Tag: family

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“Violent” Is in the Title

I was sent on a quest to Walmart this morning, so Summer could go to the gym and still have time to bake a ham for the Superfast Christmas potluck this afternoon. The light bulb aisle was frustratingly unorganized, and the choices weren’t really very good for a simple spherical vanity bulb. All of them had labels printed on the top, and weren’t frosted very evenly. I got what we needed though, and then made my way across the store for some foil and wax paper. I had to get help from an employee to climb up and fetch some wider rolls of foil, but I caught the case I wanted, to keep it from crushing her.

When I got back to the house, I took Eaddie to my parents’ house for bánh mì for lunch. Summer finished up the ham and went to the Secret Santa potluck while we were gone, and we all got back to the house around the same time.

Summer wanted to go see Violent Night, which shocked Eaddie and me a bit. Autumn didn’t want to go, citing “homework” while she spent all morning in front of the TV. My parents met us at the theater, and decided to join us instead of watching Wakanda Forever. I think Dad expected more humor than ultraviolence, but I thought the movie was great. The dialog was a little overly vulgar for me, but the violence was over-the-top enough to be humorous at times. Summer didn’t expect it to be so gory or violent, but we had to remind her it was in the title.

When we got back to the house, Eaddie wanted to make Oreo balls. Autumn immediately disappeared to her room, except to come out and gripe about laundry. Eaddie had also been trying to get video games going on their desktop computer all day, but never had much luck. I guess kids these days are just in the habit of using their school emails, and repeatedly make new personal email accounts any time they need one for something. I can’t relate, but we’ll need her to come up with a permanent one for many things in the near future.

Everyone made it to bed relatively early. With a band concert and up to three more Christmas parties, this week will be busy. I’m glad I’m not actually doing anything important for the holidays.

What kids have become, they are little junkies. They’re little shits!

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O Plastic Tree

The girls decided they all wanted to go shopping today, but they didn’t want me along. I went home when they left, and hung out by myself for a while. Summer suggested that Autumn should cook dinner, and Eaddie decided she wanted fish tacos, so they got stuff for fish, shrimp, and ground beef tacos.

I made my way back to them around the time I thought dinner would be ready, but they were just hanging out in the living room. Luckily dinner didn’t take long though, and we all ate pretty quickly. After we ate, Summer got the Christmas tree out from under the bed and set it up in the living room. I helped a bit because Autumn was just being a complete bitch the entire time. I rigged up some blinking lights for it, but I was short by one blinking bulb for the white tree lights. I guess the replacements were too low wattage, and kept blowing immediately.

Stop accepting that you consistently choose to make everyone’s life worse.

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Oh, It’s Friday

We had a meeting this morning to talk about how to tighten up our cyber security a bit. Overall, Gary has most of our stuff set up pretty smartly, but the whole system is only as strong as its weakest link, and we hire almost exclusively weak links. Zach split up a couple groups for some work that shouldn’t have taken much time at all, but ended up taking the whole day. Thomas left to go to a tech directors meeting to discuss the different districts that have become compromised around us. I was left to my own devices, which was mostly just boring.

I went to Dwight for a bit and got trapped in the office while they performed, as far as I could tell, an exorcism. I might have been more shocked if I hadn’t just had to deal with Autumn for the past two years, but at this point I’m an expert on crazy.

I got back to the shop right at lunch time, and Kyle came out to tell me that everyone was splitting up. He wanted to try Ridgewood, but I expressed concern that he likely wouldn’t get to order before his lunch break was over. A minute after he left to roll the dice, Greg and Josh came out of the shop and said they were planning to go to La Chiquita, so I drove them. There, our server was pretty awkward, but friendly. He got me a cheese enchilada instead of chicken, so I had him bring me another and just ate both.

After lunch, I had to go investigate Dina’s computer, because a bunch of people got phishing emails from her, and Thomas wanted to see if her computer was compromised. I neither expected nor found any evidence, but I also wasn’t sure what tools would be best for discovering any.

The rest of the afternoon was really quiet, but then at the last half hour, Kelsea came back to tell me that Burris finally showed up with furniture for the child nutrition folks. They were supposed to have it all done in the morning, so I had to send out a message to recall a bunch of guys to help finish moving them. On the way out, Zach parked the truck and looked pretty defeated by the door they had been trying to wire all day long.

After work, I hung out at home for quite a while, and spent my time between watching the shrimp, playing Phase 10 on my phone, and trying to get Disney+ to work on my TV. Summer made it home late, so I met her there while the girls were at some lights event downtown. It was a dull night until I made it to bed, an hour earlier than I ever do during the week.

Never once in step.

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Magic Hippies

It was a bit of a struggle to get up today, but I had to get home to shower before meeting my parents to go to the magic club’s annual potluck and Christmas show. We knew Autumn didn’t want to go, but Eaddie changed her mind after originally saying she would go with us. Summer picked me up, and then my parents drove. Phone games kept me occupied for the trip, but then we arrived at a mostly abandoned looking facility.

Larry invited a bunch of his church crew, which was a rather odd looking group of folks. Most of them arrived before anybody I recognized, and then the potluck appeared a bit sparse for that many people. The Walmart chicken was pretty awful, but at least there was plenty of it. At least I don’t think anyone went hungry.

The show was very typical, and then the cleanup went relatively quickly. We didn’t stick around, and loaded up to leave pretty quickly. We stopped very briefly at the Midland market so Mom could look for some stuff, but it was probably the shortest visit I’ve ever seen her make. I picked up a bag of rambutans and some lychee gummies, and then we headed home.

For feeling so tired, we actually got home pretty early. Summer dropped me off at home so I could bring the car back up to her house. Eaddie had Summer quiz her for a test, and Autumn had some laundry going that she left in the machine after I called at her to take them out. Otherwise it was a really quiet, early night to bed.

Fraking gnats, everywhere.

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One of Everything

Eaddie woke us up at four in the morning to be dropped off at the high school for an away robotics tournament. I got frustrated with her when she asked for food after we had already started driving the wrong direction for that, and then we tried two different gas stations that ended up being closed for the night. She ended up changing her mind about it, but then wanted me to drop her off to kill time by wandering around the campus in the dark. I at least got her in the building, and then checked up on her on camera once I got back home and into bed.

I didn’t let myself sleep too long though, because I wanted to make it to the Ridgewood Brothers for their soft open at 11. I got cleaned up, and Summer and I went across town. We were actually the second ones there, but I think the other lady might have been there the night before as well, so I was fuzzy on how the invites or events went out. Gary showed up a little while after we did, and came to join us. We were all really surprised there wasn’t just a line of people wrapped around the place.

They had a somewhat limited menu, but we definitely weren’t short on food. They could have just opened for regular price, and I would have paid it just to support them, but they were giving dine-in orders for half-off for the day. The one new thing I got to try was their new cheesy jalapeño rice grits. I thought they were fantastic, and could have started the day with a bowl of that for breakfast.

After we ate and finished socializing, Summer and I headed back to the house to get my yoke, and then went to Superfast to borrow some tools. They ended up having to buy a socket adapter that I would have had at home, but I didn’t have a breaker bar or a 10mm hex to go on the end of one. It took a little bit, but I ultimately got the wheel off with an air impact. I ended up swapping the whole front facia and using my OEM buttons, rather than separate the horn springs and whatever else was contained in the wiring harness. In the end, I thought it looked pretty good, and the experience of driving with a yoke was exactly like I expected: In no way better, but tolerable as a style choice.

We went to my parents’ house to show them, and they at least liked the look of it. We made plans to come back for dinner, and I took Summer back to the house so she could go to the gym. I poked around the house for a little bit, and tried to clean up some oil or grease stains on my hoodie from spending more than a couple minutes at the shop. Then I stopped by Walmart for bread flour, yeast, and a forgotten cucumber before heading up to get Summer for dinner.

Mom made egg rolls the other day, so Dad fried some up for salads. Eaddie was heading home on the bus the entire time, so we didn’t stick around too long after we finished eating. I dropped Summer off, and then immediately went to the high school to get her. We stopped by my house so she could get some things she had left, and I showed her my first three ice spheres from my new fridge. I was pretty happy with how they turned out, especially for the first batch.

Summer was making bread when we got back home. Eaddie chatted a bunch about her day, and then everyone was off to bed pretty early. Autumn made it home from Quiz Bowl, but didn’t bother to greet anyone before closing herself up in her room. I was absolutely heartbroken.

I feel personally attacked!

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Bro

I squeezed in a minute late today, but beat Tammy by nearly 20 minutes. Thomas was apparently out on some (possibly?) surprise trip, so Zach set the guys out on some projects after Gary had a spiel about how the high school is being stupid about their guest WiFi access. I didn’t have to do any of that, so I spent some time in my office for the morning.

After a little while, I started getting phone calls. Kayla was still having trouble with transcribing her time cards, and then one of my old teachers at Oakland called asking for some help with a display issue. I kind of wanted an excuse to go back over there anyway, so I did.

Brody wanted to eat lunch with us since he was finally off on Fridays. We met him at Zaxby’s, and he did the surprised Pikachu face when he saw me pull up in my Tesla. He said he hated his new job, and had an interview with Ryan for a network engineer job in Clarksville. I guess Ryan didn’t remember having lunch with him when we picked up the carts from Bentonville, otherwise he might not have gotten the interview.

After lunch, I went across the street to spend some time with Kayla. She was still super stressed over the time cards, and Rebecca wasn’t really any help with her payroll knowledge. I did some more tweaking on the spreadsheet, and tried my best to make her job as easy as possible before going back to my office to send out the CPPC agenda.

After work, I stopped by to see the Ridgewood Brothers, and they had the restaurant ready to roll, with tons of staff everywhere. I thought I was helping, but didn’t realize they actually had an event scheduled that evening. I went home to get a tablet, but got sidetracked by picking up my blood pressure meds from Walgreens, and then cleaning up my new fridge so I could power it on. By the time I made it back to the restaurant, they had two parking lots FULL of people.

I went back home for a bit before meeting Summer at Arby’s for dinner. Then we came home and waited for the girls to get there. They both had to get up super early for school events the next day, so they wanted to stay close by for a shorter drive to the school. Summer watched some TV in bed as usual, and everyone was off to bed pretty early, except me, who was not at all used to sleeping at home.

Of course my refrigerator has a firmware update. How could it possibly keep my food cold without firmware?

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Chill Day, Stressful Night

I woke up early this morning after very little sleep so we could get breakfast before we checked out of the hotel. I anticipated a crowd on account of the concert, but after stressing over Summer not wanting to wake up, we found the steakhouse to be relatively empty. Breakfast was good though, and we had our fill before heading back to the room to get ready for the day.

It took us a little bit to leave, since neither of us had a plan for the day. We ultimately decided to head toward home, and then I suggested stopping right inside Conway so I could go to PetCo. We ended up going through several of the stores in that strip mall, including Sam’s, Michael’s, and Ross. We even found a neat tabletop gaming store, and Summer picked up something to do for Christmas.

After shopping around for a few hours, we went to On the Border for lunch, and my chicken fajitas tasted completely unseasoned. The rest of the food was good though, so I made do with some black pepper. Summer finished her tacos pretty quickly, so they must have been a lot better than what I took home for leftovers.

After we ate, we went to PetCo and I picked up some ghost and “bee” shrimp to take home. Autumn didn’t get Eaddie from flute practice, so we had to make it back in time to get her. I had Summer drop me off at home so I could tend to the shrimp, but I guess Autumn gave Summer the wrong time to get Eaddie. Summer ended up coming to get me, and we went up to the house to unpack. I went back home in the Montego, traded some more water for the shrimp, and then took the Model 3 to get Eaddie and Maristella. We took her home, and then went back to my house to finally put the shrimp into my tiny, old shrimp tank. I’m hoping they enjoy cleaning up the algae that I can’t get under control.

Eaddie and I chatted, and headed on home for the evening. Autumn eventually showed up after karate, and predictably wanted to argue about who does the most chores around the house when Summer asked her to walk the trash down to the curb. Summer decided it was time to unveil my chore tracking spreadsheet, and suddenly Autumn didn’t care about seeing how much anyone did around the house. She just knew that she did more chores while we weren’t around than any of us did. I managed to steer that conversation into less hostile territory, and we’ll try to publicly track chores for a while to see if that helps.

Other than that, I spent most of the evening stressing out about my refrigerator delivery. I never got a call to schedule, but eventually Julie got a text with a two hour window. I touched base with Ben to remind him, and everything else was on the up-and-up. He offered to let me take his truck and a furniture dolly, so that mitigated my stressing over needing the Murano to tow a trailer while Summer needed a way to get to Cabot for the day.

The girls all made it to bed reasonably early, but evidently Eaddie was still up when I did a late-night model reset. She came out for a bit for some help getting reconnected, and then I did my best to get to bed before two in the morning.

Too distracting. This is my brain all of the time.

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Breasts

Autumn slept in this morning and didn’t shower like she promised, before going to get Eaddie and heading to Clarksville. This shocked nobody, and I was a little upset there wasn’t more screaming involved. It was a nice day without the kids though. I made ham sandwiches for breakfast, and Summer worked on the jigsaw puzzle for most of the day.

Eventually we got out of the house in the rain, and went to Walmart to look for turkeys on sale. They still had whole turkey breasts for a buck a pound, so we picked up five for me to practice smoking. They had enormous Butterball turkeys for 75 cents per pound, but I didn’t really want a turkey that large. We wandered through the rest of the store before making our way out, where I managed to wade through some pretty deep water in the parking lot.

We made another stop at Sally Beauty so Summer could pick up some tools for nail art, and then I got a McRib on the way back to the house. Once there, Summer took off to go to the gym and then I killed more time working on the jigsaw puzzle.

Eventually I made it home to start some laundry and shower. It took me a while to get everything sorted before the Eagles concert, but hopefully I got everything. I finally made my way back up to Summer around midnight, and it was off to bed.

Lot about birds, lately.

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Laundreaddie

Summer went back to work today. I eventually got up and toasted a very small ham sandwich for breakfast. Autumn left pretty early to go work at Tom E Tiger. Even Eaddie got up without me having to pull her out of bed. She kept wanting to know if I was leaving, and finally discussed me taking her to Maristella’s after she finished doing laundry. What she thought would only take her until about three o’clock turned into nearly six.

In that time, my greatest accomplishments were placing a curbside pickup order from Home Depot so Eaddie would have some better organization of her tiny plastic beads, and completing this year’s Cards Against Humanity Black Friday game. It was a series of captchas that I was fairly proud of solving, but I got stuck on an obvious one that kept me from getting paid to have them ship me a new storage box. I was still happy with my 43% discount though.

Summer got home just as Eaddie was finishing up, so we loaded up one of the tables and the chairs we borrowed from my parents, and I dropped Eaddie off along the way. I still hadn’t cleaned up the smoker, so I didn’t stay with my parents long. The cleanup was relatively easy, and I even prepped it for next time. Having gloves makes a big difference as well.

After a shower, I headed back up to Summer’s for the evening. She was watching Grease 2 while putting together the jigsaw puzzle, and then put on a Jo Koy special afterward. Autumn got home late, and Summer made her come sit in the living room with us rather than hide in her room. As soon as the special was over, everyone was off to bed.

Read: Laundry Dae

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The Host that Smokes

Summer spent all morning getting ready for everyone to come over for Thanksgiving dinner. We struggled to get Autumn to help as usual, and we’re just counting the days until we show her, imperically, that she’s not pulling her weight around the house. In fact, she’s completely delusional, as is often the case.

Summer really wanted to get a table and chairs set up early, so I took out some trash and dumped it at Dwight on the way, and brought back a big and little table, as well as chairs. Then I quickly made the butter and seasoning concoction that I would be injecting into the bird. I made it about a block down the road before I realized I forgot to actually take the turkey with me, so I had to turn back.

The smoker started reliably well, but I kind of forgot how foolproof it was and unnecessarily started it twice. It got up to temperature much more quickly than I prepped the bird. I wished I had done all of that at Summer’s where I had more room to work. I was in and out of gloves to get the grill set up, and then had trouble getting the drip pan in under the grates. I just needed to think my process through better before starting. My syringe clogged during my very first attempt to inject the first breast, but I was eventually able to clean that out and made it work.

The turkey seemed to be rising in temperature pretty steadily, but it was pretty clear it wasn’t going to be done by 4 when we told everyone we would be eating. I eventually had to crank the heat up from the already-high 295 all the way up to about 350 to finish it off, because I wasn’t sure of the accuracy of the temperature probe, and I didn’t think to use my wireless Meater probe alongside the one integrated into the smoker. Ultimately I lost the apparently cool part that I was measuring, and every other part I probed tested over 160.

Just before it finished, I glazed it with some of the leftover butter and seasoning from the injection, and mixed in some honey and bourbon. The skin was super crispy, and I think the glaze softened it up a little bit, but it could have also been the covered ride back over to Summer’s.

Mom, Dad, Bác Vân, and Doug were all there with the girls. Julie was somehow last after I told her not to rush on account of the turkey. Fortunately we didn’t have to wait any longer than it took me to carve the turkey, and we all dug in.

All of the food was great. Summer made a bunch of sides and a ham, and the turkey was at least done, and I thought it presented well. I thought it was a little bit salty, could have used some more smoke, and ended up not being as moist as I expected. I assumed that was all because of my cook time and temperature, so next time I’ll take much more care to start earlier. Hopefully we can pick up some more turkey on clearance in the coming days.

After we ate, Julie wanted to play a game, so the girls brought out Phase 10. She had to teach Mom how to play, and the game wasn’t entirely without drama, but I think most everyone had a good time while Dad, Bác Vân, and Doug watched from the couch. We played through more phases than I expected, and then everyone filed out relatively quickly. Summer was proud of how quickly everything broke down and cleaned up, and then she was off to bed while the girls started on another jigsaw puzzle before bed.

Less heat; more smoke!