Tag: health

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ANOTHER ONE

I had an anxiety attack in bed just after midnight when I got up to go to the restroom, but went right back to sleep. I got to sleep in a very little bit since we were headed to Little Rock for my car. She went to her bank to get some money for me, and I went to Arvest to close my account, since they wanted to start charging for basic checking accounts. I took Muad’Dib in and we saw Aaron first. Then I was maybe a little too surprised that there was zero effort to try and talk me into some other kind of bank account, or keep me as a customer. I told the young teller that I wanted to close my account, she took my ID, and then handed me a cashier’s check for my balance after just a few seconds. She then had to cash that for me, which felt silly, but then it was done. My first bank account, which I’d had since childhood, and which only held birthday money for years before my first job, was closed.

We hit the road after that. Summer had to get back to work, so we dropped her car off at the Love’s in Morrilton, then continued to Gwatney in the loaner to get my car. I also queued up Randy and Ben for lunch before we headed home. My car was right out front, and I guess I should have looked it over first. They didn’t really even walk me around it. I just took a moment while Anneka was gathering paperwork, and walked around it quickly. I immediately spotted a blemish just under the left taillight. Then Summer looked closer and found flaws on the edge of the hood. Anneka took it back to see if they could buff any of it out, but then came back and said we would have to schedule another visit.

They had a Buick Envista that they had just gotten in for a loaner, so rather than come back next week, we took the loaner and also kept the loaner Model 3 from Tesla. That created a predicament later. We left there and dropped the Buick off at the high school before meeting Randy, Jim, Jae, and Ben at Cotham’s. I sent Summer in to find a table, and luckily Ben was already there. I waited outside with Muad’Dib until everyone else got there, and then we had lunch. I wasn’t impressed with any of the food this time, which was rare. The hubcap burgers have always been excellent. We had a good time visiting, but Summer needed to be back at work in a hurry, so we left.

I dropped Summer off at her loaner, then went to Conway to Supercharge in order to make it home. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except I didn’t expect to have to drive it back home. She went straight to work, so I ended up going to Love’s to swap out her car just to get it out of the public parking lot. I went to work for a couple hours, and then Teisha gave me a ride to Love’s so I could leave Summer’s car at work overnight inside the gate.

I got home and had a ton of stuff from Vine, but it all processed super quickly. It was actually mostly clothes for the girls, but I did get a bike service stand that needed some assembly. Eaddie and Eli chatted in the kitchen over some food he brought while I assembled it, and then they both left. She went to spend the night with Autumn because she had created some new health drama and needed to draw more attention to herself.

Summer eventually made it home from her work meeting, and we went to swim at my parents’ house. I thought they’d check out the Buick, but they were busy watering plants. Muad’Dib ran both ways, but had to stop and poop on the way back. It looked like it was all loose, so something he ate didn’t sit well with him. I ended up walking about a third of the way back home with him while Summer drove home.

They went to bed and I prepared for work, but it was a pretty quick night to bed.

You didn’t have anyone quality check it???

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Hound Town

I had a little bit of a rough start this morning, but we squeezed into work for a quiet day. Teisha had Janice’s two little dogs closed up in her office, so we just headed straight upstairs. Scott hit me up immediately with a dead laptop, but he just had something stuck in his charge port. Then Heaven had an issue with Rhonda’s computer monitor, but I just had to unplug it for a moment. After that, I was left to my own devices.

I had an anxiety attack pretty early in the morning that left me feeling super exhausted for a while. Otherwise I didn’t really start the day with a goal, but I got into my Netbox documentation again briefly, and did some more “practice” networking. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I think all this fighting security devices has made me more comfortable with practical networking and subnetting. Next is to get into some routing and firewall configuration, but I keep wanting to just rebuild the entire network. I need to give myself some more time to “accidentally discover” more physical stuff in our environment.

We took a late lunch and went to Taco Bell. It was hot, but we had shade and a small breeze, so it felt okay out. Summer was upset that she had to work in the heat all day, but still hadn’t made any real moves to change her situation. She got home shortly after we did, and was pretty immediately just miserable to be around. She was hungry, but didn’t want to do anything about it. I eventually just stepped away until she came to find me, and I pointed her at her leftover pasta she made a week ago. I eventually came out to have some too.

I found the new Masters of the Universe on Prime Video, so I put that on for her and then took Muad’Dib out for a run. We visited my parents, and then I let him guide us back home, skipping all of the zigs and zags. Summer was finishing up her movie and went to bed. I got things ready for work, and then made it to bed early myself.

You’re on your own!

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Back Doorman

Internet at home was still out until late in the morning, without much news from TCW. I was excited to get to experiment with some scheduling instead of just beating my head against the wall over intercom programming today. Nobody else seemed to show any feelings about it, but I assumed they were just glad I finally fixed something. Of course now I also have a backup, and can replicate my success in a few minutes rather than weeks. Programming was relatively straightforward, but the holiday scheduling had me stumped for a while. The guides I found all had them added to schedules, but that wasn’t the case. Just adding the holiday dates defaulted the lock schedules to a locked state.

We took a really late lunch and picked up some free McNuggets, then had chili cheese fries and onion rings at Sonic. It was cheap and light, and the weather was great for it. When we got back, I stopped by the back gate to test the closing, and it worked perfectly. I had its schedule fixed, but now that the plant is running around the clock, the gate isn’t really even necessary.

The last piece of the puzzle for now was to get cameras integrated with the security system, but everything I tried seemed incompatible between systems. I had an anxiety attack late in the afternoon, but it cleared up well. We left a little late after verifying the gate shut properly. Then we made it home to find Eaddie back from her band conference, and Summer in the bath.

Once Summer got out, I took them to Brangus for dinner. I had a pretty awful steak, which was both overcooked and somehow cold to the touch. The girls enjoyed it, so I didn’t press. I just don’t think they’re any good for a dinner on a slow day.

I tried to take them out for dessert when we left, but they didn’t want to go. Instead, Summer and I had a beer on the back porch before I took Muad’Dib out for a run. We took a big plastic bag from Eaddie’s vacuum-sealed couch, and then came back home. As we got back, I heard the familiar frustrated cries of a man trying to recall a stubborn dog. I was proud to be able to call Muad’Dib back out of the house to run and fetch him, and then deliver him back across the street.

Not bad for a Thursday.

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RESET ALL THE THINGS

We were a little behind today, but I had time to get things ready for our staff meeting. I felt like I did okay, and then I spent the entire day working on the Aiphone gate stuff. At one point, David and I walked out to the front gate and looked at the control box out there. All of that stuff was Avigilon, but it was still useful to tinker with it a bit.

I had an anxiety attack about half an hour before I left to meet Summer at Ortega’s for lunch. Then I finally perceived some luck in the afternoon. I ended up factory resetting both the master controller on Heaven’s desk, as well as the relay control module. I really thought I had something, but by the end of the day, Heaven’s phone still couldn’t call the stations.

We left a little late, and made it home just moments before Summer pulled in. She took a cool bath, and I finally made it to Leonard’s to pick up an air filter. The house took forever to cool down, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the away temperature being high, or if it’s just been running non-stop and couldn’t keep up.

Muad’Dib could have handled the store a little better, but he was excited about a new place. He was super high energy all evening, so I took him on a late run straight to my parents’ house before it got too dark. He ran nearly the entire way there and back, which was pretty intense for how miserable it was outside.

We made it home and I juggled chargers, since Summer made it home with under 10%. Fortunately I charged extra last night, so I had a little more than usual when we got home. I rummaged through the freezer and found some buns that I could use to make a sandwich for tomorrow, and then wound down for bed pretty quickly as the air finally started to feel a little cooler.

Enter Enter Enter Enter Enter Enter Enter

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Gatekeeping

My shower wasn’t great this morning, and I almost wished I had just left the old, broken head in place. When I finished, I bent over to dry off and then pinched a nerve in the middle of my back as I tried to stand back up. I was hunched for the rest of the day from that, and I could barely move without tweaking it.

I realized after we left the house that I forgot my breakfast, so I survived the morning on coffee alone. At least I remembered to bring my leftovers for lunch. The first thing I fought was actually the broken maintenance network again. This time I tried changing some STP priorities to see if it would prevent the far point-to-point from tripping the port.

The rest of the day was spent digging through and documenting the security cameras and gate system. Heaven mentioned Charles doing something on her phone that caused the front and rear gate cameras to become inverted, and I could never figure out how or where that might be set. I spent all day tinkering with settings, but never heard anything back from Fleming about what the old password might have been. I had finally given up on trying to recover anything from the non-wiped equipment, but then I couldn’t seem to write new configurations over them, so tomorrow I’ll still be stuck working on that.

I left work late again after messing around with the relay portion of the gate controls, then made it home through heavy traffic. I quickly fixed the leaky shower head and bruised the bottom of my foot in the process. Summer got home moments later and took a shower. I made her a sandwich and had some more Long John Silvers myself. A bunch of the lunch meat went bad, and I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to buy so much in the first place. We ate, and then cleaned up a bit. Eaddie was already gone to work the conference, so Summer had to finish her laundry for her.

Summer was dead tired from working in the heat, and I could still barely move. Leonard’s was closed, so I couldn’t go get the air filter we’d been needing for a few weeks. Muad’Dib hadn’t been run in a couple days either, so I decided to take him to the Neighborhood Market to get rid of some recycling. One of our neighbors had a car in the driveway with a trunk that was open the entire time we were gone, so we stopped by on the way home to knock on the door. Someone turned on some lights, but we never got a response, so I considered that the extent of my neighborly responsibility.

We hobbled home and went to bed.

Meet prep!

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It’s a Machine

My shower wasn’t great with a messed up diverter this morning, but it could have been worse. It was still better than a hotel shower by a huge margin. We got to work, and things were again pretty quiet. I spent a large part of the morning troubleshooting a weird Start Menu issue where it keeps reverting back to category view. I found several articles mentioning group policy, but I couldn’t find anything similar that would have affected it in Intune.

I took a really late lunch and ended up at Wendy’s for a spicy chicken sandwich in a Minions & Monsters meal. For some reason they felt the need to serve it to me piecemeal, so I got my Frosty first. Then I got fries. Finally, my sandwich was delivered to my table. I guess at least the food was fresh?

The afternoon went by fairly quickly just because I ate so late. I had a sudden anxiety attack that didn’t linger too long, and then we made it home. Eaddie had received my Steam Machine that Johnny let me order, so I had been looking forward to opening that.

Summer got home shortly after I did, and I unboxed my new computer while she showered. I had to tinker with my home theater again, because for some reason there was no sound coming out of the subwoofer. Once I got everything set up, Summer decided she wanted Taco Villa for dinner, so Muad’Dib and I went to pick that up.

We ate, and then she went to bed. I cleaned all the stuff out of my car so I can leave it at the body shop, and made it to bed on time.

Now what?

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Low Down Dirty Dogs

I started a batch of cold brew yesterday before I left work, so I was excited to start the day with that and some cold foam. It turned out pretty well, but I forgot to fill my cup with ice before I left the house. It also didn’t take very long for me to find out the lid leaked, so I had a wet shirt for most of the morning.

It was a much quieter day, so I just kept chugging away at different little problems. I did get a couple of calls from Tesla just before lunch time. I had emailed the service manager at Tulsa last night, and apparently there was a new one in training that called me first. He said he was going to make sure I got a loaner, and reached out to the service manager in Little Rock. Then I got a call from him, assuring me that they would work something out.

I brought the last of the roast for lunch, but I couldn’t finish it because it was so much liquid and rice left over. I also started with another leftover salad from the weekend crew, so it was a decently good lunch. Teisha stopped me when I went down to visit the microwave, and said a couple of the guys in the plant wanted the dogs to stay out of the breakroom because that’s where they eat. Of course that was no problem at all for us because they’re well within their right to ask for that, but I did kind of have to laugh at the fact that I can’t lean up against any surface in that room for fear of getting my clothes dirty.

The afternoon went by a little slowly and I had an anxiety attack that left me exhausted again, but we made it through. The drive home wasn’t too bad, and we arrived to find Summer cleaning a huge section of the kitchen. Then she cleaned up some fresh veggies to make cold sandwiches and chips for lunch, which was really good.

It was still early and hot, but I took Muad’Dib for his best run since the fourth, and we visited with Dad for a bit. Then we ran a trimmed route the rest of the way home, but still more than he’d run all week. Summer and I finished thee penultimate episode of Funny AF, followed by most of Jeff Arcuri’s special. We gave up early so we could get to bed on time. She said Eaddie went to Clarksville to work, and wouldn’t be home, so it was just a quiet night after that.

Don’t ruin it for everyone!

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See? See?!

Teisha texted me this morning just as I left the house, to say that the internet was still down. I saw it go down during the storm over the weekend, but completely forgot to check that it came back up. I raced in and started working on it right away. Of course I also had Heaven stressed from getting a new computer, so there was a lot to do right off the bat.

All of the equipment lights were on, but it looked like the firewall/router had choked. Of course as soon as I reset that, Joel reset the AT&T equipment and everything came back up, so he felt like he fixed it. I think one of the firewall pair was still having trouble, but I never had a chance to circle back to that because of everything else that broke. I had several unexpected devices at every level start pulling dynamic addresses, which ideally would have been set statically or by reservation. I just couldn’t understand why the Sophos wouldn’t allow for reservations, but it’s what we’ve got.

I was up and down the stairs several times as Heaven encountered new issues, but I think I finally had her satisfied by the afternoon. I ended up taking lunch late, which was fine since I brought leftover roast. Teisha also announced that there were several salads from Colton’s in the refrigerator that the guys who worked over the break didn’t eat. The entire day went by super fast, and then I ended up staying late trying to help Rhonda with a weird phone issue that may also be due to the outage this weekend.

The drive home was infuriating, as I followed someone at 40mph down the entire offramp, watching as the huge, wide-open space passes us by and was replaced by two lanes of trucks and other vehicles. I just barely squeezed around them and took off, but later got stuck behind two cars needlessly locked side-by-side under the speed limit. We finally were able to pass one of them on the right, I think because the person on the right realized how stupid it was and sped up.

We made it home where Muad’Dib was anxious to get inside, still fearful for the fireworks. Eaddie and Eli would be joining Summer and me at Cici’s for dinner, but she didn’t want to load everyone up in her car for some reason, and we didn’t want to have to unload the dog hammock. We left him in the bedroom to watch Spider-Man and met the kids at the restaurant for the pizza that all of us were craving.

After dinner, we came straight home and I tried taking Muad’Dib for a run. He absolutely refused to leave the driveway toward my parents’ house, so I tried to lead him in the opposite direction. He refused to go down our street or Tanglewood, but we made it very slowly up Inglewood. I felt so bad, but he needed a run. I had an anxiety attack just as we got to my parents’ house, and it left me pretty dazed for a while. Afterward I felt like I hit a brick wall of exhaustion, but we made it back home, just barely with a dead Onewheel.

Eaddie and Eli watched TV all night, and I tried to finish up quickly. There were still a few fireworks in the distance, but hopefully they quit soon, because I can’t stand seeing Muad’Dib so anxious. He spent a lot of time under the bed again, so I gave him some calming treats and went to bed.

EVERYBODY MOVE

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Rally-Ho!

I didn’t sleep in much today because I wanted to get some more work done. We spent a lot more time than I expected out of the house yesterday, and I still wanted to get some movement on the dining area and entryway. Summer got up while I was putting some things away, and got upset with the way I asked her to continue passing through while I was in the middle of the hallway. She made us some eggs and sausage for breakfast, but I could tell her mood was declining. She got ready for the gym, and we finally had to have a talk about it before she left.

Eaddie finally got out of her room and we chatted for a little while before making a plan to attack the dining room. Summer came back from the gym and mowed while Eaddie and I moved things around. I showed her how to pull the light switch off the wall in the shed out back, and we fixed a flaky connection there. She continued carrying things outside, and then I nearly broke the ceiling fan trying to get to the light bulbs. I ended up taking it down completely to fix later.

Muad’Dib had been hiding under the bed all day long, so I thought I’d try and take him out. I guess he kept hearing things in the distance that I couldn’t hear, because he was skittish the whole way to my parents’ house. I let him inside to hide under the dining room table while I helped put away the pool cover bags and mounted the filter fountain in the pool. Then after a quick swim we headed straight home at a hurried pace, especially after someone set off a mortar shell just a block away.

Eaddie and Eli were holed up watching a movie and Summer was headed to bed, so I took a quick shower and wound down quickly myself. My feet hurt pretty badly from being on them so much this weekend, and someone kept setting off fireworks well past ten, so hopefully Monday will bring a reset.

Owwww.

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Check the Cable

Today was very busy for me. We got to work immediately started prepping the new computer for Heaven. I brought my adjustable power supply to see if it would help, and that was when I learned that Dell power supplies have a data feed to confirm OEM power, otherwise the CPU gets throttled. I eventually remembered there was a bigger power supply on the breakroom computer, so I stole that for the rest of the day.

It was a good thing I had a frozen breakfast sandwich that I could eat late, because it was another long day without leaving for a break. I had a random anxiety attack just before noon, but luckily it passed quickly without any lingering effects. I eventually got the new computer in place in the early afternoon, but then the video would work during POST, but quit before Windows would load. I went back and forth before giving up until after hours.

Then Amanda needed help with the check printer. I fought it with drivers, but it ended up being a loose USB cable on the computer side. We had only checked the printer side, but the cable was hanging off the edge of the desk, which caused enough tension to lose connectivity.

I skipped lunch and had some watermelon that Teisha had cut up and divided out for everyone. I did some more troubleshooting, and then went back downstairs after Heaven left to try and figure things out. An hour and a half later, I figured out it was the video adapter I was using. Apparently it was having trouble negotiating the DiisplayPort signal, which didn’t make sense to me, but I found an adapter that worked.

I finally left, proud to have maybe finally worked longer than Janice. Of course, that wasn’t the case. She and Elizabeth were there much later trying to finish up something else.

I stopped by Harp’s for some beer, and Casey’s for some free slushies. It wasn’t until after I checked out that I realized it wasn’t Friday, and I wouldn’t be getting the slushies for free. I just paid and headed home.

Summer had volunteered to stuff race packet, so I beat her home by a little bit. She took a shower and then we went to New China for dinner. Some of the food was impressively good, but some of it was well below average. While I was getting my first plate, I heard my name from a table behind me. I didn’t recognize him, but it was my old classmate Cecil. If anyone had asked me, I would have said he didn’t even know my name back when we were in school, much less 25 years later. We fist-bumped and carried on.

Muad’Dib had been in the car the whole time we ate, so I took him for a run when we got home. It was dark, but he did great with his headlamp. He ran or jogged swiftly the entire time, almost never slowing down to walk. I let him lead, and he took me on the full route, but skipped the basin on the way to my parents’ house. We visited Dad, then made it home.

Summer went to sleep, Eaddie was out all day and night, and I ended up messaging Dan to ask about his Steam Machine reservation. He had posted earlier that he won the lottery but would probably pass on the purchase. We ended up catching up for a couple hours until I finally had to go to bed, itchy with residual poison ivy oils from something.

POISON!