Tara Gone - Day 3

Ruth got up first this morning, normally when she gets up in the morning she goes to talk to Tara. (She normally only tries to talk to me when I'm sleeping these days if it is the afternoon and I'm taking a nap. I think it's one of those things where she will only risk waking me up if it's daylight and she knows what she's headed for and the escape route is clearly defined...) A few month ago, Tara and I were talking about how Ruth always comes in to wake her up, we switched sides of the bed for the night. The next morning Ruth came in, (I woke up when she opened her door) walked over to the side of the bed where she expected Tara, found me, said nothing, and went to the other side of the bed to talk to Tara. It was pretty funny. Anyhow, Ruth came in this morning to visit Tara's side of the bed. I'm ok with that. She laid down on Tara's pillow and slept for another hour.

Lily woke up from her nap very agitated. She just wouldn't calm down. We called Tara, Lily talked to her for a little bit, and was back to her normal happy self again the rest of the afternoon.

The girls watched a Goofy DVD from Netflix this afternoon. It was mostly those old sports episodes they did with Goofy. Emma thought it was absolutely totally hilarious. She kept busting up laughing.

I spent the evening at the church, we had Stake Education night. When I got back, the girls were all asleep. I'm not sure how this one particular babysitter does it, but every time she watches the girls, they go right to sleep. I put them to bed, and it's "2 monkeys and a ping pong ball" for a number of hours after that. Maybe I tired them out by making them clean Lily's bedroom this afternoon...

At the Stake center this evening, after the event, the Ringers were talking about how they had dinner at Smokehouse. The Bishop and the Stake President were talking about the virtues and vices of various vegetables. I really hadn't made specific dinner plans to that point, and wasn't all that sure there would be energy to make something, I might have been on the road to shredded wheat and bananas. After all that talk at the church, I came home and made steak, rice pilaf, and corn.

Things seem to be going ok. I need to ask Missy if she can come over Sunday morning to fix the girl's hair. That way they don't look mangy at church...

Tara Gone - Day 2

Ruth has decided that anyone who is not currently in the house has "gone to Oklahoma." Mom is in Oklahoma. Aunt Missy is in Oklahoma. Kate is at Oklahoma...

Lily appears to have accepted the changed in the back room. She's still penned in, but she doesn't seem to mind as much.

I got into some food I shouldn't have yesterday (yes, I'm referring to myself the same as you would some naughty puppy...), I'm pretty sore today. Also, I didn't feel the best at the beginning of the week, I tried resting earlier in the week, but it didn't stick. I thought it was just about gone yesterday, but it's pretty much all the way back again. (The worst part is a sore constricted throat, with the feeling that something needs to cough up, but nothing comes.) I guess my consolation is that with 12 hours of work today, I'm not doing any tomorrow. (For those counting, that's 12 hours of work on a day off...)

The girls (meaning Mary, really) cleaned Ruth and Emma's room this afternoon. As a reward, I took them to eat at Chuck-A-Rama. Thursday is make your own taco day. Normally Chuck-A-Rama is ok, today the food was kind of not all that fresh. Even the stuff they brought from the kitchen seemed to be a little warmed over. Maybe we caught them on a bad day. The girls really like the slurpees out of there. They seemed to enjoy eating there, plus I didn't have to cook or clean up after it. Tomorrow I plan to get them to clean Ruth's bedroom by bribing them with pizza.

When we got home, I went to change Lily's diaper, I found all kinds of boiled egg. Down her shirt, in her diaper, that sort of thing. It must have gotten away from her at the restaurant. Not much else did...

Where'd we find this kid?

Lily

For a few days after Mom and Dad left, Lily went around the house saying "Grandma?" "Grandpa!" (Or at least her equivalent.) She was sure they had to be somewhere in the house. After her nap this afternoon, She started calling for Mom. She seemed slightly concerned that Tara still wasn't there by the time she woke up. We called Tara on the phone, and let Lily talk to her on the speaker phone, but Lily didn't seem to buy it. We'll see what happens tomorrow...

Tara Gone - Day 1

Tara left. She just walked right out of the house this morning.

At least that's the story I tried to pawn off at work this morning. No one really claimed to believe it. Tara's actually gone off with her sister to visit her brother in Oklahoma City. I'm here with the girls. There are bets on whether or not I will survive a week alone with the girls. There are also bets on whether or not the girls will survive a week alone with me...

I took Emma, Ruth, and Lily to work with me this morning. They were celebrating International Pancake Day today, the girls each got a pancake. Ruth took hers, tore it to pieces, and tried to stuff it into a tape drive on a very old Sun server one of my coworkers has on his desk. (I stopped her, mostly.) After the majority of my office got defaced, we went to go get milk and go home to get Mary. I fed them lunch, as soon as each child looked and/or claimed to be done with their lunch, they were shuttled off for nap time. I actually got 3 out of 4 of them to take naps. Emma was the holdout, but I put on a audiobook from the ipod for her in the room she was in, she at least didn't come out.

When Kate got home, I got them to clean the back room so they could get a surprise. The surprise was that they got to play outside for an hour. They seemed to enjoy being outside. (It's pretty much dried out around here now.) I took the opportunity to re-arraign the back room. Tara wasn't here to stop me.

Kate claims to have gotten her homework for the day done, I haven't followed up yet. I'm not sure if Mary did any homework. I wasn't here at all, so I have no idea what the bedtime routine tonight involved...

Missy and Steve came over tonight to watch the girls so I could go to my meetings, Missy ended up calling in the middle of the meetings. I thought that was weird, because she doesn't usually call, so I slipped out to call her back to see what was up. (Fire, blood, other bodily fluids, etc) Missy's question was: "How do you get the Wii turned on?" I'm ok with the question, the Stake Relief Society president was amused...

Long story short - Survival on both sides of the fence today...

Long receipts

I don't understand why receipts from stores are sometimes so long. It drives me crazy to go to the store to buy 20 cheese sticks, and have the cashier scan them each individually. The designers of the checkout system allowed for entering in multiples of items, why not scan one and multiply it by twenty. I suppose that would involve counting, which some people just don't want to do. Or they are really tired and don't want to get things wrong. Who knows.

2 weeks ago, I found myself at Sears with Tara, we bought 2 shirts for her, and a new winter coat for Kate. When the receipt printed, it just kept going and going. I thought it was a joke or some sort of problem with the cash register, but the girl took all the paper, folded it up, and stuck it in the bag.

I found these receipts today and measured them. It ended up being 41.5 inches long. For 3 items. I think Sears holds the record.

Processor reorg

We ordered a new processor for a server (capacity increase) a few weeks ago. We did it long enough ago that we thought the thing would be here before our outage last week, but it got lost in the shuffle and the order got delayed. The processor got to campus on Thursday.

I gave the end user the option of picking any time before this next Wednesday to schedule their downtime to get the processor in. (They really wanted it in, they have been having pretty severe performance problems.) They picked this morning, so I found myself in the Data center trying to get the databases down on the server at 5am this morning. It was very early, between sick kids, Netflix, and playing games, I only got about an hour sleep before that.
Anyhow, I got the job done, with the help of this processor installation tool, pictured here. The tool shipped with the processor. I saved them a few hundred dollars by doing the installation myself, rather than paying HP to do it. You'd think they would at least buy me breakfast to thank me for doing the work, but no, I had to go home and have shredded wheat with bananas. At least I got a cool little tool out of it that I may never use again. It's kid of fun to spin at least...

A couple of years ago, we decided that we needed to reorganize the processor layout in some of our really large servers. I volunteered to do that one too, but I didn't have one of these tools, when I got into the server, I found that I lack a "secure Torx" and a long allen wrench to get the job done. I ended up finding a long allen wrench over in my office, but I had to have one of the DBA's drive in with their tool set, they had some secure torx drivers. (Secure Torx is a torx with a little post in it. It's kind of annoying, actually.) Another time, when moving some processors around between some smaller machines, I had the processor come apart from the heat sink and fan. The glue was just melted, the thing just popped off without the processor. My jaw dropped open, I figured I had a $3000 problem on my hands. ($3000 at that time, anyway) I was able to remove the processor, and get the heat sink stuck back on. We haven't really had a problem with that processor in the machine it ended up in, so I guess I did it right.

I figure the same thing about today, the machines booted back up, and haven't crashed in the 9 hours since, so I must have done it right. I'm not sure HP would be happy to hear these stories, but here they are. (I think our field engineers would be ok with them, though. They are perfectly happy with me doing things like this, it means they don't have to come down to visit us in the middle of the night...)

Game Time

Age of Empires

Dad and I were the only ones who showed up this morning, besides Emma. We played 2 vs 6 hard computers.

There was quite a bit of lag during the game, I'm not sure where that came from. The computers rose up to overthrow their masters. I'm only glad they didn't send anything back in time to prevent me from starting the game in the first place once we got into it, that would have been awkward...

Friday Night Game night

Tonight we had Sam, Tisha, and Amber over to play Ticket to Ride. Sam ended up winning, beating me by 1 point. Nice job Sam.

For dessert, we had apple pie. I decided to put caramel on the plate, with burnt almond fudge ice cream. (My mom bought the ice cream, but didn't take it home with her, so we used it.) The caramel took a long time to melt in the little double boiler I made, so I stuck it in the oven, but turned the oven on too high, which was nearly a mistake. The caramel ended up being a mistake anyway, because we ended up with giant blobs of hard caramel on the plates.

The pie was good, I got to have some tonight, the first real treat since Thanksgiving. How I made the pie:

Ingredients:

Pie shells from the store
3 apples, 5 different varieties. (There were 5 different varieties on sale this week at the store.)
sugar (enough to cover the apples)
lemon juice or Tara's fruit freshener
cinnamon
nutmeg
allspice
butter pats

Directions:

Peel, core, and slice all apples. Stick in a bowl, add sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice to bowl, mix all around to cover completely with the stuff. Add the lemon juice (or Tara's fruit freshener) to keep the apples from going brown. Toss apples into a colander, place over a bowl. Allow apples to sit for 90 minutes, the apples will reduce, apple juice will drip out of the colander into the bowl. After the time is up, take the juice, and boil it down until it gets tacky.

Put pie shell in a pie tin or pie glass or whatever. (I looked around for a tart pan but couldn't find one this week.) Fill the shell with apples. When I say fill it, I mean get as many apples as physically possible in the thing. Put the butter pats on top, place another pie shell on the top, seal the edges. Cut slits in the pie shell, brush the top of the shell with the apple drippings that you boiled down.

Cook for 45 minutes on 425 degrees. Allow to cool for as long as you possibly can. (I only made it 2 hours...)

Back to work

Today is the first day back to the office for me since last Tuesday. I ended up only claiming 2 vacation days because of all the work I ended up doing "on vacation." Despite all that work, I still had a large list of things to do today when I got down to it. I actually ended up with 23 different things of varying priorities and difficulties. By the end of the day, I had only gotten 9 of them done. (3 had high priority, and 1 took a while.) This leaves me with a list of 14 before I even start the day tomorrow. Fun.

My only consolation is that one of the items on my list today ended up involving lunch at Ruby River. There are some benefits sometimes...

Dinner recipe - 21 Feb 2008

There was some talk on the rarely updated family blog a little while back about doing a family cookbook. I might have deflated the idea a little because of the cooking style used in this house. If I ever use a recipe, I never stay strict to it. (See last Sunday's broccoli soup...)

Part of the problem is that I just take what we've got. I see it in the fridge or cupboard, and think, "why not?" and toss it in. Measuring is overrated. Just put in what you think you want.

Here's tonight's recipe -

Ingredients:

• olive oil
• butter
• chopped garlic
  
• some onion (chopped)
• some green bell pepper (chopped)
• some orange bell pepper (chopped)
• some yellow bell pepper (chopped)
• some red bell pepper (chopped)
• shredded carrot
• precooked rice (leftover from the fridge in this case)
• ground beef
• corn (frozen)
• salt
• pepper
• ground mustard
  

Directions:

Pot with cover. Add olive oil, onion, garlic, and butter to pot. Turn stovetop on medium high. Allow onion to start sautéeing. Add all chopped peppers and carrots. Put cover on pot, start defrosting ground beef. (It's in your freezer, right?) When the meat is mostly defrosted, stir vegetables, then drop meat in. Cover and let cook until the meat looks to be cooked. Start chopping meat into pieces, stir until meat is browned. Add salt, pepper, and mustard.

Lower temperature to medium low, add rice and corn. Cover, allow to cook some, stir a couple of times. Lower temperature to simmer, let sit for a couple of minutes until the frozen corn gets heated up, but not all that soft. (This will also make sure you don't cook it so longer that the rice burns to the bottom of the pot...) Add more salt and pepper to taste.

Serve with tortilla strips. (I use them as edible silverware.)

That's all I've got. Who is disappointed?

Afternoon naps

I've been "on vacation" for the past week, whatever that means. (It means only 20 or so hours of work in the last seven days...) A couple of days I tried afternoon naps:

• Sunday - I laid down at 1pm, Ruth came in and said "Dad, are you asleep?" I didn't answer so she kept asking until I did. She also climbed up on the bed with me to make sure I was awake. I ended up getting up, and got a little sleep later when Ruth was distracted.
• Monday - I worked all night Sunday night, in the late morning Monday I could not stay awake at all. I don't count Monday's nap as a real nap, since it was total blackout. I hear there was all kinds of noise all around while I was asleep, but I can't confirm it.
• Today - I tried taking a nap, but my phone kept ringing. I would fall asleep, the phone would ring. Then I would fall asleep, and the phone would ring again...

I guess I will have to go back to work tomorrow, where I can get a proper afternoon nap...

Driving in the car pool lane

AKA "Why I don't commute"

This morning (6:30 "boy it's early" am) I took Grandma Oaks, Amy and Darren to the airport. I thought traffic wouldn't be too terribly bad being that early, but as soon as we hit the car pool lane, we ended up with a never ending stream of knuckleheads behind us. Several decided it was a good idea to tailgate in the lane. These were both people who didn't actually have more than one person in the car. They seem to have figured that the car pool lane was a good open place to go 90 miles an hour. Unfortunately for them, I don't get intimidated, they ended up having to merge out to pass.

After them, the next guy came up on us, and kept flashing his brights to try to get us out of the HOV lane so he could pass. I didn't flinch. After 4 or 5 attempts, he gave up and pulled out of the HOV lane and went around us.

Now, I wasn't exactly going slow. I don't know what the hurry was for everyone this morning, but I had cruise on and paid them little heed. It was just kind of odd. It's a little like there are now roaming packs of idiot drivers wandering around out there looking for trouble on the freeway. Too bad I'm only on the freeway here a few times a year...

New faucet

Last night I was supposed to be at work doing some patching from 10pm to about 2 or 3. I was there until 8am, but it wasn't my fault, and this is not the topic of this post.
When I got home from work, Drew was in the kitchen with Dad already pulling the faucet out. I had looked at it several months ago, but didn't put enough effort into it, and didn't figure out how to get it off. Drew and Dad made short work of it.

We went and got a new faucet and disposal, and Dad put them in this morning. I was trying to help, but I was really tired. When it was time to go back to the hardware store to get the bendy collapsible pipe, I was too tired to go, and went to bed. Dad did the rest of the installation without my interference.

The new faucet is really nice. It's got lots more pressure than the old one, and as an added bonus, the hot side and cold side are not crossed in this installation. (It was backwards from normal in the old one.) In the next couple of days, I will lay down a new shelf under the sink... I'm sure the disposal is very nice, I just haven't started pouring things down it yet to see what it can do. (Plus it's not like it's a paper shredder...)

Wedding stuff

Missy got married yesterday. (To Steve.) Before the wedding I had a great idea for the reception. I made them a new blog, took my camera & laptop, and took pictures of people and had them write Missy and Steve a message. People seemed to take to it ok, but they seemed easily entertained. You can see the posts yourself.

When I got to the church for the reception, there were some guys playing ball in there. I walked in and told them they were done. They talked about how they knew about the primary activity, were not bothering them, and had talked to Sister Boren. They knew a wedding was happening, said they had talked to someone and would be helping to set up for the wedding.

I told them again they were done and wouldn't be helping, one guy had turned to look at me, then turned around and said "What's the score?" They figured it was 7 to 5, and kept playing. It was at this point I decided they wouldn't be even bouncing the ball another time, much less playing more. I walked over, and told them they were done, and needed to leave now. Some dude turned to protest, I didn't let him and told them again they were done and wouldn't be playing basketball again. Some other guy started getting excited about things, wanted to raise a stink. They spent about another 45 seconds protesting until it was perfectly clear they had to leave. A few of them were upset, one tried to demand for an apology. He didn't get his apology.

Now, I was perfectly ready to use any means necessary to remove them from the building. We've had problems at the Stake center with ball players muscling people out, not scheduling the building, being there all times of the day and night, that sort of thing. There was no way they were going to bully us into letting them stick around while we tried to set up. We had something like $1000 in food, and $10,000 in electronic equipment there, both of which didn't really coexist well with basketball. After the ball players left, Drew didn't want to commit to what he would have helped out with had a fight started, but I'm sure had they started a fight, the basketball hoops in the Stake center would have been taken down, and everyone would have lost the privilege going forward. That's how close things are now.

It worked out ok, I let their Bishop know I kicked them out, the reception went well, from what I could tell.

The Age of Empires Festival

We played Asian Dynasties a bunch yesterday. We ended up playing a whole bunch of "King of the Hill" games, where you have to take control of a fort for certain amount of time. We kept playing, I kept winning, I was waiting for someone to beat me before we switched to a different mode. They didn't, so we finally gave up and started playing against expert level computers, which we also beat.

"King of the Hill" mode was good for a couple of reasons. First, the games were fairly short, you could pop off a few of them in not too much time. Second, I kept winning...

Left to my own devices

I went to the doctor yesterday. He's letting me off the diet to eat as I see fit. What he really wants is for me to pay attention to what I eat, and look for triggers for the pain to see what causes it to get worse. (Food, environment, weather, etc.)

He said I should be careful about how I use sugar, but it likely wasn't necessary to stay completely off anymore, and I could regulate it myself. He thought I should take it easy to start.

So I'm not out eating doughnuts right and left, even though I've seen several good looking ones today, but I tried a little sugar free ice cream yesterday, and a little sugar free frozen yogurt today. (I couldn't have the artificial sweeteners before, either.) It might be a while still before I try breads...

2008 Goal Update

1. Post a goal update to the blog at least twice a month. 3 updates - Right on schedule.
   
2. Don't let a post go by without some progress to report. You be the judge.
3. Stain the play set. Spring.
4. Finish the retaining wall. Spring.
5. Finish the mission journal. No progress.
   
6. Build a bunk bed for Emma and Ruth. Late Spring.
   
7. Stay under the 210 weight. Current weight - 204,6. I went to the doctor yesterday, and wore my big heavy coats with lots of stuff in the pockets, just so we wouldn't have to talk about my current weight. There is nothing wrong with my current weight, it was just that it was 7:30am, so I wasn't firing on all cylinders, and it seemed like a good idea at the time...
8. Go to the temple at least once a month. We went to the temple today, courtesy of Missy, who is getting married tomorrow.
   
9. Take Tara somewhere for our 10th wedding anniversary. No trip picked or booked yet.
   
10. Read 18 books. Zero completed, but I'm working on several.
    
11. Plant something other than tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, green beans and peas. I thought about buying some tomatoes from Burpee.com this week, I decided it was too early...

Restaurant Review

Tonight my Mom was going to make Chicken, Steak, rice, and broccoli for dinner, but Amy and Drew's families bailed out, and took Peggy and Adam with them, so Mom decided to hold the food for Sunday. (The fact that the meat still had to defrost at 3pm factored in...)

We ended up getting a babysitter, and going to Golden Corral. There were 7 of us, all adults, and the place was packed, so they were in "please wait to be seated mode". We got taken to a table by a wall, but it was really a 6 seat table, not a 7 seat table. They had pulled a chair over to the side, like they would for a high chair or something. I nearly went after them to refuse the table, but several members of our party started making comments as if they didn't want me doing that, so I sat down.

The place was busy, which is good for Golden Corral, which is good because the food is rotated out faster. But not the Fried Okra. People must not have been eating that stuff, because it didn't taste all that fresh.

When we were ready to go, I asked the server if he was going to give me a balloon, since they made me sit on the end like I was some little kid. He refused my request. He said "No, you're fine. You don't need a balloon." I guess that's that.

Playing the Wii

I got a notification (www.itracker.com) on Tuesday morning that the Walmart 10 miles North of us had Wiis in stock. One of the guys at work went up with us to get one. The employees said they got 64 of the things sometime Monday night, they had 16 left when we got there to get ours.

I got mine, Karl got his, there were about 3 people behind us lined up to get theirs. They sold something like 50 of them in 12 hours. I guess that's why you can't ever find them.

We got an extra remote, and bought Mario/Sonic Olympic Games. We've been playing a lot since we got it at lunchtime yesterday.

Things that have been learned:

• All the girls can beat me in boxing. I'm not sure why, really.
• If I could keep from swinging at every one of Mary's pitches, I would be able to win the baseball game just on walks. (She pitches into the dirt.)
• Some of those games wear you out pretty quick. Tara went 3 rounds of boxing with me today, and it wiped her out. She ended up having to take a nap.
• We need more remotes.
  
• You can make just about anyone into a Mii, and make a fairly recognizable likeness of them.
  

I made Ruth, Emma, and Mary make their beds today before they could start watching the game, and made them all clean before playing, but I must have missed Kate's homework, she didn't get it done today. (It's not due until Friday.)

We'll have to make some sort of structure for rules of use of the thing.

New widgets

Tara has started visiting some of the blogs of her friends, one of them had a counter on it from a place called NeoWORX. I went to the site, they have some pretty cool little widgets there. I am currently testing out a counter for visits per city, it's on the left. I am also testing a number of "Visits per country" widgets at the bottom. They are bound to be much less interesting, as there is a low rate of non-US visits to this blog, that's the reason they are at the bottom.

I wish the counters would let me upload my Google Analytics data into it, I have several years worth of visit data in there that I could add to the counters, but it looks like it starts from this point in time. If I get bored of these things, I will remove them...

Wii

There haven't been any Wii's around here for a while. Stores get them from time to time, but you basically have to get lucky to find on in stock. We think a Wii would be fun. Tara wants to do the boxing. (I guess she has some aggression to work out.)

Today I found out that the University bookstore has entered into an agreement to sell Wii's. They are currently out of stock. (Of course.) I was over there this afternoon to patch their servers, and talked to the guys in the computer department. They have a waiting list for the consoles, but it turns out no one knows about it. I am now #9 on the list. I figure a waiting list of a Wii, that might come in a week, or might come in 9 months, is better than never finding one in any of the stores ever...

Sometimes you just have to go without the thanks

When I started working as a student employee on campus, we used to print all the administrative reports in the computer room on a giant Xerox printer, and delivered reams and reams of stuff all over campus in the morning. We also did lots of microfilming of reports.

As we started replacing our mainframe with HPUX machines, I kept suggesting that we start printing directly to these office's printers directly. (I got tired of delivering boxes of reports, and seeing the last batch I brought over unopened.) We eventually got everyone to switch to printing directly. This was good for the end users too, they would get the print outs right away.

For the past couple of years, I have been trying to get us out of the "printing from Unix" business altogether. At this point, I don't see why people are submitting ad hoc print jobs to print from the machines. Most of the applications are web apps, I don't see why they don't just print locally from their browser. It should be easy to switch the application, but people are slow to change when there isn't some "we're getting rid of the Mainframe, this is how things are going to be" edict for us to give.

3 years ago, I made all the printers we print to print via DNS names. I got tired of IP addresses changing, and them wanting me to change the print queues on tons of machines. Last year, I created a Unix print gateway, all our machines send their jobs to the print gateway, and if a printer needs to be changed, I only have to do it in one place.

Last Friday, the purchasing office moved their office. In the move, they got a new printer. Their CSR decided the printer needed a new IP address and DNS name. The old printer disappeared. On Monday I didn't show up to work. (I didn't even get out of bed until 11am.) It turns out the purchasing office discovered they couldn't print purchase orders sometime on Monday. They opened an issue, but didn't get the information where it needed to go. On Tuesday, they made a federal case out of it. One of the guys in our office showed then how to print locally, without having the print from the servers themselves, but not before someone convinced the Operations staff to try to 'fix' the print queue by modifying it. Unfortunately, the CSR that talked them into making the changes was going on his knowledge of Linux, and didn't know anything about HPUX printing. They didn't fix the problem, they just messed things up worse.

Last night, my director very politely asked me when I would get a chance to fix the print queue. I told him I would get around to it sometime today. (He was ok with this answer.) This morning when I looked at it, the old queue had about 40 print jobs, which the purchasing department still wanted printed, but I couldn't use the existing queue, which had been damaged. The old queue also used the old driver, the new printer wasn't compatible. I was able to create a new queue, and preserve the print jobs. It wasn't all that hard to do. We didn't really get a thank you or anything.

Later in the day, and thank you came in from a couple of people, it was directed at someone else, it was forwarded by the guy who got it. I don't need the thanks, really, but I could do without the federal case about a printing problem. The least they could do is drop off some donuts. I can't have donuts, but at least everyone else in the place would be able to...

Super Tuesday

Tuesday was the Western States Primary out here. The Republican and Democratic parties paid for the election, so the county had to consolidate the polling places down to lots less of them. We had to go to a different school this time, they put 6 precincts together. (We usually only have 2 in our place.)

Since I was the poll manager, I was in charge of the place. (This is how I like it. In charge, ready to fix whatever happens, that sort of thing. I really don't ever want to be working an election, being a poll worker, having problems, but some other poll manager doing things wrong. That would drive me crazy.)

Anyhow, things were kind of crazy. Lots of people were coming to vote, lots of people were coming to the school but were supposed to be somewhere else, and 3 of the 4 polls workers were little old ladies that really weren't cut out to be there for 15 hours that day.

Having said that, we were able to keep our wait times fairly low. Our longest wait was 20 minutes or so, for the last 3 hours, the wait was usually only 10 or 15 minutes. The secret is to have someone one the registration book that can get to the right name quickly, and get the job done fast and consistent. Putting someone slow on the thing spells disaster. We were completely done with our results back to the county by 9pm, I hear the places around us had very long lines still when we dropped our stuff off. 3 hour lines or longer wasn't an anomaly. This is unacceptable to me. I spent the better part of the last 90 minutes the polls were opened going up and down the line, making sure people were in the right place, making sure they had the right information, that sort of thing. This helped our lines stay down. We had 5 voting machines, we couldn't keep them filled all the time, the bottleneck was still at the registration table, but we also didn't have any problems with the machines or people using the machines, except for one old lady who didn't press the "casts ballot" button. She was hard of hearing, didn't understand what was wrong, and her husband had a hard time explaining it. He finally got through by shouting at her (They were both old and hard of hearing, he wasn't shouting in a mean way) and taking her finger to point at the "cast ballot" button.

I talked to some people the next day about their experiences voting, some of them had problems voting because of the lines. We had one dude show up at our place that was ticked off that the wait in line was going to be 15 minutes. This was unacceptable to him, he stormed off in a huff. I didn't feel sorry for him, really. I basically told the people at work that if they wanted to avoid having voting problems in the future, they should sign up to be poll workers, or better yet, poll managers. The problem is that a lot of the current workers are not capable of doing the job efficiently, and new blood is needed in the process. If you are out there, and had a bad experience voting, contact the county clerk (your local county clerk). Tell he or she that you want to sign up to work the elections at your local polling place. I am sure they could use your help.

There might be problems with the current election process, and there might be problems in other polling locations, but at least I can make sure that my polling place runs things correctly and efficiently...

Restaurant Review

KFC - Hot Wings

Last week, we got an order of hot wings from KFC. I was disappointed, they weren't really all that hot. (Some of them were downright plain.) On Monday, I posted a query on their site asking about their Hot Wings, I wanted to know if that was how they were intended to taste, or if we missed something. (I let them know if that was what they intended, we wouldn't be buying the things again.)

On Tuesday, the manager of the store called me. We talked about the things, it turned out that there was supposed to be some sort of sauce for us to use if we really wanted the full taste. (We didn't know.) He insisted that I let him send a coupon for another set of Hot Wings, so I let him. The coupon came yesterday. It's for another 20 piece order, he also wrote down for us to also get lots of sauce and 3 cookies. I'm not sure where the cookies come in to play, but we'll take them. Stay tuned to see how it goes...

I was awake the entire time

Tonight we went to see "A Midsummer Night's Dream." It being Chinese New Year, we went out to Panda Express for dinner before. The employees there didn't seem to know it was Chinese New Year, they just knew it was busy all day...

We had Orange Chicken and Firecracker chicken. It was good, Tara burned her mouth on a pepper. Although it was good, I maybe shouldn't have eaten it, I'm starting to brew a fairly good gut ache at this point, I will likely pay for my crimes tomorrow...

The play was interesting, their vision for the play was to set it in the 1800's in South America, something about that native Brazilians vs. their conquerors. There was lots of dancing, the guy that played Mustard Seed did all kinds of flips, and handstands, and all kinds of stuff like that. They did a pretty good job. (Tara figures this is one of Shakespeare's strangest play, since everyone has a different way to interpret the thing.)

We went with Kirk E, his wife was in Chicago. He ended up leaving at intermission. They always leave at intermission.

Funeral for a Prophet

President Hinckley's funeral was this morning. (For those who don't know, he was the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and God's prophet on the earth.) I've been thinking the past couple of days about some of the things he's taught in the past few years.

President Hinckley has been the prophet since I was on my mission. That seems to be longer and longer ago all the time. He was always positive, had a good outlook towards everything. (one of the things he talked about was how we were generally doing well, but needed to do just a little better.) I remember one time he was talking about how busy everyone's life was, the idea was that he was going to announce some sort of shortened meetings or something. In the end he told us all to not shortchange Family Home Evening. He never seemed to be one to compromise things. He was always one who was not afraid to speak out about what we believe. Hopefully I've listened to some of what he's said in the past few years...

When we finished our current Data Center, he came down to take a tour through it. Engineers were persona non grata at the event. Sorrel and I had been hunting around in our building that morning, and found an old set of disk drives out of a mainframe. (I had been up all night before working on a server that had gone down, and after getting things done went wandering as a diversion.) We got the idea to take it down to the Data Center that morning, give to Kelly, and tell him we were there to install it in something. (The idea was mostly sparked from the fact that they didn't want us there.) When we got the the Data Center, the church security guys were outside with the cars, just hanging around. They asked us what we were up to, we told them, they asked if we really thought that would work, but let us go down. We got in the elevator and went down, when the elevator opened, Max was there to intercept us. We didn't get any further. I think Max thought it was funny, but he still didn't let us in. If only they didn't have that camera system down there. When we got back outside, the security guys said "You didn't get in, did you?" They seemed amused. I went home and went to bed.

Anyhow, it's a comforting thought that the Priesthood is organized in a way that there is always someone to serve as another moves on...

Age of Empires

We missed Tom and Amy again this morning, not sure what happened to them, but Dad, Dave, and Drew played against me in a game.

I was able to knocked Drew and Dave out of their first town centers, but didn't knock them out of the game, so they stuck around. Eventually the 3 of them figured out that they should all attack me at the same time, which would have knocked me out completely if they had stuck with it for 2 more waves than they did.

In the end, they were able to knock me out, but it took 3 hours...

I thought I had made an excessive number of Redcoats, but Dave had an equally excessive number of "dudes on horses".

Friday Game Night

Tonight we have Sam, Sybelle, Jason, and Natalie over to play Outburst. We ended up playing 3 teams of 2. Sam and Sybelle won, but I think it was rigged, because we didn't get to do the category "Famous cartoon pairs".

I made Fried wontons for dessert, I made 4 different ones: Caramel filled, banana chocolate, raspberry preserve, and jumbleberry. I hear they were pretty good, they were served on top of chocolate with strawberry ice cream.

Jason and Natalie seemed to be in good spirits still, their little boy is still gaining weight, he's over 4 pounds now.