One frustration I have with blogger is the inability to read the original post and comment on certain parts at the same time. I have changed the blog so that the comments now open in a separate window that can be maneuvered or made to split the screen. I am not sure I like it yet, but I am giving it a test run.
haha... I also have made two very interesting discoveries about blogger.
1. I can send blog posts in the past! Look at my previous blog post which was actually posted tonight.
2. I can now edit anything and everything anyone says, comments, or otherwise.
muhhahahaha... Better watch out people!
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
The end bachelorhood is near...
Monday promised to be a good day. It was cloudy outside with even a slight chance of rain. This means a watering reduction. Hooray!
After waking up at 5:30, I set the large sprinkler on the south flower gardens. The previous day, some neighbors offered to help me with the daunting watering task. We arranged to correspond via email and she and her children would cycle the sprinklers while I was at work.
The larger sprinkler takes 4 hours to attain the equivalent of 1/2 inch rain. Doing the simple math, this means that they would have to turn it off at 9:30 a.m.
With this assurance, I packed up everything and headed for work. The work day was slow at first, but in the afternoon things began to get crazy. By the time 4:00 rolled around we had 5 computers to fix yet and 2 hard drives to mirror. Consequently, I didn't get back to the house until approximately 6:00 p.m.
Upon entering the driveway, I failed to see any progress on the watering. Remembering the sprinkler that I had turned on early that morning, I rushed to the back. A nice swamp greeted me with the sprinkler still happily performing its duties.
After shutting off the water, I surveyed the damage.
I thanked God because it could have been much worse. Before I had left that morning, God had given me the foresight to turn off the little sprinkler on the off chance our neighbors didn't receive my emails. If I hadn't done that, the whole backyard would probably be one large lake!
Coming into the kitchen I found ants simply everywhere. I apparently had left some crumbs on the stove. The ants were rejoicing over my clumsiness. They were crawling all around the counters and sink in very large numbers. I groaned, and made everything spotless again. :)
Tuesday morning I woke up and checked the back gardens. I come to report that the plants have not drowned. In fact, they are as green as ever with considerably more beautiful pink flowers on one, very well watered, shrub.
Later that day, our neighbors finally emailed me back from the previous day and we arranged and coordinated the watering for the day. The rest of Tuesday was pretty uneventful.
Wednesday was the highlight of my week. This was the day when Rance and I finally completed the week long troublesome computer.
This computer originally had a power surge blow out most of the internal parts. After replacing the motherboard, the processor, and the memory, the computer seemed to work better.
Yet, we still had many errors. The computer didn't resolve them even after swapping out hard drives, optical drives, even a brand new motherboard. Every time we reinstalled windows we got the same error. Finally, out of desperation, Rance took the computer uptown to another computer repair place to show them the problem. When he setup the computer, everything worked flawlessly! Setup completed just fine and everything. Being a little embarrassed, Rance took the computer back down to TCS.net to setup the drivers and complete the job.
After rebooting windows, the same old error came up again! We were very puzzled and confused. We went through the possibilities, until Rance discovered that they only difference between the other place and our place was the electricity. Yet, all the other computers, desktops and otherwise worked as usual. To confirm our theory, we replaced the power supply with a brand new one, and wallah, the problem finally disappeared.
The original problem was the power supply, but the reason it worked at the other computer store was because of the higher quality electricity. Our old electricity was not powerful enough to overcome the power supply's faults, but the newer electricity provided enough juice despite the dying power supply.
During this project, two storms went through Kearney, and dropped some heavy torrential rain for a few minutes. It meant I was finished with watering for the week. Hooray!
If you got lost in the above description of our computer trials, than you may tune in again. If you didn't get lost, than give yourself a pat on the back. :)
After we finally completed the computer, I prepared to return it to a very patient customer. We had been working on this computer for slightly more than a week, and set the record for the longest, unsolved, job in history!
Leaving the shop, I noticed a steady stream of cars and decided to make a run for my car. Behind me, I heard someone yelling at me. Looking back, I see a older man poking his head out from the bar next door yelling "Hey, did you steal that?" I yell back, "No!" I then heard him reentering and reassuring his half drunk comrades that I hadn't stolen anything. I didn't hear from him again.
I finished the rest of the Chow Mein, and beans for lunch, and made some cheese dogs for supper. That may sound sophisticated, but it was only hot dogs in a pot, (because the Tillotsons had confiscated the frying iron) with strips of cheese on top. It wasn't anything fancy by any means.
I spent two hours that night picking beans and cucumbers. Later, I caught up with friends that had been left in the dust during the confusion and increased business of the past week and a half.
The next day was Thursday. I ate some more cheese dogs that day and found out the Tillotson's were returning the following day at approximately 4 p.m. This day was incredibly busy down at the shop, and I was constantly running around working on various things.
One particular customer was rather curious. A man, probably in his latter twenties, walked in and requested that we purchase his computers from him. This man may be considered "cute" according to my limited training. He was a brawny cross between a lumber jack and a lawyer. He had the build of a lumber jack, but his well trimmed beard and mustache would have made him highly presentable in a courtroom.
While we were having our discussion, a young woman and a young child walked in and joined him. The young women was a couple inches above 5 foot, and had the characteristics of a 16 or 17 year old.
After we completed our business, the man introduced us to his wife and child and explained that they were moving to Alaska permanently to fish. They were planning on living on an island, and couldn't bring their computers along. Rance and I were shell shocked that this young woman was his wife but tried not to show our surprise.
That night I picked broccoli, and completed migrating all my old email settings, documents, contacts, to my new, more recognizable, GMAIL address.
My previous address was slightly more than 5 years old and was created out of extreme frustration with MSN Hotmail. I kept on writing long emails and then losing them, and the constant spam was disgusting! Thus the mad-me-am. Horrendous grammar! lol
Gmail was a welcome relief from Google. It provided such features as automatic save, and the best non-exclusive spam filter on the internet. I rarely received more than one spam email in my inbox a month! The rest were conveniently forwarded to my spam folder. Believe me, I have tested virtually all of the popular webmails, and GMAIL deserves the best rating in all categories.
I went to bed that night quite a bit later than I should have. Waking up at 5 a.m, I began the considerably long list I had made the previous night. It was Friday! The day the Tillotson's were brave enough to show their faces again and release me from being shackled to Kearney.
The list went something like this. Check the garden, put away sprinklers, restore the T's computer back to its defaults, and sweep the floors. While putting away the sprinkler, I foolishly tossed it over the outdoor air-conditioner fan and broke the plastic hose connection. :( I was devastated, but resolved to purchase a new one the next day. All this was necessary to sufficiently prepare for the Tillotson onslaught scheduled later that day.
That day, business was much slower during the morning but it picked up substantially during the afternoon. At one point, I was taking housecalls, and Rance had to urge me to return because of the extreme busi-ness. I was soo thankful for His constant provision.
The previous afternoon, I attempted contacting Michael, but some unknown identity answered instead and was reluctant to deliver to him a message. After some urging, she agreed. I asked Michael to hurry down to the office as soon as he returned because Rance and I had to reorient him with his own business after being gone for two weeks.
Michael kept his promise and came down to the office right around 4:15. It took us a whole hour and a half to explain everything that had happened the past few weeks. But finally, all the stories had been told, and I headed back for supper back at the T's.
After a delicious late supper and many vacation stories, I began heading towards bed.
The nice thing about a blackberry is that you appear to be online at all times and are easily reached by several means of communication: SMS, MMS, Gtalk, Gmail Facebook, and phone. It also makes it easy to inform my friends of my current status without actually talking with them. If at anytime, I don't want to be contacted, I can easily turn my phone off and all communication ceases.
That night, I was kept rather busy until the wee hours of the morning and enjoyed myself immensely. It was a huge relief not having to wake up early and be responsible for breakfast, watering and more! I was determined to take full advantage of my freedom. :)
That is the end of my bachelorhood stories. I hope you enjoyed them, but I also hope you won't have to tune in next time for a long time!
A few final notes...
I had originally strove to design a complete database of all our inventory at the shop while the Tillotson's were gone, but very little of my plans were accomplished.
Before the T's left, I weighed myself so that I would could contrast it with my weight after my days of fasting. Eight hours after my first meal with the Tillotsons, I weighed myself and found that I had remarkably gained 1.4 pounds! I was up to 150 even. I was astounded. :)
If you were expecting another week like the previous one, thankfully, I learned from many of my lessons, and had a much less exciting week.
This post is wimpy compared with my last one and is only 1,752 words. Sorry for the disappointment. :(
After waking up at 5:30, I set the large sprinkler on the south flower gardens. The previous day, some neighbors offered to help me with the daunting watering task. We arranged to correspond via email and she and her children would cycle the sprinklers while I was at work.
The larger sprinkler takes 4 hours to attain the equivalent of 1/2 inch rain. Doing the simple math, this means that they would have to turn it off at 9:30 a.m.
With this assurance, I packed up everything and headed for work. The work day was slow at first, but in the afternoon things began to get crazy. By the time 4:00 rolled around we had 5 computers to fix yet and 2 hard drives to mirror. Consequently, I didn't get back to the house until approximately 6:00 p.m.
Upon entering the driveway, I failed to see any progress on the watering. Remembering the sprinkler that I had turned on early that morning, I rushed to the back. A nice swamp greeted me with the sprinkler still happily performing its duties.
After shutting off the water, I surveyed the damage.
I thanked God because it could have been much worse. Before I had left that morning, God had given me the foresight to turn off the little sprinkler on the off chance our neighbors didn't receive my emails. If I hadn't done that, the whole backyard would probably be one large lake!
Coming into the kitchen I found ants simply everywhere. I apparently had left some crumbs on the stove. The ants were rejoicing over my clumsiness. They were crawling all around the counters and sink in very large numbers. I groaned, and made everything spotless again. :)
Tuesday morning I woke up and checked the back gardens. I come to report that the plants have not drowned. In fact, they are as green as ever with considerably more beautiful pink flowers on one, very well watered, shrub.
Later that day, our neighbors finally emailed me back from the previous day and we arranged and coordinated the watering for the day. The rest of Tuesday was pretty uneventful.
Wednesday was the highlight of my week. This was the day when Rance and I finally completed the week long troublesome computer.
This computer originally had a power surge blow out most of the internal parts. After replacing the motherboard, the processor, and the memory, the computer seemed to work better.
Yet, we still had many errors. The computer didn't resolve them even after swapping out hard drives, optical drives, even a brand new motherboard. Every time we reinstalled windows we got the same error. Finally, out of desperation, Rance took the computer uptown to another computer repair place to show them the problem. When he setup the computer, everything worked flawlessly! Setup completed just fine and everything. Being a little embarrassed, Rance took the computer back down to TCS.net to setup the drivers and complete the job.
After rebooting windows, the same old error came up again! We were very puzzled and confused. We went through the possibilities, until Rance discovered that they only difference between the other place and our place was the electricity. Yet, all the other computers, desktops and otherwise worked as usual. To confirm our theory, we replaced the power supply with a brand new one, and wallah, the problem finally disappeared.
The original problem was the power supply, but the reason it worked at the other computer store was because of the higher quality electricity. Our old electricity was not powerful enough to overcome the power supply's faults, but the newer electricity provided enough juice despite the dying power supply.
During this project, two storms went through Kearney, and dropped some heavy torrential rain for a few minutes. It meant I was finished with watering for the week. Hooray!
If you got lost in the above description of our computer trials, than you may tune in again. If you didn't get lost, than give yourself a pat on the back. :)
After we finally completed the computer, I prepared to return it to a very patient customer. We had been working on this computer for slightly more than a week, and set the record for the longest, unsolved, job in history!
Leaving the shop, I noticed a steady stream of cars and decided to make a run for my car. Behind me, I heard someone yelling at me. Looking back, I see a older man poking his head out from the bar next door yelling "Hey, did you steal that?" I yell back, "No!" I then heard him reentering and reassuring his half drunk comrades that I hadn't stolen anything. I didn't hear from him again.
I finished the rest of the Chow Mein, and beans for lunch, and made some cheese dogs for supper. That may sound sophisticated, but it was only hot dogs in a pot, (because the Tillotsons had confiscated the frying iron) with strips of cheese on top. It wasn't anything fancy by any means.
I spent two hours that night picking beans and cucumbers. Later, I caught up with friends that had been left in the dust during the confusion and increased business of the past week and a half.
The next day was Thursday. I ate some more cheese dogs that day and found out the Tillotson's were returning the following day at approximately 4 p.m. This day was incredibly busy down at the shop, and I was constantly running around working on various things.
One particular customer was rather curious. A man, probably in his latter twenties, walked in and requested that we purchase his computers from him. This man may be considered "cute" according to my limited training. He was a brawny cross between a lumber jack and a lawyer. He had the build of a lumber jack, but his well trimmed beard and mustache would have made him highly presentable in a courtroom.
While we were having our discussion, a young woman and a young child walked in and joined him. The young women was a couple inches above 5 foot, and had the characteristics of a 16 or 17 year old.
After we completed our business, the man introduced us to his wife and child and explained that they were moving to Alaska permanently to fish. They were planning on living on an island, and couldn't bring their computers along. Rance and I were shell shocked that this young woman was his wife but tried not to show our surprise.
That night I picked broccoli, and completed migrating all my old email settings, documents, contacts, to my new, more recognizable, GMAIL address.
My previous address was slightly more than 5 years old and was created out of extreme frustration with MSN Hotmail. I kept on writing long emails and then losing them, and the constant spam was disgusting! Thus the mad-me-am. Horrendous grammar! lol
Gmail was a welcome relief from Google. It provided such features as automatic save, and the best non-exclusive spam filter on the internet. I rarely received more than one spam email in my inbox a month! The rest were conveniently forwarded to my spam folder. Believe me, I have tested virtually all of the popular webmails, and GMAIL deserves the best rating in all categories.
I went to bed that night quite a bit later than I should have. Waking up at 5 a.m, I began the considerably long list I had made the previous night. It was Friday! The day the Tillotson's were brave enough to show their faces again and release me from being shackled to Kearney.
The list went something like this. Check the garden, put away sprinklers, restore the T's computer back to its defaults, and sweep the floors. While putting away the sprinkler, I foolishly tossed it over the outdoor air-conditioner fan and broke the plastic hose connection. :( I was devastated, but resolved to purchase a new one the next day. All this was necessary to sufficiently prepare for the Tillotson onslaught scheduled later that day.
That day, business was much slower during the morning but it picked up substantially during the afternoon. At one point, I was taking housecalls, and Rance had to urge me to return because of the extreme busi-ness. I was soo thankful for His constant provision.
The previous afternoon, I attempted contacting Michael, but some unknown identity answered instead and was reluctant to deliver to him a message. After some urging, she agreed. I asked Michael to hurry down to the office as soon as he returned because Rance and I had to reorient him with his own business after being gone for two weeks.
Michael kept his promise and came down to the office right around 4:15. It took us a whole hour and a half to explain everything that had happened the past few weeks. But finally, all the stories had been told, and I headed back for supper back at the T's.
After a delicious late supper and many vacation stories, I began heading towards bed.
The nice thing about a blackberry is that you appear to be online at all times and are easily reached by several means of communication: SMS, MMS, Gtalk, Gmail Facebook, and phone. It also makes it easy to inform my friends of my current status without actually talking with them. If at anytime, I don't want to be contacted, I can easily turn my phone off and all communication ceases.
That night, I was kept rather busy until the wee hours of the morning and enjoyed myself immensely. It was a huge relief not having to wake up early and be responsible for breakfast, watering and more! I was determined to take full advantage of my freedom. :)
That is the end of my bachelorhood stories. I hope you enjoyed them, but I also hope you won't have to tune in next time for a long time!
A few final notes...
I had originally strove to design a complete database of all our inventory at the shop while the Tillotson's were gone, but very little of my plans were accomplished.
Before the T's left, I weighed myself so that I would could contrast it with my weight after my days of fasting. Eight hours after my first meal with the Tillotsons, I weighed myself and found that I had remarkably gained 1.4 pounds! I was up to 150 even. I was astounded. :)
If you were expecting another week like the previous one, thankfully, I learned from many of my lessons, and had a much less exciting week.
This post is wimpy compared with my last one and is only 1,752 words. Sorry for the disappointment. :(
Saturday, July 18, 2009
The first week of bachelorhood...
With a title like that, you may need some assurance that I am still mostly alive and not quite starving. *cough* :) Some of you may know, but I successfully banished the Tillotsons on a two week trip around the north western United States. :)
After being too busy to blog for a week, don't expect a short post here. lol
Before they left, I was given several pieces of advice. Some from Catherine, and some from a friend at church. Catherine advised me against having girls, booze, and loud music. My friend suggested that I transform the T's house into a regular hotel during their absence. He thought buying a billboard along I-80 would be sufficient advertising. With advice like this, I was confident I wouldn't have any problems.
The T's didn't leave though until after they had compiled a mile long chore list and graciously handed it to me. All it involved was watering plants, checking garden, feeding critters, and taking out the dumpsters on the appropriate day. A piece of cake! Or so I thought.
The T's "supposedly" left at 8:00 A.M sharp this last Monday morning. When I woke up that day, I didn't fully understand my ignorance of several very important details. Boy, was I in for a reality check!
The work day went relatively smoothly until mid afternoon. I was busy with a house call, and Rance was solo at the shop. (Rance is 35 and volunteered to assist me during the T's vacation/business trip.) But more about Rance later. :) *chuckles*
Before Ben left, he notified a framing customer that her photo was complete and had scheduled to pick it up on this day. Well... it was embarrassing. Benjamin hadn't told us the photo was done, he hadn't told us where the photo was, and he hadn't told us the price. So in strolls the customer asking for her print, and we were totally clueless. Right about this time, Ben and Michael were rock climbing and couldn't be contacted. It was even more embarrassing that she had come from out of town specifically to get her picture. Thankfully, she was understanding and said she would stop in next week.
When getting a hold of the T's. I call Michael first, (he answers occasionally), then Benjamin, (his answering habits are even less) and finally faithful K. :) Finally getting a hold of K, I find out that Michael had lost his blackberry somewhere while rock climbing. Needless to say, I wasn't too surprised. It isn't the first time he has lost it. Later, Benjamin called me from Michael's phone and gave us the information we should have had before they left. (Yes, he left it in the car)
After this interesting ordeal, the rest of the business hours went smoothly. That night, I examined "the list" and set reminders on my phone for everything I was going to forget. I divied up the weekly tasks on different days hoping to maintain some pleasure time. But I was sadly mistaken.
TCS.net is officially closed at 5:00 p.m. on weekdays, but I usually don't get back to the house til 5:30 or later. This leaves plenty of time to make supper plans! JK
I glance at the list and end the watering cycle for the past week by watering the pine trees.
Entering the forbidden kitchen, I quickly realized my minimal knowledge. Attempting to decipher the T's food storage logic was too difficult. Starting with the fridge, I deep cleaned it and moved the many foreign substances to another location. I then opened the cupboards and sorted the known from the unknown. (The unknown pile was substantially larger) :)
By this time, it was past 10:00 p.m, and I still hadn't eaten supper! So I grabbed some fritos, set my alarm for 6:30 (15 minutes earlier than normal) and headed for bed. Very healthy, I know. ;)
The next morning I learned very quickly that I couldn't make breakfast, have devotions, feed animals, make lunch, and get ready to go in that short time period. Breakfast was very poorly planned. I was told that waffles were left for me, but I couldn't find them for the life of me! I finally found them in the freezer, and managed to burn one to a crisp in the oven trying to defrost it quickly. Being the only food in more than 12 hours, it tasted delicious!
The bread was another story. I foolishly waited until the morning of to find the bread. After scrummaging awhile, I found it in the freezer, frozen solid! I was dismayed. How was I supposed to have sandwiches for lunch with frozen bread? This was the first time Google came in handy.
A quick search revealed that wrapping the bread in aluminum foil and turning the oven on 400 degrees would do the trick. Bingo! After a few minutes the bread was totally thawed and ready for sandwiches! I said a quick prayer of thankfulness after that episode. :)
It became very obvious when I was still throwing together a quick lunch at 8:15 that I had to readjust my schedule the next day.
Rushing to work, I opened up the shop and dreaded lunch time. Seeing my puny lunch Monday prompted Rance to buy me some Lays. It was soo thoughtful of him! This day went pretty smoothly.
After locking up for the night, I headed back to the house resolving to start the watering cycle again for the week. Scrutinizing the list, it began to dawn on me what the rest of the week would look like. :(
Let's just say that the Tillotsons don't water in some kind of hap hazard or disorganized fashion. They have systematically engineered their watering schedule and sprinklers to achieve the maximum effectiveness. I knew after that night, that my proposed list, for the week, would never get accomplished.
Let me explain the watering schedule as simply as possible. Basically, the T's own two sprinklers. One of them is massive and has fewer customizations, and the other is smaller and easily customizable for any watering task. The priority list goes like this: gardens, flower beds, and grass.
The requirement is that everything receives 1 inch of water per week. The larger sprinkler takes 4 hours to get 1/2 inch with a complete arch, and the smaller one takes only 30 minutes. The ground can only hold 1/2 inch at a time, so this requires too separate watering times to complete the cycle for each week. The sprinklers have to be moved a minimum of 18 times to get everything watered sufficiently at the proper intervals.
The T's tend two gardens. One at some friends of theirs, and their own at their house. The other garden is about 2.9 miles away or takes approximately 10 minutes to get there.
A few more outdoor tasks involve picking the 6 green bean rows every three days (approx. 20 feet long each), cut brocoli once or twice a week, pick zucchini, pick cucumber, and pick tomatoes. (The list adds the qualifier: "when they are ripe" haha...)
The rest of the list was pretty simple. Feed the fish morning and evening, feed mouse, (Ralph died), and prepare trash and recycling.
After getting the sprinklers going, I made a quick trip to Walmart and bought some noodles and some ingredients for chow mein. By this time, it was about 9:00. (Boy time goes fast when you have to do everything!) Since I hadn't yet had supper, my stomach informed me it was time to eat. The T's informed me that they had left some spaghetti sauce for me. Digging through the fridge hadn't found it, so I headed for the freezers. After rummaging through the large freezer for quite some time, I was about to give up, when I remembered they had another little freezer above the fridge. Ah ha! There it was, frozen like a rock. Brilliant!
I was starving my this time, and didn't want to wait for supper any longer! Thank God, I devised a quick way to get it defrosted. After that task was completed, I had sauce but again I foolishly didn't start the noodles until after the sauce was thawed. By the time everything was ready, I ate supper at about 10:15 that night.
That night, I made the "hard" decision to get up at 5a.m. A quick weather check revealed 50% chance of rain the following day. (This means, no watering!) Believe me, I begged God to bring it here. But alas, we only got 10 hundredths of an inch. Wednesday morning went much smoother and I was actually on time for work! I was relieved!
The day went relatively smoothly, but was the beginning of a very troublesome computer that originally had major problems. But I will leave the technical details out of this post.
That day I realized I was being forced to cook something for myself. I had only one more meal of spaghetti and that was for supper Having very little confidence in my cooking skills prompted me to go back to Google and youtube to find a live recipie for chow mein. Finding a decent recipie, I realized I was missing a few ingredients. One very important one. Soysauce!
So I ate the rest of the spaghetti, finished the watering cycle for the night and retired for bed.
The next morning, was Thursday. By this time, I had my schedule down pat. Wake up at 5:00 A.M, start the sprinklers, shower, get breakfast, get lunch, go to work at 7:50 and come back at 5:00 p.m.
After a hectic day at work, mostly involving the computer we started on Wednesday, I went to Walmart to purchase the remaining chow mein ingredients. Having nothing anymore in the house to eat, I began making the chow mein. I said another prayer and headed back to the computer to outline the process on paper and began cutting vegetables. After I was done, I wasn't sure what to call the dish. It wasn't chow mein, it wasn't fried rice, but what was it? It was delicious though, so I didn't really care. Lesley called it, "Chow mein a la Seth" and I called it poor man's chow mein.
Anyway, I just barely managed to get to bed before midnight after cleaning up my kitchen mess.
The next day, Friday, was another rough day. After being awake a couple hours, I was already out of energy from having less than 6 hours of sleep the rest of the week. But God somehow gave me the strength, but I still didn't get that troublesome computer completed. Halfway into the afternoon, my cousins from Cozad (Josh and Katrina) stopped by because of computer problems and we later did Mexican that night. I also gave them a treehouse tour, and pushed Katrina on the swing. It was soo funny!
The next day was Saturday! Hooray! I woke up at a decent hour, 8:00 A.M and decided to get the outdoor tasks done before the heat of the day.
The tillotsons had also instructed me to mow the lawn today. So I opened the garage door and discovered that they had wedged the lawnmower in between the work bench and the Honda. Txt'ng Kristin, I find out that they didn't leave me any keys to move the car. Michael suggested finding a couple guys to drag the car, (who would have guessed) but I thought that hot wiring would be much easier and tons more fun. :)
I restrained my longing to do some damage and managed to twist and yank the lawnmower out. After completing the mowing, I decided that 11:14 was the time to have my first meal of the day. Well... not quite. I still hadn't made french toast. So I googled again, found a wikihow, made a milk trip, and made the french toast. By 1 P.M. I was enjoying the first course of my brunch. :) I then cooked green beans, and made some outstanding dark chocolate brownies!
I still had some dark chocolate left in my room, and thought that I should do something with it. Thanks to cookingforengineers.com, I found a easy to follow recipie with detailed pictures for every step and successfully made those brownies.
I teased K about how delicious they were and told her I wouldn't save one for her until she asked nicely enough. The first time, her request was rather lame but did include numerous smiley faces. :) But the second time, she won me over, with beautiful picture combined with a please! :)
And that is my week in brief. lol
So what do you think? Do you think I fit the qualities and living conditions of true bachelors?
Hmm... only 2,140 words, not bad. :)
After being too busy to blog for a week, don't expect a short post here. lol
Before they left, I was given several pieces of advice. Some from Catherine, and some from a friend at church. Catherine advised me against having girls, booze, and loud music. My friend suggested that I transform the T's house into a regular hotel during their absence. He thought buying a billboard along I-80 would be sufficient advertising. With advice like this, I was confident I wouldn't have any problems.
The T's didn't leave though until after they had compiled a mile long chore list and graciously handed it to me. All it involved was watering plants, checking garden, feeding critters, and taking out the dumpsters on the appropriate day. A piece of cake! Or so I thought.
The T's "supposedly" left at 8:00 A.M sharp this last Monday morning. When I woke up that day, I didn't fully understand my ignorance of several very important details. Boy, was I in for a reality check!
The work day went relatively smoothly until mid afternoon. I was busy with a house call, and Rance was solo at the shop. (Rance is 35 and volunteered to assist me during the T's vacation/business trip.) But more about Rance later. :) *chuckles*
Before Ben left, he notified a framing customer that her photo was complete and had scheduled to pick it up on this day. Well... it was embarrassing. Benjamin hadn't told us the photo was done, he hadn't told us where the photo was, and he hadn't told us the price. So in strolls the customer asking for her print, and we were totally clueless. Right about this time, Ben and Michael were rock climbing and couldn't be contacted. It was even more embarrassing that she had come from out of town specifically to get her picture. Thankfully, she was understanding and said she would stop in next week.
When getting a hold of the T's. I call Michael first, (he answers occasionally), then Benjamin, (his answering habits are even less) and finally faithful K. :) Finally getting a hold of K, I find out that Michael had lost his blackberry somewhere while rock climbing. Needless to say, I wasn't too surprised. It isn't the first time he has lost it. Later, Benjamin called me from Michael's phone and gave us the information we should have had before they left. (Yes, he left it in the car)
After this interesting ordeal, the rest of the business hours went smoothly. That night, I examined "the list" and set reminders on my phone for everything I was going to forget. I divied up the weekly tasks on different days hoping to maintain some pleasure time. But I was sadly mistaken.
TCS.net is officially closed at 5:00 p.m. on weekdays, but I usually don't get back to the house til 5:30 or later. This leaves plenty of time to make supper plans! JK
I glance at the list and end the watering cycle for the past week by watering the pine trees.
Entering the forbidden kitchen, I quickly realized my minimal knowledge. Attempting to decipher the T's food storage logic was too difficult. Starting with the fridge, I deep cleaned it and moved the many foreign substances to another location. I then opened the cupboards and sorted the known from the unknown. (The unknown pile was substantially larger) :)
By this time, it was past 10:00 p.m, and I still hadn't eaten supper! So I grabbed some fritos, set my alarm for 6:30 (15 minutes earlier than normal) and headed for bed. Very healthy, I know. ;)
The next morning I learned very quickly that I couldn't make breakfast, have devotions, feed animals, make lunch, and get ready to go in that short time period. Breakfast was very poorly planned. I was told that waffles were left for me, but I couldn't find them for the life of me! I finally found them in the freezer, and managed to burn one to a crisp in the oven trying to defrost it quickly. Being the only food in more than 12 hours, it tasted delicious!
The bread was another story. I foolishly waited until the morning of to find the bread. After scrummaging awhile, I found it in the freezer, frozen solid! I was dismayed. How was I supposed to have sandwiches for lunch with frozen bread? This was the first time Google came in handy.
A quick search revealed that wrapping the bread in aluminum foil and turning the oven on 400 degrees would do the trick. Bingo! After a few minutes the bread was totally thawed and ready for sandwiches! I said a quick prayer of thankfulness after that episode. :)
It became very obvious when I was still throwing together a quick lunch at 8:15 that I had to readjust my schedule the next day.
Rushing to work, I opened up the shop and dreaded lunch time. Seeing my puny lunch Monday prompted Rance to buy me some Lays. It was soo thoughtful of him! This day went pretty smoothly.
After locking up for the night, I headed back to the house resolving to start the watering cycle again for the week. Scrutinizing the list, it began to dawn on me what the rest of the week would look like. :(
Let's just say that the Tillotsons don't water in some kind of hap hazard or disorganized fashion. They have systematically engineered their watering schedule and sprinklers to achieve the maximum effectiveness. I knew after that night, that my proposed list, for the week, would never get accomplished.
Let me explain the watering schedule as simply as possible. Basically, the T's own two sprinklers. One of them is massive and has fewer customizations, and the other is smaller and easily customizable for any watering task. The priority list goes like this: gardens, flower beds, and grass.
The requirement is that everything receives 1 inch of water per week. The larger sprinkler takes 4 hours to get 1/2 inch with a complete arch, and the smaller one takes only 30 minutes. The ground can only hold 1/2 inch at a time, so this requires too separate watering times to complete the cycle for each week. The sprinklers have to be moved a minimum of 18 times to get everything watered sufficiently at the proper intervals.
The T's tend two gardens. One at some friends of theirs, and their own at their house. The other garden is about 2.9 miles away or takes approximately 10 minutes to get there.
A few more outdoor tasks involve picking the 6 green bean rows every three days (approx. 20 feet long each), cut brocoli once or twice a week, pick zucchini, pick cucumber, and pick tomatoes. (The list adds the qualifier: "when they are ripe" haha...)
The rest of the list was pretty simple. Feed the fish morning and evening, feed mouse, (Ralph died), and prepare trash and recycling.
After getting the sprinklers going, I made a quick trip to Walmart and bought some noodles and some ingredients for chow mein. By this time, it was about 9:00. (Boy time goes fast when you have to do everything!) Since I hadn't yet had supper, my stomach informed me it was time to eat. The T's informed me that they had left some spaghetti sauce for me. Digging through the fridge hadn't found it, so I headed for the freezers. After rummaging through the large freezer for quite some time, I was about to give up, when I remembered they had another little freezer above the fridge. Ah ha! There it was, frozen like a rock. Brilliant!
I was starving my this time, and didn't want to wait for supper any longer! Thank God, I devised a quick way to get it defrosted. After that task was completed, I had sauce but again I foolishly didn't start the noodles until after the sauce was thawed. By the time everything was ready, I ate supper at about 10:15 that night.
That night, I made the "hard" decision to get up at 5a.m. A quick weather check revealed 50% chance of rain the following day. (This means, no watering!) Believe me, I begged God to bring it here. But alas, we only got 10 hundredths of an inch. Wednesday morning went much smoother and I was actually on time for work! I was relieved!
The day went relatively smoothly, but was the beginning of a very troublesome computer that originally had major problems. But I will leave the technical details out of this post.
That day I realized I was being forced to cook something for myself. I had only one more meal of spaghetti and that was for supper Having very little confidence in my cooking skills prompted me to go back to Google and youtube to find a live recipie for chow mein. Finding a decent recipie, I realized I was missing a few ingredients. One very important one. Soysauce!
So I ate the rest of the spaghetti, finished the watering cycle for the night and retired for bed.
The next morning, was Thursday. By this time, I had my schedule down pat. Wake up at 5:00 A.M, start the sprinklers, shower, get breakfast, get lunch, go to work at 7:50 and come back at 5:00 p.m.
After a hectic day at work, mostly involving the computer we started on Wednesday, I went to Walmart to purchase the remaining chow mein ingredients. Having nothing anymore in the house to eat, I began making the chow mein. I said another prayer and headed back to the computer to outline the process on paper and began cutting vegetables. After I was done, I wasn't sure what to call the dish. It wasn't chow mein, it wasn't fried rice, but what was it? It was delicious though, so I didn't really care. Lesley called it, "Chow mein a la Seth" and I called it poor man's chow mein.
Anyway, I just barely managed to get to bed before midnight after cleaning up my kitchen mess.
The next day, Friday, was another rough day. After being awake a couple hours, I was already out of energy from having less than 6 hours of sleep the rest of the week. But God somehow gave me the strength, but I still didn't get that troublesome computer completed. Halfway into the afternoon, my cousins from Cozad (Josh and Katrina) stopped by because of computer problems and we later did Mexican that night. I also gave them a treehouse tour, and pushed Katrina on the swing. It was soo funny!
The next day was Saturday! Hooray! I woke up at a decent hour, 8:00 A.M and decided to get the outdoor tasks done before the heat of the day.
The tillotsons had also instructed me to mow the lawn today. So I opened the garage door and discovered that they had wedged the lawnmower in between the work bench and the Honda. Txt'ng Kristin, I find out that they didn't leave me any keys to move the car. Michael suggested finding a couple guys to drag the car, (who would have guessed) but I thought that hot wiring would be much easier and tons more fun. :)
I restrained my longing to do some damage and managed to twist and yank the lawnmower out. After completing the mowing, I decided that 11:14 was the time to have my first meal of the day. Well... not quite. I still hadn't made french toast. So I googled again, found a wikihow, made a milk trip, and made the french toast. By 1 P.M. I was enjoying the first course of my brunch. :) I then cooked green beans, and made some outstanding dark chocolate brownies!
I still had some dark chocolate left in my room, and thought that I should do something with it. Thanks to cookingforengineers.com, I found a easy to follow recipie with detailed pictures for every step and successfully made those brownies.
I teased K about how delicious they were and told her I wouldn't save one for her until she asked nicely enough. The first time, her request was rather lame but did include numerous smiley faces. :) But the second time, she won me over, with beautiful picture combined with a please! :)
And that is my week in brief. lol
So what do you think? Do you think I fit the qualities and living conditions of true bachelors?
Hmm... only 2,140 words, not bad. :)
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