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The Curious Case of Bingeman Button

We didn’t sleep in super late today in spite of how late we got to bed. We didn’t get much of anything accomplished either. I made a little breakfast out of what was left in the fridge, and then we basically binge-watched The Office all day. Summer left after a while to take care of some things at home and get dinner started.

I took a shower and discovered an entire colony of ants in my orchid pot. I decided not to spray them, and instead hoped that they would just move themselves in a much cleaner way. If they’re still around tomorrow, I may stick a bunch of them in an old ant farm I never used from years ago.

Eventually I made my way up to Summer’s where I made some rice to go with her garlic herb chicken and mashed broccoli, cauliflower, and cheese. The girls left to go to a trunk or treat event with their father while Summer and I continued our binge until bed.

Uyimbube, uyimbube, uyimbube, uyimbube.

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The Runs

We slept in a while this morning until we had to leave for Summer’s 10K in Little Rock. We stopped by McDonald’s for some chicken tenders on the way out of town, which were actually really good, and then made our way to Conway for our first stop. I had a Shoe Carnival reward burning a hole in my pocket, so Summer scored a couple pairs of boots in a BOGO free sale. I wanted to go to Old Chicago for lunch while we were in town, but we ran short on time and Summer wasn’t hungry enough to eat. We made a quick stop at Dick’s to check for potential kayaks on sale before departing on the last leg of our trip.

Thirsty and still a bit hungry myself, we stopped by another McDonald’s on the way out of Conway for some drinks. The kid brought one of our drinks out, but said they didn’t have the equipment to make the slush I ordered even though there was a giant window cling for it on the front of the store. He offered to make me another of what we did get, but I ended up having to go inside because he forgot to bring the replacement drink out to me after it was made. I guess nobody cared enough to find out why there was another drink sitting on the counter at the end of the makeline.

We finally arrived at the Creep ‘N Crawl 10K/5K shortly after Hannah and Dylan, and spent most of our time waiting in line with the girls for the bathroom. There were some interesting costumes there, but Old Greg was one of my favorites. Some of the costumes definitely didn’t seem run-friendly, but by golly they did it. My number one favorite had to go to a couple of girls that were dressed as a cop and robber, and ran the race handcuffed to one another.

Summer and Dylan took off first in the 10K, and then Hannah took off 15 minutes later. Dylan ended up getting second place in his age group, so he got a tiny trophy. Hannah and Summer both came in squarely in the middle of their categories, but Hannah arrived first since she was only doing the 5K. While we were waiting, I bumped into Officer Beyette, and he offered to take my picture with Hannah and Mr. Peanut, but I declined and said I wasn’t actually with them. I assumed he didn’t remember me from the time I trolled him at Oakland, but it was funny to me all the same.

I started to worry a bit about Summer because she was a fair bit behind her goal time. I expected her right along with Dylan, but the clock just kept on ticking. She ended up getting sick in the middle of the race, but she puckered up and pushed through to the end. I made the trek back to the car to come back and pick everyone up, and we headed to Dave and Buster’s for some evening fun.

They didn’t have Angry Orchard on tap, which was the girls’ choice drink, so we didn’t get to experience the 100 oz tower. The food was pretty decent, the drinks were overpriced, and the games were fun while they lasted. We all decided to hold on to what tickets we earned and, tired from the day’s activities, called it a night and drove on home.

Mission: Disastrously Successful

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New Ryan

Brice finally started today, though I’m still fuzzy on how he started so long after his contract start date. More importantly, I finally found out what my building assignments would be, and it looks like it’s just more of the same. I think they’re expecting Brice to pick up mostly where Ryan left off, and I hope it does work out, but I knew I’d have mixed feelings about it no matter what. Ben said he dreaded the thought of having to have a conversation with Sheri about taking me away from her building, so I guess their constant bragging on me isn’t lost.

Zach, Jason, and I hung a broken(?) touch panel in the coaches’ office, mostly to get it out of the warehouse since nobody else wanted it. Then we hung a new one for Allen before lunch. Everyone but Allen and Heather came to Brangus, but it wasn’t much ado about anything. Afterward it was just back to work orders for me.

After work, I came home and played a few rounds of solo Rocket League until Summer got there. I spent some time cleaning up a CamelBak for her race tomorrow, and then we went to La Huerta to split some fajitas for dinner. I stopped to air up my cold tires on the way home, and then she read her book while I played some doubles with Josh until bedtime.

Dude, you’re making it look like they actually pay us fairly around here!

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Well I don’t want to see you waiting.

Zach griped at me this morning for wasting my time playing with a Firefox deployment I made yesterday. I just need experience fighting with some of this stuff so I can get better at it. There’s always time for work orders later.

Jason texted and asked if I wanted to go to Las Palmas for lunch, so when he and Ben got back to the shop, we met Dale there. My taco salad was hot and fresh, but there’s no denying that the key lime candy at the register was my favorite part.

After lunch, I went to the junior high for a little bit, but ended up leaving to take care of some work back at Oakland before ultimately ending the day at the junior high. Autumn got rained out of color guard at the game, but Eaddie was upset that she wouldn’t get to watch TV at my house, so I took the girls home with me while Summer went to the gym. Josh met me there just long enough to hand over the laptop I picked up for Summer, and the girls settled in for an episode of Criminal Minds.

When Summer got to the house, we went to Burger King for the best family deal coupon in town. I had more burgers than heads for under 20 bucks. We just happened to be on the Halloween episode of The Office, so we watched that before the girls went home for the night. Then I finished laundry and headed to bed myself.

I’m wasting my time agaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiinnnnnn!

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Powerpuff Curls

I stopped by Oakland for just a little bit this morning, but most of the teachers I was there to see were out for the day. It was just as well though, because work orders started pouring in from the junior high. I guess there was some kind of power issue there over the last few days, because I had several SMART boards that wouldn’t power on at all and just needed to be power flushed. I ran around the building doing that over and over again after spending half an hour on my first one thinking it was a component problem.

I took a late lunch, and after some difficulty deciding where to go, I ended up at Wendy’s for a salad. They were packed, and the service was pretty slow because they only had one register open. It seems to be a trend for them lately. The salad was really good, even though I was craving fried chicken or burritos. I tried to make a healthy choice.

I spent the afternoon picking up loose ends from old work orders, and I’m getting to the point where I really need to focus my energy on learning how to pick up the slack that Ryan left behind. It’s been tough motivating myself lately though.

After work, I went home to start some laundry before heading to Summer’s for the evening. She picked up some Little Caesar’s after I suggested it, ending my short run at lighter meals.

I’m sure I’ll be much more productive tomorrow when it’ll be cooler, cloudy, and a little rainy.

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Conferred

Ben started off the morning addressing relatively singular issues as though they were widespread, and then we split up to do work orders all day. I went to Oakland first and shuffled some batteries around since that place was a ghost town. Then I went straight to the junior high until lunch. Summer had a break then as well, so we went to Taco Bell where I ran into my old classmate Noreen. I kind of expected her to take off and really make something of herself, so that was a bit of a surprise.

I spent the rest of the afternoon on into a late evening working on various things at the junior high. Conferences started at 1:00 and ran until 7, so I stuck around wandering between work orders and chatting with people that were there. I don’t find a lot of people that are social employees the way that I am. Most people are just in and out, but I kind of enjoy sticking around after hours sometimes. Plus I got to chow on some La Huerta that they set up for the teachers, so dinner was done, and dessert was amazing.

After work, I had to run to Walgreens to pick up a FedEx package that was dropped there for me. I tried answering the doorbell while I was at work, but for some reason it cut out just as I was asking if he could bring it to our office for a signature. The notification that he dropped it off at Walgreens was a complete surprise, but I’m glad he did because I wasn’t expecting it until tomorrow, nor for it to require a signature.

Back home, I washed some socks and crashed early from my long day.

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A Fault and Battery

It was frosty this morning, so I had to let the car warm up before I could get home. Somehow after all of that I managed to make it to work a bit early, but it didn’t take too long before my jacket got too hot. We all went to the middle school to hang and shuffle some TVs and touch panels around. I didn’t know until later, but Allen showed me that the first one we did ended up getting damaged somehow on the side, so I’m absolutely sure it’s just going to end up being a junked TV at some point. I’m hoping I can swipe it for my office, but I guess we’ll see.

Dale, Allen, and I went to KFC for lunch, as Autumn and Summer texted me from the Wendy’s drive-through. Then Jason’s plan for after lunch was for all of us to go to our buildings to scope out what battery components we needed in order to complete the upgrade. The problem here is that not a single one of those guys had any idea what they were even looking for. After milling around for a while, I ended up pulling all of the remaining batteries out of the graveyard and taking Allen and Amanda to the high school to meet Dale so we could scope out his closets. He ended up only needing one of the three spare battery expansions I found, and we switched over four of his closets before heading to Oakland.

They were in the middle of parent-teacher conferences, so all we could do was drop off three pairs of batteries before heading back to the shop. I asked Allen to go to his building now that we knew what we were looking for, and he kept arguing that he wanted to see what Jason had for us to do. I ended up driving the three of us over to the middle school to do it, and he ran around looking at his other closets while Amanda sat on the couch and I went to the truck to get the last two battery expansions for the controllers he and Jason had already brought to his office.

We ended up getting out right at quitting time, but then I had to put the truck away. I went downstairs to chat with Ben for a minute on the way out, and he asked how I’d feel about having my campuses shuffled. I don’t want to leave either of them, but it’s looking like there are other issues in play, and all I can do is hope that he’s not just moving a problem from one place to another rather than addressing it properly with disciplinary action.

Summer came over in the evening and we picked up some Tropical Smoothie for her dinner, then came back home and watched an incredible IMAX 3D documentary about the Hubble telescope, appropriately named Hubble. It was probably the best quality 3D I have ever seen because everything was super crisp and clear, and not blurred with fast-motion, high-action sequences.

You see, this is why I never really get stressed out. We are so very insignificant, and nothing that we do could possibly ever matter in the grand scheme of things.
But yeah, sure. I’ll get right on those TPS Reports.

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Netflix and Bill

I got up before the girls this morning and made a little breakfast for them. A heart-shaped egg, hash browns, and bun toast. I forgot I had ham in the freezer that I could have included too. Then we sat around watching Arrow and eating popcorn all day.

Summer had to pick Autumn up eventually, so she took Eaddie and went home while I cleaned up a tiny bit and finished earning my rank in solo Rocket League. Around the time I started getting bored, Summer said she had dinner almost ready, so I headed up to her place for the evening.

Her sriracha chicken turned out really good, and then we let the girls watch an episode of Criminal Minds before they went to bed. Summer and I were watching The Office when Julie called complaining about getting kicked off of Netflix. Dad had been watching too, and the plan we were on had been reduced to only two screens, so she got Dad’s approval and I upgraded the plan to the next step up for four screens with UHD content.

Better start watching more…

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Sew Much to Pack

I slept really well last night, and stayed that way until almost noon today. When I finally got out of bed, I packed things up and headed home to clean up a bit before Josh came over to check out his laptop I had repaired for him. Both hungry, we went to Denny’s for a late lunch and chatted for quite a while. The food was really good, but also really slow to come out, so it was fortunate we were just killing time being social.

When he dropped me back off at home, I took a shower and then played some Rocket League with him once he got home. We did pretty well until we didn’t, and I still don’t have a placement in ranked duos yet. Once we lost a couple games, he was ready to call it quits for the day, so I decided to sew up the mismade velcro patch on my new backpack. I felt like I did a pretty good job on it, but as I was trying to tie a knot to finish the whole project, the thread got caught up in something, and I ended up having to just cut off all of the excess without knotting it properly. I don’t think it’ll be a problem though, since the whole thing just gets tied up in the hooks of the velcro.

I spent quite a while unpacking all of my old daily cary stuff and sort through the new swag to decide what I wanted to put in the pack. I’m still not completely sold on how I have it arranged, but it’ll do for now. I’ll probably make some changes once I’ve had a chance to use it at work for a while. I was mostly surprised to see there wasn’t any organization for pens, or any small, vertical pouches.

Summer finally got back into town after her quiz bowl tournament, picked Eaddie up, then came over for a bit before having to run home to get Eaddie showered and changed into some new clothes. Summer passed out as soon as they got back and had a bite to eat, and Eaddie started watching Arrow while I cleaned up from all of my packing.

So I guess I collect koozies now.

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They’re Missing the Point

“The whole point of the conference is to get us out of there and get away from the work orders and the teachers.” Quote of the day, and at least one of the themes for the whole day. Jason was clearly only there so he could not be at work. Some may be puzzled by how this might make any difference at all.

Classes started at 8:30 for real this morning, so I grabbed breakfast and headed into my classes. I was really disappointed by two out of three today, with the first being mostly a sales meeting, or at the very least an introduction to what they do sell. The second class was actually pretty good, though not necessarily very useful since we don’t actually have any Extreme equipment. The third was another dud only because it was an hour class on how to perform fewer than six steps. I don’t even know why it was a class. It could have been almost anything else.

The lunch was buffet-style this time, and pretty awesome. Fried pork chops and baked chicken with tons of extras. It was way better than yesterday, and the carrot cake for dessert was awesome. I failed to win any door prizes, so we headed home right after lunch. I dropped Jason off at his house, then merged back onto the interstate right next to Dale and Allen. I think Heather and Gary left quite a bit earlier in the day, but I don’t know when.

When I got back into town, I decided to stop by the shop to talk to Ben and Zach. Zach got his Pixel 3 XL in, and it seemed pretty nice, but he didn’t seem too keen on handling it much. I’ll get some more time with it once it’s in a case. Once he left work, I headed home to unpack before eventually making it to Summer’s. She had me take her to the football game to be honored for quiz bowl during halftime, and then we came right back home where I unpacked my stuffed swag backpack before bed.

The point is to learn something that you can bring back and share with the department.