… Or the importance of friends.

The past week has been kind of depressing for me.  I realized just how much some folks in my life really influenced where I’ve come over these past five or six years.  It took one of my coworkers turning in his resignation for it to really sink in.

I guess the best place to begin is back where this whole tale started, late October 2002.  I went to get out of bed and heard (and felt) an enormous pop resound from my back.  I spent the next year plus trying to recover from three ruptured disks in my back.  In December 2003, I was trying to find work, any kind of work that my back would tolerate.  The money had long since run out and I was living off my credit cards and loans from Mom and Dad.  I got called about a local company hiring.  They were looking to fill a data entry position.  “Data entry… I can do this.” I thought to myself.   Years of chatting on the internet had made me a fairly decent typist.  I knew that it wasn’t the perfect job.  I would be taking a drastic pay cut from what I had been making before my back decided to take its vacation, but anything was better than nothing, which was what I was making at that moment.  It took four months and a bunch of paperwork to finally start working. 

I walked in their door as an employee on April 5^th 2004, the day before my birthday.  I began my life as a data entry person with the thought that if my back didn’t improve drastically, I may be stuck typing the rest of my life.  Fortunately for me, fate had different plans.  My electronics background and computer experience led me to look at a temporary position that was being offered.  The job consisted of prepping and packaging laptop computers for distribution to the field.  There would be some lifting involved, but my back was proving itself and I felt I could tolerate the required lifting.  The money was better and while it was a limited placement, it might give me a chance to move to the I.T. Department.  I threw my application in the pool.

I got the call to come for an interview.  The appointed time and day arrived.  I strolled down to the I.T. Department, after a detour to the Fish Bowl Conference Room which is where I had been told the interviews were.  Great! Late to the interview, this is going to make a good impression.  I found the place I was supposed to go and walked in.  I was greeted by three individual; Karen, Brenda and Ron.  Karen was the overall manager I’d be working under.  Brenda was the Help Desk Lead and Ron was the Lead PC Technician.  From the get go, Ron was pulling for me to be hired.  It came out that we had similar work histories and knowledge backgrounds.   I was asked why I hadn’t applied for the PC Tech position that was also open.  I hadn’t seen the posting as our floor was in disarray due to construction.  It was sheer luck that I overheard someone talking about the temporary position and went to find the posting on a bulletin board on the other floor.

To make a long story short, I started the temporary (detail) position and within a couple months was asked to take the PC Tech slot that was open.  The detail was now permanent.  Ron showed me the ropes.  We hit it off fairly quickly and started having lunch together.  We soon teamed up with Dave, who would later become a faux PC Tech.  He was given all the duties but not the title or pay of a PC Tech.  The three of us became good friends.  We had a blast horsing around from day to day and even more fun when we were called on to go out on location to swap hard drives in laptops.  We became the self appointed three monkeys.  You know the ones; Hear No Evil, See No Evil and Speak No Evil. We chose the monkeys after all three of us were chastised by our boss during our trip to San Francisco.  I was See No Evil because I was told I wrote unprofessionally after sending an email over the head of the Help Desk Manager and straight to the Help Desk.  Dave was Speak No Evil because he got told to stop questioning every decision our boss made.  Ron got the remaining Hear No Evil because nobody would listen to him even though he was right and they all knew it. 

The comical thing is that it happened in San Francisco.  We completed our tasks early and had Friday to kill.  Off we went on a little site-seeing journey.  One of our planned stops was Chinatown.  We had to stop and take photos at the entry arch going into Chinatown’s main thoroughfare.   There on a park style bench sat our namesakes in bronze regalia.  We laugh to this day about that trip.  In Chinatown, you find all kinds of little knick knack shops.  Ron and Dave found The Three Monkeys.  They were a must have.  Ron cheerfully showed them to the gang as he packed his desk last week.

Ron had told me he had been testing the waters for a new job.  He even had a lead or two that looked solid.  I don’t know if others caught on that he was pushing off critical tasks onto the other techs or not.  I took it that he was preparing them for a soon to come day when he would be leaving.  Sure enough, two weeks ago at lunch, he told me he had accepted a position at another company.  I was happy to hear it.  Ron is a very talented individual.  I’ve always wondered why he stuck it out where he was.  He had little opportunity to advance due to roadblocks that had been put up around him.

This year has been a year of people stepping out of my life.  A situation dissolved a friendship of nine years.  Vince, Jess and their clan moved to North Carolina to rebuild their lives just as it seemed our friendships were really taking flight.  I’m really glad they took the opportunity to move.  I still talk to them daily online and we started playing Anarchy Online together, so it’s not like we’ve lost touch.  One of these days, I’m going to break off from work and go visit.  Time and finances will tell on that, though.  Ron’s leaving drug me back down a depressing road that I was just starting to head away from.  Dave now works for another company and with Ron gone I’m the last monkey left.

I guess to make matters worse, I feel like I don’t really fit in to the department I work in.  I’m not on the tech level but I’m not quite a manager either.  It puts me in the awkward position of having to work on projects with the guys, yet also having to push them to manage their time on project better.  There are also some issues with our beliefs conflicting from time to time.  These guys are, for the most part, great guys, but they are extremely sexist and bigoted.   I’ve seen numerous circumstances that could bring the Human Resources department knocking.  I digress.  I don’t even want to get started down that rant.

Anyway, God does work things in his own way.  As one friend, leaves my daily environment, a new one has stepped into another area of my life.  Where will our friendship go?  I don’t think either of us knows just yet, but we have a lot in common.   Time will show us what the kind of plant the seed grows up to be. 

Friendships are like germinating seeds in a greenhouse.  You give them what they require and they turn into individual plants, each unique in its own way and bearing its own fruit.  The well nurtured ones become strong healthy plants that vine and intertwine through the structure of our lives.  They add their own little color to our character. 

Didjaever…have one of those weekends where you feel like you would have been better off staying at work all weekend?

Didjaever…start a project. Plan it all out to the “T”. Calculate, measure it all up, check it three times and you still end up missing parts or it doesn’t go right?

Didjaever…change your plans twice in the same weekend because more than one thing didn’t go as planned?

If you answered “yes” to any of the above, then you too have had that grand phenomenon called a Didjaever Weekend.

My Didjaever Weekend started like most Didjaever Weekends do. It started Friday with a fairly concerned call from my mom. They took the camper out to Tionesta camping for the week, but she forgot one important bag containing things they really needed. This started things off on a bad foot because last call I got from her when they were camping, was when my dad collapse while setting up the camper. He spent several days in the hospital. He has been having knee problems lately, so I thought “Oh boy! I’m going to be running up to the hospital again. Fortunately, this time I only had to track down a couple friends who were going up to visit on Saturday.

I had plans to fix a couple cracks that were allowing water into my basement on Saturday Morning, then racetrack on Saturday Night.

Problem one: My outside spigot for water has been broken since last winter and I never fixed it. Oh well, its just a connector. No biggie, I’ll fix it before doing the crack patch. I had to hunt all over creation to find someone who had the size connector I needed. Problem one: Resolved.

Problem 2: The crack is not just down along the stairs and across below the down spout. No! It extends 5 feet beyond the downspout and is 3/4 inches wide. Good thing I bought the big bucket of crack patch mix! Again, no real biggie. Same process I had planned on using just a lot longer to complete. Problem 2: Resolved about 6:30 pm. Could still make the races, but now I’m tired and it looks like its going to storm.

On a bright note, I came inside and began a new character in Anarchy Online. I got most of the way off Noob Island myself, but forgot a couple key components that you need to get during your time there. No problem. Vince reminded me where to find them. Thanks again for your patience while I learn and sometimes relearn. We twinked (added things) on my character for a couple minutes after I got through, but then decided to bring my normal character back in so that we could actually play and gain some points etc. I think we ended somewhere around midnight or 12:30.

I got up this morning found water in my basement. No… not water from the cracks outside. That area seemed quite dry even though it rained fairly hard most of the night. I took a shower and proceded with my morning. Later, I noticed the water was worse and it seemed to be coming from my shower drain or spigot. I narrowed it down to the spigot. I found the plastic pipe cracked that runs from the valve out. Greaaaat! (Not really).

I guess I should throw a little side note in here. The guy that owned the house before me rented it out. He let the tenant do alot of the work. You see some really interesting things when you start working on this house.

The plumbing appears to have been made up of whatever scrap the tenant found in someone else junk pile. There is a mix of copper, steel, brass and plastic. Its hard to tell sometimes what they used to hold it together. In the case of today’s leak, it was a copper adapter held by glue into a plastic fitting. I don’t think you’ll find that in any “Time-Life Quick Home Repair Plumbing” Book. I don;t even think they put that kind of slop in “Plumbing Repairs for DUMBIES”. I’m not a professional plumber, but my connections don’t leak and I know what should and shouldn’t be put together.

Anyway, to get back on track here. I sat down and planned out how many elbows, what length of pipe, what connectors and such I would need to replace the broken piece and to change the shower back to copper and put a new shower head on. Got my list… off to Lowe’s I go!

I returned home and began my fairly simple task. I won’t even need to shut off the water because both connection I want to work on are past the shower/tub valves and shouldn’t be hard to get apart. Yep! You guessed it!! The bozos have them glued. Brass fittings adapted to copper adapters GLUED to plastic pipe. In the process of applying my selvet mass to the stubborn connector, the plastic pipe explodes off the shower head. No problem, its getting replaced. Almost simultaneously, as I’m looking up, the plastic hot water line explodes into pieces.

Two things immediately go through my mind: 1) &$@!!!!! That’s HOT! (Hot water tank is less than 8 linear feet of pipe from the valve where I’m working) and 2) Get to the basement and shut off the hotwater to the line before the bathroom floods. (I did install valves to shut off water to the tub without shutting down the whole house.) I am now trying to get the hot shirt off. Not only did I get sprayed when the line broke. A water fall of hot water was tumbling down over the valve just below when I got there to shut it off. I guess adjusting my water pressure to safe levels from the 140 psi it was and lowering the temperature to recommended guidelines saved me some skin today, literally.

I mop up the water and change shirts. Back to Lowe’s I go to get parts to repair the line that blew. Frazzled, but still taking time to list my needed components, I leave Lowe’s sound in the feeling that I will not have any plastic pipe left in the line when I’m finished tonight. Yeah… Riiiiiiiiiiiiight! I forgot to pick up two of the adapters I needed. Fortunately, I did have one that worked that was left over from another project. The hot water line is now completely copper. The cold water line has an 18 inch piece of plastic that will hold until I get back up to get another connector.

Finally, about 11:30 pm, I finished cleaning the shower and installing the new shower head. It has a massage feature and can run both the hand held wand and the shower head at the same time. I mounted the wand bracket just at the right height so that the massage will hit the troublesome part of my back. I packed up my tools, rehung the shower curtain and decided that I ached so bad that it was time to try out my craftsmanship. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I sit here now writing this while I wait for the meds to kick in so that I can sleep. My back is telling me that I should have paid a professional brick layer and a plumber to do these tasks. I spent about $300 bucks to buy the stuff. Pros would have cost me alot more than that, plus their labor, especially on a weekend.

I’ll let you know if I can move in the morning.

I’ve always enjoyed watching storms. Its not unusual for me to stand around watching the lightning and clouds. 

Last night, I was at KMart picking up some meds from the pharmacy.  I decided to walk across the plaza to Big Lots just to see what kind of wacky stuff they had this round.  Thunder was rumbling in the distance and a storm warning had been issued just before I went into the store.

I happened to turn around and see the above cloud formation moving fairly quickly above the plaza.  Within a few minutes, rain was pounding down and lightning was striking close by. 

I wish I would have had my camera.  The cell phone camera just doesn’t do the anger of this cloud justice.

Another Fourth of July has come and gone.

Once again, I helped with the fireworks and a few other things for “The Party on the White House Lawn”. Rick and his family put their all into this gig every year. Their last name is White aka the name of the party. They spend a lot of time… and money getting ready for the party. They deal with the mess during and after, year after year. The party seems to get better each go ’round. This year was the thirteenth year.

There was a crowd from the start this year. I’m not sure I recall a year when the turn out has been this good. Part of the bargain is that you bring a covered dish or dessert and Rick provides the hot dogs, burgers and suds (beer). I think we had food coming out our ears this year. At one point early one, I tried to count the number of guests. I was well over 80 and that didn’t include those that were at the front of the food line that I couldn’t see.

It seems the last few years, we have fought rain at some point during the day. There would be a quick shower mid afternoon. Just enough to crank up the humidity. This year the weather guessers smiled on us. Forecasts called for a twenty percent chance of rain which bumped up to thirty percent between three and six o’clock. Weather radar showed rain showers and heavy storms to our south, but we remained rain-free all day. About six-thirty(ish), the temperature was in the mid-seventies, with a nice breeze. Perfect for the launch festivities at dark.

We hung out at the pool as long as we could before having to go prep the launch site. The water was cool when you first got in. That’s not such a bad thing though, when you’re one of the folks on the launch crew for the fireworks show. Only one cell phone got damaged this year… that we know of. People tend to get thrown in the pool. The throw ers.. don’t always take time to find out if the throw ees have any valuables in their pockets before the throw ing takes place.

The fireworks went off without a hitch this year. I mentioned the breeze earlier because a gentle breeze blows the smoke out of the area. We had one party a few years ago where the air was moist and stagnant. The smoke hung low across the launch site. Shots from the ground displays or low aerial shells got lost in the hazy. All you could see was a colored flash. We had a nice sized crew this year. We didn’t have to have one or two people racing around to launch mortors. I usually end up being one of the ones racing, but I don’t mind. Its fun. We always have the attention of the local police, but usually its because they come to watch. All of us that help with the party try to make things as safe as possible for the guests. The police see this and don’t give us any trouble.

Even though I didn’t get home about three this morning and I didn’t sleep well thanks to my sore back, I chalk this year up as a great party. Rick, Delores (AKA Mrs White or Rick’s Mom), Tam and the gang deserve a round of applause for hosting a great party. A party that now seems to keep the whole town entertained.

Great Job! Keep up the good work! It was a blast! (Literally!)