Tag: movie

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The Time Honored Tradition of Hating the New Guy

It rained a bit last night, but today was cool, clear, and beautiful out. My morning went by pretty quickly, though I didn’t accomplish a whole lot. I did decide to take a lunch though, and went home to make myself a couple burritos. I should have stopped at one, but I was afraid I’d still be hungry with the work I would be doing in the afternoon.

I took the Grom back to work after lunch. I spent just a little while at the high school, then had to meet some guys at the shop to help with a couple touch panel installs at Dwight. Zach, Greg, and Kyle were loading up Greg’s truck, and then I rode with Kyle to the school. We got there with plenty of time to spare before school let out, but the teachers let us in anyway.

The first install went relatively quickly, but Zach kept making eyes about how Kyle was doing a lot of standing and watching. In his defense, he’s shy anyway, so being new and timid seems completely normal to me. He’s fully capable of doing what you ask him to do, but it was like the other two just expected him to figure it all out. I’m sure he’ll get to where he can lead a project eventually.

We ended up having to re-run some cables in both rooms, so we didn’t finish up until right at quitting time. We unloaded at the shop, and then I went by Summer’s shop to see her for a bit. She was just about ready to leave though, so I headed home for a little while before going up to her house for dinner.

I thought we were just cleaning up leftovers, but she actually made some fresh chicken for the girls. I wasn’t really very hungry, but I just shoveled a bunch of really old food down my gullet to get rid of it. It was pretty dissatisfying.

After dinner, we came back to my house and moved the couch so we could watch a movie. Autumn really wanted to watch a Disney princess movie, which seemed to mostly annoy everyone else as usual. I had a trick up my sleeves though, because I knew we had the new Mulan on Disney Plus.

I thought the movie was alright, but lacked the punch you would expect from someone as large as the Walt Disney Company. In fact, I guess from that frame of reference it was pretty disappointing. There were a few groany parts, but overall it was entertaining and different enough from the original cartoon that it didn’t feel like a super lazy reproduction.

No, there is not at least some singing.

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Saturdate

I went to sleep super late last night after staying up with the cat to let him eat as much as he was willing. My alarm was set for just about six hours later, and I climbed out of bed to get ready for our day date in Little Rock.

Before I could get through my morning cleanup routine, Mark wanted to have a remote session to answer a few questions. What I thought was going to be a 15 minute call turned into just over an hour. I was worried we weren’t going to have time to get lunch before the matinee, but it actually worked out perfectly.

I picked Summer up and we went to Yesterday’s in Morrilton for lunch. I figured it was pretty good food from somewhere we never go, and it would put us outside of Little Rock far enough that we’d be hungry for some popcorn in the theater. My catfish and Summer’s salmon were both pretty great, and she recognized our server as a student from the junior high, which was novel enough.

We got to the Pramenade with just enough time to drive the strip, park, and enjoy just a couple minutes of blue skies before going into the nearly empty IMAX. I need to remember the seating layout better, because the online seating chart didn’t make it clear to me where my favorite seats were. Since the place was basically a ghost town, we hopped on down to our usual seats, which were really too close for comfort, but gave us a handrail to put up our feet.

Tenet was great, though a little over-loud. Some of the dialog was difficult to understand just due to the volume alone. Summer was on edge for most of it, but we enjoyed its usual Nolan-level of mind bendiness. Re-reading the plot later helped put some pieces together for me, of course.

After the movie, we went by Sam’s just to do a little shopping before we headed home. We stopped in Conway for some Rita’s Italian ice and had a nice little chat at one of the outdoor tables. When we got back home, we stopped at her house for a change of clothes, then came to my house for the evening.

What’s happened happened, which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world. It’s not an excuse to do nothing.

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Waiting…

It’s been raining all week, and it’s made me really sluggish in the mornings. It doesn’t help that I’ve been working nonstop for what feels like forever. I miss the early days of COVID when the days were shorter, and we spent most of them at home.

I went by the shop this morning to turn in Autumn’s time sheets. I brought my life jacket, because they said the basement and the server room both flooded yesterday, and that it was way worse than ever before. Evidently we lost about $15,000 worth of equipment. There was still (again?) about an inch of water in the shop today, and both custodians and maintenance were there helping to clean it up.

Eventually I made it to the high school and just churned out work orders as quickly as I could. I think I actually got down below 40 by the end of the day. I did take a lunch break to run home and check on Split, because I left him outside all day while I was at work. I felt pretty bad about it near the end of the day, especially when it just kept raining late in the afternoon. I brought him inside all soggy and boney, and I just knew how close to the end we were.

Summer came over after a while with some salad, and we ate that with some cold chicken I got the other day. Then she went to get the girls and I stayed with the cat. We watched Waiting, mostly because I remembered watching it when it came out, and that was the year he was born. It wasn’t really as sentimental as I thought it would be. I guess cats don’t really care about movies. At least, not when they’re starving to death and it’s a movie about servers at a restaurant.

Well, we are under a flood watch...

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Last Friday Night

Summer went in to work this morning while I caught up on a bit of sleep. When I got up, I spent the morning and most of the afternoon tinkering with G Suite. Autumn got up and started cleaning house, which eventually prompted Eaddie to do the same.

I had to run home and shower so I could meet up with Mark in the late afternoon. When I got there, he said he forgot to text me that he wasn’t going to have time today, so I headed back home to clean up after the cat. He left me several little presents, so I got the carpet cleaner out and went to work. I ended up liquifying some food for him to see if that would help.

When Noah got off of work, I picked him up and we headed up to Summer’s for the evening. She grilled some chicken for salads, and we watched a bit of TV with the kids until they wanted to watch something without us. Then Summer and I retired to the bedroom and watched Starship Troopers until bedtime.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

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From Womb to Tomb

Summer took the girls to meet up with their father today while I cleaned and tinkered at the house. Eventually she came back over and we went to my parents’ house for some dinner.

Evidently Autumn went skydiving, and we didn’t learn about it until after the fact. I don’t think either of us really minded except that we didn’t learn that it was even a possibility until after the fact. It’s possible I was more upset about it than Summer.

After dinner, we came back home and watched Cloud Atlas. It was pretty tough to keep up at first, and it was more impressive how many characters each actor portrayed than anything than anything else. After three hours, we decided we liked it, but I’m not sure I’d watch it again. Just another one checked off my list.

I ended the evening tinkering with my TeamSpeak Sinus bot some more, and managed to get YouTube search and streaming to work. I just don’t understand how something so well designed and refined can have such completely absent documentation.

Our lives are not our own. we are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

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Slow Start; Quick Finish

I slept so well last night that I really didn’t want to get out of bed this morning. It took me a while to get going, and Eaddie basically slept until the last minute. I eventually got around to making an “everything” Italian loaf egg sandwich to take to Summer for what was supposed to be brunch but ended up being a late lunch. It felt super hot outside in the sun, and traffic was awful again. I miss the early days of the pandemic.

After lunch, we went by Julie’s to help take her TV off the wall so Suddenlink could check out why her internet keeps dropping out throughout the day. While we were there, we heat-pressed half of the flags I made, to cure the ink. The other half I wanted to experiment with water to get the paint to flow to both sides of the flag. Hopefully that will keep me from having to come up with a way to screen print the reverse side as well.

With that done, Eaddie and I headed back home and watched some more Daredevil until Summer got off work and came to get her. They went home to clean up while I did the same, and then they picked up Slim Chickens for dinner on the way back here.

The chicken was pretty decent, but I think for my money, Zaxby’s has better sauces. I put on the 2003 Daredevil movie for us to watch, and Eaddie just kept groaning through the entire thing, which really made it all worthwhile. She did find a lot of parallels though, and insisted we watch the first episode of the Netflix series when the movie was over.

After that, Summer went to bed and we watched a few more episodes, ending with a really horrible one with a pointless flashback to an already established-well-enough character. Being this close to the end, it really aggravated me that they wasted a whole episode to that.

Gravy. Gravy would make it all better.

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Student Driver

We got up this morning and picked at some leftovers for breakfast. Autumn continued watching The Sound of Music, and we watched through the intermission. Then she wanted to go out for a drive, so I let her take me to Walmart where we walked around the whole store to pick up whatever we could remember needing.

It rained pretty hard while we were in the store, but it quit by the time we left. I let her drive to the gas station to fill up the car, then we went by my house to feed the cat before going to her friend’s house to pick up some clothes she wanted to buy.

Shortly after we got back to the house, my parents invited us to Linh, so Summer, Eaddie, and I met up with them for an early dinner. Then it was back to the house to finish the movie. Summer eventually went for a run, and then we all sat down for an episode of Game of Thrones before bed.

Eaddie came out of her room to talk to me for a while as I worked on the blog. Then she sat next to me learning Spanish on Duolingo until I went to bed.

What’s “hospital” in Spanish?

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Rapping Up Before the Weekend

Ben was out this morning, so with Melinda working from home, Greg and I just hung out at the shop all day. I kept pretty busy, and even successfully helped someone remotely. The morning went by pretty quickly, and then Greg gave me some leftover pulled pork he brought.

Ben came around in the afternoon and did some work in his office, and then came back to the shop and chatted with me for a while. We got my virtual machine working for the Watchfire sign software, which was my biggest success of the day. Then I went home for the weekend.

Summer came over right after work, and I ran to Taco Villa to get her some nachos before we eventually sat down to watch Captain Fantastic. I thought it was a pretty great story, but I couldn’t remember how it ever made its way to my watch list in the first place. It was nice getting to mark out something completely new.

If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.

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I Made Sliders

My medication alarm kept nagging me awake this morning, and I got up to make an “everything” sandwich for lunch. I got the girls up and had to go out to air up my front bike tire again since it was completely flat. Then we rode to the shop for lunch with Summer. There was quite a bit more traffic in the middle of a Friday, but we managed without too much trouble.

They were pretty busy, so Summer had us go upstairs to eat inside away from the paying customers. I guess the bagged sandwich was too loose and the meat and cheese slid down through to the other sandwiches, leaving Autumn’s first end piece without. It wasn’t terrible to correct though, and we had a feel-good lunch. Afterward we rode back home, the long way again, through the city park. The heat was hot and the ground was dry, but the air was full of sound.

When we got home, we drove back to the shop so Autumn could stay and work for some money to “buy” the Matrix from her grandparents. Eaddie had to get her bag with a change of clothes too, since she forgot to bring the bag inside last night.

With just the two of us left, Eaddie and I decided to try and clean up the house a little bit. We were going to start in the garage, but as it got warmer that felt less appealing to her, and she landed in the kitchen instead. She poked around a little bit while I got some dishes shuffled. We didn’t get a whole lot done, but at least it seemed like a noticeable difference.

Summer and Autumn eventually came home and we had to figure out dinner. We were craving Chinese but decided against Sumo because of the price. Then Summer got set on Brown’s but I discovered they had shut down for a few days to remodel for social distancing. At a buffet. Still seems like a bad idea, especially with how many old people eat there.

We ended up getting Wendy’s, then came back home and ate while we watched Autumn’s pick of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Summer seemed a bit broken after a decidedly non-happy ending, but we made it better with some Yahtzee and Moana. Julie invited us to kayak tomorrow, so we called it an early night to give us plenty of time to get everything together for Summer’s first time on the creek.

Listen. For a thousand years, I’ve only been thinking about keepin’ this hair silky, getting my hook, and being awesome, again.

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Reluctant Day

With a surprising exception of Autumn, nobody wanted to get around to doing much of anything today. She started a few chores early in the morning and then wanted to sit in her room the rest of the day. I rolled around first thing and tried my hand at day trading, but ultimately only saved myself from losing about 50 cents. Then I spent the rest of the day working between breaks in Animal Crossing. A part of me really hates the grind in that game, but another part of me feels satisfied enough with the progression that I keep going back for more.

The girls went outside for a while in the afternoon and tried cleaning up their weird nightmaremobile that’s been parked under the back porch for as long as I’ve known them. Eventually Summer came home from work and demanded dinner in the way that a working spouse would.

I baked some chicken thighs and legs in some Buffalo sauce and tried my hand at frying some sliced potatoes and onions. Summer warmed up a can of peas to round out the meal, and the girls all seemed pretty happy with it all. After dinner, Autumn wanted to watch WALL-E with us and Eaddie absolutely refused on account of hating wonderful things.

In the end, Autumn couldn’t even finish the 103-minute movie, so she and Summer went to bed. Eaddie and I stayed up for too many episodes of The Punisher. It’s been moving quite a bit faster than some of the others in the franchise, so it’s kept us hooked.

One batch, two batch…