Last weekend was kind of a washout, but not fully a washout. Doug wasn't feeling well after getting his vaccine and usually we are driven to "do" based on his wants. I'm perfectly happy not doing things. Not going places. Working around the house and doing things instead of going places to do nothing.
He muttered and stumbled around sighing all weekend, complaining. I actually did work (I'm not supposed to work on the weekend but I did because I'm so far behind) and I downloaded pictures from the Samsung Cloud to my phone because I dunno - Samsung is discontinuing our cloud or some shit.
I then sat and uploaded pictures to Dropbox to get them off my phone. I had all the photos I'd taken that didn't go up to the cloud and then all the pictures removed from the cloud, so there were several thousand images that needed taken care of.
I tried to bulk upload all the images at once and around 4 hours later nothing was happening, so I opted to go month by month, starting with the ones not downloaded from the cloud. Worked out well but was slow going. I sat here on the couch most of the afternoon on Saturday and pretty much all day on Sunday, purging pictures I didn't want to send up to Dropbox, lots of junk, lots of pictures of beer.
Really should start posting to the Shenanigans with Dave blog again since we enjoy a lot of Maryland Beer. I should resurrect it. I use Untappd, so I do take pictures of the beers and share thoughts about them, but I miss the blog.
The work week was busy. Very busy. We have a new employee that I hand selected and encouraged to interview. So she's coming up to speed and I'm helping her every chance I get when a question comes up. We had launched 4 sites onto the new content management system and I've been doing that task, which I love doing. I love meeting with the stations, talking them through the process, and then testing/verifying/spot checking all the content. But I also have to do my own job, like the job that usually takes me a solid 50 hours a week to do. If I could not do my own job at all and only focus on the migration of sites to the new platform, I think I'd actually be very happy. I really enjoy this. I feel accomplished and successful.
I'm not sure that will ever happen.
But it makes me happy, and I get to do it because the person who had been doing it is on family leave. I'm not sure when he comes back but when he does, I'm going to dig my heels in and say I really want to keep doing this task. I am hoping he'll be more than amenable for me to do it so he can do his other 900 duties. And I'll continue to futz with my actual job at all kinds of off hours, I guess. Just to keep things going.
Doug gets mad at me and says I'm doing too much, that "they're getting way too much out of you for what you're getting paid."
I know. I am aware. I'm fine with it though for now. For Now.
Anyway.
We are watching this hurricane situation carefully to see if it was going to float westward at us but things look incredibly safe and clear here for us.
Not so much for my sister and possibly my parents. Screenshot above is from this morning. That's all subject to change, of course. My parents are South East of Providence, and my sister is kind of due south of New Haven.
We have a small tree that is growing into the fence up front, most of it was killed by the cicadas, so Doug had done a big trim and tidy of it, thinking that we'll see what it looks like next spring to see what's still worth keeping. It started to send out dozens of suckers out of the base, so it looks like a big dumb dead tree growing out of a bush. I cut back all the suckers, and back in July I had planted morning glories on the fence on either side of the gate, and while I was in Denver and then in Pennsylvania they went crazy bananas and grew all over the damn place. I'd intended to thread them nicely all through the fence, but they blew up kind of all in one place. On one side of the gate, I'm did a ton of detangling, and am training them towards the dead-ish tree to use it as kind of a trellis and grow up vertically. On the other side, of the gate, I did some de-tangling and rethreading, and cut giant leaves back from the mailbox, so the USPS can open our mailbox and put mail in!
Note to self, next year start the morning glories on every pole along the fence and not right next to the gate.
I'm going to go out tomorrow morning and take a picture. They literally are gorgeous first thing in the morning, and by 10am they close up for the day. This side of the house faces East, so this is beautiful first thing. I love them and am already looking forward to doing it differently next year.
I also did a bunch of grass trimming along the fence, and pulled out all kinds of fun growing things that had been left to their own devices for most of the month while I was away. Everything here is very prolific, and grows very fast, especially in August. There is some really cute ground cover that I don't recognize, I may dig it up and put it in a bare patch at another part of the fence by the street.
It was hot, I was sweating and filthy. I got to be Farmer Chris again after several weeks of it being way too hot to even deal with being outside. This was delightful and peaceful.
The rain came after I'd spent about two hours out there, Doug finished mowing the lawn, and we came inside to escape the afternoon downpour. It's hot and humid and dead still out there, hard to imagine that a couple hundred miles to our east there's a hurricane churning away.
Geoff is house sitting for a friend of mine that I met at a Guster concert a few years ago. RG is in his mid 30s, and came to the show in DC alone, and connected with our burgeoning friend group. He's super sweet and I like him a lot. We haven't seen each other in person since the show back then, but he is so nice and we're connected on Facebook. He asked if anyone could take his dog so he could travel this weekend. I told him we couldn't take the dog (Phineas is not other dog friendly) but I volunteered the boy. He took me up on the offer.
Glad the boy gets to now live a bachelor's life until Monday night when I go to pick him up. He longs for his own apartment and that solo life, and maybe his own dog. Downtown Bethesda is really nice, and walking distance to restaurants and a brew pub too, so I think he was very excited about tasting what living in town would be like, since we're not walking distance from anything except a 1/2 mile walk to the metro, where you can then get out to all the fun things, but it isn't the same as living in a neighborhood like Bethesda.
So this is a good thing for him to do.
I can't believe he starts back for classes again on August 30th for the Fall semester. Next weekend I hope he can squeeze in another good thing to do for himself like kayaking or something. He's accomplished so much and this next year is going to hopefully be amazing. I believe this time next year he's done with his degree, and we'll see where he goes next.
I just talked to my mom who seems confident that nothing is going to happen for them, she's saying she's prepared. She has cheetos puffs and triscuits for food. When you are almost 80 and that is what you eat, that's fine I guess.
Anyway, it is only Saturday and I feel we got a bunch done. And I'm making up for last week. And still have a day ahead to do more. I'll take some pictures of the flowers tomorrow, and take care of them until the vine withers
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