Breaking Wind In Style

Memorial Day weekend was nice, we did not have any plans other than building a fire pit and a pergola, only one of these got built, hint it was the one in which it would be perfectly ok acceptable to mix with fire. I ended up not being able to get wood delivered for the pergola and unfortunately the little 6’ bed on my truck is simply not long enough to haul a bunch of 16’ boards. I started the fire pit Friday evening and then finished Saturday morning. During the process I noted that my estimating skills were significantly lacking as I ended up making three separate trips to Lowes to buy gravel and sand for the base, fortunately I am capable of counting up to 36 so I did not have to go back for paver’s stones, although even that was a close thing since my first iteration of the bottom ring had one too many blocks in it and I didn’t even catch the error until late in the process. Overall I was very pleased with the final product; it has been a while since I’ve been able to have a decent sized fire in a real fire pit.

Tuesday evening Leslie had gone to a women’s group with our church so I was at home alone… or as alone as one can be with two children and perhaps that is more frighteningly alone than actually being alone. Anyhow, I am lying on the floor alternating between wrestling with Jack and playing with Ayla whenever he would run around the corner. At one point I was looking at my daughter when Jack came running around the corner coming from the kitchen with something between his fingers, something he immediately tried to shove into my mouth. Let me back up a little, since I had gotten home I had noticed little Cheerios scattered all over the floor, the remains of a failed endeavor to allow Jack to tote around a cup of Cheerios as a snack. On numerous occasions I had gotten on to him for trying to eat Cheerios off of the floor. So here I am with my son running towards me full tilt with, what I assume is a Cheerio, grasped between his fingers. Not wishing to consume a floor Cheerio I turned my head and clamped my lips shut. Just missing my mouth, Jack’s hands collided with my cheek and promptly dropped the alleged Cheerio onto my shoulder. In my attempts to locate said Cheerio I was horrified to discover that he had not tried to stuff a Cheerio in my mouth at all, rather he had tried to stuff in a partial fly corpse. Seriously kid? I shudder to think what gave him the idea that we should be eating flies.

Today we held a groundbreaking ceremony on one of our larger projects, despite the fact that we actually broke ground a little over 4 months ago. We had senior level management attend as well as executive level management from our customer; of course no groundbreaking ceremony would be complete without the obligatory politicians. While this ceremony had been in the works for quite some time this project was only recently transferred over to me and it appeared that the management of this ceremony was well in hand by others in my business. Tuesday I did a little digging and was horrified to see how many of the little details had been overlooked. Working with our contractor I was able to get everything nailed down by yesterday afternoon, including portable restroom facilities (i.e. port-o-johns) fit for a king… or at least a state senator. It is no stretch of the imagination to say that this facility was significantly nicer than my bathroom at home. My team was impressed with the fact that I was able to locate a solar powered facility with air conditioning, running water, and real toilet paper. In fact, at the end of the day the port-o-potty kind of stole the show, I got more comments on that thing than I did the rest of the solar field. I suppose the hardwood floors, stylized vanity, and cherry cabinets might have had something to do with that. I wonder if it would be appropriate to mention this port-o-potty next year when it comes time for my performance review. After all, my boss was one of the ones who commented on the facilities. I’ll put it this way, we were breaking ground in style, I just wanted everyone in attendance to feel comfortable breaking wind in style as well.

It is worth mentioning that last week as I was in the process of posting my newsletter I happened to see what search term produced the most links to my blog from the previous week. I’m not certain exactly what cued my blog to produce a hit on this particular search term but I found it quite hilarious either way, hilarious and probably appropriate as well. The search term was “my neighbors think I’m weird.” I’m certain there cannot be any correlation.

Turns Out Pergola Is Not Just a Made Up Word

Well, we made it back from vacation, barely. Overall we had a very good time spent with a lot of family… seriously; we saw a lot of family while in Atlanta. Mother’s Day everyone went over to my mom and dad’s new house for lunch; we counted 21 people while we were there, parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins, and cousins-in-law (if that’s even a thing) from both sides of the family. We had a very long nine days down in Atlanta (in which I only ate at Chickfila twice!), but overall it was a very enjoyable trip.

While on vacation I reiterated the fact that it would appear that I like to live life on the edge. Jack woke up early one morning, before anyone else at my in-laws house was awake, so I decided to pack him up and go have breakfast at Chickfila. Once we got there I realized that I had not brought any diapers or wipes… or any other item of baby paraphernalia, other than the actual baby, of course. I promptly then began to feed my child greasy hash browns and a box of apple juice and then proceeded to watch as he climbed all over the playground. Yep, I’m just going to cross my fingers and hope that I don’t have a Class 4 disaster on my hands in the meantime because I certainly do not have any of the requisite materials to implement Containment Level Green. On the plus side, at least it is only a rental car.

We were scheduled to fly out of Atlanta on Sunday at 1500; we left my mom and dad’s place in plenty of time and ended up getting to the gate a little more than an hour before our scheduled departure. While sitting at the gate we overheard the ticketing agent make an announcement that they were oversold and they needed three people who were willing to give up their seats and take the later flight into Albany… yada yada yada. When they announced that they were going to give out $800 travel vouchers we decided to see if we would even be eligible since we both had children sitting in our laps. Of course it wasn’t until after they had processed the paperwork and issued us new tickets on the later flight that I realized that taking the later flight would entail waiting in the terminal for another five hours… ouch. All told, what should have been a total of six hours of travel time turned into about eleven. That said, I cannot really complain, both of the kids did an awesome job, it was just exhausting.

Getting home at 2245 on a Sunday night did not really help me prepare for work early the next morning either. I went straight from vacation to a site visit that lasted until later Monday evening. As you may well know, the catch up work required when returning from vacation can be quite voluminous and being out of the office the entire day is not a good way to catch up on paperwork and email. Fortunately by the end of the day Thursday I was pretty much caught up on everything I needed to do last week, then all that was left was to catch up on everything I hadn’t done this week because I was too busy catching up on last week’s work.

When we left Albany it was in the 90’s, on Thursday of this week I had to turn on my heater because it got down to 63 in the house. Personally, I was ok with 63F, on the other hand Leslie commented on how it probably was not good that our daughter was shivering while inside the house. I was even more surprised that it is calling for the temperatures to get as low as 36F tonight. Somehow it would not entirely surprise me if we wound up getting snow on Memorial Day.

Speaking of Memorial Day, I have decided to spend my three day weekend putting my handyman skills to work again in the form of a fire pit and, if I can find a trailer to haul the wood home in, a pergola. For those of you who don’t know what a pergola is, it is a contraption that seems to serve absolutely zero functional purpose and merely exists for aesthetic reasons. Picture a gazebo type structure with no roof, or at least with a “roof” that has absolutely no chance of keeping any of the elements off of you. Nevertheless, my wife wants a pergola and I want to feel productive this weekend so she’s getting a pergola. The plus side is that this would seem the perfect excuse to buy a couple more tools, woohoo!

An Almost Normal Week

Well, vacation starts in roughly 18 hours; I can pretty much guarantee that if I don’t finish this by 2200 tonight this week’s newsletter won’t happen at all.   To be fair, next week’s might not happen at all. So between now and 2200 I will fill the pages with comments on how I actually had to work this week, for the first time in about 14 years I had to mow a lawn… *shudder* It makes me begin to wonder just why exactly one even has a lawn to begin with. Why can’t I just cover my entire yard in two or three inches of pea gravel?

After flying across the country and spending four days on top of a roof this week seemed pretty tame in comparison. I did not even have to make any day trips to any of our somewhat local sites, a couple of which I am picking up since the recent hire of another project manager who will be primarily focused on the West Coast. Between contract revisions (shouldn’t we be paying a lawyer to do this) and meeting after meeting it almost seemed down right normal, just in time to pack everything up and travel to Atlanta for a vacation.

Its 2230, well past the witching hour. I am packed and exhausted. I keep telling Leslie that we don’t need to get up until 0500 for our 0600 flight but she insists that we leave much earlier, something to do with children slowing down the process. I tried to get this written earlier today, I really did, but alas it seems my failure is nearly complete… only nearly mind you since I did get something written and published. Oh look, a cute picture of one of my children, be distracted.

Special Brownies

This week was a long and busy week. I flew out of Albany early Monday morning and headed west. True to recent form I set my alarm for 0500 to wake up for a 0600 flight. 20 minutes to get ready and out the door, 15 minutes to get to the airport, 4 minutes to find a parking spot, 8 minutes to get through security, and about 2 minutes to walk to my gate. This all adds up to me getting to the gate just as they are starting to call to board Zone 2. Of course, this is all for the 0600 flight to Atlanta, I wasn’t going to Atlanta, I had the 0600 flight to Detroit. As I got through security I heard a call come over the PA system, “This is the final call for flight 2604 to Detroit, we will be closing the gates in five minutes.” Five minutes! Good thing it only takes me two to walk to the gate. In the end my flight ended up leaving ten minutes early… how does that happen? Are they even allowed to do that? I made it, although I was the last person to board the aircraft. Perhaps on my future flights through Detroit I won’t cut it quite so close, maybe I will leave the house two minutes earlier.

When I finally arrived in San Jose it was only about noon time on the West coast so I went straight to the job site rather than trying to check into my hotel room first. At the end of the day, after almost ten hours of travel and another five of being on the roof I was exhausted and more than ready to change out of my boots and take a hot shower. As I pulled into the Extended Stay I was a little surprised to see two different buildings, I was even more surprised to see the “Lobby” label on each of the two buildings. Feeling extremely tired I parked in front of the closest building and walked in. I told them my name and that I should have a reservation. The guy looked at his computer and said he did not have any record of my reservation; did I try at the building next door? Frustrated I walked next door and into the other building. As I went through the check in process I made the comment to the lady at the desk that they could probably eliminate some overhead costs if they would combine the lobbies of the two buildings. “Oh no,” she replied, “We’re two separate hotels; we don’t share any of the same personnel.” Ok, so you have two separate Extended Stay Americas literally right next door to each other and you operate them as completely separate hotels? I understand that they are likely run as separate franchises but if someone at the chain corporate office did not recognize the opportunity for cost savings then somebody is really missing something.

It was an interesting four days that I spent in California. We are installing a rooftop system out there so I pretty much spent the entirety of my four days up on a roof in 90+ degree days, it was more than a little shock to my upstate New York climate adjusted body… A body that hadn’t even seen a 90+ degree day since it left Texas more than seven months ago. I’m fortunate in that I have the good Italian skin coloring which has a tendency to tan rather than burn, but this assumes a gradual introduction to summer weather. I was thrown from the end of winter where we’ve only had about 3 full days of sunshine to, as the locals described it, abnormally warm weather. For the first time in about eight years I wound up purchasing sunscreen. Needless to say, Leslie was extremely jealous of my California tan that I had upon my return. By California tan I mean a tan that extends from my hands up to right about where a short sleeved shirt would extend and then my entire face down to my neckline… that’s a California tan, right?

I had barbecue at a place called Armadillo Willy’s this week, it was actually pretty decent barbecue. While I was ordering my food I noticed the sign shown above. I’ll be honest, considering I was in northern California I was suckered in, I really did think they were serving “special” brownies, the fact that Willie Nelson’s face graced the front of this poster only served to reinforce that presumption. Of course, once I read the text I realized what was going on and I got a pretty good laugh out of it.

I received an interesting call from my boss this week while I was in California. A couple of weeks ago I had given him a couple of time lapse cameras that I had configured and waterproofed so that he could hand them off to the general contractor to mount on the side of one of the buildings; the purpose being to get good time lapse footage of another one of our projects being built. Tuesday I received a call requesting the spec sheet on both of the cameras; curious I asked why he needed the spec sheet; the cameras should have been fully configured and didn’t need any further work other than to just flip on the switch. As it turns out the contractor had mounted the cameras on an old salt storage building on the edge of the project, they then promptly proceeded to destroy the building. I applaud the effort; I can honestly say that I have never had to replace equipment because I mounted it on a building that was slated for destruction.