Leafs

The only part of Fall that I dislike is raking up all of those leaves… not that I’m a big fan of yardwork anyway, but the leaf situation is a bane.  It took about 4 hours to do the front yard… I took breaks often so it wasn’t actually 4 hours of continual ass pain… why kill yerself, especially over freakin’ LEAVES! 

I hurt, but that is the way of the world.

On my way to visit Cap’n Eddie last nite…

…I stopped by Che Kroger for a 2 liter bottle of Ginger Ale and was heading over to the ABC store to get some rum with which Cap’n Eddie flavours his ‘ale, when I heard a booming voice from my deaf ear side:

“DAVE!”

I looked over my shoulder and there was Cousin Steve hanging out of the window of his driver’s truck, as big as life!  And he is, too, big that is: an affable chap, he has the look that would make most people cross the street when they see him heading their way.  He’s a bouncer, and isn’t ashamed of the 100 + assault charges made against him.  Few of them stuck, otherwise he would probably be down in Red Onion Mountain Prison terrorizing the mean people.  Cousin Steve had been one of my  customers at the ‘C on Willie-D, always a pleasure to visit with him, always happy to see me.

He and his driver were heading to the Towers Mall ABC Store as well so I caught up with them there.  “You really need to come back to the ABC store, Dave, it just ain’t the same without you.  I miss coming in and hearing:’Cousin Steve!  How in the world are you doing today?’” 

He said that with me gone, it just doesn’t seem as friendly a place anymore, and that lots of the customers that feel the same way; everyone misses me.  Kind words, kind words indeed!  That made me feel good and I told him so.  We chatted a while & headed our separate ways, but before leaving, we gave each other a big hug  (An honest and manly hug, not one of those seemingly obligatory [and seemingly insincere] hand shake-chest bump-back pounding hugs that are so popular today amongst the hip hop community).

“Adios, Dave, I’ll see you out in the Territories!”, he said, using one of my phrases…  “Adios, Cousin Steve…”

Dog Pee…

The vet said to try to bring in a sample of Dog Nick’s pee for intensive investigation… he has a problem: he sometimes pees on the bed while he is sleeping.  Ever try to capture dog pee? Isn’t as easy as you might think, not with the Dog Nixie.  That’s him in the picture at the top of this page.  If he just had a thumb, he could hold the little vial himself… but no.  Evolution has a ways to go before he can do that.

Trish had a plan: Close the dog door and when I get up, awaken Trish while I get the coffee started; she would go out and wait for the dogs in the dog yard, then I would open the dog door.   All went well until Trish clunked Nick’s leg with the pie pan and he ran back upstairs.  After coaxing him back downstairs, Trish tried squeezing his bladder as she has done with the dogs in the past with good results.  No go.  He wants to retail possession of his pee.

Plan B: I’d take him out on the leash and when he starts marking his turf, I’ll slip the pie pan under him.  I too whacked his leg with the pan, and he then began marking with short spurts whenever the op presented itself.  Back inside, he is wary of all humaans.  He gave me that “What’s with the pie pan?” look every time I came near him.  He finally jumped up on the couch beside me as I watched O’Reilly on FOX.

I guess that plan C will be to take him with her to the vet’s and let them extract some of the stuff manually. There’s another charge.  Maybe if I showed him the bank account levels he would be more cooperative…  we’ll see…

Better today.

Got down to making some design things in Autodesk Inventor… I’ve pretty much had it with the 2-D CAD… it was OK back in the day, but the ‘improvements’ that have been made to the program since the early 0’s have me scratching my head… so heck with it.  Long as I can read the old drawings, I suppose that I’ll be OK.

But, it is nice to be working for a company where metric units of measure are the company standard.  No attempt to make it easy for the vendors that don’t like metric measurements by putting dual dimensions on the drawings (Metric and Non-Metric for every dimension) , fuckum, as they say on my planet.  Conform, or enter a ‘No Bid’!  Bwa-hahahaha…  There’s lots of hungry shoppes out there in these Hopey-Changey times…

I received the last of my initial safety training today… boy, these guys are careful about everything!  When they say Zero Accidents they mean it!  5mph in the parking lots… no walking outside the crosswalks, outside the building AND in the plant!  Locks… bagels…  No, the bagels were at another plant.  Oy!  And if you screw up the tiniest little bit, WHAM~!  You get the black spot!  Yarrr…..

But all in all, it is a really neat organization.  Hope that they decide to hire me full time, it will be a blast!

Week 2 starts today…

Getting ready to begin my second week at Lite Steel.  Hopefully this week will be more productive for me.  More later….

Windows Live Messenger upgrade that didn’t happen

Tried to upgrade to a higher level of IM so I could again share files with VW….

De-loaded the program… twice… and loaded the ‘latest’ program again, twice… and still have the 2009 version.  Still can’t exchange files.  Screwum… I’ll leave it be until The Bill tells me that I have to do so….

“Oh, Great And Evil Bill…. I will obey…..”

 

Now… on to things that I could have been accomplishing all day….

Week One is behind me… Now, it’s time to brew!

The Star City Brewer’s Guild is having one of the semi-annual “Learn To Home Brew” days today, Saturday, at Lamplighter Mall at our friends and fellow member’s business, ‘Blue Ridge Hydroponics and Home Brew Supplies’.  I’m probably going to go and help set up and maybe take a sixer of my IPA to pour samples from.  Its going to be cold today… 40’s… and there are going to be three brewing demos going on all day… lots of water spew’n out upon the pavement to freeze in the 20’s tonite… the weather might keep people at bay.  We’ll see.

The event used to be called ‘Teach a friend to Home Brew’ but the High Council of Home Brewers (…or whatever the heck it is) suggested that the name be changed to “Learn To Home Brew”… which I changed to sound more colloquial to “Learn A Friend To Home Brew”.  It is the way of my people, you see… It is catching on….

Now, to tell the High Command that I’ll be out & about today….