… but here, it’s always wintertime, baby.

Yeah, you’ve probably seen SnowCraft before, but it’s still fun.

Okay, it’s quittin’ time.

“Depend on the predictability and steadiness of life to support you.”

Pardon me while I laugh my ass off, folks.

Amy’s college roommate, Monica, said to me this weekend, “Oh, so you’re one of those people who thrives on always being busy?” Amy chirped, “Yeah, without a to-do list that he’s always behind on, Geof would never get anything done.” This week, so far, has been proof of that. Never mind that I’ve been without my truck for over two weeks, and that I probably could have gotten my stuff moved before now had I had the truck–I’d probably have put it off a bit myself to do other things. Todd’s right about that–now that we have the apartment cleared, we can concentrate on the house. We have a deadline–August 15th–and the only thing I don’t like about that deadline is that it’s not unreasonable enough.

Let me pass on two lessons for the day: one, when you agree to a schedule, don’t slip it back three weeks at the drop of a hat; two, when you screw up something, report it as early as possible.

F— it, I tempted the Rain Gods by washing my rental today, so mowing is going down. I’m going to sit down and watch the Reds game and drink beer. Screw being responsible.

You know, about the second week of August, I realized I’d made a mistake in selecting an apartment. Don’t get me wrong–I loved living up on Monte Sano. [You've heard me babble on and on about this before.] But I made a mistake in taking the smallest bedroom in that apartment. If money had been no object, we should have rented two apartments, side by side, and that way, we might have had enough room for all of us.

However, with much help from Sarah and Todd, the moving is done and the cleaning is complete. Blake just came in from work and handed me his keys; I’ll take off at lunch and go turn them in sometime today. That apartment is cleaner than it was when we got the keys–and I’m really not kidding. Todd gets the props for that.

If you think I’m done, well, hell no! I should take a photo of the pile of boxes. I haven’t earned the nickname “wonton” [for having "wonton of stuff"] for nothing. The garage is full of boxes and such, and hey, there’s still a lot of exterior work to do [painting, board replacement] here at Club Todder III.

But man, it’s good to be out of there…

Okay, so I don’t want to fool with it, but I’m just going to pot the “whine” gain down to nothing and go on and get the rest of my stuff moved. If I could have moved around a bit more today, rather than just sit here at my desk, I’d probably not be so stiff. Oooooh, look, Advil. That should solve that problem.

My wrangling with the schedules is done for the day. The work I put in on them this weekend was very worth it–the schedule slips that are caused by our customer are now very clearly presented, and that’s a very important thing. It’s one thing for the Boeing POC and us to say that Boeing is the problem; it’s another to have it graphically on the schedule.

Of course, I still haven’t gotten to meet with the person I should have met with yesterday. The stalling and delaying is somewhat familiar, and all the more frustrating because of that. However, this is work, and we’ve got to get this done. The schedules are now being read, though, and of that, I am thankful.

How scary is it that August starts on Thursday? Pardon me, but where the heck did my summer go?

Again, m4d pr0pz to Todd, without whom I’d be wholly screwed on the moving front. Damn, I miss my truck. Of course, the Semi is so big that we got two loads’ worth of my truck in his.

I really need to repair my bed. The bottom frame’s cross-piece is starting to get stripped out. A couple wooden golf tees, some wood glue, and a drill will fix that up quite quickly. Tonight, however, it’s getting the last few bits of stuff out of the apartment and to the new place for all of us [mostly me, but Blake has a few things there] and cleaning it. Todd’s done the bulk of the cleaning already, and I’ll get the vacuuming on my end done and mop up the hall bath, and we should be good. Sure, I’m on about five hours’ sleep, but when you play Mr. Last MInute …

Todd has started calling me “wonton”, because as he says, “You have wonton of stuff.” Well, not really, but I do have a lot of stuff. And it was crammed into a very small bedroom. Here, I got lotsa lotsa room! Verra nice.

Mmmmm … I better go think about getting the laundry out over at the house and getting to work. I so want to call in sick or something like that, but that’s unethical and painful, especially considering that someone else who does Boeing Status Tuesday was out sick last week, which made it hard on the rest of us. I can’t do that to them guilt-free.

I swear, it’s not enough to tell some people what you need them to do in order for you to help them with their job. I think you need to write it on their hands and their foreheads [in reverse] in permanent ink so they can’t help but realize what you’re asking.

Because of that, the time I spent up here yesterday is pretty much for naught, because the party in question isn’t ready to meet with me today so we can work towards resolving the situation that’s causing everyone up here to have a lot of frustration and me to be up here and working on this stuff rather than being at the apartment helping Todd get my stuff out the door [or, hell, get the kitchen cleaned up or any of the other things that Todd did while I was at work this weekend].

I’ve just about done all I can do today, and unless my boss strenuously objects, I’m going to take off in a little bit and go grab a few loads of stuff and dump them off at the Outhouse. I can’t get the remaining big furniture into the car, but I can get it disassembled and into the living room where I can find some truck [Todd's or a rental] to put it in and cart it home.

… I spent a lot of time at work yesterday. Far too much, actually. Spent a little at Amy and Jeff’s for dinner, got to meet Amy’s old college roommate from Hendrix.

To put it simple, we’re having to make some mid-course corrections in how we manage our various flight hardware projects for Boeing. What we’ve been doing just hasn’t been working–at least in terms of trying to get things done in a timely manner. As I’m part of the project office for this effort, I’ve got to try to re-finagle our schedules and get them back together so we’re representative of the effort and can try to manage some of the resource headaches we’ve been having.

The biggest headaches, of course, aren’t our people. At present, we only have one Boeing and one government quality person assigned to this project. If they’re out watching testing, we’re dead in the water on getting inspections on anything else. One of the things that we have to do is get quality scheduled a bit better. This means that we have to drill down another level on the schedules, something that I suggested that we do a few months ago when I started doing this. That suggestion was pushed aside then because it wasn’t really necessary; now that it is, we’re paying for it.

I went back to work early this morning to do the video for church. [Must get PowerPoint on this laptop!] I came back from church and promptly sacked out for about three hours. I feel very guilty about not helping with stuff around the house today, but I was fighting falling asleep the entire drive home. I wouldn’t have been any help around here. And yes, I still need to go back to work sometime tonight.

Well, today sucked. Tomorrow will suck, too.

Schedule hell I am in, yes. Work now means less work later, I think. Of course, this severely impinges moving plans. Dammit.

Last night, as I was heading home in the rental chariot, the radio quit working. Just … dead. Nothing on the LCD at all. No sound out of the speakers. The rest of the car was running okay, though, so I kept on driving it.

I got to a stop sign and stopped, and the car just … died. Nothing. I tried to re-start it, and it was like the starter had been pulled from the car. A passer-by–a nice black man, going against all hearsay that there are problems with race relations in the northern parts of Madison County–helped to push me off to the side. I called Todd, who was home, and asked him to come get me if he could. I got back in the car and, on a lark, tried to start it. It worked, so I called Todd and told him I’d keep on coming.

As I drove the last mile home, I called the rental company. They said, “Can you come bring it in?” When I consider that it was 5:30 p.m., I was halfway across the county, and they closed at 6:00, I said, “I’ll just come in tomorrow morning.” I did, but when I woke up this morning, I had a phone call from the boss-man … so this little post is made from work. Who knows how late I’ll be here today? Oh well, they pay me to be here …

Our customer’s customer tells our customer that they suck.

He walks out of the room.

Our customer has fun passing blame.

Us dumb subcontractors sit quietly in the corner and don’t speak unless spoken to.

I have fun hiding behind the monitor while running the slides so no one can see my reactions to things.

I then get to deliver the best one-liner of the day:

Ed: “Geof, I need you to take a look at this schedule for me and tell me what you think it looks like.” He hands me the schedule.

Me: (pause) “Shit.” The entire table [thankfully, all TBE people] laugh uproariously.

Okay, this is just weird.

Of course, I’ve always preferred mutts to pure-breds. Buttons, the family dog when I was growing up, was the sweetest doggie in all the wide world, and she was part poodle … and the rest, we’re not real sure about. Bubba is half Yorkshire terrier and half Maltese, and while he can get in trouble from time to time, he’s still a lovable lump of lard and fluff. [My evil plan to kidnap him the next time I'm home in Tennessee will probably cause my mother to write me out of the family will.]

But ordering your dogs? I guess I’m just a pound person, myself. Of course, Bubba came from a breeder who cross-bred her dogs every few litters just to keep things interesting. A Yorkie would piss me off, and a Maltese would be a useless flufflump, but Bubba, he’s damn cool.

Of course, reading that story makes me want to get a dog, but why? I’ve got Nanook and Dakota and Hayden to play with.

I am like an elephant. I do not forget. I am strong with the Visor!

Of course, after this summer, the list of people whose anniversaries I have to remember gets longer. Bless the Visor, it has a better memory than I do …

-sigh- This whole saga is really beginning to frustrate me. I think my biggest frustration is with the rental car I’m driving, which I patently do not like. But hey, it’s a temporary solution, and really is just a thorn in my side.

My insurance company is convinced that my truck is worth $6000. Kelly Blue Book agrees with them. The collision repair shop and I do not, but they’re not interested in our opinion, really. So, Darlene isn’t a total loss like we thought it would be. Still, it is $3200 worth of damage, and that’s an awfully high number, in my mind.

I just talked it over with my parents [well, mainly with Dad--Mom, for the first time in living memory, said, "I don't have any advice"--causing me to nearly have a seizure from pure shock], and Dad counseled me that, even with his proclivities towards trucks, he would go ahead and authorize the repairs, hold on to the truck, and see what happens. Maybe there’s more damage than originally considered–who knows, until you really begin to tear the thing apart and check it out?
(more…)

Now, don’t ask me where I got these [okay, I'll tell you ... one of my guys took them and had me off-load them to my machine so that they could be emailed around ... and hey, it's not like some Boeing guy won't put funny captions on these and send them around the office ... wait, I didn't say that], but I have cool [in my opinion] photos of flight hardware that we’re building for ISS.

Included in these photos are a couple of astronauts. Since I didn’t take them, I didn’t meet them. That makes nearly three years at this company without having the pleasure [and pain] of dealing with crew. I’m not 100% sure which project this is, but it’s bound to be one of our FRAM FSE projects. Anyway, on to the pictures.

I have seven pictures to show you, and since I’m feeling singularly unwitty today, I won’t provide captions. Provide your own in the comments if you wish, at your own risk:

That last one is especially ripe for commentary, as is the fourth one, although you can’t see all of the Boeing guy’s face to give him a thought balloon. [I could, since I know him, but I won't. It'd be my luck that he'd Google for his own name, this site would turn up, and then he'd yell at me. ]

… makes me happy. I love being a deviant little git.

/me holds his hands together, palms touching, and drums his fingers together

Eeeeeeeeexcellent.