Yesterday, I went out to my car and it didn't start.
I put in the key and there was no chime telling me that my seatbelt wasn't fastened. There were no dashboard lights. I tried to start the car and there wasn't even a click. Nothing. It was DEAD.
I had no idea why. None. I called upstairs (I was at work) and asked my brother if he had jumper cables. Then, remembering that I had class at 5:00 and not wanting to take chances with a vehicle of possibly unknown reliability, I had my brother take me home and I drove our "spare" car back to work.
After class that night, I went back to the car to see if I could figure out what went wrong. It should have been the first thing I checked: I had left the lights on. Oy...
I have an excuse. This particular vehicle is 14 model years old now. Sometimes, when you take the key out of the ignition, it sticks and the chime sounds when you open the door because the car thinks the key is still in the ignition. So when the chime was sounding telling me that my lights were on, I assumed it was the other chime telling me that my key was in my ignition.
Ok, so it's a lame excuse. I'll pay more attention to the stupid chime next time.
At any rate, a quick jump start got the battery charging again and by the time I got home, it had charged enough because it started right up this morning.
I have a new favorite friend. It's a plugin for WordPress called Akismet.
I've had Akismet installed for as long as I've had this Blog. I saw it as a sort of necessity. Even a little blog like mine that isn't even indexed by search engines might be a target for SPAM, right?
Up until about a week ago, the amount of SPAM that Akismet had protected this blog from was barely in the double digits. Somewhere around 12 comments had been flagged as SPAM since April, 2006. That's not bad.
Last week, the number jumped to 260. Someone found my blog and has been FLOODING it with SPAM. The only reason I knew? ONE comment made it through to "moderation." One comment. The rest were flagged as SPAM.
I love Akismet. If I had money, I would give some to Akismet. If I ever have a blog that makes money, I will license Akismet. Akismet RULES.
On Saturday, we did even MORE landscaping. That should be no surprise to anyone that has land to scape, because everyone with land to scape KNOWS that landscaping is a never-ending battle.
We started out by cutting sod away from all of the trees in the yard. Now we have nice circles of dirt around each tree. It's MUCH easier to mow around the trees that way. Additionally, it's easier to see when the tree has been well-watered. The water standing on the dirt is easier to see than water seeping through the grass.
We then moved landscaping rocks around. There were a bunch of rocks left behind when the landscapers built our rock wall. We piled them up next to the garage so that someday, we would be able to put them in various aesthetically-pleasing locations around the house. That "someday" was Saturday.
We also noticed some brown spots in our lawn. Earlier in my life, I would have assumed that the brown spots were due to insufficient watering or something like that, but sad experience has taught me to investigate the brown spots by tugging on them. If the grass stays firm, it means that maybe there IS a problem with watering. If the grass pulls up easily, there are lawn pests at work. I tugged on a brown spot and the grass gave way immediately. Further exploration revealed that we had sod webworms. Those things are EXTREMELY destructive if not killed immediately, so I went and bought a product that specifically mentioned its killing power against sod webworms. I spread that over the lawn and watered it in.
Finally, I went to a sprinkler supply store and bought emitters for our drip system. Now all of the newly-planted trees near our drip irrigation system will be watered twice a week without any additional effort on our part.
Tune in next week for the next exciting installment of "More Landscaping" when I talk about moving dirt around.
I'm back at work after a week away. It's nice to be back, working with my head rather than breaking my back. But at the same time, I'm now behind on my projects. I hate being behind.
If I'm scarce online for a while, you'll understand, right?
I bought a small forest today. We bought 4 crimson sentry maples, 2 flowering pears, 2 flowering plum trees, a peach tree, a redbud tree, a couple of pacific sunset maples, and a pair of very large royal red maples. We got them home and started digging holes in the ground!
The Homeowner's Association whose property backs ours decided that they don't like trees very much. At least, that's how they're behaving. The cut down a bunch of mature, beautiful trees all along the fence line behind us. So we had to purchase our small forest to replace the privacy and beauty that they destroyed. They said it was because they were afraid that the trees might start leaning on or start pushing against the fence. I'd rather have a bent fence than no trees. But apparently, that's not so important to the people that live behind us.
I ended up getting 6 of the trees planted today. I also transplanted a baby blue spruce that was in a bad location. I would have gotten the two biggest trees planted, but unfortunately, a nasty storm blew through just before dark. I'll get them in the ground as first thing in the morning along with the rest of the trees. Then it'll be time to do some tilling and get some garden mix and mulch and get all of the garden areas FINALLY looking nice.
After this week of "vacation," I'll want to get back to work to get some rest!
If you haven't seen the movie "Premonition" (Sandra Bullock), then stop reading now unless you don't care about spoilers.
Most movies, I can enjoy despite plot holes. Really. I watch a movie to be entertained for the 90 minutes or so that the movie runs. I don't expect academy-award-winning films every time. It's just too much to be expected. Generally, I watch a movie, roll my eyes when something is totally outside the realm of reality, laugh when it's funny, and enjoy the film for telling a story and entertaining me.
Spoiler Warning Take 2: If you haven't seen the show, then stop reading unless you want to know too much about it.
Premonition bombed for me. So badly, in fact, that it's been a few days later and I can't quit thinking about the huge, gaping holes in the plot. Seriously. You could drive a tanker truck (the kind that kills the main character's husband in the movie) through these plot holes and still have a couple of road widths of space to drive a couple of more tanker trucks through.
So here's a summary of the things that bugged me about the movie.
A completely unnecessary F-bomb. Normally, I don't like these, but this one was one of the worst in recent memory. Bullock's character all but screams the word in the presence of her two young children on the steps of a church on the way to her husband's funeral, right before confronting the funeral director about her husband's corpse.
Speaking of the husband's corpse: During this confrontation, the muscle-headed doofuses decided this is the perfect time to remove the casket from the back of the hearse. They, of course, mess this up, dropping the casket, which pops open and the husband's head goes rolling down the street. There are WAY too many things wrong with this. First of all, meat-head one and meat-head two would realize that the altercation was about the body and would leave the hearse door CLOSED until the funeral director calmed the grieving widow down. Second, nowadays, caskets aren't usually carried around. They're rolled out of the hearse onto a cart. This keeps problems like dropped caskets from happening. Third, I'm pretty sure that sealed casket funerals have SEALED caskets that wouldn't pop open. I'm not an expert on caskets though, so I may be wrong here. Fourth, after a guy gets his car run over by a tanker truck, decapitated, and then the tanker explodes and burns, I'm doubting that there would be enough left of the guy to put in an urn, let alone a casket. This whole part of the movie STUNK to high heaven.
Mr. Sheriff Guy had the misfortune of having to go to the Bullock character's house and notify her of her husband's untimely demise. This makes sense until the end of the movie where despite the fact that every problem is neatly tied up and resolved, Bullock's character not only watches her husband die in the fiery crash, but was inadvertently the CAUSE of the fiery crash. So other than to tell the viewing audience that her husband really IS dead, why would Mr. Sheriff Guy show up? He would have no reason to notify her that her husband is dead because HE WOULD HAVE TALKED TO HER AT THE SCENE. Ugh.
I can enjoy most any movie, but when one of the early plot points that sets the rest of the movie in motion IS one of the gaping holes in the plot, it just doesn't work for me. For this reason, I'd never, EVER be able to watch this movie again without yelling at the screen when Mr. Sheriff Guy showed up.
No, really. I'm telling you that you can't get there from here.
Where is "here?" My house.
Where is "there?" Anywhere else.
The city of Pleasant Grove is doing lots of work getting a pressurized secondary water system up and running. The good news is that we'll soon have cheaper, secondary water do dump on our lawns instead of the more expensive culinary water.
But during this construction phase, it's hard to get around town. To put in the secondary water pipes (big purple PVC jobbies), they have to trench down the middle of about every single street in existence. On Wednesday, they were working in the 4-way stop intersection just south of my house. Usually, when they're done for the night, they fill the trenches with gravel so that cars don't get damaged. They forgot to do that on Wednesday. Driving my son to church for his Cub Scout meeting was scary, to say the least. I thought my little Saturn was going to get swallowed up. Somehow, I made it there and back again.
Additionally, there is construction further down the same street on the way to the freeway AND construction in "downtown" Pleasant Grove" on the way to work, and I feel like I just can't get there from here.
*sigh*
On the bright side, at least they're started. The sooner they start, the sooner they'll be done with this whole mess.
On Monday, I was told I would be reporting to a different manager.
My former manager is still around. There were no layoffs or anything like that. My former manager just had absolutely too much to do, so they moved three of his people (including me) to a different manager.
I'm not exactly sure what I think about it yet. My former manager had a difficult time communicating things to me. It was probably, at least in part, due to his overload. Hopefully, the new manager will be better able to communicate with me and my job will get better.
Yet there's always a little fear of the unknown when I start working for someone else. What if he's the quintessential Pointy-Haired Boss? But what if he's the best boss I've ever worked for? I thought about talking with some of his other direct reports to see what they think of him. But I decided against it. I'd rather form my own opinion, untainted by the experiences of others.
Tonight we went to have dinner with some friends. We decided to do a dutch oven dinner, and it turned out great. We had chicken and rice, corn on the cob, apple cinnamon bread, and peach cobbler. I made the apple cinnamon pull-apart bread. I've been enjoying creating yeast breads in my dutch oven lately.
When I was checking the "doneness" of the bread, I did what I usually do when I make rolls in the dutch oven. I tapped the top of a roll to see if it would spring back.
Mistake.
The apple cinnamon pull-apart bread had hot, carmelized brown sugar on it that instantly stuck to my finger. OUCH!!!
Now I have a little blister on the tip of my left index finger. It's hard to type. Hopefully, it will start feeling better in the morning. Ugh.
I went to 4 hours of orientation meetings on Monday. I set up the online portion of my course. I prepared a syllabus and had it printed. I even hooked my laptop up to the "Media Enhanced Classroom" stuff to make sure there will be no surprises when I try to project things this evening. I reviewed the material that I'll be teaching tonight.
I think I'm ready.
When I dropped off the syllabus yesterday, I couldn't believe how young everyone looked. Then I realized that many of them graduated from High School this year. That means they were born in 1989 or 1990. That makes me more than double their age. They were born while I was a missionary, or even after I came home.