Category Anything and Everything

November is typically the start of our dry season. The humidity eases, the temperatures moderate and rain is light and infrequent. In the past few days we have reverted back to a summer like pattern. We got enough rain that we are once again underwater at home, something I don’t ever remember happening in November. Well at least the garden is taking off as a result.

Another typically summertime event happened last night. We lost power. We lost it just as my mom was getting ready to boil the water for the rigatoni. So we dug out the candles and flashlights. Luckily our gas grill has a side burner attachment so we were able to boil the water on it. My mom attempted to toast the garlic bread on the burner by sitting the bread on top of some aluminum foil. That experiment didn’t go well as the bread smoked in less than a minute. We had a nice dinner outside by candles.

I was starting to get nervous though because Thursday is Survivor night. No power could seriously put a damper on our Survivor viewing. I remembered that we have one of those mini pocket tv’s sitting around somewhere. I was on a mission. I haven’t used it in almost a year. So I am searching the house with a flashlight. I’m not having any luck. I am searching the same areas twice thinking I may have missed it. Finally I find it tucked away in a spare bedroom! So our emergency plan was in place, if power was still out at 8 we could huddle around this 2 inch screen and get our fix. 🙂 The crisis was averted when almost on cue at 8 oclock, the lights snapped back on. Whew. Another great show.

Tomorrow I will be crawling out of bed around 4am for my flight up to Milwaukee. Yawn…. as fun as this weekend will be, one thing I don’t think it will be is restful. Look forward to my Wednesday report.

Naples forecast for Monday

Partly Cloudy

High: 84
Low: 67

Green Bay forecast for Monday

Rain/Snow Showers

High: 40
Low: 38

Hopefully I’ll be too drunk to feel it.

The snowbirds are coming, the snowbirds are coming! The restaurants are filling up, the shopping plazas are dotted with gray heads moving slowly about, and the roads are backing up with elderly motorists going 5 mph under the speed limit in the passing lane. Yay!!!!!!!

I was walking the dog this morning and in the middle of the yard was another one of those mystery catfish. Not near any standing water. It rained a decent amount yesterday. So either this dropped from the clouds or was dropped by a bird. Never thought I would have fish in the yard. So odd.

The past 24 hours has been a traffic nightmare. On my way home last night our main road was blocked by an oil spill and related accidents, I got redirected 3 times to get around it, a 30 minute trip took 75 minutes. This morning for no apparent reason other than the fact the road was wet, the morning commute took 75 minutes. It’s really wearing thin on me. I find myself cursing out total strangers in other cars for no other reason than they are contributing to the gridlock that is making me miserable. Of course I know it’s silly but I do it anyway. And don’t get me started on dump trucks, those god damn dump trucks@!!!!! HATE THEM.

We rushed home to prepare for trick or treaters. Last year we didn’t get a lot, maybe a dozen, but still we wanted to be prepared. We(I) actually put out Halloween decorations this year. We carved the pumpkin. I put away the groceries quickly and then lit the pumpkin and waited for the kiddies to arrive. Perhaps our pumpkin wasn’t sincere enough (Charlie Brown fans understand) At 10 pm I blew out the candle in the pumpkin with a grand total of ZERO visitors. Disappointing. Our street and connecting side streets has over 200 homes on them, many, many kids live in them. Oh well. Perhaps in today’s fear filled world, coventional trick or treating is seen as just too darn dangerous. Sigh…….

Alison had to work on Saturday so you would figure I would enjoy the time to myself, do something fun. Of course not, instead I spent most of the day cleaning the house and doing chores. I had some screw off time where I watched an episode of Playmakers and some other stuff but basically I hustled most of the day. Not really complaining because if I didn’t do anything I’d feel like a bum.

Our pool is still green although a light shade of it. We have thrown enough chemicals in it to kill a small army but it still isn’t totally clean. I’ve had to clean out the pool filter 4 times clearing out all the junk that is in the water. Hopefully it will be cleared up this week.

This weekend I relocated 3 pygmy rattle snakes as well as spotting 3 black racer snakes. Ali HATES snakes, they freak her out. She hates them enough that she actually talked about the idea of moving to a development. I was never determined to live out where we do, that was much more of her thing, she wanted the space. I’ve always been open to living in a more community type area (development) but for totally different reasons than her. She would want to do it because of snakes and having sidewalks to walk the dog. I would want to do it to be closer to work and “stuff” as well as relieving myself of the financial and labor responsibilities of living in a single familiy home with almost 3 acres of land. However in reality, I doubt that it would actually happen. I have so much invested in that house emotionally, financially and sweat, it would be very hard to walk way from. If the house would ever be up for sale it won’t be for any of the reasons listed above.

The Eagles won again. As bad as things have been, they are 5-3 halfway through the season. The offense actually performed well, albeit against one of the worst defenses in the league. Maybe there is hope yet. I will see my team first hand this upcoming monday night at Green Bay. One of those once in a lifetime things that I’m sure many stories will come out of. I leave early Saturday morning and return Tuesday.

I’ve been slowly working on getting a model Cessna RC airplane ready to fly that my buddy Mike gave me before he shipped out to Colorado. He painstakingly built it from scratch. It’s very realsitic and even includes working marker lights. I finally have all the components I need to get it in the air, however I am very nervous to fly it. I will feel like shit if I crash the thing and it is so light, it needs to be flown in near zero wind conditions. It was too windy to fly it this weekend. I’ll take the plunge soon. Instead of flying the Cessna I threw my flying wing in the air. It is literally a bat out of hell. I take it up a thousand feet and power dive it and then pull out low. It sounds so cool as it screams overhead. I buzz the surrounding houses. It’s fun.

My buddy Chuck got me a copy of Max Payne 2. I put in a few hours with that as well over the weekend. If you liked the first one, you’ll like the second one. It is basically the same thing with enhanced graphics. Personally I never get tired of shooting lots of baddies so I am enjoying the game.

My old server went for 336 on ebay. 3 dollars less than the BUY IT NOW price I started it at. I’m happy with getting that for it. Shipping that beast will be a challenge.

Somehow, believe it or not, I know there are other things that I thought about the weekend that would make good blog material but it escapes me now. I seriously have some sort of issue in my brain that is going on. Makes me speak poorly at times, forget shit that I should easily remember. Sometimes I even “misspeak” while typing, scary. I hope I kick the bucket before I can’t remember what day of the week it is. How miserable.

I set a new non-creatine bench mark today of 260 at the gym over lunch hour. It felt like I could have even gotten 265 possibly. I haven’t heard any new bench highs coming from the yard gnome lately so I am assuming that he has not passed me yet. Pip squeak.

There is a regular gym goer that I see quite often. He is stocky, not huge, not ripped but he’s strong. He has very odd workout routines. He will do the same exercise repeatedly with very high weight, very limited reps (1-3) with very long rest periods in between (5-10 minutes) It’s very odd and would seem very difficult to complete in under 2 hours considering the hour I was there he was doing the same exercise for all but the last 5 minutes. Today he was doing I guess what you would call a dead lift, except he wasn’t picking it off the floor, he was picking it off the squat rack. In total he wasn’t moving the bar more than 6 to 8 inches. Granted he had 5 or 6, 45 pound plates on either side of the barbell but still he was moving it such a short distance I was speculating if I could do the same feat. Last night there was some old man that used horrible form on every machine he was on, pulling the lat bar down to his knees, using the tricep machine as a modified ab exercise, crazy stuff.

Remember I said I had a snake in my water equipment? Here is a pic of it.

Here is a pic of my Audrey set up on our kitchen counter. Speaking of the Audrey, I added further geektronics last night. Now when a phone call comes in, not only does the caller id come up on the Audrey, it also flashes up on my PC. How cool huh? 🙂

Survivor this year is just flat out great. The most entertaining stuff on tv right now in my opinon. How great was it that they brought back all the kicked off people and let them compete against the remaining people??? The fact they won was even better. Again, like almost every other Survivor a black contestant made a very poor showing. I’m no racist but for whatever reason, almost every black contestant on Survivor has come off very poorly whether it has been through editing or reality. However in this case there was no sugar coating it. Osten, the most fit looking contestant of this show’s cast basically quit. He asked his team to vote him out. He basically was ready to quit a few days in but they refused to vote him out at that time. This time they granted him his wish. At tribal council Jeff probst basically embarrassed him. Osten expressed how he was just done and wanted to leave. Jeff simply asked the others if they agreed he was going to go. They all said yes, no official paper ballot vote was taken. Jeff said, fine, Osten came up and Jeff put out his torch and said go home. Jeff laid his torch down on the floor, no parting words were shown by Osten, he was just gone. This has never happened before in Survivor. What an embarrassment. Osten is a schlub.

Last night we carved our pumpkin. Instead of putting it outside it went into the fridge so it keeps for today. My mom didn’t understand but I explained how quickly a pumpkin rots in the Florida environment once you carve it, plus it would have been filled with frogs, insects and God knows what else if we left it outside. Tonight we have nothing big planned besides hanging out for the handful of trick or treaters that we will get.

The pool is slowly recuperating. It went from cloudy green mess to clear but it still has a light green color to it. I will blast it with muratic acid and chlorine this weekend to kill whatever is in there yet.

This weekend we have a lot of home stuff to do. Clean the inside and mow outside. At least we can get away with mowing every other weekend now. Next weekend I will be in Green Bay with Keener at Lambeau Field watching the Eagles. It will be wild. I have to scrape together whatever semblance of winter clothes I have left. It is going to be cold.

Damn I wish I had a video camera and editing software growing up. This kid is quite funny.

I’v been dumping different images on my Audrey the past couple nights. I think I finally settled on one. Last night I was listening to internet radio on it, playing mp3’s and using it as a digital picture frame. It’s way cool.

Last night Ali and I watched the Charlie Brown Halloween special for the at least the 20th time. It’s amazing how it never gets old. Still makes me laugh.
I love when they are going trick or treating, “I got a candy bar, I got a quarter…… I got a ROCK” 🙂 Love Charlie Brown.

Last night when we got home we found out we had a nearly empty pool filled with well water. We had a crack in the finish and called in the repair. However we had no idea when they were coming. So the crack is fixed but now our clear blue water has been replaced with murky green water. It will take a couple weeks until we get it cleaned up.

Even though I have been down in Florida for over 3 years, I have been able to stay more or less current with my buddies up north thanks to using instant messenger. It is super convenient and helped keep my day moving along. Recently, Sovereign Bank (where I used to work and where most of my buddies are) declared instant messhenger stuff as a security risk and banned it from desktops. As a result my contact with those people is much less frequent. Bummer. 🙁