Blog 081908
A haphazard listing of things that have happened recently.
One of my best friends has cancer and it’s spread. It’s into his stomach. The doctors are conferring whether to go with surgery to remove parts of the cancer or just go straight to cemo. This is really suckles news. D is our linchpin for our collective. We enjoy his presence and he’s great for getting us all together for good times. If the worst happens our group will splinter off into individuals that’ll see each other maybe once or twice a year. There is hope in all this. D’s cancer has a 90% survival rate. That is absolutely terrific. He’s going to have so tough days ahead regardless what happens and I hope I’m a worthy friend and will be there to support him when he needs it most.
I went crazy on tax free weekend. I went out to buy a new clothes dryer in hopes to eventually cut down on my electric bill. Currently my crappy portable dryer takes 3 hours to dry a load of laundry. I ended up buying the cheapest dryer because that’s pretty much what my budget was. So I dropped $270 on it. Then, as I was paying for I found I needed an electric cord for it. HUH? Those cheap bastards didn’t include a cord! So that was another $30! I ended up paying for it in cash.
Now I have my dryer but it’s not hooked up. I have to buy some 220 volt wire and a new breaker to have it work. Sigh. Damn hidden expenses!
On my way around to 5 stores to comparison shop I noticed sno-blowers were for sale. Now they call them sno-throwers. My driveway has a decent incline to it and it can be a real pain in the ass to shovel. Sometimes, it’s actually dangerous for me to do things in the cold. Under certain circumstances I noticed I can hardly breathe if I’m doing something physical in the cold. Normally I spot it early on and compensate usually by stopping what I’m doing. But I could possibly see being stubborn some day when I’m older and collapsing and dying from whatever bothers me. So the sno-thrower should solve this pretty good. I bought an Ariens 2 stage 5 and ½ horsepower thrower for $600. No sales tax because it was sales tax free weekend. So I finally spent my stimulus check. Last year when I had heard about the checks I had planned to use it to buy a sno-blower and I finally got around to it.
My brother hasn’t said anything because he doesn’t want to piss me off I suspect but I’m getting the feeling that he and the kids will be living with me for the next few months full-time. The courts said that my brother and the ex are to swap the kids every two weeks. The ex lied to the courts, big surprise there, and moved to live in Ohio claiming she was just going for a vacation. Now she has apparently told my niece but not my brother that she can’t come get the kids every two weeks. Not that she has any kind of job or anything. So pretty much my idea is that she’s living off of the child support and unemployment while leaving the kids in my brother’s care.
More typical ex shit: She told my niece to tell my brother to buy my niece school clothes. My brother said no that’s what he pays child support for. So the ex gave my niece $40 to buy new clothes and told her to buy tops only. That’s it. So now by default my brother pretty much has to buy the kids school clothes. What a piece of shit the ex is.
My oldest brother will be gone for awhile as his job takes him to Hawaii and then straight to San Diego. He’ll be gone about a month.
The same brother also got a call from a collection agency – about my 8 year old nephew! They wouldn’t reveal any info to him not even how they got his number. So this can’t be good news. Someone’s stolen something from my nephew or I wouldn’t put it pass the ex to open an account in my nephew’s name. And my nephew could carry this problem into his adulthood through no fault of his own. Sigh.
My sleep has really been screwed up the past couple of days because of my neighbor. For whatever reason he paid to have a fence put up along our properties. He tried to get my brother to do several years ago or at least pay half the costs but my brother said get lost. So I guess the guy finally broke down and paid to have it done. He probably doesn’t like that when I mow the lawn there’s no clear boundary between our lawns so I sometimes cut part of his grass for him. I don’t know. The guy only shows up when he wants something or tries to sell me something of his. He gave a line of shit to the fencing/tree company about being worried about one of my trees falling on my house. The real deal is that he hates the leaves that fall off my trees and on to his lawn. He’s a lawn fanatic. I’ve seen him mow his lawn almost in the dark driving around with his mower’s lights on. So the tree company said they would take some branches off for me. They ended up cutting down the whole tree! I can’t recall them saying that they would cut down the whole tree but they did. The tree is at the edge of my property and hangs over on to my neighbor’s a bit. So Tuesday I was totally screwed over as about eight guys cut down this tree and cut it up. Chainsaws were blazing all day while I was trying but failing to sleep. One thing really pissed me off though and I quickly put a stop to it. I’m not even sure who decided this but I suspect my neighbor suggested it. Someone pounded on my door at 3pm which is the middle of my ‘night’ since I slept between 11am and 7pm usually. It took me a minute to get to the door in a shirt and shorts and nobody was there nor in sight. Fuck! I said cursing my neighbor and went back to bed. A few minutes later I hear all this noise in my driveway and peek out my window to see a quart ton dump truck back a wood grinder up my driveway with the intention of parking it in my back yard driving over my septic tank to grind up the tree limbs. WTF?! So I bolted out there and put a stop to it. They were all apologetic and I tried not to be an ass but I was pissed! I was screwed for sleep after that. The tree they cut down ended up being heavy as all hell and shook the house every time they cut a chunk of the trunk off. Doesn’t seem like they hit the house at all but it felt like it! I thought they had mentioned about cutting down more trees so after I got up later in the day to prep for work I taped a clearly visible sign telling them NOT to cut down a certain tree. I found out the next day that they only needed or had to cut down the one tree. I almost screwed myself because pretty much I said to them in about a minute’s conversion total that if I wasn’t paying for, it didn’t damage my yard and it didn’t leave a big mess in my yard I was okay with it. That ended up getting me paranoid about how many of my trees they were going to cut down.
In the end, the fence is apparently up and they only cut one tree down and I didn’t have to pay for it. I am a little miffed that my lawn took a bit of a beating though. I’m guessing my neighbor made sure to tell the guys to park on MY lawn since I hardly ever saw them set foot on HIS property. In the end it doesn’t look bad and the company seems to have done a decent job cleaning up as best as possible. It also seems totally unnecessary too. But I didn’t pay for it. If my neighbor tries to get me to pay for it he can go fuck himself because he didn’t involve me in any of this until the workers needed my permission to cut at least branches from a tree. And they got rid of the stump which I was worried about that they wouldn’t.
I recently applied for a hard but better paying job within my company. I have this one co-worker that’s a bit unstable. And she’s a union rep to boot. One day she’s your best friend and the next she’s backstabbing you. You never know what you’re going to get with her. So she tried to get me all worried about the test that any potential applicant has to take to get into this skilled labor job. I ended up taking the test with 3 fellow co-workers that I all know. I didn’t think the test was that hard overall. The mechanical part was 60 questions all either ‘A’ or ‘B’. It had a picture for every question that were all about torque, momentum, and stuff like that. I blazed through it fairly quickly. The second part was where I had some trouble. There were about 40 math questions. More were doable but I couldn’t recall how to divide fractions. I thought I had correctly remembered how to multiply fractions but after conversing with people I may have screwed those up too. The company doesn’t say what’s on the test at all or what to study for. If you pass, a 70 or higher, you can qualify for the job. If you fail it’s a little uncertain but the general deal seems to be that you can’t take the test again for 6 months. I thought I had done well until I heard about multiplying fractions. Even then I still felt I probably passed but not as well as I had hoped. After a few days I found I scored a 74. Phew! I think most people failed the test. I was surprised a friend of mine did because he took the test a few days later. I told him to study up on fractions which he did but he still failed, He got a 67. He’s a good guy so I was sorry to hear this.
The unstable co-worker had a jolly time being very negative as I spoke about the test. Later a friend of mine told her when I wasn’t around that she was very negative about the whole thing. She denied that and then stated to him that she doesn’t like me. WTF?! I work with this woman closely for over a year, we talk about our families and stuff including me in her food gift giving at the holidays and then she says she doesn’t like me? Then the next day it’s back to being all happy and jolly? Gah! It rather pissed me off.
Actually, all her negativity was pissing me off. I was discussing a certain question on the test with my supervisor when she played butt-in-ski and told me I was obviously wrong and that it was common sense if I had worked on a farm. She vaguely works on a farm during the Halloween holiday on a haunted hayride. It was a question about a pole and leverage. I mentioned I went with a certain reasoning learned from my brother. I looked her in the eye and told her flatly that my oldest brother spent four years in college becoming an engineer and he’s been making boats for the U.S. Navy for twenty years and that I trust him over her. My supervisor couldn’t contain his giggle. I later asked about 5 guys about the same question and they all answered the same way I did.
I didn’t get the first job that opened up but I bid on the second that came up the following week. I think I may have scored second highest out of the people testing so it’s looking probable that I have the job. It’s not a given yet. If I miss out there should be a third opening for the same job.
So last night unstable girl was all happy go lucky. Later, she was questioned by a supervisor about her wanderings. She wanders the plant a lot using the guise of union business as an excuse. Or at least, she uses union business as an excuse to leave but abuses the position by talking with people long after the union business is done. Then she turned into a real hag because someone had the nerve to question her. She got all negative about my potential to get the second skilled labor job again and started ripping ip good hardworking employees that were standing around after they had finished their night’s work. She also went off on what my ‘back up’ plan was in case I didn’t get the paint room job. She’s really a flake.
I also had another co-worker flake out on me. My current job to is remove finished golf balls from the people putting logos on them and delivering the golf balls to packers after the golf balls have been properly treated to keep the logo from smudging. There’s this one woman in her 50’s. She might be in her 40’s but it’s been hard 40 years if she’s only in her 40’s. Anyways, she dyes her gray hair which is a clue to her true age. She’s really high strung. Since I rotated into the work-in-progress job she’s been on my case about getting the golf balls to her. She’s the only one to do this. She’ll come into my area and check all the times. She even told me it’s time to deliver balls when I’m right there able to clearly see all the times. She’s even told me that I don’t have to wait for the balls to cool and that I can lop off almost a total of 20 minutes waiting time between cooking and cooling. Again she’s the only one that does this. She also watches me like a hawk anytime she’s not busy and I’m pushing a cart load of trays around.
On previous days she’s mentioned her unhappiness to others about my work. Nobody else has complained and I even checked with the supervisor on this. Even the unstable co-worker stuck up for me before on it. The high strung lady usually makes comments and waves her arms around pointing to all the trays. Even after I planned it so that I could take a shit she was complaining yet never asked me once why the trays have built up. So finally, she gets really demonstrative after some egging by a co-worker starting trouble to get a good laugh out of everything. I see high strung but ignore her purposely doing other jobs just to get her ire up more because I was getting pissed. During all this a sick co-worker who’s been on the edge for getting fired went home sick. Except he made it sound like he was fired. This drove me nuts because I don’t like the supervisor subbing for our supervisor. I’ve also seen substituting supervisors fire people not on their shifts. So I believed that this co-worker got fired as he looked miserable as he left and left his departure open for interpretation. So I get to the high strung lady and she starts giving me shit. I ask her all pissed off’ What’re you sqwacking about?!” and she gets more uppity. So I tell her “Isiah gets fired and all you care about are getting your trays!” and she goes ‘Oh, well!” So I took the trays and stormed off.
Later on I don’t say anything to her refusing to even look at her. About 2 and a half hours later she asks if I’m mad at her. I tell her, ”you’ve given me pretty good reason to be.” She looks at me blankly and goes ‘for what?”
I couldn’t believe it! I contemplated going off on her but just kind of shook my head and walked off. About another 40 minutes later she apologized. So I accepted it but I’m still hesitant around her. So we’re back to talking but I’m much more guarded around her.
And this ends my monster entry.
