… but here, it’s always wintertime, baby.

Yeah, you’ve probably seen SnowCraft before, but it’s still fun.

Okay, it’s quittin’ time.

“Depend on the predictability and steadiness of life to support you.”

Pardon me while I laugh my ass off, folks.

Amy’s college roommate, Monica, said to me this weekend, “Oh, so you’re one of those people who thrives on always being busy?” Amy chirped, “Yeah, without a to-do list that he’s always behind on, Geof would never get anything done.” This week, so far, has been proof of that. Never mind that I’ve been without my truck for over two weeks, and that I probably could have gotten my stuff moved before now had I had the truck–I’d probably have put it off a bit myself to do other things. Todd’s right about that–now that we have the apartment cleared, we can concentrate on the house. We have a deadline–August 15th–and the only thing I don’t like about that deadline is that it’s not unreasonable enough.

Let me pass on two lessons for the day: one, when you agree to a schedule, don’t slip it back three weeks at the drop of a hat; two, when you screw up something, report it as early as possible.

F— it, I tempted the Rain Gods by washing my rental today, so mowing is going down. I’m going to sit down and watch the Reds game and drink beer. Screw being responsible.

You know, about the second week of August, I realized I’d made a mistake in selecting an apartment. Don’t get me wrong–I loved living up on Monte Sano. [You've heard me babble on and on about this before.] But I made a mistake in taking the smallest bedroom in that apartment. If money had been no object, we should have rented two apartments, side by side, and that way, we might have had enough room for all of us.

However, with much help from Sarah and Todd, the moving is done and the cleaning is complete. Blake just came in from work and handed me his keys; I’ll take off at lunch and go turn them in sometime today. That apartment is cleaner than it was when we got the keys–and I’m really not kidding. Todd gets the props for that.

If you think I’m done, well, hell no! I should take a photo of the pile of boxes. I haven’t earned the nickname “wonton” [for having "wonton of stuff"] for nothing. The garage is full of boxes and such, and hey, there’s still a lot of exterior work to do [painting, board replacement] here at Club Todder III.

But man, it’s good to be out of there…

Okay, so I don’t want to fool with it, but I’m just going to pot the “whine” gain down to nothing and go on and get the rest of my stuff moved. If I could have moved around a bit more today, rather than just sit here at my desk, I’d probably not be so stiff. Oooooh, look, Advil. That should solve that problem.

My wrangling with the schedules is done for the day. The work I put in on them this weekend was very worth it–the schedule slips that are caused by our customer are now very clearly presented, and that’s a very important thing. It’s one thing for the Boeing POC and us to say that Boeing is the problem; it’s another to have it graphically on the schedule.

Of course, I still haven’t gotten to meet with the person I should have met with yesterday. The stalling and delaying is somewhat familiar, and all the more frustrating because of that. However, this is work, and we’ve got to get this done. The schedules are now being read, though, and of that, I am thankful.

How scary is it that August starts on Thursday? Pardon me, but where the heck did my summer go?

Again, m4d pr0pz to Todd, without whom I’d be wholly screwed on the moving front. Damn, I miss my truck. Of course, the Semi is so big that we got two loads’ worth of my truck in his.

I really need to repair my bed. The bottom frame’s cross-piece is starting to get stripped out. A couple wooden golf tees, some wood glue, and a drill will fix that up quite quickly. Tonight, however, it’s getting the last few bits of stuff out of the apartment and to the new place for all of us [mostly me, but Blake has a few things there] and cleaning it. Todd’s done the bulk of the cleaning already, and I’ll get the vacuuming on my end done and mop up the hall bath, and we should be good. Sure, I’m on about five hours’ sleep, but when you play Mr. Last MInute …

Todd has started calling me “wonton”, because as he says, “You have wonton of stuff.” Well, not really, but I do have a lot of stuff. And it was crammed into a very small bedroom. Here, I got lotsa lotsa room! Verra nice.

Mmmmm … I better go think about getting the laundry out over at the house and getting to work. I so want to call in sick or something like that, but that’s unethical and painful, especially considering that someone else who does Boeing Status Tuesday was out sick last week, which made it hard on the rest of us. I can’t do that to them guilt-free.

I swear, it’s not enough to tell some people what you need them to do in order for you to help them with their job. I think you need to write it on their hands and their foreheads [in reverse] in permanent ink so they can’t help but realize what you’re asking.

Because of that, the time I spent up here yesterday is pretty much for naught, because the party in question isn’t ready to meet with me today so we can work towards resolving the situation that’s causing everyone up here to have a lot of frustration and me to be up here and working on this stuff rather than being at the apartment helping Todd get my stuff out the door [or, hell, get the kitchen cleaned up or any of the other things that Todd did while I was at work this weekend].

I’ve just about done all I can do today, and unless my boss strenuously objects, I’m going to take off in a little bit and go grab a few loads of stuff and dump them off at the Outhouse. I can’t get the remaining big furniture into the car, but I can get it disassembled and into the living room where I can find some truck [Todd's or a rental] to put it in and cart it home.

… I spent a lot of time at work yesterday. Far too much, actually. Spent a little at Amy and Jeff’s for dinner, got to meet Amy’s old college roommate from Hendrix.

To put it simple, we’re having to make some mid-course corrections in how we manage our various flight hardware projects for Boeing. What we’ve been doing just hasn’t been working–at least in terms of trying to get things done in a timely manner. As I’m part of the project office for this effort, I’ve got to try to re-finagle our schedules and get them back together so we’re representative of the effort and can try to manage some of the resource headaches we’ve been having.

The biggest headaches, of course, aren’t our people. At present, we only have one Boeing and one government quality person assigned to this project. If they’re out watching testing, we’re dead in the water on getting inspections on anything else. One of the things that we have to do is get quality scheduled a bit better. This means that we have to drill down another level on the schedules, something that I suggested that we do a few months ago when I started doing this. That suggestion was pushed aside then because it wasn’t really necessary; now that it is, we’re paying for it.

I went back to work early this morning to do the video for church. [Must get PowerPoint on this laptop!] I came back from church and promptly sacked out for about three hours. I feel very guilty about not helping with stuff around the house today, but I was fighting falling asleep the entire drive home. I wouldn’t have been any help around here. And yes, I still need to go back to work sometime tonight.

Well, today sucked. Tomorrow will suck, too.

Schedule hell I am in, yes. Work now means less work later, I think. Of course, this severely impinges moving plans. Dammit.

Last night, as I was heading home in the rental chariot, the radio quit working. Just … dead. Nothing on the LCD at all. No sound out of the speakers. The rest of the car was running okay, though, so I kept on driving it.

I got to a stop sign and stopped, and the car just … died. Nothing. I tried to re-start it, and it was like the starter had been pulled from the car. A passer-by–a nice black man, going against all hearsay that there are problems with race relations in the northern parts of Madison County–helped to push me off to the side. I called Todd, who was home, and asked him to come get me if he could. I got back in the car and, on a lark, tried to start it. It worked, so I called Todd and told him I’d keep on coming.

As I drove the last mile home, I called the rental company. They said, “Can you come bring it in?” When I consider that it was 5:30 p.m., I was halfway across the county, and they closed at 6:00, I said, “I’ll just come in tomorrow morning.” I did, but when I woke up this morning, I had a phone call from the boss-man … so this little post is made from work. Who knows how late I’ll be here today? Oh well, they pay me to be here …

Our customer’s customer tells our customer that they suck.

He walks out of the room.

Our customer has fun passing blame.

Us dumb subcontractors sit quietly in the corner and don’t speak unless spoken to.

I have fun hiding behind the monitor while running the slides so no one can see my reactions to things.

I then get to deliver the best one-liner of the day:

Ed: “Geof, I need you to take a look at this schedule for me and tell me what you think it looks like.” He hands me the schedule.

Me: (pause) “Shit.” The entire table [thankfully, all TBE people] laugh uproariously.

Okay, this is just weird.

Of course, I’ve always preferred mutts to pure-breds. Buttons, the family dog when I was growing up, was the sweetest doggie in all the wide world, and she was part poodle … and the rest, we’re not real sure about. Bubba is half Yorkshire terrier and half Maltese, and while he can get in trouble from time to time, he’s still a lovable lump of lard and fluff. [My evil plan to kidnap him the next time I'm home in Tennessee will probably cause my mother to write me out of the family will.]

But ordering your dogs? I guess I’m just a pound person, myself. Of course, Bubba came from a breeder who cross-bred her dogs every few litters just to keep things interesting. A Yorkie would piss me off, and a Maltese would be a useless flufflump, but Bubba, he’s damn cool.

Of course, reading that story makes me want to get a dog, but why? I’ve got Nanook and Dakota and Hayden to play with.

I am like an elephant. I do not forget. I am strong with the Visor!

Of course, after this summer, the list of people whose anniversaries I have to remember gets longer. Bless the Visor, it has a better memory than I do …

-sigh- This whole saga is really beginning to frustrate me. I think my biggest frustration is with the rental car I’m driving, which I patently do not like. But hey, it’s a temporary solution, and really is just a thorn in my side.

My insurance company is convinced that my truck is worth $6000. Kelly Blue Book agrees with them. The collision repair shop and I do not, but they’re not interested in our opinion, really. So, Darlene isn’t a total loss like we thought it would be. Still, it is $3200 worth of damage, and that’s an awfully high number, in my mind.

I just talked it over with my parents [well, mainly with Dad--Mom, for the first time in living memory, said, "I don't have any advice"--causing me to nearly have a seizure from pure shock], and Dad counseled me that, even with his proclivities towards trucks, he would go ahead and authorize the repairs, hold on to the truck, and see what happens. Maybe there’s more damage than originally considered–who knows, until you really begin to tear the thing apart and check it out?
(more…)

Now, don’t ask me where I got these [okay, I'll tell you ... one of my guys took them and had me off-load them to my machine so that they could be emailed around ... and hey, it's not like some Boeing guy won't put funny captions on these and send them around the office ... wait, I didn't say that], but I have cool [in my opinion] photos of flight hardware that we’re building for ISS.

Included in these photos are a couple of astronauts. Since I didn’t take them, I didn’t meet them. That makes nearly three years at this company without having the pleasure [and pain] of dealing with crew. I’m not 100% sure which project this is, but it’s bound to be one of our FRAM FSE projects. Anyway, on to the pictures.

I have seven pictures to show you, and since I’m feeling singularly unwitty today, I won’t provide captions. Provide your own in the comments if you wish, at your own risk:

That last one is especially ripe for commentary, as is the fourth one, although you can’t see all of the Boeing guy’s face to give him a thought balloon. [I could, since I know him, but I won't. It'd be my luck that he'd Google for his own name, this site would turn up, and then he'd yell at me. :D]

… makes me happy. I love being a deviant little git.

/me holds his hands together, palms touching, and drums his fingers together

Eeeeeeeeexcellent.

Well, the kick-ass installers for Mediacom got us hooked up today. Those two kick serious butt.

Big kudos to Todd for crawling his ass up in the attic and getting those wires laid. Dude, I owe you more than that damn pizza.

Of course, the hilarity of this message is that I’ve had a working network connection at the Outhouse since, oh, 6:00, and I haven’t been on that part of the property at all … hell, this is posted from the SGA Office. Quite sad, if you ask me.

No, it’s my shoulders that hurt [the left in sympathy pain for the right], but there’s someone at work [unfortunately, very high up in the management structure] that’s being a significant pain in my butt. Oh well, like a big kidney stone, this too shall eventually pass.

Let me tell you, DirecTV kicks major butt. DirecTV + nice new TV = Geof sitting, mouth agape, in slack-jawed wonderment. Hopefully work won’t keep me from going home at 4:00 today to get the cable guy in the door and let him do the cable and modem installation at the house.

Several things have gone sub-optimally today: the Three Hour Meeting from Hell, my shoulder hurting like a sonofagun, my insurance company vastly overvaluing my truck. But, at least, I will have DirecTV install my system today. Yay, TV at my place.

“USAA Loss Department.”

“Hi, this is Geof Morris, policy number #######, and I’m checking on the status of my July 13th claim.”

“Hold on one minute, Mr. Morris, while I pull that up.”

(pause)

“Well, it seems that we don’t have all the information we need. Judy has a call in to the collision shop.”

“That’s funny … he told me on Friday that he had all the information in to you and to expect a call today.”

“Well, it’s only a 54% loss, so we’re trying to figure out why he wrote it up as a total loss.”

“Oh, okay. Well, I’ll call back later.”

“Okay, Mr. Morris. Have a nice day, and thanks for using USAA.”

They think my truck is worth $6000? These people are on crack. The collision shop and I put it at more like $4500; it’d be up near $5500 if it wasn’t a high-mileage vehicle.

And so the saga drags on …

Wow, what an odd weekend.

Friday night, Anthony and I hit the Jello Room. [No, there wasn't any jello wrestling that night. Alas.] I was miffed at a place that didn’t serve beers on tap [hell, I'll serve beer on tap at home as soon as I can find an old refrigerator, a CO2 cylinder, and the necessary drill bits...], but I lived. I have decided that Labatt Blue, from a bottle, is okay by me. [Molson is for crap, though.]

Saturday morning, I had another freaking migraine. [Yes, I have an appointment at the end of the week. Stop kvetching, all of you.] It wasn’t bad, and I got over it. I snagged a pressure washer so the houses could get cleaned off, which was about as much fun as you would imagine. Anthony and Todd are two pressure-washing fools, I tell you. I think Anthony actually enjoys it.

Saturday evening, rather than hitting Sammy T’s, I stayed home with Todd to do some stuff on the house. He was gracious enough to help me install the air conditioner on the Fourth but hadn’t installed. Then we went back to the main house and started roughing in the cable and Ethernet drops. Roughing in drops with a handsaw blade without a handle sucks, but not nearly as much as crawling around the attic at midnight with hockey shin guards on–right, Todd?

Yesterday was church, then pressure washing, then more church–lots and lots of water balloon wars–and more attic wiring. I was going to offer to hit the attic for Todd, but when I got home, he was already up there, and it’s a one-butt attic that mine won’t fit. Todd and I bitched and futzed and got most everything wired up by, oh, 1:15 this morning. There’s a reason that both of us were a little slow to get to work. Sucks for Todd that his workload increases this week, while mine has decreased significantly with my buddy Allan’s return.

Gah, my shoulder is acting up again. It took seven Advil to get it to stop this morning, and that only after two hours. Oh well, it’ll only hurt one more day, and it’s not like I subluxed it or anything. The pain was actually good, because it kept me awake during the Three Hour Status Meeting from Hell. I’ve been back in my office for an hour, just staring at the CRT and randomly talking to people. I so need to figure out what I have to do this afternoon, because I’m behind the ball already thanks to that meeting. Grrr.

Well, I spoke this morning with the dealership … they have approved my loan and want $NNNN in a down payment and they’ll be happy. I don’t have $NNNN to give them at present, because the claims process is moving about as swiftly as molasses in January in da UP. When I made the phone call on Sunday, the nice guy I spoke with on the phone thought we’d be done by Friday. Ha!

Okay, so I’ll admit that I’m antsy and want to go ahead and have the new vehicle now that it’s going to happen. I am patient about many things, but when it comes to driving a piece of crap Ford Focus with an automatic transmission as a rental car, this is not something that provides patience. Not in the bloody slightest!

I’m about to head out of here for the day and go drop off a $NNN check to hold the little WRX for the weekend so some ninny doesn’t come out and buy it away from me. If I knew how much the valuation of my dearly departed truck would be, I could give them an idea on that and maybe talk them into letting me drive off the lot with it today, but that’s not going to happen, because my insurance company doesn’t even have the knowledge yet that it will be a total loss. -grrr-

In other news, I found out that an old friend from high school [Willie Mauldin, for Rick's benefit] is working as a beat reporter mainly covering the NYPD for the New York Sun. Going into college, Willie and I were two of the biggest physics foofs of our class, and now we’re both in the liberal arts spectra. Go fig.

Okay, well, tomorrow promises to be fun. I just have three hours left in this work week; while I may have work to do, I’ll be happy to come in and do it on Saturday when I can get paid for it rather than stay here tomorrow when I’ll be donating my time past, oh, 11:00 a.m. So I’ve got my DirecTV installer set up to come on out and get me hooked up with DirecTV. I’ll also head out to the collision shop to get all my junk out of the truck before they take her wherever they take totaled vehicles.

Tomorrow night, I’ll try to catch up with the kids from church and see a movie with them. If USAA gets off their duff and gets their paperwork processed, I have an outside chance of having a vehicle tomorrow, but I figure I’m looking at early next week before I get anything.

Now, I’ve got to go chase a couple documents down, tape up this box, ship it out, and head to the house. I have things to do at home …

Okay, so when you wreck your old vehicle and get to contemplate a new one, you start looking. Blessedly, I started the drool^H^H^H^H^Hlooking process back in March or April, back when I thought that buying a new car and letting Darlene go was a Good Idea™. I had done a lot of looking and had narrowed myself down to a few choices:

– Yet Another Nissan Truck

– A Mini [because I'm silly]

– A Subaru Impreza WRX

Some folks have said, “Look at a used car.” Well, I’ve thought about that, and I figure that this is the only time in my life when I can afford a new car [good-paying job, low rent, no wife or kids], so screw it … I’m not going to buy a house, so buying a new car is the next best thing. [You may think I'm silly. I think you're right.]

When I got to thinking about it, I didn’t want another truck. Yes, I love the utility of a truck. If I’d never wrecked Darlene, I was gleefully looking to the day when her odometer read over 300,000 miles–a decade or so down the road. While a Mini would be fun, it’s not very feasible–and I’d have to go to Nashville to even test-drive one.

So, I set out on Monday with Sean to go look at a WRX. We drove a used one, which means that the engine was broken in and had full use of the turbo. I let rip with it once, and that pretty much sold me on the car. They’ve got good crash ratings, they’re fun to drive, it’s a well-built car, and it’ll zoom.

I just got back from the local Subaru dealer. I wanted an ‘02 wagon, but they’re out of them and are having a very hard time finding them. They’ll do some looking–another customer was in there today looking for one–but the ’03’s are due out in two more months, so the supply lines are drying up. I found a very nice sedan, and a sedan will do just fine.

Say it with me now: “She will be mine; oh yes, she will be mine.”

Man, I don’t know how to take the news that Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton have split. Do I:

– Hope that she could snap to her senses and find me to be Mr. Wonderful, as I’m sure half of the under-17 white male demographic would dream?

– Revel in two really weird people being repulsed by their weirdness?

– Grieve for yet another marriage gone awry?

Oh hell, I just blog indecision and go on with my life. Jolie is quite beautiful and yet still very, very disturbing…

With used parts, the repair would have run about $3000. The guy asked me if I wanted him to try and save it.

God, this feels like telling a vet to put a dog to sleep. Dammit. Just too many memories wrapped up in that little truck, a lot of long drives down a lot of dusty roads here in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Always reliable. Always a little fun to drive.

Shit.