Last Updated : Sunday, 10 March, 2002 at 10:01 PM -0600
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| Daynotes On a Budget Last Updated : Sunday, 10 March, 2002 at 10:01 PM -0600 |
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Monday, March 4, 2002
How was my day?
5:45 am : Alarm goes off. All too early when I got to bed at
11:30 pm.
6:00 am : Finally roll out of bed.
6:50 am : Head out the door with all cylinders semi-functional
7:05 am : Get to daycare, unload 20+ bags of Girl Scout Cookies
7:10 am : Instruct the daycare folks on how to collect the money
7:12 am : Say goodbye to Jack, leave.
7:22 am : Get Ann to the bus station. She's got an 11 minute wait
in the warm station.
7:35 am : Drop off Rhiannon at school.
7:43 am : Get into on-ramp.
7:47 am : Get onto freeway.
7:55 am : Get into the parking lot at the gas station.
8:05 am : Leave the gas station.
8:12 am : Pull into parking lot. See the phone company van and the
moving people.
8:15 am : Walk into the new suite. The downward spiral starts
here... Crap on the floor, holes in the walls, and a foul, foul
smell. Lots of furniture, only some of it removed.
8:20 am : Call into building management about getting the mess cleaned
up.
8:25 am : Call to my boss with a "whassup" report.
Shortly after that, things went seriously downhill. As if they weren't already.
Perhaps they went into a hole. I'm not sure. I do know that I spent most of my day on my feet, and if I ever need to make really easy money, I'm going to go to work for an office-moving firm. We had two different companies who were holding us up today.
I will tell you this much. The company we used, named "Brownsworth" is literally worth a whole bucket full of brown... as in, well, you know.
Tomorrow, our knuckleheads movers will hopefully finish
the desktops before I get in the office, and all I have to do is crawl under
some desks and plug in computers and rock and roll. I hope.
The only good news through all of this is that we did manage to sell the office furniture we were going to ship back to Columbus. So it's a nice swing of cash the company could certainly use.
So, back to the Salt Mines tomorrow...
Tuesday, March 5, 2002
Gee.
I wonder if I can get a bulk discount for medical issues...
This morning, at 8:35 am, Ann Called. Rhiannon threw up at school. I had a couple of movers hanging around, a couple of corporate folks, and no one showed up until after 9 am.
So, I left instructions, then headed home. Picked up Rhiannon, where she was flat on her back in the nurse's office. We headed home, and Ann and I decided, against my better judgment, to split the day. She was low on vacation time, and I'd worked until 9:00 pm the night before, so I guess it was a good idea.
Then, at 12:30 pm, just as I was getting ready to go get Ann so she could come get the second half of the day, Jack's daycare called. Three times by 12:30 pm he'd grabbed his left eye and started crying. No apparent prompting, no event causing it. Just screaming pain. That was it.
So, I went to St. Paul, picked up Ann, then she dropped me off at my office. I worked for a couple more hours, then packed it in for the evening. She took Jack to the Doctor, where he diagnosed a scratched cornea. Lovely. Treated, eyepatched, and now we hope it's not more serious. So, now we're just on eggshells, hoping that Jack's eye doesn't hurt in the morning. If it does, we visit the Doctor again. Yikes.
G'nite.
Wednesday, March 6, 2002
You'd think things would get better. So far, not.
More furniture, and more fun stuff. Ann's got the details over on her site.
I'm tired, and behind in my packing. G'nite...
Thursday, March 7, 2002
Finally. All of the stuff we need is out of the old space at work. The problem is that the new office seems to be running about 78-85 degrees. Lovely.
This week has been rather surprising for me, though. I tend to think of myself as a rather large (well, OK, overly very large) tub of goo. However, I found myself on Monday one of the very few people who could handle the really heavy furniture we had to move - like the server tower (empty, but still, eight feet of heavy caging ain't light).
So that was a nice little ego boost.
Of course, it came accompanied by the new notice that I just can't do that like I used to. I mean, I used to be able to pull off this sort of stuff and then get up the next morning like nothing's happened.
Trust me, my body is still protesting.
Though, I suppose, It was bound to happen sooner or later. By "It" I mean the time has come (the Walrus said) for the local public television station to invoke the presence of the Bee Gees in a retrospective concert during pledge week.
I don't know about you, but when I think about "the good old days" musically, I'm dead certain the Bee Gees have never figured in the calculations. The sole redeeming thought I've been able to dredge up regarding the whole thing is that if there is a God and he thinks disco music is the abomination that I've always believed it is, in a couple of years, these fellows will still be on a stage somewhere, performing, and some unfortunate woman who has suffered the combined effects of old age, poor, high-fat diet, and gravity, who will lob her 70-Quadruple-G brassiere onto the stage in a frenzied, Alzheimer-induced moment of dementia...
There's something oddly satisfying in the thought of the three Bee Gees - one in the cleavage, and the other two in the cups, like twin dunces. Oh well. Two out of three ain't bad, Meatloaf once said. I'm sure he wasn't talking about these guys.
I think right about now I'd trade an eternity in hell for just a glimpse of that moment.
Since that's not likely to happen, I'm going to bed.
And I'm going to fervently hope that the Bee Gees do not haunt my dreams this night.
G'nite...
Friday, March 8, 2002
Today, we're just going to call it a total loss and move on. Nothing to see here but carnage, mayhem, and some strange little man doing something disgusting in a tub of jello.
Why, you ask? Well, aside from a simple project (putting up shelves in the computer room) which should have taken 30-90 minutes, the day has been a string of disaster after disaster. The worst occurred about 11:40 am today, when, just as I was thinking "I really should bug the guys at corporate about the whole e-mail backup thing we talked about" I trashed my "Folders" Folder.
You see, in Outlook, I've got my Inbox. Under that, I've always created a "Folders" folder, for organization. That way, if I need a screen shot of outlook for training, or whatever, I can collapse the inbox and leave myself with a clean screen.
There's no need for the people looking at the screen shot to see that I subscribe to the Windows magazine mailing list, or the security lists, or the Aurora Borealis Detection stuff, or whatever else strikes my fancy. The problem is, unfortunately, that all of my folders, with, in some cases years of archived information, were gone in a "poof" when I hit the delete key.
Yes, as a trained Exchange administrator, systems administrator, all-around-computer geek and ham-fisted, thumb-fingered idiot of the first water, I should have known better. Then again, I could parade the myriad excuses in front of you like lemmings ready to leap to their deaths (Sorry Mat, no insult intended, and when you gonna get off your duff and post again? ;-).
Oh, and the backup issue? Not my fault. Seriously. The Exchange server in our office is remote-administered, I don't have the password or access to the server, and until recently, no one was aware it wasn't getting backed up - I was told the corporate people were taking care of it, and the corporate people (as I was told earlier this week) "just forgot about it". Lovely.
But, as it so happens, this is one of those "well, that was REALLY DUMB" moves. So it goes. So it just bloody well goes.
It could be worse, I suppose. I'm trying to figure out how.
Saturday, March 9, 2002
Yup, an early post for me. Ran out of gas last night, and found my head bobbing in front of the television about 8:30 pm. Decided to hit the shower and then head to bed, and I encountered Modern Marvels on the History Channel. Specifically, a piece on Apollo 13. Never could resist that sort of thing.
Today, we're working on packing. And, of course, we had about an inch of rain last night (and the air temps got as warm as 31 degrees), and then another three or four inches of snow. Not much, but when you pile the snow on the nice thick layer of ice we've managed to accumulate, you've got a real mess.
And ordinarily, we'd just dig in and stay home on a day like today, but this afternoon Rhiannon's got a thing at school to prepare for First Communion. So we'll have to send at least some of us out.
And I think I'm going a bit goofy. I'm starting to like the color of cardboard. I need SERIOUS help.
Hopefully, more later...
Sunday, March 10, 2002
Well, that was fun.
Actually, we packed up about 20 more boxes this weekend. I didn't get the computer desk down, but it's close. I've got one shelf up left, the stuff below, and that's about it.
We also went out and delivered cookies, and let the kids run for a while. Then we visited some friends, and did the grocery store, came home, and did a few more boxes. Then we watched the 9/11 special on CBS. Boy, that was really, really good.
That was about it.
Oh - one nice bit of news. My wife's not so thrilled... But I've been going on about Rhiannon's loft project, right? Well, today I got the sale flyer from the Home Depot. And running off semi-informed price guesses, I'd come up with a price of about $212 for the lumber I need. Using the actual sale prices I'll be paying, I was low by all of $1.51. That's not too shabby, I think.
Enough blowing my own horn. I'm off to bed. G'nite...
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