choke on that causality

I think I take things too personally. Sometimes I get an email, and I feel like maybe the person is being a little short with me…and I get upset. Why? And then I spend an hour dwelling on it and obsessing over an email response. The truth is probably just that people are busy and performing their job by stating the facts, and moving on…I wish I could be like that-but not mean. Whatever.

What have I been up to? Well I had a full week off of work because of the flood. I was going to post pictures but I haven’t gotten around to it. Didn’t really do much during my time off. Logged way too much time playing Dragon Quest VIII. I know I’m living in 2006 (I don’t remember the first time around - the year not the game). Whatever. It was a cheap game and I like it.

The other day my mom called me and said that her and my sister and some other family members were going to go over to my grandparents and help them clean out their basement after the flood damage. She said to stop by if I had time in a wishy washy sorta way. The next day she called me and said, “Where are you?”. You were supposed to come over and help clean up. I said, “Sorry, I thought it was optional.” I still didn’t go over and help. I don’t like doing work.

Speaking of not liking to do work, I decided to mow the lawn the other day. I did the whole back yard by myself. Never again. My dainty delicate hands got a big bloody blister from pushing that thing. I continue to bitch about it every day to Mike.

Ya know having a big bloody scabby painful blister sucks especially since the water at work has been unusable after the flood. I never realized how often I was my hands. Actually the signs say not potable. I had to look that up. Apparently it means not safe to drink. So technically I could have washed my hands with it. Kinda scary though. I suppose it’s nice that they provide hand sanitizer in all of the bathrooms. Although it’s that foam kind. I’m not a fan of foam anything…

I got new glasses. I made Mike go with me to help me pick some out and we found this pair that I really like but they were like two tone dark and lime green. I thought they were really cool, but the green just seemed a little impractical. Luckily, I asked about other colors and they had black listed in the catalog.

The Futurama movie is now available for pre-order though Amazon.com. Can’t wait. It should also air on Comedy Central next year, split into 3 episodes.

Here is a description from Wikipedia:

The Planet Express crew fights to save the world from nudist alien internet scammers, who send Bender back into the past to steal the world’s greatest treasures. The secret to time travel is tatooed on Fry’s buttocks, Leela finds true love, and Fry learns a terrible secret about his destiny and his buttocks.

So there was severe flooding here. The river that runs through the middle of town completely overflowed and flooded all of downtown. It was on the national news and shit. Weird. I’ve been off of work for the past 3 1/2 days. My workplace was flooded and they have been having all kinds of problems cleaning up and getting the electricity and systems back up. It’s cool to get a few free days off…but there really isn’t a whole lot to do. I’m honestly getting really freakin bored.

We went out to eat last night at Cheddar’s. They must have been really understaffed from the flood…because the food and service sucked. My steak was incredibly dry and overcooked, and they were out of half of the side items…The manager came out and apologized in person, and it was really awkward for us. I remember just being embarrassed and I really wanted her to go away. People were staring and probably thinking that we were complaining…but we really weren’t. It’s just not worth it. Have you seen that movie “Waiting”. Ever since I saw that I just have a new appreciation for servers and restaurant staff. Plus I don’t want spit or any other bodily fluid to find its way into my food. Yuck.

So our house didn’t flood at all. I posted the pics of the creek from Tuesday…but it receded by midday and has been fine since. We were lucky. There are people who lost everything. I hope all of the businesses in the downtown area can bounce back alright. We drove down there last night and saw all the rubbage people were pulling out of the different shops and stuff. Ripped out carpet and furniture. Some places were still pumping out water. Sucks. I forgot my camera at home or would have taken some more pics.

I’m so freakin bored. There is a level 3 flood warning right now. So I can’t really go anywhere. We were able to leave work early today, which was nice…but now I’m just really bored.

Check out these pics of the flooding of the creek by our house. I’m not the greatest at taking pictures…but you kinda get the idea. I went to let KC out this morning, and I was like wtf! Ya see I’m too lazy to listen to the news or radio so I didn’t even realize there was a chance of flooding. Comforting right…At least my house didn’t flood. And at least we don’t have a basement…cause it would probably be pretty flooded about now. It seems like a bunch of my family here in town had flooding in their basements.

Driving to work this morning was interesting. I went one way blocked..back the other way…blocked…I had to take the most round-about out-of-the-way way to work. Ah well. Everyone else was way later than me.

This month I got a ginormous cable bill. What the hell, right. I know I paid it last month. Well it turns out I paid the bill..but to the wrong account through my bank’s bill paying system. Woops. I had to call and sound all stupid…Uh yeah I accidentally paid you for an account I closed 2 months ago. Now I have to wait for them to send me a refund check. Wonderful.

Mike and I actually unpacked a couple of boxes last night! Well I’m not sure if it counts since we pretty much just put stuff in a different box. But at least we sorted through the stuff and decided what can stay in storage and what we will eventually want to put somewhere…we just don’t know where yet. So it’s an accomplishment after all.

I also finally finished painting the shelfs and cabinets in the bathroom. It took forever, but I wanted them just right. Hopefully I can post some pics of the finished bathroom soon. I think it turned out pretty good. Blue/Khaki/Brown kinda theme.

Yesterday I somehow overslept and was like 2 hours late for work. woops. No one noticed, but I swear to chebus I will never let that happen again. Today I had two alarms going off, and I got up right away at 6am. Ok maybe I hit the snooze once….

So I really would like to take a vacation. But it will be pretty damn near impossible, since Mike and I will never be able to get coinciding time off, especially with his school starting back up next week. And flights are crazy expensive over the holiday time. I don’t know how we were able to swing Vegas over Thanksgiving last year. At least that was before we had Makalu and KC, but we still had to haul all the other pets to Mike’s parents in the Cleveland area. I cannot imagine loading up all of the pets now and expecting Mike’s parents to take care of all of them! It’s sad to say…but I really don’t trust anyone to take care of our pets except Mike’s parents. One time I asked my mom to feed our fish while were gone, and she just didn’t do it. And then when I asked her why she didn’t come over, she was all like…how did you know?. Uh because I taped a big note over the aquarium lid and set the food up there that you would have had to move to feed them….and it was still in the same place. Geez. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes. So yeah. Wouldn’t trust my parents with the pets.

I frequently have to deal with software vendors at work. In fact, that is almost all I do considering we do very little in-house development. Anyway, it seems like whenever we have a problem, like a web portal stops responding or we get certain ominous error messages…I contact the vendor, explain the problem, send them some pretty screenshots and copies of log files and whatever. Then a couple days later they come back and tell me that it must be something we are doing wrong. Don’t you just love to hear that? “Looks like you are having database connectivity issues. You should check with your database people.” What I really love to hear is them beat the dead horse (I hate that expression), and mention that we chose not to follow the recommended installation scheme (a year ago). “We wouldn’t be having these problems had we installed a SQL Server instance on the local machine.” Yeah fuck you. I (or the company I work for really) seem to remember paying you for a customized software solution, asshole. Just fix it. No more excuses for all your buggy code.