things for 12 - 20 - 06
Blog 122006
Lots of various things over the past few days.
I still play my new Elvis Presley Christmas music CD a lot. I stopped a bit on days I work. The reason for that is because I pretty much get up, make a lunch, watch BBC news for 15 minutes or whatever time I have left and then I head off to work.
I actually started watching Youtube recently. I may have mentioned it before but I went there looking for wrestling videos. I found one listing many wrestlers that have died. It had a wonderfully sad song. It’s called Mad World. Originally done by Tears for Fears it was redone by this fellow (I forgot his name) and was used in the movie Donnie Darko (which I have never seen). So now my favorite current song is Mad World. Because of the wrestling video I often think about friends and history gone by and even though many of those memories are very happy ones the tone of the melody gets me kind of misty eyed in that they are just memories these days.
Seems the detached retina surgery went well. I was at work so my oldest brother brought dad down and my second oldest brother brought him home. I went up to my parents to see how things were after I had grabbed some hours of sleep. Mom was to call in case of problems with the surgery and I thankfully never got that call. Unfortunately, my dad’s one the worst patients around. He’s already breaking doctor’s orders only hours after surgery. He’s supposed to lay on his side for 24 hours I believe for pressure reasons or details I’ve forgotten. Instead he’s sitting upright with his head propped on one arm. It was expressly put to us that he not sit up but you can’t tell my dad nothing. So the whole family is kinda pissed at him for this and if he has complications we won’t feel sorry for him because he’s the only one not following orders. And if you tell him what the doctor said he gets all mad and starts bitching at us. He was specifically told to sleep only on his side or stomach during sleep. I don’t think he was successful in that last night. Of course, ignoring the fact that everybody rolls around and changes position during sleep, my dad insists that he sleeps on his side and can do so all night. There are a few scary things about his vision. One is that he might lose a lot of it in one eye from the detached retina. Worse, in Massachusetts the doctor said it’s not illegal to drive with only one eye. So here’s where it gets really scary – real world scary – I can easily see my dad refusing not to drive. A 70+ year old man with fading reaction times and possibly one good eye thus further limiting decision making ability based on reduced depth perception. I could see my dad causing a car accident and killing someone because he drives my brother’s pick-up and blaming the other driver to avoid dealing with the consequences and responsibility that he should never have been on the road in the first place.
On another small note, my dad is blaming my niece and her boyfriend for clogging up the computer with spyware and viruses to the point where I think my computer savvy brother may have to reformat the hard drive for like the 5th time in 2 or 3 weeks. All of us that know about computers are starting to think that maybe dad should go back to WebTV were there are no viruses or spyware.
I love my dad but he creates a lot of frustration within the family by being old and crotchety and refusing to accept certain things in life.
Mom’s Christmas open house party went fairly well. She figures about 60 people showed up during the day. The weather was extremely warm for December – around 50+ degrees – so people were outdoors which made the house less congested and made it seem like attendance was off. The chow was terrific and I saw a lot of people I only see once or twice a year. Of course, there was some tension before the party because a number of things were left until the last minute or not done. There were some legitimate reasons for some stuff not happening like my dad’s pre-surgery various bloodwork and doctor visits at the last minute and some that were due to people just putting stuff off until it couldn’t get done. But I don’t think the attendees noticed anything way off-base. And nothing really was. I suppose it was just a need for my family to be the perfect hosts and being our own worst enemy at times.
Had a small shing-ding at work. Mostly it was just people bringing in food and taking a 90 minute break instead of the usual 30 minute lunch. The chow was surprisingly really good. Another surprise was that store bought stuff didn’t get eaten half as much as homemade stuff. The big hit was my co-worker’s wife’s strawberries on cream cheese or something with whipped cream. That plate was scrapped bare. I brought two half gallons of Friendly’s ice cream. I think only myself and my co-worker that loves ice cream had any. I offered her the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream to take home and she readily accepted it. I kept the chocolate/vanilla half gallon that wasn’t even opened. One of my serving spoons was scoffed up to be used for the strawberry cream cheese thing though.
The maintenance guys that service our room came down and had some chow too. They’re pretty cool and good workers so it was a welcome addition. About an hour into the 90 minute dinner this other guy came down. Never helps us, not sure how he knew what was going, and showed up when most of the food was gone and some slight picking up was going on. He took a plate, looked at the scraps that were left, apparently just tossed his plate on to the center of the table and walked out. Good riddance you douche.
The rest of the night was fairly easy because one of my three presses was done and I ran out of materials to mill (shop talk) which was nice after a big dinner.
The two work nights before weren’t the best though. I was circle tech. This means me and another dude make sure the people running the mold presses have good working molds and change the 55 gallon drums of materials that run the chemical mixtures of the banks. It’s not my favorite job. It’s not my favorite job because I have to put up with bitching by my fellow co-workers. We all like to have nice working molds instead of ones going on the fritz damaging the golf balls or causing havoc in the creation process which can really add to the work we do. The problem is, cleaning the molds takes a long time like 3 hours. So we often run out of molds and have to work a bit harder because of trying to extend the life of a mold going bad. And as circle tech I have to go around and listen to all this bitching. The two newest members of my crew were driving me nuts. They’re pretty nice people overall but goddamn, one mold gets a little sticky after a two hour rotation and they’ll chew my ear off looking for a new mold. Many of my co-workers noticed that I wasn’t in my usual good spirits those two days.
Part of the reason was I was mad at myself. I do okay as circle tech but I’m not perfect. And I like to do a top notch job on whatever I do. At the end of the night I and the other circle tech had a disastrous time trying to grasp the new scrap collecting details. Because we supposedly lost $2 million dollars in scrap last year or something to that effect, we now have to count every single scrap ball we make. If a bank is running well we are expected to make over 700 dozen balls in one night. And banks are really in sets of two and we run 5 banks on our shift. So ideally we should be making something to the effect of 7000 dozen balls per night. And everything has to be documented. So the circle techs and the supervisor really run their asses off at the last hour of the 12 hour shift. And we were really horrible that first night. The second night saw probably a 300% increase in performance from us circle techs and things went fairly smoothly. But that first night my supervisor’s hair was literally standing straight up because he kept running his hand through his hair from anxiety. I felt really bad about that because he was really frazzed out and even though he said it wasn’t us, we had a part in it.
In any event, I work one more night, Thursday, which will be a shutdown night which means it’ll only be a partial day and then my room gets shut down for about 10 days. I love this time of year but I can use the break to finish things up like my Christmas gift buying and wrapping and helping my mom wrap. And then there’s brining my dad to the eye doctor and … you get the picture.
Lots of various things over the past few days.
I still play my new Elvis Presley Christmas music CD a lot. I stopped a bit on days I work. The reason for that is because I pretty much get up, make a lunch, watch BBC news for 15 minutes or whatever time I have left and then I head off to work.
I actually started watching Youtube recently. I may have mentioned it before but I went there looking for wrestling videos. I found one listing many wrestlers that have died. It had a wonderfully sad song. It’s called Mad World. Originally done by Tears for Fears it was redone by this fellow (I forgot his name) and was used in the movie Donnie Darko (which I have never seen). So now my favorite current song is Mad World. Because of the wrestling video I often think about friends and history gone by and even though many of those memories are very happy ones the tone of the melody gets me kind of misty eyed in that they are just memories these days.
Seems the detached retina surgery went well. I was at work so my oldest brother brought dad down and my second oldest brother brought him home. I went up to my parents to see how things were after I had grabbed some hours of sleep. Mom was to call in case of problems with the surgery and I thankfully never got that call. Unfortunately, my dad’s one the worst patients around. He’s already breaking doctor’s orders only hours after surgery. He’s supposed to lay on his side for 24 hours I believe for pressure reasons or details I’ve forgotten. Instead he’s sitting upright with his head propped on one arm. It was expressly put to us that he not sit up but you can’t tell my dad nothing. So the whole family is kinda pissed at him for this and if he has complications we won’t feel sorry for him because he’s the only one not following orders. And if you tell him what the doctor said he gets all mad and starts bitching at us. He was specifically told to sleep only on his side or stomach during sleep. I don’t think he was successful in that last night. Of course, ignoring the fact that everybody rolls around and changes position during sleep, my dad insists that he sleeps on his side and can do so all night. There are a few scary things about his vision. One is that he might lose a lot of it in one eye from the detached retina. Worse, in Massachusetts the doctor said it’s not illegal to drive with only one eye. So here’s where it gets really scary – real world scary – I can easily see my dad refusing not to drive. A 70+ year old man with fading reaction times and possibly one good eye thus further limiting decision making ability based on reduced depth perception. I could see my dad causing a car accident and killing someone because he drives my brother’s pick-up and blaming the other driver to avoid dealing with the consequences and responsibility that he should never have been on the road in the first place.
On another small note, my dad is blaming my niece and her boyfriend for clogging up the computer with spyware and viruses to the point where I think my computer savvy brother may have to reformat the hard drive for like the 5th time in 2 or 3 weeks. All of us that know about computers are starting to think that maybe dad should go back to WebTV were there are no viruses or spyware.
I love my dad but he creates a lot of frustration within the family by being old and crotchety and refusing to accept certain things in life.
Mom’s Christmas open house party went fairly well. She figures about 60 people showed up during the day. The weather was extremely warm for December – around 50+ degrees – so people were outdoors which made the house less congested and made it seem like attendance was off. The chow was terrific and I saw a lot of people I only see once or twice a year. Of course, there was some tension before the party because a number of things were left until the last minute or not done. There were some legitimate reasons for some stuff not happening like my dad’s pre-surgery various bloodwork and doctor visits at the last minute and some that were due to people just putting stuff off until it couldn’t get done. But I don’t think the attendees noticed anything way off-base. And nothing really was. I suppose it was just a need for my family to be the perfect hosts and being our own worst enemy at times.
Had a small shing-ding at work. Mostly it was just people bringing in food and taking a 90 minute break instead of the usual 30 minute lunch. The chow was surprisingly really good. Another surprise was that store bought stuff didn’t get eaten half as much as homemade stuff. The big hit was my co-worker’s wife’s strawberries on cream cheese or something with whipped cream. That plate was scrapped bare. I brought two half gallons of Friendly’s ice cream. I think only myself and my co-worker that loves ice cream had any. I offered her the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream to take home and she readily accepted it. I kept the chocolate/vanilla half gallon that wasn’t even opened. One of my serving spoons was scoffed up to be used for the strawberry cream cheese thing though.
The maintenance guys that service our room came down and had some chow too. They’re pretty cool and good workers so it was a welcome addition. About an hour into the 90 minute dinner this other guy came down. Never helps us, not sure how he knew what was going, and showed up when most of the food was gone and some slight picking up was going on. He took a plate, looked at the scraps that were left, apparently just tossed his plate on to the center of the table and walked out. Good riddance you douche.
The rest of the night was fairly easy because one of my three presses was done and I ran out of materials to mill (shop talk) which was nice after a big dinner.
The two work nights before weren’t the best though. I was circle tech. This means me and another dude make sure the people running the mold presses have good working molds and change the 55 gallon drums of materials that run the chemical mixtures of the banks. It’s not my favorite job. It’s not my favorite job because I have to put up with bitching by my fellow co-workers. We all like to have nice working molds instead of ones going on the fritz damaging the golf balls or causing havoc in the creation process which can really add to the work we do. The problem is, cleaning the molds takes a long time like 3 hours. So we often run out of molds and have to work a bit harder because of trying to extend the life of a mold going bad. And as circle tech I have to go around and listen to all this bitching. The two newest members of my crew were driving me nuts. They’re pretty nice people overall but goddamn, one mold gets a little sticky after a two hour rotation and they’ll chew my ear off looking for a new mold. Many of my co-workers noticed that I wasn’t in my usual good spirits those two days.
Part of the reason was I was mad at myself. I do okay as circle tech but I’m not perfect. And I like to do a top notch job on whatever I do. At the end of the night I and the other circle tech had a disastrous time trying to grasp the new scrap collecting details. Because we supposedly lost $2 million dollars in scrap last year or something to that effect, we now have to count every single scrap ball we make. If a bank is running well we are expected to make over 700 dozen balls in one night. And banks are really in sets of two and we run 5 banks on our shift. So ideally we should be making something to the effect of 7000 dozen balls per night. And everything has to be documented. So the circle techs and the supervisor really run their asses off at the last hour of the 12 hour shift. And we were really horrible that first night. The second night saw probably a 300% increase in performance from us circle techs and things went fairly smoothly. But that first night my supervisor’s hair was literally standing straight up because he kept running his hand through his hair from anxiety. I felt really bad about that because he was really frazzed out and even though he said it wasn’t us, we had a part in it.
In any event, I work one more night, Thursday, which will be a shutdown night which means it’ll only be a partial day and then my room gets shut down for about 10 days. I love this time of year but I can use the break to finish things up like my Christmas gift buying and wrapping and helping my mom wrap. And then there’s brining my dad to the eye doctor and … you get the picture.
posted by DungeonMasterJim at 6:51 AM
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