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. :(