2017-04-21:

And I certainly didn't churn out two chapters of the next story I'm writing. No, I didn't do that.

What I did do it just too secret, too game changing to be told. It's true.*

I can tell you that after work I went to the bank, went shopping, and had a nice dinner with my parents.

Came back here, checked my sites, made phone calls (3) reached (1) who wanted next tuesday? What? That can't be right. I now have tuesday and wednesday of next week booked. Weird.

Watched the rest of the katana video, proofread, and that was that.

*this is not true

Sat:
Did a ton of stuff in the morning. Washed my sheets. Cleaned up the house a bit. Tried the fuse in the TV. (Failed to make it turn on, sigh) Wrapped the water heater finally. Updated the website. Put in the latest Susan edits. Straightened up the basement. Even vacuumed down there, plus the breezeway and the living room. I know it doesn't seem like that would be worthy of note. But for me, it is. Moved the plants to the breezeway (okay there's only three).

Ate lunch and went to see the guy about his printer. Oh look, it prints just fine. So I drove 25 minutes to tell some 85? year old there was nothing wrong with his printer for 5 minutes. Yay! At least I got to pet his pup!

Got back here, watched a bit more slayers, guy came with his crappy new "laptop motherboard" PC which I started copying his stuff into. Why do we have USB 3 interfaces that can copy 600+ MB/s but windows averages about 1 MB/s? Oh hey, it's actually up to 30-40 at the moment. A full 1/20th of the actual maximum!

And now guy is emailing me about his stupid printer again.

It's possible there's no paper in the tray?

Anyway, transfer finished, so hopefully he's happy with his new, crappy, system.
I'll be happy to put this SSD back into it and sell it to someone, and they will be thrilled with the performance.

Played some fallout, and even some of that metroid game Nintendo pulled down. Got a bit further, had to sort of "dark souls" it and get destroyed a few times before I figured out how to beat the things I was having trouble with.

Now that's a good day!

Sun:
The getting stuff done continued into today. Repotted a plant and blew the leaves and dirt out of the garage. Cleaned up more sticks. Put the bits of the PC the guy left together and ran the updates on it.

Checked my Sunday websites. Cleaned out the car a little bit. Finally applied that Sailor Mercury decal I got from Sean months ago.

Played a bit more Metroid (ice beam!) and left for my parent's house.

Had a lovely dinner, did not go to the zoo but did take the nature walk around the house. (Snails!)

Came back here, made some calls, did a bit more metroid and got ready for tomorrow.

Mon:
You win some, you lose some. That's the way of the world, right?

Did actual work at work today. I know, it's a shock. Loaded the latest, did all the test cases I haven't done in a month. Nothing much changed, actually. Closed some bugs, one was fixed but only half way. Closed that one, wrote up "please put entire error message, not just half of it. K Thx bye!"

Thought about retaking an elf farming village.

Out to set up the laptop. She had an SSD before, so this machine is not going to perform quite as well I think. But I got her stuff moved and Outlook set up.

Got back, had a package. My <gift item> and 3 light sensors had arrived! With no calls I ate dinner and got to work on them. 2 of the 3 went flawless. Now when I come in the house from the collection room I don't have to a) leave a light on when I leave b) trip over one cat or another. The light just goes on. I also replaced the original one that was busted in the kitchen, as the light for that is waaaaaay on the other side of the room. So it now goes on when I am in the hallway.

Turned this

[[image file="2017-04/turnedthis.jpg" alt="the old switch" ]]

Into this

[[image file="2017-04/intothis.jpg" alt="new switch" ]]

So much better, no? Yes, it's had no cover for YEARS now. Years. But I got there in the end, right?

The third one… sigh. The light in the garage is very odd. It had two (2) black wires, a red wire, and the white wires. So here I am thinking I'll just put the two blacks together and put the red where it goes and everything will be fine. Nope. Burnt it to crisp. Why is this box so different? Trying to put it back the breaker kept flipping, had to figure out how I had gotten them out of there. Finally did manage it. Are the two black actually a black and a red, and the red is a grounding wire? I don't get it. The others in the house were the same, and worked just fine. Sigh.

It wasn't too expensive.

As for <gift item> it turned out I ordered the wrong one. I had purchased <gift item> some time ago and loved it. Wanted to get one for <person> so I did. Nope. It was a smaller one. GGRRRRRR. Sending it back wouldn't have gotten me much because of return shipping. So I guess it's mine now. Ordered the right one. What am I going to do with this one? I already have the bigger one. I don't need this one! Guess I'll think about it.

That took up till about 9:00. Ah well, some good was accomplished.

Did some more metroid. Beat up that Omega one and three more besides. So there.

Tues:
Not much to say at work. Didn't even get a new build, my automatic process just reloaded what was already there.

After work job took a bit to get to. Thanks google maps. It said "continue on such and such a street, then turn left." So I'm looking and looking for three miles for this stupid road. Nope. Should never have continued on such and such street, just should have turned into the street. Well, it was just 6 miles out of the way.

Updated some stuff, answered questions, nothing too serious.

Back here I checked my sites, ate dinner, no calls. Put in some character information into the database. Why is the automatic spell thing being weird now, that hasn't changed and it worked perfectly before. Gurr.

And it works at work, I checked it the next day. So weird.

Won Metroid 2. Of course I had done it so slowly as to not even rate the "meh" ending but whatever. Never did find the jump ball either. Weird.

Wed:
What can I say about work that hasn't been said? Poked around, verified one bug was fixed. Wrote some other ones. Like I noticed there were several supplies listed as having been changed on Monday. We did not change a bunch of stuff that day, honest.

Otherwise, thought about the back story for the Annunaki.

Went to see the lady about the printer. She had works, which I guess worked out. Scanned the thing in she wanted to write on, put the text boxes where they needed to go, and that was that. But she's still returning the printer I guess. Whatever. The form should work no matter what.

Got home, found a cute little state tax envelope in my mailbox. That's always good. Apparently we made a $10 error. That didn't change anything, but they insist they didn't get the $175 prepayments I made during 2016. Really! So I called them. That's odd, their hours are rather suspiciously narrow- 8:30 (after everyone has gone to work) to 4:30 (before anyone gets home). Super.

So I log into the website and go to the place they say. I type in the code they say. (because they can't just have a "this is your current issues" area, duh.) No, that number doesn't work. Uh, what? Yes, it does. I have it right here, in my hand.

So I FAXED it. Like it was 1999. At least I hope it did. It tried three times, showed it was doing up to page 4/7 and then just sort of said it was done. Neat. I guess I'll check in a few days? So stupid.

Did some, ugh, writing. I know, I know, I promised video games. But I was writing this humorous scene in my head on the way home where one character is taking selfies and the other has no idea what's going on and there's this whole cute scene I just had to note it down. Of course it didn't come out exactly as I planned but I'm so much happier with this story you wouldn't believe it. I think she really comes off as happy and flirty. While the guy she's with just doesn't know how to deal with her, but he really likes her. The story is coming together just so well.

Ahem.

Thurs:
More of the same at work. Poked around, wrote some minor bugs about typos. Went to the meeting. Apparently they want to put 70 machines in the lab we're in? Yipes. So we're moving out soon. Chris spent most of the day trying to get the solid ink printer that's right in front of me working again. It worked yesterday but it was hung up and when he pulled the plug it wouldn't go back on. So he's somewhat stumped.

Worked on getting the log files from the machines that get knocked off when you put the latest software. Developers said they couldn't get them or something? I only got that second hand. I have them but didn't get a response when I told them where I had put them.

Did a bit more, uh, writing.

No job so I came back. Ate dinner, checked my sites. Watched some videos, (like on the metroid game, it was deeper than I thought. I'll have to play it again with certain things in mind) had another great scene pop into my head when watching the video about the philosophy of final fantasy. Naturally I had to get it down. My main character gets hit by the loss of his entire world when he first steps into the real town he's come to.

Such characterization. Much emotion. Wow.

I'm up to 14.5 chapters. When I finish chapter 15 I'll be at 50,000 words. For a story I wasn't going to write for a year. Whoops!

I'll go back to gaming, promise! I did get my NES working so I could play the pony game my parents got me for christmas. Probably bang that out next.

Talked to the lady printing certificates. Seems almost random if it'll print in the center or not. Stupid Works.

Otherwise, no new calls/jobs. Book guy is complaining about the printer again, wants me to come again. It's a printer. You hit print and feed it paper. It's no different from your other printer. Why is this such a big deal? Do your shoes give you trouble in the morning? Honestly.

So from here we come to Friday, normal stuff but no bank. Only have two checks, useless. Shopping and parents seeing as usual.

Saturday no Sean news and no jobs at the moment, so maybe this weekend I'll get off? Last week of April already. Sheesh.

Raining like crazy at the moment. Some thunder too. According to radar it's going to keep up, too. Need to do the grass seed in the front again, that whole patch is once again dead. Maybe I have grubs under there or something? It was all green last year, I was good and watered every day and there was real grass. Honest!

Anyway, see you all next week, don't get washed away or whatever if there's rain where you are.