Today started like any other, tried to get work early, staying busy preparing for my customer presentation tomorrow & Thursday. Then I get a call on my cell phone from some weird area code. Dude says, "This is your alarm company letting you know that your burglar alarm AND my fire alarm just went off." OH SHIT!!! Of course, I drop what I'm doing, and run to my car. I pass my entire management line as they returned from their lunch. I wonder what they are thinking, what they were talking about, I'll get to that later. I call both of my neighbors. One is a Mr. Mom, the other works days. No luck.
I jump in my car, and hit the gas as my mind started flooding the rest of my body with the fear of the worst. Forgetting that I have a tight sports suspension, I speed over the big company speed bumps. *Oooph* *Ahhhh* That hurt. Get on the main street, and I test out my SuperCharger. Mind you, you can't roll 3 blocks on this side of town w/o seeing a cop. One block....two blocks... three... there he is, right in front of me! Too make matters worse, not only do I now have to drive the speed limit, but my "Check Engine" light is on!
Now my car is about to blow up while I can only think about how one of the trailer park kids (neighboring subdivision) broke into my basement, stole who knows what, then tried to burn my house down! My castle!!! Up in flames with dreams. I get to my house, my neighbor is working in his yard (I'll get back to that too). No fire truck. I enter my house, turn my alarm off. It's hot as hell up in here!!! My car said it was 94 degrees outside, and I have my a/c on timer, so it's off during the day. No fire. No smoke. no busted windows or doors. What the hell? False alarm. My heart didn't get the message, cause it's still beating at 160 beats per min. Running upstairs, then downstairs, then down to the basement, & back up, sure didn't help. Thermostat says it's 87 in here. Fire alarm upstairs is flashing "red". Alarm says it's a basement window or door that was opened. OK. I don't know what's going on. The Alarm company didn't help any.
My neighbor said the fire truck left just as I arrived, I just missed them. Apparently, they came, knocked on the door & looked in my windows. Ummm, you can't see shit through my windows! Look at my house! ===> You can't tell if there's a fire upstairs. Nor from the windows in the front of my house. So if I left my iron on upstairs, or my clothes dryer caught fire, the firemen came & left w/o putting the fire out! Well, they must know that when they get a house fire alarm when no one is home, it's probably a false call. I'm glad they didn't knock down any doors.
Day stays bad
I return back to work 30 mins after I left. (10 min commute, 10 mins at my house). Now I the reason for my position is largely to ensure that tomorrow's presentation goes well. I go to the print shop to pick my my slide presentation, which is about 250 pages long! Instead of getting 25 stacks of 1 presentation package, I pick up 30 separate sections of the presentation, 25 copies each. AAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!! Plus, they are stapled together. As I frantically try to rearrange the packages prorperly, I realize that I'm about to present a bootleg package to our customer on a $80 million project. Each package is held together by rubber bands! Shit! I rummage through the office supplies to find the LARGE binder clips. But the staples make the corner of the slides too large for the clip. Conveniently, the young kid that helps had to leave, so I was stuck trying to find a way not to embarass myself tomorrow by myself. So here I am, removing thick staples from 30 sections just to apply one binder clip. Not the way I wanted to end my day. I'm no good at manual labor, so I stopped after creating 10 packages. Those are for the customer. Anyone else gets a bootlegged pkg!
Diversity
OK, back to my mangement. why did I get a message from my manager only addressed to the few blacks in my group, inviting us to attend a breakfast with the Director of our program. This doesn't make any sense to me. Is he trying to fool folks to think that only the Black engineers have noteworthy info to tell? Nah. Is he trying to portray that he supports diversity, so here's all my proof? Does have some game he's playing and we're just pawns? There's probably 70 folks under him, 10 blacks, and he picks 4 to attend this meeting. Hmmm. Maybe I'm over reacting.
Keeping Up With the Jones' Part III
So after my heartrate came down to it's normal pace, I talked some more to my neighbor. Remember, I already told you that
2 doors down, dude built a retaining wall for his garden exactly like mine, so three adjacent houses have the same landscaping. Now my other neighbor is starting to build the exact same wall as mine! Where's the lack of creativity? Originality? I bit off of someone, so I guess it's just part of the neighbor game. His yard slopes much more than anyone else's yard, so his wall will be at least 5 feet tall! Mine is only 2.5 feet. I warned him, you just can't stack bricks 5 feet tall, the dirt will knock the wall down when it rains and dirt settles. He'll have to use cement or something to secure the bricks. I left for work, and noticed that he didn't make any progress since I was there. I guess he decided to quit for the time being after I warned him
Teaming up w/ the Jones' Part I
Before I left though, he acknowledged that he's been cutting part of my front yard. I was wondering why he was creeping onto my property (again). He says that when I cut my grass, it makes his yard look horrible, and vice versa. So he wants me to cut part of his yard so both of our yards will look nice. Hmmm, whatever.
Then he pointed out these strange bugs that were flying around the trees. He says they are
Japanese Beetles. I've never heard of them. I saw them up close, and damn, these were some big ugly things, and they were mating like crazy! I've never seen such horny little insects! They were all over the trees. I never noticed. Here's my green thumb confession. I have a dead Oak tree in my backyard. Don't know what happened. It was alive last year. My neighbor suspects these beetles ate it to death! WTF? He put some type of powder on my trees, as well as his. He did that so the beetles on my trees won't infect his. I did some
research, and he's right. I need to find me some insecticide ASAP. I also noticed one day part of my gutter fell off in the back of my house. I was about to go fix it one day, and it was already fixed! I think I will gladly cut his small section of lawn adjacent to mine.
Stevie on the Harmonica
Did you see Stevie Wonder play the Harmonica before tonights NBA game? AWESOME!!! Man's a musical genious.
