Wow, you skip a few journal entries and suddenly it's been a week.

Weekend was a mixed bag. The BBQ was good enough, grandma liked her card and gifts and my parents friends who came over were interesting enough to talk to. Oddly they all were ex military of some type. It's strange that my parents were both military and I didn't follow the same path.

While at the house I used the road and the driveway area to sight in the bow. Man, what a huge difference. I got the pins set for 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 yards and I gotta say at 50 yards the bow is really running out of power. No reason to hurry up and look where your shot lands, you can do a full follow-through and still take the bow down and watch the impact. The sight rocks though, even at 50 yards I was hitting 5 for 5 on a 24"x24" target. That doesn't sound all that impressive, but for my first time using it that's awesome. I couldn't even begin to make more than a 30 yard shot before, and at the 10-30 yard range I'm spot on. At longer ranges you can tell the difference between the older 4" vanes and the newer 2" I used when I fletched them myself. The 2" are a lot faster and are inches higher on the targets at all ranges. I ended up dialing for the 2" vanes and will just strip and re-do the old 4" stuff I have left. 50 yards also isn't much in terms of rifle stuff but it's about as far as you can go in any sort of wooded terrain. I had to really work to get a clear 50 yard shot on the road, anywhere else it was near impossible.

Mom and Kristen and I tried to go 4x4ing a bit, but when we finally made it to Pardoe trail it was closed still. Didn't say when it was open but since there was still a bit of snow at 7000 ft my guess is that at 9k there is enough to keep the forest service guys away for a while. I don't see why they have to clear the trail, the whole point of 4x4ing is to find and tackle obstacles. Clearing the road seems like the wrong thing to do. If we wanted a paved road there are already plenty of those available. One picture out of the new camera (dialed down to 6 megapixel I think, no need for 10 just now):

Monday I went and got some new running shoes and it made all the difference in the world. The sales guy suggested that I don't spend top dollar on the shoes, but to get middle of the road shoes and buy top dollar inserts. There is a huge difference between the stock inserts on even the top shoes and the aftermarket stuff. I ended up with Nike Pegasus shoes which apparently have been around for 25 years. Kristen says she remembers those exactly from her high school track days and how they were the coolest things around. Those with a set of inserts was 40% less than the top tier shoes but man what a huge difference the make. First day out with them I had zero knee pain. Zero. The rest day after (which is often worse) was no problem either. So, I either suddenly got back into shape or the shoes help. The review sites say the insole is the last part of the comfort equation but running both with and without I can tell the difference the aftermarket stuff makes. One review says the tread shows wear after 400 miles which sounds like a lot but at my current rate that's 25 weeks. Actually that's probably most of the running season anyway, especially if I get a pair of trail running shoes and wear them some of the time while on the street to wear them in.

Other than being really busy at work getting settled and doing real 'management' stuff, not a lot has been going on. I have managed to run to the gym twice this week but it's killing my knees. I went cheap on the shoes this last time because I wasn't running anymore, but now that I'm back to it my next pair will have to be real running shoes again. Getting old sucks (as do my stupid allergies!).

We'll be packing up and heading to my parent place today, going up for a BBQ for my grandma's birthday. I'm hoping traffic won't be bad, the roads were pretty empty yesterday so hopefully people got off to an early start for the weekend. We'll be coming home Sunday, no way I'm chancing driving on Monday, plus I have stuff to do around the house.

I'm taking my on-line ethics class/orientation thingy from apple legal. Boring.

Damn, busy week.

Even though I had to come back to the house due to an on-call problem, I still managed to get two of my errands done today. I got a sight and arrow rest put on the bow and got the tires put on the Jeep.

The sight and rest were fairly reasonably priced, I didn't go crazy high end on anything, in fact I stayed toward the bottom. Although the sight can be moved to another bow, I figured I can start low and if I stick with it I can always just give this sight back to my father in law along with his bow. Make it better than I found it so to speak. He'll appreciate that.

The tires look great and although they kick out a little more noise it's not really that bad. Can't wait to get them on the trail in a few weeks.

My headphones at work were some $3 cheapies I swiped from Skyrider (it was my skype headset) and while they seemed to work OK they gave me crazy headaches. I tried to buy a slightly less crappy pair from Fry's but they sucked too (but at least Fry's took them back). I tried the $300 headphones that one of the audiophile guys in the office has and they were very comfortable, but obviously expensive. He looked on Amazon and recommended a pair of Sennheiser that ran me $27 total. They may be 1/10th the cost of his but man are they still so very nice, possibly the nicest headphones I've ever owned. They seem pretty comfy, and the sound is good enough that I need to use the EQ to drop the bass. Now that I've got a reason to use the EQ I just programmed it to mimic what my hearing aids do. Suddenly music sounds 'funny'.

The woman had lied to her mother about the length of my Europe trip so we wouldn't have to try to get me back to PHX for the family reunion crap as they were being vague about the dates. Now however they've scheduled it for a weekend I'm actually here, and airfare was cheap enough for me to fly out for just the weekend to be in the all-family pictures. Oy, looks like 36 hours of hell in PHX for me before I get to go have fun. :(

So the bozos at comcast took us off the air for a bit. I explicitly told them time and time again that we wanted to KEEP the internet portion of our service when we got rid of the TV portion. So, what did they do? Why, send some tech out to physically cut our cable connection. I looked in the box this morning and rather than a filter or even just unplugging the cable the guy actually cut it about 2" from the jack. After wasting the morning waiting for the tech (or a different tech) to show up he spent all of 5 minutes reattaching an end and plugging it back in. I could have done that, but I'm sure without a note in the system somewhere the next jack-hole that wandered by would end up cutting it again.

We had a welcome breakfast this morning for the new help desk guy which means that I had to skip the gym in order to make it on time. However, I did have enough time to go for a run, my first real run since, uh, leaving Skyrider? Oy. So it took me 15 minutes to get to the gym, 20 to get back. Guess I was moving slower on the trip home, and now I'm sore pretty much everywhere. I can do 30 minutes on the ellipse without even breaking a sweat but apparently running is a whole other story. I really need to get some new shoes if I'm going to run on pavement every day, and from what I can tell there is no other way to go about it if I want to go the direct route. There is a school in the way but it looks like a prison with all it's multi-layer fences and stuff so I can't cut through the track or anything which leaves me with just sidewalks. If I'm going to actually try trail running this year a short run every morning to/from the gym in place of my ellipse stuff should help me get started.

Picked up the pager today, my last on-call as a contractor. Not looking forward to this week that's for sure.

Finally took a crack and fletching the arrows. I had scraped off the old fletchings before but today I finally got around to using the alcohol prep and then putting the new fletches on. The "Arizona ez-fletch" does it's thing as long as you keep it clean. I went sparingly on the glue but it still gets all over the holder.

Saturday morning the dish guy showed up and we got it installed. I helped him run the cable and whatnot to speed up the process. Since I wanted to actually keep the cable for the cable modem he couldn't use the cable to pull his cable through the walls. Instead we just ran it in the garage door and along the garage ceiling up to the hole I made for the Ethernet cable to the garage server. Simple, and it doesn't look any worse than any of the other cables I have running along the ceiling. The new DVR isn't as bad as I thought, yes the lack of auto commercial skipping is annoying but the 30 second button works and the ability to record multiple things at once is slick.

Saturday night we went to Scott and Lina's for another BBQ. Steaks were good as usual, but since the woman made some cheesecake desert I didn't get to share in it. Oh well.

Today I installed a few mods to the Jeep that I picked up yesterday. First a set of grab handles to make it easier for the woman to get in, and second was the winch. It's only a 'cosmetic mount', I didn't locktite the bolts in because I want to get new tow hooks before I make it more secure. I'll also need to get new bolts, I reused the stock ones but they have those stupid torx heads. I had to run around to several stores before I hit Sears and found a T-55 and T-60 bit. I also want to paint the sway bar mounts. They look like raw steel and since they're normally under a plastic cover no one would notice them rusting. With that cover off to mount the winch though it's painfully obvious how nasty they're going to look in a few years.

I also ran the clay bar over the hood and gave the Jeep a good hand wax. Using the orbital would be more trouble than it's worth I think because of all the small spaces and lumps. I've forgotten how painful it is to clean a jeep, you're constantly finding hard edges to bash fingers against.

Rode up to Alice's alone today but met up with the cool kids once I got there. I finally got to meet the 'chick' they said rides the KLR so fast. I dunno if 'chick' works though, she's easily in her mid 50s. Her and her husband have a bunch of bikes but between them they have 3 KLRs. Crazy people. The racetech forks she had on hers were about 2x the size of the stock units on my bike, and the rear was heavily tweaked as well. That probably helps her dust the sportbike guys in the twisties, but once the road opens up she's got the same problem I do, namely only 32hp on tap. The KLR isn't a sportbike though, even if it can (sometimes) be ridden like one.

I was going to order the winch for the Jeep from Amazon of all places but in the end I ended up getting it from the local shop, sorta. I checked 4 wheel parts web site and they had the winch I wanted listed for $200 cheaper than they quoted me in the store. I called them and asked WTF and since it was free shipping to the store, it didn't make sense that I would by it on-line and then go to the same store to pick it up and save myself all that money. They agreed and matched prices. They also got me a no-name mounting plate which they swore up and down is the same as the expensive one from Warn. Since when does a sales guy talk you down to the cheaper part? With the cheaper mount and still paying tax it came out to less than Amazon and I get it tomorrow (or really as soon as I get down to the store when they're open) since it's sitting there with my name on it. I still need to get the hood lock, forgot to order that when I had the guy on the phone.

I don't think anywhere in here I actually said that I got and accepted my full time offer from Apple. As of 5/18 I'll be a real employee. My base salary is up only a smidgen, hardly makes up for all the OT I'll be losing but the woman said I shouldn't be working so much anyway. One nice thing is that instead of some token number of options they gave me a token number of restricted stock shares. With Apple stock actually going up the actual shares are better since all the stock options they've given everyone else that's converted have been underwater almost immediately. There is also a small signing bonus, not enough to pay for the jeep or anything but still better than anything I've ever received before.

Saturday I spent 12 hours gaming up near sacto. Good group of guys, not a bunch of pressure or any real rules lawyers. That said we did spend a lot of time looking up rules since no one could remember half of what we were trying to do. Unarmed combat? Who does that? These guys also like playing lower level stuff which is good, it makes it easier for me to keep up since I don't read every rule book cover-to-cover and don't know all the really esoteric stuff. It's supposed to be fun, dammit.

Sunday I finally figured out which vehicle I wanted to buy:

The wife is really happy with it since she can drive it and she says she looks cute in it. Guess that's all that matters to the chickies? :) Now I've got to start looking for tires and a winch so it's ready to take off-road in a few weeks when we visit my parents. Hopefully that snow has melted off that fire trail enough that we can go exploring without 2' of snow blocking everything still. Maybe I can get it cleaned off and take some real pictures (we did a bit of 4x4ing on the test drive and it's got crap all over it still).