Tag: frustration

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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.

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Veterinarians Day

I slept longer than usual last night, but still struggled to make it to work on time. We didn’t have much to cover in our meeting, as everyone else was run off relatively quickly, but I stuck around to chat with the newbies for a bit. After that, I just tried to stay productive until lunch time. Roy’s was there to work on our air conditioner up front, so Tammy came back to my office for a bit and I started to tell her the story of Sam the clam. Unfortunately I didn’t get to finish, because Kelsea walked up right as I was wrapping up and I didn’t want to spoil the ending.

Gary, Greg, Josh, and I were the only ones to go out today, and somebody decided on Fat Daddy’s. I actually had a really good burger there, but I still couldn’t imagine what takes them so long to make it. It’s a half hour burger for sure.

The afternoon was really quiet, and got pretty cold with the door hanging wide open all day. I went to Dwight for a bit, and then tinkered all afternoon. I never did get a chance to finish my story, so I guess I’ll have to start over later. I walked out a few minutes early so I could catch Summer at the Veterans Day parade.

I had to park on the side of the street on the south side and then walk across to find Summer. Then she ran across the street at the start of the parade so she could record Autumn with the American flag. I think she would have actually had a better view from where I was sitting, and I got aggravated thinking she was going to spend the rest of the parade over there, but fortunately she came back.

We left in a hurry since I had to run across the street before the traffic started up. I sped home, quite pleased with the zippy, instant torque of my new car. It really made navigating stupid traffic feel much better. I took a moment to relax a bit, and eventually made my way up to the girls for the evening.

Summer kept talking about going out to get food, which further aggravated me on account of how much food was in the refrigerator. Of course they all picked at the tasty stuff, and nobody touched the mixing bowl full of salad that was slowly wilting. In fact, a couple of them didn’t even finish the plates they had made themselves, so I finished those up and then had a salad myself. Autumn never once made an appearance, and Eaddie didn’t stick around for very long. Summer and I looked at some houses for a bit, and then she went to bed really early.

I spent the rest of the evening mostly bored out of my mind. I tinkered on YouTube a bit, and finally got ready for bed so we could go to the robotics tournament in the morning.

How do you say “I don’t understand” in Spanish? “No Nintendo?” I simply do not.

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Red is Black

I struggled to find a whole lot of motivation today, and spent a bit too much time aggravated that the little felt letterboard I had in the shop was likely thrown into the garbage for “cluttering the place up.” I don’t understand why we couldn’t have anything decorative in the room. It just feels so sterile back there now, and I kind of hate it.

I left to go to Dwight and install a AA battery, but the one in the microphone just wasn’t installed properly. What made it worse was that you could easily see where the battery needed additional contact to charge. While I was there, I had to ask Karen to decipher the calendar again, because evidently the copy she gave me for the agenda had the names inverted from what Linda was expecting. This was even more confusing, considering that Linda was the source of both copies.

We thought Jeff was going to eat lunch with us, but it ended up being Gary, Zach, Thomas, and me. Gary drove this time, and I sensed that Thomas appreciated the extra leg room. Kevin texted that he saw me, but I didn’t spot him until we left. He and Keith were having lunch together, and it was good to see both of them.

Dad went by my house to meet a guy from Terminix to inspect the termite damage. I had nightmares all night about my walls falling apart from termite damage, but the end result of the inspection was really just to sell what appeared to be a highly overpriced poison treatment plan that will do nothing for the repair of any damage. He didn’t even look in the attic, which seemed particularly important to me since he couldn’t look behind the drywall. The only relief will be how much easier rerunning electrical will be if we have to tear the drywall out.

I had to go back to Dwight again after lunch because their projector in the cafeteria had some sort of problem. I finally got Karen to figure out what was happening, and luckily the end of the VGA cable would be bent and twisted in a way that the colors looked normal again. It’s super tempting to make Kyle re-run that cable on account of how high the ceiling is.

After work, I ran straight to Arvest to withdraw a sack of money. Aaron chatted with me for a bit, and all the girls got super chatty about the car. I think I would enjoy being rich. With a Popeye’s paper bag full of large bills, I picked up Summer from the gym and we went to her bank to deposit it all back into her savings account. Their lobby was closed, so we had to wait forever in the drive-through, but we finally finished, and Summer was super relieved to have her account squared away.

I dropped Summer off and ran to pick up Eaddie late from robotics. Ethan was giving Lindsey a tour of their Ioniq, but I still felt bad for being so late. We continued to my house so I could change, and then went to Walmart for some salad fixings. Eaddie argued for boring lettuce, so I made her get the unprepared romaine hearts instead of the pre-bagged stuff.

Summer and Autumn were sitting out on the porch when we got there, and I fixed dinner by myself. I got pretty frustrated by how late it was, and the fact that I couldn’t use either side of the sink to clean vegetables. I ate, the kids ate, and then Summer finally ate after a shower. Then Summer and I chatted for a bit before she went off to bed.

Be kind; Unwind!

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Abstinence Club

I was a couple minutes late to work, but I walked in with Gary, which lightened the concern. The shop seemed super quiet with Zach out, and everyone else out at their own buildings. It’s super slow everywhere, but I think everyone’s just hiding out in their newly assigned buildings. I had a CPPC meeting in the morning that went without incident. We were still missing two of the administrative members, but at least Justin was there for No Shave November. I convinced one other person to abstain from the calendar vote, since it actually made no difference to any of the classified staff.

On the way out, there was a white Model X parked right in front of the building, blocking the wheelchair ramp and handicapped space. I went to Dwight to drop off a cable, and it was still there when I got back, but I don’t have a clue who was driving it.

Josh met Thomas, Gary, and me at Popeye’s for lunch. They were packed inside, but got the chicken out to us relatively quickly. I actually went with the bone-in chicken since it looked really plump compared to their usual tiny pieces. I’m not sure I got spicy, but it was still good. I wished I had gotten some hot sauce, but they didn’t have any condiments at all out in the dining area and I didn’t feel like going back up to talk to any of the employees, who appeared to be stressed out enough.

After lunch, I tinkered and wrote my meeting minutes, and ran around the campus a bit more. At one point I went back to Dwight again, and stopped at the new Ridgewood Brothers building on the way back. Robert was there with one of their guys, and gave me a quick 30-second tour of the place. He had literally just gotten the news that the fire marshal wouldn’t let them fit four smokers in the smokehouse, which was upsetting after they approved the blueprints. I left them to get back to work, but I wasn’t super productive for most of the afternoon.

I did everything I could to avoid a crash, including sip on some black coffee until quitting time. When I finally left work, I drove to the Arvest across town to see Aaron. He didn’t notice that I had gotten out of a new car, but clocked out for the day to come see it once he realized what it was. I let him drive it to Spices to pick up his food, and he had the best reaction so far. When we got back to the bank, he said he would check on getting my cash to me in the morning. I stopped by my parents’ house on the way home and talked to Dad about the termite inspection I’ll be getting tomorrow. After that, my imagination left me stressing pretty hard about how much damage they’re likely to find tomorrow.

I went home to try and clean up a bit to make the walls a bit more accessible. While I messed around with that, I started a load of laundry to clean up the bedroom, since I hadn’t slept there in weeks. I kept getting super frustrated with things, and ended up staying in the rest of the night just to decompress.

…and now I just sit in silence.