Turkey trotter 2010

This past thanksgiving I returned to a race that I ran in last year on thanksgiving day. I think I ran a worse time then last year, and worse than the uc clermont 5k a month ago. I have been unable as of now to find an official results page, but I do believe my time was 27:56. I didn't feel really well the whole race. I had to stop a couple of times to walk. I didn't run as much as I could have during the week to prepare myself. I wasn't even able to get a race day T-shirt to wear around like a badge of honor. The lady that took my money said they would mail me the two I ordered.

I am also seeming to aggravate my grandpa more than usual nowadays. I got into two arguements with him today. The first was because I wanted to put a tarp on the trailer so that my dad could more easily unroll it when he decided the time was right. The tarp was up on a balcony in our barn and grandpa refused to let me go to get it. So when I agreeed with him that we would do what he wanted to do, and quickly conceded to doing what he wanted to do, he got angry at that also. Then later in the day he got mad because I had set out to much tobacco near the end of the work day. When everyone had left after we had gotten everything done, about 5 minutes after quitting time, I got to be chastised again. Apparently it is impossible to let people leave at the hour mark when they want to leave when there is tobacco on the bench. The way he wants to do things, no one leaves until the bench is empty. I had in my mind, that we needed enough on the table to work and not let them leave early. What is the use of paying a person for a full hour and letting them leave ten minutes early so the bench would be empty when it needed be? The real issue is that I have to ask him all sorts of questions to try and get into his mind because we cannot figure each other out by observations.

I had some other topic in my mind today stripping tobacco, but it has now escaped me.

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Movember

I have been growing a mustache since the first of the month. Attempting to grow might be a better qualifier, since my mustache is more laughable than commendable. I got the idea from reading the clubtrillion blog and decided that I would try it this month. The idea behind the mustache movement is to raise prostate cancer awareness. It would seem that prostate cancer is to men as to what breast cancer is to women, but those pink ribbons get all the press.

I am now at a turning point with my mustache. I need to make a public appearance and don't really want to do so with a crummy looking facial hair feature. I had considered carrying around some cards explaining my cause, but don't really want to do that now. I had discussed with the vet tech keeping the 'stache all month but am now going to sleep on it and decide to keep it or not in the morning.

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Game time

This weekend I went to the Penn State vs Ohio State game. The game itself was much better during the second half than the first half. There were some key interceptions that really turned the tide to OSU favor. I seem to remember a better game my sophomore year though. Both teams were ranked, and an interception that was broght back by the OSU defense ended up being the deciding score. That season has not quite been repeated. They have made the national championship games since then, but haven't gotten a win like they did against the hurricanes back in 2002. Maybe the reason that season holds so much appeal to me is because of how novel all that was for me. I had never gotten into football so much before, and seeing how it all takes place and progresses was really fun.

I also took the chance to do a little bit of drinking saturday also. I had kind of hoped that I would be able to hang around for a little while after the game and head home. However, the vet tech also decided that she wanted to stay around after the game, so we got to drinking and ended up making an overnight trip out of it. I got to see some of my old friends from college and hung out with my brothers most of the night also.

I am also going to be especially busy here in the next couple of weeks. I finally got my paperwork on some of the sub list for the county. The tobacco is also going to be coming in case here soon hopefully. Since we have been unable to find any help thus far, I may have to strip a bunch of it by myself. The upside of this is that the biggest cost of putting out tobacco is hiring someone else to strip. So the more I do myself, the more money I keep for myself. This should help out when I want to go and buy that truck I have been thinking about gettting. The downside is that I may have to put in 12 hour or more days to really make any progress. I think I will end up buying a small TV to put in the stripping room to help pass some of the time. Just something that will get the HD channels and that I can put a DVD player to if I want to watch a movie and work at the same time.

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Home Improvement

The past month or so has been busy with improvements to my home address. I'll start with the upstairs renovations. I had the room worked over and it is now livable. The wood paneling is gone and replaced with drywall. The floor is been redone with a dark colored laminate and looks way better. I did have some issues with the corners being way out of level, but got the corners close and pushed the trim down far enough to hide the flaw. The track lighting does an excellent job of illuminating the room also. The paint turned out real well, the vet tech did an excellent job of picking the color scheme and doing the painting. Once all that was done, the long dresser and bed fit in the room with room to spare. I was beginning to worry that those two items would take up a great deal of the floor space and not make the room much of a bedroom. My dad was in the "only good for a walk in closet" camp, but the room turned out to be way more than adequate for that. The added benefit of all this is that the room I put carpet in two summers ago is now freed up for couches and dressers that were cluttering up the downstairs a bit. I may have only renovated 150 square feet, but likely gained twice that in overall space. I am now using room next to the bathroom as a type of staging area for my work clothes and that frees up the laundary room so nicely. I don't have to trip over and lean around work shoes now to wash my hands.

I also bought my parents outdoor wood furnace and had that installed to heat my house with. It definitely keeps my house nice and warm now. I am not sure if I am burning too much wood or not, but the electric bill should be cheaper. I added up the bills for the year and am averaging about 165 a month for electric in this house. That average includes a low of 50 for one of the summer months, but I don't remember the high from that run of bills. With the four grand I spent on getting the furnace and installation, it may take some years to be ahead overall. I'm not really concerned about that though, the electric furnace didn't really do a good job keeping the house warm. The wood furnace is.

I also went ahead and bought a new TV for my big living room downstairs. I decided to move my other TV upstairs and bought a 50 inch plasma for downstairs. The only issue is that I now should buy some better cables and a decent DVD player for the TV. The five year old thirty dollar DVD player from walmart isn't playing in color on my new TV, so a change is to be in effect.

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