Outrunning, outcast and outlets

Good morning loyal listeners! I have a few things on my agenda this morning and I hope to address them all before getting sidetracked. Damn, already sidetracked once. Stupid work and it's e-mail and meetings.

Okay, first of all I would like to talk about some of the things I learned this weekend. Friday night I went out with some local chums to a popular dining establishment The Olde Forge (AKA The Forge, AKA Olde Forge). Actually, The Forge is so popular there's a term associated with traveling to said establishment and dining - Forging It. Anyways, we had reservations for 7:30 so obviously I had to run some quick errands on the way, causing us to be a few minutes late. No biggie, they're usually swamped anyways.

When we arrived, it quickly became apparent that there wasn't going to be any parking available. Being the chivalrous one that I am, I dropped my passengers off at the door and drove down to the auxiliary lot up the road. I parked the A-ride, locked'er up tight and started a slow jog towards The Forge. Wouldn't you know that as soon as my feet hit pavement I hear the deep barking of an angry/hungry/venomous dog. I looked around for someone to push down (as bait), and when I found I was alone I shifted from slow jog to all-out sprint. I never did see the dog, but if you see a rabid dog with burnt whiskers, it's him. The burnt whiskers are from getting too close to my afterburners. What what! Moral of the story - ALWAYS travel with people you can outrun.

CELEBRITY SIGHTING: Len from work was there. He even shook my hand and later gave me the 1,2,3 fist pound (like the Rasta Mons do).

Saturday morning I joined the Crazy Group at Balance Rock Park for a run in the woods. I knew it was supposed to be warm Saturday, so I dressed lightly. Eeerrrooonnnggg, it was 36 degrees and windy. I figured once the sun came up it would be fine, and it was.

In the meantime, one of the women lent me her mittens. They were lavender in color and I voiced my concern that they would make me run like a girl (the lender of the aforementioned gloves has a funny "tweetybird" run where her arms stick out like little chick wings). Committed to the joke, I ran tweetybird-style for about 30 minutes until I could no longer take it. I returned the mittens and just dealt with the cold.

The neat thing about the Crazy Group is that they go on these runs and I have no idea where we're going. At one point, one of the women told me we'd end up at Jiminy Peak (a local ski resort). I figured we'd come running across some field and end up in their parking lot, but at one point I looked over and saw skiers. It turns out we were running up the back side of the mountain. As we arrived at the top, we decided to visit Hendricks Lodge for some water and a warmup. Plus the view from the top is AWESOME! We ate some bagels and drank some water, then returned to the trails.

On our way out of the lodge, we looked both ways and scampered across the trail. A family had just unboarded the lift and the youngest one commented "What are those people, daddy?" Yes, we looked like "The Others" from the popular TV show "Lost".

Later on, a snowball fight broke out and I was once again shown how smaller people are to be used as human shields. Bad Jim used one of the women as a shield, or more appropriately a baseball mitt, blocking each and every snowball whether it would have hit him or not. Mind you, this is the same woman we ditched that time the dogs chased us. I figured this was another one of Bad Jim's teachings, related to my story about being caught without slow people at the Forge.

Yesterday's run was less eventful. There was a great deal of mud and rocks, but the cool part was the plethora of zombie holes. You see, occasionally someone will slip on ice or mud and holler out to the people behind "ICE" or "MUD". But when you step on what appears to be solid ground and your foot goes through (and you can almost feel the cold hand of the undead on your foot), the only logical explanation is Zombies. I dubbed such hazards "Zombie Holes", which caught on rather quickly. It's pretty funny to hear grown people running through the woods yelling "ZOMBIE HOLES!" every time a foot breaks through the ground.

The last thing I want to discuss is my outlet situation. After borrowing an outlet tester from Len (see above), I found that about half of my outlets were wired backwards. Since we use alternating current (AC) in the good ole USA (and everywhere else in the world) this is not always a problem. There are however, situations where a simple short could cause a rather unpleasant death. So I decided it would be easy enough to just swap the hot and neutral wires on the outlets and all would be fine.

After about 30 trips up and down the stairs to the basement (to turn power on and off to the house), I got all but 3 working. Those three seem to be simply ungrounded, which isn't a major problem, but I'd like to fix it. It may require rewiring those outlets, in which case I will not fix it. The last thing I want is some home inspector ratting me out to a potential buyer, causing a problem when I try and sell the house.

Well, there you have it folks. I hope this wasn't too much to read in one sitting. I have some pictures of my unfinished kitchen at flickr, or you can wait until later when I post a little photo documentary illustrating the job from old cabinets to new ones (and completed paint job). Let me tell you, it looks fabulous!

Over and Out,
Old Coot