabetic cat) So Ali called them to tell them we were coming in. Of course the first thing out of their mouth is “…minimum 69 dollar charge…” By the time we were ready to go, Nicki was again walking on the affected leg. She was favoring it a bit but could walk and was able to jump up into the car herself. By the time we got her to the vet it was hard to tell there was anything wrong with her at all. But we were committed at this point and Ali wanted to make SURE she was ok. So we spent about an hours time and 89 bucks for Nicki to have her heart rate taken, a thermometer stuck up her ass, have the vet move her leg around and give her a shot of some anti-inflammatory stuff. He couldn’t really detect exactly what happened, just that whatever it was it couldn’t have been too bad if she was almost back to normal already. I guess it was better to be safe than sorry. I felt bad that she hurt herself while playing with me. You always hear stories about how couples with no kids almost literally view their dog as their kid, we are definitely a prime example. Alison loves this dog like she gave birth to it. I don’t think I am to that degree but it is hard to imagine that I actually wanted to turn her back in in the beginning. I was wrong on that one.
When I was up in PA for the Rumble, they had a raffle to win a new Geo Tracker, 5 bucks a ticket. I felt lucky so I bought one. The drawing was July 5th. I am still holding on to the ticket for some reason just in case they haven’t gotten around to calling me yet. Silly.
Ebaum is truly a wonderful web site, here is just one of the many reasons why…
I was doing work at someone’s place last night. I ran across one of the kid’s PC’s that was a spyware/adware/pop up nightmare. It was basically unuseable as when it came up you were immediately deluged with an endless array of pop up windows and an always busy hard drive. I was able to get some anti-spyware stuff installed after some prolonged effort. A scan of the system revealed over 1500 spyware components on the system! Oh my. After multiple clean attempts both in regular and safe mode with both spybot and adaware I was able to get it under control. But there was still something lurking that I couldn’t get rid of. When I would try to run spybot or even regedit while booted up normally they would not start. By the time I got to this point it was late, almost 9pm so I wrapped it up for the night. This morning I researched it and found out that on top of all that spyware, the computer was also infected by the Bagle virus. What a mess. Evidently the computer is used a lot for chatting, downloading MP3’s via peer to peer networks and other activities common for teenager run puters. Parents don’t let your kids have free run over their computers unless you are ok with reformatting them every couple months.
I have had a bunch of stuff for sale on half.com for over a year. I sold a bunch of stuff off of it, mostly old cd’s from Ali’s collection when she was younger. In total I think I made almost 500 bucks selling stuff on HALF. Ebay is phasing out half.com so it is trying to push half.com sellers to move into an EBAY store. The first month was free so I decided to give it a shot. I already sold one thing out of it so that was cool. Check it out, it’s ultra cheesy but if you are looking for early 90’s cd releases I may have you covered.
I left the alarm set at it’s normal time so I could get up Saturday morning to make the trek up to Tampa to pick up the new mower. I had my old mower loaded up in the back of the truck which would make the truck significantly less aerodynamic going 80 mph up interstate 75. I was considering bringing along a tarp in case it rained but I figured what the hell, it hardly ever rains in the morning down here. Of course, it rained. Other than the rain, the drive went ok as I covered the 180 miles in around 2.5 hours. The guy selling it lived in a development filled with large houses on small plots of land. I was wondering to myself how this guy has all this mower stuff in a house like this. Once I looked in his 3 car garage I saw how. It was basically packed with stuff almost floor to ceiling with little pathways to walk through. The stuff consisted of basically tools, mowers, mower parts and car parts. Evidently the guy has a mower shop as well but the garage just stored the stuff he wanted to keep close by. Wow. One thing I immediately noticed that wasn’t mentioned on the ebay ad was the mower was a 6 speed. My old mower was a hydrostatic automatic which meant you simply had a foot pedal to go forward and backward. The 6 speed requires you to stop the mower everytime you change gears. It wasn’t a huge deal but still I wished I knew about it upfront. When I mentioned it to the guy he said “I didn’t have that in the ad?” Yea, ok. We unloaded my mower and then were ready to pull the new one onto my truck. It didn’t turn over and just hummed. Oh oh. Multiple tries and the same thing happened. It was raining again and before I got there he had hosed off the deck to clean it up a bit. After some troubleshooting he determined that it had to be the the solenoid that controlled the starter. Perhaps it somehow took on some water. So what we wound up doing was pulling the solenoid from my old tractor and threw it into the new one. Not an ideal way to have things go with my NEW tractor but after the swap it fired up just fine. As part of the deal I also snagged a spike aerator to help bust up some of the thatch that plagues our lawn. By the time I left the rain had stopped, cool. Of course, halfway home it started to rain again. 🙁
I unloaded the new tractor and mowed a small patch and then hooked up the aerator just to tool around and watch it poke holes in the ground. Simple fun. It mows well, it’s new and I have an aerator for 400 bucks out of pocket so I can’t complain too much. By the time I parked the mower it was around 2:30. Alison had to work on Saturday and wasn’t going to be home until around 4:30. In the next 2 hours I did a housework blitz in order to alleviate Ali from having to help with these chores later. In the space of 120 minutes I did the following:
Cleaned both bird cages
Cleaned both bathrooms
Dusted around the house
Did 2 loads of laundry
Pulled out our defective VCR from our AV shelf
Hung up some dog thing on the wall
Cleaned all the kitchen counters
Swept the kitchen and utility room floors
Swept the rest of the house
As I was vacuuming Ali came home. She didn’t believe I was cleaning everything after spending 6 hours driving earlier. I couldn’t quite understand it myself. I think part of the reason I do this kind of stuff is I want to make the weekends easier for Ali just because that is my nature. I think another part of it is to demonstrate to Ali what can get done in a short amount of time with concentrated effort. There are many days where I may be out doing something on a weekend and Ali is home all day and she will do one or two things around the house in the span of 8, 10, 12 hours. I have to admit it frustrates me because then even though it isn’t her intention, I immediately take on the responsibility of knocking out the chores asap so I can relax and do what I want the rest of the weekend. Her preference is to relax first and then get to the chores as she feels inspired (which sometimes never comes) , my preference is to bust ass and get the stuff done right away so I have uniterrupted free time the rest of the weekend. Our contrast on this issue causes conflict at times and my approach to resolving it is that I just do things and if she helps that’s great if she doesn’t oh well. I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t get to me sometimes but I mostly just grin and bear it. I also have been trying to cut back on the frequency and rigidity of certain chores so that has helped some.
After I got done vacuuming I took Ali out to show her the new mower. She mowed a patch out back. She isn’t thrilled with the 6 speed but otherwise reported it as a success. The built in fender cup holder scored brownie points. After her mowing test I pulled out the aerator and hooked it up. I stood on it as she drove so my weight assisted in making the aerator really work. I’m sure it looked pretty funny to drivers as we tooled around the front poking thousands of holes in the grass but hey it worked great, I don’t care if I looked dumb.
That night we went to one of Alison’s favorite restaurants, Iguana Mia. It is a mexican Chi Chi’s stlye restaurant on a smaller scale, without the big chain feel. They are really quick with service and our waiter must have asked us if there was anything we needed 10 times. Courtesy of an Entertainment book coupon, we got out of there with a 16 dollar bill. Can’t beat that.
Even with my efforts on Saturday we still had a substantially full plate for Sunday. The grass hadn’t been mowed in 2 weeks because of the mower failure 2 weekends ago. Our lawn looked like a wheat field with tall shoots of grass poking up everywhere. Alison rode the tractor while I weed whacked, weeded all the landscaped areas and filled the bird feeders. It was hot as hell, 94 and humid. The reported rain that was due to come in was only a few light showers in our area. By the time we got done with the outside stuff it was around 1. We ate lunch, watched an “I Love the 90’s” episode on Tivo (great show) and then came up with a great idea, let’s get more stuff at Home Depot so we can do more work!
So we cleaned up a bit and headed out. On the way we stopped at Blockbuster and picked up 2 movies. At Home Depot we snagged various things like some bolts, a replacement for the diseased topiary we had in front of the house and out of the blue we grabbed a 15 foot tall Jacaranda tree. Getting the tree home was a chore as it was very thin and wispy so we were concerned about branches breaking. I drove 50 mph on I-75 which is a dangerous manuever, but the reduced speed allowed us to get home with the tree intact with no damage. So we got home and did another work session planting the jacaranda, the topiary, 3 crown of thorn plants and some cauliflower we bought for the garden. The tree looks great where we planted it, at the spot where the broken mosquito magnet once stood. If the tree thrives it will be awesome because they are beautiful trees when mature.
The remaining hours of our weekend were taken up mostly by watching one of the movies we rented, The Big Leibowski. We rented it because of some funny clips we saw in the I love the 90’s show. It looked very funny. It was very funny in a whacked out weird way. A very different kind of movie that I enjoyed. The diverse cast of characters in the movie is really out of the ordinary. Jeff Bridges, John Goodman and the guy that played Jesus the ace bowler were the funniest characters in the flick. I’d recommend it. Another movie we saw in the show was Slingblade, I want to rent that one later as well, looks good.
Yesterday I came into work and immediately noticed that our email server was dragging it’s feet. Emails took forever to come up and in many instances I would get the waiting for server dialog box. I immediately started listing things in my mind that have changed recently. Hmmmm. Well I installed MSFT’s latest critical updates on Wednesday, it shouldn’t cause that sort of issue but you never know. So I began researching everywhere I could. I found several things in our configuration that could be possible issues but they were configured that way for a long time, nothing new. I spent the majority of the day tweaking, changing and rebooting the server with little or no improvement. Damn it. Late in the day I get a notification about the main back up job failing. When I looked at the log it all became clear, the email server was being backed up that entire time which was causing it to drag. Evidently there were some problem messages that were making it go very slow.
In retrospect it wasn’t such a bad thing for me to have to go through all of that as it uncovered several things that needed to be fixed anyway. However my failure to check the simple things first resulted in a whole lot of frustration.
This weekend the big event is my trip up to Tampa to pick up my replacement mower. I’m excited to pick up my new tool of yard mastery. I am also getting several accessories that will allow me to expand my grass maintenance capabilities.
One thing I forgot to mention regarding the MLB All-Star game. I found it ironic and a bit annoying to see George and Barbara Bush in every close up batter shot during the game. They were sitting right behind home plate. It seemed like George was pigging out most of the time he was on camera.
Even though I hardly follow baseball at all anymore besides following the Phillies scores, I decided to tune into the All-Star game. I only made it to the 3rd inning or so. A few brief observations. Fantasia’s rendition of the National Anthem wasn’t great and it was made worse by the fact that she messed up a few words. Come on, if you are going to sing the national anthem in front of a nationwide audience, LEARN THE WORDS.
They pushed out Muhammad Ali to be involved in the first pitch ceremony. It literally made me cringe. Why do they do this to the guy? He has non-stop severe tremors that just are so disturbing to watch. To see a man that was such a master quick wit be relinquished to being a silent, shaking figurehead really bothers me. I love Ali, that is why it hurts so bad to see what has happened to him.
When they announced the rosters I knew maybe a third of the all stars. Years ago I would known every single player on every team. It just doesn’t hold my interest anymore. I got to see the first inning slaughter of Clemens. It was unfortunate that what may be his last All-Star game went down like that. He looked real bad. It was very ironic to see him throwing to Piazza as the catcher, since Piazza basically hates Clemens and vice versa.
The most exciting moment of what I saw was during pregame when the middle aged fat guy was able to throw 5 balls through a hole in 30 seconds to win a million bucks. Number 5 bounced through the hole just as time expired.
Ali comes back from her conference tonight. It will be good to have her back. The dog has been moping around the house ever since she left.
Sunday and Monday were rather lowkey with me basically getting stuff done around the house and keeping the dog busy. On Monday I wanted to mow the ENTIRE property. I noticed immediately that the mower deck was vibrating abnormally and that it was cutting low on that side. The last time I replaced the blades I noticed a stress crack on that side so I figured it was worsening. However that didn’t stop me as I mowed down the back of the property, loud noise and all. Just as I finished the back and was ready to do the area around the house it let loose with a loud bang! The metal in the mower housing simply snapped. I wasn’t happy but wasn’t surprised it happened as I knew it would sooner or later. I did some research on the net about replacement costs for the mower deck. 300 bucks plus is what I came back with, ouch. So I did some more searching. I found a guy in Tampa, via ebay, selling a brand new model for around 700 bucks. Then through a series of contacts with the seller I negotiated a deal where I would give him my old tractor in trade and get the new mower and a pull behind aerator and a hitch sleeve for $425. It really works out well, since I will be spending only 100 more than what a new mower deck would have cost and I don’t have to go through the bother of trying to sell the old tractor myself. Plus I get an aerator which normally will cost another 100 bucks itself. The only downside is the 3 hour drive up and back to Tampa to get my new tractor.
Since my grass cutting project was abrubtly cut short, I volunteered to go over to Mom’s to help her plant a couple things. While I was there I fixed a few other things that were amiss so Mom was happy.
I watched Rocky II again on Monday. It still gets me going, it’s such a great movie. No Jack sightings or incidents this weekend.
The headlines down here are all about a former school board chairman who was being indicted for molesting a 12 year old boy. He blew his brains out today. As sterile and pleasant as the elderly residents around here try to keep the community, it’s impossible to keep the ugliness of the real world totally out of view.
We got 2nd in our volleyball tournament yesterday. It was a long, grueling hot day. When we finished up around 7:30 the temperature was still at 92 degrees. We had some great games throughout the day and got some revenge for the last loss we suffered at Deerfield Beach. That team was in our pool and we took them out in the last game of pool play. We finished 4-0 on our net, had a bye for the first round of playoffs, won a long hard semi-final match against an A and AA indoor player who had won the last 2 BB tournaments they had entered. But then we lost in the finals against a guy/girl team. Both of them normally play A level but dropped down to BB to play together. We made a tactical error and decided to serve the guy almost exclusively and wound up losing the final 15-9. Even with the loss it was a great day overall and was the best finish I have had with Randall to this point so we are definitely improving as a team.
Some funny moments from the day:
Guy on another team is frustrated because he and his partner let a serve drop between them. In a split second he reaches down and scoops up 2 big handfuls of sand and rubs it into his hair like he is shampooing with it.
I walk under one of the canopies around center court and seconds later am doing the ant dance as my right foot is covered in fire ants. I escaped with only a half a dozen bites.
We are playing one team where one guy is clearly the weaker player. On game point, we serve the weaker player and win. The stronger player says, “Serve the weaker player on game point, smart….” but his tone made it sound like he thought just the opposite.
The same guy that gave himself a sand shampoo cramped up bad in the playoffs. By the time he was done rolling in the powdery white sand, he pretty much looked like was just dug up from an egyptian pyramid.
Some numbers for yesterday:
4.5 – The amount of pounds less I weighed by bedtime than the day before even after drinking a more than couple gallons of gatorade during the day.
111 – the amount of miles I drove to get to Siesta Keys each way
12 – the amount of hours I was out on the beach
I added a few more tips to the volleyball tips page and one new nickname that will mean nothing to anyone else but myself. One guy we played against looked almost exactly like a kid I played baseball with back in high school, except the guy yesterday was a real italian along with heavy accent and all.