Tag: cleanup on aisle 5

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The Princess Is in a Cooler Castle

I had to take an alternate route home this morning due to railroad construction, and then the extra traffic on the way in to work very nearly made me late. I spent all morning with Brice doing the cleanup work orders at Oakland. Allen came by and helped after taking care of something else.

Ben brought smoked turkey for lunch, so I had to run to Neighborhood Market for my side. I brought potato salad and rolls, because I didn’t realize Jason was bringing some kind of cheesy potato salad type dish. Both people in front of me in line paid by cash at the self-checkout, which was stupid and slow. Why do people use money?

The afternoon was more of the same, with the addition of Amanda and Jason for a short while. Summer and Ben stopped by after Mark stood them up for their meeting, but I couldn’t really help them. Ben let us have a working lunch, so most of us left early. I ended up going to the high school to drop off some things first, where I got caught up chatting with Bryan for a minute outside. I didn’t realize higher level administrators had the same number of contract days that we have.

I stayed super late in my new office, hooking up one of my speakers and contemplating a desk move. Then I went home and started water changes in all of the aquariums before having to pick Eaddie up from karate. We went by my parents’ house without any real plan, where we ended up eating some leftovers and doing puzzles. Eaddie was doing them on her phone, while I put together a 3D castle that Dad pulled out of the closet.

We headed back to Summer’s pretty late, and I was so exhausted that I just crashed there. It took my house a frustrating hour to cool down four degrees, and I don’t know if it’s the weather, or if there’s something wrong with the new unit, or if it’s just not designed to be shut off for long periods of time. In any case, I need to spend some more time at home now to take care of all of this stuff. I just feel like I’ve been run over by a school bus.

“And at the end of it all, my only regret is not spending more of my life working for a living.”  –nobody ever

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The Humidity of Our City – Our Ciiiity!

I scarfed down an apple fritter on the way home this morning, and was greeted by another dead A/C unit, presumably full of water again. At least the house had cooled down quite a bit, so I was able to get ready for work without too much additional sweat. I was running a tiny bit ahead, so I proceeded with adding the new shrimp to the kitchen aquarium. Dad showed up just before I left for work so he could house-sit while Dependable replaced my central heating and air. I figured it would be a few hours, but it ended up taking all day long.

Jason decided to take a look at the high school sign with me, which took quite a bit of walking and driving back and forth across the campus. We ended with the assumption that the outlet is bad, or at least giving dirty power that’s causing some issues. Everything else seems to be working correctly. When we got back to the shop, we loaded up with some cable and went to meet Heather at the junior high to pull a couple lines. I thought I had it down to the foot, but I ended up being super short and lost one of the two cables in the ceiling, so we had to finish after lunch.

Allen and Gary wanted to go to Bocadillos for lunch, but didn’t want to wait for me to get back to the shop, so I had to drive myself down to Dardanelle. The food had been better, and the salsa tasted like it had started to turn. To top it all off, I was charged double for my drink, and my mangonada cup was served super messy. I managed to make it home to check on Dad though. Bác Vân brought him lunch, but I felt bad that he had to sit in the hot house all day. I really had no idea it would take that long, and I didn’t leave him anything to keep entertained. I really should have just taken the day off myself.

Back at work, Jason stayed at the shop while Heather and I finished re-running and terminating cables. Then we ended the day with some battery swaps and a cooldown in the office. That’s when the rain finally hit, and it really poured. I wasn’t willing to wait it out, so I ran to the car, splashing through the flooded parking lot, and made my way home.

Baby Bye Bye Bye!

The guys were just finishing up with the equipment and needed to test the thermostat. It was a bit upsetting that they didn’t seem to have a clue how to use the Nest thermostat since Dependable is a registered Nest Pro. I had to set the thermostat up myself after plugging it in to a micro-USB cable to quickly charge it back up after they cut power at the breaker for it last month. They had enough other stuff to finish while we waited for the charge though, and eventually tested everything successfully. It took the house a few hours to cool down from the peak of 89 degrees, and the unit didn’t seem to be very fast at all. The air coming out of the vents was just barely cool, and the outside unit didn’t blow as hot as I expected. I was just happy to have something going though.

When Summer and Eaddie finished what they were doing, they came to pick me up and we went to my parents’ house for some leftover phở. We sat there for a little while before going back for my car. They went home and to sleep while I cleaned up a couple things at the house, and then I joined them for another night.

So much to catch up on now…

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Lessons in Procrastination

Uncle Giao brought the whole family down yesterday and we missed them, so I went to Bác Vân’s house first thing this morning to catch them on the way out. I don’t even remember the last time I saw Erika. I don’t know if it was premeditated, but seemingly out of the blue, Bác Vân handed her seldom-driven car over to Nova since she’s old enough to drive now. Then they were all off.

Back in my house, the betta I had in the kitchen died overnight for no obvious reason, so I brought out the test kit and went through everything I could test. For some reason I’ve always had really acidic water, but I think the nitrates are what ultimately done her in.

When the girls got back from lunch with their father, I met them at my parents’ house so Summer and I could eat. They all went swimming for a bit while I ran home to start cleaning up in preparation for a new air conditioner and furnace installation tomorrow. Since there weren’t any other large critters in the aquarium, I did a huge 80% water change to prepare it for the new shrimp. Summer stopped by to help move the kayaks across the garage, and I completed clearing a path to the furnace. All throughout the day, I fought with my portable A/C unit because it kept filling up with water, so I’m particularly excited to have a working central unit after tomorrow.

The girls came back over in the evening, and we went to my parents’ house for dinner. We were there for a while before heading back to their house for the evening. I’m not super thrilled to go back to work tomorrow, but I’ve got to spend some time there moving in to the new office if I can only break away from group non-work for a day.

I’m likely to freeze out the house after tomorrow.

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Be Happier, and That’s an Order!

I woke up around 4am and couldn’t go back to sleep for a long time. I felt like I just started to doze off a little bit around the time I had to get up. Ben had his little chat for us and basically told everyone to get along better and stop having poor morale over our pay. I hate that the district’s response to that is that they’ll help us find new employment if we don’t like it.

We loaded the trucks up and took two groups to Oakland to rehang touch panels. I’m pretty sure at least one of the rooms we hung had a newer projector, so it aggravates me that they didn’t even attempt to change the bulb before removing them. I guess I’ve just got to learn to ignore the stupidity at this point, but it’s just so damned aggravating.

Summer was running around with Ben schmoozing local businesses, and invited me out to lunch at Fat Daddy’s. It must be so nice to be appreciated by your employer.

After lunch, I kind of got left behind in the shop, so I spent the whole afternoon just chatting and sifting through Dale’s old Google Drive. It won’t be long before I have to dig right into the 1:1 laptops, and I couldn’t be less excited.

I went home after work and spent a bunch of time cleaning up. I took care of the cat, fish, cleaned up the kayak and put it away, and finally headed up to Summer’s. I beat her and Eaddie home, so I started cleaning up a salad with chicken strips. When they got in, we watched an episode of Parks and Rec, and I watched just a little bit of Into the Spider-Verse while they showered before bed.

Alright, let’s do this one last time.

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Bring the Heat

We got up this morning and Summer mowed her lawn while I went home to get laundry started. It was so hot inside that I had to fire up the portable air conditioner in the bedroom. I only got one load of laundry done before I got super hungry for lunch, so I came back up and made some big chicken and fruit salads for us. I mostly wanted to clean all of that stuff out of the refrigerator so it wouldn’t go bad, but the salads turned out awesome.

We both slowed down quite a bit after that, but I had to get back home to continue with laundry. While I did that, I got some other things cleaned up, did a little vacuuming, and cleaned up the big Pioneer speakers I brought home the other day. I was able to vacuum the speaker domes out without any trouble, but I did notice one of the tweeters was ripped. I couldn’t tell by listening though, so all was well.

After a while, Summer came over and mowed the lawn while I finished up the last of the laundry. Then she went home and I took a shower before heading back up to her house. All total, I did six big loads of laundry. It got so hot and humid in the house that it was just miserable, and it wasn’t forecast to get much cooler in the evening. I’m ready to have a new central unit installed.

When I got to Summer’s, I cleaned up some more salad and we watched a couple episodes of Parks and Rec before bed.

Ready to drop the bass.

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The Good Househusband

Summer had to work today, so I got up and started trying to make myself useful. I cleaned out her refrigerator and threw away a bunch of food that had gone bad while I cleaned up the last of the chicken tacos we had that one time forever ago. Then I made her a huge salad with everything I could find. Radishes? You bet. Strawberries and mango? Bring it on! Just a dusting of coleslaw mix? Crunch it up! I fried some chicken strips at the last minute so they’d be hot, and took it to her on my way home.

I stayed pretty scattered once I got there, but I still managed to get a lot done. I cleaned up the laundry room, did dishes, got my work shirts washed and put away, and even spent some time going through some old stacks of receipts and paperwork. It got pretty uncomfortably hot, so I took a cold shower and then met Summer at Walmart to shop for dinner. She invited Alex over for dinner, so we picked up some ribeyes, fries, corn, and even a big cake that was marked down.

We had a little time to relax before Alex would be over, so I let the steaks sit with their seasonings for a while. About 30 minutes before he got there, I started getting everything going. The steaks and corn turned out really good for being cooked over a gas grill. The fries fried up nicely, though I did get a bit of a burn due to a lack of a fry basket or metal scoop to lower them down into the oil. Even the cake was moist and delicious.

Summer and Alex went back and forth with stories about work while I just kind of sat there looking pretty. I was pleased with how all of the day’s food was presented. Now the trick is to clean out as much of the food in the refrigerator as we can before we leave for the week.

Bare-foot with a big, round belly.

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Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels

Heather met me at the junior high this morning, and we ran around working on a few of the individual work orders I had collected last week. It wasn’t much, but she did at least get to open up a computer to pull out a power supply. We, or I, should probably be going over some of them with more urgency, but summer is nearly here, and I’ve lost a lot of steam. Jesica was in town for a meeting and wanted to get lunch, so I met her at Stoby’s and we caught up a bit.

After lunch, I went to the high school and helped Dale out by doing a stack of keyboard bezels. Then we brought two more carts full of laptops to the office and stowed them away under the bins. It was tiring, boring, and thankless work, but evidently I have to do it now. I did pull a quarter out of one of the card readers, but I’m sure if anyone from central office had seen me earn that bonus, they would have relieved me of it. At one point we did get a little bit of excitement when Paul burst into the office asking what our IP was. After some digging and looking at the snipping tool clip of a screenshot he printed on paper, I discovered he had gotten a popup regarding a reset password. I was relatively certain he was crazy, but I gave him a couple pointers and sent him on his way. He came back just minutes later and asked us to come take a look at it, and left in an audible huff when Dale told him we were too busy at the moment. I honestly think there may have been tears. It must have been remorse for not paying attention, or not having a damn clue.

We left at the end of the day, feeling vaguely accomplished. I went home and tried to clean up a bit through a headache I had been incubating. I spent a bit of time on the aquariums, less in the kitchen, and a bit more on the computer. I’ve got to get things ready for the trip, but my travel anxiety is already well on its way. I ate my leftover beef spud from last week when I got home, but after wandering around the house for a couple more hours, I worked up enough of an appetite to run to my parents’ house for some more leftovers. They were watching Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves on TV, and they both had forgotten we had watched it before. It was one of my favorite movies as a child, and I thought we had the VHS, but it’s possible we had borrowed it from someone. I never remembered much of it myself for some reason, but I sure remembered those fire arrows!

Back home, I wound it down pretty quickly and headed to bed for a long sleep.

A snake, a snake! Snake! Snake! Oooh, it’s a snake!

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Three Meal Day

We had three meals planned for today, so we had to get up in time to squeeze them all in. First it was Honey Bunches of Oats in maple bacon donut, and then chicken and waffle flavors. The maple was good, but I couldn’t catch much bacon other than the little flecks that looked like bacon bits stuck to the donut Os. The chicken and waffles had at least a bit of the fried chicken breading flavor. Both were good, and I’d eat them any time.

It was finally Eaddie’s day to learn how to mow the lawn, and Autumn was made to follow her around in case she got sucked into the blades. Summer and I watched an episode of Battlestar Galactica, and I fried a few fresh corn chips followed by some chicken strips for sandwiches. My sandwich was probably about three times the size I needed, but they were super delicious on the assorted bread bag we picked up. I guess Eaddie worked up an appetite mowing, because she ate two sandwiches and then another handful of strips. Autumn skimped as usual, even on a super plain bread-and-chicken sandwich. At least they successfully took turns mowing their huge lawn.

I finally picked myself up in the afternoon and headed home while Summer went to the gym. I was exhausted and wanted to nap once I got there, but got myself motivated enough to move some fish around, and then to mow my own lawn. I still love my battery powered lawn mower so much, and had even more juice left at the end of this round than last time. My back yard has grown up really badly though, and I need to burn all of the yard waste that’s back there soon.

Dinner time rolled around and I wasn’t hungry, but I knew I wasn’t going to be any more use at home with as tired as I was. Summer had the leftover chicken tacos warming up, so I went up to her place to catch the tail end of dinner. I couldn’t help but eat a number of tacos again, and then she let the girls stay up late to watch an episode of Parks and Rec with us. Then we watched a couple more without them before heading off to bed.

You just have to believe in your placebo!

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People That Do Things

I sort of halfway got to sleep in just a little bit today, but it wasn’t much. The girls went home while I showered and got the bike rack mounted. I had forgotten how heavy and cumbersome that thing is, and it makes me wish I had a better way to store it than boxing it back up in the retail package. It really is the most secure, uniform shape that way though.

Noah and Eaddie stayed behind, so it was just Summer, Autumn, and myself again heading to Little Rock. We went straight to Dick’s and met with Ryan, who I had spoken to over the phone. He threw the bike up and checked the breaks and a couple things, but evidently didn’t tighten the handlebars or air up the tires, and one of the valve stem caps was missing. Of course we didn’t notice any of this until we got home and tried to ride them.

While in Little Rock, we tried to find somewhere to go for lunch and ended up at Hooter’s right around the corner. The girls kept being super apologetic about how slow they were and how behind the kitchen was, but I honestly didn’t really even notice it at all, especially for a Mother’s Day crowd. Autumn thought she could handle the heat of the wings, but she ended up struggling to eat. Summer lucked out and got a free salad for Mother’s Day.

We stopped in Conway on the way home to get the last bike. As we walked into Dick’s, we found they had lost power, so they let us shop around under the emergency lighting. Taylor met up with us and tried to talk me into biting the bullet on a new bike for myself with his n+1=x where n is the number of bikes I have, and x is the number of bikes I need. I passed, deciding instead to hoard my money for another day.

When we got home, I ordered some Domino’s for dinner and picked it up on the way to my parents’ house. Summer took the kids to her mother’s to visit for a bit on the way, and eventually we all made it to dinner with my parents. Julie got her own broccoli crust pizza from Brick Oven. I mostly ate salad, but had a slice of Hawaiian and a slice of Julie’s chicken bacon ranch that wasn’t bad. After we finished eating, we went outside and let everyone try riding the new bikes in the street a bit. That’s when we found Summer’s had not been put together completely, or at least not tightly enough.

They headed home, and I took the bikes home to try and clean out the garage enough to store them. I managed, but only because of how much junk I had that I could rearrange. Trying to store them with another vehicle in the garage will prove to be more difficult unless one of those vehicles is a Miata. Time will tell, I suppose.

Kleer the mind.

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Roller Coaster! Of Blooooooood. (say what?)

The Catapult Health Clinic was at the middle school today, and I had my visit scheduled first thing in the morning. They seemed to be running a little slow, so it took me a few minutes to get in, but it wasn’t any worse than going to my doctor’s office. The difference is that they had me do all the paperwork right there with them while they sampled my blood. That’s about the time that shit got cray.

My first blood pressure reading was 188/122. I’ve never paid particular attention to those goals, so for me it was business as usual. The second reading was 170/111, which was more than 10 points off of the first reading, so I got a third at 186/127. That’s when a different nurse came over with an alarmed look on his face. He called the first girl back over and asked what they should do, and she replied that the video chat nurse would probably just talk to me about it. After a brief wait to go behind the video chat curtain, a nurse practitioner video chatted with me and brought up a warning/disclaimer to call my doctor immediately.

I went to Oakland to do some work and told the girls about my experience, so Leslie took my blood pressure again at 183/114. Nearly an hour later, I had relaxed it down to 174/114. I was less concerned, but already coerced into calling my doctor. I could have gone in right at lunch time, but I was already hangry at that point, so I scheduled a visit for 2 in the afternoon and went with a big group to lunch at Western Sizzlin where I had an incredibly unhealthy salad. It could have been better.

After lunch, the doctor visit went relatively well. They had renovated most of the building, and pretty well removed my old doctor’s name and replaced pretty much every comfort of familiarity. I hated watching the reel of healthcare advertisements in the lobby. At least everything else looked cleaner and less dingy than before. The first nurse got my blood pressure at 160/90 in both arms and said it wasn’t that bad, and blamed the high numbers on the auto-cuffs we had used all morning. A short wait later, the ARNP came in and basically said the same, but then followed that she was prescribing some low dosage blood pressure medication. I’ve officially made it to the stage in life where I’m kept artificially alive. Also, I have ringworm.

I went straight back to the junior high after my visit was over, and had Chrystal take my blood pressure again. She had a manual cuff like the doctor’s office, and came up with 182/110, which served only to confuse me more. Convinced that Death was following me around, I continued on with the rest of my day. Summer left to go to the gym, and I took the girls to Walgreens to pick up my prescriptions before going to my parents’ house for dinner.

My parents seemed not to be too concerned with me getting medication, and leftovers were good. All I had left to do was research my new drugs.

Until I got home.

Bulk item pickup day apparently didn’t include tires or televisions, so both were left in my front lawn. The CRT TV chassis appeared to be split open, so of course it fell completely apart as soon as I touched it. The glass immediately shattered, half on the grass and half on my driveway. I would have preferred to sweep it off of only the driveway, but that would have left me feeling less defeated. My new, concerned neighbor laughed at my response that I was okay, but contemplating life.

We’ll try again tomorrow.

Blood pressure’s like a roller coaster baby, baby. I’m gonna die.