Tag: parenting

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This Guy Fawkes

Summer had a race in Conway this morning, and Eaddie had to get to the high school to take a bus to Conway for her orchestra concert. I got up pretty early myself and took a bath before Summer got back home. Then we packed up for a night at Alice’s.

We left Eaddie with the Model Y and took the Murano to Conway, which was awful after living on Autopilot for the past year. My arms were constantly tired, and all of my muscle memories were wrong. Our first stop was the liquor store in Morrilton, and then the China Town buffet in Conway for lunch. We finished up there just in time to make it across town to the Conway High School for Eaddie’s concert.

Both bands were pretty good, but I think my absolute favorite song was Eaddie’s last one. The concert was pretty short with only three songs from each of two bands, and then we headed straight to Alice’s place, only making a brief stop at a Dollar General for some energy drinks.

It was a small party this year. Alice and Josh were there, and Josh had one other friend come by. I took Summer, Alice, and the kids to the guest house to check things out, and then to see her in-laws next door briefly before going back to the house. They had some snacks there, but the girls mostly just chatted in the kitchen while the guys went down to start the fire. By the time we made it down the hill, it had mostly died down.

It was a great night of chatting by the fire though, and then we got to retire to a guest house instead of making the drive home after midnight. The guest house was a really cool, two-level house with everything we could have needed. Summer crashed pretty quickly while watching an episode of Fear Factor, which appeared to be on repeat. I wrapped up pretty quickly myself so I wouldn’t sleep too late.

That’s enough 90s television.

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Cash Cow

I was a little bit behind this morning, and the rain made everyone stupid and slow, and there was gravel all over the roads, but I made it to work on time. There wasn’t much exciting going on. Lunch was some pretty gross spaghetti that oddly was super light on noodles. It felt a little bit like eating mouthfuls of marinara with hamburger meat in it.

As I was leaving, John texted wanting payment for the electrical work. I had completely forgotten that we still owed him half, so I raced home to feed the fish and hit up the bank before meeting him at the new house. While he was there, he showed me where the first guy messed up and drilled a hole through the ceiling on the first day, but said the “free” outlets he installed in the garage made up for it. The funny thing is that the hole was from when they were installing those outlets, and he had already promised “free” outlets beforehand. I was just happy to have one house project done though.

After that, I went to my parents’ house for some leftover phở. Then when I got back to the house, the girls were looking up food for Eaddie. She also needed gas, so the two of us went out to get her some Zaxby’s. We sat and chatted for quite a while, and then got gas from Casey’s on the way home.

It was a pretty early night for everyone after that. I got to bed a little bit early to make up for earlier in the week. Time is just flying by, so we’re going to have to kick it into gear this weekend.

Watch your tone diacritical.

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March On

I finally got my request submitted to attend this year’s Arkansas Conference of Technology, and Blake came into the office to ask me to commit to staying for the rest of the school year. I understand that the budget for this year was made, and I know that I haven’t had long to prove myself, but I also feel like my department has really been set back from the direction I wanted to go. I told him honestly that it’s not my intention to leave, but that I was still kicking myself for not taking the $70,000 offer I got earlier in the year. I’m even more upset that I didn’t join Brody at Clarksville. This year is full of regrets, and there’s no confusion about how I feel toward my new school. There is a lot of work to be done, and they’re barely paying me enough to submit tickets to DIS to let them handle it. In the end, he said he would get me a PO, so I’ll be going for both days of the main conference, as well as both pre-conference days. It’s an investment in me, and I feel I’ve earned it whether I stay or go.

It was otherwise a pretty quiet day. I made plans to meet with John at the house after work to sign an invoice, for which he was expecting half of the payment before I actually knew what that payment would be. That was on him. After I met with him at the house, I took my car to the old house to charge and then took the Shadow to the high school for the marching assessment. It got cold fast, and I was pretty much immediately ready to leave, but it wasn’t awful. Mark and Laura actually came up and sat by us, and we chatted very briefly. She evidently knew my name from my own firing, and Mark laughed saying, “me too!” It’s harder to find a good lawyer at Technician pay though.

After the marching assessment, I went to the house to pay some bills before finally heading to the new house for the evening.

Actually, I thought there’d be more fire.

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Regrounding

I slept reasonably well last night in the new house, but it was still a hassle to go home in the morning. I was reasonably early for work, and the cafeteria lunch menu didn’t sound very appealing for most of the week, so I stopped at McDonald’s for breakfast. Nothing remarkable happened at work, and things were mostly pretty quiet. I still kind of feel like a temporary guest there most of the time, and I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing.

The electrician finally made it out to the house, so I had Summer meet him there to test charging. The breaker never tripped, but evidently he tightened some ground wires while he was there. I’ll have to get my tools from the new house to see if that fixed the floating ground issue I had elsewhere in the house.

After work, I met Summer at the high school for parent-teacher conferences. The atmosphere there seemed to be about what I expected with the current regime. I’d love to take a survey to see if anyone has anything nice to say.

When we finished, I got tacos and went home. Summer didn’t want to get back out to help me with bulk item pickup after she got to the new house, so I just ended up staying home for the night.

Disapproval Ratings

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What a Miserable Wretch

I was incredibly sore again today after cleaning carpets for so long last night. Summer took some stuff to the new house and then brought Eaddie back with some lunch. Eaddie had a band thing in the afternoon in Cabot, so they loaded up some more stuff to take while I waited at the house for Autumn to come get the rest of her crap that she never took when we kicked her out.

Summer came back, and Autumn eventually showed up quite a bit later than she told Summer, which already aggravated us. Then she came in and had the audacity to ask for help, when all Summer has done for the past month is move her own stuff to the new house. When she finished, Summer asked her to take some old clothes she didn’t want to keep to Goodwill, and she refused and started yelling that we couldn’t tell her what to do any more. I kicked her out again, and hopefully that will just be the last we hear from her for a very long time.

Summer and I had another load ready to go, so we went to the new house and unloaded. I wanted nothing more than a shower, but then I decided to redo the caulk in the shower instead. I also caulked the tub since Summer had scrubbed around the tile. I got better over time, but it took nearly the entire tube. I was really glad I didn’t buy the small squeeze tube.

Summer went home while I did that, and then I finally went home for a shower. By the time I made it up to her house, she was dead asleep. I cleaned up a bunch of leftovers to get them out of the fridge, and then it was off to bed.

I guess we can blame inflation for the “Freshman 50.”

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All About the Little Wins

Kim didn’t show up to work today, and texted about an hour late that she probably wasn’t going to make it. That instantly made my day more productive in certain areas. It certainly made things quieter, at least in part because I simply closed people out during lunch.

Harry came to fetch me early in the morning because he couldn’t get into his computer. Shortly after that, Toby came to ask me about another request from Dean to move his touch panel. I was confused, on account of my conversation with Blake, so I shot off an email to confirm. He totally had my back, so I denied the request again with the blessing of both supers.

I missed out on lunch, but powered right on through. The kids set off my car alarm again while they were playing foursquare, but it didn’t look like they hurt anything. I just kept feeling like maybe the idiot sitting in the rocking chair should move the kids somewhere away from staff vehicles.

After work, I headed home until I heard from Eaddie. She took the Model S to school, but forgot her phone. She called me when she got home, and then came over to charge while we went to eat. Ben called before she got there, and I ended up on the phone with him for a little while. I had Eaddie drive us to The Gunslingin’ Burger, but they were closed for the day. We crossed the street to wash my car, and then I took us to Sam’s Southern Eatery.

I can’t even say we had poor service, because we simply had no service. They took our order, delivered our food, and then we never saw anyone ever again. Eaddie really enjoyed the food though, and we had a really long, great talk. Afterward, we made our way to their old house to get a few more things for the night. Then we went back to my house for the Model S and possibly a mattress for me to stay the night.

It didn’t take long for us to decide it was too late to be moving that much bedding to the new house just to sleep in the floor, so she helped me clean out my bedroom instead. Then we went to the new house so I could help her unload and check out how she arranged her room. I checked on my carpet experiment and found no difference between presoaking and just using the machine with detergent, so I figure I’ll just stick with what I was doing before, but limit myself to smaller areas to concentrate the detergent.

I finally headed back home with the Model S, trusting her to go to school in the Model 3. I called Summer to catch up with her after a long day out of town, and then made it to sleep as quickly as I could.

This house is haunted, it’s so pathetic.

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Delegate

I left the house early today and cruised in to work on Autopilot. Kim was there on her birthday, and we delivered a couple more carts. I tried to take her to lunch, but we ended up just eating cafeteria food. They thought they ran out of orange chicken, so they gave us some chicken strips and fries instead, but then someone else came out the back entrance with some “teacher trays” of orange chicken, so I ate twice. The rice was pretty miserable, but the chicken was good.

Kim spent most of the day cleaning up old work orders, and I was glad that she was taking the initiative to do what she could do without me having to take a walk with her. Of course her days are super short, since she’s gone for lunch duty for what feels like hours, and then she leaves when the kids get out of class. Maybe some day I’ll get bored and actually pay attention to her hours.

I headed home as casually as I had driven in to work, and spent some time charging at home before heading up to Summer’s. Eaddie wanted me to help her with some physics homework, and I tried, but she was already kind of burned out on schoolwork. Eventually everyone made it to bed after an uneventful day.

How does insurance work, anyway?

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Taco Platter

I was a little bit late for work this morning, half because of my own timing, and half because of super slow traffic for the entire drive. I anticipated traffic around Dardanelle, but it wasn’t as bad as yesterday. Kim was there and immediately took me to a room with touch panel issues. It fixed itself, and provided further example of just how unconfident she is about resolving issues on her own. I’m stuck doing things that anyone could do, so nobody will get to the things that only I could do.

The day didn’t go by quite as quickly as yesterday, but lunch time arrived all the same. This time I went for some soft tacos, and apparently they made too many. They put out a bunch of extra food, and a few kids came up and started just grabbing tons more. Kim ended up getting a whole foil tray full of tacos to take home.

For a while in the afternoon, she disappeared to the elementary building to close some work orders. I didn’t expect her to do a ton, but at least it gave me some time to think. Ben called for a bit and I sent him some eSchool upload templates for a script he was trying to fix.

I finally built one Chromebook cart that can be deployed tomorrow, but we still have like 16 more to go, plus the one-to-one deployment for the older kids. I just wish it would all go away. I left a little later than I wanted, confused by who works what hours. Coming home was nearly as slow as it was on the way to work.

I tried calling Fast Glass to schedule appointments to have our windshields replaced, but they never answered. I figured I would stop by the shop, but the doors were locked at least 10 minutes early. We may never get new glass. From there, I caught Summer at Superfast just briefly before grabbing some Taco John’s and going home to do more laundry.

When I finally made it up to Summer’s, she was already in bed. I watered some plants and made more hummingbird food, and then Eaddie finally got home in the middle of my internet chores. She came out later to show me her new backpack, and then wanted to sit and talk for about an hour about school and friends. I finally had to finish up so I could go to bed, so I ran her off.

We can tacobout it later.

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Droopy Roofy

We had our home inspection today, so I had to go home to clean up before the girls came to pick me up. We made it about halfway to the house before I realized I forgot the check to pay the inspector, so Summer turned around. Luckily the inspection seemed to be going quite a bit longer than we anticipated. I wasn’t sure if he just got started late or if it really was just taking him that long to be that thorough. Summer had to stop by Rose Drug anyway, and Nick was still in the attic by the time we got there.

Summer and I wandered around a bit, and Dad eventually showed up. When Nick came down, he let us into the house to continue looking around while he worked. When he finished, he went over some of the worst repair issues he found, and it really was pretty varied. The biggest concern was a drooping ceiling in the living room. Evidently the new roof over the addition was just built on top of the old roof, so the trusses weren’t built to support the shift in weight. He said some of them had just split apart, and needed to be lifted and put back together. He also measured the water pressure at 120 PSI, which was a little more than excessive. I didn’t realize that he didn’t inspect the out building at all until I got his written report later in the day, but that is one of the big repairs that has to happen for us to move in at all.

Dad headed home after that, and the girls and I went to Stoby’s for lunch. As we finished up, I saw Shane from Howard sitting at the table across from us, so I talked to him briefly before we left. Summer had to go to work, so she dropped Eaddie and me off at my house so we could go for a motorcycle ride. Eaddie wanted to see the new splash pad at the city park, so we rode there first and walked around.

It was incredibly hot and humid outside, so I didn’t much enjoy baking in the sun. We continued on to Splash to see Summer, and then rode around the city, up the mountain and down past the arena until we made it back to my house. We were both hot and sweaty, so we decided to get our suits and go to my parents’ house to swim.

Eaddie did a great job driving across town, and swimming was a good time. The pool was still in full sun when we got there, so I propped some floats on top of the ladder and we just hid under them for shade. We talked for a really long time about a whole lot of things, and it was really great. As the shade started to cover more of the pool, it got a little chilly and we decided to get back out and dry off.

We chatted with Dad for a bit inside after we got changed, and he reminded me that it was their anniversary. Mom didn’t want to do anything when she got home from work, so Eaddie and I headed back to the house where Summer was home early after having a pretty rough day. She wanted a pretzel crust from Little Caesar’s, so we picked that up on the way. It wasn’t until we got back to the house that we realized they gave us the wrong order though, so I had to go back. As soon as I pulled up, he ran out with the correct pizza and we got to keep the first one he gave us.

I reviewed the inspection paperwork and talked to Alisha a bit before going back home to pack for the funeral trip. I felt like I needed a slightly larger backpack for the trip, but didn’t want to increase my load to carry. I may just have to leave my Steam Deck behind, but I really don’t want to.

I eventually made it back up to the girls, and Eaddie greeted me at the door with excitement. Just a little bit earlier in the evening, some friends invited her to go with them to play their instruments at a nursing home, and she was super happy about it. We talked for quite a while longer while I tried to wrap up for bed. Tomorrow would be an even earlier day than usual, and I wasn’t excited.

Just don’t die.

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Handbook Policy

Alisha sent us the offer paperwork to decline this morning, but that was just the start of a wild ride. I headed to work and got behind a bunch of slow people, so coming out of Centerville I laid on the accelerator so I could pass someone way ahead of me when the road split into two lanes. Little did I know that tiny speck of a vehicle was a State Trooper. I was going the speed limit when I got to him, but he had me. He pulled over until I passed and then lit me up. It was a short stop with only a warning, and apparently his “granny” works in the cafeteria. No idea if that helped my case, but it was funny that everyone at work knew exactly who it was that pulled me over. Small town.

After I got to work, Alisha sent me a message asking if we still wanted the Sherwood house for $275,000. Apparently after receiving the counter rejection, the seller’s agent thought they might be able to make it work if they could have until Friday, and wanted the offer in writing. I had Alisha send back our original offer with the addition of a delayed occupancy, and we’ll see what happens.

Kim came in late again and picked at a few things. I don’t know how many hours she’s supposed to work, but I guess I can’t complain for what she’s paid. I worked on a Chromebook handbook for most of the day. We went down to the elementary for a bit, but then I ended the day by myself to finish up my handbook. I was pretty proud of how nice it looked, but hopefully we can implement it for this school year.

I was a little sheepish to drive home too quickly, but I made it. I stopped at Casey’s to use some rewards, went home to change, and then went to the other Casey’s for another reward before going to my parents’ house. I ate some spring rolls and chatted with them for a little bit.

I eventually made it up to the girls’ house and tried to wind down relatively quickly, but got caught up going full Matrix mode on a bunch of houseflies that had gotten in somehow. I’ve gotten pretty good with my Bug-A-Salt gun. Then Eaddie came out to chat with me for a little while about her day with Autumn yesterday, lunch with her father the day before, and the negotiation for the house. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day with the board meeting in the evening.

Hi. I’m the guy you hired.