Grandma's Birthday

My Mom just had her most recent in a long string of Birthdays.



(The Monkey is me celebrating, not her)

It is nice to have Taylor's Grandparents so close. We simply walked over with her gift bag in hand. We got her stuff that we know she likes: Wild Flowers 2009 Calendar, Josh Grobin CD and a package of Tea Light Candles from IKEA.

We ate BBQ for lunch and Grandma had Carrot Cake for dessert. I was able to say no to the cake, but there was plenty of room for Ice Cream.



All that BBQ made us sleepy, so we wandered home and took a nap.

Why is it that I never want to go to bed at night, but I am always ready for a nap?

Daily Plate

In addition to the exercise in the gym located in the basement of the building I work in, I have also been logging all of the food I have been eating for the past month.



So far I have lost 4 pounds. It is exactly the rate and amount that I calculated that I wanted to lose. At this rate I should be a total of 20 pounds lighter by New Years Day.



Most days I do not have any problem staying below my total calories. It is only on the weekend that the Evil Restaurants call my name and tempt me with their tasty treats. If you check out the chart above, you can trace most spikes to a weekend.

I am sure if I really watched my diet and exercised more often I could strike an imposing figure, but I am much too lazy to do either. Slow and steady got me to the state I am in, and it will help me get back to "normal".

14th Anniversary

Tawnya & I just had our 14th Wedding Anniversary.



We decided to celebrate by meeting downtown for dinner after work. She left work at 5PM and drove to the restaurant, and I left work at 5:30PM and walked. We actually almost bumped into each other on a street corner across from P.F. Chang's



Tawnya had eaten at the famed China Bistro a few times in California with people from work, but I had never tried it. A few weeks ago while we were in Houston for a mini vacation we ate at Pei Wei and I experienced the Best Chicken I had ever had. When I learned that Pei Wei was sort of a casual version of P.F. Chang's, I knew it had to be the dinner destination for our Anniversary. I tried the Orange Peel Chicken. It was very good, but not half as good as what Pei Wei had served in Houston. On Evan's recomendation Tawnya ordered the Crispy Honey Chicken. I now have a new favorite food to add to my list.

After dinner Tawnya drove me back to work where I went upstairs to grab some things I needed to bring home. I thanked Evan for his dining tip and walked the 3 blocks to the parking garage. When I searched for my car keys I suddenly remembered that I had left my keys in my lunch bag, and that I had left my lunch bag in Tawnya's car, and that Tawnya had left me in front of the building I work in 20 minutes ago. By the time I got her on the phone to ask her to bring me my keys, she was almost 75% of the way home.

Not a great way to impress your wife on our anniversary and remind her what a great idea it was to marry you in the first place.

I am a Dunderklumpen.

Ab-Work

Oh sure, I get on the Elliptical machine for 30 minutes, or spend time working on the upper body machines or the lower body machines...but I have Never used the Abdominal equipment at the gym. I hate sit ups. I always have. Even as a 140 pound "kid" at the CHP Academy doing PT every morning before the sun came up I hated sit ups. Friday I decided that I was tired of looking like I was in my third trimester, so I decided to try out the equipment that I had never even peeked at since I had joined the gym in the basement of the building I work in. I didn't do as bad as I thought. It was not easy or pretty, but I was putting in some effort. I felt pretty smug with my new-found determination to finally do what needed to be done.

Fast forward to Saturday morning in Taekwondo class.



Our instructor informs us that today we are working on our Core. We will also be working with a partner. Our partner is to stand over our head as we lay straight on the ground. We bring our legs straight up to past vertical, where our partners catch our feet and push them back towards the ground. Our feet are to Not touch the ground while we do this. Loads of fun to have a guy shove my feet towards the mat while I am bent in a 90 degree angle. The next task was to do crunches with our legs crossed and elevated while our partner held their body off the ground with their hands while their fully extended legs were being supported at their feet by our bellies. The final test of strength was to partner up four people, have them lay side by side with a staff (about the length of a pool cue) held by each of the four. This would force all of us to do sit ups in unison. To cap this torture off, they asked all of the waiting parents to watch us so they could judge us on our performance. Our team of four did not win Gold, Silver or even Bronze, but one "nice" old lady said that we deserved special consideration as a team because we were so supportive of each other. This is actually code for the Fat Guy in the middle slowed everyone down and they had to shout encouragement to coax every last ounce of strength I had left in me to struggle to a sitting position.

Lesson Learned: Do Not use the Ab Machines the day before a Saturday Taekwondo class.

Resurrected TiVo

After fighting with my TiVo for way too long, I finally resurrected it this weekend.



I took the cheapest path to fix the problem and it worked better than I had hoped. I bought a new 500GB Hard Drive to replace the failing 250GB the factory installed. I also bought the Instant Cake program and created a boot-able CD that I used to prepare the new drive for the swap. The swap was easier than I had expected and now the TiVo seems to be faster than before.



I reinserted the cable cards and soon I was watching HiDef again.

All is well and I can now get back to laying in bed with the remote in my hand.

The Dark Knight

After all I heard about The Dark Knight, I expected it to be the best movie ever.

My verdict after watching it a full month after it was released is that it was the best movie I have seen in a theater this year, but not the best movie ever.

While watching Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne I noticed that he has a bit of a palatal lisp. He even lisps slightly in his "I just gargled with Kerosene and Bleach" voice he affects while donning the mask.

Heath Ledger did a great job as the Joker. I case you did not hear, he died after he finished his part of the movie.

I suggest that you see this one while it is still in the theaters.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

As a 10 year old kid I saw Star Wars: A New Hope in its initial theatrical release and was hooked. I continued to grow as a fan as episodes 5 and 6 were released. As an adult I was excited that the franchise was kicking back into gear with a prequel trilogy by telling the back story of how it all started. It turns out that these new movies seemed to be written with 10 year olds in mind as their target audience. When I heard about Star Wars: The Clone Wars I thought it sounded interesting, but I was now skeptical that in this new iteration I would once again be decades older than its intended demographic.



After watching the actual movie this afternoon I have to rate it a 7, just a bit better than "I liked it" and just a bit lower than "I really liked it". Jabba the Hut's uncle Ziro proved to be the worst part of the movie when he spoke in English with a lispy, high-pitched twang purposely reminiscent of Truman Capote. Who knew that there were Gay Hutts?



This was nothing more than a 90 minute commercial for a new batch of Star Wars toys and pilot for the upcoming TV series of the same name.

Good, Bad or Something exactly like this, if it has Star Wars in the title, I will still probably watch every last frame and enjoy it just the same.

Plan B

After Evan read my misnamed blog (It should be the TiVo Blog) he suggested that since I had not seen any obvious physical problems when I cracked open the case of my TiVo that the issue might actually be a failing Hard Drive.



I went to my favorite online TiVo vendor and scoped out a brand spanking new 500 GB Hard Drive that will work out of the box for $229. I could buy a blank of the same exact drive for $159 and use a program like Instant Cake ($20) to do the setup myself. The cheapest option would be to buy the exact same drive from a web site I have never heard of for as little as $76 and use the Instant Cake option.

I should bounce these options off my trusted Tech Adviser, Evan.

Now It Is Just Messing With Me

At this point I think that TiVo is just messing with me.

I cracked the case and was sad to note that it was mostly dust free. Looks like my silver bullet in the shape of canned air was not going to fix all. I blew out what little dust was in the system and sealed it back up. When I turned it back on it gleefully began rebooting again.

I ignored it for several hours while we watched Big Brother 10 in the living room on my old Series 2 TiVo. The powers that be conspired to twist the knife in my ribs by showing a commercial for the upcoming season of Survivor...this time in HD. I barely paid attention to the rest of the show while my brain pondered these deep questions:

Where do you send a sick TiVo?
How much would it cost to fix?
Could it be fixed?
Would it be back in time for all the upcoming fall shows in HD?

I shuffled back into the master bedroom and noticed that the rebooting had stopped. I turned on the TV and everything was fully functional again...at first. I reconnected to the internet and downloaded programming updates and watched a couple of shows. All was fine right up to the time it started getting jittery and paused like a slow video feed.

What now? Beats me.

My TiVo is Toast

It is now hit and miss with my TiVo.

Late last night it worked great. No HD, but at least it was working again.

I checked it first thing this morning...still working. Big exhale, now it is only a matter of getting the cable cards working again. I came home tonight and all was still well...until I tried to fast forward the show I was watching. When it got to the end, it stuck in freeze frame. No combination of button pushing and grumbling seemed to be able to convince TiVo to behave.

After I cycled the power (by yanking the plug) the TiVo lapsed into the now familiar dance I will call the Reboot Boogie. It stayed working long enough for me to check the internal temp: 50 C. For those of us who are 'merican, that is about 122 F. TiVo said that 50 C is "Normal", but when I checked our Series 2 TiVo, I found to to be 45 C or 113 F and labeled as "Normal". In the past both of them had consistently been around 40 C (104 F). From my previous experience as a Computer Tech I knew that when electronics get warmer than are comfortable to touch with your bare hand, things stop working too well. I think that 122 F qualifies as warmer than I would want to touch for very long.

I quickly went to the command that allowed me to shut down the machine gracefully and then unplugged the machine. I plan on cracking open the case and blow out all the dust it has accumulated over the last year and a half. I have revived more PCs than I can remember with this trick, and I hope it will be just what the doctor ordered.

TiVo Emergency

The Worst Thing Ever greeted me when I got home today...



My TiVo Series 3 was caught in an endless loop of rebooting itself.

After the fourth time I realized that this was not looking good. I did a Google search for TiVo Series 3 reboot and found a site that I trusted that had step by step instructions for a possible fix. The Good News is that after spending all night following these instructions I was able to get it to stop rebooting. The Bad News is that I can only get basic cable channels now and I can't get the cable cards to magically start working by inserting them back into their slots. The TiVo also seems to be frozen now.

I am Tired & Angry.

Bad combination.

I bet if I just go to sleep everything will be just fine in the morning.

Water = Money

Our upstairs bathroom never has any visitors. Taylor will play upstairs once in a while, but for the most part the entire second floor is ignored. While putting away towels in our upstairs linen closet we noticed discolored grout in the darkened bathroom. Flip on the light...Surprise! We had a leak under the sink that had created a puddle on the tile floor.

I had to take the afternoon off from work to meet the plumber. He was scheduled to be at my place between 4 and 6 PM. After 6:30 I called to check his status and all I got was an answering service. He finally shows up around 7:30 PM, surveys under my sink and delivers the verdict:

You have a leak.

The master of the obvious gathers his tools & supplies, fixes the problem and is out the door before 8 PM.

The problem was a faulty Cold Water Shutoff Valve. This is the second one that we have had to replace in our 3 year old house.

The good news is that the leak has stopped. The bad news is we are $181 lighter and now need to repair water damage to the sink vanity and molding around the bathroom door.

The Mole - The Final Season?

We just finished watching what is probably the Final Season of The Mole.



Taylor joined us halfway through the season, but quickly became a big fan.

I have added Season 1 of The Mole to her NetFlix que.

When I told her that this was probably the final season due to low ratings she just knew that there just had to be thousands of people watching the show and enjoying it as much as we were...sadly I believe her estimate was closer to the mark than ABC had expected.