Tag: frustration

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Uncountability

The junior high started actual testing this morning, and of course it was a cluster just as it always is. Instead of holding students accountable for bringing charged devices to school, they just sent any kid with any inkling of a problem to the library. It wasn’t as many kids as yesterday, but it was still a lot, just sitting around and socializing instead of doing their tests. Josh was there with me to help Jacob, but we weren’t needed for very long. I stopped by Dwight on my way back to the office, but that was a short visit.

It was quiet in the office until we left for lunch. I was thinking Arby’s, but I was mildly disappointed by the spicy roast beef. It was a quick lunch, so we made it back to the office a little bit early.

I decided to take care of the road sign, but I had to run to the high school to borrow Jacob’s Allen wrench. Then I walked around the building with an eight foot ladder and called tech support from the top of it. Swapping panels for troubleshooting was relatively easy, and we’ll have a replacement part on the way.

After work, I went by Oakland to give Sheri her laptop back. She paid me double what we agreed, but I didn’t notice until after she wandered off on a phone call. I took Stephen for a quick ride down the road, and he was super excited for that. Then I continued home to start some laundry.

Eventually I made it up to Summer’s for the evening, but everyone was in their rooms. I finished up a bit slower than I wanted, but made it to bed at a reasonable time.

Reasonablish

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Surrounded by Imbeciles

I was relatively calm this morning, for all the anxiety I had leading up to today. Maybe I was distracted by the fact that my car didn’t recognize me when I was ready to leave the house, and I had to use my physical key card to get to work. Two more work orders came in for the same issue I diagnosed at Dwight yesterday afternoon, so I ran a power supply over there first thing. Then I grabbed some donuts for our CPPC meeting and killed a few minutes with the folks at the Transportation office. I gave Frankie a ride down the block, and then I was told that I was officiating the meeting.

I was actually a little annoyed that Karen told me she had asked Janie to do it, because I figured as the only other elected officer on the committee, it should naturally fall to me. Then I was annoyed when Janie said she hadn’t heard anything of the sort, and that I was supposed to do it. We got things kicked off though, and sped through most of the meeting until we got to the part about the newsletter. Of course Ginni and Jeff walked in super late, and she acted completely ignorant about why I was even mentioning the idea. If I had been better at thinking on my feet, I would have used her own tactic against her and pointedly ask if she had specific questions about what was written on the agenda. I would give anything to shut the idiots up, and have the more intelligent folks in the room say anything at all, but that’s just not how it works there, and I’m sick of it.

It was tough to get motivated the rest of the day. I started to skip lunch until Gary showed up to find a food buddy. He took me to Wendy’s and we ate in relatively awkward quiet. Then after a while I ran to the maintenance office with him just to get out of the basement for a bit.

After work, I stopped by Ridgewood Brothers to see what the guys were up to. I guess one of their friends/fans had brought a turkey leg for everyone to try, so they offered me a bite of that. Then I gave like five of those guys rides up the road in the Tesla. One of the guys on the first trip to PDQ for some drinks just kept going on about it, and it was fun to give them that thrill. The second time, I let Kyler take it for a spin, and then I headed on home.

Eaddie stuck with Autumn after school, so I went home and stared at shrimp for a bit. I had a drink and spent some time cleaning out some of the last remnants of threadlike algae out of the tank until Eaddie called, screaming at Autumn in the background, asking me to pick her up from the gym. I got her home, and then hid in the bedroom when Autumn finally got home. Eaddie poked her head out a couple of times for food, so I munched with her for a little bit, and then resumed hiding until Summer came home and quickly went to bed. I perused jobs for a bit, and found some high-paying ones that I seem to be relatively overqualified for, so as soon as I can find some of that ambition, I’ll probably end up applying.

This entire place is the lowest common denominator.

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Like a Teen With a Learner’s Permit

I thought I was onto something with Metro by T-Mobile this morning. Eaddie and I left the house a little early so we could get to Clarksville, which showed to have the only retail store within 75 miles. When we got there, it was an old Radio Shack, run by a singular, super old guy. It was neat to see a store like that again after losing our Radio Shack nearly 20 years ago. Having Eaddie along prevented me from browsing around more, but it looked like a neat place that made me nostalgic for the times that Dad and I used to go for parts.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have any of the iPhones we wanted, so we made our way out of town, where I dropped Eaddie off at Gavin’s. Then I headed back toward home and decided to stop at my parents’ house for some food. They still had lots of ham left over from Christmas, so I ate that in front of them. Mom got eyebrows tattooed on, but they were incongruent and misplaced. I don’t know why she bothered, but I disliked them very much.

I continued home to do some laundry until Summer finished up at work. Then she came to get me, and we went back to my parents’ house for some spaghetti. It wasn’t ready as early as I expected, so by the time we finished, it was about time for me to head back to Clarksville to get Eaddie.

Summer dropped me off and went on home for the night, and I ran by the car wash to get some of the grime off of my car from the ice a few days ago. The trip on Enhanced Auto Pilot was absolutely infuriating. There were cars and trucks on the road, but hardly any traffic to be concerned about, and plenty of room for navigating between the lanes. Still, I ran into places where my car wanted to continuously change lanes, back and forth, back to back. There was no one to pass, or anything to avoid. It just kept changing lanes, and nearly made me miss my exit.

It was a fun drive through the curves through the hills, but I had to watch for deer. Once I secured Eaddie, we ran home to change and then headed home for the night. Autumn stayed the night at Hannah’s to dog-sit, though she spent the entire afternoon at the pet store. Otherwise it was a relatively early night to bed.

Who is also, possibly, very drunk.

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How McDonald Stole Christmas

I thought we were headed to the middle school first thing this morning to scope out tomorrow’s cable run, but evidently Zach planned to do that in the afternoon. I mostly stayed low and cleaned up some old work orders before break. Several of us met up at Taco John’s for lunch, but even that was pretty quiet after the chaos from getting orders to the correct customers calmed down.

Right after lunch, we all met in the shop so Judy could train us on another new system for requesting time off. As soon as we finished with that, we all headed to the middle school to plan tomorrow’s work. It’s a big job, but hopefully it goes well with so many hands on deck.

After work, I went to Splash to check in with Summer. She had me run across the street to get some Zaxby’s for a couple of them. I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention, because the curb reached up and grabbed the bottom of my front bumper when I parked. It was low enough that the scuffing was just on the very bottom of the car, so hopefully it won’t be visible in the daylight.

I probably stuck around longer than I should have, just because everyone was busy and I felt out of place. I ate a bunch of chicken though, and then headed home to change. The girls went bowling with their boyfriends, and then Autumn wanted to bring Adam over for a little bit afterward, so I beat them home. They watched The Santa Clause until Summer got home, and then I wound down pretty quickly from there.

I’m still stressing quite a bit about how this month’s superintendent is cracking down on holiday traditions within the school. It feels like she’s picking new and unnecessary battles with the few good staff members we have left, and I really don’t know how much fight I have in me. It may just be the bump I need to move on with my life.

Packed it up with their presents, their ribbons, their wrappings, their snoof and their fuzzles, their tringlers and trappings!

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Washed Up

Summer got up super early this morning for opening day at the new wash in town. I made it in to work several minutes early on account of how sheepish I felt from Friday. I absolutely did not want to be there. It wasn’t bad work though, because Jeff had individual carts set up for each hallway at the middle school, and we all split up to deploy them.

Josh ended up sharing a cart with me since we had so many people there, and we covered one of the sixth grade hallways. We had a lockdown drill in the middle of it, and I made sure to stay in a dark room, but mistakenly thought the window was covered and didn’t hide in the corner. Evidently they saw me, and called me out by name, so I’m just waiting for that writeup too.

Infuriatingly, none of the classrooms we visited were actually doing anything other than holiday activities like drawing or goofing off. One of them was specifically watching Arthur Christmas, which burned after being written up for publishing a FICTIONAL POEM ABOUT TEACHERS SHOWING MOVIES because it would be poor use of instructional time.

Lunch was about as unawkward as possible with Thomas, Zach, and Josh. Most of us got the burrito supreme lunch, which was a pretty great deal. Then we went back to the shop and I spent the afternoon with Jacob. We ran to Dwight to take care of a ticket, and then spent the remainder of the day in my office trying to convince Kelsea to move to Peru.

After work, I stopped by the wash to visit Summer, who was mostly busy with work stuff. They had several cars come in, which was good, but also meant I didn’t get to visit with her much. The wash was really impressive, but I’m still upset that they aren’t cleaning interiors.

From there, I went across town to visit with Mom. She worked really late, so I tried to get dinner warmed up for her before she walked in. I didn’t have to wait long though, and then she was more worried about feeding me than eating anything herself. I got everything warm and ate, and then she finished some soup and kicked me out before it got too late.

Autumn went to her father’s for the evening for some reason, but Eaddie and Summer were home. Eaddie was laying in Autumn’s bed for most of the evening just because her bed was messy. Eventually she came out to play some flute for us, and then everyone was off to bed. I stayed up chatting with Ben for a while just to get some advice in dealing with our new bully superintendent. I ended the night pretty defeated though, so it may just be time to go.

Burned Out

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Kick ‘Em When They’re Up

Summer had to work for a couple hours again today, so I ate some leftovers and headed home myself. I did a bit of poking around the house, cleaned and sorted things out, and took a shower. It seemed like a good day to be a shrimp. After I got cleaned up, I did a couple loads of laundry.

It was a little later when I got back to Summer’s. I cleaned up some leftovers while they watched TV, and then everyone filtered off to bed. I made it to bed early, both tired and bored from a largely wasted day.

Kick ‘Em When They’re Down

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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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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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Spatched

Summer went to work this morning, and I eventually got out of bed and made some rice for the leftover corned beef. Autumn slept on the couch because she got everything out of her storage unit, but didn’t have her room cleaned up with a place for everything. She sat around watching Criminal Minds all morning, and then ate some plain white rice without any of the actual leftovers. I tried to get Eaddie out of bed, but she didn’t want to get up. Neither of them wanted to clean house like I asked.

I eventually left to meet Summer at Superfast so we could get her patched tire back on. I was there with her for a little while after the guys helped swap the tires, since she was ready to leave work a bit early and I thought she might do something with me. She ended up going to the gym, so I went to my parents’ house to prep the turkey.

I’d never actually handled a raw turkey before, but this was actually much cleaner than I expected. I’ve always felt that chickens were super gross and slimy, but the turkey wasn’t slimy at all. It trimmed up nicely, and the random clearanced shears I picked up at Walmart a while back did a great job cutting the spine out. I decided to spatchcock the turkey for my first attempt at smoking one, since it promised a more even cook with the added benefit of speeding up the whole process. I couldn’t have been more pleased with how the prep went.

Mom warmed up some shrimp soup while I was there, so we ate a bit before I headed home. I was supposed to drop the spine and other assorted entrails off at Julie’s house so she could make gravy out of it, but she took forever to respond to my text messages, and said she had left the house to go shopping. I killed a bunch of time cleaning up at home, re-covering the fire pit out back, showering, and getting things generally organized to smoke the turkey. Finally she just had me leave the bag of turkey bits in my mailbox so she could pick it up on the way home.

I had to stop by Lowe’s for an injector, and I decided to throw out my leftover marinade, so I’ll be making my own from scratch in the morning. Just as I left Lowe’s, Summer reminded me to bring my bread maker, so I had to circle back home to get it. When I got to her house, Autumn was still at her boyfriend’s house. Eaddie was working on homework, and Summer was making fruit salad, key lime pie, and deviled eggs. She finished up with a loaf of bread that we thought was a bit overdone. Autumn got back home a little early, and after a little wind-down time, everyone was off to bed.

There’s simply no respect.