Corn Dogs with Catch Up

I ran a little early this morning and made some coffee at work. Kim walked in a little late, but said she had been there talking to Toby, so who was I to argue? We spent a while chatting and catching up on work, the conference, and everything else. I didn’t get to focus on any big stuff, but I got her wrangled into closing some old work orders while I went to the elementary building to round up the spare Chromebook cart we had stuck in the closet there. I wish I could remember what I was planning to do, but inventory down there has been so scattered anyway.

I went to the old house after work and charged for a little bit while I fed the fish and took a little break. Then I went to Taco John’s for some dinner before heading home. The girls would be out late, so I just ate by myself and then started cleaning up in the living room. I plotted out the new couch setup, and I think it will be really nice in that space. In fact, I don’t think the 15-foot one we originally liked would have fit quite as well. It wouldn’t have been bad, but it just wouldn’t have allowed as much room to walk around it. Either couch makes the room feel small.

Slow your rolling tool chest.

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.

Electrifying

I had a really good Sausage McMuffin on the way to work this morning, and I was glad I did because lunch was a pretty small portion of a “walking taco” with a strange bag of low fat Doritos and a tiny scoop of meat and cheese on a big, plastic lunch tray. I didn’t really complete any big projects, but I jumped around a lot to figure out some new things that have been sitting in my queue for a while.

Dad spent most of the day at the house while the electrician was there running cable for the Wall Connector and then replacing the whole electrical panel. They finished up near the end of the school day, so when I left work, I went to the old house briefly to feed the fish before going home.

Summer beat me there and was cooking dinner. The floors were left a mess with drywall dust everywhere, but I had one mission on my mind, and that was to set up the Wall Connector. I got it mounted to the wall and started charging my car, and then we all ate a good dinner.

Afterward, Summer cleaned the floors, Eaddie vacuumed, and I cleaned up other stuff before getting Summer’s car turned around to charge. At the end of it all, it was a successful day.

Definitely haunted.

Pique Productivity

It was loud at work again today, with the girls chittering in the back office for much of the day. Kim seemed to be at least a little bit active, though I’m still not sure what she spends her hours doing. I mostly read up on Windows Deployment Services, since I only had experience with its bigger brother. I think my big win for the day was simply adding network drivers to the currently-deployed image. It still didn’t add the computer to the domain like I expected, but at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if that was simply never set up properly in the first place.

I went to the old house briefly for a quick charge and to feed the fish before going to my parents’ house. Mom made phở, and Eaddie came to join us after school. Summer was home with a bad back, so we didn’t bother her. After we ate, Dad came over to the house to help with a few things.

He had come to the house earlier in the morning to babysit the electrician while they got some wires started. While he was there, he poked around with a handful of things. One of those things was the wonky ceiling fan that needed to be re-mounded to the ceiling. Then I had him help me mount the back plate of the Tesla Wall Connector to the garage wall in preparation for another visit from the electrician tomorrow.

I did my best to wind down quickly after we finished all of that. The girls made it to bed early, but I’ve struggled to do that so far this week. I hate that it takes me so long to become hyper productive. I just need longer days.

Dig in and settle.

Wiped Out

I slept in a little bit this morning, but tried to get productive relatively quickly. It was difficult, and I wasn’t super successful, but I did get some things done. I ate some leftovers when Eaddie left to meet with her robotics team. Dad came over to help replace the refrigerator part, but that didn’t actually resolve the issue. John stopped by to let me know he wasn’t actually going to be doing any work today, which seemed like it could have been a text. I was pretty aggravated by that, but whaddya do?

I cleaned up some more leftovers for lunch after Dad left, and was frustrated some more just by things in the kitchen. Then I decided to shampoo a single strip in the office nook just to see if I could get any more dirt out. It ended up not being too bad, so I decided to move Summer’s desk up into that area where it was still dry.

By the time all of that was done, I had to sit down for an interview with a couple people in Wisconsin for Rockline. It was a pretty long-winded interview for me, and I wasn’t quite sure how much I would enjoy going to work every day, especially if I have to drive to Booneville four days a week. I doubt the price will be right, but we’ll see.

Summer made it home late while I was cleaning up in the kitchen. She bathed and I got some bills and other paperwork organized and out of the dining room. It wasn’t long before she was asleep, and I actually made it to bed on time for a change.

I could do with some cheese.

Bratty Satty

I woke up in an anxiety attack this morning and had a headache for most of the morning. I tried to get moving on something productive, but I just felt off for most of the day. I grilled some brats for lunch before Eaddie left to go to Eli’s for his birthday. Then I was going to clean the carpet in the small office nook by the bedroom while Summer went to get her hair trimmed, but then Dad wanted to come by and take a look at the old refrigerator.

We got the parts out, but couldn’t really test that they were bad. Based on the behavior of the compressor trying to kick on, I ordered a new start relay. After that, I finally got started on the carpets, very slowly. Then Summer got hungry and wanted Little Caesar’s, so she picked that up while I finished the carpet.

The night seemed to go by really quickly. I soaked in a bath for a while just to try and refresh myself before bed. Eaddie got home late, and Summer was already in bed. I tried not to stay up too late because I figured I had a whole weekend to make up on Sunday.

Back in the day, we had to browse the internet by candlelight!

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.

What a Miserable Wretch

I was incredibly sore again today after cleaning carpets for so long last night. Summer took some stuff to the new house and then brought Eaddie back with some lunch. Eaddie had a band thing in the afternoon in Cabot, so they loaded up some more stuff to take while I waited at the house for Autumn to come get the rest of her crap that she never took when we kicked her out.

Summer came back, and Autumn eventually showed up quite a bit later than she told Summer, which already aggravated us. Then she came in and had the audacity to ask for help, when all Summer has done for the past month is move her own stuff to the new house. When she finished, Summer asked her to take some old clothes she didn’t want to keep to Goodwill, and she refused and started yelling that we couldn’t tell her what to do any more. I kicked her out again, and hopefully that will just be the last we hear from her for a very long time.

Summer and I had another load ready to go, so we went to the new house and unloaded. I wanted nothing more than a shower, but then I decided to redo the caulk in the shower instead. I also caulked the tub since Summer had scrubbed around the tile. I got better over time, but it took nearly the entire tube. I was really glad I didn’t buy the small squeeze tube.

Summer went home while I did that, and then I finally went home for a shower. By the time I made it up to her house, she was dead asleep. I cleaned up a bunch of leftovers to get them out of the fridge, and then it was off to bed.

I guess we can blame inflation for the “Freshman 50.”

House Toad

As I was heading out the door, I noticed a little toad stuck in a sticky bug trap. I don’t have a clue how he got into the house in the first place. I get them in the garage occasionally, but this little guy was inside the laundry room. I got him out with some vegetable oil spray, and hopefully he’ll survive after I put him back outside.

Committed to showing up late to work, I stopped at Taco John’s for some breakfast to eat along the way. It was quiet in the office again, and I wasn’t having much luck staying focused. The big exciting thing of the day was when a security camera stole the IP of my virtualization server. Every day it’s something new. Fortunately I was able to track down the switch port of the camera, and shutting that down resolved my issue. I’ll wait until somebody complains to do anything more with the camera.

I skipped lunch because the “sloppy joes” didn’t look very sloppy or edible. Johnny called for some help with GoGuardian, and I tried to point him in a direction. It was tough not to just leave early, but I made it to the end of the day.

I changed and picked up some Hardee’s for a quick bite with Summer before getting into carpets again. She had been moving stuff for most of the day, so she was already tired. Our new Optimum router came in, so I got the internet going, and then I finished shampooing the rest of the master bedroom. Hopefully it’ll be dry enough to move some things in this weekend.

It was pretty late when I got up to Summer’s house. Eaddie stayed at the new house since her bed was cleared off again. The old house is feeling pretty empty except for a bunch of big stuff we need to move. I originally wanted to rent a box truck, but now I’m not sure it will be much help on account of how steep the new driveway is.

STROKE! STROKE! STROKE! STROKE!

Let’s Review

I was a shut-in at work again today, stuck in my seat, trying to figure out why I couldn’t adopt our gateway router. Out of nowhere, I got a call from someone at the Department of Information Systems about a support ticket they still had open from January. He indicated our link protocol was still dropping, and wanted to know if we noticed anything. I shared how broken things have been, and welcomed the help.

I also got a call from Jay, the Executive Sales Director at TCW, regarding the review I left them last night. He apologized and offered to refund the money, and even offered a free month of service if I wanted to give them a shot. I felt much better after that conversation, and after hearing that they could offer synchronous gigabit service for the same price I got from Optimum, I’ll really consider switching. Being a smaller company, I think their terms were just a little half-baked, but Jay indicated that I’d be welcome to talk to the engineering team, and that they could work with me on just about anything I needed.

After work, I went home to charge for just a little bit before going to the new house. I took the housewarming gift to The UPS Store for return, stopped at Wendy’s for a quick bite, and then got to work on carpets again. All total, I’ve finished about two thirds of the master bedroom, so I should be able to completely finish it tomorrow, in time to move some furniture this weekend. I’m less worried about the living room since we don’t know what furniture we’re moving in yet, plus we still have ceiling drywall work to be done.

I eventually made it up to Summer’s, just before Eaddie did. She came and sat with me for a bit when she got home, and shared some fight videos from school. I know they had a pretty rough class coming up, so I guess they’re here now.

Rereview