Tag: food

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Grommin Around

It was nice out today, so I decided to take the Grom to work. Gary, Amanda, and I were sent to clean up a few things at the middle school, and then Sequoyah and Oakland since Brice is out with the new baby. Heather met up with us out of the blue just as we were getting started, and we continued on all morning making the smallest bit of progress in the least efficient way possible. I did score a couple tomatoes out of the garden at Sequoyah though, and then it was nice getting to see my Oakland friends for a bit.

I was able to talk Heather and Gary into going to Taco Villa for lunch, where I scarfed down a taco salad with the house dressing. It seemed way too sweet today, so I think I should stick with my usual Thousand Island or cheese dip and hot sauce. I took the Grom since it was still super nice outside. It was less embarrassing than driving down the highway back to town when we picked it up, and though meager, it was super fun to putt around town. I stopped for gas at Casey’s because I wasn’t willing to risk my reserve to get across town to my usual Shell station. There, a kid stopped to chat with me about it for a couple minutes, which kind of reinforced how much fun I was having.

After lunch we were sent out for work orders, so I ran around with Gary fixing some networking issues that popped up after so much equipment was moved around for the sake of cleaning. I told him we should just let it be broken until we receive work orders, since being super proactive about it just creates more work for us and gives everyone else the illusion that moving things around without us is an okay thing to do.

Summer wanted me to take Eaddie to karate after work, so I ran by the high school to take care of a couple things first, then made my way up to their house. Eaddie was insistent that she didn’t want to go spar with the adults from Krav Maga since they “go hard,” so she convinced Summer to let her mow the lawn instead. I fried up some chicken strips for dinner so we could make some really awesome wraps with tons of spinach, avocado, onion, slaw mix, and anything else I could dig out of the fridge. Then we sat around and talked until it was time to head home for bed.

Got me craving that power between my legs!

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70s Pizza Party

We got up and around this morning to some leftover chicken tacos. They were so much better with the crunchy greens this time, and frying the cheese in the pan onto the tortillas made them that much better, and even a little more durable. Eaddie and I watched a little Daredevil while Summer went out with Autumn to get some things. Then I went home to clean up for our trip to Cabot.

I got frustrated when my brand new air conditioner only dropped about six degrees in three hours, but I didn’t have the temperature probes I needed to check how much it’s actually cooling. I left my still-warm house to pick up Dad, and then to get the girls for our trip to Cabot for Uncle Rick’s birthday party.

We met up at U.S. Pizza Company and greeted a few of the mostly strangers-level family. It was pretty uneventful for us, but Dad had a good time and it was nice to get together to celebrate. The pizza wasn’t bad, but the toppings seemed cheap. I got pretty frustrated as usual with Autumn’s refusal to eat anything other than a plain pepperoni pizza. It only got worse when she ate our pizza after she finished hers. I swear next time I’m just not asking what they want at all.

On the way back we stopped at PetSmart and then PetCo looking for some shrimp. The first stop was a complete bust. PetCo had some, but they were mostly pretty tiny. I went ahead and picked up three anyway just to grow them, but I’m thinking I may have better luck just getting some from a random stranger on the internet.

Once we got back to town, I dropped the girls off at their house, then the shrimp at my house, and took my parents’ receiver with us back to their house. Dad and I tried hooking it back up, but it still didn’t pass any video along to the TV. I guess it really is only good as an audio amplifier now.

Back at Summer’s house, Eaddie and I finished the evening with a couple more episodes of Daredevil while everyone else was in bed. We made it most of the way through the first season pretty quickly, and I’m excited to finally watch more for the first time.

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The Time I Almost Stole Dinner

We didn’t get to finish up the 1:1 laptops today. Instead, Jason took a crew to get a bunch of bottled water for the shop while the rest of us enrolled Chromebooks in the graveyard. When they got back, I was upset to see a literal pallet of water bottles. I don’t even drink the bottles, and it aggravates me that everyone else does. We don’t live in a third world country. We don’t live in Mexico. We don’t even live in Flint, Michigan. Paying thousands of dollars every year for water that comes with its own trash just seems insane to me, and nobody is even a little bit sympathetic, or even appears understanding to the idea that this is just terrible.

Once we got the pallet unloaded, we took two trucks worth of stuff to vo-tech to run a bunch of network cable. I don’t have a ton of experience running lines out there, but I know enough to know that it’s terrible. We encountered a wall without visible penetration, so we didn’t get our WAP lines run. We did at least manage to find existing cabling where most of the phones were going, which was a great relief.

We all went to Stoby’s for lunch and crammed us three fatties, Allen, and Gary into a booth. When we got back, we reminded everyone that Gary and I didn’t leave early in the middle of the week like everyone else, and that we would be leaving early today. We wrapped up a couple lines and then left at 1:30. I dropped Gary off back at the shop and then went home and took a nap because I felt completely exhausted.

When I woke up, I got my things together and headed to Walmart for groceries. Ronda, Steven, and Maleea were coming over for dinner, and I wanted to make Instant Pot chicken tacos. I was a bit impatient while checking out with Walmart Pay, and forgot that I had received a new Discover Card number after discovering an unauthorized charge. My payment didn’t go through, so I had to run back to the register and apologize for looking like a thief and/or a fool. They had printed a receipt with all my groceries just as I showed up, and with a quick scan of a single barcode, it loaded up my entire purchase again so I could process my payment the old fashioned way.

The girls did a pretty good job of cleaning the place up, and dinner went together pretty well. I completely forgot the slaw mix and punch in the refrigerator, which was super disappointing. Nobody really seemed to notice though, because we had so much other stuff to put on the tacos. Now I’ve got to figure out what else to do with the stuff though, since no one else ever seems interested in eating it.

The girls hung out and played and did whatever kids do in 2019 while we sat at the table and chatted. After the others left, Summer crashed and Eaddie and I watched some Daredevil, though she evidently watched quite a bit without me. I guess that’s how it us during boring old summer vacation.

There are no heroes, no villains. Just people with different agendas.

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Friends and Stuff

Gary and I spent all day imaging laptops again. Ben bought lunch for Melinda’s first day, and everyone walked next door to Smackin’ Wings and Things. They had a 20-piece wing special that cost as much as a larger meal, so I just ate that. The Cyclone Fever sauce was a pretty good mix of hot honey mustard and sweet honey barbecue.

In the afternoon, Melissa dispatched someone to check out my air conditioner, so I had to do a bit of juggling to get Dad over to the house, and get Summer to open the garage since my app still doesn’t work with the Android beta. Fortunately I’m not completely crazy and he did find the unit a little low on refrigerant. He said he’d come by again next week to check again, so I’ll have to spend some time there in the afternoons to see if it cools any faster.

Summer took the day off and spent some time with the kids at the Clarksville water park, and then came home to grill steaks and burgers for us. She invited Gary over for dinner, and luckily I got there right as he was turning around to make another pass by her house. We played a couple games of Magic, ate, had a couple beers outside on the fancy new lawn furniture, and then came in to play Stuff Happens with the kids.

Eaddie begged to watch Parks and Rec after Gary left, and after a couple episodes of that everyone headed on to bed.

Better dreams this time.

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Relief Work

I got off to a pretty rough start this morning, throwing an entire brand new bottle of pills all over the kitchen floor. Somehow I miraculously found every last pill and filled the bottle back up. All of this was because I noticed that Walgreens had incorrectly filled my prescription with a lower dosage than what I needed. I wouldn’t have noticed, except the pills were the wrong shape. I can’t wait until I’m old and dumb, and accidentally take the wrong pill that kills me.

I almost went straight to the high school to continue my imaging work, but I went to the shop as usual instead. It was a good thing though, because Gary needed the excuse to get away from the others at the office for a while. I can only imagine the frustration he feels when he tries to do things in a more correct way, but then gets told to just let other people do what they want instead. There’s no telling how much extra work has been created for him because someone else didn’t have the competency they needed to do it without breaking something.

Everyone else stayed at the shop, seemingly unmotivated, while he and I went to the high school to continue imaging. I didn’t particularly need the help, but it definitely helped to pass the time less painfully. It helped that I wore thicker-soled shoes this time too. We took a break for lunch at Arby’s and had enough time after we ate to stop by the house and see the Grom. It was then that we noticed a little bit of road rash on the rear fender indicating it had been stood up at least once. I guess it wasn’t too much of a surprise really, and I plan to get rid of it anyway. I haven’t had much time to look at mods, but I know there must be quite a few.

The afternoon went by just as quickly, and then I stopped into the shop after dropping Gary off. That’s where I learned that all the others combined only enrolled about 200 Chromebooks, while Gary and I finished up about 250 Windows computers with software deployments. That’s just the underpaid, peak efficiency model versus the Jason-lead group, I suppose.

When I left there, I stopped by Superfast to see Summer before going to Walgreens to fix my prescription. Fortunately I didn’t really have to put on my mean face, but I was only one wrong sentence away from doing so. From there I went to Summer’s to start making chicken salads. Autumn stayed with her grandparents, so the remaining three of us watched a couple episodes of Parks and Rec before I headed home.

I finished the night cleaning up after the pets, which was long overdue as usual. I’m going to have to find some time pretty soon, no matter the cost.

What’s the deal with Stonehenge?

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Grom

We got up this morning and finished putting together the patio furniture and fire pit. It drizzled on and off, so we actually assembled the fire pit inside while the girls did a few chores. Just as we finished moving all of that stuff around outside, I saw Chase post on Instagram that they were selling his wife’s 2019 Honda Grom with next to no miles on it. On a complete whim, I hit him up and we arranged to go pick it up at his place. I stopped by Arvest on the way home, but my debit card was expired. He didn’t mind PayPal though, so as soon as Summer got to my house, we headed on out to London. We stopped for gas at Kroger and ran into Ronda just briefly. We only stopped to chat long enough to pump our gas, and then we were on our way.

The bike was so much tinier than I had imagined. It will be a great learner bike though, and perfect for riding around in town. While we were looking around, his pet pig kept trying to get into the garage, which just tickled me so. It kept threatening rain, so we didn’t stick around for super long. We made our way back to town, and I managed to get the bike up to 60mph, tucked and coming down a bit of a hill. Screaming along that fast and sitting so high and forward didn’t feel great, but I figure it’ll still be perfect if the girls want to learn to ride too. I bet Eaddie will want to learn, and I could see her riding to high school on it eventually. I stopped by Walgreens to pick up my medication, and then ran by Allen’s place to show him. He was absolutely thrilled about it. Then I finally took it home so I could shower and clean up a bit.

I was going to go back up to Summer’s for dinner, but I first got distracted by a fraud alert email from Discover. Evidently they stopped a $503.44 charge at Nordstrom from going through. I had to call and talk to someone, and they closed my account and created a new one. Unfortunately that also meant my memorized credit card information was no longer useful. In the middle of all of that, the doorbell rang. Michael stopped by, so I stepped out to chat with him. They had some kind of party and had some leftover food, but the friend he was going to deliver them to wasn’t home. Their loss was our gain. We chatted for a bit about some of his conspiracies, the Fiero, the Grom, and his van. I never realized he had it outfitted for living. I always imagined him roughing it out in the woods, but at least some of the time he’s just been sleeping in the van.

Finally, I made it back up to Summer’s for the evening. The girls had gone with their father for the evening, so we ate some of Michael’s leftover barbecue along with some sweet potato fries, and then went to bed with some Sealab 2021. It was definitely funnier in my 20s.

 

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Pudding can’t fill the emptiness inside me!!!
But it’ll help….

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Quality Time

Summer had to work this morning. I got up after she left and went home to clean up before going to check Autumn out of band camp. Luckily I went up the right flight of stairs and ran right into her, so checkout was painless. I signed a piece of paper “Adult” and nobody cared who I was, but I completed the job.

From there, I went to get Eaddie and Summer, and we came back for Autumn’s concert. Dad texted me just after we sat down, so I had him meet us there as well. Autumn made the first band and even had a song introduction, but she struggled really badly between the anxiety and some of the words. The band was otherwise pretty good though, and afterward I took Summer back to work and the girls to Cicis for lunch.

We ate a bunch, then went to my parents’ house to swim for a while until Summer got out of work. Then we ran by Walmart for a couple things, and I scoped out a deal on a patio furniture set. We headed back up to their house and relaxed there for a bit before Autumn and I went back to Walmart for some hot dogs, and I went ahead and picked up one of the furniture sets.

I broke a pretty good sweat trying to fit the thing into the back of the Murano, and even more of a sweat outside trying to get the thing out of the box. Sylvia came over for dinner and to chat with Summer for a bit. I got two chairs built, but not before both of them decided to come inside away from the bugs. She didn’t stick around for very long though, and the others started crashing pretty quickly after she left. Eaddie and I stayed up watching Daredevil again, and we started getting into some of the cliffhanger episodes. Eventually I started falling asleep on the couch though, so I had to call it quits.

Knot what I was trying to do, but it did the trick.

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1200 Squats

I spent the entire day by myself imaging laptops. Between yesterday’s boot disk creation and today, I’ve completed 150 devices. There are only about 1050 left to go. I didn’t have a terrible time today, but next week is going to be a long week.

Allen was the only one that said anything about lunch, and we were both pretty hungry, so it was KFC or bust. Then it was right back to the grind. The music helps. Having things to rearrange helps too.

After work, I went home for a while and ended up vacuuming out my car so I could install the new WeatherTech floor mats. I got super hot and sweaty, but the job’s done and I’ll feel better about having those nasty children in and out of the car all of the time. I just wish they tucked under the door moulding to keep the crumbs from falling down between them.

I beat Summer and Eaddie home but just waited in the car for them. Then I fried up some chicken for their sandwiches, and Summer went to bed while Eaddie and I watched another episode of Daredevil.

I’m gonna have to get some better knee pads…

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Runaround Blues

Jason had us take a crew of four to Oakland this morning to do what really only two probably should have done. We’ve got pallets worth of higher priority work to do, and we’re doing cleanup crap, and it’s just infuriating as usual. I peeled off with Amanda, which somehow made it less bad. Then she and I ate leftover turkey at the shop while the others went out to eat.

After lunch, I managed to escape and run around with Gary for a bit, mostly to start looking at high school stuff. While we were there, it started to pour down rain, so we stayed longer than originally planned. We explored the PAC some more while trying to find some people there. All we ever heard were ghost whistling and wood cutting, but no people.

Once it cleared up, we went to the junior high and helped Heather with some stuff for the rest of the day. I stopped by the high school on the way home to deliver my refrigerator from the junior high. I think I may have scratched up the front a bit, but it was a gimme anyway. I shouldn’t be too attached.

I went home and got ready to go to Sheri’s father’s visitation at Humphrey. I’d only met the guy a couple times and only in passing, but I at least wanted to stop by to see her for a second. I told her it really felt like I was in line for a buffet that was just taking forever, so I didn’t want to keep her long. There was a good sided group of people there, and it was nice to see them outside of work for a change. Everyone was all smiles, as I think they should be in the best of scenarios.

Becky, Marcia, Miranda, Mollie, and I all went to Ruby Tuesday afterward for dinner and drinks, and we had a grand ol’ time. Our waitress was awesome and took all three coupons I had, and worked her magic to split the discounts across all five tickets. When we left, I dropped Becky off at her car, then had to stop in to see Summer for a minute. She and Eaddie were watching Spider-Verse in bed, and I had a bed of my own at home that still hadn’t been cleared, so I left to do that and get some sleep there for the first time in over a month.

So long, flower man.

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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