Work and Non-Work

Latest on the computer saga: Sheryl called 1-800-2-MAXTOR to find out WTF was up with my second hard drive. She says they told her what to do to make it go, so she’s going to try it tonight and hope it works. See, fdisk was saying the partitions were non-DOS partitions, which makes things difficult. Hopefully this portion of the general computer stupidity will be solved soon. Let’s hear it for Maxtor Tech Support!

I’ve discovered the joy of SHOUTcast, now that I don’t have my many-GB collection of mp3’s to keep me company. My current favorite (when normalradio isn’t on, of course) is Club 977: The 80’s Channel. Right now it’s being a little bitch, losing Glenn Fry’s signal, but this is the first time I’ve had any load problems with it after a couple days of listening. Great selection of tunes, no repeats, wide variety of genres and levels of popularity. I’ve heard songs on here that I never even considered downloading and had successfully forgotten about for years. Not to mention songs I’ve never even heard before. Check it out.

Aaron’s doing so well with his guitar-playing! I’m excited for him. Today when I came home early from work, before he left, he showed me how much he could play of Wish You Were Here. I’m quite impressed, considering that he has about zero musical background… not including that summer he played trumpet in the backyard facing toward the turnpike in 4th or 5th grade.

Aaron also got home early last night — 2:00am instead of 3:30 or four. I shouldn’t have been awake, but I was, so I got to see Aaron for a few minutes before I went to sleep. You know, part of me wishes I could get to see him more often, but part of me thinks that maybe having schedules like this helps us to appreciate the time we do have together, instead of taking it for granted. I mean, I always get so excited when I can spend time with Aaron during the week. Sure, we’re still newlyweds, but we’ve been together for over seven years total, and living together for a year and a half. How many people out there have been with someone that long and still get all giggly and smiley when they spend time together? I think it’s cool.

At work, our supervisor has instituted a new schedule of mail pickups. See, usually the courier shows up with the mail from the Toledo post office between 9:30 and 10:15am. It takes about half an hour to open all 80-some-odd bags with mail in them, and another few minutes to get some work ready for me, Rama, and Loni (or, this week, Andrew) to process. So, we don’t usually get started with our day until at least 10:30am. It’s a good thing we do have such long Mondays, since the rest of the week usually consists of 7-hour days, give or take a half-hour lunch.

The new and improved plan means a much earlier day for everyone. The couriers head up to Toledo bright and early, to get a run of mail to us by 8am. The preppers open the mail and get the heaviest accounts ready to process. We start processing the work at 9am, what there is of it, and the second, normal run of mail shows up between 9:30 and 10:00am. But that’s an hour of work we got done earlier—so even if we have to stay and scratch our asses to get a full 8 hours in, it means staying until 6:00 or 6:30, not some retarded time like 7:30 on a Friday. I’m OK with the earlier start time. I’m sure Loni will be too, when she comes back next week.

Oh, did I mention? Loni’s out on vacation because her daughter-in-law had her third child. Loni’s first granddaughter, out of five grandkids total. Her daughter, Maria, lives in Indiana with her husband Mike, and they have two young boys. Loni’s son, David (aka Crockett) lives around BG with his wife Jolene, and they also have two young boys, in addition to little Lena. So, Loni took the week off of work to help Crockett and Jolene with the boys, and to spend massive quantities of time with her new grandbaby.

Aaron’s massive vacation extravaganza starts in a couple weeks or so. Four weeks straight. No work. Dang. So… this weekend, we’re going to the Taste Of Cleveland on Saturday to eat lots of food and watch P-Funk for $7.00, then next weekend is Black Swamp (which I assume Amy is still coming to…?), and the following weekend is the beginning of Aaron’s massive vacation. I still have about a week total left of vacation, personal, and floating holidays, so I’m planning to take some of that time off to spend with Aaron. This is going to be so cool.