Now, granted, I’m a hockey fiend, but this is driving me just a little crazy. It seems as if every band I pick up these days is a Canadian band.

Of course, I only realize this when I’m talking to Becka during idle time at work.

Me: “Word!”

Becka: “hey geof! :)”

Me: “What’s going on?”

Becka: “not much, you?”

Me: “Oh, killing time, working, listening to [insert band name here].”

Becka: “they’re Canadian, you know?”

The latest such band is Default [after Nickelback last week]. Default’s playing Big Spring Jam at the end of the month, and I’m going to dig it.

Ooooh, suddenly, thinking about hockey has reminded me that my writers have to submit stuff in for USA College Hockey Magazine by next weekend. Since I don’t have team beat writers for three CHA schools, I’ll get to write something about each of them as well as my regular column. That’s a couple thousand words to chuck out the door this next week … in amongst everything else. Fnark.

Me: “Really, eh?”

I want to know why, after a week where I had a hard time waking up every single morning, I was awake at 6:03 a.m. and ready to take on the world?

I mean, sure, I came to my senses about 240 seconds later and rolled back over and went back to sleep, but on Saturday–the one day where I don’t have to wake up early, because the only thing I’m going to have to do for someone today is call my boss at 11:00 and see if I need to come in and babysit stuff at work–why, now, did I wake up like a go-getter?

I don’t even make sense to myself.

I’m going to go home, plop down in the recliner, and watch me some baseball. They didn’t go on strike, just as I figured, so the games are on for tonight. Then, I’ll probably go to sleep early and sleep in tomorrow. I might have to come in to work for a while tomorrow to cover for my boss, who wants to spend some time with his kids. Hey, I don’t mind. I’m still getting to sleep in even if I come in to cover for him.

You know, whenever Amy will let me at Quarto, there will be a whole category entitled the “Darlene Saga”. I keep wondering if I should have taken my grandmother up on her offer of $5000 the Friday after the accident … I’d have a perfectly good working 2002 Subaru WRX sedan and a broke-ass electrical system in my secondary vehicle, Darlene.

Oh well, at least she runs mechanically well, has been perfectly aligned, and still loves me.

I sat down last night with my Haynes book and troubleshooted what all could be wrong with. It comes down to two things: fuses, or bad wiring. I finally got the 10A fuse for my turn signals pulled, and sure enough, it was blown. Since fuses are cheap and I was pissed, I decieded to replace the fuse with the spare 10A that I had and see what would happen. I got about a blink and a half before the system went kaput again.

Yep, folks there be a short in my eeeelecktrickle system. There wasn’t one before the wreck. You do the math. I’ve called USAA ["take it back", duh] and the collision shop ["Mark isn't in at the moment"]. I wonder what car I can finagle from Enterprise this time … I’m really tempted to rent a convertible or something, since it’ll be on the collision shop’s bill.

Grrrrr.

I went and got the truck back this afternoon.

All was fine until I was driving down University and went to change lanes. I signaled … but there wasn’t the familiar mechanical sound that goes with my blinkers being engaged. At the next stop light, I checked my blinkers in the chrome bumper of the car in front of me. They don’t work.

It was about that time that I also noticed that my air conditioning, which is normally slow to cool on a hot day when the truck’s been sitting for a while, wasn’t cooling at all.

Mechanically, the truck is in great shape. However, that is not a complete repair.

At present, I’m too pissed off to think rationally, so I’m going to sit here for about half an hour and occupy my mind with something else before I set about to getting this straightened out.

I love my American Polity class.

That’s all. Off to go play NHL2002.

Well, the truck is almost ready [they're adding the last part now, but they've already done all the cleaning and aligning ... poor bastards having to clean my truck, muahahahahhahahaahah!]. I’m not. I’m stuck in meeting hell with Boeing people.

That’s not entirely true, though, because I am posting. They finally got my new office up and going. Only took two weeks!

Now, I need to get Microsoft Project on this machine, and all will be truly, truly well.

Word. This is a copy of the email I just sent to the SGA mailing list. If you’re in Huntsvegas and wish to show up, just let me know, eh? Yeah, yeah, I know that all of you d*c people are going to miss out. Tough. We’ll have another bash another time.

–

SGA folks are cordially invited to a party at Anthony Holden and my house on Labor Day. We’ll crank up sometime around 6:00 or something like that. Keg party by the pool … oh yeah. I will plan on securing a couple large hunks of meat [we ran a beef brisket last year, and it worked] and chips and such things to gnosh on.

If you’re interested in coming, please shoot me an email. Small donations to the fund will be appreciated. Since we’ve got a pool, preparations to be wet would be strongly encouraged. We will have a holding area for cell phones and such just outside the back door so you can stow things in case
you just happened to get chucked in the pool …

From campus:

Go north on Sparkman [away from 565]. Stay on Sparkman until you get to Pulaski Pike [a large electrical substation will be on the far left corner of the intersection].

Turn north [left] on Pulaski Pike. Stay on Pulaski Pike until the road narrows from four lanes to two. The road that crosses at that point is Bob Wade Lane.

Turn east [right] on Bob Wade Lane. Stay on Bob Wade Lane through all the curvy parts. You will be looking for the first left; a T intersection sign appears a couple tenths of a mile before the turn.

Turn north [left] on North Gate. From there, you take the first left [Renee], take a left at the stop sign [West Ridge], and take the first right [Brookwood]. Brookwood curves to the left; we are the last house on the paved part of the road.

Approximate travel time from campus: 20 minutes.

From Rideout Road:

Go north on Rideout until it T’s into Jordan Lane. Turn left onto Jordan. Take a right at the first light [where Jordan narrows into two lanes]. This puts you onto Nick Fitcheard Road. Stay on Nick Fitcheard until you get to the stop sign.

Turn right onto Bob Wade Lane. Go through the stop sign at Pulaski Pike, and stay on Bob Wade Lane through all the curvy parts. You will be looking for the first left; a T intersection sign appears a couple tenths of a mile before the turn.

Turn north [left] on North Gate. From there, you take the first left [Renee], take a left at the stop sign [West Ridge], and take the first right [Brookwood]. Brookwood curves to the left; we are the last house on the paved part of the road.

Approximate time from the time you get off of Rideout: ten minutes.

From the Parkway:

Go north on the Parkway all the way past Alabama A&M. Hit the second light past A&M, which is Bob Wade. [The first is Winchester Road.] Turn left [west] on Bob Wade Lane. You’ll go about 2.5 miles. Bob Wade is straight as an arrow for about half of the drive, and then it starts curving. When the curves have finished and you’re starting up a hill, you’ll see a sign for a T intersection where the road goes to the right. This is North Gate.

Turn north [right] on North Gate. From there, you take the first left [Renee], take a left at the stop sign [West Ridge], and take the first right [Brookwood]. Brookwood curves to the left; we are the last house on the paved part of the road.

Approximate time from the time you exit the Parkway: eight minutes.

Parking:

Pick a place to park anywhere on the left side of the road. There is a
detached garage on the property [which is where I live], and if you wish
to park there, that’s fine as well.

…

Please feel free to invite other people on out to the house. We have a couple of acres and can afford to get a little silly. Nothing like celebrating [?] the start of school with a pool party. All I ask is that I get a rough number of people coming on out there …
Directions follow.

Okay, it’s not like I ever quote Caedmon’s Call or anything like that.

[Nope. Not me.]

If’n you’re similarly interested in the band, you might want to check out the Caedmon’s Call Song Vault. I’d seen this once before, but I hadn’t really dug into it before. What a treasure trove!

Makes me want to go home and pick up my guitar. Heh.

I had a discussion with one of the customer guys here at work this morning. We were discussing one of the external groups and how I’ve been scheduling the slips that they cause us. I mentioned that the main reason that the schedules have been evolutionary is because I was a co-op until May.

It then occurred to me at that exact second that last Sunday was my 3rd anniversary here at TBE.

Woo. Or something.

Well, really, they’ve been pretty good to me here. They’ve been especially good to the pocketbook.

Okay, time to take a quick study break and note something before I head back to read for a bit more and then to bed … went to Wal-Mart tonight on the way home [needed foodage]. I ran into an old roommate of mine. I would have never believed that Josh Ward would be a manager at Wal-Mart.

Joooooooooooooorsh!

He’s as goofy and handsome as ever. He’ll finish in December with a melange of majors in administrative science. As I noted, working at Wal-Mart was more an exercise in knowing what he didn’t want to do for the rest of his life.

Joooooooooooooorsh!

I miss him. -sniff-

Well, I’ll get the truck tomorrow.

Yeah.

They hadn’t looked at the aftermarket grille they’d ordered until today; found out it was crap. Ordered a new one from a local dealership just to get it ASAP [waiting on an aftermarket one would have caused a three-day slip, and the rental car company is now charging the collision shop for what the insurance was covering], so they should have it tomorrow.

What is nice is that they’re going to clean the truck out for me. If you’ve ever seen my truck, you’re laughing and/or cringing at that thought. They’re going to put it all in a box and leave it all nice and clean. For what it’s worth, that’s worth a day’s wait.

The whole waiting saga reminds me of work, where I rip off the Hokey Pokey: “I put a task in / I pull a task out / I put a task in / and I slip the schedule out / I do the Hokey Pokey and I slip the schedule out / that’s what it’s all about.”

Hmmm, weird, I’m positive as I leave work today … what’s wrong here?

Again, I’m substituting for Allan on updating our status sheets. I’ve been pretty covered up of late, and remembering how this was before [when it took up at least half of my day], I was afeared. However, because someone’s gotten the bright idea of doing a document version of CVS, the updates that used to take four hours took a little less than one this afternoon.

Certainly, I’m not going to enjoy added work any more than I normally would, but the fact that it’s not that much more of a burden is kinda nice.

Now, let me see if I can either swim out to my car or catch the next ark that happens to float by our building…

…and then I’ll have the truck back.

I go to pick up Darlene at 4:00 p.m. tomorrow. Yay.

About 3:30 this morning, I got an IM from Indigo, who runs my Web host, showing me the login to the new Webmail system on the server. He said, “I think you’ll like this.”

I am indeed quite happy. I now have Webmail access to my IJSM.org and email.uah.edu [through a POP fetch] accounts through one interface that isn’t going to be firewalled anywhere. I can stop dickering around with Eudora on my work machine [in fact, I've uninstalled it], and I can stop telnetting to my UAH account.

Oh, and the Webmail system uses SquirrelMail, which I really like, and it’s on the SSL layer. Woot.

This weekend, I’ve not been good for much. Headaches [freaking sinuses], just generally tired. I’ve gotten some stuff read for class, which is good, because the weekends are going to be prime studying time, but still … I just feel like I’ve been next to useless. Oh well, maybe I just needed to recharge the batteries a bit.

I do hope to have my truck back tomorrow. The manager of the collision shop and I are on a first name basis, and I swear, the receptionist knows my voice when I call on the phone. She’s kinda cute, actually, but she’s married. -chuckle-

Anyhow, the truck went into their paint shop Friday. Provided that nothing weird happened there, it was going to cure over the weekend and then have the stripe kit applied in the morning. Hopefully I will leave for work in the Focus and return with Darlene.

You want to know how ready I am for this? Between the two rentals, I’ve put 2000 miles on cars that are not mine. It’s been painful to drive an automatic that long.

Well, that’s enough rambling for a night. I think I’m going to sit here and read a little bit, enjoy these spiffy spiral headphones from Sony that I’ve had but not used for a couple of weeks, and then mosey off to bed. Work looms in the distance, awaiting me with big, nasty, pointy teeth. -ffffth-

Okay, this entry is about work, but it’s not negative, so hey. [I could be negative about what's happened later today, but I pledged not to do it, so I won't.]

We had two astronauts here at work this morning for a fit check. So I can now put down Scott Kelly and Carlos Noriega as the first two crew I’ve actually met and shook hands with.

That was fun. Fit check even went pretty well. Nice that something does around here.

I will no longer post about how much my job sucks. There are three reasons.

1) It’s a damn broken record. You don’t like reading it anymore than I like to write it.

2) One of you [probably one of my friends] is going to snap and kill me when you get tired of the repetitive sob stories from my end of town.

3) I have better things to write about, and frankly, they pay me pretty well to put up with all the bullshit.

If I post about work excessively, you may zap me with the bare leads of a home electrical outlet.

My class kicks ass. I love it. It’s going to be fun. It’s so fun, I came home tonight and studied right when I came in the door. I never do that. Never.

For now, sleep. I need it, and frankly, if I keep rambling, you’ll wish I’d gone to bed.

Oh dear, I do believe that I just reset Wayne’s World.

Well, I’m in the process of uploading photos to my Gallery installation. You can see them all on gfmorris.com/gallery … the foam party pics are a must see. They’re all my copyright, though, so steal them and I will beat you down. Really.

I had SOOOOOO much fun taking photos last night … I took about 150 of them. The 90 best are for your viewing here.

Man, the foam party tonight was so much fun. I have photos offloaded from my camera, but right now, I’m too distracted to do anything with them. This probably brings to 300 the number of photos that I have in a queue to retouch and stuff … all the Florida ones and now these.

I dialed back the recording settings on the digicam to 1280×800 [or whatever the proper ratio is ... I'm too tired and lazy to look it up at present], which gave me 375 phots to take. I took about 130. Some of them are going to be quite great. I won’t do that real often–photos “for me” are going to be taken at max resolution so I have the most area to play with [like I'm a Photoshop wiz or something, heh]–but for this outing, it seemed like the wisest idea.

I found that taking photos close to the foam machine output gave a great effect … just like being inside the foam itself. Since the foam machines were running suboptimally–they were jury-rigged by yours truly, since no one had bothered to see that we had the right hoses and such, and we also didn’t have enough foam solution–we didn’t have a lot of foam, and that necessitated that I take photos creatively.

After the party started to wind down, I walked into the UC and sat down in the lobby. I put together a huge set of notes about all that went right and wrong [mostly wrong]. It was starting to get me down, having lots of bad things to correct, but then a foreign student walked up to me and said, “Man, you guys put on a great party. Thank you so much.” I smiled and thanked him.

UAH is a commuter school. Getting students to come out for anything is hard. Honestly, I think we had 600+ students there tonight. Part of me thinks that it could have been as high as 1000, but that’s probably overstating it. But it was the most fun that I’d ever seen students have on our campus in my five years here. I’m just glad to have been a part.

But man oh man, is it going to be hard to get up in the morning! Photos to come, as always on gfmorris.com/gallery.

“I wish it would go ahead and rain already,” I remarked to Amy yesterday. You see, we both live on the north side of Huntsville, both of just barely outside the reaches of the city limits. [Pause now to throw your own "North Side" gang signs. When you figure out how to make an "N", let me know.] Amy remarked then that this was the first time that she’d heard rumbling at all.

Apparently, we’re just in the wrong part of Huntsvegas. To read Sarah’s site, UAH had flooding problems yesterday. I can believe it; when I drove to church last night, I drove through a steady, driving rain that limited visibility to maybe 1/8 mile.

It was just that kind of weekend. Saturday, it was raining so hard here that DirecTV wouldn’t come through, but when I went to campus, it was bone dry. [That is, of course, until Steve and I got back to campus in the Jeep and were unloading stuff to make the barrier for the foam party. Oops.] After a long drought, we got some good rain this weekend. Of course, now the grass is going to start to grow like mad again. Woo.

And so you thought that I was 0wn3d by this site. Poo on you!

Tonight is a friend’s bachelor party. We convene at Hooters in half an hour or so; we’ll stay there for a while and then go to the best man’s house for a bit more goofiness later in the evening. PJ lives out in Madison, so I must make my way by Windmill and pick up some Woody’s … yes, these guys don’t know the power of Woody’s Ice.

After the day I’ve had, I need it. After tomorrow, I may need it more.

I’m in a horrible mood today. I hope that I’m hiding it from the customer.

I think I have the schedule under control … for now. Some people keep trying to change little variables to make their life easier, but they do so with total disregard for a schedule. I’m the schedule guy, and that means it’s my job to raise a flag and go, “Uh, we can’t afford that much time.” Blessedly, Boeing management listens.

I also had no time yesterday to send anything off to Japan … so now I have to work them up a note and get it out to them … and mind you, this is all on my time.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be in tomorrow. At least I’m getting paid then.

I’m sure that I’ll get used to this, but right now, it’s a significant drag.

Okay, so I hit the “from here until Friday, this work is free” point about an hour ago. Considering what just screwed up down at the Cape with our hardware, the “f—it” mode is in full throttle.

Anthony and I are going to the bar. We have to work on our article for the paper. Might as well do it over a beer.

Have I mentioned lately just how much I love my job?