Tag: work

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That’s a Big “If”

I sprung a leak on a blood blister this morning that I thought would never quit bleeding out, so I was really late getting in to work. I started the day at Oakland to take care of some work orders that had been accumulating, and then rode on in to the office. It was pretty quiet since I spent most of the morning away from my office and nobody had a chance yet to come to me with anything.

I rode to Taco John’s to meet the others for lunch, and had too many potatoes. I always think a medium isn’t enough, but then feel too full with a large. Since I rode alone, I stopped back by Oakland on the way back to the office and found that I didn’t have the cable I needed to finish something. I got sidetracked by the PowerShell Istation stuff before I made it back, but I had a clever thought for an if statement that ended up turning a dozen lines of code into just a couple.

I left even later than I started because I wanted to make sure Istation would be fully functional for the next day. Then I ran home to change before heading straight up to Summer’s for dinner. She had forgotten the kids had marching band practice until pretty late, so instead of making her pasta, we went to Mulan’s for dinner.

After we ate, I took her to my house to help me clean up the packaging from my new grill so I could once again move off of the beaten path in my garage. I’ve got so much work to do before I can even begin to look at installing a charging solution, and as usual I’m having trouble deciding where to start.

We made it back to the house just before the girls got home, and then it was a quiet night until bedtime. My head cold finally developed into a cough primarily from a tickled throat, so I’ve only got about a month left of feeling like this.

Sniiiiiiiiiffffffff, HACK!

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Home Cooked

It’s getting colder now, and it’s fully dark when I wake up. My CPAP humidifier has been gurgling overnight, and it doesn’t help me sleep any better while I’m sick. I still managed to make it out the door a couple minutes early today, and got a bit of a chill on the way in on the Shadow. My whole day carried on relatively busily between various phone calls and urgent cries for help.

I met Summer at Superfast for lunch, and we ate the bánh mì that Mom made us yesterday. She was dressed up to work in the office there, so we just hung out in the office while we ate. Then I went back to work and had to beckon Josh to come to the office to eat the apple pie that Tammy made for his birthday.

The afternoon was oddly both busy and quiet. There wasn’t much activity in person, but I got several calls from Brody the rest of the day. I figured that Eaddie and I would go to my parents’ house for eggplant soup, but she wouldn’t respond to my text. She finally called when I got home and said she forgot about her private lesson, but by then she was done. Autumn dropped her off at my house and then carried on toward home. Summer didn’t want to go, so it was just the two of us.

Eaddie was thinking she didn’t like the eggplant soup or the tofu so much, but once we got there, she remembered that she actually loved all of it, and she kept going on about how much she liked soups. Dad was fasting, and Mom got home from work a bit late and didn’t eat until after we were done and gone.

On the way to the house, I took Eaddie through Sonic for a churro shake, and it was pretty awesome. It took them about five minutes to fry the churro, and they brought food out to two cars behind us while we waited. Back at the house, Summer was finishing up some work stuff, and then it was a pretty quick night to bed for everyone. I think it just felt a lot later than it really was, but I was exhausted from all the coughing anyway.

Whoop, whoop….

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S’putum Up!

Last night was a really rough night for my head cold, and marked the real transition into my chest. I managed to deal with it alright at work through a bunch of hot coffee and tea. We had a brief meeting this morning with the group, and then I was surprised with a meeting of my own with Thomas and Gary to discuss options for fixing Istation. We kind of just got more of what we already knew, but I guess that was what we got for not having a resolution on our own yet.

I picked at a few various other things throughout the morning, but then skipped Fat Daddy’s with the group. I went up to Summer’s instead, and just ate half of my leftover tuna sandwich from Subway in the peace and quiet. The afternoon didn’t have any surprises, and we wrapped up the week pretty quietly.

Summer’s been talking about wanting to see the Eagles, so I picked up a couple tickets and planned a weekend for that when I got home. She wanted to go to the football game to see the girls perform and see Autumn get her quiz bowl state championship ring. I ran trough McDonald’s and Wendy’s for some quick dinner before meeting her at halftime. Then I took the Shadow back home before heading up to her place for the night.

I stopped by Taco Bell for her on the way, and was in the drive-through for about 20 minutes. I was sure she wasn’t going to get any edible food out of it, but she said it was good. The girls got home super late, so Summer was already in bed. I doped up on amphetamines and sat up with Eaddie for a bit until she got up to take a shower. Then it was off to bed.

There’s plenty of room at the Wyndham Riverfront!

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Fresh Ain’t Cheap

I felt a bit bloated all day since I didn’t follow my usual routine. Fortunately it never got any worse than that, aside from my head cold working into my chest. There were a few people out for the day, so it was really quiet in the shop. I just slowly chipped away at the pile of old work orders I had, and tried to avoid accumulating new ones.

Zach suggested Subway for lunch, so the two of us drove over and met Gary and Greg there. I placed my order online and didn’t actually get it until after they were almost done eating their own food, but that was fine because I paid less with a BOGO sandwich deal.

The afternoon was quiet as well. I tried to spend a little time at Oakland, but got called away abruptly when a family came up to the virtual academy office with hotspot trouble. I spent some time working on that and ended up swapping the kid’s laptop, and then finished the day in the basement.

When I got home, I found the missing home for the extra screw we had last night. It went to a corner of one of the heat shields on the side of the grill. Unfortunately the rotisserie attachment I bought was missing a couple parts, so I’ll have to see what I can do about that. I hung out at home for a little longer, then went up to Summer’s for the evening. I helped Eaddie with like one math problem, and then everyone was quickly off to bed.

Can’t wait for the preseason!

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Cog no sEnce

As soon as I walked into my office this morning, I got called over to Oakland, because they didn’t test the sound system in the room they wanted to use before they invited a guest speaker. I took care of that and a couple other things quickly, and then went back to the shop to dig into my Cognos reports. That’s all I did for the rest of the day.

Gary took Zach, Thomas, and me to Zaxby’s for lunch, where we met Brody and then had a surprise visit from Wesley. He told us that Cindy planned to retire at the end of the month, which was a bit of a surprise to me at least.

The afternoon was quiet and slow. Dad wanted to borrow my electric mower when his wouldn’t work. Then Eaddie wanted me to get her after school, but decided to walk to the house instead. When I got home after work, she wanted to go home immediately, so I dropped her off and then came back home where Dad had beaten me to return the mower.

I was chomping at the bit to get my new grill assembled and out of the way, so Dad helped me with that. It took us quite a bit longer than I originally expected, and we were surrounded by a cloud of mosquitos the entire time, but it felt good to have that done. We came up with an extra screw somehow though, so I’ll have to go back over the instructions later to make sure we didn’t miss anything. I’m super excited to cook on it though.

I was completely drenched in sweat by the end of that, so I decided to take a shower and then ran a hot straightening brush through my hair really slowly to try and burn off anything that might have taken up residence up there. I was super sore and exhausted after all the bending around the grill, so I doped up and wrapped up my evening as quickly as I could.

It’s teppanyaki time!

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Nit Picky

I felt a little off for most of the day, like another anxiety attack was right around the corner. Fortunately it never happened, because I wouldn’t have had time for it anyway. I didn’t really do anything remarkable throughout the day, but I felt super busy just keeping up. I was super hungry when lunch came around, and was actually pretty excited to learn that it was already Taco Tuesday. I think I paid too much for the pico on my tacos though.

After lunch, I ended up at Oakland a couple of times because I didn’t have everything I needed the first time around. I’ll end up having to run a video cable through the ceiling if I can’t get a longer video cable later. I spent the end of my day in the queue waiting to talk to someone about an Istation issue, and then trying to negotiate an attendance report out of Cognos. I kind of enjoy working with Cognos, but it would sure make me feel a lot better if I could find some better documentation on the variables the state uses.

Eaddie and Summer had hair appointments after work, but Summer had to take care of something else and asked me to get Eaddie. I ran home to change and then got Eaddie there just as Lelan was finishing up with her last client. I think she just stayed late to take care of them, because nobody else was even in the salon. Eaddie’s trim ended up getting cut a little short, and then I had to take her to band practice while Summer got hers started. I went back up to the salon for a little bit, but then went to my parents’ house for some pork chops for dinner.

I picked Eaddie up after band, and then we headed home to do some laundry and shampooing. It wasn’t an early night to bed, but it sure felt like it.

What’s bugging you?

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Sheesh Hulk

I woke up around two or three in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep for hours. I barely felt like I dozed off at all, but somehow I wasn’t completely dead when I got to work. We had a pretty short meeting over nothing, and then I headed over to Oakland to hook up the couple of touch panels that we didn’t finish yesterday.

Lunch time eventually came around, and nobody could decide where to go. I think Brody actually had Gary and Greg talked into CiCi’s, but Zach was a hard pass. We ended up going to La Chiquita and had pretty good service for once. It’s normally not awful, but our server was just really attentive today. The salsa wasn’t very good, but the burrito I had was fair.

I spent most of the afternoon staring at Cognos, trying to figure out how to get the data I needed out of a report. I texted Ben for a bit, and then talked to Kayla since she had a fair amount of experience. In the end, I found some documentation, but it still wasn’t really what I needed.

I left work a little late and went home to get ready for the weekend. I decided to stay home to try and get some better sleep, since we’d have to leave an hour earlier than I normally get up for work. I did manage to squeeze in the first episode of She Hulk, which wasn’t awful, but was basically just every teaser trailer they’ve released. I’ll be interested to see if it gets good, but so far it kind of feels like filler. Nothing has touched how good Loki was.

Bye bye money!

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TV Is Not a Roman Numeral

I slept really hard, straight through the night again last night, and then woke up about five minutes before my alarm. I was feeling some Margaritaville, so I found a playlist of that name that gave me a weird mix of some classics and some more modern country. I thought Greg might say something, but he never did. In fact, he ended up leaving for a while. I mostly had the morning to myself, and dug into Cognos again so I could automate some data.

Nobody came around for lunch, so I just sat at my desk for a while until I decided to run through Sonic for some 99-cent cheese sticks. I thought the girls might want some, but they were both gone when I got back. I gave a couple orders to Greg though, and he was super excited about it.

Zach scheduled Brody, Josh, and Jacob to help me move two older touch panels at Oakland, and then hang two new ones in the old rooms, as well as replace an old SMART board with another new touch panel. We knew it was going to be an annoying job, but we didn’t realize how annoying. Every single room gave us issues, and Zach ended up sending Greg to help.

The first room should have been an easy SMART board swap, but they used half-width cinderblocks that were too thin to allow toggle bolts to expand. The next two rooms had every-other column of the block wall filled with cement, so we couldn’t get toggles into the brick. The two new small rooms had their own issues. The wall between then was really thin, so Brody blew out the back side of the cinderblock in one room. Then the last room was a mount on drywall. Greg ended up just mounting it to two studs with a couple of bolts we had to tighten with an actual wrench.

Greg, Brody, and I worked a little late to finish up, but we got it all done aside from the wiring. That would end up being a problem for Future Me. I headed home to get the wall charger that had just been delivered, then changed to head up to Summer’s pretty immediately. She had been running around with the kids most of the day, since Autumn had her heart checked and Eaddie needed to see someone about the blisters she got from the bugs. While home, she made a corned beef for dinner that the three of us slurped right up.

Autumn was out doing something, followed by some tutoring with Jennifer at the city mall. She came home in good spirits though, and it was overall a really quiet night. I’ve constantly felt like I’ve just been juggling a ton of different things at once, and I think it’s just the time of year. Starting school is always crazy, but it just usually seems more crazy before school actually starts.

It’s happening…!

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Impromptumus Prime

I slept really well last night, but that meant I really didn’t want to get out of bed. I was a couple minutes late, but spent the first several minutes just untangling mice anyway. I thought I would spend the first part of my morning closing things out at Oakland, but I kept getting dragged into other things that nearly ate up the entire first half of my day. I did eventually get over to my building, but ended up having to go back after lunch anyway.

Several of us went to Quiznos, where we ran into Heather and who was apparently her newest baby daddy. I thought she was married to some white hillbilly kid, so I assumed this was a new guy today. If I had known he was the crazy one, I totally would have antagonized her. Instead, we all just said a quick hello and continued through the ridiculously long line.

After lunch, I got some more random things done, including going back to Oakland. I just kept feeling super distracted, but thankfully Jacob has been diving right into anything we’ve given him access to. I ended up leaving work on time, but just went straight home to start some laundry.

I spent some more money on grill parts so I can put it together and get it out of the garage. My delivery date was moved back again, so there’s really no time to waste in cleaning out the garage. I ended up staying home for the evening, and just fought off mosquitos until bedtime.

Time to put those points to use!

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Driving Results

I had so much trouble sleeping last night because my mind just kept racing about anything that floated by. I dragged myself into work, but had trouble getting started on anything. Summer took Eaddie in for her second attempt at her driving test first thing this morning, and fortunately she passed. They relaxed a bit with some breakfast before coming to trade cars with me and taking Eaddie back to school.

The whole day seemed to go by pretty slowly. I had a light lunch for Taco Tuesday, and then I spent some time upstairs in the afternoon. At the end of the day, I went to the junior high to help Jacob hang a television, and then unloaded some tools back at the shop before making it home.

Summer had her big VIP night at the new Maumelle wash. The girls had band until super late. I just hung out at home by myself all evening. I left for some McDonald’s fries and a Zaxby’s sandwich, and both were pretty incredible. I got to McDonald’s just as a busload of mullet-bearing kids were leaving, so my fries were super fresh. The sandwich from Zaxby’s could have been the best fast food chicken sandwich if it only had some lettuce and tomato.

Eventually the girls came over so Autumn could get her car back and drop off the Montego. Eaddie was in a mood, and Autumn was painfully dehydrated. They didn’t stick around long. I got my new grill mostly unboxed, but I think the assembly will need a little more open space than I had available at the time, so I ended up leaving it to watch some YouTube videos on the assembly and mods. That turned into science videos, and ended with Tesla mods before bed.

You’ve got to be yoking.