Tag: Reviews

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It’s Curtains for You!

I went in to the office for a little while today, then got a call from Brody to help with something at the junior high. We only sort of fixed that for Matt, then piddled around with some print issues in the library until lunch.

We decided to try Whatta Burger after having possibly not been at all since I started working there. They had changed the decorations again, replacing the generic pictures of hamburgers with some squidly kites. The menu boards and POS systems were all new and lacking any character at all. The burger was fine, but the fries were pretty lame. For a $10 lunch deal, it hardly felt like a deal at all.

After lunch, I spent a good amount of time hunting for my bead curtain. Ben hid it somewhere, and I couldn’t tell whether he played some camera trickery on me. There definitely didn’t seem to be any place for it to hide in that storage room where he originally hid it. I was able to recover my pirate flag, but no curtain.

I was supposed to go by Mark’s after work but forgot in the process of getting the girls ready for karate. Fortunately he called to say he had to leave work, so we’d have to schedule another time anyway. I dropped the girls off, then went to the Neighborhood Market for some extras to dress up one of the school pizzas that Brody brought back for us.

Once I got to Summer’s, I started cooking some bacon and putting the dryer back together. The part went in super easily, and I managed to get all the screws back in the right place. I did put the drum in backwards, but it was symmetrical anyway. The pizza turned out pretty great, and was completely unrecognizable with everything I added.

The girls trickled off to showers and bed, and I headed home for the evening hoping not to lose any more Doge. It definitely hit a low where I was losing, but popped right back up within minutes. It just made me wish I was better prepared to begin with, but now that the money is in the account, trades can happen without any fear of missing out.

Rollercoaster…. of Doooooge.

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Where’s Curtain?

I had so much trouble going to sleep last night that it was a real surprise making it to work early today. Ben enjoyed my I Know What You Did Last Summer Recently picture so much that he made his own Where’s Waldo Curtain picture to tape over my door. Melinda was gone and left me with a gift bag of snacks and a single-shot dart gun with a pile of foam darts; mostly pink.

It was a quiet day, because Zach was off and Ben left to cover testing at Crawford. Greg and I were the only two at the shop for a while. Gary was in and out. I had some work orders assigned to me, so I just took care of those for most of the morning.

Lunch time approached surprisingly fast. I convinced Gary, Greg, and Josh to go to McAlister’s with me so I could redeem my free entrée. I should have taken a picture of how pitiful it looked. I got the Pick Two with a cup of soup that was only about two thirds full, and a sandwich that hardly had anything inside of the bread. For ten bucks, I would have been super mad. For free, I just sort of felt like I was on a diet.

After lunch, I continued work in Jamf, trying to enroll that new iMac. I finally asked Gary for some advice and we pretty well decided it was just an OS incompatibility for being so new. Ben and I chatted for a little bit after work, and then I headed home to get Autumn to her Explorers event in Dardanelle.

The internet was in and out for a while, so we had to let Eaddie into the garage from her bike ride. After dropping Autumn off, I came home and continued packing things into my cabinet and cleaning up the garage. Summer came by to get Eaddie, and once the sun went down, I moved inside to try and clean up the laundry room. It gets a lot slower as the things I’m organizing get smaller.

I finished the evening trying to find some arrangement of picture frames that lined up well enough to not notice minor height differences. Next time I’m staggering them purposefully, because inconsistency in mounting hardware height is stupid.

It’s like triangular marketing.

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Dude, You’re Getting a Dell!

I ran home this morning after clicking some more cookies with Eaddie. Uncle Giao and the family came down, so I had to get a laptop ready for him to take. It took me a while to get everything updated and ready to go, but hopefully it works well for him. I spent most of the afternoon at my parents’ house until they left. Then I ate some leftovers before heading back to Summer’s.

Nobody was really hungry for a proper dinner, but Autumn grilled some hot dogs and we all munched a bit in the evening. Then she wanted to watch The Greatest Showman, which I surprisingly didn’t really care for. I didn’t dislike it by any means, but I think I had just built it up to be something completely different in my mind.

When we finished that, I put on The History of Time Travel until Summer and Autumn went to bed. Then Eaddie and I stayed up and watched an episode of House before bed.

No, that was not a real documentary about how someone invented an actual time machine out of an Atari.

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Attack of the Time Sinks

I woke up to an empty house today, and continued my clicker games until my FedEx package arrived at the Dollar General up the road. As soon as I got it back to the house, I got to work applying my screen protector with the liquid, optically clear adhesive. The packaging of the phone ended up making it a dirtier and dustier project than I like, but I eventually got everything together.

The sticker at the top of the phone that was supposed to prevent the adhesive from seeping into the speaker did basically nothing, and appeared to even draw the liquid into it with surface tension. Next time I’ll have to line the phone with some masking tape or something, because it was a bit of a pain to get it all out. It made me pretty nervous, but it all worked out alright in the end. The biggest disappointment was a wave of discolored area in the screen. Unfortunately I didn’t turn the phone on before applying the screen protector, so I have no way of knowing if it’s caused by the adhesive, or if the screen itself is defective. Rather than remove the screen protector now, I decided to give it just under a year to crack or chip. As the end of the phone warranty approaches, I may have to peel the protector off and see what’s really going on.

I eventually had to leave to get the girls from school. I took them back to my house, and they rode their bikes to Oakland Heights until it was time for me to take Autumn to her Monday night school. Eaddie and I went to my parents’ house to work on some leftovers until it was time to get Autumn again. Then we made it up the hill for the evening.

Summer spent the evening on the couch setting up her replacement phone after her original Pixel 3 died. We never could get it going again, so it’ll be sent back tomorrow. The girls went to bed pretty soon after they got home, and I stayed up late getting my new phone prepared to port my old Sprint number over tomorrow.

Entertain the swarm.

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A Wonder We’ve Made It This Far

I picked up some semi-disappointing biscuits from Hardee’s for breakfast this morning before our trip to Conway. They just seemed like they weren’t quite as “loaded” as they should have been. The biscuits themselves, however, were perfect as always.

The girls loaded up in the cold, misty rain, and we made it to Conway just in time to grab snacks and take our seats before the previews started. The girls didn’t really remember the first Wonder Woman movie, and we probably should have watched it last night instead of The Dark Knight Rises for a refresher. I thought this one was entertaining, but the story seemed weak. I would have liked to see more building up of the villain and where he came from. In contrast, I didn’t find the flashback to baby Diana to be very important at all.

After the movie and with some protest, we went to Kohl’s to look around. I got a mooing chip clip that was on clearance for what should have been regular price, so that was worth the trip by itself. The girls all wanted to eat by then, and of course couldn’t agree on a place to go, so I picked Mike’s Place as a treat. I figured Autumn could get the steak she wanted, and Eaddie could get something aquatic.

Our server was fantastic, but I didn’t love my fish. Autumn’s $30 New York strip looked to be cooked to perfection, but she turned her nose up at it after about three bites. Then she tried to convince us that her palate was sophisticated enough to identify and appreciate different cuts and qualities of beef, and that she didn’t want it because it wasn’t good. Astoundingly, I managed to bury whatever beast those comments normally would have unleashed, and we boxed up her leftovers for my breakfast.

Both of the girls’ behavior really started to slide from that point on, as we went to walk Target, and then Best Buy. They cried about staying one more night at my house, and I got to try my hand at Good Cop again. Their attitudes really seem to be habits learned from always getting their way, and again I can feel my strict hand at parenting tightening its grip.

Such is the cost of making a better people.

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Food Zombies

We got up early this morning to take Summer to work at the Conway location. Autumn wanted to tag along for some shopping as well. I had to run home to clean up, then pick up my trial contacts, and finally picked up the girls for a drive to Conway. We dropped Summer off, then went to Target for a slow walk around the store.

We picked up a couple very small things, but nothing of much consequence. Autumn got pretty hungry, so we left there and went to Golden Corral for lunch. The buffet was pretty disappointing, with several duplicated dishes and only hamburgers made with rolls instead of buns from the grill. I still filled up, but I left super unsatisfied.

From there, we went back to Kohl’s to try and find some clearance. Autumn actually did a good job thumbing through the racks and picked up a pair of pants. Still, I didn’t find a whole lot that interested me, so we eventually moved on to Best Buy. We were both feeling super exhausted after a big lunch, and just wanted to nap. Best Buy was really just a time killer for an hour before we could fetch Summer from work.

On the way, I grabbed an iced coffee from McDonald’s that really helped to pep me up. When we got to Summer, she was in the pit training their manager. She wanted to do another oil change with her down there, so she had me pull around and get mine done a bit prematurely. I couldn’t complain, and the oil was still black anyway.

When they finished up, the three of us ran to Sam’s to pick up a few things. I tried to do a bit more deal scouting, but came up dry. We headed home as the sun came down, stopping once in Morrilton for some a-a-a-a-a-a-alcohol. Autumn wanted to make tacos for dinner, so we let her run into Walmart for a couple missing ingredients once we got back into town.

The tacos were simple but tasty enough. Everyone turned in super early after we finished eating. I was exhausted, but had a bunch of email to catch up on before going to bed myself.

This is starting to feel like work.

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Sorta Sitting

Summer got up this morning for a hair appointment that kept her out all day, so I was left alone in a house full of teenage girls. They make that sound way more exciting in the short films I watch, but in reality it was me playing video games in bed all day, waiting for Summer to get back. On the bright side, Stadia has been pretty great, even handling buffering issues pretty well when all the girls started streaming other things across the network. Latency isn’t much of an issue in a turn-based game like Into the Breach, but it was still pretty impressive.

That pretty well burned the whole day, so when Summer returned and then left to take the girls home, I went home to shower. Then she came over and we went to Mulan’s for dinner to show off her fancy new hairdo. When we got back home, it was pretty much straight to bed again.

My only regret was that I didn’t have more of that lychee/longan/rambutan flavored jello.

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#UnexpectedCrucifix

I went by the shop this morning to pick up a couple TVs for Athletics, and dropped them off at their office. After that, I stayed quietly busy in my office for most of the day. Allen invited me out to lunch, so we decided to try The Gunslingin’ Burger.

The staff was friendly, and the menu was quaint. They had a TV up with a special Murder Burger that looked pretty good, so I just got that without even bothering to look at anything else. Loaded Beer Cheese Fries on the side brought my total to just under $15, which set the bar pretty high.

After we ordered, we noticed the rest of the decor, which consisted of a giant, life-sized, floor-standing cross, and a jail cell. We took a photo op with the more interesting of the two, and then were relatively quickly served our meals. I was more than a little put off by the overall presentation, but it was cool that Allen could get a side of chili with his. My fries were pretty good, and the burger was tasty, but the price was all I could think about. The burgers were disappointingly flat, at about half the thickness of the photo. More vegetables would have given it the thickness I craved, but the sliced celery was an interesting addition that I enjoyed.

The cook came out a couple times, once to check on another couple of guys that were there, and again to check on us. The approach was a little bit awkward, but I could appreciate his desire to connect with his patrons. I hadn’t fully made up my mind by the time he came to us, so we just responded that everything tasted good, which wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t worth $15.

I actually left hungry, so I ran home and cut up another peach for my afternoon at work. I did a bit of running around, had a sit down political conversation in the library, and then left work to meet up at Summer’s for dinner. She grilled a bunch of meats to eat for the whole week, so tonight was rice, chicken, broccoli, and cheese. I threw all of mine into a bowl and just sort of mixed it up, and it was great. She didn’t take the girls to karate, and Autumn decided she didn’t need to go to the high school for whatever band fitting they were having, so I ended up leaving them there for the night so I could come back home.

I wanted to clean up a bit more, but most of my evening was spent getting distracted by different problems everywhere, and I was never satisfied with any fixes. My new WEMO switch still isn’t working, my WiFi is a mess because of it, and I’m overall just super frustrated with the whole process.

And for some reason, I’m still freakin’ hungry.

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What Pandemic?

We planned a trip to Magic Springs today, so I got cleaned up and waited for Summer to bring all three kids over. As soon as they got here, I remembered the souvenir cups were at her house, so she and Autumn ran to get them while we waited for Dad to get here. Then we hit the road.

It was a pretty good drive down, in spite of getting stuck behind every Jeep. Seriously, if you drive a Jeep down Highway 7, screw you, buddy. When we got to Hot Springs, Summer and I decided to go back to Rolando’s for lunch. The strip was absolutely packed though, and we made it all the way to the top of the parking garage without finding a space. Luckily there was a lot of foot traffic back to the garage, and we found two people leaving just as we turned around at the top.

It was a pretty good, brisk walk to Rolando’s. I was surprised they weren’t completely packed, but we got right in and sat in the 1920s-30s speakeasy themed floor. The rest of the visit was pretty disappointing, unfortunately. The food looked great, but it was all just barely warm. It didn’t take much time to come out, so I don’t know if it just wasn’t cooked fresh, or what. Evidently they also didn’t serve chips and salsa for lunch unless you ordered it as an appetizer. Then the salsa didn’t taste as good as any of us remembered. Overall it was super disappointing compared to the incredible experience we had on their rooftop deck last time.

From there, we made our way to Magic Springs, and wandered through to a few rides. They were pretty busy too, with really long lines for the roller coasters when we first got there. We split up a little bit to get some rides done, and then all ended up back at the Gauntlet, where the line had diminished to almost nothing. We all rode it twice, and then everyone but Summer and Autumn rode it a third time since there was hardly a wait.

We wanted to get some funnel cakes on the way out, but we got really lucky and missed out, because they stopped making them over half an hour before they would close. Instead, we went back downtown and walked all the way to the end of the strip to a place called Kringles and Kones. Kyle, the sole person there, was an amazing and friendly host. It was a bit weird to be so Santa-themed, but the Santa’s Way danish and ice cream was incredible.

After that, we walked back to the car and filled up some water bottles while Dad checked on some tickets to see Maxwell Blade’s show. It was a packed theater, but he got us tickets in the back corner, and it really wasn’t that bad. It was a great show, and Dad got to visit with him for a bit after it was over. Everyone was exhausted by that time, but it was a great way to end the day.

I had to hit the brakes pretty hard on the way home to avoid hitting a deer, and that lead to about a gallon of spilled spring water in the back of the car, so when we got home I had to sponge a big pool of it out from under the spare tire. Of course it’s all in the carpet and everything too, and it won’t evaporate very well in the cold weather. I’ll just have to deal with it tomorrow. Along with replacing my car battery.

And I won’t take “no” for an answer.

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What a Wreck

Autumn got up this morning ahead of everyone else, and actually wanted to take the others out to do something. Once everyone else was up, we sent the three of them to get breakfast from Burger King. When they got back, Eaddie said she had slipped in some gravel and had a little wreck, breaking the bottle holder off of her bike. Fortunately I had about a dozen more, so I had her fixed up with a replacement in no time.

They took off again to go exploring on their bikes, so Summer went to the gym while I took a shower and started some laundry. She and the kids all got back home around the same time, and they came in to rest while I went outside with Summer so she could practice riding the Grom around the neighborhood.

I was in and out with laundry since she seemed to be doing really well. That’s when I heard someone beating on the door. The neighbor came over and said he thought someone hit her in the road. I ran outside, and she was standing on the sidewalk at the end of the road with a couple stopped cars and a bunch of people.

Luckly she hadn’t actually been hit, but she had a low-speed crash after what I guessed was a failed downshift in the middle of turning onto our street. As far as crashes go, it couldn’t have happened in a more convenient place. She was able to walk to the house, and I got the Grom started up and rode it home. It wasn’t until we got there that I realized how bad the gash in her chin was.

We dropped Noah off at work, then tried to go by MedExpress. They came out to check on her, then politely suggested the emergency room just in case it was something more serious. We really should have insisted on getting stitches there, because it took over four hours at Saint Mary’s to get three stitches in her chin. The staff there was overall much less friendly and helpful, and I’m sure it’ll be more expensive. We were running with an abundance of caution though, and didn’t have the gift of hindsight.

Julie was nice enough to pick up Noah from work while we were stuck at the hospital. When we did finally make it back to the house, I had Noah take her home while I finished up my laundry. Then I ran to get her a Baconator for dinner before Wendy’s closed, since we never did eat after breakfast. I picked the girls up from my house, then headed up to theirs for the evening. Summer was obviously exhausted after an afternoon of road rash, a laceration on her chin, and at least one chipped tooth, but didn’t seem as defeated as she had been the rest of the evening. She made it up into bed for some of her kids baking show until she fell asleep. I struggled to get my laptop running long enough to get this blog post up, and then crashed myself.

See what I did there?