Remember Sailing

I woke up around noon and eventually got out to my parents’ house so Dad and I could go sailing. We looked at both boat ramps at the marina, and though they are on opposite sides, the wind was coming in the wrong direction at both, so we took the favor of familiarity at the dock we normally use. It was tough getting out of the breakwater because of the bad wind, but we eventually made it and sailed around the lake for a while.

We didn’t stay out on the water for very long, but we didn’t plan to pack a lunch or anything. I tried my best to re-learn how to read the wind while my dad piloted the boat. Overall there weren’t too many moments of panic, but I really do wish I had a small motor to get out into the water a ways before putting the sails up. It would be a great deal less stressful that way. This is definitely something that needs practice. Perhaps in the end, the lack of the motor will make me a better sailor.

After we pulled back onto the hard and tore down, we went back to my parents’ house and I had some leftover chow mein. I was so tired after I ate that I came home and fought sleep with some Overwatch for a while. A few games in, I got a text from Mayra inviting me over for some lasagna she made. She was there with Armando, her cousins, and a couple new guys from AT&T that I had never met before. I hung out there and watched them play PS4 for a while, then came home to sleep.

Until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore, you will not know the terror of being forever lost at sea.

Keep On Lifting Me Higher and Higher

Expectations…

Today was the day I was supposed to get a lot of things wrapped up at the junior high, and I got really aggravated when everyone seemed to jump at other jobs rather than help me again. It really seems like this is a trend, and I don’t understand why. Maybe I’m perceiving it wrong, but it feels like I’m quick to offer help, and last to receive it from certain people. Zach and I got the lift and ran a bunch of cables for the choir room, but didn’t get to the band rooms with just the two of us there. What we did run, we never actually finished.

Most of us went to Arby’s for lunch, where I had one of the worst examples of an expectations versus reality that I’ve ever had. It wasn’t quite Bikes Blues and Barbecue rib eye sandwich level, but it was pretty bad. It tasted good, but it was dry and the presentation was just awful. In fact, looking back at it, I’m positive the guy actually gave me something completely different from what I asked for. Apparently I wasn’t the only one with that experience either. To be fair/grossed-out, he did tell me he wasn’t feeling well because he had been sick.

Sad, sad reality…

Allen came to help me after lunch, but we really didn’t get anything accomplished then on account of the band practicing for a parade in the afternoon. I finished up some things in the building by myself before we got to leave work early at 3:15 to beat the parade traffic. I ended up going back to the office for something, then chatted with Ben for quite a while.

I was waiting for Josh to come over so we could go to Conway, and ended up stopping by the Boys & Girls Club to see Becky’s computer lab setup there. We talked for a while there until Josh got to my house, and I raced home to pick him up. He showed up dressed to the nines, so I broke out a button-up shirt and jeans for a night out.

We went to Best Buy first to spend some expiring credit I had. They happened to have a relatively fair price on a cable modem I had been eyeing, so I picked it up for no money out of pocket. Josh was just glad I didn’t get the blender I was contemplating. Afterward we went to Chipotle where I was accidentally shorted on the steak in my burrito. It was already so full of other stuff that I didn’t bother fussing over it, and it tasted awesome anyway. After we ate, we walked around Walmart for a bit before the movie.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle was pretty good. I’m still kind of surprised that neither of them came out in 3D, but I guess it really is kind of going away as a fad. That really upsets me, but I guess the changing market and how people consume media has decided the fate of 3D for me. Like tonight, it’s not uncommon to go to see a movie on the weekend in a mostly empty theater.

If it’s windy tomorrow, we sail!

Cafeteria Food

I had my wellness checkup this morning. Apparently I’m down 10 pounds from last year, but I definitely don’t feel like it. I don’t even know why I’d be down at this point. Most of the time I actually feel fatter for no particular reason. The Soylent typically makes me feel pretty good though, so I guess I’ll stick with that. I guess I could give up food at any point, but I still use it as a social event.

Ronda sent me an email this morning inviting me to have cafeteria salads with them for lunch. I got a bit lost in the cafeteria until Hobby pointed me toward the adult bar they had in the side room. I ended up filling my container almost entirely with salad from the kids’ bar, and then went to the adult section and crammed even more in it. They had some kind of chicken and cheese hash brown bake, some chicken salad sandwiches, and pinwheels of some sort. It was actually a pretty decent spread for $3.60. We ate in the library, then chatted for a while after.

I ate the remainder of my salad before I left work for the day, then came home and played some Rocket League with Josh. I’m more than a little disappointed with the rank I earned last season, and I didn’t realize the season was already over. I’ll have to make more of an effort this season.

Moovie Night needs to happen again soon, but I have too many hobbies, and the internet is just such a warm blanket of laziness.

The End is Nigh

I had a great deal of trouble waking up this morning. I felt super drunk or hungover or something, but I hadn’t had any alcohol for days. It was just a weird form of grogginess from sleeping weird, I guess. When I did finally get up and out, I spent a little time bouncing between buildings before settling in at the junior high. I’m getting really close to finishing the deployment.

After lunch, the freight company delivered my tower speakers to me at the office and I loaded them into the back of my car. I was really surprised not to have to give any ID, or even have it delivered at the proper destination. That, paired with the fact that they were content to just hold on to my package until I called them didn’t fill me with a great deal of confidence, but the journey was already over.

Jason came to the junior high with me afterward, and helped me run a couple more lines. Friday will be spent up on the lift to finish up. I need to talk to the teachers to confirm what times I can get in and out.

When I finished at work, I came straight home and unloaded the speakers. The kitty litter worked surprisingly well to clean up the vegetable oil that had spilled a few days ago, and I got the speakers into the dining room. I’m completely out of space at this point. I’ll have to do some major rearranging to make this work.

I tried playing Battlegrounds and Overwatch, but didn’t have much luck with either. Hopefully I’ll get some decent rest tonight.

Everyone thinks they’re the exception.

The Shrinkening

I got up this morning and decided to go out for breakfast, which I hadn’t done in a long time. I had a free breakfast reward from Chick-fil-A, so I got their Hash Brown Scramble with chicken nuggets. I thought it was pretty decent, but probably not worth nearly what they charge for them. Freebie wasn’t bad, though. For my $4, I’m actually kind of getting to the point where I’d just prefer a Soylent.

I’m down to the last few teacher computers at my office to deploy, but I still have a handful more that I have to get from the shop for some of the administrative folk. At least the end is in sight. I ended up skipping lunch because I wasn’t hungry until late, and I filled up with an afternoon coffee instead.

After work, I went to my parents’ house for dinner. Mom was late getting home from work and frustrated from having been switched to an iPhone by my sister, so we went to Morelo’s for Mexican. I ordered what I thought would be a smaller dinner combo because I wasn’t super hungry, and ended up gorging myself trying to clean my plate. If I were to play this smarter, I could probably take advantage of a shrinking stomach.

Once home, I did a load of laundry and wasted the rest of the night on Reddit.

She don’t got a lot to say, but there’s something about her.

Mellow Monday

I spent all day at the junior high today. I didn’t really stress too much over anything. I only got a couple new computers deployed, but got several more pre-staged and ready to go. I’m almost done with the ones I have in my office now.

I took a slightly late lunch and went to Wendy’s to try out their Giant Junior Bacon Cheeseburger combo, and was quite pleased with the experience. At first I was a little disappointed in the size, but in the end it was a good amount of food for five bucks. I finished with some time left and decided to swing by Apex to see who was there. Eric is working out his last few days before starting at HP in Conway, but he’ll be commuting, so I’ll still have the chance to not ever see him around even though he lives in town.

After work, I went by my parents’ house to help clean up some fish soup, then came home to do another load of laundry. I found out my Play Store credit from doing surveys expires at the end of the month, so I spent all evening on and off browsing through the store to find the perfect few apps to buy with my $9 worth of credit. I’m still stuck around $5, so I’ll have to obsess over it some more tomorrow before finally choosing something I was eyeing early in my selection process and ultimately feeling buyer’s remorse after the purchase.

Such is the life of an obsessive.

Sunday Done Day

I slept pretty well last night after such a long day. I probably should have gone to bed earlier to avoid waking up so late, but at least I felt well rested. I had a brief inkling of ambition toward cleaning the house, but as usual I squandered the day away to who knows what.

I got out of the house for dinner at my parents’ house, but found myself frustratingly unsatisfied with the shrimp soup my mom made. I’ve found myself in a trend of getting unnecessarily annoyed or aggravated any time I go to my parents’ house, and I don’t fully understand why. A part of me thinks it’s the anxiety I get from driving across that part of town and the broken nerves I get when I expect to run across the wrong person along the way. Another part of me wonders if I just see too much of the past and how I don’t feel any progression in their lives as they’ve fallen victim to a lifetime of routine that I’m trying my best to avoid falling into myself. All I know is that I feel overwhelmingly unhappy when I visit sometimes, and it doesn’t necessarily have anything at all to do with either of my parents. I actually really enjoyed having them over to watch an entire movie the other night. I think it’s just an unfortunate combination of a lot of different things.

When I made it back home, I did a couple loads of laundry to bring today at least a little bit of accomplishment. In the middle of that, I found one of my containers of vegetable oil had sprung a leak in my garage. I transferred the oil to a different container and spilled oil everywhere in the process, but I got most of it cleaned up. Fortunately I had some old kitty litter that soaked it up perfectly. I guess I’ll get rid of all that oil I was keeping, since the fry oil diesel vehicle dream is dead in favor of having fewer things.

Maybe I’ll have friends again when it’s cooler.

Bikes, Blues, and BBQ 2017

I got up early this morning to meet Allen and some people he invited along to Bikes, Blues, and BBQ. For some reason I was actually a little surprised to see Kristen there with him. I guess just like him, I’ll never learn.

They had three friends meet us at the First Assembly of God, then we took the interstate to Ozark where we exited to take the Pig Trail north to Fayetteville. It was so incredibly hot, and when we weren’t stuck behind an 18-wheeler, we had freshies along to slow us down. Overall the ride was pretty frustrating. For a bit of relief near our destination, we stopped at a hipster McDonald’s where I was greeted by a girl literally training customers to use a self-ordering kiosk that will eventually make her position irrelevant.
 
Once we got to Baum Stadium, I found they had traded up Wild Bill’s $25 refillable aluminum souvenir cups for Ozark Mountain stainless steel tumblers that were nicely painted with a BB&BBQ logo for the same price. That was a purchase I definitely didn’t hesitate to make. From there, I bought a $9 ribeye sandwich that was a solid two steps below cafeteria food. It started off as a really shitty cut of meat that was served bland on a cheap white hamburger bun. That was it. That was the whole sandwich, wrapped in foil. I didn’t realize until halfway through that they had a condiment table with just the very basics like ketchup and mustard, but at that point I had already convinced myself to enjoy the childhood reminiscence of stuffing the last half of a simple bread-and-meat sandwich into my mouth to finish it in one bite. Wholly unsatisfied, I visited a different vendor and was recommended some brisket nachos that did not disappoint.

After I finished eating my nachos by myself, I wandered through the vendors looking for the gang. It had gotten so hot by that point that I was just dripping with sweat… and probably cheese and barbecue sauce. Somehow it wasn’t just completely miserable, though. Once we finished at Baum, we rode down Dickson Street for one of the guys that was with us. Throughout the trip, he seemed a simple man with a questionable moral compass and an overall negative attitude, so it didn’t help when the rest of us were ready to go home instead of walking Dickson. He claimed not to be a drinker, but I don’t see the draw to Dickson for any other reason, especially since he didn’t see any of the tits or ass he kept expecting to be hanging out on the street.

The rest of us headed back home straight down the interstate for the sake of speed, but it was such a boring drive. I still had a bit of a headache from the ride up there, and the sun was just unrelenting. We stopped by a Braum’s on the way home, and I had a surprisingly reasonably priced strawberry shortcake sundae that was really good.

In spite of everything wrong, I had quite a bit of fun doing something..anything with real life people. I made it home with a new stainless steel insulated tumbler, a free beer mug, a Geico backpack and cotton candy colored sunglasses, and a wicked suntan. I call that a success.

New Lights album, tho…

The Life of Piscine

Work left me exhausted today. We started out making more Chromebook carts before going to CJ’s for lunch. When I got back to the junior high, Ben was waiting to help me run cable, so we ran a total of three relatively long runs. I was drenched in sweat from the humidity, so I came straight home. Julie called me on my way home to invite me out for dinner for Andy’s birthday, and explained why she hadn’t invited me previously. I was too tired to go out anyway.

After they ate, my parents came over because my mom thought I upgraded my speakers again, but I explained to her that I had only ordered two more towers like the four I already have. She seemed unimpressed, so I put on Life of Pi to let her watch it with 3D and theater sound. I love that movie, and though confused, she seemed to enjoy it as well.

Tomorrow is Bikes, Blues, and BBQ with Allen and some of his friends, so I’ve got to manage some sleep somehow.

I like watchin’ the puddles gather rain.

If I go crazy then will you still call me Superman?

I just wasn’t feeling it this morning. Or most of the day. I got several machines deployed and fixed some other things, but for the most part I just wasn’t into any of it.

I took a late lunch and went to pick up my Nanoleaf Aurora and Rhythm upgrade module for which I paid way too much. It’s neat, but holy shit. These are features that should have come with the original device out of the box for the original $200 I paid. No way is it worth a $50 upgrade module. I feel mostly stupid for buying it, but it’s kind of neat.

After work, I just came home and watched Man of Steel. Superman was always my superhero growing up. I loved Christopher Reeve in the old movies, and I loved this version as well. I even loved Superman Returns, and evidently many people didn’t care for it.

As the movie ended, Josh wanted to play some Rocket League, and I got on to play with him after I worked out a massive leg cramp. We couldn’t catch a break to save our lives, so I called it early to get ready for bed.

You took for granted all the times I never let you down.