Tag: cleanup on aisle 5

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Go Pro or Go Home

Today was undoubtedly the most productive day of the week. I woke up to a little Animal Crossing before taking Autumn on a ride-along to get $1 roast beef sandwiches from Arby’s. We stopped by to feed Summer at work, then went back to their house to eat with Eaddie.

When we finished eating, I set the girls up with the pressure washer out back and had them clean the side of the house and the deck. They didn’t stay outside very long the first time, and Autumn came in complaining about not feeling well. She immediately laid down on the couch and started watching Harry Potter while Eaddie complained that she didn’t want to be outside alone. I gave them a few minutes inside, then made them go back out for over an hour before I’d let them back in. They got a lot more done that time, and the house looked so much better.

I eventually had to run home to clean up, then stopped by Walmart to fill some gaps for dinner. Autumn wanted to try making a copycat Chick-fil-A nuggets recipe along with some homemade macaroni and cheese. Summer got back from work shortly after I got there, and Autumn got to work on dinner. I helped a very minimal amount while Summer and Eaddie went on a run. We ended up deep frying the chicken instead of frying it in a pan, and they came out really great. Everyone was really impressed with dinner, and baking the mac and cheese with some extra cheddar broiled on top was the right decision for everyone’s lives.

Afterward, I finished WALL-E with Autumn, then started an episode of Jessica Jones with Eaddie. We quit after just one episode because we were both really tired, but then she started chatting away, so I sat and talked with her for quite a while.

Earlier in the evening, Julie started asking for my opinion on a waterproof case for her phone. I suggested a purpose-built camera instead, arguing for hours that spending more on camera was a better value than spending less to protect a phone that also has a camera on it. In reality, the resulting photos or videos will probably be seen half a dozen times before they’re forgotten in the great digital cloud vault. Such is the nature of our instantly reminiscent age. She even ended up calling me after she got tired of texting, but in the end I won because I am so smart.

So, so smart.

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End of Quarantine

Today was the last day of quarantine for me, and Monday would start my turn at a week at work. We got up and had some grilled chicken for brunch, and almost ate a metal bristle from the brush Autumn used to clean the grill. Afterward we all sat around on our devices until eventually Summer and Autumn left to get some groceries for her parents. Then I went home to wait for them all.

Bác Vân was outside, and I decided to go out back to try and burn some brush. Everything ended up being way too wet though, so I just let it smolder and go out. The girls eventually came over and took their bikes out for a ride while I picked up around the garage. It was slow, but good progress. Autumn eventually came home before the other two because she fell into a mud puddle and got super upset about messing up her nice shoes.

When Summer and Eaddie got back, they came inside for a little while. Becky called me to catch up a bit, so I put together the bathroom shelf I ordered while talking to her. She had quit Asurion a while back, but got a part-time gig at Brookdale. The girls headed home after I got off the phone, so I picked up a little more and then caught up with them.

Autumn made bacon for them to all have BLTs while Summer did some OxiClean voodoo on the shoes. I warmed up the leftover steak, but was sorely disappointed by its ruined, tough texture and lack of flavor. I figured warming it up in the skillet with the bacon grease would enhance it a little, but it was awful.

After dinner, we watched the first episode of the fourth season of Glee. Then Eaddie and I started in on Iron Fist again. I just had to roll my eyes at some of the story, but overall it’s still been pretty decent.

Sure it’s a little qisy sometimes, but it’s not all bad.

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Divide and Progress

I tried not to sleep in too late today since spring break is officially over. Summer got the kids up, and we picked at leftovers for breakfast. It was a nice day out, so Summer wanted to take the kids out on a hike while I went home to clean up. They went to Long Pool for what looked like a really great time, and I took a long overdue shower.

They got to my house just as I was getting dressed, and then I sent Noah and Eaddie out on bikes while Summer went out for another 5k around the neighborhood. Autumn wanted to lay around watching TV, but I made her go outside with me to eat our sandwiches I made. Summer got back from her run about the time we finished eating, and then I started picking at stuff in the garage. Autumn even helped break down some cardboard for recycling because I wouldn’t let her go back inside to lay down.

It really was a perfect day for cleaning up outside, and the kids enjoyed getting out of the house again. I made two clear paths through the garage, so hopefully soon I’ll have room for parking again. Summer took everyone back to her house, and I trailed along a little later once I was satisfied with my stopping point.

I took Eaddie a Google Home Mini for her room since she worked so hard on cleaning and rearranging it. Summer finally got her Magic Bullet blender, and I warmed up some leftovers for dinner before she, Eaddie, and I snuggled up for some Glee until bedtime.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re awake.

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Dear Summer,

I envy that in all of your own troubles and pain and suffering, you managed to hold on to what I had lost so long ago in my own years-long wars. You seemed to earnestly believe that you could fall in love with prince charming and have everything fall into place so perfectly, and you fawned over me more than any person ever should. In that fantasy, you sometimes had trouble making things work in a practical sense, but your struggles appeared to be my strengths. For years upon years when all I wanted to do was die, focusing on practicality and making the day-to-day work was what kept me alive. Ultimately I felt like your emotional strength and devotion met with my practicality and wit, allowing us to grow stronger together, into a proper, functional family. What you felt was weakness in our differences, I perceived as strength in the breadth of our combined skillset.

It’s no secret that cynicism and sarcasm are my strongest and most prevalent defense mechanisms. I’m not so bad, after all, if everything else is awful too. I seldom speak those things as true and honest feelings, though I understand how someone could take them to heart. I doth joke too hard and too negatively, but it keeps me sane, I think. There are three truths to every situation: your truth, my truth, and the actual truth. Neither of us can ever truly know the truth apart from our own without some trust in the other, so I’m afraid I’ll never really understand the causality. Did my cynicism truly drive you away from me? Or were we never meant to last, and my darkened heart proved itself yet again in protecting me from further harm? After years of struggling with a very real addiction to Sarah and her emotional manipulation, I was left broken in so many ways. Not all of those wounds healed completely, and even if they did heal, you might not recognize them for all the calluses. I knew that I would never survive another trip through that level of darkness, and so in order to protect myself and my own family from what I understood as my own ultimate demise, I found strength where I could. I survived tonight because of how jaded my relationship with Sarah made me. And just like that, somehow I’ve credited that wretch for saving my life.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, unless you’re just left paralyzed, in which case everything pretty much just sucks. I would rather the end of our relationship be an inevitability, and credit my dark humor for saving me, than accept the thought that I drove you away with my own misgivings. I couldn’t let you into my heart quickly enough because I was terrified of exactly what happened tonight. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I wholly trusted a “completely innocent” interaction and later learned it to be the complete opposite. It’s literally my greatest fear in a relationship, and you knew this. Finding you having dinner at Umami with that guy brought me right back to ground zero, and I have to say I handled it like a goddamn champ. I didn’t want to revert back to that suspicious, jealous me that I had given up eight years ago, but there we were. Even if it was completely innocent to you, and you just needed a friend, it should absolutely NEVER have been some random guy you know through work that I’ve never even heard of. If it had been a male friend like Alex that you had known for years, I would have 1,000% understood. As it was, I knew that you had already made up your mind that I was old news, and it was obvious because that motherfucker ghosted you AS SOON AS HE SAW MY FACE. Even if you play naive again, he knew exactly what he was getting into, and for that, shame on him.

I never thought I’d be saying, “goodbye,” forever, but I think that is because I am an idiot. They told me actions speak louder than words, so I physically put myself into your home to make it our home, and my own house became a very strange place for me. Regardless of what idiocies came from my mouth, I continually tried to put myself where it really counted. It was hard and overwhelming a lot of the time, but I kept coming back because I thought it was worth the steep learning curve. Ultimately I guess you had bigger fish to fry. At least I was honest from the beginning when I asked if you were looking for Mr. Third-Time’s-a-Charm. I don’t need superficial symbols because I show my devotion with actual honesty, presence, and inclusion in family, and I expect my partner to respect me and mine well enough to verbally decline unwanted advances. It’s a pity you didn’t really want to be a part of mine, because they’re a pretty great family most of the time.

You can’t expect your boiled-over, emotional diatribes to function as productive adult conversations. I was very honest in that I knew I had a lot of growing to do. I knew it was going to be an uphill battle for me, and I thought that I had adequately expressed that to you as well. I suppose I could have done more to initiate the conversations, but who has the time when you’re busy parenting teenagers. Blame whatever you want, but at the end of the day you have to learn how to express what you’re feeling in some kind of meaningful way. You can’t outwardly express that everything is perfect and expect your partner to accept that with eager arms, then get upset over all of the combined little things. You literally went from “I would marry you tomorrow” to “dinner with schmuck” in a week’s time, and so for that reason, I’m out.

I just want someone to scratch my head for a while and tell me I’m not so irrevocably broken that I can’t maintain a real, adult relationship ever again.

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RoboBowl

Summer and Autumn left for a quiz bowl tournament at the junior high his morning, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I tossed around for a while before giving up and heading home to clean up. I had to wash my new towels before putting them away, so I split that up into two loads before taking a shower. Just as I was getting ready to leave the house, Doug came over from next door and asked me to come hook up his old DVD/VCR combo. He had the cable coming out of an input port, so it was an easy fix.

Summer had just finished at her nail appointment as I headed to the junior high, and we pulled into the parking lot at the same time. I went in with her to see the quiz bowl awards before we walked back to the gym area where Oakland was hosting a robotics tournament. Everyone had already packed up and left, and nobody ended up going to Fat Daddy’s afterward, so we ended up just going back home for the day.

Autumn and I went to Dollar General to pick up some pasta, but got sidetracked by a bunch of tables with miscellaneous clearance stuff. She accidentally threw hot pink powdered chalk all over my light button-up shirt, but luckily it mostly shook out. We picked up a few things and headed back so Summer could make dinner. Eaddie had finished, or at least found a bunch of her missing homework that was keeping her grades low, so we let her join us in watching a bunch of Glee before bed.

When we open the lab each morning, we tell the robot to kill.
It’s our little joke.
But secretly, we’re just afraid to tell it to love.

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Ode to Toilet

I felt like I just banged my head against the wall all day long. I hardly left my office, and didn’t even take a lunch, snacking a bit and sipping a late Soylent. I just couldn’t figure out why one of my new desktops wouldn’t image, or why two of my laptops won’t wake up from sleep mode. I ultimately made my way to the shop for the last hour of the day so I could chat with Gary about it, and ended up leaving the computer there to try again tomorrow morning.

When I left work, I went by my parents’ house and finished up some eggplant soup before Dad came over to look at my toilet. The closet flange was just too big for the pipe, but we didn’t want to chip out the foundation to fix the poor build. We went to Lowe’s and decided to try a non-wax seal first, but it ended up being too small to fill the void. It took another trip to get two wax seals to fill in the gap. We ended up replacing the rest of the components as well since we already had everything torn apart anyway. It took too long, and it was pretty unpleasant, but we finally got it all back in place.

As I finally got to wind down, I saw a whole team of guys playing Overwatch, so I stayed up a little late and joined in for a couple rounds before bed.

I don’t have time for toilet humor.

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Deep Diving

I didn’t really have anything new come in today, so I got to spend my time working on some older work. I started at the arena messing with one of their Crestron iPads. Then I tinkered around in Group Policy for a while because I couldn’t figure out why a printer wouldn’t deploy properly. I ended up heading back to the shop, but lunchtime snuck up on me. Gary and Heather were going to Taco Villa, so I tagged along and we brought food back to the shop. Then Gary helped me pick through my Group Policy issue. It all came down to a rogue space in the share name of the device.

Back at the high school, I finally got the Crestron app working after receiving a call back from our vendor. Then I ended the day setting up a bunch of computers in the field house. Autumn and her friend were at the high school for the Harlem Globetrotters, but Summer came to get them and I just went home.

Dad and I talked a bit more about my clogged drain pipe this morning, so I dug out an old, long piece of aluminum to shove down the hole. I poured some more boiling water down the hole to fill it up, and then shoved the stick down as far as I could go. It bent around the angled pipe almost perfectly, and I managed to clear the drain. I still wasn’t sure if there were any roots inside it, and the closet flange was still offset on the pipe, so I left it for another day. I ran by Lowe’s to check out some parts to fix it, and to pick up a windchime on clearance.

Heather had told me during lunch that the Globetrotters event was free for employees, so I tried going out there to check it out. There was a huge line of people, and none of the other employees I talked to knew anything about it being free or even discounted. I wasn’t even aware that it was a charity event, so that made me feel even less good about trying to get in. I ended up going home and doing more research on toilet repairs until bedtime.

Still not hard. Just gross.

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Rooting For You

We started testing today, so it was pretty quiet. It sprinkled for most of the day too, so I didn’t make it down to the field house. Gary had a few minutes to call me and help with some things I had been tinkering with, and I think I learned a bit, and maybe even proved myself a little.

I took an early lunch to meet Ronda, Steven, and a coworker of his at Ruby Tuesday for $5 salads. It was pretty quiet there today, but it’s possible that was just due to how early we were. I went by the shop for a little bit afterward, then went back to the high school in the rain.

I guess I was a bit too ambitious, because I didn’t quite finish all I wanted to before quitting time. I actually ended up staying pretty late, fighting with a replacement computer I deployed. I actually didn’t even finish, so I’ll have to check on it in the morning as well.

Dad left me a big, flat drain tape to run up under the house, so I met Summer at home to see what we could do. The girls sat in the car the whole time because I don’t think they realized how long it was going to take me. I ran the snake all the way up the sewer pipe without too much trouble, so I had to coil it all back up and go down from the inside of the house. It wasn’t too difficult in spite of how gross the toilet mounting bolts looked. They were so rusted that I could just about pull the whole thing straight up.

With the toilet out of the way, I could see a bright orange root snaking around the drain. Inside was a literal wall of cat poop, completely blocking the pipe. Water could only seep out the drain, and a lot of that was probably my fault for flushing dry cat poop out of the litter box. I’m about at the point that I’m ready to quit using that half-broken automatic CatGenie and go back to a regular box. I called Dad, and we decided to get Roto-Rooter back out to properly snake the drain.

I spent the rest of the evening cleaning up a bit, then went to Summer’s for the evening. All the extra work running around the house made me hungry, so I cleaned up some random leftovers and eventually made it to bed.

Well, shit.

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Hot Swaps

I made it to work a bit early this morning and went straight to work swapping out computers so I could take the older ones to the old fieldhouse. Other work kept coming in as well, making it a super busy day for me. Allen wanted to go to lunch, and was actually willing to go five minutes late because I was in the middle of working on something. I met him at Arby’s, and luckily found a pretty good meal-for-two coupon in my car.

After lunch was just as busy, but I was still mostly fighting with imaging the old computers I pulled out. I didn’t get them to the fieldhouse today, but I can have an intern help me tomorrow. When I got home, I started right away on cleaning the cat box. That’s when the trouble really started.

The toilet in my guest bathroom slowed down after a few flushes, and eventually stopped up almost completely. Gross water came out from the bottom, so I know the seal is broken. I spent a while cleaning everything up again, but I’ll probably try and pull the toilet tomorrow to see what’s going on down there.

The remainder of the evening went by pretty quickly as I parsed more email and skimmed through articles of varying interest.

The handyman can, ’cause he fixes it with tape…

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Tending the Dumber Slumbered

We got up this morning and decided on a cheapish Burger King lunch for the horde. Summer left for the gym, and after a bit I took the kids up to her house so they could shed their collective stench. I had gotten a call earlier in the morning that my final(?) pair of trial contacts had come in, so I stopped to get them on the way home. Then I spent the afternoon cleaning house.

I found myself getting bitter over the careless, wasteful, and generally unsanitary nature of the kids, but they’ve grown into their filthy habits without regard for the types of things that matter to me. I shouldn’t have much room to gripe on account of my own lifestyle, but so much of what irks me comes from a lack of consideration or respect. Sometimes I feel like I just have to step around them and ignore what they’ve done as I clean up after them, but ultimately it just makes me want them around less.

Summer eventually brought them all over again, along with a bunch of stuff for dinner. We left them here watching The Simpsons against my better judgement, while Summer and I went to Walmart to pick up groceries for New Year’s Eve. Hopefully it’s a fun time for everyone. We should have plenty of snacks, but I still think I’ll end up getting more vegetables.

We made salads and sloppy joes for dinner, then finished The Lord of the Rings saga with The Return of the King. Overall it was a better night than last. I even put together a shoe rack to bring some order to my entryway.

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.