wolfhound668

Boy, did I come across as a cold-hearted bastard today.

All week long my director has been talking about how he was going to be leaving early today because he's going camping this weekend. He probably talked to me about it for 20 minutes yesterday at the end of my shift.

This morning I'm on the phone with a user who's only been with the company for a couple of weeks but has already developed a reputation for being a complete pain in the ass. The call came in as a priority 2 so my mind is totally on getting her off the phone. :)

I feel a tap on my shoulder and it's my director. He extends his hand and says he's out of here.

I shake his hand and tell him to have a good weekend then turn back to my call.

A couple of minutes later I feel another tap on my should and figure it's my director wanting to dump something else on me before he leaves. I turn and it's the VP over the other half of the IT department. She works on the developer side and normally won't be caught dead slumming by us infrastructure folks so my mind is in WTF mode. She tells me that my VP needs me up in his office right away.

???? Wait a second, my director never shakes hands with us. Did I just miss something here?

Yeah, he got canned and was saying goodbye permanently.

Ouch.

Ok, we're getting ready to put the house up for sale. I've been packing and moving a ton of stuff to storage to make the place look presentable.

Last night I was cleaning out my office and grabbed a notebook of the shelf. The notebook was from the local community college where I haven't taken a class in years so I opened it up to a random page to see what was in it. The page contained my notes for my father-in-law's lost and (thought) gone forever brisket recipe. I was the only one that he ever showed how to make his awesome brisket and after he passed on I could never find my notes. If I had opened it to any other page then the recipe would have been truly lost.

Needless to say wolfspouse has demanded a brisket for Passover. :)

Oh darn. It's pretty overcast right now and it's been raining off and on since yesterday. Being the 1st Tuesday of the month they are testing the tornado siren in town, which can be heard in my cube-farm.

My perfect April Fools Day victim isn't at his desk. :( I probably would have had him halfway to the basement before he remembered what day it is.

Wolfspouse had to have some moles removed from her back this week. Guess who gets to change the dressings? No one ever warned me of *that* when we got engaged.

Funny though, I went to the dermatologist a couple of years back. She told me she had never seen someone my age with my pasty skin-tone that didn't have any precursors to possible skin cancer later in life. Ever since I had two bouts of sun-poisoning in the army I'm pretty careful about my sun exposure.

Little miss "I never burn" with her Spanish skin-tone had three moles that "didn't look right".

Ok, in hindsight painting the master bedroom battleship-gray was about the silliest thing I ever let the wife talk me into. I knew it was going to be a bear to cover when we decided to sell the place. I've put on two coats of primer and three coats of "new and improved better covering" paint and am still not completely happy with the coverage.

So I've had a new hobby foisted on me. Wolf Spouse promised Little Wolf that when he (finally) gave up the diapers she would get him a pet (they've been discussing pets pretty regular at his daycare). We decided on fish since I would be doing 99% of the work.

Well, he's finally wearing regular underwear (yay) so we made the trip to the local $major_pet_chain over the weekend. I learned that there is a two day waiting period for fish. Just kidding, you have to set up the tank and let the water sit for a couple of days. So we (I) brought home the tank and set it up.

I took LW back yesterday to get his fish. We ended up with ten neon tetras (mom's pick) and two black phantom tetras (my pick). The rule according to the fish site I went to said to not feed them for 48 hours after getting home. Got them in the tank and set.

While buying supplies I noticed a whole range of water testers. When I was a kid with goldfish you just threw them in and hoped for the best. I got a tester and found that the PH in our water is too high (big surprise). I went back today and got some tablets that are supposed to neutralize the PH. I drop one in and all the fish shoot up to the top of the tank. Double-check the box, "safe for all tropical fish" so they're not suffocating or anything (I hope). They look like they're trying to get food. Hmmmm, drop in a pinch of flakes. Feeding frenzy of biblical proportions. Don't feed for 48 hours my ass. I would have lost a finger by then. :)

Some background: at the company I currently work for help desk tickets are prioritized from 1 to 5. A 1 means "drop everything and do it". A 5 is something like a dead printer where a replacement has already been ordered. Makes sense so far.

Somewhere in the murky past it was decided that *every* ticket that originated at one of the company's distribution centers, no matter how minor, *must* be opened as a priority 1. If someone at a DC who only uses his computer for the occasional email has a bad mouse, one of us must immediately drop whatever we are working on and go replace it. No kidding. This rule is set in stone and will not be changed. Most DCs are pretty good at taking care of themselves. The folks at the DC that's right across from our office building are useless as tits on a bull.

Anyway, because of one of my more useless (l)users I wish I could instate the following rule:

If you call from a distribution center on the other side of the country because you have a "bad network cable" (priority 1 remember) even though you have a laptop and can just as easily tap in the building's wireless and the poor bastard who gets the ticket (me) leaves you three voice-mails which you never respond to but you leave two more calls at the help desk saying you still have an issue so I have to place a call to your boss and then you open another ticket two days later for a completely unrelated matter which results in another three unanswered voice-mails you will hence-forth be slowly drowned in a huge vat of lime jello. Sorry about the run-on sentence. :)

To my cow-orker:

If you're going to insist on regularly having detailed personal conversations right outside my cube in a voice that would wake the dead then as far as I'm concerned you give up any right to act "wounded" when I decide to join in.

If my comment served to highlight your advanced age, well, then so be it. >:)

I live within walking distance of a comedy club. They get pretty big acts there and it's usually a good time. A friend got free passes (plus a two 'item' minimum) so a group of us went. The headlining (and only other then the MC) act tonight was a group called National Lampoon's Lemmings. I had high hopes since I've been a National Lampoon fan since I was a pup.

Bloody awful. First time I've ever been to a comedy club and kept looking at my watch waiting for it to be over. About the only folks that enjoyed it were the eight drunk guys behind us. Lots of folks walked out. It's amazing that this is a group that once consisted of John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest. I only got 10 bucks worth of food and feel ripped off.

I was going though a pamphlet from the local park district for a summer day-camp they host. Lots of pictures of healthy, happy kids. Buried in the middle they say that the kids need to bring a sack lunch Monday through Thursday. Fridays are "special cookout days" (in bold purple type no less). Just who is providing the "special cookout" food? They list:

McDonald's
KFC
Subway
Pizza
Wendy's
Taco Bell
Wild Wings

Fast food = "cookout"?

Scattered throughout there are also multiple fast food chains listed for "special events". Portillo's, another day at McDonald's for breakfast, a trip to Wendy's for Frosties and a "field trip" to Chuck E. Cheese for the love of Pete.

I thought it was nuts that Little Wolf's daycare is required by the state of Illinois to feed the kids every two hours whether they are hungry or not.

You folks in a single-religion family will never hear the phrase:

"Bagels have a hole in them so you can hang them on the tree".

Since Mrs Wolf is down with bronchitis it's fallen on me to make dinner tonight.

Since she loves to cook I picked up a couple of cookbooks for her a couple of months ago. One for baking, the other for soup. Her being sick I was thinking a nice healthy soup would be just the ticket.

The selection for tonight is garlic/tomato soup. The recipe calls for 10 cloves of garlic. Mmmmmmm.

This is the first time I've made soup from scratch (even chopped the tomatoes and minced the garlic by hand). So far it smells wonderful. :)

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Little Wolf has developed a fear of all bugs recently. I'm pretty sure he picked it up at daycare because several of the kids there freak out over bugs and "monkey see monkey do".

We just had a fly in the house and the freak-out begins, "a fly dada, a fly. Kill it, kill it!!".

Little Wolf and I stopped at the store last night on the way home to do some shopping. I won't mention the store's name but their sign is a series of concentric red and white circles. :)

As we're getting to the register the cashier is going on and on about how her scale is broken and not one guy in the store has offered to fix it for her (gasp!).

After listening to this for a couple of minutes LW looks right up at me and says in his "fill the room" three-year-old voice, "boy, she's cranky, isn't she daddy?".

Man, did she blush. >:)

Little Wolf has transitioned to Pull-Ups this week as part of his potty training. He's still getting used to them. When I picked him up at daycare he was "adjusting" the front of his shorts and the following conversation ensued:

Little Wolf, do you have to use the potty?

Noooo.

Then why are you grabbing your penis?

Because I want to grab my penis.

Can't argue with that. :)