I think someone suggested that I become more optimistic and loving. Let me let you in on a little secret. IT AIN’T HAPPENING. For example, my sister (yeah, the one who does all the knitting and sewing and seems like such a nice person unless you’re her brother) tells me every single day that since I’m starting a new job, I better get a prescription for Prozac and heavily medicate myself. She ain’t all fluffy bunnies and knit cats. I bet she knocked over a few little old ladies and pushed some kids out of the way to get that ice cream. OK, so she probably didn’t hurt anyone to get the ice cream, but you should see what I’m getting at. Nobody expects me to be nice without medication and my sister is no help.

So, why haven’t I posted? I really have little to talk about. I need to keep digging a hole around the house foundation. I keep driving to Scappoose to help a guy build this aluminum antenna monstrosity. I keep trying to chat with women on the internet and when they reply I bore them to tears and they quit talking to me. THE SAME THING AS EVERY OTHER DAY.

I suppose I could mention I saw one of the women from the gym on a date today with a guy who looked like he wanted to thumb wrestle me for the title of King Geek. Well, he wasn’t building ham radio antennas all afternoon and he was on a date, so I guess I WIN.

Today I spent all day pretending to fix things. ALL FREAKING DAY. All while I was listening to the next Chief Justice thing on NPR. What fun that was.

First I dug some holes to find out that the facade, which was supposed to be resting on dirt, was resting on some sort of poured foundation. Obviously some sort of inferior poured foundation, but we’ll see after I do some more excavation.

Then it was off to Home Depot to buy a new cordless drill and some long roofing screws. I didn’t like the ones at Home Depot, so it was off to Pearl Hardware where I didn’t really buy anything. So, down the street to Portland Fasteners where the minimum purchase was one box of screws, or about $50. I didn’t like that so I went to Winks Hardware and bought eight Phillips head screws.

Back home to meet with a contractor who spent a half hour telling me that the whole facade needed to be torn down and redone, and that you can’t find clinker brick any more, so maybe just tear down the brick and stone facade. Well, you might as well just tear down the whole house because it would look like shit without the facade. What good news. Anyway, he told me to keep digging out the foundation so he could look at it.

Then it was back to Pearl Hardware to buy some paint (it was right next door to the Pella Window store, where I bought my expensive new window), and then Parr Lumber for a 2×4 I was going to use as a cross brace for the garage door.

Then I realized that the Phillips head screws were all just stripping and I needed to get the hex head, so back to Pearl Hardware. And then I realized that not only is the garage door starting to rot but so is the door frame and crossbracing would do no good. All the garage door nonsense ended about 6PM when I started digging some more holes. I’m still not done with that.

So, in summary: I did get to spend some more time with a cute window salesman who made me promise to spend several thousand dollars on a new window, I confirmed that fixing the front of the house is not only going to cost a fortune but may require some sort of miracle, and I half-assed a repair on the garage door.

Did I mention I’m not finished with any of of that stuff?

OK, so it sounds a lot better than it actually was. She was blonde and cute and SELLING ME WINDOWS. She had to measure the size of the current window. (For those who aren’t paying attention, like someone whose initials are SUN K BAE, the window is old, aluminum and rattly. So rattly that if the wind hits it a certain way, it makes a sound louder than any alarm clock I’ve ever heard, but I’ve never been a fireman so maybe it’s as loud as a fireman’s alarm clock. I don’t know.)

So, what really happened today was getting pricing on a window for several thousand dollars, plus the garage door falling completely apart, and finding a rotted sewage pipe that I couldn’t fix very well. So, not only do I get to fix the foundation and the window, but I also get to pay for plumbing repairs.

Here’s what my friend Greg calls a shitty picture:

While I can make it sound like I had a good day (the whole girl in my bedroom for the first time in, what, four or five years) it wasn’t like someone sent me a bunch of ice cream or something.

Well, since I’m quitting company V to go to company I, I am losing a ton of vacation time. I think I had about 200 hours saved up, and they only pay out 80 hours, so I’m losing about 2 1/2 weeks of vacation time. That’s THOUSANDS of dollars I’m losing. That’s what I get for working like the tool that I am. My boss says, “There’s nothing I can do,” and that’s partially true. He can’t force the company to pay me for the vacation time. But it’s not illegal for the company to pay it to me, either. I mean, I should have just told them I was quitting in 3 weeks and I was on vacation until then. The reason I had all the vacation time saved up was because I was WORKING.

Ah, well. I’m leaving so I suppose I should leave with some bad feelings for the company. 🙂

Did I mention that this last iTunes update was a complete disaster? I lost a bunch of my music. Lost, not deleted, so I started up a unix command line program that just went through and started up every single mp3 (or m4a, or whatever) I had in my iTunes directory. That way they’re all registered in my iTunes. Next, I have to re-rip some CDs I got that I ripped with Apple Lossless Encoding. You can only fit a couple of songs on your iPod if you do that. The files are HUGE.

Just because it’s like 50ft x 50ft and weighs 400 pounds doesn’t mean it’s not a crafts project.

So, my brother-in-law drives around with his birthday cake. I think I was going to say something clever about it, but basically he lets you take slices out of it and then drives around with it some more.

I did go out to dinner with him and Craig and Megan. That and the antenna kept me from watching too much football. I suppose that’s what I get for having such a deplorable pastime as watching NFL football. 🙂

Looks like more computer problems of some sort have kept me from posting. If I would quit monkeying with my computers, I wouldn’t have this kind of problem, but what sort of life would you have if you didn’t have seemingly stupid hobbies? I can’t even remember what I did to my computer on Friday night. We went out to dinner with my brother-in-law since his birthday was Saturday.

Saturday I spent most of the day helping a guy build a monstrous antenna. It’s not finished yet. And in the evening I went to Megan’s mom’s house and met their crazy friend who lives in Thailand. So, a pretty busy day for a normally boring guy like me.

Tonight: chicken and dumplings at the diner with Megan, Craig (I hope), and my brother-in-law.

I am leaving my current position to take another with a large company that makes CPUs. I’m going to start in a position creating standards for Linux. What does that mean? I’m sure to find out soon. I felt rather guilty about it, but my current boss wished me luck. I mean, the guy was one of the most reasonable guys I’ve worked for and here I go back to the land of adversarial negotiations.

The big minus is that I have to cancel my trip to Japan. November marks 14 years since I left Japan, and I guess it’ll be even longer.

In other news, someone sent me a box of cookies!

You can guess who it is:

I did a Quicktime and iTunes update and now my Finder keeps crashing every 30 seconds. The Finder is always supposed to be running, so it restarts, only to crash 30 seconds later. I’m sure there’s something goofy in my preferences because I can create another user and the new user does not have this problem.

In any case, that’s why I didn’t post. Big changes coming, job-wise, but that’ll have to wait.

The past couple of months I haven’t been using up all my 450 minutes but this month I’m already over by 100 minutes. And that doesn’t even count all the time I spent on the phone today. Oy. I spent a half hour on hold today, only to finally ring through to a recording that said, “Our office is now closed.” Nice, huh?

First it was all about adding items to the start menu for my friend Greg. Not a big problem, since I just had to try it and find a way around all the “help” given to you by “helpful” computers. This was Linux, after all, so it was a little harder than, say, the Mac or Windows.

Then a friend called me to ask me how to compile sendmail on Solaris. This is standard system administration and a job that I interviewed for. I was one of two people at the end, but they hired someone else. For some reason that someone else never seems to be around to fix anything, so my friend is always calling me to see how I’d do it. That hardly seems fair.

I was also fixing my sister’s laptop, and my brother-in-law called to see if I could fix the ringtone on his fancy new cell phone. Somehow he got it stuck saying, “Hello Moto,” instead of ringing like a sane person’s phone.

So, I suppose I forgot to kvetch, er, post yesterday. I spent the day installing Linux on a friend’s computer. Today I think it was sort of watching TV or shopping for my sister’s new refrigerator. In other words, excitement city.

Since it’s the first Sunday of the month, here’s a picture from the schoolyard of a bunch of scofflaws. You probably can’t tell, but there’s a lot of little chihuahuas running around, off-leash! At $75 per violation, there’s at least, hmm, some number times $75!