Thanks For The Tacos

Another busy day at work today. We were still short handed, which made the above average call volume seem all the more brutal. Again, no major outages, just a ton of calls. The coworker with the sick child emailed in apologizing for his absence. We made a joke response, thanking him for all the breakfast tacos he would be bringing on Friday. LOL

When I got home, I got Clara a snack, got dinner started, set Colin to work cleaning his room and started searching the office for D’s security badge. Colin’s DS broke some time back, and I sent it in to Nintendo for repairs. It arrived yesterday and I started it charging so I could give it back to him ready to use, but I wasn’t about to give it to him without him cleaning the horrorshow scene that was his room. I told him I had something that I really wanted to give him, but he needed to clean his room first. First time he came to tell me it was all done I checked up on it, and I’m glad I did: he had pushed everything under the bed. Every the thing. I explained to him that doing that would just make it harder for him to clean later and that he should take care of it now. He spent another 15-20 minutes actually cleaning his room – at least you can walk in there without fear of losing your foot.

He followed me to the office where I gave him his stylus back. Very perplexed, he thanked me and just kinda stared at it. Then I told him that he would need it if he wanted to use the DS that just came in the mail. :D He was very excited to get his DS back, but I told him to be more careful this time with it.

I must have cleared out a tree’s worth of junk mail, papers, paper plates, wrappers, old ketchup packets and decayed food from DeAnn’s desk – no security badge. I even filed some of the non-junk items in the filing cabinet to prevent them from taking up more room and getting any more crap spilled on them. I’m generally pretty thorough when searching for something that is lost; I told her that she “lost it real good” when even I can’t find it.

With Colin playing, baby fed and office torn apart to no avail, I sat down for Dynamis – Beaucedine. This time, we had Ventrilo running, and it was like the good old days again. I think it’s really easy in this game to forget that there are real people with thoughts and feelings behind the pixeled characters and the green chat text. We joked and had out Soulfire Late Night chat. It was the most fun I’d had at a dynamis, or any other event, in a long time.

DeAnn was feeling a bit down all evening. She had a really long day at work, and was feeling kind of lonely all evening with me gaming. So I decided to leave dynamis early to hang out with her. I had to go out and fill her car up, and brought back a big Heineken for her, and we talked for awhile over some popcorn and the Ken Lee YouTube video. I’ve been really stressed out lately about all the changes going on, in life and in game, but tonight I was finally able to just relax and breathe.

BLM static tomorrow night. I dunno if I will feel in the mood to want to go somewhere new or just stick with the familiar rats. We have a few spots we could do in Halvung, if Ame doesn’t mind dying. A lot. >.>; Also need to revisit our schedule. It appears that our linkshell is heading toward using a 75% attendance model, meaning that you need to aim for attending 75% of the events you are online for. It’s a little high in my opinion; not impossible, but it will require us to drop to one night a week if Keri and I are to meet this kind of requirement. It might be a good thing in disguise – with all the drama and stress surrounding this venture, I’ve been kinda getting burned out on BLM.

“Fishing. Just fishing.”

We were short staffed today at work. One of my coworkers made a sudden change of schedule and took the week off for a vacation, and another was out with a sick child. Made for a kind of manic day. Nothing out of hand, but there were no real breaks in the calls. They just did not stop.

I was pretty tired when I got home. I threw some ribs in the oven and played with Clara a bit before DeAnn got home. Colin was busy with friends outside, but came home long enough to gobble down some sandwich and run back out. DeAnn and I logged on to static on BLM. It appears that Square/Enix has changed the spawn rate on the the Mamool Ja’s Wyvern, so it is no longer a viable pet camp. We did some rats to burn off a ring charge, then did some exploring in Halvung to find the supposed Black Pudding camp. Didn’t find a great camp, but we did find a camp with a zone in case things get ugly. The problem with this spot is that all the puddings are mixed in with the trolls in the area, making it a puller’s nightmare.

Rounded out the night with some fishing: I pulled up some 20k out of the sea before logging off. Turns out that by logging off, I missed some drama about how our group missed sea by a minute or two. I’m getting really tired of the shenanigans; I’m not in this shell to wear a target. It really upset my wife: she wrote a post that I know will rattle chains. The combination of my upset wife, in game drama, workday stress and simply not being able to relax resulted in yet another upset stomach.

I’m getting worried about my stomach. I’ve been drinking Maalox like it’s going out of style. I should go see a doctor, but I can’t very well take time off to do that with a brand new job coming up. This stresses me out, too. I couldn’t sleep, so I took some stomach meds and logged back in to fish. No stress, no drama, just fish. I pulled up some 25k more, got some skill ups and reached fishing fatigue about the time my stomach settled down and DeAnn came to see if I was ok. She was worried I was mad at her for her actions and post. I wasn’t mad at her, or anyone, or anything. I just want to relax...

Dynamis – Beaucedine tomorrow. I’m just in no frame of mind lately to study CCNA. I’ll pick that back up again after my life cools off a bit. I’ll prolly head out there after work and go AFK while I look for D’s lost security badge. Clara likes to pick up things and put them in random places, so my bet is it’s either in the heap that is my wife’s desk or in the toybox that is my living room.

Key Drive Blues

I forgot my USB key at home, so this post is short. >.<

I had a pretty busy, but relatively easy day at work today. A bunch of people decided to move themselves, without telling anyone, and wondered why nothing was the way they wanted it when they got to their new location. What's even more logic-defying is that somewhere, there was a manager or director that thought that was a really good idea, and that IS would have no problems at all accommodating whatever issue that would cause.

I felt like studying about as much as DeAnn felt like exercising. I didn't really feel like gaming either, but I hopped on anyway and went to sky hunt. All in all, not a bad hunt.

Static is tomorrow, and hopefully I'll remember to bring my blogging keydrive.

Weekend Intelligence: “That man is wearing two pairs of sunglasses…”

Getting tired of feeling like we waste our weekends, DeAnn and I decided last weekend that we would sit down on Friday afternoon, before the chaos of the weekend strikes, and plan out our weekend. This resulted in us not wondering where the time went. So, in typical weekend intelligence fashion, here are the highlights!

House and Home:

I ended my shift lead week by staying late on Friday afternoon. It would have been my turn to stay late on my last day, but a coworker traded me days so I wouldn’t have to. I really am going to miss working here – it’s been a good experience. I stopped by the store to pick up some port and some Coke Zero for the weekend. Nothing expensive. DeAnn had the daycare check, so she needed to pick up Clara. Once we were both home, we sat down and decided that we wanted to work on the yards this weekend, as well as clean our room and get all the laundry down from the last few weeks. I had already cleaned our room and gotten two loads pushed through. We made got some Little Caesar’s pizza and played until about midnight, knowing we had a big morning.

I was up early the next morning around 8am, getting more laundry through and picking up cans for recycling. I got the rest of the house up, and we piled into the car to take the cans in and nab some donuts for breakfast. After we were finished eating, we suited up to tackle yard work the rest of the morning. DeAnn and Colin went to work pulling up the forest of weeds in the back yard as I got the big weeds up front and tilled up the ground around the bushes. A lovely variety of soft, lavender flowers have spread like wildfire in our backyard, and we wouldn’t mind those growing in the bushes, so I also laid down a little fertilizer while I tilled up the ground. It got to the point where we were all exhausted well before all the work had been done, but what can you do? When you’re done, you’re done. We had filled half the dumpster with pulled plants anyway: I’d say we did pretty well for ourselves. D and I took a shower and napped for a while. I woke up with a sore back, DeAnn woke up with a sore DeAnn. D:! We stayed up late goofing around and drinking. I had brought home some of these Upshot Energy Shots from work the other day, so we tried those out, too.

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much that night. The drink didn’t make for a wired feeling, but it was a definite sharp awareness that defied sleep. Funny thing was that I wasn’t tired the next morning. I got up early to do some fishing and goof around on the forums. The forums were down and I only fished for an hour before deciding I would try to go get some more rest. I got another two hours or so before it was time to get up and get ready for church. We got there early, and I’m never going to try to do that again. One thing I’ve found about living in San Antonio is that no one knows how to deal with a punctual person. The norm is to arrive sometime between just in time and 10 minutes late. Earliness can elicit symptoms ranging from mild anxiety to aneurism in the native population. Parking was a trick, no one was ready to check in the kids, and Colin and I had to bounce from building to building to find a place to drop him off. In the end, we didn’t save any more time than if we would have arrived just in time, but we did see an old friend of ours briefly, so it was worth it. I wonder if we can get together with them sometime soon… Anyway, after church and our weekly WalMart run, we went home, put everything away and promptly crashed until dinner.

In game:

Campaign was the main order of the weekend in game. Both of us had a little more than a week to get rank up, which was shaving a little closer than I’d have liked. Friday and a good part of Saturday was spent campaigning. I got my rank up, but Keri did not. Hopefully ops will put her over the top this week. At the very least, if she can’t get rank up, they are pleased with her efforts, so she can keep her current rank.

After I ranked up on Saturday, I spent the rest of my weekend fishing. I got nearly 2 levels of fishing skill just getting NPC money fish. My favorite spot at the moment is Nashmau. I call it ‘Little Jeuno’: it has a nomad moogle, Jeuno AH and delivery box reps, Tenshodo shop and various other stores, all packed in a little two-room town. Best of all, it has some really good fishing: the clams can be desynthed into pearls and black pearls for nearly pure profit, and the other various big fish sell for 600-900 a pop to NPCs. I took two stacks of wind crystals and easily pulled 35k out of the sea in about an hour. And that includes all the running around to the stores for Keri’s cooking mule, Rhylosha. Speaking of Rhylosha, she used the black sole I sent her to cap out on sole sushi, and made a bunch of other kinds of sushi with the easy access I provided to all the sushi-making materials from the Tenshodo shop.

Sunday I spent using up the rest of the sliced cod I had made to catch black sole. The bite rate on those fish is enough to make a grown man cry, but I was able to strangle a stack of sole out of the ice pond in Qufim. After that, I went to fishing up the daily guild item, Coral Butterflies, in Kazham before logging for the night.

My last week with Valero starts tomorrow. I’ve often said that the expectation of a two-week notice courtesy was sick and wrong. Businesses expect you to give them plenty of lead time, but will announce immediate layoffs at the drop of a hat. It’s also been my experience that the company that gets the notice also gets all the abuse in that they can on the person giving the notice. Doesn’t mean I don’t give notice, I just have always thought they had double standard written all over them. That being said, this has been, without a doubt, one of the easiest two-week notices I’ve ever given. While sad to see me go, my coworkers and supervisors have been kind and congratulatory. I’ll miss them when I’m gone.