daveb

Thoughts and prayers for bostondave on the passing of his father on Monday.

Sorry for the delay y'all. The days are all running together lately.

On Monday October 11, 2010 at approximately 2:14 pm CST my little baby girl was born via c-section.



This picture was actually taken the other day. Thank God for quick reflexes with a camera!

I'm still on the bowling league here. April is too. We bowl on Tuesday nights which is a non-smoking league, oddly enough. There is no smoking in the building after 6:45pm until the league is finished. The funny thing is there are a lot of smokers on the league, me being one of them.

Anyway, we bowled tonight. I didn't do too bad. I went over my average (138) two out of three games. The first game we lost, not by much but we still lost. The second and third game came all the way down to the anchors (the last bowler on the team usually with the highest average) me being the one for our team. I had to get 14 pins on the second game and I got them and then some. The third game I had to get 12. I struck the first throw and hit seven the second so we had it. We won overall by about eight pins. Pretty close. I had a 139, a 157 and a 133.

I haven't broke 200 yet. I want to do it by the end of the season. I really need a new ball though. I'm using one I bought back in the Air Force- some twenty years ago!

I feel better too about the other day with the kids. I guess it just hit me wrong.

Anyway, off to bed.

I've lived in South Texas now for right around twenty years. I was stationed here in July of 1988 for basic training and again after tech school for my only permenant duty station in my military career. I got married here, started a family here and now this is where I'll probably live until I die. Do I like it? Not always. Would I do it again if I had the chance? Not likely.

I'm utterly alone here. I have no family here. I have no friends here- at least not any that I would feel comfortable talking to about anything extremely sensitive. I almost did but he turned out to be an asshole. It's been a long long time since I had such a friend. It's part of the reason I have this journal. I can, at least, write about the things on my mind. Sometimes it helps. Other times it doesn't. Those are the hard times. Those are the times where I have to just swallow my feelings and move on with life the best I can and leave it all bottled up inside. Sometimes that's just not that easy to do, but I do it to spare other people's feelings. Always to spare someone else. Oh God that I should see the day where someone gave a DAMN about my feelings that way!

Someday, maybe, I'll have a friend like that. Someone I can talk to, that would feel comfortable talking to me, too. The last few weeks I sure could have used a friend like that. They've been a little difficult for me and I'm kind of hurt right now. I don't really know what to say about it. I guess "nothing" will have to suffice for now.

I'm sorry. Ignore this post if it offends you in some way.

Great. Now we have a hurricane headed our way. Swell.

Now that I work at a power plant, this means a whole world of fun and exciting things for me. We're regulated by the Texas Public Utilities Commission who apparently sends us an email every time the weather does something weird saying that we must do everything within our power to keep the megawatts flowing. Well duh! We don't make money if we don't generate electricity! So we already have management telling us the same thing.

What I'm told is that when a hurricane hits nearby, we (the instrument shop) have to maintain a presence at the plant until the danger has past. This, in itself, isn't such a bad thing, but it means staying at work for a few days if neccessary. Sheet metal blows all over the place and if you happen to be in the way of a piece, off goes whatever limb happens to be in the way.

Good thing they pay well.

Not a whole lot else going on. They killed a 4 ft rattlesnake in the parking lot yesterday. It was under someone's van. Today you could see everyone looking cautiously under their cars before stepping up to unlock them. Not that I blame them.

I do have more to write, but I can't right now. Later on, perhaps.

Good idea:
The plant, in lieu of having a company picnic, gave us all tickets to one of the water parks in the area. We didn't have to wait until a certain day, we could go whenever we wanted.

Bad idea:
Waiting until Labor Day weekend to go.

Can we say "Packed"?

It's just so wrong. You wait for an hour and a half to get on a ride that lasts two minutes. Bah!

Hey y'all, here's a news flash for you: I have officially lost my mind. Off the deep end. Out to lunch. The lights are on but nobody's home. Yep, all outa marbles over here. Don't know what happened to it, but it's gone.

A while back, when I was still at the old job, I wrote about being the apparent target of a workplace bully. The term "workplace bully" is actually a somewhat emerging term- at least in Texas. Bullying in general is actually now getting more and more attention in schools and jobs out here. Apparently this last summer the teachers at the kids' schools had to go through some sort of training about bullying. That's all wonderful, I just wonder where all the concern was when I was in school.

So anyway, the individual I was posting about emailed me a few months ago. He said he wanted to see how it was all going for me and he asked if there were any more positions in my shop open. Call it a brain cramp, call it a momentary lapse of common sense but I wrote him back and told him that yes, we were looking for another tech and he should apply. Well, now he's going to send in a resume and put in for the position. To make matters worse, I gave him a glowing recommendation.

Glutton for punishment? Certifiably mad? I don't know. The guy is a very good tech and we could use that at work. I guess I felt I needed to put my personal feelings aside and do what's best for the plant. At least, that notion makes me feel considerably less like a boob.

Maybe he'll change. Maybe he won't pick on me like he used to.

...maybe I'll grow a gigantic spring in my ass and bounce all the way to a new job.

Bah!

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First, an announcement. This is for the people that find themselves here from MySpace. Most of my entries here at LiveJournal have been "friends only". You will have to create a LiveJournal account yourself and I'll have to add you to my friends list to read those. Most of the reasons I had for doing this no longer apply so I'll be doing a lot more public posts from now on.

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Anyway...

Yes, I have a MySpace page now. I don't know how much I'll use it but several people in my family have them, so I wanted to make one in an effort to keep in touch with them. Someone already had the name DaveB so there I'm "DaveB002".

The pain in my arm I mentioned in my last entry turned out to be tennis elbow. If you've never had it count yourself among the lucky as it is very painful. I haven't had a decent night's sleep in two weeks because of it and I'm popping pain meds like they're M&Ms. Now it seems to be abating slightly but it still hurts a lot from time to time. It's a dull aching pain that travels to the forearm sometimes and up to my shoulders sometimes. At work it seems to ease up after I've been working a little but it hurts like hell after work.

Thank you for the birthday wishes. I turned 38 Last Thursday. We didn't do much. Everyone pitched in and gave me a very nice circular saw with laser track and a few other bells and whistles. VERY nice! The one I've been using until now I got for my 23rd birthday... about time for a new one! I really needed a new one so I can start getting serious about fixing a few things around here.

Saying which, when we moved in here I had to make some emergency repairs to the floor in the master bathroom. I didn't have the right tools to fix it properly, and doing it right would have meant completely redoing the plumbing for the shower and the toilet, so I did one of those "temporary" type jobs. You know just to get by for a little while until I can get the time to do it right. Anyway, I had cut a small rectangular hole for some water lines that came through the floor and I really thought it would be okay that way for a while. The problem is the hole is apparently just big enough for a small animal to fit through... specifically a small possum. Three, actually. I bought a live catch trap and managed to trap all three of them and released them down the road a couple of miles. Hopefully that's the last of them.

Gotta fix that floor.

Speaking of unusual critters, we left our house a couple of days ago, went around the corner and came face to face with an emu. Of all the things you expect to see on the backroads around here, that is definitely in the lower part of the list. Years ago there was a flirtation around here with the idea of raising ostriches and emus for the meat. It flopped after a year or so but I guess some people still keep them as pets or something. We drove around a little trying to figure out who it might belong to but we didn't see any likely homes for it. It was gone when we got back so I guess they found it. That or someone is barbecuing some really big drumsticks this weekend!

We got the kids' school shopping done. I grew up in California in the eighties so going to the mall was something we did for fun. Now I thank God every time I go to one and leave without killing someone. People piss me off so much sometimes! I always leave public places like that with the urge to buy an island somewhere and live there. Next year I'm handing Ann some cash and wishing her the best of luck 'cause I ain't goin'!

I got about half the mowing done yesterday. Hopefully I can do the rest today but they're calling for rain most of next week around here. It's a lot to do; there's about three acres I keep mowed here. We're on a corner lot so it just looks funky to mow some of it but not the rest. I ran out of gas yesterday so today I have to sell some blood and get some more. $3.57 a gallon the other day. Sheesh!

I ran into a former coworker of mine the other day. I kind of thought my leaving that job might trigger a sort of landslide and it seems I was right. Counting myself, six people have left the shop. One retirement, four transfers and one leaving entirely- that would be me. Maybe they'll get desperate enough to offer me a substantial raise to come back. Nah! They can't won't match my current pay. I do have to admit, though, even though I'm beginning to like this job more and more every day I still liked the other one better. We were a lot more technical there than we are here. A little more challenging. The biggest challenge at the power plant is doing your job without shutting the plant down.

Better stop now. Hope all is well with everyone.

Note: I actually began this entry last Monday. Hey, sue me, I'm a busy guy! ;)

We just got back from our vacation to the coast. We actually got back last night around 3am. It was nice- short, but nice. We had decided that this year would be kind of low-keyed, just a long weekend while we get our finances built up and then next year we'd take a longer one. As always, it was nice to get away and tough to come home, but we had fun. It was the four of us and one of Allison's friends, a girl we've known since she was barely a toddler and is pretty much like another daughter to us. A little different from the last two years but we had fun.

( More on the vacation...Collapse )

So there's vacation 2008. Not bad at all!

A few random notes:

- Work has been about normal. Johnny, the guy I wrote about a while back is back to being all moody and acting like an asshole again. Last Friday I reached my limit and if he had so much as scowled at me any more that day I think I would have absolutely gone off. No, I would never hit anyone. Especially on the job, but I can yell with the best of them.

- In another couple of months we rotate our primary areas of responsibility. It's confusing; we all work pretty much everywhere although I'm assigned to the boiler and scrubber area and in outage I was on turbine. Anyway, I'm rotating to CEMS, Continuous Emissions Monitoring System. It's a rather complicated array of analyzers, pupms etc. This means I'll be going up on the stack a lot more. Joy.

- We got a little rain out of the hurricane that hit Brownsville Wednesday. Southeastern San Antonio got a couple of tornados out of it but we didn't see anything like that. Good rain, though. Everything is getting nice and green now around here... and long. Now I have to mow.

- Our cat had a kitten. Yep, just one. I scoured under the porch for another one or two, but there weren't any more. The cat saw me looking and got nervous. She picked up the one kitten and raced into the house with it straight under Allison's bed. It's orange and maybe four weeks old now.

- Dad's treatments for prostate cancer went okay. They'll monitor him for a while now and then he'll get yearly checks I think. Other than being a little tired more often he's not having any terrible side effects.

- I feel so bad for everyone caught up in this mortgage thing now. Mom almost got burned by hers but she's managing to stay above water. I thank God every day for the fixed rate we insisted on when we financed our house!

Hope all is well with everyone!

I did some house cleaning today. I had a few dead journals and a few that didn't feel like being friends with me anymore, but I only dropped those who did not list me as a friend. If I accidentally dropped someone that did, please let me know- this is why I don't do this often. I get paranoid that I'm going to drop someone that's still a friend.

Wow, this week is starting of on a stressful note. Ann called me because she couldn't find the keys to the explorer. I had them in my jacket. This wouldn't have been a problem if I wasn't already about 30 miles from home. #@$!