THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER!

Blessings

2008-07-01T07:42:00.000-04:00

So, one of the things that I would like to do on this blog is chronicle times in my life when I feel like I have felt the hand / influence of God in my life. I seem to recall hearing someone talking about this in church - for some reason I keep thinking it was Heber J. Grant - he would read his father's journal and see the various blessings in the day to day life of his father. I may be completely making that up but it seems to have some nugget of truth.

Anyway I would be remiss (and other weird phrases Mormons like to repeat over and over again even though nobody really talks like this - kind of like I would like to bear my testimony or inthenameofjesuschristamen all one word or "nourish and strengthen us" etc.) if I did not share what happened yesterday.

As I mentioned the other day our van limped into the driveway on Saturday evening. We were able to take a look at it and determined that it was the van's drive belt that had come off. The belt itself looked to be in good shape, but my car-savvy friend and I (well, mostly just him) were not able to get it back on all the assorted pulleys and such.

We were able to jump it and get it running enough to take it to Midas. I also took in my new tires so that they could put them on. And early Monday morning I called in and spoke to my main man Don who is now the manager over there (last time he was the assistant mgr. I think). I told him what was up and he said that he would take a look at it and let me know. Don and I have worked together several times in the past. And of course by work together I mean that I take him my car and he works on it. We first kind of connected a few years ago when I had brought one of the cars in for something and we got to talking about Madeira - he grew up there so he said that he'd give me a break. He has continued to take good care of us and has been very reasonable price-wise.

So he called me around noon and said that he looked at the belt and there was nothing wrong with it, and he also inspected the pulleys and said they were fine. He had put the belt back on, put the new tires on and rotated them, and also changed the oil. I had been meaning to start changing my oil myself but just hadn't gotten around to it and so while it was there I decided to pay a few extra bucks to have them do it.

I asked him how much he had charged for putting the belt back on and he was like "Oh I didn't charge anything for that".

Okay - so hold that thought as I move on to some separate stories from the day. I will tie them in at the end.

Today was the drop off day for one of Carolyn's diaper studies at P&G. Basically they pay you to evaluate new diaper ideas. These ones were pull-up kinds and so we were supposed to evaluate them and check for leaks or red marks and such. We also had to weigh each diaper (on a provided scale) and log that. For that we get 3-4 weeks of free diapers plus a $55 gift card. It can be a hassle but not too bad. So today was the drop off day so we picked up a $55 Meijer gift card.

But that is not all, oh no that is not all. Randomly we got 2 checks in the mail from TriHealth, one for $30 and one for $20. We still do not know what they were for. They were addressed to two different of my kids, too. Does that last sentence look weird? I was just trying to use all three variations of to/too/two correctly in the same sentence. Anyway... :-). The best we can come up with was some sort of visit where we paid a co-pay where we didn't have to so they refunded it.

So the net of it was that after worrying for a day and a half that something was seriously wrong with the van, to the tune of us having to figure out a way to come up with at least several hundred dollars, we ended up being able to pay Midas with the money that we had already budgeted in auto maintenance (the total ended up being like $58 something, after $5 printable coupon, natch). And maybe you can write off the $55 gift card since we knew we were getting that. But to also randomly get $50 in the mail for no explicable reason?!??! Call it a coincidence if you want, but to me, it's the hand of God taking care of us. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands

Virgin HealthMiles

2008-06-30T09:31:00.000-04:00

So last week, my company started this new health initiative called Virgin HealthMiles. It's apparently run at least somewhat in conjunction with our health insurer. Anyone else ever heard of this?

The basic idea is that you wear this special pedometer that tracks the number of steps that you do in a given day. You get points (they call them "miles") for doing various things, chief of which is different activities, like getting at least 7000 steps in a day. Once you reach certain levels of miles, they give you money. The more you do, the more you make. The pedometers come with a USB cable and some software that automatically uploads your steps to Virgin's website.

My company was giving out these pedometers to the first 400 people that signed up (normally they are $24.99 each) so naturally I scored one. You can get up to $150 a year by doing this. There are 5 levels and you get different amounts of cash for reaching each level. Level 1 is where you start out and is worth $0, then $25, $25, $50 and $50 I believe. It looks like the 5th level might be a bit hard to get, though we shall see.

They also have an "upgraded" membership which you can sign up for $6.99/mo. With that membership, you can earn up to $500/year. I think the levels are $0, $25, $125, $175, and $175. So if you can make it to level 3 (which is 12,000 "miles"), the upgraded membership pays for itself. After like a week, I'm at 3910 miles, though they give you lots of bonus miles when you first start out so I don't think I'll be able to keep up that pace. Still, Level 3 seems pretty reachable. I'm already almost to Level 2 (6,000 "miles"). You have up to 60 days to convert your membership so I'll be seeing where I'm at around Day 58 but I expect that I'll be upgrading at that point.

The other thing is that a few of us here at work that got the pedometers are having a little step-competition. We were trying to figure out what kind of ground rules that we could make to discourage cheating. It turns out that the website lets you set up challenges. These challenges allow you to set up teams as well as handicaps (to allow people at different step levels to compete on even ground). We have set one up but the system doesn't seem to be working correctly.

I'm not sure if this is open to the general public or not - you'd certainly have to pay the $6.99/mo and the $25 for the pedometer, but even still, if you're moderately active, it could be worth it. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

General Stuff that is up

2008-06-30T07:30:00.000-04:00

So this past Sunday night / Monday morning (a week or so), I'm laying in bed when I hear one of the kids screaming / crying. I'm kind of half asleep, and it wakes me up. In my half-asleep stupor I wonder where Carolyn is. Not that it's her job to get the kids when they wake up in the middle of night, but typically she does that. So I roll over and I notice that a) it's like 4 a.m. and b) Carolyn is not bed. Again, remember I am half asleep so I think "hmm well that's weird"

The 2 possibilities I entertain are that perhaps she is in the bathroom, or maybe she is tending to one kid and a different kid is crying. So I think okay I will go investigate. So I start to make my way out of our bedroom and into the main living area. As I do this I start waking up and I realize that it's not one of the kids - It's CAROLYN who is crying / screaming. I hustle to the sound and she is laying down at the foot of the stairs in obvious pain.

The combination of dark, tired, pregnant (so not as agile as she once was) and a new house (so not as familiar with number of steps and such) caused her to miss the last step or two. I guess she thought she was on the last step and so took a normal sized step so she fell down the last step or two. Ended up breaking her foot and spraining her ankle. You can read her take here.

I was joking around and told her the other day that this was not a very convenient time for her to decide to break her foot! But then she told me that it would have been way worse say 6 months from now. Touche, touche!! My mom has come down from Cleveland to stay with us for awhile and we've had lots of friends come over to help unpack some and bring us over some meals and such. We are very grateful to all our helpers.

In further annoying news, everyone else besides me was driving home from the library on Saturday during a crazy thunderstorm when all of a sudden the van stopped really working. Power steering went out, the engine started overheating and in general craziness ensued. They managed to limp home but it turns out that the van's drive belt slipped off its track. It looks like the belt itself is still in good condition but we were not able to get it back into place. And of course when I say we I mean I stood around and watched while one of my more car-savvy friends tried to do it. In an interesting coincidence, I had just called Midas the day before to bring in the van to have them put on our new tires that I bought off the Internet. I had already been planning to take the van there so this just made it that much more fun!!

Complicating the matter was the fact that the side door had accidentally been left open all night, meaning that the battery was dead when we went to try and start it on Sunday morning. We managed to push the van out of the driveway with my mom's car, and then I pushed it over to the side of the street. And of course by "I", I mean I flailed around barely moving it until thankfully some random guy came by out for a walk and he helped me. It was much easier with 2 people, surprisingly enough :-). One funny thing was that we kept trying to push it over to where I had parked the little car (preparing for a jumpstart), and it was getting harder as the road was starting to go uphill, till I realized that maybe it might be easier to put the van in park and actually move the car that could actually work!?!?!? :-).

We jumped it and the van started up. I let it rev for awhile and put the window down so I could hear things. But as soon as I removed the jumper cables, the van died. I tried that twice with the same result and then decided to give up for awhile. I got ready for church and went there, and in the meantime, eagle-eye Carolyn noticed that there was something hanging below the van. That turned out to be the aforementioned belt. Perhaps by losing the ability to walk her other senses have been honed? I charged the battery and in the evening, our friend came over and we tried for awhile to get the belt back on. In the end, we just took it up to Midas. I guess you can drive without a belt but you don't have power steering and you only have a limited amount of juice before the battery dies. So my friend offered to drive and I tried to follow him. But he was driving like a maniac because he wasn't sure how much time he'd have. He passed a few cars on the double yellow and he told me he ran every red light :-). Good times....

We'll see how much the damage is....

Complaining pays off baby!

2008-06-20T07:31:00.000-04:00

Time to follow up on my earlier note about complaining about Home Depot. Here is the note I received back today

Dear Dan,

Thank you for contacting The Home Depot Customer Care.

We appreciate receiving feedback from you about your experience at the
Pleasant Ridge Home Depot store. We apologize for not meeting your
expectations.

Please know that the feedback you have provided is taken seriously and
will be used in the overall evaluation of the services we provide to our
customers.

We would like to offer you a $25 Home Depot gift card in the hope that
your next shopping experience will be a more pleasurable one. In
addition, it is our way to 'thank you' for taking the time to provide us
with this feedback. By doing this, you are giving us an opportunity to
improve.

Thank you, again, for sharing your comments and bringing this to our
attention.

So there you go. I would like to take a bit of time to make the distinction between making up complaints just to get free stuff and complaining because you were unhappy with something.

I think companies want to get feedback about how they're doing, and ways in which they are not meeting their customer's needs. I also have been known to give positive feedback when an employee really goes out of their way above and beyond. I don't do that very often because I don't think it happens really often, but I remember emailing about a particular Meijer pharmacist that I felt really went out of his way to help me.

Anyway, I highly recommend complaining when you receive poor service. a) you are helping these companies improve their performance for all of us and b) free stuff!!! :-)

It is finished!

2008-06-19T07:05:00.001-04:00

And by it, I mean the move, and by finished, I mean mostly finished. Well, maybe somewhat finished. Well, there is a lot to do still.

But at least the new house is finished and ready to move in to. Well, how about mostly finished. Somewhat? Sort of? :-)

Actually the house is for real for real mostly done. There is still some work to be done by the contractors but the essentials are all in. There are some lights, fixtures and other electrical work that needs to happen, and some minor plumbing, heating and other work to be done, but for instance I was able to take a shower today and the toilets work, and "tah" (what one of the kids used to call the TV) was able to be plugged in. There is no shower curtain but I just aimed towards the back wall of the tub. Well, let me correct myself - we have found the shower curtain, we just can't find the shower curtain ROD. There are boxes and crap all over the house, but before I left for work today I was able to cordon off a safe zone for the TV and we will just keep unloading what we can. I expect by the weekend we should have things mostly in order.

So let's recap the day yesterday, shall we? Around lunchtime I called up Time Warner to have them switch our high speed Internet over. Lady told me that the earliest they could have someone out was Sunday. So I said fine. Then I went online to Cincinnati Bell to also get the phone switched over. Expecting the same kind of leviathan performance, when they asked what day to change the service I put in the current day (since we were moving). Got an email about 20 minutes later saying our request had been "processed". I called home and nothing. They had already put the service over to the new house. Where, of course, there was no actual telephone. Good times....

I went home a bit early and packed a few more things and then headed off to get the truck. That went fine and I got back home about 4:30. I started loading up the boxes and such. Got a call about 5:25 from a church friend who was at the new house (since that's the address listed in the directory). I gave him directions and he was the first to arrive. Soon after Carolyn arrived with the pizza and then the folks started coming and we started loading.

I assumed my standard job of "Tetris-master" i.e. putting all the boxes and such in the van to optimize space. I think we lost a lot of space with some of our shelving units. I have about 10 5-shelf shelving units that were in the basement that I had taken up and put in the truck. My thinking was that we could just put the various bins and boxes on those shelves and we wouldn't lose space. But we left a lot of space there I think because the boxes and bins that we put on those shelves were not the right sizes to fill every nook and cranny. That was another problem - we have a bunch of plastic storage bins that I got from a deal at Staples awhile back (about 30 of them for free). And I had gotten a lot of big Dell computer boxes from work. But we didn't have very many smaller boxes. Normally when loading up a truck you can get a lot of those smaller boxes back in "Mom's Attic" and further back in the truck to really save on space (kind of the pebbles and sand in that "big rocks first" parable). But we had lots of really BIG boxes and bins and that hurt us I think.

As we were getting towards the end someone brought up the dreaded "M" word. As in "multiple trips". Moving very close by (as opposed to cross country) has advantages but also drawbacks. The advantage is that you can make multiple trips and even multiple car / van trips afterwards to pick up loose ends. The drawback is that you can afford to be more sloppy with your packing and loading and so typically one takes advantage of that (and we were no exception). In the end I thought that we could get it all to fit but we had a lot of people just sitting around as we tried to pack things so we decided to just go over with what we had and came back.

We unloaded the truck pretty quickly. I tried to direct where various boxes and stuff went but I have been since informed that I did not do that great a job. Plus we did have a few instances of "Ooh the basement? How about ummmm right here? :-)"

Another reason I didn't want to make 2 trips is I was afraid of the bailage. We had about 20 people there originally and all but 6 left. The scouts had to go get swim-certified for their upcoming Scout Camp and a couple other people had appointments and such.

We loaded up a few of the bigger things. We had to take the doors off the fridge and then we got the deep freezer, washer and dryer as well. Then it was just tons of "junk". I can not BELIEVE how much stuff we have!!!!! The problems on this load were 1) We knew we had tons of room (24' truck) so we were a bit haphazard with getting stuff in there and 2) Most of the stuff that was left was awkwardly sized, like a kids' rocking horse, or a basketball goal, or a lawnmower, etc.

Hauling some of that big stuff was really hard. When we got over we realized that the fridge, even with the doors off, was not going to fit in the kitchen via the front door. So we went around to the back door. Of course, first we had to wheel it on the dolly through the dirt that is my driveway / back yard. Oh, and then we had to unscrew the door stop that my contractor had put in the back door to prevent it from opening. Why would he do that, you might ask? Well, because the deck is not yet built and so the back door opens 3 feet off the ground :-). The 3' made it fun to try and lift all that stuff into the house, but we got everything in. It's all around the house in various boxes and bins, and even some of the boxes are not in the right place, but it is all (most / some) in.

I want to give a big thank you to all the people that came to help us move. Ralph, Scott, Brent, Aaron and Jake Blackwelder, Abby Doyle, Matt Foister, Kent Huxel, Scott Cottrell, Rob and April Hopkin, John, Mike and Bob Tensmeyer, Chuck Salzman and 2 boys I didn't know but I assume were either his sons or other kids from the scout troop, Brandon Brooks, Aaron Olmsted, John Whatley, Tim Gross and hopefully I did not forget anybody? Thanks especially to Rob, April, John and Aaron who were in until the bitter end.

Name me 2 cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse

2008-06-17T07:12:00.000-04:00

So.... maybe I'm just not a very good Modern Major General, but I am having a hard time coming up with more than 1 cheerful fact about the square of the hypotenuse.

1. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other 2 sides of the triangle.

Yes indeedy-do. There is no doubting that is a very solid fact about the square of the hypotenuse. But Major General Stanley clearly states that he knows MANY cheerful factS about the square of the hypotenuse.

So help me out dear readers. Give me some more facts. And no fair cheating and giving facts about just the hypotenuse. I need facts about the SQUARE of the hypotenuse

Take that corn, ya Home Depot

2008-06-17T06:01:00.000-04:00

Here's a nice email I just sent off to Home Depot.

I am writing because I was extremely dissatisfied with the tool rental at my local home depot (Highland Ave in Pleasant Ridge / Cincinnati Ohio). I rented a 2 man power auger to dig some post holes on Wednesday night. I planned on using it for 4 hours and returning it, but the bit got stuck in the ground.

I called up the store and spoke to Zach R. I asked him for assistance in how I might be able to get the bit out. He explained that the machine did not have any type of reverse motor and didn't really have any ideas for me to try, but he told me not to worry - he would put a note on my account to only charge me for the 4 hours. This was great and really set my mind at ease since we had already been trying to get it out of the ground for an hour or so.

I have a full time job so I was not able to get back over there till the evening of Thursday (the next day). We tried various ways to get it unstuck, including snapping a metal pipe wrench in half trying to reverse the bit, but with no success.

Finally on Friday I took a day of vacation from my job so that I could get this thing out. Zach from the store had told me that he would only be charging me for the 4 hours, but I wanted to be sensitive to your time and return it so it could be rented again if necessary. Finally, by digging a hole all the way around it to the depth of the bit we were able to extricate it. We cleaned it off and returned it to the store by Friday afternoon at 1:45 pm.

But when I got there, the man (Lawrence R) insisted that he could not charge me for only 4 hours. He did eventually give me a credit for 1 day of use, so instead of charging me for $140, I was charged for $70. I found it strange that he would discount $70 but not the additional $21 (to get it to the $49 rate for 4 hours that Zach had promised me over the phone). His explanation was that Zach must have meant that he would only charge me for 4 hours if I returned it by Thursday (rather than Friday). But Zach did not say that on the phone and I don't know how I possibly could have been expected to know that?

So, after being (in my mind) overcharged for $24.61 (the $21 extra fee, $2.10 extra damage protection and $1.51 extra sales tax), rather than continuing my shopping at the Home Depot store, I went 2 minutes down the street to Lowe's and bought my sump pump, kitchen faucet, 3 light fixtures and 5 4x4x6 posts (total spent at Lowe's was $196.26).

Since I'm in the middle of complaining about retail stores, let me paste one in I sent to GNC the other day

I would like to comment about an experience I had today at the GNC store
inside the Kenwood Towne Centre in Cincinnati, OH.

I was on a tight schedule so I left the rest of my family in the parking
lot so I could run into the mall when it opened at 10 to make a
purchase.

I got to GNC at 10 but the store was closed. I waited around for a bit
until the employee finally showed up at 5 after.

Without any type of apology, she greeted me with "It's going to be a
bit" as she disappeared into the store to start the pre-opening
procedures.

About 5 minutes later she opened and I was able to finally make my
purchases at 10:10.

I was definitely disappointed since I was on a tight schedule. Though I
don't shop at GNC very often so perhaps this is standard procedure at
GNC or mall stores. I understand that sometimes people are running late
but what got me the most was even the lack of an apology. Even a "Hey -
sorry I was running late" would have gone a long way....

That one snagged me a $15 gift certificate to GNC. Too bad I just stocked up on melatonin and I don't really need much in the way of protein powder or whatever else they sell....

Shot down by Lowe's

2008-06-06T12:54:00.001-04:00

So as I thought I had previously mentioned but could not find, Lowe's has been running 2 concurrent promotions. In each one, for every $1000 you spend, you would get a $100 Lowe's Gift Card. One was called Lowe's Kitchen and Bath (run here in Cincinnati) and the other was Lowe's Spring Event (run mostly in places like VA, NC, TN, etc).

With all the work we've been doing at the new house I've been attempting to double dip and use both of these promotions. I entered my receipts in at both websites but it quickly became apparent that they were actually smart enough to check and disallow that. The Kitchen and Bath one was a few weeks ahead of the other one so I focused there. I got up to $7000 in purchases which meant $700 in GCs, but all my receipts on the Spring Event promo were still showing up as "Pending". I called a few times but was not able to get anywhere.

I didn't want to fight too hard until my $700 in GCs arrived in the mail, in case I might somehow lose those. They arrived last week so I gave it one last try. I spoke to someone and she had me fax in my receipts. Just got the call though that they see that they've already been entered in to the Kitchen and Bath promo and are therefore no good.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I guess I'll have to settle for 30% off (20% coupon plus $100 for every $1000) instead of 40%!

Facebook

2008-06-06T11:03:00.001-04:00

So I recently set up an account on Facebook. Well actually I had set up an account awhile ago but never really got around to doing anything with it. For whatever reason a few days ago I started adding friends and setting up a "real" page.

It's interesting - I consider myself fairly technical. From programming in BASIC on my TI-994A (and saving not to a disk but to an actual audio-cassette!?!?), to "surfing" text-based BBSes on my 300-baud modem to seeing the evolution of Mosaic / Netscape and the beginnings of the WWW when I was in college, I've enjoyed technical stuff like this. I mean I am a computer nerd to the extreme after all!

But it seems like I've never been an early adopter of some of the more "social" Internet applications. I remember one of my friends sending me a link back in 97 or 98 to use this "new" thing called AOL instant messenger. I believe she was on AOL and it was recently after AOL had opened IM up to non-AOL users. I remember thinking "This is dumb". I of course signed up later and now IM on a regular basis.

Similarly blogging - blogs were around long before I started in April 2005. I actually think I was a bit earlier on this one - I was certainly the first one in my (at least somewhat close) family to have one - a trend that has certainly expanded.

So now we are on to Facebook. Again as with IM, part of me thinks "this is dumb". But another part of me thinks this might be a good way to keep in touch with some people. I was reading a comment on the Facebook page of someone I went to high school with saying something along the lines of "I wish they had had this when we were in HS - I lost touch with so many people" and that rings very true to me. There are lots of people that I was good friends with in High School that I no longer talk to. Of course there are also plenty of people that I'm glad to have lost contact with :-). So with that in mind, let me introduce Dan's 5 categories of Facebook Friends!

1. The real friends. These are people that I am fairly close to already and / or talk to / see in person on a somewhat regular basis. People like say my wife or my mom etc.

2. Acquaintances / friends / family that I don't see that often but that I am interested in following along with. This might be cousins or church-friends or work-friends etc.

3. Acquaintances / friends / family that I'm not really that interested in following along with but I added as friends because hey why not. If you're not sure if you're in group 2 or 3, I'll let you decide :-D

4. People that I've lost touch with and I want to see what they're up to. For me, this is mostly friends and such from High School or my mission. It will be interesting to see how many people I catch up with here. It's challenging to go from the "Hey what have you been doing for the past 10 years" to a real fake Internet relationship.

5. Then there's the "friends" that I add just because I'm a "friend-whore". They're the people that you vaguely know. Like anyone that may have ruined the Forest Elementary School touch football game in 5th grade (yes he's on there) or people that I barely knew in high school. Actually I don't have too many of these (yet). I just haven't brought myself to that point, much less trying to add people that I don't even know (which I guess some people do).

Anyways we shall see how it goes... I do think that social networking sites like this (or MySpace or Twitter etc) are not going anywhere. As this technology matures and even more kids that have grown up on this start becoming adults, it's just going to continue. My friend Jeff wrote a post about this the other day. He was mentioning what advice he would give new computer programmers and he said "The ability to communicate with others (read: business leaders) will be the single most important thing you can work on as a developer. Your ability to think and communicate effectively to your management will go MUCH farther than your ability to apply polymorphism principles to your application. Trust me." I think this is very true.

So that's about all I have to say on this. We got a renter for our place and will be moving to the new house within a week or two!!

Competitiveness

2008-05-24T08:00:00.004-04:00

So I occasionally get labeled as "competitive". This happens often at work where we have various things going on. I can kind of agree with it, but I've never really thought of myself as overly competitive.

This past week though, I realized that there are 2 kinds of competitiveness. I usually think of someone that is competitive as someone that just hates losing. You often see this in pro sports. There are stories about Michael Jordan or so just really HATING losing and when they lose they are just livid.

I'm not really like that. I really don't mind losing. This is in contrast to my early life when I think I did hate losing much more, and I also had a pretty bad temper. I'm much more mellow now-a-days.

But my philosophy is that if I'm going to play, I might as well win, right!!!

So I do get a little competitive in the sense that I seek out every advantage / loophole I can in an attempt to win. I don't cheat or actively break the rules but here's an example. A few years ago, the IT department where I work had an "Amazing Race" around Mason. So in the few days before, I drove around Mason looking for possible clues, including visiting the Chamber of Commerce seeking possible locations that we might be sent to. We ended up finishing 2nd there due to this one guy sinking a crazy half court basketball shot at one of the stations. Of course, the fact that I still remember this maybe means that I do hate losing a little bit at least. I think it's mostly due to the luckiness of that other team. I don't really mind losing to a team / person that just played better; but I do get a bit singed at playing well enough to win only to lose due to luck or other factors out of my control.

But anyways... it was once again National Employee Health and Fitness week at work, along with the various competitions that they had. I of course signed up for just about everything.

Monday there was kickball - despite successfully instituting a no bunting rule, our team lost the first game and were eliminated.

Tuesday we had Ultimate Frisbee. We ended up winning that, and then my friends' volleyball team needed one more player so I played that afterwards. I typically do not like volleyball because people get so particular about the various rules like "in the net" or "carrying" that makes it not very fun for me, the not very good player. But this was a pretty laid back game, and fun. We ended up losing in the finals.

Wednesday we had a relay race. It was pretty lame. 4 legs and only 2 teams showed up. First team finished in 45 seconds and then we finished in 31, winning. Then we went over to the croquet station. While not quite the Extreme Croquet that I prefer, it was still fun. My team won 2 games and the overall championship.

Thursday was an off day.

Friday we had a scaled down version of the Amazing Race, just around the campus at work. My original partner had a "production work issue" (supposedly!) so I had to find a backup partner. The sabotage of the other teams was very much an issue as I got a flat tire on the way to work which delayed me. The first clue had us finding a particular emergency pole (we have 5 or 6 around in the parking lots and out back and such that I guess if you are mugged while walking around the path you can get help?). My new partner just happened to know which one was pole #5 and that was pretty much the ballgame. We ran around to the various stations and ended up winning in about 14 minutes, about 5 minutes ahead of the 2nd place team. In fact, we finished, got our food (free picnic at work also that day!), came back and sat down and ate outside and watched the last few teams arrive!

So we ended up winning 4 events and finishing 2nd in another one. It was a lot of fun, even if some of the events were not organized quite up to "Dan standards" :-D

Rental woes

2008-05-24T07:47:00.004-04:00

So since we're moving to a new house, we have decided to rent the home that we're currently living in. We decided that with the market the way that it is, even if we could sell it, we couldn't get as much as we think it's worth.

I put a sign out front and some ads on Craigslist. We've had lots of interest. I think that it's priced appropriately and we've gotten a lot of the work done to "pretty it up". This is a good time of year too - lots of people moving around with the end of the school year and such.

I'd say that we've had 10-15 people actually show up and see the house. Many of them have taken applications. But nobody has returned them or taken the next steps. Mostly they just disappear. I used to try and follow up with people, but after thinking about it and discussing it with other landlords online, the consensus was that it was just a waste of time; if someone is interested, typically they are very aggressive about following up.

So yesterday we had 2 calls about people potentially interested in BUYING the house. And I've started feeling like maybe we are supposed to sell the house. Certainly if we could sell it, we could definitely use the equity that we get out of it. So I'm going to post an ad in the for sale section of Craigslist and see what happens.

I'm not really worried at this point. I always have felt like God takes care of us. I can point to several times in my life where things have maybe not happened as soon or the way that I've wanted to, but in the end, it always works out just fine, and usually in a better way than I'd have done it if left to my own devices. First mortgage payment on the new house is due 7/1 so we have a little more than a month before it starts to get dicey :-)

What we've been up to

2008-05-24T07:27:00.004-04:00

Haven't posted in awhile. I've had a few blog posts milling around in the ol' noggin, but just haven't gotten around to posting. I've been really busy over at the new house. I haven't quite reached my breaking point, but I have been quite busy and worn out.

In addition to the various physical labors that I've been doing (mostly painting and tiling in the bathroom floors), it's my responsibility to coordinate with the various contractors. My general contractor (Ron) has actually been very good, though there are times like when he shows up an hour or 2 later than when I was expecting him when I have to remind myself "he is still a contractor". This is the guy that I have used to fix up my other houses and I've been happy with his work and his overall communicativeness and just everything really. I really feel like we've been blessed in my starting this rehabbing business a few years ago mostly because of the connection we made with Ron; I think that we would not have come close to being able to afford this new house if we had had to go with a construction firm - most of them were bidding $30-40 thousand more than I think we're going to end up spending on this project.

We've had fairly good luck even with most of our subs. But let me share one story about the electrician. Him and his crew had gotten all the electrical work roughed in a month or two ago and then I hadn't heard from him in awhile. This in and of itself was not a problem, because there wasn't anything for them to do until we got things all drywalled and painted and such. But after a few weeks, we were getting close to ready for him and so I called him up to see what his schedule was like. And called him. And called. I left many messages but never got a call back. One time I did get a hold of him and he said "Can I call you right back?" I said sure, but he never called.

Finally, (after maybe 2 weeks of messages) I get an email from him saying "I'm back from Iowa - I'll be over tomorrow". When he said that, it did sound vaguely familiar that he was going to be out of town. After talking to him, it turns out he was involved in some sort of custody soap opera, the details of which I will not go in to here, but the good news is that he's back in town and back on the case. Switches and light fixtures have started to go up.

Oh, and my other job is making sure we have enough money to finish this dang house! We currently are in the positive (And that's a good thing! ™) But there's always things like "Oh we're going to need another $100 to pay Ray to finish mudding out the drywall" or "well since we took out the chimney, we need to either move the gas water heater so we can vent it out the side of the house or buy a new electric water heater").

One of our friends is coming to watch the kids today, so we're planning on going over there this morning I think - I'll take the camera and try to post some pics later.

Lowe's update

2008-04-28T06:56:00.000-04:00

I thought I would give an update on the Lowe's situation that I posted about last Friday. I called the installer about 4 p.m. and he said that he had sent his information off to the store. I called Lowe's then and they told me that they had received it but there was some sort of processing that had to be done on their side before I could come pay for it. They told me that they would call me when it was ready and that my order had all kinds of ASAPs all over it. Mmm-hmm, sure they will.

So that Lowe's is on my way home from work, so I stopped in an hour or so later. I went back to the flooring department and waited for the associate to finish helping someone else. While I was waiting, the guy from "installed sales" called me on my cell phone and told me it was all ready. When the flooring associate was finished, I told him my situation and he started looking for the order but couldn't find it. I told him that the guy had gone out there today and measured and he said something like "Oh then it couldn't possibly be ready now - it usually takes 2-3 days." I told him that the guy from Lowe's just called me like 5 minutes ago! He still couldn't find it and so he went back to get a manager (I'm used to it!). They came back out a bit later and found my order. Apparently it was put in on the "old" system and not the "new" system. Or something. In any case I went to pay for it but couldn't use my 20% off coupon because they don't take them on installed sales / special orders / labor. I tried to get them to do it but the system wouldn't let them and the manager wouldn't (or possibly couldn't) override it. Bummer as that cost me like $400.

So finally I accept the price and go to pay for it. The POS gives an 800 number to call for an authorization and after awhile of trying that, I get the notice that my card has been declined and I'd have to call Citibank. I called them and apparently Lowe's had charged me $1900 this morning and they were wanting to know if that was an actual purchase. It was not, and after a few calls and investigations it turned out that they had charged me (again) for the deck materials (even though I had paid for it back on Wednesday). So that was annoying but I had Citibank lift the hold so I could buy the carpet.

By this time it was getting late. I had made an appointment for some folks to come look at our house to rent at 6:30 (yay!), and it was becoming apparent that I was not going to make it. So I made a call to have Carolyn be ready to show it. I hurried home and ended up hitting the tail end of their visit.

While this was all going on, I had received a call from the other Lowe's, saying that my deck materials were on their way. I called back and ended up getting hold of a manager down there and after walking her through the various transactions, she saw where I was double charged, and said she'd reverse it. I have yet to verify if that has actually been taken care of or not.

Saturday I went to inspect the decking and (of course) they had just dropped it in the driveway AND there were things missing. So off I went to Lowe's (again). Turns out that some of the stuff that I thought was missing they put in the front room of the house (even though I looked there; not sure how I missed it). And some of it they didn't have and would be delivering later. I went back out to the house in the afternoon and counted and I think most of the stuff was there.

In non-Lowe's annoyances, we had arranged for a few people to come over Saturday afternoon to paint but when I got there, it turned out that the drywaller had not finished sanding the drywall. So we couldn't paint, and it was rather embarrassing to have to send those folks back home.

Back to Lowe's, as I have mentioned previously, they have this promotion going on where for every $1000 you buy, you get a $100 gift card. I've been entering in my receipts, but I haven't really been tracking it to make sure I hit the even thousand mark. Since obviously $3909.99 in total purchases is a lot worse than $4000. Well, $100 worse anyways. So I was entering in all my receipts from over the weekend and it came to ........ $7002.49! How cool is that? And I even went back in late on Saturday night to buy one last 5 gallon thing of paint since I didn't think we would have enough. So that paint was free and then some. So we should be getting $700 in Lowe's gift cards in the next 6-8 weeks. I think we can find some things to spend that on...

The middle number's an 8!

2008-04-28T06:23:00.001-04:00

Yup that middle number is now an 8. Again. For now.

I've been in the middle of my revolutionary weight loss program - "Eat less; exercise more". It's been going pretty well as you can see below. Blue line is my actual daily weights - Green line is the "trend" line which is just a weighted average.

I was down to 188.4 on Sunday morning (slightly up this morning). I'm shooting for 170.

I am trying to get this weight loss pic on my blog somehow as a widget so that I can be accountable and that you can all follow along with me, but it's not working so well.

I'm actually considering moving from Blogger over to Wordpress.

Blogoversary

2008-04-28T06:22:00.000-04:00

So I have now been blogging for 3 years now. I meant to put up a post on the actual 3 year anniversary date, but for some reason I was thinking that it was at the end of the month, when in fact it was on April 12th.

To celebrate, all readers will receive 50% off their monthly membership fees for TPMTHDM for the rest of the month!!!!

See now don't say I never do anything for you.

Lowe's are idiots

2008-04-25T19:38:00.000-04:00

Lowe's is idiots? Lowe's is an idiot? Hmmm... I must be grammatically sound before I go OFF on the annoyances of the past few days. On the one hand, the store's name is Lowe's. If you go to one singular store, it says Lowe's, which I guess must be singular. But Lowe's is an idiot doesn't sound right. I guess what I'm really trying to say is the people at Lowe's are idiots, which works. Okay then.

So Wednesday afternoon I go down and buy the last of my deck materials. I covered this in the last post. So the guy there said that they could totally load up their truck for me to rent and come by Thursday to pick it up, and to just call tomorrow (Thursday which is now yesterday). So I called and of course nobody had heard of anything nor done anything. Not surprising. So they set to work on it and then they call back a little later and say it's a lot of stuff and would be like 2 or 3 trips / loads so would I rather just pay them $60 to deliver it. So I say okay. They say it would be delivered tomorrow (Friday which is now today).

So I call them up today to see when it might be delivered. After being transferred around several times, STILL nobody has heard of anything; the delivery guy does not have my "ticket". They're currently looking into that.

But that is not all; oh no, that is not all. Also on Wednesday (ear-lie in the morning before work) I went into a different Lowe's to get my carpet. The first step in that is to pay them to come out and measure the area so that I know how much carpet to buy. They put me in the system, I pay the $35 for that, and then they turn me over to a flooring installer who will call me within 48 business hours. Flash forward to today and of course nobody has called me. So I call them up, go through a few people and finally get someone who tells me that they have 48 business hours. And I'm thinking "Lady, I have the timestamped receipt right in front of me and it's been 50 hours". She says that they have all day today to do it.

Now normally it wouldn't be that big of a deal, because we're actually not ready for the carpet until we paint, so it will be probably a week or so before we can get it installed. But Lowe's has a promotion going on where for every $1000 you spend, you get $100 in gift cards. Well actually they have 2 similar promotions going on, but one of them expires 4/27. So I really need to pay for this carpet by Saturday (tomorrow) or I lose out on about $200 in gift cards.

So I ask for the name and number of this company that is supposed to call me. I call them, and of course Lowe's has sent them zip. So she takes my number and calls me back in a few minutes. She had called the store and gotten my order. Then she asks "Can we come by on Tuesday?" I mention how I really need this done by tomorrow and she tells me she'll see what she can do and will call me back.

In the meantime a lady calls me about renting our current house so I'm talking with her. And like 500 people call me while I'm on the phone with her. So I call back the deck Lowe's - they don't know anything and they're going to look at it. I call back Missy from the flooring company - they called back the store and had them switch it to a different installer so that they could get it done today. What? GOOD customer service? I'm floored!!! Goooooo Pro Flooring of Cincinnati!!

But then Lowe's calls the house and talks to Carolyn (even though I told them to call my cell) and she doesn't know what's going on with anything because I haven't kept her in the loop. The lady is snippy with her and so then she (Carolyn) calls me (one of the 500). Finally I get that straightened out and someone is coming to measure this afternoon (no thanks to Lowe's)

Good times!

Bad Spanish

2008-04-25T14:16:00.003-04:00

So I sent this to my sister a few weeks ago but I don't know if she checked it out.

This is a good one for any of you Spanish speakers out there.

You know how they have those menus at businesses where they say (in Spanish) press 2 for Spanish, etc.

Take a listen to National City at 1-800-738-3888. That is totally a gringo with the worst accent in the world

New house deck

2008-04-23T21:26:00.004-04:00

Sorry - no pictures today. But I did want to make a note about the new deck. We're putting on a new deck and so I went to buy some of the materials. Lowe's is having a promotion where for every $1000 you buy, you get $100 in gift cards. This promotion ends on Saturday so I wanted to make sure I bought all the stuff this week. I'm also going to buy all of our carpet (probably another $2000) this week.

Naturally I also have 20% off coupons that I am combining with this deal, so it's like 30% off. Actually they have a totally separate gift-card promotion similar to the one above so it's like 40% off.

So anyways, I already bought some of the deck stuff last week but I had to buy the rest of it. Lowe's has a little deck design program that spits out all the stuff that you need with quantities and such.

So I went to the checkout lane and put in all the stuff. The subtotal came to like $2330, and I gave them my coupon. The guy was having some problems putting it in. The coupon said that it was good for 20% off up to $2000, so we both agreed that it should be $1930 (20% off $2000 = $1600 plus the extra $330). But he couldn't figure out how to put that into the system.

So he calls over his manager who is not sure what to put in and in fact was getting a little snippy with me. At first he looked like he was going to give it to me for just $1600 which I told him was wrong. Then he snips at me that he can't give me the discount on the extra $330, which I knew and was not trying to have him do.

Anyway he too had problems, so a 3rd person was called over. This guy looks at the coupon and says that it means that it's good for a DISCOUNT of $2000 (I guess up to purchases of $10,000), so he just gives me the 20% on the whole thing, so instead of $1930, it was $1864 - a savings of $66 plus tax!

Gooooo me!

Still looking like an end of May move date; it's getting closer! We've been painting here at the old house trying to get it ready to rent out.

Over at the new house they have put on all the interior doors and all the drywall. We'll be going over on Saturday I think to finish priming and then putting the paint on early next week. Also I believe it's finally been dry enough that my contractor is renting a Bobcat to do the final grading of all the dirt in the backyard (we're sloping it). And the siding should be arriving soon; so that will go up probably next week. Good times for all!

2008 Miami Triathlon report

2008-04-21T07:55:00.005-04:00

Woohoo it's exciting triathlon time again! Just like last year I am racing in the Miami University Student Foundation triathlon.

Here is my race report. First of all, I am going to be going by my watch time. I did get the official results from HFP and they are 2 minutes slower than the time I had on my watch. I could understand a few seconds discrepancy but 2 minutes? My friend PJ also had a watch on and his time was also 2 minutes or so slower on the "official" results. So until that gets resolved, I'm calling shenanigans.

So, looking back at last year's report, my first big dilemma came at a wake up time. This year due to the large number of participants (over 600!) they moved the start time from 8:00 to 7:30, and then to 7:15. I decided to wake up at 4:30 a.m. I didn't sleep all that great and ended up waking up on my own at 4:18. I packed the car and set off.

The second big dilemma, upon review, was which route to take to Oxford - Cross County or 275. I was disappointed to find that no empirical data existed from my choice last year. How else was I supposed to determine the best way? I'm a scientist!. I need the data.

So here's the data from this year's route - where I took Cross County.

Time: 28 minutes from my house to the intersection of US-27 and 275.

Or should I say, 28 minutes from my house to ALMOST the intersection of US-27 and 275, AT WHICH POINT I GOT PULLED OVER BY A COP!!!!!.

Yeah, I got pulled over at like 5 a.m. by a Colerain Twp. police officer. He comes up to the door and asks the classic cop question "Do you know why I pulled you over?" I, of course, follow Rule 1 of being pulled over by a cop which is "Never admit to anything". I knew I wasn't speeding - that was for sure - I was hypermiling :-). So I say no, and he tells me that I have a headlight out. I was aware of this as Carolyn has been telling me to get this fixed for some time now. But the first words out of my mouth (had I not followed Rule 1) would have been "because my license plate sticker is expired?" I thought for sure he was going to bust me when he ran my plates but he either didn't notice or didn't care. He ended up just giving me a warning, and then asked where I was going and we talked a little triathlon. It was refreshing to meet a cop who wasn't a complete jerk. I even tried to go out to RateMyCop.com to give him a positive rating but they don't have Colerain Twp's department online yet. But hey let's hear it for buffer time!!! Carolyn kept wondering why I was leaving so early.

I've written (and you theoretically have read) this much and I haven't even gotten to Oxford yet? Hoo-ee this is going to be long.

The rest of the drive was fairly uneventful. I spent a couple of minutes trying to remember the name of that town between Cincinnati and Oxford. I also had a car pass me with a bike on the back (I guess also going for the triathlon). The bike had saran wrap all over the bike seat and handlebars. I thought that was an interesting way to try and combat the rain (forecast was for rain all morning). But then I thought it would be extra time during transition to try and pull that off. I didn't see them at the race itself so I don't know if they pulled it off before the race or not. Anyways, once I got to Oxford, I missed the turnoff and had to turn around.

I got there at about 5:30 or so. I went up and registered and then took my bike into the transition area.

As you can see from the picture above, I got the prime "end of row" spot on the rack. Yet another reason to get there early. You come down that row after the swim, so being right there on the end is worth AT LEAST 5 seconds or so :-).

Here is a picture of PJ and I. I was wearing my shirt from last year's race; trying to "intimidate" everyone else by letting them know that yes, I'm a veteran. PJ said that he opted for a blank white T-shirt to let potential advertisers know that he was available. We talked about sponsors and I commented that really, advertisers were wasting their money sponsoring any of the front runners - after all, I'd be on the course for MUCH longer, giving them much more bang for the buck! Notice too my ultra tight super streamlined racing swimsuit.

One of the things that I had done this year was bring a 2nd towel. It was time for some strategic placing. I left one towel out in the transition area. And then, I made my way poolside.

This picture is taken right at where you start the swim. You start right in that bottom left corner, and then do a serpentine swim down one lane and up the other, until you make your way through the 8th and final lane, exiting the pool at the 8th lane, in the top left corner of the picture. Notice PJ there in the background.
Here's a closeup of the area right next to the pool exit. You can see that I stuck my 2nd towel there. That way once I got out of the pool I could grab a towel and dry off as I made my way to the transition area. Again, saving me the CRUCIAL 5 SECONDS THAT WILL GET ME INTO 1ST PLACE! PJ wanted me to point out that he too put his towel there but it's not in the picture simulating how he was already out of the pool before I got there :-)

We kind of hung around for the next hour or so, making a few trips back to our cars to get everything ready. They had the mandatory pre-race poolside meeting at about 7 and midway through I decided to head back to the transition area to make my final adjustments (dump the shirt and flip-flops I still had on). As we were heading back there we heard an announcement "Final warning to clear the transition area before we turn the timing mats on". We made it just in time.

Sat in the bleachers for about 40 or so minutes while the first 300 or so people started their swim. Then we made our way back down. Unlike the 3 Pigs last year, I got my goggles in place with no mishaps.

Then it was time for the swim. Even though I promised to cannonball into the pool if I did it this year I didn't. PJ did and got a few laughs from the people around.

When I started swimming it seriously felt like there was a current pushing against me. I don't know if I was just imagining it or if it was some sort of byproduct of all those people in the water or what. I had just read about this attachment to pools that let you use a regular family pool as a lap swimming pool by pushing a current back at you and that's what it felt like.

My goal was to try and pass more than the 2 people I was able to pass in the swim last year. I knew people would pass me, especially since I had put in an overly optimistic swim estimate of 9 minutes. Turns out 10 people passed me while I did not pass anyone. I did manage to swim freestyle the whole time without stopping. A few people hit my feet as they were coming up on me; I gave them some extra hard kicks. Then one guy was passing me like right on top of me; getting all in my way (rather than passing on the left where there was plenty of room). I gave him an elbow. Other than that, not much happened.

Got out of the pool and grabbed my clandestine towel. Unfortunately I forgot to hit the lap button when I did so I'm not sure of my exact time. By the time I got into the transition area and hit it, it was 11:31. So I'm guessing about 11 minutes or so.

Transition was fine. Not much to do and I made my way out - 1:52 on my watch plus whatever time due to not hitting my watch on time. Again, let's say 2:23. I left the transition area right behind PJ who managed to not take forever like he did last year (3:39!) :-)

The bike course was different this year than it was last year. I had set my internal goal at 50 minutes, and figured that would need about 15.5 mph. So I decided to aim for 16 mph on the flat stretches. Because I'm a total nerd, one of the things that I do as I ride is calculate miles per hour and stuff in my head as I ride. So I figured that I should be aiming for a mile every 4 minutes. At the 4 mile mark I was only at 15 minutes (1 minute ahead of pace) and I thought "Wow I've got this!". Then I told myself "Well, maybe I should wait until some of these big hills before I start congratulating myself :-)"

As the bike course started I was keeping track of how many people I was passing. I am nothing but devoted to my faithful readers who I knew would be hanging on every detail such as this. I almost stopped counting the people that passed me (because there were a lot right at the beginning) but then a funny thing happened - people stopped passing me and I started passing people!

Shortly after that I looked up and realized I had gone off the course. At least I thought I had - I had just passed a road off to the left and gone straight. But I couldn't see any course markings or any bikers ahead of me. Just as I was about to start panicing I did see some race officials in the distance.

And they signalled the start of the first hill. It was brutal. I immediately passed 3 people who were walking their bikes up. I managed to ride all the way up but it was slow and very hard. I had noticed from the course topo map that there were 2 big hills, so when I got to the 2nd one I thought "Wow this one wasn't even close to that first one". Then I realized that was just a fun intermediate hill. The 2nd hill was also pretty big though not as bad as the first one.

After about mile 9 or 10, the rest of the course is fairly flat with a slight downhill back to the transition area. I was hitting about 20 to 25 mph. The final totals were passed 32, passed by 26 (net +6 for the bike). Time for the 20.5K (12.7 miles) was 51:16, or 14.9 mph.

Transition 2 was a brisk 34 seconds, which I note was 26th overall, again proving the adage that although I can not swim, bike or run very fast, I can do NOTHING very fast.

As I made my way to start the run, I noticed that I was going to have to do about 24:30 on the run to hit my stretch goal time of 1:30. It looked like beating last year's time of 1:38:45 was definitely going to happen, barring some sort of craziness on the run.

So off I went. The first mile was pretty slow - I had a bit of the jelly legs going on. I didn't see the Mile 1 marker, but at the water station which I think was about there, I had about 9 minutes. I had both passed and been passed by a few people. Somewhere around here, this one person passed me and I decided to try and run with him as long as I could. I figured since he was going a bit faster than me, he'd be good to try and push myself. I ran behind him for most of the rest of the course and we passed a few people. I briefly passed him when he stopped for water but he then passed me right back. My time at Mile 2 was 16:55, meaning my 2nd mile was at about 8 minutes. At about mile 2.5 I started pushing a little harder. I saw that while 1:30 might be tough, I could probably hit 1:30:SOMETHING which I figured I could count :-). I passed the guy I had been running with as well as a few other people. Once we crossed the street back towards the transition area I kicked and really blew by 2 people there. Final passing totals were passed by 6 and passed 22 (net +16), and a final run time of 25:22, which is an 8:09 clip.

Final final time was 1:30:40, a time I was EXTREMELY pleased with. I improved in all 3 disciplines, leaving me to wonder how I could possibly get better again next year!

Again, like I mentioned, the "official" results have some definite time discrepancies, but here they are.

I'm assuming that the discrepancies are the same for everyone (at least several people I've seen have mentioned them), so even though the times are off, the order is probably fairly accurate. I was 285th out of 532, 24th out of 30 in my age group and 3rd out of 3 in the "Miller" division.

The race after party that was so fun last year was completely lame this year, probably mostly due to the rain. It had sprinkled off and on. During my bike it had rained a bit off and on and then when I got back from the bike all my stuff was noticably damp and then it had continued to sprinkle. I didn't even get any free pizza!! :-).

All in all it was an extremely fun time and I'm looking forward to coming back next year! And remember, don't mess with me, I'm an "athelete" [sic] :-D

Some walking adventures

2008-04-14T21:44:00.000-04:00

So I have decided to add walking to my list of exercises on my running log. In fact, if you read this blog post in a timely manner, you will see that I did some walking back on April 8th. 4.5 miles as a matter of fact. Why would I do something like that, you might ask? Well... read on.

Red Robin has a free birthday burger that they email you. Well, they don't email you the burger (that would be tricky) - just a coupon for one. I was going to go on my actual birthday since I was out in the area for lunch, but alas, I had forgotten my coupon, and I didn't feel like driving back to work to get it. I thought that I could probably have gotten away with it by showing them my license or something but just decided to do it the next day.

So the next day dawned and around 11 or so I decided to walk to Red Robin. I looked it up and it was only 2.5 miles (turned out to be about 2.3 as I cut through an abandoned golf course). It was a beautiful day (about 70 degrees or so) so I thought eh why not. Plus, I had just read an article about hypermiling so I was being all fuel conscious.

I think that had I realized QUITE how far 2.5 miles is (while walking) that I might have reconsidered. I know I definitely rued the long sleeve black shirt I picked out in the morning...

Pretty uneventful. The burger was good, and came with fries. It was interesting in seeing how just because the fries were there, I ate them, even though I'm trying my revolutionary diet, and as such didn't really want them. I did not eat all of them though, which is unusual for me (I have a big "clean your plate" problem when it has food I like). I ate by myself and then tipped the waitress with a buck or so of change I had in my desk.

At least they didn't bring me out a plate of nothing but a candle!

I do want to point out that I am not counting this walking time toward my goal of 4 days of exercise. I also want to point out that if you did NOT read this post in a timely fashion (so as to be able to see my walking outing on the exercise widget well then what's wrong with you? You need your recommended daily allowance of DanMiller after all.

Kroger part 2

2008-04-14T20:34:00.000-04:00

Okay - many of you have commented in on my last post, wanting to know if Kroger had indeed gotten the best of me.

OF COURSE NOT!!!!!

In fact, I'm hurt that you could even suggest such a thing. They caved like a master spelunker. It actually wasn't even that hard. I called up to the Kroger 1-800 customer service line. Spoke to a lady there, explained my situation, and she added it to my plus card like that.

We talked for a little while and I thought I would share a few things. I asked if there was indeed a limit on how many of these pharmacy coupons you could use. She said that she thought there was a limit of $60 but that the pharmacist could override that. She said that they typically would override it for good customers, such as myself (her words).

Then she started talking about how they have that limit there because some people would just take advantage of things. She said that there shouldn't be a problem for good, loyal customers such as myself (she said this several times during our conversation).

Then she delivered the money line, which went something like:

"Because you know, some people just use these coupons to get free groceries and that's just not right"

GOOD! TIMES!

She's right - free groceries aren't right - it's better when they pay you! That happened Friday afternoon - got a whole load of stuff and after coupons, and the buy 10 get $5 off promotion and some of those pharmacy rewards, my total came out to -$0.36. It's always funny when they're like "Okay your total is 36 cents" and I have to be like "Uhhhh actually YOU owe ME 36 cents" :-).

Uhhuh Kroger, you want a piece of ME?

2008-04-05T18:56:00.003-04:00

Apparently Kroger does not read my blog in which National City caves (Part 1 and Part 2). I go there today for some deals and also go to pick up a prescription from the pharmacy. I had to have them transfer it over from Meijer where Meijer had only let me use one prescription coupon at a time (good for $20 off a future order). Naturally I had another one in hand.

The pharmacist scanned it (though she looked annoyed about it) and I paid and that was that. Except that I did not get a receipt saying that my Rx Rewards had printed, and my balance remained at $15.49 (from the $20 pharmacy coupon I did a few days ago for a different one). I stop and ask about it.

She then starts babbling lies. First off she says that they don't print out a separate receipt. I tell her that I've seen it. She says they changed the system. I tell her I was just here on Wednesday and it did it. Then she tells me that there is a limit of how many you can do per Kroger card. I say I haven't heard anything about that - what's the limit. She makes up "3". And then just walks away.

Ooooooh Kroger you have not heard the last of this one. I will get my $20 out of you. I called the annoyingly named helpline 1-800-KROGERS but they are closed. But I will be on the case Monday baby.

Triathlon brick

2008-04-05T18:10:00.002-04:00

What's a brick, you might ask? Well, I mean most people know what a brick is but how does that relate to a triathlon? Fear not gentle readers, I will let you know.

A brick is just doing two workouts back to back - most commonly biking and running (though I have also done running then swimming). Nobody knows for sure why it's called a brick - it just is. Wikipedia has the following as claims for origin

A partial anagram of Bike-Run.
It may simply be a descriptive term for how your legs feel for the first part of the run.
Another is credited to Mark Sisson and Scott Zagarino (1988), who associated the term brick with the idea of "Just another brick in the wall"... as noted in a song by the group "Pink Floyd".
Another association of this term has been claimed to originate from a New Zealand athlete by the name of Matt Brick.

Uh huh Matt Brick - you just go on thinking that.... I'm so sure.

Anyway with my triathlon coming up in 2 weeks, it's time to do some serious preparation. I have been wanting to get out and do some biking and running outside since that's much different than a treadmill / exercise bike. And since the triathlon is not ON a treadmill or exercise bike, it seemed prudent. Weather cooperated nicely and away I went.

I opted to just do a 3.05 mile course around my house and do 4 laps of it. That was about 12.2 miles which is about 1/2 mile short of the bike course but close enough. My lap times were: 12:38:33, 12:39:69, 12:54:56, and 13:24:07 for a total time of 51:37:45. Felt pretty good. That's an average speed of about 14.2 mph which would put me at about 54:15 for my bike course. If I am to achieve my goal of 1:30:00, I really need to get that bike time down to about 50 minutes, which would be about 15.4 mph.

As I rode, I thought about the differences between this route and the race route. One thing I will have in my favor is that there will be less turning and slowing down to check for cars and such. I was not sure about hills. On the one hand, the hills on the Oxford course seemed like they were steeper and/or longer, but on the other hand, every hill I went on (Greenbriar from Miami, Homart from Thomas to Jethve, Sanoma from Osceola to Iuka) I had to go on 4 times! Of course I got to fly down that sweet downhill (25 mph+) on Thomas 4 times too....

The run was hard but satisfying in that I was able to run the whole way. One thing that I thought helped me was that physically the transition between biking and running is very difficult (the aforementioned way that your legs feel after biking). I think that this helped me to keep my pace slow. I just did 2 laps around my block which is 1.62 miles, or a little less than 1/2 my 5K race course. My 2 lap times were 6:58:33 and 6:31:16 for an overall time of 13:29:49, or a pace of an 8:20 mile.

An 8:20 mile is a 5K pace of 25:53 which would be sweet. I wanted to stop and walk several times but kept going. One thing I'll definitely have to my advantage is that the course I ran today has a few nice hills in it, where the Miami course is fairly flat. Of course I have to run it almost twice as far....

New house drywall

2008-04-04T19:10:00.003-04:00

They got the drywall (mostly) on to the new house. I went by this morning and snapped some pics. They did most of the rest of the drywalling today and I guess will be back on Tuesday to finish off the exterior walls. So.... good times!

Here's the view from the kitchen, looking out to the new family room. To the left are the stairs going up (and the stairs going down are just to its left, off camera). You can also see the mud room back there. The 2 wood 2x4s are coming down eventually. The 2 drywalled columns just to the right of the stairs we're going to drywall into one column since they are so close together.

And here's the opposite view from the edge of the family room, looking back into the kitchen. Sure makes the kitchen seem a lot bigger! Again, all those wood 2x4s will be taken down, and that track lighting will be replaced with canned lighting similar to the ones you can see in the ceiling of the family room in the first picture.

They've installed the bathtub upstairs. They were going to install the other one but it was damaged so we have to take it back to Lowe's and exchange it.

Here's the view from the family room looking into the mud room and out the back door. The archway is to match the several archways that are in the existing house.

Still looking at a May move-in (hopefully!)

More toilet fun

2008-04-03T20:49:00.003-04:00

Well then since we all seem to be so enamored with talking about toilets, let me offer up some rules for everyone.

The Toilet Rules

The toilet is not a toy.

Toilet paper is not a toy.

After I use the bathroom I get 3 squares of toilet paper.

I count the squares: 1-2-3.

I tear off only 3 squares of toilet paper.

I wipe myself.

If I am still dirty, I can count 3 more squares of toilet paper.

I count the squares: 1-2-3.

I tear off the 3 squares of toilet paper again.

I wipe myself some more.

I am clean.

I do not play with the toilet paper.

I flush the toilet one time.

I do not put a lot toilet paper in the toilet.

Helpful information, wouldn't you agree? No reason for sharing at all... Nobody in our house dumped an entire double roll of toilet paper in the toilet. Nope, nobody at all. Though if somebody DID do such a thing, I bet it was one of those "wants the seat down" type people.....

The mistake I made was trying to plunge it before reaching in to try to de-clog. Carolyn informed me of this after the fact. Why yes, this isn't the first or even close to the first time such a thing has happened.

Luckily we are borrowing a wet-dry vacuum from a friend (originally for our basement cleanout). Came in very handy today. The trick was not to just suck all the water out but instead to shove the vacuum end all the way as far as it would reach BEFORE turning it on. It took a few tries but eventually we sucked that TP all the way out.

Oh and in case you were wondering, basement grime mixed with toilet paper is VERY disgusting...