Saturday, December 20, 2008

A Bloody Mess!

When I managed to extract myself from bed this morning, I had a few things I wanted to do today. Not that I wanted to get up seeing it was another cloudy, dreary cold morning. Its been a while since we've seen any sunshine. The things I wanted to do were to erg, watch Navy play in their bowl game and fix our outside lights. As I was getting my morning coke from the refrigerator, I decided before my day got underway, a Christmas movie might be nice way to ease into the day. Comcast's On Demand Channel is running a large selection of Holiday movies, some free and some not. Ann likes the Bill Murray movie "Scrooged" so that's what I picked. It's really pretty funny and has the usual "A Christmas Carol" happy ending. So that was two hours well spent.

After the movie, I headed upstairs to erg. Working out on the erg for me is a funny thing. Sometimes I feel into it. Sometimes I don't. Today I didn't feel it. I struggled through 5,000 meters. About the best I can say for it was that I finished it. Maybe tomorrow I'll be more into it. After a shower, I settled in to watch the first of the college bowl games, which featured Navy vs Wake Forest. I really like both teams so it was hard to know who to route for. In the end, our and my family's association with the Navy won out over Jim Grobe's (the Wake Forest's coach)
Ohio University ties. It was a good game with the score going back and forth before Wake finally pulled away at the end.

Next up - lunch. Ann and I grabbed a sub from Jerry's Subs and Pizzas before I tackled the outside lights. It was a two fold job. One, remove the net with the melted connection and two, find the burned out light on another net that was keeping a section of that net from lighting. Removing the melted net was quick and painless and I moved some other nets around to cover that space. Good, one down and one to go. I brought the second net in to find the burned out light. After plugging in the net, it only took me a few minutes to find the problem. A bulb had broken off leaving just the remnants in the base. Frankly it was a lucky find right off the bat, otherwise I was looking at checking some 50 lights. As I tried to get the broken bulb out I got a shock as the wires to the bulb were still there and exposed. Note to self - unplug the lights before you work on them. I replaced the broken bulb and the net lit right up. However, I did notice another bulb that was burned out. As I was going about trying to extract that bulb, it broke off and cut the heck out of my thumb. It wasn't a bad cut, but did it bleed and bleed and bleed. I continued to try and replace the bulb, but I was dripping blood onto the kitchen floor, which didn't sit well with Ann. She took over the task while I worked on stopping the bleeding. Once I got a band-aid on it, that seem to do the trick. I took the now repaired net outside and out it on the bushes and it's now burning brightly in the night.

After attending church services, Ann and I dug into bowls of white bean chili with The Son driving up to join us. We retired to the family room to watch some more football and the three of us promptly all nodded off to sleep. No one can say we aren't a lively group. Now I'm off to finish that nap.

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