Tow Mater!

Imported the old LJ, and I was reading through some posts as they came through.

Holy pathetic. I may delete some because *cringe*.

LJ must be feeling the departure to Facebook. LJ now has games? Really? Ugh.

I belong to, well several, internet forums. The fun happened this morning on one of the motorcycle/FZ6 forums. One member, a moderator, posted a for sale ad for some "revolutionary cable lubricator" that's "patent pending". Yeah, it's a set of 3 syringes with engine oil in them, and a flexible tube fitting to attach to them. I called him out in that it's neither 'revolutionary', nor is it actually patentable because it doesn't pass the "nonobviousness" test. It's 2 off-the-shelf parts put together to make an "invention". I called him out repeatedly about it because he never responded to my questions.

This morning, my posts were deleted, and I was then banned for a week from the forum, after being warned and doing nothing more. Damn moderators sure get butt hurt in a hurry. LOL

Yeah, I'm still alive. Been living in Facebook land like most everyone else.

Last week I went out to lunch with a coworker. The conversation somehow ended up on TV's, and how we were looking into getting a small flat screen for the bedroom. He tells me about another coworker that's looking to get rid of his 51" projection TV (for giggles)....for FREE. Hells yeah I want it! Now, the job of convincing the wife-unit that she wants it too.

Somehow, I managed to get my way, and we took a drive to get it yesterday.

It sat outside for roughly 10-12 hours, as I was waiting for help carrying it into the house. We got it in and hooked up. It took a couple minutes for it to warm up enough to actually turn on, but finally, it did. I'm playing with the settings, and Kim's getting annoyed with me. I can't, for some reason, get rid of the hazy/cloudy look to it. It looks like everything we watch is in a perpetual state of "dream sequence". Some google-fu, and come to find out TV's actually have coolant! From what I'm finding, the coolant will actually allow algae/bacteria to grow, causing the picture to get fuzzy. OH FUN! More searching directs me to the how-to's on changing it. Great. Now to find new coolant. Fortunately, it only runs about $10/bottle, and I'll need roughly 3 bottles. So for the cost of gas +$30, we should have a "new" BIG tv that the dog can't stand in front of and block! *happy dance*

Tonight, I shall dig into it and take a look at what I'm dealing with, and decide if a coolant change is truly needed. I talked to the coworker that we got it from and he said it worked just fine the last time they used it. Maybe something happened during the transport. I'm hoping it's just the lenses that need cleaning.

Here's hoping!

It's been a busy weekend, and I'm exhausted.

Friday night Kim and I actually got a life and spent some time with friends we haven't seen in quite a while. This lead to not getting to sleep until around 1:30am on Saturday. Of course, 6:30am brought on a bathroom run, then back to bed for another hour or so. This lead to us heading down to Avon to my parents' house to see some family while one of my dad's cousins was in town. After kabitzing for a bit, we headed down to clean up the boat. We got the inside of the boat cleaned up, leaving just washing, waxing, and apparently poli-coating the hull. We also took inventory of the camper status, and decided there was too much that needed to be done, so we held off until today. All of this on about 6 hours of sleep.

This morning, the dog decided it was time for me to get up around 7am, because I got sick of listening to him whine. I guess I don't need an alarm clock because he always goes off at 6:30am. Around 8:30, after Kim got up and moving, I headed out to change the oil in my truck. While the oil was draining, I cleaned up the yard in order to rid it of dog poo. Finished the oil in my truck and then mowed and trimmed the lawn. After all the rain that we'd gotten, we needed it BADLY (an understatement). While I did that, Kim showered and ran to the dollar store to pick up cleaning supplies that we needed for today. We headed down to Avon around 11, and started to tackle the camper...cleaning it inside and out. Lots of scrubbing and sorting through stuff.

Yeah. It's been a busy weekend. Can I get another weekend to recover? Please?

Need caffeine.

Working on about 34 hours of lousy sleep. BLAH.

I finally caught my first ice fishing fish, AND my first pike. It's a two-fer!

This was my third time ice fishing. I'm limited in how many times I can go because it's close to 2 hours one-way to get to the lake (and equipment). We got "special" access to the lake through my brother-in-law's mom, who has a patient that lives on the lake. We have a little cove all to ourselves, and BOY is it a pike hot spot!

The first time I went, we had close to 12 hits, but only landed 2 (pike). The rest either took the bait or broke the line (at least 10 years old, and no leaders). As the line broke, we replaced it with heavier 30lb mono.

The 2nd trip wasn't quite as good as the first. We still landed 2, and broke some like, but not nearly as much.

3rd trip, we only had 3 hits, but we landed 2 of them. (see a pattern here?)

( Yeah, it's a great way to survive the winter blahs. )

I went ice fishing for the first time over the weekend.

It was a pretty neat experience on a beautiful day.

When I left my house around 8am, it was right around 2 degrees F out, and it never got above the teens, but the sun was shining, and there was barely a breeze. I drove down to my parents', and met up with my brother-in-law to head down to his parents' place to meet up with his dad and pick up the gear. His mom work's in a doctor's office, and one of her patients lives on Silver Lake (runs between Castile, NY and Perry, NY) and they told her we could use their house as an access point to the lake as they live in FL this time of year.

We got there, drilled a test hole, ice measured 6.5" thick by the shore, and about 5.5" about 100' feet out. NYS law says you can have 5 tip-ups per person, and since there were 3 of us, we had all 15 tip-ups out. We initially lined them up heading into the lake, and set them ~1' off the bottom. We had 3 hits within an hour, and caught one pike around 18" long. The other 2 broke the lines. As it turns out, this was the common theme throughout the day. We had roughly 12 flags tip, and only landed 1 fish all day. The lines kept breaking, either on the ice, a big fish, or the fish cutting the line. As the lines broke, we replaced them with 30lb mono-filament line (yeah, should use steel leaders, but that's not an option currently). The line that kept breaking is somewhere between 10 and 15 years old, so it's not surprising that it was breaking.

All in all it was a great day, despite the frustration of losing so many fish. I'm definitely looking forward to the next trip.

I adjusted the humidity setting from 2 down to 1, and swapped out the medium nasal insert for the small nasal insert. I'm contemplating trying the large tonight with a humidity at 1.5.

I managed to keep it on all night, and even though I contemplated taking it off at 5:30 and resting until Kim got me up, I ended up falling back asleep and passing out cold until Kim woke me up.

Mild improvement over how I feel this morning compared to most days (definitely better than yesterday, as it was the first day using the c-pap.).