The Week In Review - 10/19/14

Hello Everybody! Welcome to my happy birthday, day...

I'll explain this picture in a bit, but I'll give you a hint, I'm on ice skates!

Remember, Click-On-A-Pic to see a larger version of it (most of the time).

To begin with, we had to get new tires (front & back) for the Camaro last weekend because they were getting close to the 'May-Pop' wear level. This is part of the invoice that shows the 'steam roller' sizes that this thing takes. Well, if yer gonna wanna play, then yer gonna hafta pay...

When I got to work on Tuesday, I took a couple of steps from the van and I noticed there was a wave of motion moving away from me, that was only a couple of inches from the ground. It turns out it was literally tens of thousands of tiny frogs trying to hop away from me as I took every step. It was almost impossible to keep from treading on some of them. I bet I looked like an engineering ninja as I moved carefully and slowly while putting each foot down. Slowest... walk... across... a... parking... lot... ever!!!

Here is a close-up shot of these tiny guys. At first I thought these were toads, but upon closer inspection, these look like a relative to the pinewoods tree frog.

On Thursday morning as I was taking the flyover ramp from I-275 to I-4, I was met with this view of the morning sun.

Well, I am officially a carrier of an iPhone5, but only after heroically trying to have an iPhone 4S for my work phone and going through 2 of them with unrecoverable defects, so I finally had to relent. At any rate, it seems the company has distributed iPhone 4S units to the most of the workforce, so I've already had opportunities to fix two of them so far.

My buddy Charlie told me that a major tree branch broke off and fell in his back yard, just missing the beehive in the picture. The bees have no idea just how lucky they are.

Here is a different view of the tree-fall. I call this beehive the 'Bee Condo' because it is so tall. I'll put more information about Charlie and his bees on this weblog as he makes it available.

Ok, it's Friday now and I had been meaning to take a picture of this earlier. What we have going on at work is a new air conditioned break room under construction. At the same time, we just had a brand new remote-controlled gantry crane installed and it was wild watching the technicians testing the crane by running it back and forth, left and right, up and down without somebody holding onto a pigtail cable hanging from the crane. I'll see if I can get a picture or two of it for next week.

Here is one of the circuit breakers that was refurbished and is ready to be crated up and shipped to the customer. I have actually seen larger ones than this one being worked on in the shop.

We've made it to Saturday now, and we have come to the point where I was wearing ice skates (above). Katrina invited me to go skating with a couple of her friends and I told her I had never been ice skating before. But, my basic motto is; "Just because I haven't done something before, doesn't mean that I can't do it". So, I went skating with them... Here is the skating rink, before the 'chaos' begins.

Here are Katrina's friends on the ice, Melissa, Brittany and Melissa with Katrina bringing up the rear.

Aaaaand, here here we all are, taking a break on the wall at the far side, resting from all of the effort of trying to keep from bouncing off of our backsides.

It took a while, be we eventually stopped hanging onto the wall and we were free-skating without it (even me). Although my posture made me look like I was a silverback gorilla on ice skates, I was able to build up some speed, skate backwards, attempt one pirouette and I only hit the ice one and one-half times. The first was after trying the pirouette and I landed on my backside, but it was more of a collapse than smacking the ice. The one-half fall was when I landed on one knee after skating backwards for a while and trying to toe-tap to turn myself around. That works good for roller skates, not so much on the ice, so I ended up sliding to a stop on one knee...

I came across this Sony Mavica MVC-FD73 and just had to take a picture of it (with my 5.0 megapixel cellphone camera). I remember that these things were the first digital camera with removable media, which was a 1.44MB floppy disc. At only 1.3 mega-pixels though, this old guy is ready for the museum shelf...

So, today (the 19th) is my birthday, and Luann & I had a few things to do today. We had breakfast at Village Inn, next we stopped and filled up the car with gas, then we stopped by the carwash. As we were there, we got a front-row seat to a textbook arrest in progress. This is a frame-grab from our in-car camera and the woman that was trying to break into the pill-mill next door (orange oval on the left with her hands up) when the officer pulled up in in his Dodge Charger patrol car (larger orange oval on the right) got out and instructed her to back up to him with her hands raised as he trained a Taser on her from behind the protection of his patrol car door (smaller oval inside the big one on the right side). He cuffed her, placed her in his patrol car and a female officer arrived to perform the pat-down.

Luann & I talked about how this was such an uncommon occurrence when we first moved to Tampa, but this kind of thing (people trying to break into a building in broad daylight and such) was what we were getting away from in Miami when we moved up here. It's sad to realize the degradation of Tampa Bay society as it has over the years.

Anyway, after we got the car washed, another errand was to get some shirts ready for an upcoming trip. I'll provide more details about this later. As for the picture, this is the birthday gift Luann got for me. It's an underwater enclosure for my digital camera. I can't wait to try it out, maybe we'll go swimming soon.

So, that was our week so far, how was yours?