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A Bit of Ste – Revisited

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A Bit of Ste – Revisited

Category Archives: happenings

Music City Muscle

27 Saturday Oct 2012

Posted by ste7888 in bodybuilding, fitness, happenings

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

bodybuilding, Brandon Curry, Dexter Jackson, fitness, music city muscle, Nashville

20121027-165818.jpg

Here I am on Saturday and made the trip down to downtown Nashville and the Tennessee Performing Arts Center attending the Music City Muscle fitness and bodybuilding competition.

it gives me some great inspiration for my continued training and an opportunity to see what it’s like before I put myself on stage (hopefully early next year or a bit later).

My trainer is competing in this one, and the are a couple of celebrity posers tonight too, namely Dexter Jackson and Brandon Curry. Very exciting stuff to those who know of them. ^^.

I’d post some pictures of the actual comp but the lighting is so bright that it comes out way too bright in the photos.

But I’ll try some more! If I get any good ones, I’ll post them later.

Expansion and Contraction

26 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by ste7888 in everyday, happenings

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

cars, engine, lessons

A car engine is an intimidating sight for me…

And today was quite the experience for me.  It started out the same as most any other day, but ended up having an event that sort of made me feel a bit helpless.  And through this experience I gave myself at least 4 lessons I’ve learned to take forward into the future.

You see, this morning I woke up bright and shiny at 5am and drove to work at 6am.

After finishing, I drove back home to have my usual cup of coffee that I must have at some point in the day before heading to the gym.

An hour later, I jump into the car and drive out to the gym where I had an easy (but still effective) shoulder workout.

I finish up the extra pieces to my workout and stroll out to the car like usual.  Open the door, get in, turn the key and ….nothing.

The car feels deader than a doornail and my heart sinks to the floor.  I thought having a car that cranks but can’t turn over was a hard sound to listen to, hearing nothing coming from the engine is even scarier.  And remember that I had just gotten my car last week.  So I immediately wanted to go into panic mode, but I didn’t.

First thing I did was try to figure out what it was i did that could have made the battery run down.  I didn’t remember having the lights on driving to the gym, and I knew specifically that I had checked to make sure my lights were off before I exited the car earlier.

I’ve had to become more thoughtful about the lights because I could keep the lights on in the Subaru I was driving previously and when I’d take the key out it would always shut down the lights, and then turn them back on when I’d turn it back on. Not so with this guy, you leave with the lights on, they stay on.    I used to keep them on in the Subaru just for better safety on the road, but I’ve had to alter since switching.  So I know it wasn’t the lights.

There’s this holder for my Iphone I have situated in the center of my front window, and as I was getting out for the gym this morning I accidentally hit the hazard light button and they began blinking.  I promptly hit the button again, and they went off.  But since that was the only non-routine thing that happened in the course of the day, I thought I may have done that wrong in some fashion.  It’s a hazard light button, it’s on or off, no gray area.  So that must not have been it.  I was puzzled and a bit deflated.

So I go inside the gym and i was able to round up someone to jump-off my car.

Lesson #1 I Learned
– I must get a pair of jumper cables.  I have a spare tire, lug wrench, jack, tools, various engine legs, and NO jumper cables.  This experience has shown me a simple thing I was missing in my everyday car needs list.  Definitely a must have item, but had always put it off “till later.”

Thankfully the gentleman who helped me had a pair and he got me jumped off.  So I sat in my car for 10 or so minutes, letting it run a bit to get a charge started because that’s what you do when your battery dies on you, right?

As I’m doing that I’m googling “reasons for a car battery to die.”  And I’m seeing weak battery, electrical issue, parasitic energy use, leaving your lights on, or the alternator isn’t recharging the battery.  Uggh, I was thinking, what could be wrong.

I turn on the lights to start heading out and drive a bit to allow the battery to charge some, and it just dies again.  I try starting it again, and no sound, dead as a doornail.

I decided I wasn’t going to go back in and get another jump for the moment.  I gave a call to the beau and talked with him about what it may be, and we both thought the same options.  He wasn’t able to come and help though because he was out in Texas for work at the moment, and since I’m not really close with anyone out here just yet, I really didn’t have anyone I could call that I could depend on.  So I felt stuck.

Then I remembered Lesson #2 – I had the Roadside Assistance option on my phone service for a long time, just never have had to use it.  Mainly because I’ve always had someone else I could call.  But right now, I was SO glad I kept that option for my phone service.  I called for the help, and they showed up promptly in a couple of minutes to jump me off again, and since they were working under the heading of “battery service”, I promptly told him i didn’t think it was a battery issue necessarily by the way the engine shut off when I turned the lights on.  There was no “slow cranking the rest of the juice out”, it just stopped.  I wanted his thoughts on what it could be.

He checked the battery (which looked to have been changed in Feb 2012), and found everything fine with it and the alternator and he was just as puzzled as me and the beau.

We tried turning the lights on again to experiment, and again the engine shut off.  Started me up again, and then all dramatically the accessories were working fine.  I could turn on the radio, a/c, blinkers, AND the lights and it was running just fine.  And the battery had a nice strong charge.  He was baffled, and just suggested to bring it by a dealership to diagnose a problem and then have someone else more in my price range look at it.

I then thank him promptly, and begin my drive back home.  I was going to vote early today but with the way the car was acting, I just wanted to get home.  I didn’t want to risk shutting off the car again and it not wanting to start and having to go through this all over again somewhere other than home.

Lesson #3 Have a mechanic you can trust. – I called the beau again, and through talking with him I decided to go ahead and drop by our mechanic and have him look at it.  I pull in, explain the situation and he looks into it.  He sees what it’s doing, checks the battery and although it’s registering okay, thought I was probably going to need a new battery.

My heart sank, I had just spent most of my money last week on a down payment and a battery was gonna take a bite out of what I had left until payday next week.  He then had an epiphany and told me to hold on as he grabbed a screwdriver and another worker.  In the end he had found that the cable connection to the battery was just loose and wasn’t getting the power effectively.  With a couple of washers and a wrench to tighten the cord down nice and tight, the car started beautifully.

He could have charged me $120 for a battery, but instead found the real fix which turned out to be simple, and didn’t even charge me for the service.  It’s so good of a connection now that the engine actually jumps when it starts.

What I’ve concluded about it all has led me to Lesson #4 – adding “make sure your connection is tight” to the list of reasons your car may not start.  There was something that happened today that was comparatively odd, and that was the drastic change in the temperature outside.  We’ve been 80 degrees all this last week, yesterday in fact, and then today we hit a drastic change of 52, it was actually colder this afternoon than it was this morning.  Which is probably why the connection was fine this morning, then as it got colder, changed.   Heat expands, cold constricts.   It was already loose, and then the cold took it further.

I am so thankful it wasn’t something more drastic.  I’m also very thankful for the patience I had, and the people that helped me problem solve the way through it.  Looking back at it, it seems so commonplace and routine, but i managed to learn a few things by experience and have added it to what I know and can use in the future.

 

Who Says I Can’t Trick-or-Treat?

01 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by ste7888 in everyday, halloween, happenings

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Dorothy, Halloween, Trick or Treat, Wicked Witch of the West

I know the post is a day late but yesterday was so jam-packed that I didn’t have time to sit down in front of the laptop.  But all-the-better because it was such a fun holiday for me.  I’m not sure how but I managed to get the day off, but I did, and we (the beau and I) spent the day with our two older lady friends.

Initially we did a lot of running around and errands, but once those items were finished things settled down and we started prepping for Halloween.  The ladies had decided they were going to dress like Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz.  Carol’s Dorothy was alright, but Marian’s Witch was awesome, right on point!  They even inspired me to get dressed up this year, making the beau take me for a last-minute costume searching spree.  I came out simple but totally cool I think!

  Last year we had quite a few trick-or-treaters and so we went out and prepped for the onslaught by grabbing quite a bit of OUR favorite candies…you know, just in case we had any leftover. >>

And I’m glad we picked our favorites because we had ONE set of treaters.  We went all out this year too with the decorations, we were all dressed up, and we even had a scary spooky noises CD going.  It was totally camp but totally sweet!

We blame it on the fact that noone else on our block seemed to be home.  No lights on anywhere but our place.  I don’t blame them, I wouldn’t be walking down a scary dark neighborhood, not very inviting to say the least.

So around 8:30 we figured that we weren’t going to get anymore treaters, and instead of retreating into the house and vegging out around the televsion…we decided to go trick-or-treating ourselves.

Well, really we just angled it as our 83-year-old  Marian had never been T-o-T’ing before (which she hadn’t), and we drove around the neighborhood looking for the hotspots.

We managed to find two big streets that were super-decked out. I was uber jealous at how all the houses seemed to be working together to provide a one-stop area for the kids, and I can definitely see why all the kids would be flocking there.

Everyone was super surprised to see this 83-year-old woman running up their sidewalks, cackling and screaming after Dorothy/Carol and her little dog, too!

Even funnier was that right around the last wing of the candy tour, she started asking (in a witchy way of course), “Do you have any soft candies for an old hag??” lol  So fun!

We ended the night by coming home and watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” and imbibing in a drink or two.  It started out kind of slow but turned out to be the best Halloween I’ve had in a long long time.

Here’s a pic of me as The Boy Wonder, Robin, and a couple of my favorite photos of Marian as The Wicked Witch of the West (can you tell we had fun with her pictures! lol


Their 11th in 2011, What a Ride!

28 Friday Oct 2011

Posted by ste7888 in baseball, happenings

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

baseball, David Freese, St Louis Cardinals, Texas Rangers, World Series


Who would have thought the Cardinals would have come from where they were to being the World Series Champions.  Starting from a wild card spot that was supposed to have the Atlanta Braves’ name on it, surpassing them, and then coming from a 3-2 game deficit and stealing from the Rangers what was first thought to be theirs to win.  Well deserved guys!

And congratulations to David Freese for getting the MVP award.  His walk-off home-run in the 11th inning secured them the win they desperately needed in game 6.

I do want to give my respects to the Texas Rangers as they suffered a second defeat at the hands of another team.  Despite my feelings about CJ Wilson, they are a solid team and I respect a number of the players.

Michael Young, Josh Hamilton, Mike Napoli, and especially Nolan Ryan.  I grew up watching that man pitch and it was almost heartbreaking for me to see his expressions during those last innings.  I really think that if the pitching staff had not had their meltdown in game 6, they would be the champions right now.

So my hat is off to them as well.

Once again, congrats to the Cardinals and to a great series to watch!



Related articles
  • David Freese sets postseason RBI record in first inning of Game 7 (aol.sportingnews.com)

Image

Tractors, Pumpkins, and Piggies, oh What Fun!

16 Sunday Oct 2011

Tags

Farm

20111016-235441.jpg

The beau, ladies, and a number of others went to a local farm (well within 20 miles) and did the whole autumn Halloween thing by doing tractor rides, a corn maze, and seeing farm animals and stuff.

Quite fun and they added alot of variety throughout. Glad we decided to head out there.

Work early in the morn so heading to bed now, see ya!

Totally loved this sign as we came in!

20111017-000422.jpg

Posted by ste7888 | Filed under everyday, happenings

≈ 2 Comments

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Welcome to a little bit of me. I'm Ste, a gay boi from the Nashville area of TN, and I just want to use this as a means to talk about things that interest me or that stir just a bit of thought. I enjoy reality tv, writing, gaming, and Oakland A's baseball!. ^^ Thanks for visiting!

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