Category: Uncategorised

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That’s a Big “If”

I sprung a leak on a blood blister this morning that I thought would never quit bleeding out, so I was really late getting in to work. I started the day at Oakland to take care of some work orders that had been accumulating, and then rode on in to the office. It was pretty quiet since I spent most of the morning away from my office and nobody had a chance yet to come to me with anything.

I rode to Taco John’s to meet the others for lunch, and had too many potatoes. I always think a medium isn’t enough, but then feel too full with a large. Since I rode alone, I stopped back by Oakland on the way back to the office and found that I didn’t have the cable I needed to finish something. I got sidetracked by the PowerShell Istation stuff before I made it back, but I had a clever thought for an if statement that ended up turning a dozen lines of code into just a couple.

I left even later than I started because I wanted to make sure Istation would be fully functional for the next day. Then I ran home to change before heading straight up to Summer’s for dinner. She had forgotten the kids had marching band practice until pretty late, so instead of making her pasta, we went to Mulan’s for dinner.

After we ate, I took her to my house to help me clean up the packaging from my new grill so I could once again move off of the beaten path in my garage. I’ve got so much work to do before I can even begin to look at installing a charging solution, and as usual I’m having trouble deciding where to start.

We made it back to the house just before the girls got home, and then it was a quiet night until bedtime. My head cold finally developed into a cough primarily from a tickled throat, so I’ve only got about a month left of feeling like this.

Sniiiiiiiiiffffffff, HACK!

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Home Cooked

It’s getting colder now, and it’s fully dark when I wake up. My CPAP humidifier has been gurgling overnight, and it doesn’t help me sleep any better while I’m sick. I still managed to make it out the door a couple minutes early today, and got a bit of a chill on the way in on the Shadow. My whole day carried on relatively busily between various phone calls and urgent cries for help.

I met Summer at Superfast for lunch, and we ate the bánh mì that Mom made us yesterday. She was dressed up to work in the office there, so we just hung out in the office while we ate. Then I went back to work and had to beckon Josh to come to the office to eat the apple pie that Tammy made for his birthday.

The afternoon was oddly both busy and quiet. There wasn’t much activity in person, but I got several calls from Brody the rest of the day. I figured that Eaddie and I would go to my parents’ house for eggplant soup, but she wouldn’t respond to my text. She finally called when I got home and said she forgot about her private lesson, but by then she was done. Autumn dropped her off at my house and then carried on toward home. Summer didn’t want to go, so it was just the two of us.

Eaddie was thinking she didn’t like the eggplant soup or the tofu so much, but once we got there, she remembered that she actually loved all of it, and she kept going on about how much she liked soups. Dad was fasting, and Mom got home from work a bit late and didn’t eat until after we were done and gone.

On the way to the house, I took Eaddie through Sonic for a churro shake, and it was pretty awesome. It took them about five minutes to fry the churro, and they brought food out to two cars behind us while we waited. Back at the house, Summer was finishing up some work stuff, and then it was a pretty quick night to bed for everyone. I think it just felt a lot later than it really was, but I was exhausted from all the coughing anyway.

Whoop, whoop….

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Pre-Season

I tried not to sleep in too late today, and got up to some leftovers while Summer made herself breakfast. She still had a bunch of cleaning she wanted to do around the house, so I eventually went home to do some work myself. I originally planned to start my new Gravity grill so I could season it while I started to clean out the garage, but ended up fighting to get the thing connected to Wi-Fi for over an hour. I ended up searching for anyone else that had similar trouble, and found a Reddit thread where someone had to contact support to learn that the SSID and password combined had to be fewer than 15 characters for it to work. Otherwise, it would stall out exactly like I was experiencing for an hour and a half.

I spun up a guest SSID with a shorter password and got the grill connected just before I finished the heating process. Then I thought I shut everything down before going to my parents’ house to get a bánh mì. Mom was asleep while Dad was in Fort Smith, but she got up and made sandwiches for me, another couple to take for Summer and myself, and finally one for herself as I was leaving.

When I got back home, I could hear the fan in my grill going full-blast, because apparently I didn’t press the power button for long enough. It was trying to get the temperature up to 400º, even though I had blocked off the air and heat intakes. I oiled up all the parts I could get to and switched the grill grates out for the griddle top, but didn’t get it started again because I had to meet Summer at Walmart.

We wandered around inefficiently, picking up stuff for Justin’s baby shower, then some brats for dinner. We ended with an annoying lap through clearance as other people kept crowding in around us. The girls were already home, so I started up the grill as soon as we got there.

Dinner was quick and simple. Eaddie had finished up mowing her part of the lawn and had me help her with some science homework. Autumn spent all night in her room. Summer went to bed pretty early, and I wound down as quickly as I could.

Bringing the inconvenience and frustration of the modern world to the centuries-old tradition of smoking food over an open fire!

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Mow, Mow, Mow to Boat

I didn’t sleep very well or for very long last night. The girls were supposed to get up early to mow so they could go to their father’s for the weekend, but we beat them out of bed. It took some prying, and neither one was super motivated. Eaddie finally went out to start mowing, but complained that she wanted to go out on the boat with her friends. Summer was kind of in and out and up in her feelings about it, but tried to get Autumn motivated to do some cleaning up herself.

Eventually I got it through to the kids that they didn’t meet our expectations, and that they had to get it done and work together if they wanted to do anything else for the weekend. Autumn eventually started mowing while Eaddie took a break to go out with her friends. Summer went to the gym and I dropped Eaddie off. On the way back, I got some more gas for the mower, then stopped by to see Grant and Robert. They didn’t have any pork pops that I wanted to try, so I got some brisket and headed back to the house.

Autumn had taken a pretty lengthy break while I was gone, but started up again shortly after I got back. Summer got back from her workout, and by that time I figured we didn’t have long before we could go to my house and do some cleaning up there. I didn’t realize she had a bunch more stuff she wanted to get done, so I ended up burning all afternoon and evening doing nothing more than playing Into the Breach.

Eventually Autumn left to get Eaddie and head to Clarksville. Summer wasted the rest of the evening in front of the TV. I ate some leftovers myself after refusing to get some takeout for her. I cleaned a whole bunch of stuff out of the refrigerator, and I’ll clean out some more for breakfast in the morning before going home.

Better just go it alone.

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S’putum Up!

Last night was a really rough night for my head cold, and marked the real transition into my chest. I managed to deal with it alright at work through a bunch of hot coffee and tea. We had a brief meeting this morning with the group, and then I was surprised with a meeting of my own with Thomas and Gary to discuss options for fixing Istation. We kind of just got more of what we already knew, but I guess that was what we got for not having a resolution on our own yet.

I picked at a few various other things throughout the morning, but then skipped Fat Daddy’s with the group. I went up to Summer’s instead, and just ate half of my leftover tuna sandwich from Subway in the peace and quiet. The afternoon didn’t have any surprises, and we wrapped up the week pretty quietly.

Summer’s been talking about wanting to see the Eagles, so I picked up a couple tickets and planned a weekend for that when I got home. She wanted to go to the football game to see the girls perform and see Autumn get her quiz bowl state championship ring. I ran trough McDonald’s and Wendy’s for some quick dinner before meeting her at halftime. Then I took the Shadow back home before heading up to her place for the night.

I stopped by Taco Bell for her on the way, and was in the drive-through for about 20 minutes. I was sure she wasn’t going to get any edible food out of it, but she said it was good. The girls got home super late, so Summer was already in bed. I doped up on amphetamines and sat up with Eaddie for a bit until she got up to take a shower. Then it was off to bed.

There’s plenty of room at the Wyndham Riverfront!

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Fresh Ain’t Cheap

I felt a bit bloated all day since I didn’t follow my usual routine. Fortunately it never got any worse than that, aside from my head cold working into my chest. There were a few people out for the day, so it was really quiet in the shop. I just slowly chipped away at the pile of old work orders I had, and tried to avoid accumulating new ones.

Zach suggested Subway for lunch, so the two of us drove over and met Gary and Greg there. I placed my order online and didn’t actually get it until after they were almost done eating their own food, but that was fine because I paid less with a BOGO sandwich deal.

The afternoon was quiet as well. I tried to spend a little time at Oakland, but got called away abruptly when a family came up to the virtual academy office with hotspot trouble. I spent some time working on that and ended up swapping the kid’s laptop, and then finished the day in the basement.

When I got home, I found the missing home for the extra screw we had last night. It went to a corner of one of the heat shields on the side of the grill. Unfortunately the rotisserie attachment I bought was missing a couple parts, so I’ll have to see what I can do about that. I hung out at home for a little longer, then went up to Summer’s for the evening. I helped Eaddie with like one math problem, and then everyone was quickly off to bed.

Can’t wait for the preseason!

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Cog no sEnce

As soon as I walked into my office this morning, I got called over to Oakland, because they didn’t test the sound system in the room they wanted to use before they invited a guest speaker. I took care of that and a couple other things quickly, and then went back to the shop to dig into my Cognos reports. That’s all I did for the rest of the day.

Gary took Zach, Thomas, and me to Zaxby’s for lunch, where we met Brody and then had a surprise visit from Wesley. He told us that Cindy planned to retire at the end of the month, which was a bit of a surprise to me at least.

The afternoon was quiet and slow. Dad wanted to borrow my electric mower when his wouldn’t work. Then Eaddie wanted me to get her after school, but decided to walk to the house instead. When I got home after work, she wanted to go home immediately, so I dropped her off and then came back home where Dad had beaten me to return the mower.

I was chomping at the bit to get my new grill assembled and out of the way, so Dad helped me with that. It took us quite a bit longer than I originally expected, and we were surrounded by a cloud of mosquitos the entire time, but it felt good to have that done. We came up with an extra screw somehow though, so I’ll have to go back over the instructions later to make sure we didn’t miss anything. I’m super excited to cook on it though.

I was completely drenched in sweat by the end of that, so I decided to take a shower and then ran a hot straightening brush through my hair really slowly to try and burn off anything that might have taken up residence up there. I was super sore and exhausted after all the bending around the grill, so I doped up and wrapped up my evening as quickly as I could.

It’s teppanyaki time!

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Nit Picky

I felt a little off for most of the day, like another anxiety attack was right around the corner. Fortunately it never happened, because I wouldn’t have had time for it anyway. I didn’t really do anything remarkable throughout the day, but I felt super busy just keeping up. I was super hungry when lunch came around, and was actually pretty excited to learn that it was already Taco Tuesday. I think I paid too much for the pico on my tacos though.

After lunch, I ended up at Oakland a couple of times because I didn’t have everything I needed the first time around. I’ll end up having to run a video cable through the ceiling if I can’t get a longer video cable later. I spent the end of my day in the queue waiting to talk to someone about an Istation issue, and then trying to negotiate an attendance report out of Cognos. I kind of enjoy working with Cognos, but it would sure make me feel a lot better if I could find some better documentation on the variables the state uses.

Eaddie and Summer had hair appointments after work, but Summer had to take care of something else and asked me to get Eaddie. I ran home to change and then got Eaddie there just as Lelan was finishing up with her last client. I think she just stayed late to take care of them, because nobody else was even in the salon. Eaddie’s trim ended up getting cut a little short, and then I had to take her to band practice while Summer got hers started. I went back up to the salon for a little bit, but then went to my parents’ house for some pork chops for dinner.

I picked Eaddie up after band, and then we headed home to do some laundry and shampooing. It wasn’t an early night to bed, but it sure felt like it.

What’s bugging you?

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Anxious to Get Home

We woke up for breakfast this morning, and Eaddie didn’t want to go downstairs. They mixed it up with some little egg rounds folded around some cheese like a cheap omelet. The bacon was super thin and mostly flavorless. Once we ate and got everyone cleaned and packed up, we checked out and headed to the Tulsa Aquarium for the day. I hated that we didn’t get to visit the actual aquarium stores that were near our hotel, but the girls really liked the aquarium.

After the aquarium, we went down the block to get some lunch at the Waterfront Grill. Summer and Eaddie really wanted seafood after looking at all the aquatic creatures, and that place was not only close, but also had things like burgers and chicken strips for the boring kid. I had a fish sandwich that was pretty awesome, and relatively cheap, though I wished it had a bit more sauce.

As soon as we finished eating, we headed on home through a surprising amount of countryside that wasn’t on the interstate. I had a really bad anxiety attack on the way to get some gas, and that lasted for a surprisingly long time. We stopped again in Clarksville to fill up, just because the gas was so cheap. We got home and unloaded, and the girls all went off to their rooms.

I wanted to go home to unpack, but still felt pretty bad with a head cold that worked its way into my chest. I had another anxiety attack that gave me really bad tunnel vision, and I ultimately decided to stay the night and just deal with unpacking in the morning. I doped up with some cold medicine and Fireball, and it was a really early night to bed.

Tingle Vision!

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Let’s Go to the Mall

We got up this morning and went down for breakfast. It was small, but adequate. Eaddie and I came back upstairs to clean up while Summer and Autumn hung out downstairs for a while. When everyone was finally ready to leave, we went to All Star Sports Complex for some mini golf. It got pretty hot in the sun, so after that, I took the girls to Iguana Island Treats for some pineapple whip and snow cones.

From there, we went back toward the hotel and stopped at the Woodland Hills Mall. I was absolutely astounded at how many people were there. It was just like Summer and I remembered from our youth. I don’t think we saw a single empty store, and there were people shopping absolutely everywhere. I was surprised at how much fun Autumn and Eaddie actually had. I figured they would be over it pretty quickly.

By the time we left, the girls started to get a little hungry. We went to the room to clean up a bit, and then went to HuHot Mongolian Grill. It was just like Genghis Grill, which we’ve visited in Little Rock, except that it was all-you-can-eat. The guys running around the circular grill were tearing it up, and the food was great.

After stuffing ourselves, I took us to the Super Target just to see what it was like. We picked up a few things and headed back to the hotel. Eaddie talked Summer into picking up some ice cream, but instead of a small box, they got a box of eight KitKat brand cones. Eaddie ended up eating three and I ate two to try and avoid melting, because our refrigerator didn’t actually have a freezer section.

I doped up on some meds because my sinuses were getting the best of me, and then it was off to bed relatively early.

BANG THAT GONG!