Tag: work

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Stress Ball

I started this morning at the high school, repeating three different data entry tasks in a meticulously crafted beast machine of over-documentation. Dale seems to have accepted that things will probably change pretty quickly after he’s gone, but more importantly it seems like I’m going to have to be demanding some additional buy-in from certain people. At least I feel efficient with the way that I perform his processes.

I could have worked through lunch, but he clocked out and ate some leftovers. I didn’t really feel like doing anything, so I went home and warmed up a frozen chicken slider that was pretty gross. Afterward, I came back a bit early to perform some intake and output of replacement parts and serviced laptops. I’ll have to do some more of that I think, before I really grasp the full process. The most aggravating part about any of that is the physical paperwork. Needless to say, 2019 is going paperless.

When we finished with that stuff, I left for the junior high to deal with needy esports kids. I gave two more PCs to the library for distribution, but I wish I had some face time with the parents at least to explain what it is that I’m doing. Summer had most of her room packed up, and then left with the kids so Nick could take them all to dinner. She ended up wanting CiCi’s too, so I met her there and stuffed myself to make up for the particularly terrible lunch. I ran into David and his tiny baby family there, and it was really great to see them. It pleased me that they seemed to be doing so well as such a young couple.

After dinner, I went to my parents’ house to pick up some mosquito larvae for my fish and banana trees for Tammy. I dropped them off at Oakland on the way home so I could check my blood pressure. It was surprisingly only “normally” high, but I did give myself a really long period of time to rest first. Then it was home to fight with a ridiculous cat box. I can’t be done with that nonsense soon enough.

It’s aight.

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So Long Haired Dale

I had a pretty slow morning again, mostly due to lack of desire to accomplish much. I ended up at the shop for a while before lunch, where they had a lockdown just before I arrived. For a while, it was the safest basement in all the land, with at least four cops and two of our security guys. I legitimately lost count.

Ronda and Jessica wanted to take the time to go out for lunch with me, so we went to Ruby Tuesday for $5 salads. It was delicious and green, but most notably the peaches were amazing. I don’t know why I don’t get more peach things more often.

After lunch I had to go to the high school to help with keyboard bezels. We got pulled away twice to go to the safe room due to some storms that rolled through. The second time, I brought some bezels along with me just in case we got stuck there for a while. I only had time to do one replacement, but it felt good all the same. We finished a big stack of them just in time to go to the library for Dale’s retirement shindig.

It really seemed like we crammed more people in that library than Alene had at the Center for her retirement, and it felt good. I’ve never made it to the very first part of anyone’s retirement party, so I assume it’s at least a little customary to say some words. Regardless of what normally happens, it wasn’t unlike Dale to have a story. He recalled starting his adult life in the high school library where he spoke with a recruiter that got him into the Marines. Eventually he retired from that and came back to the school district, where he had a retirement party in the same library. It seemed as though he might have started to choke up a bit, and it was sweet. I’ll really miss him.

Hannah had agreed to babysit my esports kids until I could get back to the junior high, so after the party I ran over there for just the tail end of practice. It was a pretty small crowd there, since most had been checked out early, or didn’t even have to come at all after being exempted from finals. I wish I had prepared for the end of the year, and the last week of practice better. I gave the district magazine to those that wanted it for the article about us. Then we took a trip to my office where I handed out a couple old computers so they could practice at home. I should have prepared for that better too. Having to move to high school has me all kinds of messed up.

I worked super late, but finally made it over to my parents’ house for some leftover mango soup. Then I helped Dad fix his smart garage door opener I had gotten them. I guess he misread the directions and wired it up incorrectly, so we fixed it without too much trouble. From there, I headed home to try and clean up, but half got distracted by email, and spent a large portion of the remainder of my evening unsubscribing from several of the overly talkative newsletters. Tomorrow morning it’s back to the high school to learn more web forms for submitting these tickets. I’m going to hate that so much.

Who’s that???

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Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels Bezels

Heather met me at the junior high this morning, and we ran around working on a few of the individual work orders I had collected last week. It wasn’t much, but she did at least get to open up a computer to pull out a power supply. We, or I, should probably be going over some of them with more urgency, but summer is nearly here, and I’ve lost a lot of steam. Jesica was in town for a meeting and wanted to get lunch, so I met her at Stoby’s and we caught up a bit.

After lunch, I went to the high school and helped Dale out by doing a stack of keyboard bezels. Then we brought two more carts full of laptops to the office and stowed them away under the bins. It was tiring, boring, and thankless work, but evidently I have to do it now. I did pull a quarter out of one of the card readers, but I’m sure if anyone from central office had seen me earn that bonus, they would have relieved me of it. At one point we did get a little bit of excitement when Paul burst into the office asking what our IP was. After some digging and looking at the snipping tool clip of a screenshot he printed on paper, I discovered he had gotten a popup regarding a reset password. I was relatively certain he was crazy, but I gave him a couple pointers and sent him on his way. He came back just minutes later and asked us to come take a look at it, and left in an audible huff when Dale told him we were too busy at the moment. I honestly think there may have been tears. It must have been remorse for not paying attention, or not having a damn clue.

We left at the end of the day, feeling vaguely accomplished. I went home and tried to clean up a bit through a headache I had been incubating. I spent a bit of time on the aquariums, less in the kitchen, and a bit more on the computer. I’ve got to get things ready for the trip, but my travel anxiety is already well on its way. I ate my leftover beef spud from last week when I got home, but after wandering around the house for a couple more hours, I worked up enough of an appetite to run to my parents’ house for some more leftovers. They were watching Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves on TV, and they both had forgotten we had watched it before. It was one of my favorite movies as a child, and I thought we had the VHS, but it’s possible we had borrowed it from someone. I never remembered much of it myself for some reason, but I sure remembered those fire arrows!

Back home, I wound it down pretty quickly and headed to bed for a long sleep.

A snake, a snake! Snake! Snake! Oooh, it’s a snake!

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Picnicin

There weren’t any projects to be done today, and I got called to Oakland first thing, so I just spent all day there working on a printer issue. They were having their field day, which seemed like lots of fun, but I didn’t really make it outside to see what they had going on. I did eat a lot of popcorn though.

Brice called for Brangus for lunch, and then Dale ended up buying for all seven of us with his bonus employee of the year check. I was pretty proud of eating only half of my smaller-than-usual spud, which is starting to sound pretty good right about now.

Jason let us leave early, but Zach, Gary, and I sat around chatting for a while after, and ended up leaving around the regular time. I headed home and waited for the girls to come over so we could go to the spring picnic at the marina.

We stopped by the Neighborhood Market to grab some snacks along the way, and then headed out to the park. It was a pretty small turnout for as loud as they had the music cranked up. The weather was pretty nice though. The skies were clear, there was a bit of a breeze at first, and it didn’t really feel hot until I got moving around a bit. I ran into three people that I knew in the band alone. I didn’t even recognize Dylan for his huge beard and all the weight he had lost. Nathan looked about the same as I last saw him at AT&T. I actually didn’t really know David, but he was a friend of Julie’s evidently. Aaron was there grilling hot dogs for Arvest.

We stuck pretty close to Ronda and Steven most of the evening. The girls wandered off and kind of did their own thing for a while. I took the opportunity to jump up and take a bunch of photos that seemed really good on my phone, but looking at them on a computer screen left me a little disappointed. All of the official funsquad members were content wandering around on their phones recording poor vertical videos, or streaming live to the internet. I had to try and show them up by getting into the action a little bit, and even took a few photos from behind the band. I got at least one pretty decent picture of Mark up on stage playing with the band too.

After that wound down, we came back to my house for a bit to clean up, and then went to Summer’s for the evening. Eaddie stayed up and watched several episodes of Parks and Rec with us until Summer was ready to pass out.

Would have been a nice evening to sail.

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Beats per Second

I got up early again this morning and picked Amanda up for our training day at Arch Ford. She said she was pretty hungover and couldn’t eat her Tornado from Love’s, so she gave the rest to me. Then I loaded up on Pop-Tarts and a Rice Krispies Treat. I really enjoyed learning and playing around in the lab again, so I was a bit upset that we had to leave at lunch time. I guess we really could have gotten away with not coming back, but Amanda was already begging to leave an hour earlier than we did. I didn’t feel too sympathetic since it was self-inflicted, but I did want to be back in time for the end of the year retirement assembly.

My anxiety was already pretty high, and I stopped by Oakland to see that my blood pressure was also really high. Then my anxiety shot through the roof once I got to the Center. I hadn’t eaten lunch either, and my hand started shaking while I was getting some punch, and I almost lost it. After we finally made our way in and sat down, my heart rate shot up to about 127 BPM and stayed about that high for the entire assembly. Nothing I did could calm it down, and I was left wishing I had brought my last Xanax. I guess I’ll need to ask to renew that for emergencies the next time I go in to the clinic.

Ben had a pretty decent speech for Dale’s retirement, but I think more than anything we were surprised to see anyone actually retire from our department. Mark’s closing statement to “trust him” regarding pay scales left some pretty bitter I think, but what do you do? When they won’t even let someone retire with their original letter and make them rewrite it to be more friendly, what kind of environment are we really fostering?

I went home for the evening feeling worn out from my body’s inability to properly human today. Summer had to pick Autumn up after she injured her knee somehow, and wants to schedule an X-ray now. I’m just ready for any kind of break.

I just want a field day like everybody else.

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In the Unlikely Event

Amanda actually volunteered to drive to Plumerville today. She even picked me up at my house. There was a box turtle in the driveway right next to the garage door, so I put it inside the fence for safe keeping. We made the trip in good time, and even stopped at Love’s in Morrilton for meat breakfast tornados. Mine tasted about as good as one would expect. I probably should have stuck with the Soylent.

One of the guys from Arch Ford had a Model 3 there, so I got to see it up close. Not as close as I wanted, but it was still neat. I tried to hint that I wanted to ride with him to lunch, but he had other plans that didn’t involve driving a complete stranger around. Amanda and I went to Wendy’s, and I had a really good, quick salad.

The afternoon went by quickly as well, and I only got dizzy for a few seconds from what I assume was my new medication. It probably didn’t help that I had been sitting all day and had absolutely no stress at all to raise my blood pressure. I wish I could have measured it. It was a really good day of learning and playing around in the virtual lab environment. Everyone likes to complain about going to Arch Ford, but they just don’t get to do what I do.

When we got back home, I found a second snail had died in the kitchen aquarium, so I moved the other one back to the bathroom and cleaned a couple of the tanks up a bit. I think I’m most excited about moving to the high school so I can set up an aquarium in the office. I’m pretty sure every other aspect of the move still just gives me anxiety.

Eventually I went to get Eaddie from her grandparents’ house, and I took the old FryDaddy up to their house to start dinner. It worked perfectly to fry up a bunch of chicken strips for the dinner salads. I still ate way too many chicken strips, but they were just so delicious. I wish I had more right now with some of that spicy ketchup.

Ultimately I had to make my way back home for an early bedtime again. We’ll have to leave training early tomorrow to make it back to our mandatory end-of-year assembly, unless I can convince Ben to let us finish our training day, since central office has already approved our leave some time ago.

I’m not a cat. I don’t say, “meow.”

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Pickup Lines

I rode to the high school early this morning to help with the laptop pickup. As I was walking into the building, Al stopped me to ask about esports, and wanted to know if we could do it during their advisory half hour. I kind of laughed, half-heartedly at the thought. At least his gut reaction to my response was that I shouldn’t be doing it for free. I’d just like to see some kind of number from someone that actually makes decisions.

The laptop pickup went just as it should have, I suppose. I was upset because we didn’t have the student help desk kids to help with power adapters. They were all seniors, and have basically all finished school already, so it’s all on us now. I’m not sure who I’m going to have to pester to fix that, but I know I don’t want to be touching 1300+ devices any more than I absolutely must.

Dale and I went to an early lunch at Taco John’s, where I had a steak and shrimp burrito that was just excellent. Doubly so, because it was free after filling out my punch card. We thought Allen was coming too, but he had suggested KFC, and probably ended up at McDonald’s.

I stuck around the high school until their last pickup, when I had to leave for esports. I stopped by on my way out to check my blood pressure, and came in averagely high. Then I rushed by Oakland and had to do some work there that got me a little frustrated, so on my way out of there I measured frustratingly high, and I could feel it on my skin.

Finally at the junior high, I ran across the building to check it again, knowing I didn’t have a proper rest period. I thought for sure I was going to stroke out during esports. I made it to the lab a bit late, so the kids were already rowdy. I had to yell at them at one point because of a usual yeller in the class. Some of them just get too excited, and haven’t been scolded for it enough I suppose. It makes the experience worse for those quiet ones that are in there for serious competition. Next year, we’ll have to weed out the club from the teams.

After work, I ran by Summer’s to try and help load the extra chicken strips into her freezers, but she had already done all of the work. Instead, she took the last case that wouldn’t fit, picked the girls up from karate, and met me at my house so we could stick it in my freezer. Then she was craving Stoby’s, so we all went out for dinner. I tried the PB&J burger, which was actually really good. The sweetness of the jelly with the jalapeños really did it. I could have gone without the peanut butter though.

Finally it was back home for the evening to cool the jets after a long, but fast-paced day of running around.

Nobody nose whistling like I do.

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I Want a New Duck

It was really slow again today, but I spent most of my time trying not to hulk out instead of cleaning or doing much of substance. My morning systolic blood pressure was pretty good, but my diastolic doesn’t like to hang out much below 90. I stopped by Sonic to get some Ched ‘R’ Peppers for Summer and a free fresh cherry lemonade that I stuck in my fridge to sip on over time. Jessica finally got power for her TVs outside the library, but I had to climb up to reset the Chromebits.

Allen wanted Dairy Queen for lunch, so I met him and Jason there. They had a promo chicken and waffles meal that was super good. The waffle was really crispy on the outside and perfectly soft in the middle, and I even got some gravy for the chicken strips. Even the fries were hot and tasty today. I felt that it was a great accomplishment to order a 4-piece meal instead of the 6 that was offered. Baby steps.

A little while after lunch, I had to go back to the doctor to let them take my blood pressure a couple times until they found a number they liked. The bad thing is that they kept my diastolic blood pressure of 80, which is an all-time low that I’ve only ever reached once before during a reading where I was distracted and taking a phone call. I always just assumed that one was bogus and should be thrown out. In any case, they wrote me a proper prescription for the 10mg of amlodipine besylate I’ve been taking, plus a new prescription for 25mg of hydrochlorothiazide. I’ve only got one more double-shot of my original prescription, so I guess I’ll wait a day and take my new ones together so they run out at the same time.

Summer had a really rough day and was super frustrated with everyone, so I took the girls with me while she went to the gym. We stopped by Walgreens so I could pick up my prescriptions, and then I took Autumn home since she was dealing with a bad attitude as well, and Eaddie wanted to join Summer and me for bún thang at my parents’ house. The soup was great, but it’ll be interesting to see how my body deals with the extra spice tomorrow.

After dinner, Summer took Eaddie home and I went to my house and did a little cleaning before setting up my replacement TicWatch E. I really love my Pebble more though, so I may try to sell the TicWatch and come back to Wear OS later in the future. A big part of me is frustrated by how many interests I’m trying to juggle right now though, and just wants to sail off and disconnect for a while. At least I think it does. I suppose it’s possible this is just another one of my many interests that is feeling neglected at the moment. I haven’t been on the water in a while.

One that’s never gonna try to migrate or escape!

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Splashing in the Rain

We woke up unnaturally early today so we could get to Conway for Summer’s 5k before 7:30. Autumn and I dropped her off in a place with way too little parking, and nearly got stuck in the mud after a couple jerks in trucks parked in the middle of the exit. It rained most of the day, so rather than sit around in the car listening to that, we went across town to Walmart to pick up some food to share for breakfast. Once Summer was done, we continued on to Benton to meet Jeff and get a tour of the Splash Car Wash & Express Lube.

The facility was super new and super clean, and really showed how much work they put into maintaining a positive and clean atmosphere for both customers and employees. It would have been neat to see the car wash in action, but that will have to wait for another time I suppose. It was great getting the full tour of the place though. I didn’t care for the acrylic tip boxes they had out, but that may be me projecting my feelings about American tip culture than anything else. Maybe enough people have tried to tip the “behind the scenes” employees that the boxes became a necessity. I tend to always feel that tips in the US are just a company’s way of subsidizing their employees’ pay so they don’t have to pay them a fair hourly wage, which doesn’t seem to be the case here.

After the tour, Jeff treated us to lunch at Olive Garden back in Little Rock. Then we went across town to Walmart and Sam’s where I spent too much money and too much time. By the time we got out of there, we were all pretty tired. We made it back to Conway and decided to stop at Dick’s to check out the bicycle sale. Summer and Autumn both liked the ride height of the GT Laguna Pro, so we picked one up there and decided to try and order the other two colors online since we didn’t have the bike rack anyway.

We circled back to Pizza Ranch for dinner, which I learned was another strangely Christian pizza buffet. I guess that’s a thing? The bar was small and the food was pretty good, but I don’t think it was worth anywhere near the $12 price tag per head. It was a relatively enjoyable visit though, and a decent cap to our day.

Once we got back home, I dropped Summer off at my house, unloaded the bike, and Autumn and I went to pick up Eaddie from their grandparents’ house. When we got back, I had Eaddie try to ride the bike, and she passed that test with flying colors, and in a fraction of the time it took the others to get both feet off the ground. Summer was already in bed, so the girls started some TV while I tried ordering bikes. The website inventory seemed inaccurate, so I got right to calling stores. Little Rock was the only one of the three I tried that had the gunmetal color in the medium size frame, so I talked them into honoring the sale price the day after expiration. Then I called back to Conway and talked to Taylor again, and he agreed to do the same for the light blue. I guess tomorrow we’ll drive across the state again, only this time with a bike rack in tow.

Oh hey! Look, it’s a pikachWHAT THE HELL?!?

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Hamburglar

It was no surprise that Jason didn’t have any projects for us. That’s probably not totally fair to say since a lot of that has to do with nobody else asking for help doing anything, but he’s already made himself an easy target. I went on about my own business and spent most of the morning at Oakland with my best blood pressure yet. Then I went to the junior high a bit before lunch so I could get a hamburger from there for lunch. I’m pretty sure that if I had timed it right, I could have had a free hamburger for lunch every single day this week.

I spent most of the afternoon there until it started raining, and I went back to the shop to pick up a badge for someone. Just as I was about to leave, Ben and Dale got back with a truck and trailer load of carts from Thomas, so I had to help unload those. Then we went across the street to give Brenda our best for her retirement. The snacks helped, but I feel so guilty going to those gatherings just for the food, so I always try to make an effort to chat a bit with whoever we’re celebrating. It’s still super awkward if I’ve never spent much time with that person though.

I delivered the badge on the way home, and then it wasn’t long before Summer and Autumn got there so we could all go to dinner at the shop. We got rained out of the park, so Ben got Summer’s crew together to grill ribeyes in the shop. It probably would have been less awkward in the park, but it wasn’t an awful time. I don’t know that anybody stuck around for a super long time after they ate. We left to go get gas and stop by PetSmart.

On the way home, Eaddie texted Summer and said she had forgotten her homework in her locker, so we went by my house to get the keys and then picked Eaddie up from her grandparents’ house. We got into the middle school, and Summer slipped on the wet floor and hurt her knee pretty badly. Then almost inevitably, Eaddie’s homework wasn’t in her locker. We took her back, then came back to my house for bed.

It’s too cold to be out running this early.