Busy, Busy, Busy
(This is a long entry so please bear with me). This week has been extremely busy. But, as it is nearly midnight, the week is fortunately almost over. On Sunday, Rachel and I handed out candy for Halloween. One of the things that I like about our neighborhood is that there are set times for trick-or-treating. This year, the kids were allowed to go out between 6:00 PM and 8:00 PM. We got our first kid shortly after 6:00 PM. Forty-five minutes and thirty pounds of candy later, we were all out of candy. Unfortunately, we had to turn some people away. Next year, we’ll need to hold some more of the candy in reserve so that we don’t have to turn people away. My favorite costume this year was that of a Presidential candidate.
On Monday, I spent most of the evening working on my mother-in-law’s computer. It would connect to the Internet, but it wouldn’t pull up any web pages. It should have been a simple fix, but I was at it for several hours, unable to fix the problem.
On Tuesday, while at work, Rachel hit her head while bending down to reach something (she’s doing okay now). Since she didn’t feel safe driving, and since we only have the one vehicle, I had to wait for someone to take me out to work. That took a couple hours out of my day. In the evening, I spent a few more hours on my mother-in-law’s computer. I finally ended up reinstalling the operating system.
On Wednesday, my vacation day, I had hoped to get caught back up. I had been neglecting my English homework and I had a lot of writing to do. Unfortunately, Rachel decided that she wanted to clean up the yard. Yard work isn’t my favorite task, but it needed to get done. We had well over thirty garbage bags filled with leaves. In fact, our garbage pile for the week nearly covered our entire tree lawn. I felt sorry for the garbage men. Of course, by the next day, we needed to rake again (but not as badly). When we first moved to our house, we thought that the prior owner never raked the yard. Now we know, that she had probably been raking every week just to keep up with the five large trees on the property.
Thursday was relatively quiet work-wise. I was able to catch up on some of my schoolwork and office work. Unfortunately, I had to do a bit more yard work. We had high winds throughout the day and several branches got knocked out of our trees and on to the driveway. In fact, one of the branches was the size of a small tree. Fortunately, nobody was hurt and nothing was damaged. Also, we didn’t loose our garbage cans this year; I was able to catch them before they rolled too far down the street.
On Friday, we had to take the truck in for some maintenance. That sucked up most of my morning and part of my afternoon. I spent the rest of the evening and night working on my schoolwork.
Today was a lot quieter. I got to sleep in a bit more than usual. Rachel and I did some window-shopping during the day. During the night, I worked on my homework and I am finally finished for the week. Whew! Two weeks of my English class down, six more to go. Hopefully the rest of my weeks won’t be as busy.
Speaking of school, I joined the school’s Computer Science Association. I was intending to join the group after I had been at school for a few months. But, I was sent an invitation and decided to join. It is kind of nice to be with a group of nerds (or nerds-to-be) again. Lately, I’ve been working with a few of the members on a new software project. For the time being, I can’t say anything about it though (we don’t want to let the cat out of the bag).
As our third wedding anniversary is in November, Rachel and I decided to take some time off together. As I already had most of my vacation days allotted (taking Wednesdays off for the rest of the year), I was only able to take off one week. Rachel, on the other hand, gets to take two weeks off. Lucky her. Maybe I’ll see if she can do some of my English homework for me. :) Just kidding.
Recently, Rachel ordered some work shirts online. Her old shirts were fading badly. Anyway, she also got me a new coffee cup with the Target logo on it. The cup has a little mixer at the bottom that will stir the contents at the touch of a button. I love it! The mixer goes so fast that it makes a little vortex in the cup. Hot chocolate is a lot easier to make now; I don’t even need to dirty a spoon. Also, it holds exactly the same as my prior coffee cup, so it fits into my coffee maker without any problems. The only downside is that I can’t completely immerse it in water.
I can’t wait until we get our new fencing. The other day, Rachel found that a section of our fence was knocked down. Apparently, the posts were only buried a few inches and they weren’t buried in cement. The fence has been temporarily fixed. What’s weird is that on the other side of the property, we noticed that a section of the fence was bent. We figure that a large animal must have run across our yard, hitting both sections of the fence.
A while ago, while filling up our dogs’ treat container, I inadvertently turned on one of the stovetop burners. Unfortunately, the treat container was sitting on top of that burner at the time. Since I can’t always smell smoke, the container was pretty much ruined before I figured out what was going on. Rachel kept ribbing me about it for several days. Recently though, she inadvertently turned on one of the burners. As there was an empty pizza box sitting on the stove at the time, I gave her a hard time. She ripped all of the knobs off of the stove. That’s probably a smart idea as it is now a pain in the butt to turn on the burners.
The weather is slowly getting colder. We were supposed to get a bit of snow earlier this week, but we only received rain. pout Ah well, I’m sure that we’ll get plenty of snow soon enough. I have been waiting to give our new heater system a good test. However, with appliances and such, the house stays well above sixty degrees. Hopefully it won’t get extremely cold in the next couple of days though. I received a call from our gas company saying that they need to replace the gas meter. Apparently, the readings have been excessive. They think that since the meter is older than twenty-five years, it’s probably broken.
Tagline for today: “Did you know that it costs forty thousand dollars a year to house each prisoner? Jeez, for forty thousand bucks a piece I’ll take a few prisoners into my house. I live in Los Angeles. I already have bars on the windows. I don’t think we should give free room and board to criminals. I think they should have to run twelve hours a day on a treadmill and generate electricity. And if they don’t want to run, they can rest in the chair that’s hooked up to the generator.” - Andy Rooney