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That Thon, Th-Thon Thon Thon

Summer left early this morning for the RussVegas Half Marathon. I set an alarm so I could get out to meet her at the end, and made it early enough to hang out for a little bit and then get a picture of her actually crossing the finish line. We walked around the train depot area to take a couple pictures before making it back to the cars, and then we went to Las Palmas for her recovery lunch. The service was pretty absent, but the food was good.

Afterward, we came home and she cleaned up and crashed in front of the TV while Dad came over and helped me seal up the hole in the brick outside. Once that was caulked in, we had to let it dry and moved to the other end that went into the laundry room. I still needed foil tape and wanted to try and find some kind of flange or boot to put against the wall, so we went to Lowe’s and then Leonard’s without any luck. We ended up just going to get some of his old sheet metal, and cut out a piece with a hole in it to tape to the wall. Since then I’ve seen some flexible tape made for flashing that I may like to find in order to seal it up a bit better.

With that done, we had to leave the foaming for later, since we couldn’t really get into the inside wall without disturbing the caulk job. Dad went on home, and then I came in to watch a movie with Summer. I warmed up some leftovers for dinner, and then we watched The Shape of Water, which had far more frontal nudity than I expected for a love story between a woman and a sea creature. Otherwise I thought it was a pretty good movie.

Summer continued to fall asleep on me while I browsed YouTube for a while, and finally went to bed. I scoured the official photos from the marathon for her for a while, and eventually had to save the rest for later so I could get some sleep.

I think I’ll sing it again!

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The Doge Days are Over

I slept most of my way through Thursday with a pretty steady 103ºF fever, body aches, and fortunately a lesser chill than I had during true COVID and my first Moderna shot. It still hurt to move, or to sit wrong, or to adjust, or to lye in one place for too long. I still couldn’t get up and do anything, or watch TV, or really bother staying awake. By Thursday night I was hungry enough to eat some real food, so Dad brought me some leftover chicken and scalloped potatoes.

I woke up Friday having finally broken my fever and chills, but after trying to continue with my morning routine it was clear that I wouldn’t be much use at work, so I took another sick day. Summer came over after taking Autumn to school and laid with me for a while. It was Melinda’s last day, and I didn’t want to miss sending her off, so I made it out of the house to meet everyone at Morelos for lunch. Ben pulled a quick one on us and paid for everyone. Then I headed up to Summer’s for a while since she was still feeling pretty rough.

It wasn’t long before I had to get Autumn from school. She got her phone back from Summer’s office after a paltry week without it. When we got home, their father was there to pick up Eaddie for the weekend. Autumn had previously volunteered for an event this weekend, but backed out so she could go as well.

Summer and I eventually made it back to my house for the evening, and she watched TV while I shuffled around in the laundry room. I was still working out some aches, but felt good enough to push myself a little more, so I got the dryer vent duct cut and temporarily placed. All we have left to do are a few finishing touches to seal everything into place, and then I’m ready to do laundry again!

Dogecoin has been on a tear, jumping from when I purchased it at around 4.6 cents to just over 49 cents. It felt really surreal to watch it keep climbing over the two days I was stuck in bed sick. Unfortunately I was too optimistic to cash out at its peak, but I still came out plenty ahead. It’s hard not to make snap emotional actions when you can make or lose hundreds of dollars in just a few seconds, but at this point I have enough of a buffer that I can afford to ride it out a little longer.

Wouldn’t mind another run at a dollar, though.

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Dos

It started out cool and rainy today. I made it into the shop to discover someone had hidden my bead curtain and pirate flag. More on that later. It was pretty quiet at first, though my attention shifted away from the Apple yet again. This time it was for an AP testing app. The morning went by super fast, and before I knew it, it was time for lunch.

Gary and Zach chose Sam’s since we didn’t go yesterday. I got the jambalaya, which was awesome. For some reason it came out super late, so the others were halfway through their meals by the time I started. Then Gary surprised us by paying for our meals.

After lunch, I had to get my second COVID shot at central office. Gary and I went together, and while we were there, we were pulled aside several times to fix various things. That lead to the discovery that Jason had never set up PaperCut for them, and basically everything would be a rebuild from scratch. Already down in manpower, we left that to be a problem for Future Us.

When I left work, I stopped by Mark’s to try and help with something, but he didn’t have time to chat after I had been unsure of how I’d feel after getting my shot. Instead, I ran across the street to chat with Robert and Grant for a while. Then I went to my parents’ for a little bit.

Noah had taken the girls home from school, and Autumn was supposed to grill brats for dinner, so Summer had me run to the store for salad and buns. It wasn’t until we got home that we discovered the kids had gone to Brick Oven after school instead, so Summer and I went out for a quick date night.

I mentioned having gone to Sam’s for lunch, so she decided we should go again for chicken livers. I got my usual 3x3x3 which turned into 5x4x3. I also learned that I do not care for fried green tomatoes. I only ate a little bit of my food after feeling full from everything else, so we packed up our leftovers and I took Summer home.

By the time I got home, my shot arm had tightened to the point that it hurt all the time. I didn’t have a fever, but was cold enough to wear a robe. Hopefully I’ll feel well enough to go to work tomorrow, but only for the sake of winning this month’s attendance award. We’re halfway there.

DOH! DOGE!

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Oh, Bully

I stopped by the high school first thing this morning because they were testing offsite kids in the arena and saferoom. Aside from not updating their backup devices to a version that would run their testing software, everything went pretty smoothly and I made my way to the shop.

Zach and I started looking at Dogecoin and noticed it had taken off for the day. He bought in with his initial $5 he used to fund his RobinHood account, and I joked that he would end up losing when it crashed again. To my surprise, it just kept going up all day. His limit sell triggered at 9 cents, so I panicked and sold all of mine for just under $1,300 from my initial $500 investment.

Gary, Zach, and I met Brody at Stoby’s for lunch where I had a big burger and a huge plate of fries that nearly made me comatose for the rest of the afternoon. That and a parade of people in and out of my office made it a little tough to stay focused on the Mac I was trying to learn to manage.

After work, I picked Eaddie up as she was walking to the middle school from her flute lesson. Then we stopped by Dairy Queen for some milkshakes before going to my house to change and then to the shop to pick up Autumn. I dropped them both off at karate, and continued to my parents’ house for dinner.

Around the time I got home, Dogecoin had spiked again to over 13 cents, which I could have cashed out at around $2,000. I should have held, but I was afraid of a larger drop after it had gone up all day. I called Summer for a bit, and then Zach beeped in to get a better understanding of investing in ten words or less. Then while we were on the phone, every light in the house turned red and freaked me out a bit. I figured it was a misheard command, but I wasn’t able to get a recording of it, so there’s no way to tell.

I cleaned up a bit more and finally headed to bed. Tomorrow is my second Moderna COVID shot, so I kind of assume it will kill me anyway.

Drop everything!

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It’s a Brick…. House

I had trouble sleeping last night, and woke up in the night with a really sore left shoulder. My only guess was that it was from moving the workbench around in the garage. I ended up snoozing a bit late before getting up for work. Somehow I managed to make it in on time, but as soon as I got settled in, Zach asked me to cover testing for Josh so he could go fix a door.

I went to the middle school and found him in the library, then walked over to the fifth grade side to much fanfare. They didn’t need me for anything, but they were still excited to see me. Once Josh got back from removing the pebble that was holding the door open, we went back to the middle school library to image some computers and fix their printers.

Brody had called me several times already by this time, so I went to the junior high next to help with something there. He’s got some super weird gaps that I can only explain away by his youth. This is what happens when we obfuscate file paths and directory structures.

That got is through lunch, so we headed back to the shop just in time to see Zach and Gary had already left for BFD. We caught up and had lunch with some of the lesser service I’ve had there. Then I spent the afternoon at the shop working on the iMac.

After work, I took the girls to Summer’s shop. On the way we spotted a red Model 3 that looked to be the performance edition that I want. The red was much darker in person than I expected, but it was beautiful, even with its older chrome accents. From there, I headed home and started drilling out holes in the brick of my house. The larger drill bit wouldn’t stay in the drill, so I had to back off to a smaller one.

By some stroke of luck, I was just about perfect in my placement, and Dad came over with a hammer and chisel to knock the brick out. The test duct I stuck in the hole slid in with a little resistance, but then the new vent we bought slid in perfectly with just the right amount of wiggle room. We still didn’t have enough time to finish the job, but we finished the hardest part. All that’s left is to finish the run and seal the outside of the house.

This is Not a Drill: It’s Hammer Time!

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Wholly Holy Hole

I forced myself up this morning instead of sleeping in, with the hopes that I could get back to sleep for work the next day. Summer got up and immediately left for her nail appointment, then came back and took Autumn to the gym. I went home and mounted a couple bikes to the Murano so she could take Eaddie out for a bike ride while Autumn was at a graduation party at Old Post.

Once the bikes were mounted, I started moving things around in the garage and called Dad so we could start mounting the new dryer vent duct in the garage. I had to go to the office to borrow the hammer drill, though we never got far enough to actually need the hammer function. We had to go to Harbor Freight for a hole saw, and then Lowe’s for mounting hardware. Then we went back to my parents’ house for a couple things before we could get started.

We decided to repair the drywall next to the power outlet first, since the dryer vent would likely cover that up, or at least make it more difficult to access. We finished up the drywall and drilled a hole through the outside cabinet wall and the garage drywall. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a bit of insulation in the garage walls. There’s at least one area with some pretty heavy water or pest damage, so I’m hoping that will be a good excuse to redo the walls with some proper insulation.

Dinner time came, and we didn’t want to start drilling brick that late, so we packed everything up for the day. The girls brought the Murano back and I unloaded, then went to my parents’ house for some leftovers. Dad and I chatted for a while after, and eventually I made it back home for the evening.

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King Zilla

I got up this morning and ate some leftover pasta while Summer went to the gym. Then I went home to clean up for our trip to Conway. As I was leaving, Bác Vân asked me to take some pictures of her garden for Bác Tran. Then I continued on up to get the girls.

I tried not to get us to Conway too early because our movie was super late, but they were getting hungry. I still had a couple gift cards for places that closed in Russellville, so we stopped by Firehouse for dinner first. We split sandwiches and used up some of my rewards points, but I’ve still got enough for another trip. There was only one guy there and they got a little bit busy, but it turned out fine. He started singing a couple times, and it was actually really nice.

Our next stop was Game Point to kill some time. Autumn wanted to look for Mario Party on the Nintendo DS, but they didn’t have it. We didn’t stay long before going to Steak ‘n Shake to burn another gift card. I also had a free burger, which I think was for my birthday, but again I didn’t consume all of the gift card.

Autumn really wanted to go to Books-A-Million, so we went there for a while and browsed around. The girls took off to go next door to Five Below, then Dollar Tree. We missed Sam’s Club because they closed early, so we spent the rest of the evening at Target until showtime.

We made it to Cinemark with plenty of time, though it took me three trips to the concession stand to satisfy everyone. We watched nearly half an hour of previews before the movie started, which just showed how much of a backlog of movies there are since the pandemic started. The next few months are gonna be bangin.

I liked the movie pretty well. The script was pretty trash, but I knew going in that we were really only going for the CG. It was almost exclusively monster action, which was probably its only saving grace. The story felt like it was just on rails the entire time so we could get to see epic titan fights. It was fun though, and you just can’t beat the screen size and audio in a theater for a good monster flick.

The drive home was fast and uneventful. The girls barely made it out of town before falling asleep, so everyone was off to bed as soon as we got home.

The movie would have been just as good, or better, with no speech or humans at all. Kind of like real life.

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An M. Night Shyamalan Plot Twist

We had a shortish meeting at work this morning, and then I unboxed a giant iMac that I would have to learn to enroll in our device management system. I didn’t notice until much later, but Josh and Brody basically burned the whole day putting the wrong image on a bunch of flash drives to take to the middle school because Josh didn’t want to image them over the network.

Most of us went to CJ’s for lunch, and when we got back, I helped make the correct flash drives while Josh started some lab computers imaging over the network. Kyle came in and kept me company while I churned out drives. I started to wrap my head around Jamf Apple computer management, but ultimately had to leave it for Monday.

Mark asked me to come by after work, so I ran home to grab my laptop and then went to his office for a little under an hour. Then I picked up the girls to meet my family at Pasta Grill to celebrate Mom’s birthday.

We had a really great time at dinner, and it was nice to see the family actually functioning and smiling. I think everyone was pretty satisfied with their food too. My blackened redfish pasta started out tasting like it was floating in butter, but either it got better or I just got used to it, and I really enjoyed the rest after a while.

When we got home, Summer wanted to talk with Autumn because I had caught her leaving town with Harry without Summer’s permission. What I thought was going to be more or less a disciplinary talk ended up being everyone coming together and spilling their guts all over the place. It was pretty hard for Summer. I’m still not really sure how I feel about some of it, but at least it was a proper airing of the past. I’ve said for a long time that therapy only goes so far, and that eventually the kids would have to come home and talk to us.

Summer and Autumn went to bed immediately after that. I stayed up a little bit longer and tried to finish an episode of House with Eaddie, but even she was tired and ended up just wanting to sleep on the couch.

We’ll never make it through the entire MonsterVerse like this!

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Mama Bear

I slept on top of the sheets last night, so it was pretty rough getting out of bed. I eventually made it to the high school to drop off the last of my CDs for Daniel to use in their play. Then I continued to the shop for the day. I told Melinda about the trouble I had the night before, and she went full-on mother-mode with the advice and being super nice all day.

Brody and Kyle came to the shop so we could hang a touch panel at Crawford, which got us through to lunch. Melinda and I were the only ones still at the shop, so she insisted that I choose, and we went to New China so I could eat my feelings. Then when we got back, she turned off her Britney Spears playlist and played Linkin Park for me for most of the rest of the day.

My office has been a big hit lately for people to mingle, which is both new and kind of neat, though distracting. I spent most of the day trying to help other people and not getting much of anything else done. I worked a little bit late, but had to get the girls to karate.

Both of the girls were pretty quiet today, and the drive to karate didn’t take long. Once they were out, I went to my parents’ house to figure out what was really going to happen with my living situation. As I suspected, it was all a misunderstanding since I’ve been watching the housing market. I’ve been pretty vocal about my plan, but still caught a lot of flak for reasons I don’t understand. At the end of the day, I get to keep living here, which is what really matters.

Dad came back with me to seal the wall back up, then move the cabinet back into its corner. We had to try multiple times because it wasn’t quite square, causing the doors to not open or not stay closed. I never got it quite perfect, but it worked well enough to load up with a bunch of stuff from the garage. Still not enough room for activities, but at least it’s easier to move around in there.

When attacked by a bear, simply lie still on the ground and cover your face and head with your hands. When the bear is finished batting you around and mauling you, contact the US Forest Service.

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Stressors

This morning started out unconventionally, but eventually worked itself out. I got to work with plenty of time and continued my investigation into why imaging was broken. Shane from Howard was taking us out to lunch at Brick Oven, so at least we had something to look forward to. I had my fill of a variety of pizzas, and even did well in breaking even with all the large pizzas I ordered for the table to share. That’s basically been my goal for forever: to successfully order for our group a perfect amount of food that would make everybody fat and happy without any waste. It turns out the answer was five large pizzas.

It took me multiple days and a bunch of consulting, but ultimately I confirmed that it was a Windows update that broke our Windows image in SCCM. I rolled back to the root image and everything was back to normal, so now I get to play “Which Update Broke Everything.”

The girls were sorted for the evening, so after work I went by Summer’s shop to find that she had already left. While I was on that side of the tracks, I stopped in to pick up my blood pressure medication. Then I went home for a little bit. Having some time left in the evening, I had Dad come over to shop at Lowe’s with me. We picked up the materials we needed to run my clothes dryer vent out of the house instead of into the garage.

While Dad was here, he took some pictures of the house for a prospective buyer. His neighbor across the street has some family moving to town that are looking for a home to buy, and evidently mine is for sale if the price is right. Nevermind the 15 years I’ve been here, presumably building equity. I assumed that building the family estate was more important, but if the house is going to be sold out from under me leaving me with no equity as though I have been renting the entire time, then all was for naught. Housing prices are high right now, so I wouldn’t blame him for selling. I’m just not sure how I feel about what I’ve paid or set aside for rent. The lesson here, kids, is to keep family and your money separate.

After a trip to lowe’s for the dryer ducting and some shopping for tile that I may or may not buy myself, we came home to a rogue cat that was wandering around the neighborhood. I spent some time outside with him, but ultimately gave up after he tried to climb up the vertical side of my car, scratching the paint on the way back down. The lesson here was apparently that you shouldn’t be nice to anything. Lots of lessons today.

I came inside and video chatted with Summer for a bit. I’d refer to Duo, except that I’m not sure the app will be around long enough for that reference to make any sense for the next person to read this. Already aggravated by life, the universe, and everything, I ended up picking a fight with her about “how many sacrifices” either of us has made for any particular reason. We ultimately had to agree to disagree in a way where everybody felt like a loser.

There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke, but uh, but you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate.