Tag: cleanup on aisle 5

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Battle of the Bulk

Summer and I got up this morning and started shuffling things in the garage. After some debate, we decided to get rid of the chest of drawers that has been rotting away in the garage due to some water damage. Then we got rid of some larger pallets from the shed out back, and moved some of the smaller ones from the garage out into the shed. There was a nest of some kind of flying ant-looking bugs out there, and they didn’t seem to be eating up anything, but they just went everywhere when we disturbed them. I just left the shed open all day, and they moved on out.

By the time we got the majority of everything out, we had worked up an appetite for lunch, so we loaded up the girls and went to Smackin’ Wings and Things. I guess I had slightly forgotten how high that place is, and I outright refused to get Autumn the 5-piece chicken strip meal she wanted for $16.49(!), especially since she was the only one of us that had already eaten something in the form of two leftover soft tacos just minutes earlier. Instead, we had them split an order of 20 boneless wings, and Summer and I shared some Curious George fries. We still didn’t get out the door for under $50 after a tip, so I hope at those prices even the servers get paid a living wage.

After we ate, we took the girls home to clean up and mow the lawn while Summer and I loaded their old mattress onto her car for a trip back to my house for bulk item pickup day. I was pleasantly surprised with how well it rode up there, and we made it home without incident. I continued to clean up and started some laundry while she went back home.

Eaddie wanted to go to an Among Us real-life game with her boyfriend, what’s-his-face, so Summer dropped her off and then came to visit me for a while later in the evening. I felt pretty tired, and was surprised to see how early it was by the time I was winding down for bed. I’ll take the sleep when I can get it.

Seriously, for $2.75 more we could have gotten a dinner buffet at Brown’s.

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Crouching Cow, Hidden Cable

Autumn had a carwash fundraiser with the explorers group this morning, so Summer dropped her off while I got up and around. When she got back, she and Eaddie wanted to go to New China, so we went out for lunch before continuing on to shop for some jeans for Eaddie.

I dropped them off at Maurices while I ran home to get some unused parts to return to Harbor Freight and Lowe’s. Then I met them back at the store as they finished up. From there, we went to Lowe’s while Eaddie stayed in the car. I returned my stuff, and then Summer and I went back to look at the tile and stuff.

Autumn was finishing up around that time, so we went to pick her up at Dairy Queen. Then Eaddie went on a bike ride while Summer took Autumn home so she could go out with Harry, then went on to the gym. While everyone else was away, I took the time to clean up a bit more in the garage, and then climbed around in the attic a bunch to run a new sensor wire and controller for the garage door. It took me a while, but so far it seems way more responsive than the Momentum camera system I’ve had up.

Eaddie eventually came back home and I needed a break, so I came in and started watching The Winter Soldier. I didn’t intend to watch the whole movie, but Summer got back right as I started it, and became interested enough to finish it. When Autumn finally came home, Eaddie and I ran to Taco Bell for a super late dinner. Then we watched another episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Eaddie stayed up a little later watching Invincible, which took a bit to catch my attention. I don’t know how serious I’ll be about watching the whole series, but I let it take up a few minutes of my time before going off to bed.

He’s just going to extort you and do that stupid head-tilt thing.

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It’s Curtains for You!

I went in to the office for a little while today, then got a call from Brody to help with something at the junior high. We only sort of fixed that for Matt, then piddled around with some print issues in the library until lunch.

We decided to try Whatta Burger after having possibly not been at all since I started working there. They had changed the decorations again, replacing the generic pictures of hamburgers with some squidly kites. The menu boards and POS systems were all new and lacking any character at all. The burger was fine, but the fries were pretty lame. For a $10 lunch deal, it hardly felt like a deal at all.

After lunch, I spent a good amount of time hunting for my bead curtain. Ben hid it somewhere, and I couldn’t tell whether he played some camera trickery on me. There definitely didn’t seem to be any place for it to hide in that storage room where he originally hid it. I was able to recover my pirate flag, but no curtain.

I was supposed to go by Mark’s after work but forgot in the process of getting the girls ready for karate. Fortunately he called to say he had to leave work, so we’d have to schedule another time anyway. I dropped the girls off, then went to the Neighborhood Market for some extras to dress up one of the school pizzas that Brody brought back for us.

Once I got to Summer’s, I started cooking some bacon and putting the dryer back together. The part went in super easily, and I managed to get all the screws back in the right place. I did put the drum in backwards, but it was symmetrical anyway. The pizza turned out pretty great, and was completely unrecognizable with everything I added.

The girls trickled off to showers and bed, and I headed home for the evening hoping not to lose any more Doge. It definitely hit a low where I was losing, but popped right back up within minutes. It just made me wish I was better prepared to begin with, but now that the money is in the account, trades can happen without any fear of missing out.

Rollercoaster…. of Doooooge.

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I’ve Been Framed

I went to high school first thing this morning and helped Mike finish up his printer swaps. Summer was feeling a little down, so I took her to Brown’s for a late lunch. While we were there, a lady next to us spotted my work shirt and asked why the school board fired our superintendent. Then she laughed at my “politically correct” answer. We continued talking for just a little bit, and she said I looked familiar. I don’t recall meeting them before, but they knew Dad and Julie from the plant.

After lunch, I stopped in to chat with Ben for a little bit about the weird day of disabling your boss’s accounts and building access. Then I went on to the junior high to spend some time with Brody. He didn’t really end up needing much from me, but I did have to fix some print issues in the library.

I got the girls from the high school and took them home so Eaddie could go ride her bike. Autumn did her homework and then came out into the garage with me while I poked around. Eventually I came back inside and started reframing posters to put up on the wall.

Just after Summer picked them up to go home, I realized that I couldn’t find the centerpiece poster of A Journey to the Center of the Earth. I could swear I actually framed that picture at some point in the past, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I also discovered they had shipped me the wrong Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland poster. After three years, I’m not sure I’ll get any resolution, especially after they closed their shop of physical posters. They just posted on Twitter that they’re coming back as ETFs, of course, but they appear to be limiting the availability to only four different posters, with a price of 0.05 Ethereum, which is currently around $120 USD. I don’t intend to pay that much for digital artwork, so hopefully if they won’t send me the missing/correct posters, they’ll at least offer a digital copy I can print myself.

Always check the package.

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Gotcha Gotcher

I swung by the high school this morning to make sure Mike was around for testing. Once I confirmed his car was there, I continued on to the office. It was pretty quiet without anyone in the front area with me, so I put on some music and tried to get busy. It wasn’t long before Mike wanted some help swapping some printers, so I went back across town for the rest of the day.

Lunchtime, again, arrived much quicker than I expected. I met Zach, Gary, Greg, and Brody at Slim Chickens and tried one of their sandwiches. It was pretty good, but it was a paltry serving of fries. Again, the thermostat inside the dining room was set to Arctic Tundra.

I went back to the high school afterward and finished up with Mike. I think he wants some more help tomorrow as well, so I may stop in first thing. At the end of the day, I loaded up a bunch of stuff to bring back to my new office. It was super windy outside, and half of my stuff nearly blew away. It took me a while, but I got everything moved.

I stopped by my parents’ house to drop off my old dryer vent for Dad on the way to get the girls from karate. Summer was already at home cooking chicken for salads. After I ate, I disassembled the dryer to find the pulley wheel had completely melted off. I ordered a new one while Summer helped Eaddie with homework, and then I went back home to finish cleaning up my laundry room.

As bedtime approached, news broke that our superintendent had been terminated. That makes two of three. The money guy’s still there, presumably because we’ve got to be paid. I hate to see that happen to anyone, and he always seemed perfectly kind to me, but poor choices had already been made. The die had been cast.

The school bell could not be unrung.

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Where’s Curtain?

I had so much trouble going to sleep last night that it was a real surprise making it to work early today. Ben enjoyed my I Know What You Did Last Summer Recently picture so much that he made his own Where’s Waldo Curtain picture to tape over my door. Melinda was gone and left me with a gift bag of snacks and a single-shot dart gun with a pile of foam darts; mostly pink.

It was a quiet day, because Zach was off and Ben left to cover testing at Crawford. Greg and I were the only two at the shop for a while. Gary was in and out. I had some work orders assigned to me, so I just took care of those for most of the morning.

Lunch time approached surprisingly fast. I convinced Gary, Greg, and Josh to go to McAlister’s with me so I could redeem my free entrée. I should have taken a picture of how pitiful it looked. I got the Pick Two with a cup of soup that was only about two thirds full, and a sandwich that hardly had anything inside of the bread. For ten bucks, I would have been super mad. For free, I just sort of felt like I was on a diet.

After lunch, I continued work in Jamf, trying to enroll that new iMac. I finally asked Gary for some advice and we pretty well decided it was just an OS incompatibility for being so new. Ben and I chatted for a little bit after work, and then I headed home to get Autumn to her Explorers event in Dardanelle.

The internet was in and out for a while, so we had to let Eaddie into the garage from her bike ride. After dropping Autumn off, I came home and continued packing things into my cabinet and cleaning up the garage. Summer came by to get Eaddie, and once the sun went down, I moved inside to try and clean up the laundry room. It gets a lot slower as the things I’m organizing get smaller.

I finished the evening trying to find some arrangement of picture frames that lined up well enough to not notice minor height differences. Next time I’m staggering them purposefully, because inconsistency in mounting hardware height is stupid.

It’s like triangular marketing.

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Hanging Out Fishing

Summer and I got up late and went to Zaxby’s for lunch before she headed home. The lobby was finally open again, so we dined in just in time to get our food before a big lunch rush. When I got back home, I cleaned up and Dad came over to help finish the dryer vent line. We foamed up around the duct inside the outside wall the best we could. Then I had to cut one of the ducts again because we managed to spin the 90º angle pieces around so it made more of a twist coming out of the laundry room, landing it about an inch closer to the outside wall. Once that was all hooked up, we tested the dryer and then taped up the joints to seal it up.

With the dryer project finally complete, we moved a whole bunch of stuff around in the garage and filled up the cabinet again. We swept up and organized a bunch of big, obvious stuff, and then I decided I wanted to run the garage door opener wire through the wall. Doing so would also allow me to hang a cork board right above it. This project ended up taking quite a bit longer than I expected, because the wall was filled with insulation and we couldn’t get my magnetic line close enough to the hole I drilled in the wall. We ultimately had to go to the shop to borrow a proper fish stick, which did the trick.

We weren’t done hanging things then, because I still wanted to re-hang three pictures in the living room where only the one was hung before. After a bunch of measurements to make sure everything was as precise as possible, we discovered the hangers on the back of the picture frames weren’t installed at a consistent distance from the edge of the frames. Fortunately I think one of my other frames is a little closer to what I need, so I’ll swap it out later and use the old frame somewhere else.

By then it was pretty late, so Dad went home and I went up to Summer’s for a quick salad and brat dinner. The girls were home and doing homework, so I pretty much ate and ran so I could clean up a bit more in the house before bed. Past Me had the foresight to pick up two clearance rugs to go in front of the washer and dryer, so the old deteriorated one will likely find a new home either in the garage or in my office at work.

Come on, be a good doge.

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That Thon, Th-Thon Thon Thon

Summer left early this morning for the RussVegas Half Marathon. I set an alarm so I could get out to meet her at the end, and made it early enough to hang out for a little bit and then get a picture of her actually crossing the finish line. We walked around the train depot area to take a couple pictures before making it back to the cars, and then we went to Las Palmas for her recovery lunch. The service was pretty absent, but the food was good.

Afterward, we came home and she cleaned up and crashed in front of the TV while Dad came over and helped me seal up the hole in the brick outside. Once that was caulked in, we had to let it dry and moved to the other end that went into the laundry room. I still needed foil tape and wanted to try and find some kind of flange or boot to put against the wall, so we went to Lowe’s and then Leonard’s without any luck. We ended up just going to get some of his old sheet metal, and cut out a piece with a hole in it to tape to the wall. Since then I’ve seen some flexible tape made for flashing that I may like to find in order to seal it up a bit better.

With that done, we had to leave the foaming for later, since we couldn’t really get into the inside wall without disturbing the caulk job. Dad went on home, and then I came in to watch a movie with Summer. I warmed up some leftovers for dinner, and then we watched The Shape of Water, which had far more frontal nudity than I expected for a love story between a woman and a sea creature. Otherwise I thought it was a pretty good movie.

Summer continued to fall asleep on me while I browsed YouTube for a while, and finally went to bed. I scoured the official photos from the marathon for her for a while, and eventually had to save the rest for later so I could get some sleep.

I think I’ll sing it again!

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The Doge Days are Over

I slept most of my way through Thursday with a pretty steady 103ºF fever, body aches, and fortunately a lesser chill than I had during true COVID and my first Moderna shot. It still hurt to move, or to sit wrong, or to adjust, or to lye in one place for too long. I still couldn’t get up and do anything, or watch TV, or really bother staying awake. By Thursday night I was hungry enough to eat some real food, so Dad brought me some leftover chicken and scalloped potatoes.

I woke up Friday having finally broken my fever and chills, but after trying to continue with my morning routine it was clear that I wouldn’t be much use at work, so I took another sick day. Summer came over after taking Autumn to school and laid with me for a while. It was Melinda’s last day, and I didn’t want to miss sending her off, so I made it out of the house to meet everyone at Morelos for lunch. Ben pulled a quick one on us and paid for everyone. Then I headed up to Summer’s for a while since she was still feeling pretty rough.

It wasn’t long before I had to get Autumn from school. She got her phone back from Summer’s office after a paltry week without it. When we got home, their father was there to pick up Eaddie for the weekend. Autumn had previously volunteered for an event this weekend, but backed out so she could go as well.

Summer and I eventually made it back to my house for the evening, and she watched TV while I shuffled around in the laundry room. I was still working out some aches, but felt good enough to push myself a little more, so I got the dryer vent duct cut and temporarily placed. All we have left to do are a few finishing touches to seal everything into place, and then I’m ready to do laundry again!

Dogecoin has been on a tear, jumping from when I purchased it at around 4.6 cents to just over 49 cents. It felt really surreal to watch it keep climbing over the two days I was stuck in bed sick. Unfortunately I was too optimistic to cash out at its peak, but I still came out plenty ahead. It’s hard not to make snap emotional actions when you can make or lose hundreds of dollars in just a few seconds, but at this point I have enough of a buffer that I can afford to ride it out a little longer.

Wouldn’t mind another run at a dollar, though.

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It’s a Brick…. House

I had trouble sleeping last night, and woke up in the night with a really sore left shoulder. My only guess was that it was from moving the workbench around in the garage. I ended up snoozing a bit late before getting up for work. Somehow I managed to make it in on time, but as soon as I got settled in, Zach asked me to cover testing for Josh so he could go fix a door.

I went to the middle school and found him in the library, then walked over to the fifth grade side to much fanfare. They didn’t need me for anything, but they were still excited to see me. Once Josh got back from removing the pebble that was holding the door open, we went back to the middle school library to image some computers and fix their printers.

Brody had called me several times already by this time, so I went to the junior high next to help with something there. He’s got some super weird gaps that I can only explain away by his youth. This is what happens when we obfuscate file paths and directory structures.

That got is through lunch, so we headed back to the shop just in time to see Zach and Gary had already left for BFD. We caught up and had lunch with some of the lesser service I’ve had there. Then I spent the afternoon at the shop working on the iMac.

After work, I took the girls to Summer’s shop. On the way we spotted a red Model 3 that looked to be the performance edition that I want. The red was much darker in person than I expected, but it was beautiful, even with its older chrome accents. From there, I headed home and started drilling out holes in the brick of my house. The larger drill bit wouldn’t stay in the drill, so I had to back off to a smaller one.

By some stroke of luck, I was just about perfect in my placement, and Dad came over with a hammer and chisel to knock the brick out. The test duct I stuck in the hole slid in with a little resistance, but then the new vent we bought slid in perfectly with just the right amount of wiggle room. We still didn’t have enough time to finish the job, but we finished the hardest part. All that’s left is to finish the run and seal the outside of the house.

This is Not a Drill: It’s Hammer Time!