Author: gallopingcow

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Knives Out, and Beaks Bloody

Evidently Eaddie finally pulled an all-nighter to get her sleep schedule back in order. I didn’t realize that when she came out of her room in the morning, it was before she actually got any sleep. I had a coffee and started running more cleaning cycles on the washing machine since I still couldn’t get the pulsator out. Summer got Eaddie back up so she could go to another escape room with some friends, and we decided to try the new Old South for dinner when she got back.

More than anything, I missed the old Dixie Cafe. Old South is fine. The food is fine. The new location seems way better, and they’ve been busy, but the food was average at best. We had a minimal amount of service from our waitress, and all of my food was cold. I’ve got to remember never to get their prime rib, and to stick with chicken fried something with gravy. At least the girls liked their food alright.

Afterward, we went by the old house and I loaded up three boxes full of DVDs to bring home. We didn’t end up watching any of them, and instead we streamed Knives Out. I really enjoyed it, and the sequel is out on Netflix, so maybe I can convince the girls to watch it tomorrow.

Think of a community theatre production of a tax return.

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Out with the Wash

I woke up to some wet snow this morning. It covered the deck, but it still just sounded like soggy rain everywhere else. I rearranged the fridge a bit and had some V8 and then a hot chocolate. Eaddie beat me to the shower, and I didn’t want to risk being out of hot water, so I piddled around for a while.

Summer made it home early with some leftover pizza from work, so Eaddie and I ate some of that. Summer was gross from power washing the wash, so then she took a hot bath which pushed me back even further. I eventually got my hot shower and then played just a few minutes of Oxygen Not Included before my computer locked up. It didn’t seem to be running poorly, so I don’t know if it was thermals or something else, but I could never get it to run again after that one time.

Summer had done some laundry and got the washing machine full of dirt and sand, so I spent a while trying to take the pulsator disc out for cleaning. It was really stuck, and I was afraid of tearing it up any further, so I figured I’d go to bed and give it another try in the morning.

DC68-03172B-03

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Arm of Coats

I’ve slowly tried to start my mornings a little bit earlier as my three week break comes to an end. It helped that I woke up pretty hungry, so I made a big burrito to start the day. After a shower, I headed on out of the house and loaded up a big load of medium-sized things from the old house. Stuff that was already sort of packed, or at least wouldn’t benefit from being boxed up any further. I also cleaned out the majority of the coat closet, so I had a back seat full of backpacks and a front seat full of coats and jackets.

Eaddie was finally up when I made it back home, and I spent quite a while unloading, and cleaning or dusting some of the things up before I brought them inside. I felt good that just about everything had a home once it came inside, so there won’t be any unpacking for later.

It was cold out, but I wanted to get a little bit of time on the Onewheel. Among the things I brought home was my red vest, so I decided to Marty McFly my way to my parents’ house for a moment. I stopped in to see Dad and then turned right back around to get home just as Summer pulled up to the house from work. She was hungry for a salad, so I chopped up some of what we had left over from burritos and made us a couple with the last of the leftover ham.

Eaddie went out with some friends to an escape room, but wasn’t out too late. After we ate, I organized the house a bit more, and then Summer and I watched a few minutes of Jurassic Bark, which had me rolling with laughter. As funny as it was to start, it wasn’t something I could finish, so we followed that with an episode of The Orville. Afterward, Summer went to bed while I wrapped up my own chores.

That’s downright evil, Marlon Butterpaws!

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Tear a Faucet

I planned to leave the second faucet alone for the time being, but having the rubber washer in the aerator break apart kind of bumped that up in priority. Luckily I was still prepared with the extra faucet, and it was a relatively easy install apart from the lack of space to get under the sink. I unearthed, for probably the fifth time in our relationship, a ton of vitamins that Summer had been hoarding under the sink, and set them out for consumption. I won’t be able to test the sink for leaks until the silicone dries, but I feel reasonably confident about it.

After I finished the sink, I made some burritos for lunch, and then Eaddie left for Eli’s for most of the day. I had a long shower and moved some more things around the house before deciding to take a break and get back on the Onewheel. Dad took one of the stray cats to the vet, but I got to their house just as Mom got home from work. I rode around the block a few times and practiced carving into some turns a bit, and Dad got home shortly after that. It got cold fast, so I rode on home in time to get dinner started for Summer.

I cooked some rice and warmed up some steak and veggies. Then we watched a Nate Bargatze special on Netflix. Eaddie got home late, but Summer and I had already wound down for bed. It didn’t seem like I did a ton today, but I was beat.

You know it when you see it. You know it when it’s there. Like Michael Jackson, “Thriller.” Like Farrah Fawcett hair.

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Heavy Sleep

I brought my weighted blanket to the new house yesterday, but Summer was too hot under it and I ended up folding all of it over to my half of the bed. I could barely move all night, which seemed fine, but then I woke up with a pretty massive headache. I think that had more to do with my neck position though, since I’ve been having that issue in that bed.

I got around to making a burrito for lunch, cleaned the kitchen, took a shower, and had some coffee later than usual. It was really cold, and I wasn’t super motivated, but Eaddie eventually came out and we went to the old house to get some more stuff.

On the way back, we stopped at Superfast to get her an oil change. Then we unloaded everything at the new house and I spent a while cleaning and organizing things. Summer came home much later than expected, so I had her pick up some tacos on the way. We ate, and the girls went to their rooms while I stayed up a while longer before bed.

Room by room

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God of Stories

I got up this morning and set out to fix the bathroom sink for the umpteenth time. I think it finally held well enough to move on to the next project, but I figured I should give it a day before tearing anything else up. I had a shower, but dawdled before leaving the house. Eaddie wanted to go to Eli’s for the day, and I needed to go to the old house to move some more stuff.

It became frustratingly obvious how much little stuff I would have to let go to the trash. I’m sure I’ll have some things worthy of donating, but in the grand scheme of things, nobody else will ever want these little trinkets I’ve collected for decades. I got the media rack cleaned off and ready to load up, but didn’t feel comfortable getting it into the car by myself. Instead, I loaded up the last filing cabinet and a few soft and bulky things.

Dad was frying egg rolls, so I went to their house to eat before continuing home to unpack. Summer made it home really late, and called Eaddie home a little early so we could finish the last two episodes of Loki. Without knowing the comic history, I thought they did a great job wrapping up the character arc. It did seem like this season flew by incredibly fast though, and I wouldn’t have minded it being about twice as long.

Nah. No more evil. Mischief, now. That’s still got legs.

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Big Brutus

The weather was pretty mild today, so Summer considered taking Eaddie out for a walk when she got out of bed. I thought I’d join them, but we quickly switched gears when my parents decided they were up for going to see Wonka at UEC. Summer went to check which showtimes were in the better theater while I showered, and then we met my parents there. The trailers didn’t do much for any of us, but to our surprise, the movie was an absolute delight. It’s been a little while since we’ve seen a movie that made us feel anything. The original was so beloved, and the Deppificated remake had us nervous. Wonka was, by all accounts, a great movie.

We headed back home where Summer was working before I could even make it in the door. Eaddie jumped up and was ready to move some more stuff, so she and I went to the old house and picked up my bedside chests of drawers. They were really dusty, but we got them cleaned off and rearranged more of the spare bedroom so she could fit things into her room. The desk won’t be easy, but we’ll figure it out.

As we got settled in after that bit of cleaning, we realized that we hadn’t had a meal all day. Eaddie wanted Little Caesars, so I ordered and then spent about 45 minutes in the store listening to a bunch of dimwitted employees as they continually messed up orders, including forgetting to make half of mine. Every time I go into that store and have to either watch a slow-motion train wreck with another customer or deal with some minor catastrophe with my own food, I think to myself how wonderful it might be to open up my own competing pizzeria called Big Brutus. It can’t be that hard.

I made it home and we ate one cold pizza, and one more fresh, along with a free order of Crazy Bread that I got for waiting so patiently while the manager failed to call out that my order was complete. Then we watched two episodes of Loki, which left us with the most thrilling of cliffhangers. Episode four was a perfect lead up to midnight, but we beat the clock by about 12 minutes.

Et tu

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Aquabland and the Lost Blockbuster

Summer woke up early and took a work call in bed this morning, which disrupted my short sleep period before I got up to get ready for a trip to Greenbrier with her. She had to terminate someone, and we decided to go out for lunch and watch the new Aquaman movie. As we passed Atkins on Full Self Driving, I continued to get false “pay attention” warnings that never actually disengaged FSD, but still ultimately led to me being banned for a week. The new software seems awful, and I hate it. I’d had the warnings before, but never actually had the system stop on me, much less ban me for any length of time. This seems like meddling policymakers, and I wonder if any other auto manufacturers are affected.

I dropped Summer off at the wash and then drove up the road to McDonald’s to wait it out. I was super hungry, and she said she might be a bit over an hour, so I got a Happy Meal and a coffee to pass the time. She ended up being reasonably quick about it, so I picked her up and we headed back to Conway to go to Golden Corral. It wasn’t a great experience, primarily due to a lack of service, but we ate and got back to the Cinemark in plenty of time for the movie.

Summer liked it, but I found it to be much too goofy, and overall very forgettable. It felt kind of like quickly skipping forward through a super long story, which left the lesser details out, but would have helped me care about any of the characters at all. In the end, I guess we’ll just have to look forward to the universe reboot.

The drive home was quick and annoying as I had to drive myself. Eaddie had gone out, and Summer went straight to bed, so I tried to wind down early myself to catch up on sleep.

I am memes.

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Pain in the Drain

I made myself get up earlier this morning and made some coffee before finally crawling back under the bathroom sink. I’ve been back and forth on whether I wanted to replace or swap faucets, or buy a whole new matching set. I figured the first thing I’d have to do is take the existing one out, which was easy enough even with the silicone we used last time. I was concerned about one of the connection points in the S-trap though, so I ended up taking Dad to Leonard’s to see if we needed a rubber gasket of some kind.

I wasn’t really satisfied with the parts we found there, so we went back to the house to look at what we had, and decided against the extra gasket. We took the top of the drain assembly back to Leonard’s to replace only that part, but that would have been a third the cost of a whole new faucet and drain kit, so I decided against that as well. The spare faucet I’d purchased long ago would have to do for the moment. We ran by the old house to get a cat carrier for Dad, and then I dropped him off at his house.

We considered going to a movie with my parents in the evening, so I ran by UEC to see what time slot had Wonka in the better theater. Then I took a break to eat some leftovers, and Dad texted when he remembered that he had a couple spare pop-up drain assemblies that he wasn’t going to use. He brought one over, and the installation was a piece of cake. I was pretty sure I still had a very tiny leak due to a poorly cut angle in the sink, but I figured I could tighten that up later.

Summer got home with a little time to spare before the movie, but Mom decided she didn’t want to go. Eaddie had been coloring in front of the TV for most of the afternoon, but then spent the early evening rearranging her room. She and I never got to our plans to move things, so she wanted to get out of the house for a little bit. I needed a couple things from Harbor Freight anyway, so we took her car to PDQ to air up the tires a bit and then headed across town.

We picked up a magnetic paper towel holder and power strip for the coffee bar, and then sat in the parking lot for a little bit while we decided what to do next. We thought we witnessed a robbery when a couple cars pulled up and a group of guys in hoodies ran in and out of the store super fast, but other people seemed to be coming out of the store unsuspiciously. Eaddie was a little bit hungry, but we couldn’t decide what to get. As we started driving toward home, I suggested the Krispy Krunchy Chicken inside of Walmart, and got excited. She even mentioned walking around a bit, but as we walked up to the counter to order some food, the employee said they were closing down and would sell us everything they had left in the case at a discount. We ended up getting a mix of tenders, thighs, and some mac and cheese for half price, which was awesome.

We headed straight home and ate, and then Summer wanted to watch an episode of Loki. The second episode of the new season had me super confused by the end, so after the girls left I had to scrub back through the first episode and then parts of the second one again. The more I thought about it, the less sense the whole plot made. If killing He Who Remains was all it took to cause the timeline to branch, then were the TVA agents actually doing anything at all? Why, after hundreds of years of pruning individual timelines, were the TVA agents suddenly so distraught when a group of rogue agents pruned a bunch of branching timelines? Didn’t that negate the overloaded Temporal Loom?

Questions unanswered, Summer went to bed and Eaddie continued rearranging her room. I rearranged the coffee bar again and then helped Eaddie for a bit, and then we were off to sleep.

Krunchy Khicken?

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Tanked

I slept pretty late again today, and the kids still had me beat. I had a shower before I ever made it to the kitchen for some cold ham on a roll, rather than making a big breakfast for the kids. Eaddie got up and wanted to get some work done, so we moved Summer’s old dining table out to the outhouse, and I spent a little time fixing the south gate after someone had screwed it together when we bought the house.

Noah was content to spend the entire day on the couch, so it was tough to get him motivated to do anything. Summer came home from work early, but had to continue working from home, so the kids and I took a couple vehicles to the old house to load up some more stuff.

We got the 55-gallon tank and stand, a bunch of pillows, and another desk out of the spare room and to the new house safely. The tank really does fit nicely in the entryway, and we’re lucky that it’s actually a main thoroughfare that will be seen daily. I hate to put a bunch of effort into a tank that won’t be seen.

Summer was watching The Guardians of the Galaxy while she worked, but as soon as that was over, everyone wanted to go to La Huerta for dinner. I took them, a little begrudgingly because I was a bit burned out after just making five pounds of taco meat at home. Then Eaddie suggested we could walk around Walmart, so that was exciting. We picked up a few more Christmas clearance things and headed home.

Noah left shortly after that, and I finished up some laundry. Eaddie stayed up fairly late and seemed like she might like to do something, but then gave up and went to bed herself. I stayed up a little later than I wanted, but tried not to waste too many waking hours.

At what point do household expectations become micromanagement for guests?