2014-08-28:

Fri:
No work today. Thought I was going to get a job, as I called someone after lunch. They then called back and said they wanted Monday. So I've filled up Monday and gotten two for tomorrow. Haven't worked on Saturday in some time.

Visited my parents, and wrote a bunch. Finished chapter 10. Sold of bunch of the magazines on ebay this time. There's only a couple left. The majority were bought by one person. Hasn't paid yet. Sent him a new invoice with the updated shipping.

Did get a few calls, one person being scammed, so that won't happen. One person wanting Monday, uh, sorry.

Still taking fleas off cats. Well, one cat anyway. How?

Sat:
Two jobs, the one went way too long. The first one was okay, it wasn't even viruses. She had two problems- excel wouldn't open documents when they were double clicked on. And some Dell Video software was going nuts about certificates. Weird. Solved them both, did the standard stuff.

The second one though. Was setting up an iPad, and couldn't get the email. Well then he couldn't get the email on his PC either. Had to be transferred FOUR times after calling Time Warner to finally get the issue fixed. Then of course I or he had put in his email address as rochester.cc.com for some bizarre reason, which of course messed things up tremendously. I got there at 1:00, finally left at 4:30. Came back here, ate dinner, and left for Sean's.

Game was… different.

There wasn't much for Mizzy, Neil, or myself to do as it was mostly focused on the one person in the tournament. He did two fights for that and one practice session with Neil. As soon as the bad guy showed up it was midnight and we stopped. The only thing I did- buy five keychains to tie to my belt and hold Spell Symbol. Woohoo.

So that happened.

Sun:
Looked into reallocating my savings into something a bit better. Getting .14 every two weeks finally grated enough to make me move. So I'm breaking it up into 4 pieces and trying four different investment plans. I seem to be getting .05% interest on my IRA, so that's a thing. Why even bother? I did look, and putting $5000 in there seems to reduce my taxes by $500. So basically I "make" 10% per year doing that. It's not compounded or anything, but keeping $500 per year means keeping $10,000 over the next 20 years, which would buy a decent used car. Not too shabby.

Cut the back lawn.

Took fleas off cats.

Watched the new Dr Who.

Thought about what I needed to buy for Labor Day next week to get that stuff done.

And did a bit of thinking about the next chapter, and started it. Only got about a thousand words in.

Mon:
My first one was at 10:30, but it was right in the area I do the shopping, so I figured I could get through it quickly. I did. Went to the bank, deposited some money in my IRA after a few months of not doing so.

Bought flea medicine, the expensive stuff, hope it works better than the crappy cheap stuff I bought last year. Tinker mainly stays on top of the refrigerator now, how do I take 20+ off him in a day?

Got to my 10:30 at 10:15, she said she had just called me because she thought our appointment was for 10:00. Patience much?

Didn't need a lot of work, just some adware taken out, scans ran. That sort of thing. She said she had taken it to Jeff's… I'm sorry.

Back home to eat lunch.

With more time than I expected (I had originally thought to do the shopping after the 10:30, and that it might take me longer) I… ah, you've already guessed. Nearly finished chapter 11 and then went out again.

Both went pretty smoothly. The first was some nonsense about not being able to log in. Had to activate the admin account (thanks for making that hard, mikeysoft) log into that, then do some regedit stuff. After I got them back I ran the usual scans, and that was that.

Then a cleanout and answering some questions.

Came back here, ate and made phone calls. Five for tomorrow!? Two should be pretty quick like-a-bunny but still. Where are they all coming from and why now? Is my car going to break down again?

Finished the chapter and started the next one.

Tues:
Quite busy, but as expected some of the jobs were quicker than others.

The morning one went fine. He was using two routers, so took one out. Ran mbam, took junk out manually. That sort of thing.

Ate lunch, then went out to the 1:00. That was just setting up a router. Oddly the telephone cable in the room didn't work, so I had to put the thing in the kitchen and then hook the machine up with wireless. It was one of those heavily customized linux machines for… well, old people. Never saw one before. Huh.

So I did what setup I could, as it was basically a closed system.
The next guy had only a minor problem at best. He said his printer wasn't working with the wireless, but when I got there it worked just fine.
The one after that was also short, he didn't know how to turn his monitor on. To be fair, the power button was not labeled as such, it was just the weird piece of plastic on the bottom I hit because I was just hitting everything under there looking for the power button.

Last was just a checkup, Mbam took a bunch of stuff off, but his machine was still pretty slow. Turned out it had a single processor and only 2GB of RAM. Yeah, that'll do it. I think his Internet was pretty slow too.

On the way home I stopped at Lowes, because I had forgotten to buy the driveway/deck stuff. $75 for two cans of goop and one can of deck sealer. Sheesh. What, does it have little gold particles embedded in it?

At 7:00 I called the guy I gave the iMac to, as it had been three weeks. Went over there and relieved him of $200, his old eMac and keyboard and the mouse. Nice.

No calls today. I have a job, Ethen Allan, looking at four machines apparently. Someone over there is a procrastinator.
Hey, I actually spelled procrastinator right on the first try. Go me.

Then guess what I did.

Wed:
Did the long job, which wasn't really too bad. Several machines that needed cleaning out. One ancient XP machine with 3/4 of its HD full of stuff in the temp folder for some bizarre reason. One 98 machine with a dead HD. One Sony vaio with a dying HD (so sayith SMART). One XP machine I added RAM too. Also made a word perfect document look a little better, and created a template in word with a table, which was the smart way to go. Various questions answered. That took from 10:30 to about 12:30 as a lot of them were laptops so I could work on a few at once.

Then came back here. No calls to really answer so I finished up chapter 13.

I did get a few calls today, so I have one job for tomorrow. Setting up a printer and cleaning an XP machine. Better than nothing.

Did half of chapter 14 and tried to figure out what to do next. In the actual show they timeskip so much, and go back and forth between things so fast, it doesn't make sense. I mean they go on Summer Vacation, then two episodes later the maid is leaving for vacation. They get the plane back thousands of miles (with no teleportation magic) in the same episode, and the guy starts making gas despite never having any real idea what it is. Then one episode later they're fighting the bad guys and then suddenly it's war. They wait three days for no apparent reason, and he misses his chance to go back. How much time actually passed? I think I'll just have war break out before they can get to the plane, because the bad guys aren't waiting for some arbitrary time.

Thurs:
Just writing for the morning. Got up to half of chapter 15 before I got stuck. That's through all of series 1, and now the anime takes a bizarre turn. Previously, the principal says "the school is now closed" and the kids are talking about going home. But now suddenly it's not closed, all the girls are there and the boys are being drafted. Huh? Plus there's a lot of filler like Hiraga running around in his weird glasses for an entire episode. So I want to do the next logical thing, but trying to figure out what that next logical thing is may take some thinking.

I did do one job at 3:00. Cleaning a machine out, getting the dust out, and hooking up a new printer. Didn't take more than an hour, so as I was down the street from the accounting guy I got the money he owed me for his son's job.

That done I came back here. Not a great week, but still better than some.

Only one call, a long time customer of mine with some malware problems. I'm going over there at 10:30 tomorrow.

Figured out the next chapter, at least. I pretended that line about the school closing never happened, to avoid diverging too much from the plot. So hopefully I'm back on track. I've written 50,000 words for this sucker already! Sheesh.

Probably no game Saturday, so I'll just be doing some pre-labor day stuff. Probably see my parents tomorrow, bring them the usual stuff, even though they'll be over here Monday. We'll see.

My next entry will be September. I hope you're prepared. It's only 4 months until Christmas!