Category: Uncategorised

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Cleanup Checkup

The kids all made it to school and work this morning, which let Summer and me sleep in a bit. Summer left to shop for an ugly sweater while I cleaned up at home. Then we went to her follow-up appointment at the clinic. The doctor and nurse went on about how much tissue they serrated-ice-cream-scooped out of her, but it was all benign, so hopefully the procedure will have the desired result.

It was a quick appointment, and we were hungry, so our next stop was New China for lunch. I didn’t have a single grain of rice, and it made me feel weird about the visit, but I also didn’t feel super stuffed when we left. We headed back home and lounged around for a while before getting back up to clean up outside. I was surprised I still had hot coals in the fire pit, but I guess we did burn a lot of wood, so there was a lot of ash to insulate them.

When we finished outside, Summer went home to do some cleaning of her own while I filed paperwork inside. Then she and Eaddie came back over to get me for Autumn’s band concert in the evening. We got there early because Autumn did a poor job of informing us of the event, so we caught the last middle school band before the high school started.

Surprisingly, some of the middle school sounded better than the worst junior high band from the other day. The high school only had two bands, which were fine. The symphonic band seemed to be cheating with the pieces they had for their trip to Carnegie Hall. There were constantly so many notes that they masked any possible mistakes throughout the performance.

Eaddie went with Autumn to a group IHOP meet after the concert, so Summer dropped me off and I wound down for the day by testing my Pixel Buds and catching up on normal computery stuff that I do every day.

Three down, half to go.

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Fire Roasted Egg Rolls

We didn’t sleep too late today, because Summer had a video call for work and Mollie texted with some computer trouble as she was trying to work from home. I got dressed and went to her house to try and help, but I kept having trouble getting the laptop to connect to her home network. I finally just took the laptop to the shop to let it talk on our network for a bit, and then took a hotspot back to her so she wouldn’t have to worry about it connecting to her network.

When I got home, I started cleaning house and washing dishes. It looked a lot better by the time I was finished, and then I took a shower while I waited for Summer to show up. She baked a delicious chocolate cake for Suzanne’s birthday. When she got there, we went to Walmart for a few last minute things, and then went to her house to pick up the cake.

Once back home, I started the fire pit and we waited for Suzanne and Trent to show up. Noah came over pretty early, and the girls showed up once they finished packing at home. It was a fun night by the fire. Bác Vân and Doug were making fresh egg rolls, so she had me take a bunch to everyone at the house. They seemed a bit undercooked, so I crisped a couple of them up over the fire and they turned out great.

Autumn went to bed predictably early, and probably questionably clean. I think at this point I just always assume she hasn’t showered when we’ve told her to. Noah and Eaddie started watching House tonight, and stayed up a bit later, but went to sleep once Suzanne and Trent left, and Summer and I went to bed.

Easy to forget that it’s a school night.

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Burn it Down

Summer and I woke up super early, but with just enough time to get dressed and drive to the hospital. Her ablation wouldn’t actually take place for a couple hours, but we had to be there at six to start her on the medication before surgery. I waited patiently in the dark, playing on my phone. It could have been less comfortable, but they weren’t great digs.

My right Pixel Bud died while the left was still around 70%, and I’ve only got a few days of warranty left. That will require some testing, like right now. We finally left the hospital around 11 and went to Rose Drug to pick up her prescription. Then we stopped by KFC to pick up lunch on the way back home.

Summer pretty much slept the rest of the day, so I played a lot of Don’t Starve. I eventually took a shower, and then she did the same so we could go to Eaddie’s Christmas concert. We stopped by KFC on the way to pick up the fries they forgot to give me with our lunch order. Then we went to my house for a few minutes before the concert.

I walked around the house to inspect for the cause of the crashing sound on my security camera overnight, but couldn’t find anything. Then we headed to the Performing Arts Center for the concert. Noah surprised us with his presence, and we sat through one terrible performance, one that should have been the worst of the night, and then Eaddie’s band, which was still worse than I anticipated.

I think the problem is that being around Eaddie, my expectations have been misguided. I assume everyone is as good as her, considering that she’s in the best of three different bands. That’s simply not the case. Even the smallest, best band that she is in, is full of people that can’t keep time or hit notes. Hopefully they beat that out of them in high school, but I think I’m more looking forward to the college years.

After the concert, Noah was going to come stay the night. He didn’t make it before everyone was off to bed though. Even I couldn’t stay up any longer after such an early morning.

That’s a helluva way to celebrate Pearl Harbor Day.

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Missing

Gary had me work on building something out for HR this morning, but we were both missing pieces. Evidently there was an email I needed that never got forwarded to me. An email in to Powerschool got me on the right track after lunch.

I met Brandie at La Huerta for lunch to catch up, since we hadn’t done so in over a year. I tried to get the inside scoop on a possible job that Brody had mentioned, but she knew nothing.

The afternoon was pretty quiet, though I did get three work orders out of the blue from Oakland. Two of them were simple restarts, and the third was the teacher asking for software that was already installed. They’re really phoning it in this close to the holiday.

After work, I made Greg show me his crow call, which was startlingly accurate. If I hadn’t watch him make the sound, I would have sworn it was a real crow.

I went home to eat and get some things ready, and then headed up to Summer’s for the evening. The girls were both busy with homework, so I just started a new map in Don’t Starve until everyone went off to bed. Summer’s surgery is super early in the morning, so it’s going to be another short night of sleep.

Say pal, you don’t look so good. You better find something to eat before night comes!

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Tropical Christmas Cookies

I got around this morning and went to Walmart and to get gas on my way to Summer’s. She baked lemon cookies for the kids to decorate when Noah got out of work. Eaddie was still in bed, so I was more or less left to my own devices for most of the day. When Autumn left the TV, I played some more Don’t Starve, which has been fun playing a little more casually on the couch.

Summer made a big pot of chicken alfredo, and we ate when Noah arrived. Then they decorated the tree while Summer made colored icing. It didn’t seem like anyone was really in the mood to do any of that stuff this early, especially with highs in the mid 70s this past week. Our weekends are pretty booked up until Christmas though, so we made do.

When Noah left, Eaddie went to finish up homework while Autumn did chores. I played my game some more, but ultimately died. C’est la vie. I needed to warm back up to the mechanics anyway.

You don’t keep it this warm in here even during the summer!

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Streamer

Summer and Autumn had a Quiz Bowl tournament at the high school today. I couldn’t get back to sleep after they left, so I just got up and picked at some leftovers for breakfast. Then I tinkered around some more with the Steam Link, which worked really well. Some of the controller support still felt pretty unintuitive, but overall it was a really good experience. I played Don’t Starve on it for quite a while.

Eventually I had to get out and get things done, so I headed home to spend some time there for the first time in what felt like forever. Bác Vân had called last night with TV remote trouble, so I went next door and re-paired the remotes to her cable boxes. After a little while, I started going through laundry and washed a whole bunch of shirts.

I pretty much spent the rest of my down time on YouTube all night, watching videos on music theory, science, and anything else the algorithm thought I would be interested in watching.

Split the load.

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At Leased We Know

I had to ride the Grom to work today in order to complete the set. I was almost out of gas though, so I stopped at Casey’s on the way in. When I got to work, we had a relatively relaxed meeting before splitting off. We didn’t have many projects, but they thought we might have some stuff to set up or move upstairs. The room was still empty though, so it was back to my office.

I helped some others as they came through, and hung the Christmas lights that Ben left me on his way out. Kyle came back to my office around lunch time, and as we often do, we suggested Ridgewood Brothers. Everyone agreed on account of the weather, though we still brought the food back to the shop to eat. The garlic beef sausage that Gary let me have was super garlicy.

After we ate, I helped Zach scan through some old Chromebooks to try and find some we had lost. We were pretty spot on with what we expected from the summer, but evidently Dell was just going to charge us into perpetuity instead of sending a final bill for the cost of buying out any devices we didn’t return.

The last part of the afternoon was pretty slow, but we walked out a couple minutes early. I went to Casey’s for some free SweeTARTS, then went home until Autumn called me for a ride. We stopped by Oakland to get Eaddie, then went to their house for the evening.

Eaddie went with her grandmother for the night, and Autumn wanted to stay home instead of go to my house, so the girls went down for an early bedtime while I stayed up and pondered homeownership.

Very poor value.

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Ye Olde Parade

I took the R1 to work today, and it was pretty frosty on the way in, but it was very close to perfect in the afternoon. I got distracted helping others in the morning until lunch time. Brody has been wanting to go to Nonna Bella’s for a while, so five of us went there and discovered that they have pretty good lunch specials. When we finished there, I went by Oakland and plugged a bunch of things back into a surge protector. It’s the silly things that really keep me going.

On the subject of silly things, I got TWO compliments on my mass emails today after sending out the meeting minutes in medieval English. It wasn’t a long email, which made it that much better that people cared enough to notice and write back.

We left work early so we could get out of the way of the parade. I went by Casey’s to try and score a free water, but they were out. From there, I went home to get dinner ready for the girls. Summer brought them over before they had to be back to school, and we had leftover burgers and hot dogs. Then she took Eaddie to the junior high while I took Autumn to the high school.

We met back up at Big Poppa’s since there was still room to park for the parade. I brought a couple camp chairs, and we sat at the edge of the road to talk until they officially closed the side street. Then we moved our chairs up into the street to watch the parade.

The parade itself was really spread out, and we were just on the tail end of where the bands stopped playing. We didn’t even hear them play further down the road, so we didn’t get to see either of the girls do anything cool. We ended up leaving early, and I went home to wait for Autumn to finish at the high school.

When we finally got up to Summer’s, she was already in bed. I stayed up late to help Eaddie with her math homework. I could really relate to how frustrated she was getting, but at least it was geometry, which is a subject I could really visualize.

On your guard, knave!

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Hot Doggin

After two days of taking Eaddie to school, I was on my own this morning and didn’t get in until five minutes after eight. I wanted to take a bike to work since the high was a little over 70, and I guess eenie-miney-mo took a little longer than it should have. I ended up on the Shadow, behind someone that clearly was not in a rush to get anywhere.

I had a CPPC meeting in the morning, which was super short. We went over some duplicate policies and laughed at how poorly they had all been organized over the years. It’s an embarrassment for all those that came before, really. It’s basically taking a full time employee to fix it all.

I didn’t get into much else, partially because I kept working on the meeting minutes, and partially because I just couldn’t focus on anything. I rode to Brangus for lunch with Thomas, Gary, and Brody. Then the afternoon was pretty quiet as well. I had to run by Oakland to turn a computer off and back on again, but otherwise I didn’t accomplish much.

After work, I went home for a little bit and had a leftover kielbasa on a hot dog bun for dinner. I thought I was doing well by going relatively light in quantity, but it left me hurting a bit later in the evening. Eventually I had to get out to pick Autumn up from a Quiz Bowl trip, so I stopped by Casey’s first for a free drink, then took pictures of the tacky lights on the front of the Gardner building.

I had to wait in the parking lot for Autumn because they were later than I was expecting. Then we stopped by Walgreens to pick up an order, and finally headed up to their house. Eaddie was stuck doing homework in her room all night, so I laid with Summer for a little bit before finishing up my own routine and going to bed.

Nothing noble about these gases.

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Beautiful Day to Waste

I narrowly got Eaddie to school this morning and made it in to work. I thought it was going to be closer than it was, but just like winning – whether you’re early by one minute or one hour, early’s early.

It was another quiet day downstairs. I went to Oakland before lunch again and took care of a few new things. I did my best to kill the time just because there wasn’t much going on. Gary said we were meeting Dale at Taco John’s for lunch, but Brody asked me to pick him up after dropping his truck off at a tint shop. I didn’t realize he was going to one halfway to Dardanelle.

We had to spread out at Taco John’s, so Josh and Greg sat behind us. Dale seemed to be doing well. The Marine talk between him and Brody must have been similar to what they hear when we talk nerdy. I was surprised that Thomas didn’t show up, but he’s sporadic at best anyway.

The afternoon was absolutely beautiful outside, and I was tempted to leave. Ben wouldn’t have cared if I took a half sick day, but I haven’t quite figured out the new regime yet. I just stayed in, quiet and bored.

After work, Eaddie was having fun on the Oakland playground, so I left her there and went home to change. When she was ready to come home, I brought her back to eat, and then I took both girls home for the night. Summer was back from Little Rock, and we helped Eaddie with some math homework and then had pie before bed.

What the buck?