Reviewing yesterday’s comedy hour(s):
- Woke at 3:30am did pushups and situps. Feeling good about life!
- Worked hard on client’s needs until 6:50am when I donned blue tights and put my underwear on the outside then heard what sounded like a mouse but turned out to be a two inch long beetle (evicted!).
- 7:00am – Mother-in-law shows and I drive her to work and back making good speed and returning ahead of schedule.
- 8:20am – Tommy is at school and the car is loaded with the STAR marketing display, paperwork, and television.
- 8:30am I have purchased a new water pump for the Jeep at Autozone. Upon pulling out of the parking lot I take a small diversion into an autodealer to look at the perfect vehicle ($60k) for us and shed a small tear.
- 8:40am I am 3 minutes away from the house. Cathy calls, "they are here and I am naked!" Lucky hvac guys. In all my days of pizza deliveries and housecalls I never got the naked people.
- 7:43-45ish – I pull up to the house and see the hvac man in the yard. "Did Cathy tell you I was coming?" "No one came to the door. The dog just barked. Sounds mean."
- 9:25am – $110 later, a DIY homework assignment later, and a promise from the hvac man to return when I’ve completed my homework, the leak in the ac is discovered, and unit recharged. It cools until the evening and at 3am we are back at 25.5°C (thanks Onlineconversion.com).
- 9:35am – I’ve had breakfast and am at the high school picking up Tommy exactly when I said I would but can’t speak to the teacher because I am babbling on the phone.
- 10am – we arrive at STAR before the previous class lets out and unload marketing materials into storage room in the barn. Discuss balance due (every half an hour it seemed like I was discussing money or giving someone money) and some paperwork.
- 10:30am – a much needed break in air conditioning at Border’s to look at David Allen’s Getting Things Done
- 10:50am – I am back at STAR mouth agape as I watch Tommy confidentally riding off lead (no volunteer on the ground holding his horse!)
- 11:30am – after a couple of u-turns and a call to the wife, we are in Karns picking up a raffle prize we won.
- 11:35am – stopping for gas. A dad and his daughter walk up on this hot day carrying a gas can. As they purchase gas I ask, "ran out of gas?" They reply, "about a quart mile up the road." I offer to drive them to their car then buy all 4 of us drinks. As we leave them at their car Tommy surprises me by remarking, "it feels good to help people."
- 12:15am – after a small jaunt through BFE we are at Air Filtration (800-745-5811) buying replacement filters for the a/c. Btw, it is now in their computer that we must bring Molly whenever we pickup filters.
- 1pm – back at the house working and dealing with angry client email
- 4:50pm – Since the Jeep has a broken water pump and cannot move, and the station wagon is potentially dead; we have borrow the mother-in-law’s car (see 7am) for a couple of days. The borrowed car has a flat tire. Nail found, removed and patched.
- 5:15pm – Noah at Karate and the rest of the crew invading the local grocery. Did you know that you could get on Homeland Security’s watch list for taking pictures at the grocery? At least the way the managers watched me you would think I was at an airport taking pictures.
- 6:15pm – Pickup Noah from Karate and go to a different grocery that actually has good meat.
- 7-9pm (things run together here). While preparing dinner, Molly barfs on the carpet. We clean the carpet. After dinner I return to working but Amy decides to flood the bathroom. I know this because downstairs I can see the water pouring through the ceiling.
In the end, I worked, napped a few hours, and was at the computer by 3am for the redux.
What this doesn’t convey is that throughout the day Cathy and I communicate via SMS (text messaging) like crazed telegraphers, and I talk on the phone paying bills, negotiating, doing sales, and scheduling appointments like an auctioneer that started the bidding too low.
Update: I forgot in the evening we offline when I rebooted the router and loosened a cable. Took a bit to find that one. Thanks for the reminder wife!
Damn dude, you do this every day? That can’t be good for you.
That’s fairly representative of the bulk of the last 12 years of my life.
[…] Doug posted a list of yesterday’s activities, but I’ll just give you the highlights. Since we don’t have a car that runs, we borrowed one to get the children to their activities. That borrowed car? It got a flat tire sitting in front of our house. The car’s owner was flabbergasted. “What? Why does everything break over there? Cr*p-Sweet-Cr*p.” Once Doug fixed the flat, we dropped Noah at karate and visited the grocery while Noah kicked and yelled. We came home and the dog barfed all over the floor. While I put the groceries away, Amy used a whole roll of toilet paper in the upstairs bathroom and closed the door instead of telling us that the toilet was overflowing. When the basement ceiling became a waterfall, Doug screamed “flood”. We used every single towel in the house to clean that mess up. Today the laundry piles are not just huge, they’re soaking wet. Oh, we were also offline for a few hours after that because a wire got knocked loose and it required detective work and several reboots to track down the source of the problem. C’est la vie. No Comments so far Leave a comment Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong> […]
[…] So I described a day in our lives. A highlight of Friday’s funnies was a sudden and dramatic power outage. I would say we had lightning very near the house. We lost the upstairs cable box (try living without your digital guide a couple of days! How 90s! How did we ever live before?) and my Linux server was scrambled (after reseting the cmos and some integrity checks, it lives again). […]