Todays Agenda

I’ve already gone out on the bike trail this morning at 4:30am and returned before 6:30am doing 20 miles.  Since I had 2 flat tires in 2 days on the front tire I’ve been leery every time I start riding after stopping at like a stop light or a stop sign because it just feels like I have a flat tire.  Then I get off the bike to check and it’s still hard from all the air pressure inside of it.

I’m still exhausted from all that work I did yesterday at the rental house next door.  I still have to do the bathroom, the bath tub, sink and toilet, the floor is already mopped.  Then I have to rake up all the leaves and dog poop that the last tenants were nice enough to leave me to clean up.  I think 3 large piles that he raked up but never actually shoveled up and thrown out.  What a nice guy right?  So now I gotta do his dirty work.  That’s it!  No more pets allowed.

Michael Jackson’s memorial service at the Staples center will be broadcast live from 9am to 1pm on almost every channel today and Darrin wants me to record it for him from CNN.  He wanted me to record it from E! but I was going through the guide on the cable but E! doesn’t show it being live until tonight so there’s something wrong there lol.  They say 10am PST but it shows the Michael Jackson True Hollywood Story being played over and over.  I think CNN will do just fine.

So at about 6pm tonight is the new show Warehouse 13 on SyFy channel.  Yes I said 6pm.  I have SyFy HD which is eastern time zone so I get to watch it as the east coast does.

My day is pretty much set already.  UGH!  I have to go fold laundry before I go next door lol.

Busy All Day

Wow I’ve just been busy all day long without 1 moment to catch my breath.  First off I woke up late.  I didn’t set the right time on my alarm for some reason.  The alarm clock has 2 alarm settings so if your spouse or whatever has to wake up at a earlier or later time then you can have them both set differently and both turned on.  Well, I have them both set for different times and the one that I needed wasn’t turned on lol.  I guess I just forgot to turn it on the right one.

So I woke up on my own at 5:30am and went out, Dell DJ battery was almost dead so naturally I had to charge that up.  6:30am comes and I leave the house.  I’m on my way home and my brand spanking new tube for the front tire blows.  UGH!  I’m like 5 minutes away from the house (not walking, by bike) so I have to pull over and put some air in the tube, just enough to get me home.  I come home and feel the tire and it’s goin’ down hehe.

I get in the shower immediately and then walk over to Albertsons to buy a bike repair kit.  My bike repair kit sucks, the patches aren’t patching lol so I needed a new one, one with that glue.  But Albertsons doesn’t have them so I go to Walgreen’s and get it.  Of course I had to go back to Albertsons anyway for other things.

I come home, put the new patch on the tube and I take one of my old tubes that the patch didn’t work for and I just cut it all the way around and since it has that green goop stuff (which doesn’t work by the way lol) I have to wash all that out, throw away all the chunks and then get it all off by hand in a bucket of water.  So then I wrapped that around my tube, the one that I just bought yesterday that already has a hole in it that I just patched up lol.  So hopefully this patch will keep it patched and if I run over another sticker then that extra tube in there will take the impact of it and not let it go through to the new tube.

So now it’s 11:45am, I’m going to drink my slim fast shake but then I have to go next door and clean the rental.  We were going to do it over the weekend but Darrin was just too exhausted to go over there.  He slept the entire weekend lol.

Hopefully it won’t take me too long, I’m going to bring my alarm clock and set it for 2:50pm so that I can come over here and watch Stargate SG-1 at 3pm.  If I still have more to do then of course I’ll go back but I don’t think there is too much to clean.

LATE!

ARGH!  I woke up and it’s 5:30am because I set the wrong alarm.  My alarm clock has 2 alarms on it and I set the wrong one lol.  I didn’t even wake up from the alarm, I just woke up.  I looked at the cable box to see what time it was and I was like OMG!  I’m LATE!

Then I go to fill my camelbak with ice and water and I think hmmm, I wonder.  So I turn on my Dell DJ Mp3 player and the battery is dead lol.  Great!  Perfect!  Well, it had 0 bars but it wasn’t dead dead.  I could listen to the radio on it but I prefer music.

So Since I’m already late I might as well wait until it’s charged up a little bit more.  I’ll leave the house at 6:30am which is about the same time I usually come home from riding the bike.  According to the weather channel app on my computer, 6am will be 70, 7am will be 71 and 8am will be 73.  Since I won’t be coming home until 8:30am I might as well mention that 9am will be 76 so between 8am and 9am the temp will go up by only 2 degrees so I’m not concerned about the heat catching up to me.  That’s the only reason I ride so early, to beat the heat.

Oh well, it finally gives me a chance to fully wake up before actually starting my day.  Or… does this mean that everything else this morning is going to go wrong and I should just stay home?  LOL

Me In The Simpsons – Wood Burned and Painted

I got bored…  LOL I went to the google search engine and typed “turn picture into simpsons character” and I found this website from Burger King called Simpsonize Me.  I thought it was a very good likeness of me lol and I got bored so I wood burned it and that wasn’t enough for me, I had to paint it too lol.  So here you go, I hope you like it.

Is Bakersfield A Safe Place To Ride A Bicycle?

Is Bakersfield a safe place to ride a bicycle?

This article was in today’s Bakersfield Californian newspaper.

In my opinion it is only safe to ride a bicycle if you are a defensive rider.  If you are watching where you are going, looking both left and right, never crossing the street unless you have the green light (or in some cases walk signal).  Never riding on the wrong side of the road then crossing while a car is turning left (which happened to me).

This one time I was leaving the bike path and I was crossing the street and this pickup truck was pulling out in front of me while he was looking right at me.  He nearly ran me over.  This was about 10am in the morning too so it’s not like he was drinking and driving… that I know of at least.

I have a little mirror that is attached to my helmet and I’m constantly looking at it to see the traffic behind me so I know what is coming at me.

Now I cannot say that it is 100% safe to ride as early as I do because even at 4:30am there are probably still some drunk drivers out there but usually when I ride that early there are maybe 1 or 2 cars every 10 minutes so it’s pretty safe where and when I ride.

You also have to consider the fact that I’m not riding in the busy streets along with traffic.  I start out in a neighborhood and I’m pretty much only in neighborhoods until I get to the bike path so there is not that much danger of getting hit.  And I know a route that gets me to the mall and to Target where it’s through neighborhoods and I never have to drive with traffic.

So is Bakersfield a safe place to ride a bicycle?  I think it is during the morning or during the daytime IF you aren’t driving in traffic where there are no bike paths or where cars are parked right in the bike path.  If you try to ride through neighborhoods then you are safe.  But if you drive alongside cars then there is never a guarantee that you are ever safe.  Even if you are crossing the street you aren’t ever safe because there are always reports of people getting killed while crossing the street.  Is it safe for me to ride here?  Yes, because I am a defensive rider and I pick the best safest routes.

If you live in a city that you aren’t sure where the safest routes are, why not just go to your favorite map website, I go to google maps and I map out my route then I adjust the route so I am going through neighborhoods then I print it out and hold it while riding through that neighborhood so I learn it so the next time I have to go that way I will remember.  And if I don’t remember then I print it out again (if I threw the old map out that is).

Box for Vedra

Today was (Darrin’s cousin) Vedra’s birthday and so we went over to her house to give her the box.  I put 2 bags of Hershey’s Kisses, 2 different flavors inside the box.  I know 1 flavor was peanut butter but the other was truffle creme with dark chocolate or something like that, I forgot what the name was lol.  Anyway, she loved it.

I went to Walgreen’s and bought one of their ready-made gift bags with the ribbon on the front and the different color tissue paper inside to match the bag color.  Then I came home and took the tissue out and put the box inside of it then tucked it back into the bag.  Then of course I put the card in there too.

When she pulled the tissue paper out of the bag with the box in the paper then she peeled away the tissue the expression on her face was priceless.  She goes “OH NO!!!” hehe.  Oh No meaning I can’t believe you got me this, I love it.  I know Oh No usually doesn’t sound good but in this case I could interpret it hehe.

She looked at every inch of it and was just in love with the design and the paint job and her name being on the top.  She was really happy so that is all that counts.

Here is my original post with the video of the box on YouTube:

Wood Burned Box

Well, now that I know what kind of reaction she gave me I think I’m going to go back to Michael’s for more boxes from here on out until December buying up as many boxes as I can afford to make boxes for everybody for Christmas 2009 lol.  Well, not just boxes lol.

Bad Tenants

Ok they are gone so now I can talk about them…

In the middle of April these people responded to the ad that we put in Craigslist to rent the little house next door.  They wanted it so bad so they put a deposit down which would be their last months rent.  See, Darrin wants people to pay first, last and a deposit.  The rent was $625 so to be able to move in you have to give $1250 plus $500 for a deposit.  When they give a 30 day notice to move out then the “last” kicks in so they don’t have to pay their rent for that last month.  This way they can use what they normally would pay for rent as a deposit for another place.

So anyway May 1st comes and they move in.  They pull up in a U-Haul truck and I’m standing there waiting patiently for them to come and I hand them both their own set of keys.  I even help them unload the truck.  I’m such a nice guy right?  LOL

The tenants were a couple, Robert who was unemployed since he was coming here from another state, obviously he had no job so he said that when Monday came he would go search for a job.  His pregnant girlfriend, no, not wife, Sarah used to work at this hospital in town (allegedly) and so they said she could come back to work.

Well, after they were living there a whole day they started complaining about stuff.  Sarah said that she was having to scrub down the stove/oven because it was absolutely filthy.  Well, I take that personally because I scrubbed it for an hour and half way before they moved in.  The previous tenant, Justin, left the place so gross that it took me forever to clean it.  So when she said it was filthy I felt like it was a slap in the face to me.  I spent my own money on the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and I spent my own money on the oven cleaner and I spent like I said, 1 1/2 hours scrubbing it clean.

Then she calls and says they are having such a huge cockroach problem and I told her that you can be the cleanest person in the world and you will still get them at this time of year.  It is in fact roach season when it starts getting hot out and when they moved in was around the time that it started heating up outside.  I mean, it wasn’t in the 100’s but I think it was in the early 90’s.  I can’t remember.  But she told me on the phone that she has lived in Bakersfield for 30 years and she has never seen 1 roach.  LOL Yeah right.  In what reality was she living in those 30 years because I’ve lived here in the 70’s and the 80’s and I’ve lived here since 2000 and the roaches are out every summer crawling in the back yard, crawling on the front yard, they get inside the house and you can’t get rid of them.  But she insisted I was wrong and she was right.

So Darrin calls Banks pest control and pays $150 for that 1 visit.  Of course she still complains.  On the 3rd day She had asked for a can of white glossy paint so she could paint the kitchen cabinets lol.  He went over there and just lit into her because she was being too demanding and asking for this and that and the other.  He even tells them they have 3 days to move and the guy Robert says well give us back all of our money.  Darrin goes, ok, I’ll give you your money… after you have moved out and I see how clean the place is, then we’ll talk about getting you your money back.  Of course then he has them both by the balls.

On June 1st instead of putting an envelope in our mail box with a rent check in it they put an envelope in our mail box with a 30 day notice to move lol.  Thank god!  Good riddance.

So they are gone by June 30th and they leave 1 set of keys in our mailbox.  I didn’t hear them drop because I was asleep.  I only found them when I got the mail.  So I went over there to see what damage they left for us.  They left what was a clean couch when they moved in but now it’s filthy.  And they took the door knobs in the house which were all original when the house was built.  I don’t know how many they took, I just found out today when Darrin went over there to look.  And the back yard they left a lot of trash and a lot of cigarette butts on the ground lol.

I never met them until they moved in but if I had met them when they were looking at the place I would’ve told Darrin not to rent to them because they both looked like white trash.  I could tell just by looking at them.  I didn’t have to get to know them to know that, I could tell.  Frankly I’m surprised they aren’t either living in a tent or a trailer.  I’m sure that’s next though because Robert got like 3 or 4 of those little post card sized letters from Bank of America that you tear off the sides and the top to reveal it is insufficient funds fees.  I’ve gotten a couple of those in my lifetime but never have I gotten 3 or 4 in 2 days lol.  Plus they’ve gotten a few letters from what looks like collections by looking at the name of the company on the return address.  We threw all their mail out because they refused to give us a mailing address and they took all the door knobs so screw them.  They also aren’t responding to our calls so how else can we give them their mail?

Let’s hope the next tenants who occupy that space aren’t such dicks.

Oh I forgot to mention something.  The whole 2 months they were living here, Robert wasn’t working.  All he did all day long was either sleep or play with his $400 remote-controlled car that takes its own gasoline or he sat on the couch playing X-Box online with other people.  I know this because I had to go over there a couple of times to install stuff like a new light fixture and a smoke detector.  So he had the nerve to make his pregnant girlfriend work while he hung out at home all day.  What a dick!

Give Yourself Liposuction At Home

Wow, now you can buy a product that you can use on YOURSELF so you can give YOURSELF liposuction.  What could go wrong?

Laser Liposuction System | Cellulite Treatment | Slimray Lipo Laser System | Fat Loss – UNLINKED

I was on Facebook and saw this ad for this.  It says it’s a risk free trial so I guess if you don’t lose any weight from it you can just send it back and get a full refund.  By the way it only costs $379.95 plus shipping, not sure about any taxes.

What it does according to their website is it melts the fat cells and the more you use it the more fat cells will melt.  You feel it right away and you can lose inches of fat every week that you use it.

But with all these things on the market are you willing to drop almost $400 on yet another gadget?  Maybe if I had $400 to spare then yeah I might but I don’t.  So I guess diet and exercise are going to have to do for now.  But it does look neat though, I mean, well the thought of being able to do that.

Edit: It appears that this website is gone for good.  Perhaps they didn’t make the money they wanted for their product so they stopped selling it online.  Who knows for sure.

14 Years Old and 555lbs.

Should mom of 555-pound boy be charged with neglect?

That is an article on the SparkPeople website.

The mother claims that she works too much and doesn’t always have any time to give her child the right foods.  She buys fast food for him all the time for his dinner and he has reached a very dangerous weight.  Can you imagine being 14 years old and weighing 555lbs?  I certain cannot.

Ok some may say that because he is 14 years old he is old enough to feed himself but come on, when I was that age if it were up to me I’d be eating candy bars and cake and ice cream for dinner every night.  You cannot let a 14-year-old make that decision on his own unless you have already taught him from birth the right foods to eat.

When I was a kid my mother fed me the right kinds of foods and I was always very very thin.  Ok so I wasn’t model thin but I had a small waistline.  Mainly because I was very active on my bike and running from bully’s and also during P.E. class they always had us running around.  There were times that my family went to McDonald’s to eat dinner and we went to other dining restaurants for dinner too, not just fast food.  My favorite place to go was Bob’s Big Boy (which I’m happy they are coming back to Bakersfield YAY).  But I wasn’t given that everyday so I knew that you weren’t supposed to eat that crap on a daily basis.  Not just because it’s not very good for you but because back then it was expensive.  The burgers were about $2.50 or so and you know, in the 70’s and 80’s money was always tight so it wasn’t too often that we would go there.  It was cheaper for my mom to go to the store.

Personally I think that this kid should be taken away from the mother because they gave her lots of chances to help her son get down in weight by teaching them better eating habits and the mother refused to comply so they took him.

This woman needs to get a better job where she is able to pay more attention to her son so she can walk with him and maybe get him a gym membership.  Go there with him every day to make sure he does what he is supposed to and not just sitting down listening to his iPod outside in the front of the gym.  She needs to take responsibility for HER actions in getting her kid fat.  If you don’t then your child needs to be in a better home environment.

Well, that’s just my opinion, 1 opinion out of probably billions.

Malt-O-Meal Hot Cereal

I can remember when I was about 4 or 5 years old and my mother used to make me Malt-O-Meal for breakfast.  That was the best hot cereal ever.  Yes I like Oatmeal but this is better.  I don’t care too much for cream of wheat though.

I remember that my mom always bought the Chocolate Malt-O-Meal and if she bought the original, I would put some chocolate syrup in it to make it chocolaty hehe.

Did you know that Malt-O-Meal hot cereal is nutritious?  I knew it was good for you but I didn’t know to what extend until I read this:

Link is gone, sorry.  But take my word for it lol.  Visit the website and do some digging (link below)

Wow, I’m going to buy this more often and eat it before my bike rides instead of regular cold cereal.  Although this means I’m either going to get a late start or I will have to get up earlier.  Then again you can nuke it lol.

I don’t know why but the stores in California, or at least in Bakersfield, don’t sell the chocolate flavored Malt-O-Meal anymore.  When I was 4 or 5 as I mentioned before we lived here in Bakersfield and that’s where my mom bought it so I’m not sure why they don’t sell it here now.  They do mention that flavor on their website.  I want CHOCOLATE Malt-O-Meal!  Adding chocolate syrup adds more calories to it lol.  Oh well, I guess Maple and Brown Sugar will have to do.

Image copied from their website www.malt-o-meal.com.  Make sure you go to your local grocery store and buy some today.  It’s the best hot cereal ever made IMHO.