I woke up this morning when Mom called to say she locked herself out of the house. She was going to Tunica with Bác Vân and Doug, and forgot to take her keys and a promo mailer she got for some free money. When we got back, Summer went to pick up some charity spaghetti dinners and then spent most of the day watching The Office with me.

I took some time to add the new filter media to my 55-gallon, and eventually started the acclimation process to introduce my new female betta to the 10-gallon tank. She’s so pretty in the right light, and it makes me want to start a sorority tank. Luckily she took to the smaller tank without any trouble, and seemed to get along with the tetras and corydoras just fine. Hopefully the water quality in the 55 will sort itself out pretty quickly.

RUN

We didn’t have any group work today, or really much work to speak of at all. I decided I was going to walk around Oakland during their field day to see all the different activities. Even before lunch, the halls smelled of sweaty children. It was super gross, but kind of fun to reminisce.

By some miracle, a group of six of us agreed on Cracker Barrel for lunch. Service was really slow, and our waiter was a little spacey from lack of sleep. Overall, I’ve had worse. At least the food was good.

I was between Oakland and the junior high in the afternoon until they cut us out early. Then I went home to an evening of laundry and cleaning house. At the end of the evening, I got to take a break and play a couple rounds of PUBG with Aaron. I’m excited to sleep in tomorrow, but there’s still work to be done.

I could watch these tadpoles all day.

I spent all morning at Oakland. I’m not sure where all my time went, because I didn’t feel like I was just wasting my time, but I didn’t complete a lot of tasks. I did manage to remote into my office computer from my phone so I could log into a switch to change a port configuration, and I didn’t break the entire internet in the process. I guess that’s gotta count for something.

I went to lunch with a surly Zach and Sara. Nobody seems particularly fond of the organization right now. I’ve seen similar things happen with other employers, but I guess just not on this scale.

I spent the afternoon at the junior high, mostly walking across the campus a lot. I did manage to spend some time after work trying to decide on a $150 toothbrush. I even revisited later in the evening, but I never bit the bullet. I’ve gotta stop shopping.

Hi. I’m Michael, and I’m a high-functioning, self-medicated shopaholic.

More of the same at work today. The real fun started when I got home. My CatGenie decided not to scoop any more, so the litter didn’t get dried properly last night. I took the whole thing apart, expecting it to be some sort of mechanical problem or failure, but it ended up being something in the processing unit. The bowl doesn’t always spin the correct direction, and now the scooping motor doesn’t seem to work at all.

I’m so over cats.

This morning was super slow. I didn’t do much of anything until lunch with Heather at Smackin’ Wings & Things. I got 20 modest sized wings for $16.88. Only a quarter of those were drumettes, which wasn’t a big problem for me, but it was an interesting observation. I don’t think I’ll get wings there again, but their Fry-day menu looks interesting.

The afternoon was mostly more of the same nothingness aside from investigating a smashed computer monitor. When I got home, I got to work right away setting up the turtle terrarium. I started with a base of charcoal from the fire, then covered that with leaves to make it a bit more even before topping it with a thin layer of dirt with moss and clover that I scraped up from the back yard. I hope it grows, but I’m not super hopeful. I’ll probably end up releasing the turtles eventually, but this will be fun for at least a little bit.

I also got the canister filter running on the 55-gallon tank and added some duckweed. A lot of it is churning through the water and passing through the filter, but hopefully it finds a place to settle on the surface and actually start growing. Once I feel better about the water quality, I’ll start dropping tadpoles in.

I slept late today after a late night gaming session with Clint. Summer was going to go hit the gym before picking up the girls, but Autumn called for a pickup earlier than expected, so we shifted our time table around a bit. She took the girls home to shower, then came over to pick me up to go to Burger King for the quiz bowl car wash. When we finished lunch, we went to my parents’ house to help uncover the pool and start cleaning things up. The girls helped scoop leaves while Summer vacuumed the pool, and Autumn even helped pressure wash a bit of concrete.

We had to get the girls home to shower again before Nick came to pick them up, and Summer and I watched a few episodes of The Office until they left. Then we went to Shoe Carnival so I could find some new sandals, and T.J.Maxx to look for some shorts for Summer. We didn’t find her any shorts, but I did end up getting some cheapo sandals from T.J.Maxx instead of having to order some from Shoe Carnival. When we finished shopping, we stopped by CiCi’s for dinner, and then came back home.

Summer was super tired and fell asleep, so I played some PUBG with Clint and Aaron before bed. Tomorrow will be more yard work, so hopefully it’ll be cool in the morning.

Is a bottle opener on the bottom of my sandals too fratty?

We wrapped up teacher appreciation day with a morning meeting about how we’re going to buy four classroom sets of iPads to better distract the children from learning. Ryan taught me some stuff about creating operating system deployments. I ate barbecue at the junior high by myself even though everyone was invited and initially said that it sounded good. Then we got to leave an hour early because Amanda got into some insulation.

After work, I came home and warmed up some leftovers. Summer came over for a little while, and then decided to stay while I played PUBG with the guys. Clint finally got to play with me again after a really long time away due to the new job. Hopefully tomorrow is really nice out, because I don’t want to waste it all sitting around inside all day.

What other job do you have to go to for nine straight months out of the year, and all you get is a week long celebration because you did it?