I’m Yellin Timber

I woke up really early today after a long night, and didn’t really feel the need to go back to sleep. I made Summer a coffee when she got up, and she eventually pushed me to get cleaned up so we could go to the store. She wanted to make Chicken Florentine, which appears to be capitalized for some reason. She and Eaddie set up the Christmas tree while I was in the shower, and then Summer and I went to Walmart to shop around a bit.

I was pretty hungry, so the first thing we did was stop and try the new Krispy Krunch Chicken inside the Walmart. The chicken strips were awesome, but the jambalaya was pretty dry and lackluster. Once we finished there, we picked up some Dirty Santa gifts for her work parties, and then got stuff for food.

We stopped by the old house on the way home so I could feed the fish and grab a few glasses out of the cabinet. Then Eaddie started baking some pumpkin muffins when we got back. Summer cleaned up a bit around the house and then helped with the baking. It was a little late by the time they finished, and Summer had to sit down for a little while and wanted me to try and execute her dinner plans.

I wasn’t thrilled with that since I wasn’t really excited about the meal anyway. Then we realized she had forgotten to pick up sundried tomatoes. It hadn’t been a very good day, and this just made me crankier, so I decided I wasn’t cooking.

After a while, Summer got up to cook herself, so I prepared to go back out to the store. Just as I was getting dressed, I heard the loud crash of the Christmas tree falling behind the TV and smashing at least one ornament into shards all around the area and into the back of one of my subwoofers. I spent a while cleaning that up, and we eventually disassembled everything to throw the tree and its broken stand away.

Dinner was actually very good, though the amount of cream in the sauce nearly caused me trouble. Eaddie’s muffins turned out pretty sandy, but I think she was at least taking those to school so they shouldn’t sit around the house. The girls went to bed and I stayed up for some peace to myself before bed.

Talk to me, ooh-ooh, talk to me.

That’s No Mop

Summer had a 5k this morning, followed by some work in Conway. I got around to cleaning up the laundry room so we could move the spare refrigerator there. Eaddie left for Fall Fest with Eli, and I just stayed behind and mopped that one room nearly a dozen times. Summer bought one of those spinning mops, and I had an absolute fit with it. The handle was too short to begin with, but then it kept sliding down as I would try to scrub the floor. The bucket didn’t hold enough water to get very many passes in, so I just kept soaking up the floor a bunch and then pulling that water back up.

At one point, the spinner broke and I had the worst time trying to rip the thing apart. I nearly ripped it apart in anger and threw the thing away. I did eventually get it back together and got into a little bit of a groove with it, but I still think it’s inferior. It’s impossible to scrub the floor with it. The mop handle itself is just insufficient.

The water got between the wood tiles and kept coming up through the cracks for the rest of the day. Dad came over to help me move the refrigerator, and Eaddie and Eli showed up just in time to help manage the doors while we twisted the refrigerator through the door. Then Summer showed up while Dad ran home to get a set of standard Allen wrenches. She disappeared to unwind while Dad and I got the treadmill apart and moved to the office.

Summer got the fridge cleaned up and I put the shelves back in. It was already pretty late, but I was really hungry, so I picked up some Wendy’s. The girls behind the counter looked like they were having fun, but they were also being pretty inefficient. They got the food out eventually though. Eaddie was home by the time I got back, and chatted with us while we ate. Then everyone went to bed while I fought with one of our Fitbit Aria 2 scales that quit syncing weights.

I’m going to be furious if this refrigerator dies now.

Booked, Flooded, and Fed

I was early to work today, but then Kim texted right after eight to say she wouldn’t be there. Things were really quiet, and I stayed reasonably busy without distractions. The kids hit my car with balls multiple times after lunch, which made me pretty angry. The first time, one kid threw a basketball and it bounced really high before hitting my front-right quarter panel. After that, some kids were playing with a soccer ball in the field between the parking lots, and one of them lobbed the ball way high and out of the area where it bounced over a girl and then bounced on my hood multiple times. I don’t know what to do other than park in the elementary lot or possibly in the agri area and walk through the building.

At the end of the day, I spent about an hour on the phone trying to book a hotel for the conference. Unfortunately the Embassy Suites were booked solid, so I had to book at another hotel a couple blocks away. It’s going to suck not having meals and everything right there, but hopefully the weather will be nice enough to walk.

After work, I stopped by the old house to feed the fish and pack up some things for my computer desk. Just as I got to the new house and went in to ask Summer to help me unload, the skies opened up and flooded the driveway. It was clear we would have to start by cleaning out the drain pipe, and then come up with another solution for the water as it creeped up to the opening of the garage. The water didn’t stick around long, but Summer’s boards to get over the gap floated off.

Once the rain calmed down a bit, we unloaded and then went out for dinner. I wanted some steak, so we went to Western Sizzlin’. Summer had a pretty bad headache afterward, so we didn’t go to the old house to get the desk like I wanted. I took her home instead, and almost took Eaddie some food to the football game before she changed her mind. I dawdled on my phone for a while after that until I finally went to bed.

Don’t bother getting out of your rocking chair to tell me what I already know.

Pixel8ed

I slept reasonably well through the night, so I was surprised at how tired I was when I woke up this morning. I had another annoying shower, fighting with the hot water again. Then it was a McChicken Biscuit kind of morning for the drive to work. It was a bit of a struggle getting Kim to focus, which was especially bad since Denice was in the office for most of the day. Summer sent me a picture of the back of her car where someone must have hit it with something and gouged the paint a bit. She tried to look through the dashcam footage, but couldn’t find anything.

I spent my entire day working on VMware again, and with Gary’s help, I got my log files cleaned up, and everything was working again. I learned quite a bit, but there’s still so much more. They had a pep rally in the afternoon, and then school let out for a three-day weekend that I really needed.

After work, I ran straight to the new house to get my Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel Watch 2. I spent most of the evening setting them up, until the girls got home and I went out to find some food. I went to the Neighborhood Market to see if they had anything interesting in the deli. They did not. Then I went to Kroger and ended up getting some brats to grill.

Summer was asleep by the time I got back, so I ate by myself, tinkered for a while longer, and then finally went to bed late.

Every day, there’s something new.

Consoling

After being late yesterday, I was actually really early today. I backtracked to Wendy’s for breakfast this time, and still made it to work several minutes early. I decided early on that I wasn’t going to get any work done, all to focus on moving things out of my office and into the front office with Kim. I started by moving some things around in our storage room, and I think I might have a reasonable plan for how to make the storage more easily accessible.

I skipped out on lunch because ham and cheese wraps sounded awful. I survived on coffee and lemonade and stayed an hour late until I got almost everything out. There was still one set of cabinets with some toner in them, but I don’t even know what they went to, so I figured that can be a problem for Monday.

We decided to keep the television console, so I queued Kevin up again. I thought he was going to be later than he was, so I started to go get some food. He texted me just as I left the house, so I turned around and went to the new house to pick up my straps. As soon as I got there, I realized the girls never took them out of the Murano after they unloaded, so I had to go back to the high school to get them while Eaddie was at a football game. I met Kevin at his place since I was already right by him, and we took his truck to get the console.

The power was already shut off, so we were working in the pitch black. Somehow we managed to get it loaded onto the truck, and I grabbed the lawn mower as well. There were still a few small things to get that Summer didn’t grab, but I figured that would wait until the next day. We got the console and mower to the new house, and then Kevin took me back to my car.

I finally stopped at Arby’s for some dinner, just as it approached bedtime. I’ve been a constant state of exhaustion, and the Big Game Burger I got was kind of a disappointment. Summer was up and mentioned a centipede in the bathroom, but all she did was cover it with a towel and surround it with shoes, hoping it wouldn’t get away. Then she got confused about what kind of bug it was. In fact, it was a centipede, and we were lucky it didn’t crawl away. I dispatched it and then took a shower, taking time to clean a whole bunch of gunk out of the crevices while I was in there. Of course water went everywhere outside of the shower while I did that, so I had to suck that up with the Bissell too. It was super nasty.

Frustrated yet again, I struggled to get to bed for the night. It wasn’t entirely fair, nor was it entirely unfounded. It feels like another week gone by, and not much closer to feeling like home.

It’s just not my year.

You Don’t Have to Go Home

Somehow I lost track of time this morning after staying at the new house, so I was 15 minutes late to work today. I didn’t really accomplish anything again, because I was preoccupied with moving stuff out of my office. I still can’t believe they’re just fine with cutting my space in half. It would be a résumé-generating event if I hadn’t just updated it already.

Overall the day went by pretty quickly, especially the morning. There’s still a lot to move tomorrow, and if nothing else gets done, oh well. I messaged Kevin on the way home to see if he would be up for helping me move the last of the big stuff from Summer’s old house, and he said he could later in the evening.

I stopped at Casey’s for some free M&Ms before going home for a little while to charge. Then I stopped by my parents’ house for some phở for dinner before going to the new house to find Summer ready to settle in for the night. I motivated her to go to the old house with me so we could prep for Kevin, and Eaddie went to a Tech band concert.

We finally got Summer’s bed apart after taking out way more screws than were required. I honestly don’t even know if we’ll be able to put it back together properly. It’s going to be well and truly rigged at this point. The whole thing was really just supposed to slide apart.

Kevin showed up and helped me take two loads to the new house. We got the washer, dryer, and bed the first trip. Then Summer stayed home while Kevin and I got the deep freeze, kitchen table, and a couple other random things. Summer will have to go back for a little more, but unless we decide we want to bring a couple more cabinets home, we’re done. I just wish she had listed them for free so they could go somewhere useful.

After Kevin left, I hopped in to try the shower to get some of the sweat off of me, and I’m pretty sure it took a couple layers of skin. It felt like I was drowning the entire time, and there was no way to adjust the water pressure down. It was so high-pressure that it was difficult to change the spray pattern.

Eaddie and I chatted for a little bit while I did my stuff on the computer, and then I did my best to squeak into bed by midnight.

But you can’t stay here.

Eviction Notice

I had a fairly rough night and morning, and woke up hungry, so I stopped at McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin. The first thing I did at work was assemble another Chromebook cart for our own use, so I could give the one we were using to the library for checkout devices. It wasn’t much later that I received an email from the assistant superintendent that the superintendent’s wife would be needing my office next week, and that I needed to get things moved.

The front of the office looks better now, but there simply won’t be enough room there for everything we have to spread out at different times of the year. Time will tell, I suppose. We had a plate of mushy “tater tot casserole” for lunch, and some guys came to install more security cameras without anyone’s knowledge.

I left a little bit late and ran to the new house to meet John so he could quote me on another Wall Connector install. He suggested we might want to update the panel as well, so we may be looking at around $2,500 for that, plus another $1,500 for the charger. We don’t have time to dawdle, but we also still have to get the last of Summer’s stuff moved, and some drywall guys in to fix the ceiling. Nevermind actually having furniture.

After he left, I cleaned up a little bit outside and sprayed some bug killer after I found a huge trial of ants leading up the deck and across the side of the house. They were on a mission to get somewhere, and I wasn’t going to have it.

Once Summer got home, I replaced her shower head, and then spent the rest of the night feeling incredibly uncomfortable in the dining room. I just didn’t want to be there.

There’s no place like home.

Moving Time

I woke up reasonably early today, but in the back of my mind I still knew it wasn’t early enough. Summer started cleaning things up, but said she was waiting on me to be ready to leave. We eventually made it to my house after stopping to get her a coffee. We had to move a whole bunch of stuff that was in front of the front door, and shuffled some other stuff around to try and clear a path for the refrigerator.

We were late getting to U-Haul to pick up our truck, and then I had to switch us to a bigger truck so we could have a loading ramp. I don’t think she realized how much stuff we had to move, because we still left a lot of stuff. She left me with Justin and Jason to try and figure out my house, and then took Jason’s lady to her house to try and pack some stuff up there. It was a bit of a cluster from there, but we managed to load nearly the whole truck with just stuff from my house.

Our first stop was my parents’ house to drop off an extra grill. Then we made it to the new house and unloaded. The girls wandered off into the yard and left us to path our own way into the kitchen with the refrigerator. It got a couple of small dents, but I don’t think anything too visible. I don’t know how, because Justin and Jason were back and forth in my front doorway for what felt like forever. We ended up removing the door from the hinges and made it out.

Once we finished there, we went up to Summer’s to get her stuff, but evidently she hadn’t actually disassembled any furniture yet. We loaded a few things, but it was mostly wasted time with our help. We should have had things more ready to go for weeks now, and I just kept getting madder and madder.

We took one load of her stuff to the house, but had to go back for more after Justin left us. Then I had to run to my house for tools to unhook the refrigerator. We got it loaded up with her living room furniture, which we were only really taking so we could get rid of it. It had gotten so late that we ended up leaving the chest freezer, the laundry appliances, the kitchen table, her bed frame, the TVs, and an “antique” entertainment console that matched the rest of her furniture.

Jason and his girl left after we got the last of it into the house, and then I had to call U-Haul to schedule a later drop-off because Summer reached the Interactive Voice Response system and just gave up instead of waiting to talk to a person. Fortunately we were able to extend our time without any fees. We took her old sofa to “little” Jordan and left the chair by the dumpster, then got some gas and returned the truck.

Returning the truck took way longer than it should have because my phone nearly died, and they wouldn’t accept ultrawide photos. I took pictures of the truck about four times to get it done, and then the website cleared them and wouldn’t let me submit any more. After what felt like an hour of finagling, including several minutes on hold for some help, we finally got confirmation that our return was successful and we headed to her old house to pick up her car.

From there, I went to Zaxby’s for my first meal of the day, and sat in my kitchen floor to eat. The refrigerator water line leaked everywhere, so I also had to clean that up. Luckily it didn’t get to the carpet or the cabinets, or anything that was in the dining area. My car charger was still gimped to under 35 amps, and I didn’t have any of my things at the new house, so I just stayed home.

You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

Che Cazzo è Una Carbonara

I woke up pretty early this morning for how late I went to sleep, and sat on the couch for a while before going home to clean up. Once everyone was ready for productivity, I suggested lunch before starting on the house. Summer wanted calamari at La Villa, but that sounded awful to me. I tried to let them go themselves so I could get something quicker and get to work on the house, but Summer said they wanted me along, so I came up with some other options, compromising with Pasta Grill as a last option.

I should have just completely passed on the pasta, because just the idea of Italian threw me into a whole mood. I didn’t want a $60 lunch bill. I wanted something quick so we could get to work on the house. Time is running out, and I feel like I’m the only one that’s actually concerned about cleaning anything at that house. The girls are happy to pile their filth on top of the existing filth, and nobody is receptive to the idea of how to keep things tidy.

I made it to the house first, even after stopping by my parents’ house, because for some reason they had to go back to their old house to get the other car. Wasteful. Dad helped me place some wood in the driveway so Summer’s car wouldn’t scrape coming into the garage. Then I went inside to start cleaning carpets.

I had to empty the closet because Summer’s things were in my way. Then I had to take my vacuum home to clean it out, because Summer hadn’t noticed the inch-wide band of hair in the brush, or the fact that the cyclone chamber was completely caked with dust. I took it home and cleaned it thoroughly before coming back to the new house to vacuum. Afterward I shampooed the carpet in the dark because the light was blocked for over half of the area I was working.

The girls made a trip or two for things, and Summer started filling cabinets, which was something I specifically asked them not to do. I also asked them to sweep and Swiffer the hard surfaces when they got back, because they kept tracking dirt into the carpeted areas. For some reason, Summer did that last, after carrying things into the spare bedrooms. I’m constantly at wit’s end, and I don’t know how much more specific I can be when I ask them to do things. All I get is reflected frustration from them when I get upset that they did something wrong, and it just spirals downward every single time.

I guess Eaddie went home to do homework after dropping off some stuff. Summer finally cleaned the floors and then left. I went to my parents’ house for some mango soup for dinner before going to Walmart for some new silicone caulk. Then I stopped to get an air purifier that I forgot to get from Dad before going back to the house to re-caulk the shower again. The last stuff just never dried, but even the new stuff started to skin over and get lumpy while I was working it.

By the end of it all, I was tired, aggravated, frustrated, angry, sad, and alone. I locked up and went home, because that’s where I wanted to be.

I hate that Italian restaurant menus all just assume you know what the fuck they’re talking about.

In Longsight

I made leftover tacos for brunch for everyone before going home to shower. Summer loaded up some things to take to the house, and I dropped the clean bean pan off at Ridgewood before meeting her there. I didn’t really get into much before heading home to shower, but eventually met her back at the house with a few more things. I pretty quickly got frustrated with what cleaning she had missed and how she had unpacked things. I tried to get her to bring things over and let me help organize, but instead she just ended up putting things in my way constantly.

The afternoon flew by, and we ended up coming home late. I made some rice and fried some fresh onion to eat with the leftover brisket, and then she went to bed. Eaddie got home late after taking the Model S across town for most of the afternoon. I was pretty frustrated that she hadn’t really packed anything up from her room, but maybe I can get them properly motivated tomorrow.

Just follow orders.