Tag: television

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Three Wheelin’

I got up relatively early this morning, but almost immediately gave up and went back to sleep for a couple more hours. The second time I woke up, Eaddie had gotten up and taken a shower. I had some cereal for breakfast and then took a shower myself before texting to request a tow for the old Pathfinder. I asked Eaddie if she wanted to go out on her bike while I rode the Onewheel, and to my delight, she was agreeable.

I aired up her tires, and we took off down the road toward Splash. I had the 16-mile achievement in the back of my mind, but it would take some lollygagging and probably a bit of charging to make it. We got as far as the city park before we stopped for a little break. Eaddie tried riding the Onewheel a time or two, and then we continued to Walgreens. I picked up an online order of some clearanced toothpaste, and then we continued all the way to Splash.

Summer was too busy to entertain us, so we circled around to get some food at Freddy’s until I got a text that David was on his way to pick up the Pathfinder. We went back and got Summer’s car, and met the tow truck at the old house, and then followed him to Orr Nissan. Tim got my information set up for service, and then we went back to drop off the Model Y.

Summer was ready to leave work, but didn’t want to have to do anything with us, so Eaddie and I rode back down the road and ended up stopping at La Huerta for dinner. The food was great, and we had a pretty good time. Afterward, we went back to Freddy’s for dessert before starting back home.

The ride home was pretty long and tiring, and by the end of it, I still needed four more miles to get my achievement. We rested for a little bit, and then Eaddie decided to ride with me to the marina, where Dad had his cameras set up to try and capture a comet. It was super windy and cold, but she got on the Onewheel some more and managed to ride around reasonably well while grasping my arm for dear life. As she got colder, she sat in the car while I rode out my final four miles.

By the time I came back around, Dad had given up on the comet. We headed home and I made us some hot chocolate, and we watched a couple episodes of Better Call Saul. It’s been on our watch list for long enough, and the show started off pretty good, so I think we’re in for an adventure.

I feel so cool!

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Stationary Turkey

I cleaned up the kitchen this morning, and had a burrito to finish up all of that stuff. I had put a turkey breast in the refrigerator last night, but it was still frozen this morning. I pulled it out and eventually got it thawed enough to stick it on the rotisserie I got a while back. Summer went to the gym, and then came back to take Eaddie dress shopping for her upcoming dance. The rotisserie didn’t work quite right, and appeared to be used, which was why I got it at a discount on Amazon. Unfortunately the motor sounded like it was skipping gears, at least in part because of my poor balancing. I ended up stopping it and letting the bird cook breast-side up.

Once the turkey was cooking, I ran to the old house to feed the fish and pick up a few more things, including some more fire wood. When I got back, the turkey was about done and Summer was finishing up some mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts. The turkey was a bit tough and dry, but tasted good and had a nice, crispy skin. Too much went wrong, so I have lots of ideas on how to make it juicier next time.

I cleaned up the kitchen, and then Noah showed up late and ate a ton of food. An incoming ice storm had us out of school the next day, so I started a fire and we watched two episodes of The Brothers Sun. Then Summer went to bed and the kids put on trash YouTube while they stared at their phones on the couch.

I don’t think they understand how much it infuriates me when they do that on my nice TV. They literally don’t make 3D TVs at all any more, and this is the best one they ever made. I’d really like to preserve it for high quality shows, instead of just letting it burn in slowly while they’re not even watching it.

We had the bedroom ready for Noah, but he slept on the couch again after blowing through like four cans of soda. I don’t think that kid drinks water at all, and I wish he’d quit just helping himself to our stuff whenever he comes over. It frustrated me the last time he came over, when he said I was micromanaging, because he doesn’t understand that we simply want him to respect our home and our things. It’s hard enough teaching the girls how to care about having and maintaining nice things, and then he comes over like some kind of entitled vagrant.

Tomorrow won’t be much fun, but at least there’s no school.

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Crying Over Spilled Beer

It was cold and rainy all day, and I had to go back to work.

It was awful.

Casey’s has free coffee on Mondays right now, so that helped, but then a hard acceleration out of Dardanelle had me spill a little in the car.

At least it was a loaner.

I got to work pretty early, and things were fairly quiet. I spent a lot more time submitting purchase requests than I expected, and way more time trying to fix some broken PowerShell scripts than should have been necessary. One of them will run manually, but not from the Task Scheduler, and I still don’t know why.

Tomorrow, I’ll have to address a needy and incredibly unprepared teacher that is so far out of her depth, she’s only able to survive by clinging to thermal vents on the sea floor. I cannot believe she is paid more than the minimum teacher salary now.

The place was a ghost town by the time I left at four, and I drove home quickly in the rain. I fed the fish, grabbed my air shim, and headed home to try and pull the pulsator out of the washing machine. Summer made it home early after having dinner with both of the girls, and told me stories about all the ways Autumn is using the people around her, and how Gerald continues to enable her.

What a shit show.

I ate her Sumo leftovers mixed with some of our own from home, and then we watched some Young Sheldon until I spilled a little bit of beer on the carpet. I got the shampooer going and pulled some black water out of the carpet, showing just how important it is to regularly vacuum and mop the home.

Eaddie went to bed so early that I hardly realized she had gone. Then Summer went to bed and had to remind me that I have to do this all over again tomorrow.

1981 McGregor 25 ft sailboat – $5,000

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Arm of Coats

I’ve slowly tried to start my mornings a little bit earlier as my three week break comes to an end. It helped that I woke up pretty hungry, so I made a big burrito to start the day. After a shower, I headed on out of the house and loaded up a big load of medium-sized things from the old house. Stuff that was already sort of packed, or at least wouldn’t benefit from being boxed up any further. I also cleaned out the majority of the coat closet, so I had a back seat full of backpacks and a front seat full of coats and jackets.

Eaddie was finally up when I made it back home, and I spent quite a while unloading, and cleaning or dusting some of the things up before I brought them inside. I felt good that just about everything had a home once it came inside, so there won’t be any unpacking for later.

It was cold out, but I wanted to get a little bit of time on the Onewheel. Among the things I brought home was my red vest, so I decided to Marty McFly my way to my parents’ house for a moment. I stopped in to see Dad and then turned right back around to get home just as Summer pulled up to the house from work. She was hungry for a salad, so I chopped up some of what we had left over from burritos and made us a couple with the last of the leftover ham.

Eaddie went out with some friends to an escape room, but wasn’t out too late. After we ate, I organized the house a bit more, and then Summer and I watched a few minutes of Jurassic Bark, which had me rolling with laughter. As funny as it was to start, it wasn’t something I could finish, so we followed that with an episode of The Orville. Afterward, Summer went to bed while I wrapped up my own chores.

That’s downright evil, Marlon Butterpaws!

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Big Brutus

The weather was pretty mild today, so Summer considered taking Eaddie out for a walk when she got out of bed. I thought I’d join them, but we quickly switched gears when my parents decided they were up for going to see Wonka at UEC. Summer went to check which showtimes were in the better theater while I showered, and then we met my parents there. The trailers didn’t do much for any of us, but to our surprise, the movie was an absolute delight. It’s been a little while since we’ve seen a movie that made us feel anything. The original was so beloved, and the Deppificated remake had us nervous. Wonka was, by all accounts, a great movie.

We headed back home where Summer was working before I could even make it in the door. Eaddie jumped up and was ready to move some more stuff, so she and I went to the old house and picked up my bedside chests of drawers. They were really dusty, but we got them cleaned off and rearranged more of the spare bedroom so she could fit things into her room. The desk won’t be easy, but we’ll figure it out.

As we got settled in after that bit of cleaning, we realized that we hadn’t had a meal all day. Eaddie wanted Little Caesars, so I ordered and then spent about 45 minutes in the store listening to a bunch of dimwitted employees as they continually messed up orders, including forgetting to make half of mine. Every time I go into that store and have to either watch a slow-motion train wreck with another customer or deal with some minor catastrophe with my own food, I think to myself how wonderful it might be to open up my own competing pizzeria called Big Brutus. It can’t be that hard.

I made it home and we ate one cold pizza, and one more fresh, along with a free order of Crazy Bread that I got for waiting so patiently while the manager failed to call out that my order was complete. Then we watched two episodes of Loki, which left us with the most thrilling of cliffhangers. Episode four was a perfect lead up to midnight, but we beat the clock by about 12 minutes.

Et tu

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Pain in the Drain

I made myself get up earlier this morning and made some coffee before finally crawling back under the bathroom sink. I’ve been back and forth on whether I wanted to replace or swap faucets, or buy a whole new matching set. I figured the first thing I’d have to do is take the existing one out, which was easy enough even with the silicone we used last time. I was concerned about one of the connection points in the S-trap though, so I ended up taking Dad to Leonard’s to see if we needed a rubber gasket of some kind.

I wasn’t really satisfied with the parts we found there, so we went back to the house to look at what we had, and decided against the extra gasket. We took the top of the drain assembly back to Leonard’s to replace only that part, but that would have been a third the cost of a whole new faucet and drain kit, so I decided against that as well. The spare faucet I’d purchased long ago would have to do for the moment. We ran by the old house to get a cat carrier for Dad, and then I dropped him off at his house.

We considered going to a movie with my parents in the evening, so I ran by UEC to see what time slot had Wonka in the better theater. Then I took a break to eat some leftovers, and Dad texted when he remembered that he had a couple spare pop-up drain assemblies that he wasn’t going to use. He brought one over, and the installation was a piece of cake. I was pretty sure I still had a very tiny leak due to a poorly cut angle in the sink, but I figured I could tighten that up later.

Summer got home with a little time to spare before the movie, but Mom decided she didn’t want to go. Eaddie had been coloring in front of the TV for most of the afternoon, but then spent the early evening rearranging her room. She and I never got to our plans to move things, so she wanted to get out of the house for a little bit. I needed a couple things from Harbor Freight anyway, so we took her car to PDQ to air up the tires a bit and then headed across town.

We picked up a magnetic paper towel holder and power strip for the coffee bar, and then sat in the parking lot for a little bit while we decided what to do next. We thought we witnessed a robbery when a couple cars pulled up and a group of guys in hoodies ran in and out of the store super fast, but other people seemed to be coming out of the store unsuspiciously. Eaddie was a little bit hungry, but we couldn’t decide what to get. As we started driving toward home, I suggested the Krispy Krunchy Chicken inside of Walmart, and got excited. She even mentioned walking around a bit, but as we walked up to the counter to order some food, the employee said they were closing down and would sell us everything they had left in the case at a discount. We ended up getting a mix of tenders, thighs, and some mac and cheese for half price, which was awesome.

We headed straight home and ate, and then Summer wanted to watch an episode of Loki. The second episode of the new season had me super confused by the end, so after the girls left I had to scrub back through the first episode and then parts of the second one again. The more I thought about it, the less sense the whole plot made. If killing He Who Remains was all it took to cause the timeline to branch, then were the TVA agents actually doing anything at all? Why, after hundreds of years of pruning individual timelines, were the TVA agents suddenly so distraught when a group of rogue agents pruned a bunch of branching timelines? Didn’t that negate the overloaded Temporal Loom?

Questions unanswered, Summer went to bed and Eaddie continued rearranging her room. I rearranged the coffee bar again and then helped Eaddie for a bit, and then we were off to sleep.

Krunchy Khicken?

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Bean Water

I tried making a couple lattes again this morning, and it went alright. I think I need a better cup for steaming milk, rather than doing it in the tiny milk carton. It took me a few to find one that wasn’t sour anyway, so it won’t be long before I have to come up with another plan. I ate a little, then cut up the last of the ham, and considered cooking some old bones for soup, but gave that up in favor of cooking some taco meat we bought a couple days prior.

Eaddie left after a while, and I took a long bath while my phone fussed over failed contact and message syncs. Summer spent most of the day catching up on work, and I tried to clean up a few things before making some refried beans from scratch.

Julie and Kevin were at my parents’ house to visit, so I rode the Onewheel over just to get some time on it and get out of the house for a bit. Then I rode back home in the twilight so I could make the taco meat. I didn’t want to waste the water from the refried beans, so I used what I needed for them and then poured the rest into the taco meat just to experiment. It turned out alright, but I think cutting out the salt made it a little more bland than usual.

Summer and I were watching the second episode of Secret Invasion when Eaddie finally made it home, and then Summer went to bed. Noah came over late, and then watched some horror flick with Eaddie late into the night.

Tootin along.

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Cruise Control

Eaddie slowed me down getting out of the house this morning, and then I had to drop her off at the high school on the way to work. Since I was already late and traffic wasn’t helping, I stopped in at Casey’s for a free coffee before making my way into the county. It was quiet all day, and I tried my best to focus on cleaning up my Windows 11 image.

After work, I fed the fish and then beat everyone home. Summer made slow cooker chili in the morning before going to Little Rock, so I stirred it up and waited for her to get home from work. She wasn’t terribly late, but Eaddie was. The two of us ate, and then I put my Govee ambient light strips on the back of the living room TV. The effect was pretty impressive.

Once Eaddie got home, the girls both went to bed pretty early. I watched some TV for a while and just appreciated the ambiance, but then I made it to bed a little bit early as well.

I think this fridge is toast.

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Love Your Curves

I slept fairly hard last night, and woke up feeling alright. I had some cereal that didn’t help, and then moved the old television into the sunroom. I started watching The Martian on it, but then quit to clean up the bathroom sink and take a shower.

Summer and I got out of the house in the middle of the afternoon to go shopping and get my LG television from the old house. We went to Bath & Body Works first, and they were super crowded. We had some coupons, but then Summer started picking up things that I felt like she already had at home. I instantly got flashbacks to all of the barely-used bottles of stuff I had to clean out from under Eaddie’s sink and our own bathroom, and probably got a little too upset about it. We grabbed our freebie with a coupon and then I was determined to take us home to pull out all of their soaps, lotions, and other miscellaneous body products.

Instead, we cooled down and stopped at Harbor Freight to see if we could score a deal on some accessories for the new tool chest-turned coffee bar. Unfortunately everything was just over the price limit for the coupon I had, so we left empty handed and went to swap cars with Eaddie.

She had gone to a robotics tournament, so we took the Murano to the old house to get the TV. Summer forgot the moving blanket in her car, so I had to drive back and get it, but fortunately moving the TV itself was completely uneventful. We got it into the new house, and I immediately mounted it to the new TV stand. I couldn’t have designed it any more perfectly if I had tried. The TV hovers less than a millimeter above the center channel speaker, and swivels well enough to get behind the whole contraption to route cables. It’s perfect.

We were hungry after that, so we went to New China for dinner. Eaddie was just getting back to town, but said she was full from eating all day at the tournament. We ate, and then went to fill up the Murano since Eaddie was nearly out of gas. When we got back to the house, I rewatched the last episode of the first season of Loki, and then kind of dozed through some random YouTube until I finally forced myself to get up and ready for bed. The girls had beat me to it by a couple hours anyway.

The Holy Grail of 3D

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No Snek

Eaddie was at a robotics tournament all day, so Summer and I hung out at the house all morning. She watched TV and took several calls for work, and I deployed a bunch of water leak sensors that were just delivered. While doing so, I discovered a leak of something under Eaddie’s sink. It felt like something more than water, but it may have just pulled something off of some of the bottles that were under there. The entire cabinet was crammed full of junk, and I just didn’t understand why they were collecting partially-used bottles of crap.

After cleaning that up and having a shower, we went to my parents’ house to eat some leftovers before going shopping. I wanted to find a drain auger that would be a little less cumbersome than Dad’s giant, exposed, metal snake. Unfortunately Harbor Freight was completely out of them. Walmart had a smaller one for more money, but we decided to just wait until Harbor Freight restocked on Monday.

We picked up an espresso machine on a deep clearance, a localized Russellville version of Monopoly, and some food to grill, and then headed home. Summer watched more TV and I did some laundry. Eaddie got home a bit late, and we didn’t see much of her. I started the first episode of The Orville with Summer, and then just dilly-dallied for a while longer before bed.

Predictably okay.