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If It Fits, It Ships

I got to kind of take the lead again today with the lease return, and we ended up getting the whole thing out the door much earlier than anyone else expected. I like to think I had a big part in driving that, especially near the end. It took us three trips to The UPS Store today, but I even managed to assemble a packing slip with a 1:1 match for serial number replacements.

Ryan was in town to visit, and Thomas, Gary, Greg, and I went to Brangus for lunch with him. I filled up on peanuts and then only ate half of my potato, so I took the rest home for dinner. The afternoon was pretty quiet, though my office got pretty popular for a little while.

I also got my contract for next year, but it was wrong again. They had me on the Tech 1 pay scale, so I sent it back for review. I wrapped up for the day and headed home for the evening. I didn’t feel super, and was pretty tired after the day at work. I poked around the house and cleaned up a little bit, and then it was off to bed on time.

Trip down Memory Road

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Insanity

The shop was quiet when I got to work today. Zach had other things to do, so I spent the morning running around with Greg. I had him take me to The UPS Store to pick up our boxes, and then we went to the middle school to give them to Josh. Jacob was there helping him sort devices, and we walked out with several boxes of good devices to ship. From there, we went back to the shop to load up some more, and took them all to The UPS Store.

When we finished with that running around, we continued to check devices in the graveyard for any that we could ship back. Jacob came out to help for a bit until lunch, when the three of us and Thomas went to Slim Chickens. My wrap took a while to come out because the fries were fresh, and they were delicious because of it.

When we got back, Greg and I went to Oakland to check on an intercom issue, and then went to look at the new jumbotron at the high school. They angled it poorly, so it’s basically impossible to see from the visitors side. I’d love to see who at Ace Signs is connected to someone in the district, because we’ve literally never been happy with anything they’ve ever done for us.

I was a little scattered for the remainder of the afternoon. Thomas came back for a minute just to hide, and I spent some time working on a few different things for others. I ended the day mostly in spreadsheets.

Summer called to let me know that she had let Autumn go into the high school by herself to drop something off, and of course Autumn had to show off the minor bruising she had after last night’s showdown. DHS called while they were all at the gym, so Summer took her right over to close out the case again. Another day; nothing learned.

I got roped into picking up Eaddie and Zane from the arcade and brought them up to Summer’s for dinner. I hadn’t really eaten much, but still felt full. I wanted to make Autumn skip a meal, but that didn’t happen. We just sat there, and I ate after everyone was done.

Eaddie had a meeting at the junior high about a band trip to Hawaii. It felt like I was in a timeshare meeting, and very little useful information was provided until we got the final handout at the end of the meeting. At $3k per person in a room of four, I’m not sure how bad of a deal it is. They’re certainly not making up for it in meals, and most of the excursions were an extra fee on top of that. As we left, Autumn was acting like she would be with us for some goddamn reason.

We dropped Zane off at home, and then I took the girls home. As I started to leave, Summer wanted to talk, so I stood there a while with her before heading home. There, I fought with a Fi rep about a promotion I’m not receiving for a SIM card that I purchased with real money. It seems like disappointment is all I know in nearly every aspect right now.

This is not the grail you’re looking for.

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uBreakiFix

After last night’s back and forth, I still wasn’t really ready for what today would bring. Eaddie was supposed to go out on her bicycle, but evidently went out with Autumn and their grandparents for most of the day instead. I took the Shadow to work since it was a lot cooler out. Fortunately I never saw any rain, though the forecast was pretty wishy-washy about it anyway.

When I first got settled in, I didn’t think I had much to do, but that changed quickly. The morning flew by as I prepared for the lease return for the big project of the day. Lunch time even snuck up on me, and I went to La Huerta with the holy trinity.

After lunch, we had to go back through all of our lease returns and check for damage and power, and then scan them one last time onto a return list to take to The UPS Store. We sent Brody and Kyle to deliver our first truckload, and they failed to bring the boxes back to us as I explicitly instructed. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because Brody also took an unscanned box of laptops along with the rest, so we ended up having to go back to The UPS Store to hunt those down.

At the end of the day, I noticed Autumn had looked up information on fixing a phone, so I had a suspicion that a friend had given her an old one to use. I rode home and then called Summer to discuss options. She went home to await her parents, who were bringing the girls back home. Autumn wanted to stay with them while Summer took Eaddie to the gym.

Summer was supposed to come by my house first to return Autumn’s sneakily-kept school laptop, but forgot after picking up Zane, so she dropped the two of them off to work out and then came over. There, I was able to get in to see a live conversation between Autumn and one of the boys she’s been talking to. That got her heated, and she was ready to throw down. I sent her to the gym so I could snoop some more, and eventually I headed up to their house to await their return home.

They were super late getting home, but Summer dropped Zane off, got Autumn from the grandparents’ house, and finally made it in. She immediately confronted Autumn about the phone, which was actually Eaddie’s old iPhone with a broken screen. That turned into a standoff, with Autumn basically taunting us because I guess she didn’t think we could break her.

Summer’s never really had to be hard on the girls. Eaddie’s always been relatively good, but Autumn has been going down a really bad path for a while now, and this required hard action that she just wasn’t fully prepared to take. We got through it though, between wall squats and kneeling with her arms out. Autumn continued to backtalk for a stupidly long time, to the point that even Eaddie was able to perfectly articulate something really inspiring. I was super proud of her for coming into the conversation in a truly meaningful way.

At the end of it all, I think we found a few honest ones among the crocodile tears. Autumn actually ran a hot bubble bath for Eaddie, and then went to bed. Then she came out in tears and said she needed a hug, and fell right into my arms, crying into my shoulder. She apologized in a way that I hadn’t heard from her before, and asked again that I continue with strict structure. Summer got her hug and apologies too, but there’s no telling how long it will last. She went to bed feeling terrible, but I was proud of her for sticking up to the bully in the house.

The Captain’s Log is the log that I use to beat you if you talk back to me again.

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Cold Shock

It was quite a bit cooler out today, and probably would have been a good day to work outside. Nothing at all went according to any kind of plan or toward any real goals. Summer took Eaddie home to get ready for her day at Urban Air. I thought she would come back after Eaddie left, but that wasn’t the case. She didn’t feel up to doing anything, so I just kind of milled around the house all day long.

As the evening approached, I decided to stay in for the night. Later on, Eaddie called and wanted me to pick her up when she got back into town so she could stay the night with me. Then Summer texted and said she was having trouble with Autumn when she was dropped back off at home from her grandparents’. When I picked Eaddie up, we had to take Zane home first, and then she threw a fit when I told her we needed to go stay the night with her mother.

Summer went back and forth along with Autumn’s mood swings, wanting me there, or saying it was fine to stay home. Plans changed a couple more times as I went back out to get some Burger King for Eaddie, but we finally landed on me staying home with Eaddie.

I stayed up a little late trying to get my home theater PC working again, as it had been powered on but unresponsive for several days. I thought the hard drive was completely toast, but it finally booted up successfully just as I was getting ready to give up for the night.

I guess I’ll have to call that a win.

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Side Quests

I wanted to get up a little early today so I could spend some time time cleaning up around the house and yard. Summer ended up having to go in to work for a while, which only partially derailed my plans. Eaddie also didn’t want to get up or come with me. I ended up sticking around their house for a while, and found a whole bunch of leftovers to clean up, including the Indian food we had a few weeks ago. Dad wanted to try and uncover the pool, so I just planned to go over there a bit after noon when Mom got off work.

After we uncovered the pool, I continued home to start some laundry and get cleaned up myself. Summer brought Eaddie over after the gym and showers, and the three of us went to my parents’ house for egg roll salads. Though it threatened thunderstorms all day, we didn’t really see any rain until later in the evening.

I thought we would at least watch a movie when we got back to my house, but Eaddie just wanted to go to bed. Summer and I watched several episodes of Modern Family, and eventually went to sleep ourselves.

Zero tasks completed.

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The Existential Review: Year 6

I finally got back on a bike today, and rode the Shadow to work. I knew we had eSCO coming to pick up some more stuff to recycle, but I didn’t have any other real need to haul anything around. Gary split us up into three pairs, and Kyle and I were on a mission to do the work orders Gary hadn’t had time to address. It ended up not being very much, and Kyle really did all the legwork by going upstairs to install Microsoft Office on a Mac.

As soon as we finished up with that, we headed up to the graveyard to make a path to get everything onto the box truck. I convinced the guys to back up to the corner of the dock like they had done in the past, and it made things quite a bit easier. We still have a lot more carts to go, but we can almost see the end of the tunnel.

Lunchtime came around pretty quickly, and Gary decided on Wendy’s. I rode separately to get some bike time, and Zach surprised us there while he was on his week of vacation. Even a bunch of the maintenance guys walked in behind us. We had a good chat and had some time to chill before going back to work.

The afternoon was really quiet. We had to unbox the rest of our new Lenovo Chromebooks to confirm that they wouldn’t auto-update. Then I mostly just hung out in the shop until my one-on-one review time with Thomas. I thought Gary and Zach would be in on it, but it was just Thomas. He ranked me higher than I think Ben had ever ranked mee before – even higher than I had ranked myself, and had some really nice things to say, so I was quite happy. In the end it doesn’t do much for me, but it did give me some additional confidence.

He let everyone leave a few minutes early for the weekend, but I trailed out a bit late as I often do. Eaddie was still out with Maristella, so I went home to start on some more laundry until Summer got home from the gym. Eaddie rode in on her bike just a few minutes after Summer, and we went to Taco Villa for dinner. Eaddie and I both had taco salads, and both of our shells were way undercooked and chewy.

I had ridden the Grom behind them so Eaddie and I could go straight to the high school to practice riding after we ate. She was fussy about it like she always is, but I tried to press her on until she really seemed to just be unable to focus. She still wanted to go for a night ride on the R1 though, so we went home and swapped, and I took her for a big loop around town. I was pretty exhausted when we made it back to the house, so we put everything up and headed up to their house for the night. Summer was already in bed, and I didn’t waste much time finding my way there as well.

Yes, I keep repeating the same things over and over again because you are repeatedly doing none of those things.

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Cartagain Weather III: Certified Pre-Owned

I had completely forgotten that we were delivering carts to Oakland today. I made it in to work, and Gary had Greg, Josh, and Jacob ready to roll. He went to the middle school to scan Chromebooks while the rest of us loaded up the trailer for two trips to Oakland. I got pretty sweaty already, just from the humidity. There was a small chance of rain, but we never saw any.

By the time we finished, everyone was ready for lunch with still an hour to go. We met up with Gary, who had discovered a bunch of the Chromebooks we need to return this summer. I sat down to verify how he was checking his devices, and discovered that I had somehow made a mistake on our original sheet, and we hadn’t been correctly identifying devices the whole time. That meant re-scanning every device in the graveyard.

We loaded some scrap into the trailer, then headed back to the shop for lunch. We picked up Thomas and went to Fat Daddy’s in London. For some reason we always end up there on Thursdays, which is an awful day for specials. I had a pulled pork sandwich, which was edible enough, and fortunately a bit larger than I expected.

When we got back to the shop, I built a new scanning sheet from scratch, then joined Josh and Greg in the graveyard to re-scan devices. We made a pretty good dent in them before we ran out of boxes. It was also about time to head to the Center for our end-of-the-year pat-on-the-back.

With new leadership, this was the shortest event I had ever seen. The whole thing took like 15 minutes, which was insane. We only recognized retirees and the teachers of the year, which was kind of lame, but I guess at least we had an excuse to leave early. Ben called me in the middle of it, and said he was passing through town. Everyone else took off, but I waited there for him, and we ended up chatting for a while until they closed the place down. Tina came around with some plastic bags for the leftover cookies, and let us take a bunch home.

I started on laundry when I got home. Eaddie had been out on her bike all day, and ended up never coming back home. She called a few times to check in, which was good. After going back and forth about it, she decided she wanted to stay the night with a friend, so eventually I had to run some clothes to her.

On the way, I stopped for a couple 50 cent corndogs from Sonic, and a large order of onion rings. After I left, I realized my bag only had three onion rings in it, so I wound up going back after I delivered Eaddie’s stuff. One of the girls ran out with a new order of onion rings for me, and said they knew what they had done, and were just waiting for me to come back. I wish they had been able to just call me to let me know.

I ended the late night just barely missing my goal of washing all of my shirts. I’ve got a performance review at work tomorrow, so I didn’t want to be up too late finishing up, so I left the last load for the weekend.

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Little Time

Summer dropped Eaddie off at my house this morning so she could ride her bike during the day. Work was a bit different today, and it was nice moving around instead of sitting in my office all day. We started off finishing the quote for Thomas, and then I spent a little time with Jacob. He was trying to figure out how to transfer YouTube videos to another user, so when Terra retires, her math videos won’t be lost forever.

Evidently Jacob hasn’t had much to do this week, so he spent a lot of time in the shop cleaning up. Then I took him to Oakland in case I needed a hand carrying out some “technology.” It ended up being a single plastic case with a few old headphones in it, so that was easy. We still had some time before lunch, so I took him to the back of the building to try and fix or replace a video cable in the autism room. I didn’t have what they needed though, so I would have to come back later.

We picked Eaddie up before heading back to the shop, because she wanted to go out to eat lunch with me. I picked up Thomas and Gary, and we met Greg at Arby’s for a quick and easy lunch. Then I dropped everyone off at the shop before taking Eaddie back home and going back to Oakland to finish up by myself with the correct part.

The afternoon was pretty quiet. Josh and Greg came back to the shop, and then Gary joined us for a bit of a chat. At the end of the day, I went with Greg to the press box at the high school football field. He wanted to test a new fiber run, and we were able to see a light, but it didn’t want to transfer any data. That took us a little past quitting time, so we headed straight home.

Eaddie had ridden her bike to her private flute lesson, and I offered to pick her up in the heat. She originally wanted to ride home, but changed her mind and called me while I was on the phone with Summer, who was on her own way back home from work.

I picked Eaddie up at Maristella’s house, and then we went to Rose Drug to pick up Summer’s medication, followed by my parents’ house so I could pick up a couple 15-inch speakers he picked up from an old magic buddy that passed away. Summer had an awards dinner with Autumn, so Eaddie and I had a date night at Stoby’s. I didn’t know what I wanted to eat, so I had the waitress pick. I don’t think I ever, in my entire life, would have ordered the barbecue chicken quesadilla, but it was super good.

After dinner, we went back to my house for a bit, and Eaddie decided she wanted to stay the night with me. We went to Dairy Queen for a couple Blizzards, and then up to their house so she could bathe and get some clothes. Then we came back to my house for the night and I finished up with a load of laundry before bed.

Favorite Time

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Silly Rabbit

We woke up in the middle of the night to some rustling in the bedroom. I assumed it was a cat, and let Summer investigate. It wasn’t until I heard her say that it was the bunny that I got out of bed. I just knew if we didn’t find it, it would die in the house from starvation, but I also wasn’t willing to stay awake tearing the room apart to find it. I told her to wake Autumn, but we went back to sleep instead.

I made it in to work a hair early, but there wasn’t much going on. Kyle came in and wanted to know what to do about the Chromebooks that wouldn’t update, and Brody called with the same question he’s already asked me, along with nearly every other staff member about. Greg was out running fiber all day for the new jumbotron, so it was mostly me with an intermittent Kyle in the shop. It aggravated me a bit the way he seemed to expect me to just figure out the problem and give him a fix, especially when I explained exactly how he could contact Google support himself.

Gary, Thomas, and I met Brody for Taco Tuesday, where he struggled to finish six softshells. He’s always complaining about what he normally orders, but just tacos are so cheap. It’s hard to pass up on a Tuesday. When we got back to the shop, I tried to go upstairs to collect some Chromebooks off the stage, but ended up on a side quest.

I’ve been asking for over two years to get a tire inflator chuck with a built-in pressure gauge for our air tank. I couldn’t get the tires inflated, so I asked Thomas directly if I could go buy one, and he had Tammy give me the credit card so I could go to Leonard’s. That’s the story of how I found the one item in the world that Leonard’s Hardware doesn’t have. They had something similar, but not the gun style with the clip-on valve stem bit. I ended up going to Harbor Freight, where they had just what I needed for a fraction of the cost and quality.

With my tires at an appropriate 30psi, the ride with the three tech tubs full of 15 Chromebooks was super smooth all the way down to the basement. It was quiet for the rest of the afternoon until Thomas came down and asked Gary and me to help with something relatively urgent tomorrow. I left work a few minutes late, expecting to meet Eaddie to ride the Grom, but she was out on her bicycle.

Once Eaddie made it back, we went to the aquatics center where Dad thought some guys would be paramotoring. Summer and Autumn met us out there as well, but after signing into Dad’s Facebook on my phone, we discovered they actually went flying on Monday, so we missed them.

Summer had let Autumn take Eaddie home since she was feeling pretty rough with her head cold. The girls found the bunny before we got home, which was a relief. Then we all ate, except for Autumn, who I have to assume is filling up on junk food at school before she gets home. Then Autumn wanted to play Phase 10 with us while Eaddie watched TV. From there, it was a relatively early night to bed for everyone.

I half expected to come home to a bowl of Trix in the floor as bait.

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Bring Your Career to Work Day

The junior high started laptop pickup today, and Jacob was a bit worried about that process, so I joined him for a couple English periods worth of students. We started lining laptops around the computer lab, in spite of them still having students in there. It went well enough, with the English teachers having the students wipe down their devices and having the laptops powered on for checking their condition.

It was nearly lunch time when I got back to the shop, so I finished loading up a few things for the afternoon, and then Gary, Greg, Thomas, and I went to Brangus. It had been a while since we had this waitress, but she remembered my beef spud. It was a good lunch.

Shortly after we got back from lunch, I headed to Oakland for their career day. I had a little table set up nest to a hair stylist, where I set up a running computer with the cover opened, as well as a couple disassembled Chromebooks. Fourth and third grade was first, and they just came in and mingled, and asked questions. Then they brought all of kindergarten, first, and second grade in to rotate stations as a whole class. That was absolute chaos. Our stations were bunched too closely together, and the kids kept leaning on the table and pushing us back into the wall. Overall it was a good time though.

By the time I got back to the shop, I was too tired to get into anything really serious. I worked on a new Chromebook that wouldn’t install updates, but never made any progress. When I left work, I picked Eaddie up as she and Zane walked back from Casey’s. We went to my house to change, and then had to shop for a couple things for dinner.

We went to Walmart, assuming they would have everything we needed. They didn’t have any cabbage though, so we had to go across town to 10Box. They had a ton of cabbage there, and then it was straight to Summer’s to prep. She had started a corned beef in the slow cooker, but I had to prep and cook the cabbage, carrots, rice, and potatoes.

A couple of the potatoes had rotted out completely, and the bag was full of maggots. Eaddie helped clean up the kitchen while I prepped the cabbage, and once the sinks were clear, I soaked the potatoes, brushed off the maggots and eggs, and then peeled and cut them for boiling. I pulled the corned beef out, and poured that juice over the potatoes and carrots, along with just enough water to cover it all. Boiling that took the longest.

Summer and Autumn showed up just after that had started to cook, and once the potatoes and carrots were tender enough, I threw the cabbage on top to steam. Dinner turned out awesome, which was good because Eaddie wouldn’t quit talking about how excited she was for corned beef. Autumn of course didn’t eat any, and laid on the couch with the cat and bunny all evening. Eaddie was tired, but stayed up to finish some laundry. School is almost out, and I think we’re all excited.

Yes, that’s exactly what I just finished explaining for the third time. This must be what teaching is like!