Tuesday Verizon (the local phone company) was here to connect our house to the fiber optic cable they installed in our neighborhood a few months ago. They had to run a cable under the lawn, the driveway and the sidewalk to a the phone box on the side of the house.
Wednesday morning I wake up to Anne telling me that the sprinklers for the front bushes won't shut off. I go out to the garage and turn the electronic control off. No help. I unplug the controller from the wall. Sprinklers are still going. I go out to the box in the ground, pry open the lid and disconnect the wires to the valve. Still no help. Try the manual control on the value. No help. Go the main sprinkler valve box and open it up. It's full of water, but I know there is a manual valve in the bottom. I reach in. And in. And in. I am up to my shoulder lying in the mud before I can reach the valve. It closes and the sprinklers are off.
So the Verizon guys must have done something to the valve. I wonder what it was? They came out later on and fixed it, whatever it was.
After work Johnny and I go for a walk around the neighborhood. Down the hill in back of Glencoe High School we find a dock in the swamp. The swamp is pretty dry. The stream is about three feet wide and about one foot deep. In the winter it is about fifty feet wide and three feet deep. But right now there are muds flats alongside the stream. The mud is fairly solid, so we go exploring. We get about a hundred feet downstream, I forge through some grass to aovid crossing the stream. When I come back onto the mud flat I sink to my knees. Johnny had no problem, but then I weigh more that twice what he does. That was the end of that expedition.
Thursday the Verizon crew was back again to hook up the new high speed link inside the house. Family tells me it is working better (faster) than the old DSL line we had. So maybe we can remove the filters from our phone lines and sell them on E-bay.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Monday, June 12, 2006
Cake, Not Cake
Cake
Cake, cake, cake and more cake. There was a senior reception Tuesday night at Glencoe High School where they served cake and punch. Wednesday we had a cake at work for June birthdays. Thursday night was honors night. Friday night we held an open house. Sunday we went to a reception at our neighbor's house for their daughter who also graduated. That is five cakes in one week, and the icing was terrible on all of them. I hate to be wasteful, but I eventually gave it up and started cutting the icing off and leaving it and just eating the cake. You might say I should forgo the cake completely, what with my weight and my waist and all, but that is not going to happen. Cake is one of my favorite things, and I am not going to pass it up. I did limit myself to more than a couple of slices per day. I do not understand the icing thing, exactly. It is full of sugar, and very sweet, but I do not care for it, and most people I talk to do not care for it either. And it is thick! It is at least a quarter of inch everywhere, and around the edges, with the frills and all it can be an inch thick. Maybe it is just supposed to be for decoration, maybe you are not supposed to eat it. Maybe they make it taste bad deliberately. It is not that I do not like sweet things, one of my favorites is a can of Squirt brand sodee pop, gulped down in less than a minute. Quantities of sugar like this are not good for me, so I try to limit them. Success is a sometimes thing.
Cakes now come with cream filling. I am not too happy about this either. Plain cake would be just fine with me, no icing, no filling. Of course I would want about six large pieces all to myself. The filling is okay, not like the iciing, but it is certainly not necessary. What is it with these cake people anyway? They do use the icing for decoration with writing and pictures, but this all about image, not substance.
Not Cake
Tueday evening we went over to Glencoe to see Ross's photography project. There were about a dozen black and white photos in a display case with three hand written notes. The notes were complicated. There was a slide show in the auditorium, pictures of students.
Saturday morning my youngest son John ran in the Helvetia half marathon. Somewhere between two and three thousand people ran. Johnny came in fifth with a time of 2 hours and fifteen minutes. The leader came in at one hour and five minutes. Actually, Johnny came in fifth out of the nine in his age group (13 to 19 years old). The leader in his age group was a twelve year old that came in at one hour and forty five minutes. Wait a minute, the leader in the 13 to 19 age group was 12? What gives? He should not have been allowed in the race. Disqualify the rug rat! Move Johnny up to 4th out of 8!
Saturday afternoon we went to my oldest son Ross's graduation. They held it at a neighboring high shool. Supposedly they didn't have enough room at Glencoe, but to me it looked like there would have been plenty of room in the Glencoe gymnasium. Maybe they saved by not having to set up the stage twice. The president of the student class gave a speech and made a crack about the intelligence of President Bush that met with a roar of approval from the crowd. I was suprised that he made such a strong political remark, and further suprised that it met with so much approval. I would not have been suprised if there had been audible grumbling.
Saturday night was the all night Senior party, held at an undisclosed location. I still don't know where it was. Ross came home with a T-shirt that had a message written on it: "Most likely to win a Pulitzer prize". I was very pleased to see that. Means that I am not alone in thinking he has some writing talent.
Jack and Audrey Gray, my wife Anne's parents, flew in Wednesday afternoon for the festivities and stayed until Sunday. Jack got to play golf once, on Thursday, I think. I think they had a pretty good time, though I was a bit grumpy on Saturday. I think I was suffering from a low grade hangover. Too many Cosmopolitans Friday night.
Cake, cake, cake and more cake. There was a senior reception Tuesday night at Glencoe High School where they served cake and punch. Wednesday we had a cake at work for June birthdays. Thursday night was honors night. Friday night we held an open house. Sunday we went to a reception at our neighbor's house for their daughter who also graduated. That is five cakes in one week, and the icing was terrible on all of them. I hate to be wasteful, but I eventually gave it up and started cutting the icing off and leaving it and just eating the cake. You might say I should forgo the cake completely, what with my weight and my waist and all, but that is not going to happen. Cake is one of my favorite things, and I am not going to pass it up. I did limit myself to more than a couple of slices per day. I do not understand the icing thing, exactly. It is full of sugar, and very sweet, but I do not care for it, and most people I talk to do not care for it either. And it is thick! It is at least a quarter of inch everywhere, and around the edges, with the frills and all it can be an inch thick. Maybe it is just supposed to be for decoration, maybe you are not supposed to eat it. Maybe they make it taste bad deliberately. It is not that I do not like sweet things, one of my favorites is a can of Squirt brand sodee pop, gulped down in less than a minute. Quantities of sugar like this are not good for me, so I try to limit them. Success is a sometimes thing.
Cakes now come with cream filling. I am not too happy about this either. Plain cake would be just fine with me, no icing, no filling. Of course I would want about six large pieces all to myself. The filling is okay, not like the iciing, but it is certainly not necessary. What is it with these cake people anyway? They do use the icing for decoration with writing and pictures, but this all about image, not substance.
Not Cake
Tueday evening we went over to Glencoe to see Ross's photography project. There were about a dozen black and white photos in a display case with three hand written notes. The notes were complicated. There was a slide show in the auditorium, pictures of students.
Saturday morning my youngest son John ran in the Helvetia half marathon. Somewhere between two and three thousand people ran. Johnny came in fifth with a time of 2 hours and fifteen minutes. The leader came in at one hour and five minutes. Actually, Johnny came in fifth out of the nine in his age group (13 to 19 years old). The leader in his age group was a twelve year old that came in at one hour and forty five minutes. Wait a minute, the leader in the 13 to 19 age group was 12? What gives? He should not have been allowed in the race. Disqualify the rug rat! Move Johnny up to 4th out of 8!
Saturday afternoon we went to my oldest son Ross's graduation. They held it at a neighboring high shool. Supposedly they didn't have enough room at Glencoe, but to me it looked like there would have been plenty of room in the Glencoe gymnasium. Maybe they saved by not having to set up the stage twice. The president of the student class gave a speech and made a crack about the intelligence of President Bush that met with a roar of approval from the crowd. I was suprised that he made such a strong political remark, and further suprised that it met with so much approval. I would not have been suprised if there had been audible grumbling.
Saturday night was the all night Senior party, held at an undisclosed location. I still don't know where it was. Ross came home with a T-shirt that had a message written on it: "Most likely to win a Pulitzer prize". I was very pleased to see that. Means that I am not alone in thinking he has some writing talent.
Jack and Audrey Gray, my wife Anne's parents, flew in Wednesday afternoon for the festivities and stayed until Sunday. Jack got to play golf once, on Thursday, I think. I think they had a pretty good time, though I was a bit grumpy on Saturday. I think I was suffering from a low grade hangover. Too many Cosmopolitans Friday night.
Sound
We were talking about buying versus renting. Renting you get noisy neighbors. Why would a condo be any better? Possibly better construction. Most residential buildings up to three stories high are built of wood. Sound insulation between floors is non-existent. I think you will find that buildings made of concrete are much quieter. Beware though, they pour thin (two inches) concrete floors in wood apartment buildings to cut the sound transmission between floors, but it doesn't do much for the walls. Some places may build separate walls for adjacent apartments, but I don't know how well that works. How to tell if a building is made of concrete or not? Without building construction reports, or sound testing, I am not sure. But you might just try walking around in different buildings, on different floors, at different times, and see if you can develop a feeling for it. Read the fine print in the advertisements. They may say something about it. Beware of people who gloss over it and denigrate the subject.
You no doubt heard about the Welsh security company that is selling a device they call a mosquito that generates an annoying high pitched whine that only children can hear. Adults can't hear it. Keeps teenagers from hanging around the mall entrance. But now the kids are using it as a ring tone for their cell phones. They can get messages in class, and the teachers cannot hear the phone ringing.
I seem to have developed some tinnitus due to it being allergy season and my escutcheon tubes getting plugged. There is usually so much mechanical humming going on around me that I can't really tell what I am hearing. But my computer at home has developed a high pitched whine that seems to interfere with my tinnitus and it is really annoying. I suppose I will have to replace one of the fans, but which one? And if it is the one in the power supply, do I replace the fan, or the whole power supply? The whole power supply would be easier, but gol-durn it, there is nothing wrong with the power supply. Why should I have to replace it?
I got a set of new speaker for my computer a couple of months ago. $30. Housings are smaller, but it came with a a single woofer, and it does sound better.
You no doubt heard about the Welsh security company that is selling a device they call a mosquito that generates an annoying high pitched whine that only children can hear. Adults can't hear it. Keeps teenagers from hanging around the mall entrance. But now the kids are using it as a ring tone for their cell phones. They can get messages in class, and the teachers cannot hear the phone ringing.
I seem to have developed some tinnitus due to it being allergy season and my escutcheon tubes getting plugged. There is usually so much mechanical humming going on around me that I can't really tell what I am hearing. But my computer at home has developed a high pitched whine that seems to interfere with my tinnitus and it is really annoying. I suppose I will have to replace one of the fans, but which one? And if it is the one in the power supply, do I replace the fan, or the whole power supply? The whole power supply would be easier, but gol-durn it, there is nothing wrong with the power supply. Why should I have to replace it?
I got a set of new speaker for my computer a couple of months ago. $30. Housings are smaller, but it came with a a single woofer, and it does sound better.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Summary of the last year
My father was hospitalized around July 1st, 2005, after falling down. He spent a couple of months in the hospital, and then a couple of months in rehab and then moved to an adult foster care facility. He was well enough to come over to my house for Thanksgiving dinner. After that he deteriorated. He passed away January 16, 2006.
Sometime around August my brother Andy's wife got a job in Fairfield, Iowa and moved out, asking for a six month trial separation. She has now filed for divorce. Andy is a basket case. He was here for a few days last week and is now headed back to Iowa. He needs something to do, something else to focus on, but he has not been able to do that. Has not been able to do it for years. As near as I can tell, this is why his wife has filed for divorce.
My oldest son Ross applied to a couple of colleges and was accepted. Drexel in Philadelphia wanted $50,000 a year. He will be going to the University of Oregon in Eugene, a state school that we can afford. He wants a laptop computer to take to school. An Apple, loaded to the gills, costs $2800. Budget Computers, a local used computer shop, has laptops for $200. I am not sure what to do here. I am leaning towards the Apple for a couple of reasons. 1) I am sick of dealing with Windows. Maybe Apple is better. This happened once before. I bought a Mac thinking it would be better than a Windows machine. It wasn't. It was just as unreliable and flakey. Has anything changed? 2) $2800 is a heck of a lot less that $50,000.
Daughter and some of her friends at school have been suffering with a hostile relationship with the star of the dance team. They were too polite, or too afraid, to say anything about it. The whole thing boiled over when they TP'd the star's house in the middle of the night last month. What a storm! Phone calls, conferences, meetings! Things finally settled down, and then we got our cell phone bill for last month: $150 in overtime! Normally our bill is $80. I think this a pretty good indicator of how much of an uproar they caused.
John, my youngest, is very active and very involved (track, zoo, paintball, building computers) and hasn't caused us any serious trouble, other than a trip to the ER for small cut in his eyebrow, which they super-glued together.
A couple of weeks ago the owner of the company took the engineering staff to lunch. This never happens. He tells us that our head engineer is leaving the company. The purpose of the lunch is so we can figure out how best to spin this so the company won't look bad! Yea gads! What an idiot! I am feeling sick to my stomach, I want to leave, but I do not want to walk the mile and half back to work. I think I will sit, and be diplomatic, and wait for a ride back to work.
The head engineer, Roger, my boss, is basically the guy holding this operation together. He knows a million details about our operations and our customers that nobody else knows. This is not good, but it is the way it is. You could look at it like this: our company is an old ship that has a lot of leaks. Roger is the guy who has been running around plugging all the leaks. This ship has been slowly sinking for years. Without Roger, and without drastic measures, this ship is going to sink. And the owner wants to talk about what color we should paint the ship. This goes on for a while, and then for a while longer, and I am starting to get impatient. The owner finally asks me a direct question, and I lose it. I let him have it with both barrels. The manager of the restaurant comes over to talk to me. I leave and end up walking back to work anyway. Of course now I am so steamed up the distance seems like nothing. Three days later the owner announces that there will be raises in June. This is the first time this has happened since he bought the company.
Other than that, I am fine.
Sometime around August my brother Andy's wife got a job in Fairfield, Iowa and moved out, asking for a six month trial separation. She has now filed for divorce. Andy is a basket case. He was here for a few days last week and is now headed back to Iowa. He needs something to do, something else to focus on, but he has not been able to do that. Has not been able to do it for years. As near as I can tell, this is why his wife has filed for divorce.
My oldest son Ross applied to a couple of colleges and was accepted. Drexel in Philadelphia wanted $50,000 a year. He will be going to the University of Oregon in Eugene, a state school that we can afford. He wants a laptop computer to take to school. An Apple, loaded to the gills, costs $2800. Budget Computers, a local used computer shop, has laptops for $200. I am not sure what to do here. I am leaning towards the Apple for a couple of reasons. 1) I am sick of dealing with Windows. Maybe Apple is better. This happened once before. I bought a Mac thinking it would be better than a Windows machine. It wasn't. It was just as unreliable and flakey. Has anything changed? 2) $2800 is a heck of a lot less that $50,000.
Daughter and some of her friends at school have been suffering with a hostile relationship with the star of the dance team. They were too polite, or too afraid, to say anything about it. The whole thing boiled over when they TP'd the star's house in the middle of the night last month. What a storm! Phone calls, conferences, meetings! Things finally settled down, and then we got our cell phone bill for last month: $150 in overtime! Normally our bill is $80. I think this a pretty good indicator of how much of an uproar they caused.
John, my youngest, is very active and very involved (track, zoo, paintball, building computers) and hasn't caused us any serious trouble, other than a trip to the ER for small cut in his eyebrow, which they super-glued together.
A couple of weeks ago the owner of the company took the engineering staff to lunch. This never happens. He tells us that our head engineer is leaving the company. The purpose of the lunch is so we can figure out how best to spin this so the company won't look bad! Yea gads! What an idiot! I am feeling sick to my stomach, I want to leave, but I do not want to walk the mile and half back to work. I think I will sit, and be diplomatic, and wait for a ride back to work.
The head engineer, Roger, my boss, is basically the guy holding this operation together. He knows a million details about our operations and our customers that nobody else knows. This is not good, but it is the way it is. You could look at it like this: our company is an old ship that has a lot of leaks. Roger is the guy who has been running around plugging all the leaks. This ship has been slowly sinking for years. Without Roger, and without drastic measures, this ship is going to sink. And the owner wants to talk about what color we should paint the ship. This goes on for a while, and then for a while longer, and I am starting to get impatient. The owner finally asks me a direct question, and I lose it. I let him have it with both barrels. The manager of the restaurant comes over to talk to me. I leave and end up walking back to work anyway. Of course now I am so steamed up the distance seems like nothing. Three days later the owner announces that there will be raises in June. This is the first time this has happened since he bought the company.
Other than that, I am fine.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Article by Buckley, "It Didn't Work."
Article by Buckley, "It Didn't Work."
http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200602241451.asp
Re: Buckley's article: crap. MY objective was to get rid of Saddam. Temporarily accomplished. He is still alive, he may still worm his way back into power. The Sunni's can all go rot in hell. Thieves, the lot of them. The two sects want to kill each other, they've been preaching it for years. Let them. Just make sure they have equal supplies of armaments. If one side is a little short of cash, use the cash from the other side to pay for guns. Keep Winchester in business.
No matter what we do in Iraq, someone will bitch about it. I like to think that we are keeping the death toll down. Last I heard it was running about a thousand Iraqi's a week. They have a civil war going, even if some people are saying they aren't. If we weren't there, the death toll might be running two thousand a week. Or not. How can you tell?
Should we pull out? Yes, let the ragheads kill themselves. No sense in our getting involved.
Should we stay? Yes, the good Iraqi people need a chance to build a decent life for themselves.
Maybe we should install our own strongman and make Iraq a colony and just take all their oil. If we give them money they just spend it on guns and bombs.
http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200602241451.asp
Re: Buckley's article: crap. MY objective was to get rid of Saddam. Temporarily accomplished. He is still alive, he may still worm his way back into power. The Sunni's can all go rot in hell. Thieves, the lot of them. The two sects want to kill each other, they've been preaching it for years. Let them. Just make sure they have equal supplies of armaments. If one side is a little short of cash, use the cash from the other side to pay for guns. Keep Winchester in business.
No matter what we do in Iraq, someone will bitch about it. I like to think that we are keeping the death toll down. Last I heard it was running about a thousand Iraqi's a week. They have a civil war going, even if some people are saying they aren't. If we weren't there, the death toll might be running two thousand a week. Or not. How can you tell?
Should we pull out? Yes, let the ragheads kill themselves. No sense in our getting involved.
Should we stay? Yes, the good Iraqi people need a chance to build a decent life for themselves.
Maybe we should install our own strongman and make Iraq a colony and just take all their oil. If we give them money they just spend it on guns and bombs.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Noritake China
So I am cleaning out Dad's house, slowly but surely. I drug the china home, feeling that I should store it, since I have room. There is a neighborhood garage sale coming up next month and we expect to get rid of a lot of stuff, so we will have more room to store more stuff! I am planning on hanging onto the china, mostly since I remember seeing it around the house when I was little.
Google found 9,120 Noritake Priscilla China items.
On E-bay, looking for Noritake China, there are 48591 items found.
Still on E-bay. Looking for Priscilla (the pattern name), there were 7 items found.
Inventory:
I have eleven each of:
10.5" dinner plate $22
6" lugged cereal bowl $20
7.5" salad plate $10
6.25" bread & butter plate $ 7
---
subtotal $59
times eleven $649
One each:
16" platter $ 80
12" platter $ 50
---
Grand Total $779
I got the prices from http://www.replacements.com/webquote/N__PRIS.htm
So these are replacement prices. I imagine the cash value at about 10% of this.
Michael said we was going to take some cups and saucers. I didn't find any, so I suppose he did.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Last Week
Daughter had her State Championship dance competition last Thursday. There were about 20 teams competing. They were divided about evenly between "show" teams and "drill" teams. The big difference is that the show teams had a painted vinyl floor and stage props, whereas the drill teams performed on a bare floor. Daughter danced her part very well. Glencoe (her team) came in fourth in their division, one place better than last year. All kinds of scuttlebutt about the judges and the scoring, but that's the way it goes with these small closed communities.
I was looking through a copy "Inc" (a business magazine) last week while I was waiting for lunch, and I found an article about "Freakonomics" (Freakanomics?). Seems to me it was a recent best selling book, but maybe it was last year. Anyway, it was a big hit and got all kinds of people excited. The book is about economics. One of the assertions the author made, and the one that got everybody stirred up, was his explanation for the drop in violent crime. Seems that during 1970's and 1980's violent crime was on the rise, but that in the early 1990's it suddenly dropped. Of course everyone who was in law enforcement claimed that they had new policies and procedures that were responsible for the decrease. The economist who wrote this book had a different take. He attributed the drop in crime to Roe vs Wade back in 1973. Before that decision, women with unwanted pregnancies carried their children to term. After that women could get abortions, so the number of unwanted children decreased. Twenty years later, the number of unwanted children who were becoming adults was much lower, and so violent crime dropped.
Ross and I went to "V for Vendetta" last Friday night at 10pm. The movie was great, all about freedom, security and fear. The 10pm show time screwed me up big time. I didn't get to bed till 1:30 in the morning, and by Sunday night I was still staying up till midnight.
Johnny and I fixed a coolant leak in the van. We started on Friday afternoon and finished up Saturday morning, but then you have already seen my report on that.
Saturday night Anne and I went to dinner at Stanford's and then to the bookstore. I picked up an $8 science fiction paperback novel. I cannot remember the last time I bought a new mass-market paperback. It is something I have not done for quite a while. Guess I am feeling a little flush since I started getting checks in the mail from Dad's TOD accounts.
The science fiction novel was nothing great, it was about werewolves and vampires in present day Washington state, but it was enjoyable reading. There was an interesting high point. Somewhere in the middle of the book I came across a paragraph that was just crystal clear. I cannot remember the subject, but I remember reading it and thinking, wow, that is really good. I am not sure I would be able to find it again if I looked.
Johnny and I went to "Iguana Micro", a small, local, computer shop, Saturday afternoon. He wanted to get a couple of fans for his computer. I have been paying him $5 an hour to exterminate the black-berry bushes in our backyard and in the swamp in back of the yard. He likes the idea of making money and he has been working diligently at it, and making good progress. He wants to get a new computer, and he sees this as a way to make the money he needs to pay for it. So now he is very excited about.
The company I work for hired a guy to run the company. His name is Larry and he started here about nine months ago. He is a very jovial, plump, at least 60 years old, and enjoys talking. His beginning was not auspicious. He had an attack of appendicitis shortly after he got here. The appendix burst and he was in the hospital for a while. OK. Bad luck for him, and he did recover. But I didn't hear a word out of him for several months. At first I let this slide, figuring he needs time to get his feet on the ground. But months went by and still nothing. So I finally took the initiative, because I didn't want this to go the way it had with the owner. So we started talking and I started attending meetings, which was good because I found out what was going on in the company.
But things did not improve. The owner was still coming in, and he was still jerking us around. Last Thursday there was supposed to be a showdown at the board meeting. Didn't happen. Larry is in Austin, where he would do well to stay. Scott, the owner has been in every day. So there was no showdown, Larry is not in charge, and Scott, the jerk, is still playing around with
the business.
I called in sick Friday, so I got a three day weekend. Very nice. I am going to try and set up a computer at home so I can do some work at home while I look for a new job. I have had it with this one.
I was looking through a copy "Inc" (a business magazine) last week while I was waiting for lunch, and I found an article about "Freakonomics" (Freakanomics?). Seems to me it was a recent best selling book, but maybe it was last year. Anyway, it was a big hit and got all kinds of people excited. The book is about economics. One of the assertions the author made, and the one that got everybody stirred up, was his explanation for the drop in violent crime. Seems that during 1970's and 1980's violent crime was on the rise, but that in the early 1990's it suddenly dropped. Of course everyone who was in law enforcement claimed that they had new policies and procedures that were responsible for the decrease. The economist who wrote this book had a different take. He attributed the drop in crime to Roe vs Wade back in 1973. Before that decision, women with unwanted pregnancies carried their children to term. After that women could get abortions, so the number of unwanted children decreased. Twenty years later, the number of unwanted children who were becoming adults was much lower, and so violent crime dropped.
Ross and I went to "V for Vendetta" last Friday night at 10pm. The movie was great, all about freedom, security and fear. The 10pm show time screwed me up big time. I didn't get to bed till 1:30 in the morning, and by Sunday night I was still staying up till midnight.
Johnny and I fixed a coolant leak in the van. We started on Friday afternoon and finished up Saturday morning, but then you have already seen my report on that.
Saturday night Anne and I went to dinner at Stanford's and then to the bookstore. I picked up an $8 science fiction paperback novel. I cannot remember the last time I bought a new mass-market paperback. It is something I have not done for quite a while. Guess I am feeling a little flush since I started getting checks in the mail from Dad's TOD accounts.
The science fiction novel was nothing great, it was about werewolves and vampires in present day Washington state, but it was enjoyable reading. There was an interesting high point. Somewhere in the middle of the book I came across a paragraph that was just crystal clear. I cannot remember the subject, but I remember reading it and thinking, wow, that is really good. I am not sure I would be able to find it again if I looked.
Johnny and I went to "Iguana Micro", a small, local, computer shop, Saturday afternoon. He wanted to get a couple of fans for his computer. I have been paying him $5 an hour to exterminate the black-berry bushes in our backyard and in the swamp in back of the yard. He likes the idea of making money and he has been working diligently at it, and making good progress. He wants to get a new computer, and he sees this as a way to make the money he needs to pay for it. So now he is very excited about.
The company I work for hired a guy to run the company. His name is Larry and he started here about nine months ago. He is a very jovial, plump, at least 60 years old, and enjoys talking. His beginning was not auspicious. He had an attack of appendicitis shortly after he got here. The appendix burst and he was in the hospital for a while. OK. Bad luck for him, and he did recover. But I didn't hear a word out of him for several months. At first I let this slide, figuring he needs time to get his feet on the ground. But months went by and still nothing. So I finally took the initiative, because I didn't want this to go the way it had with the owner. So we started talking and I started attending meetings, which was good because I found out what was going on in the company.
But things did not improve. The owner was still coming in, and he was still jerking us around. Last Thursday there was supposed to be a showdown at the board meeting. Didn't happen. Larry is in Austin, where he would do well to stay. Scott, the owner has been in every day. So there was no showdown, Larry is not in charge, and Scott, the jerk, is still playing around with
the business.
I called in sick Friday, so I got a three day weekend. Very nice. I am going to try and set up a computer at home so I can do some work at home while I look for a new job. I have had it with this one.
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