Geeking Out Friday

Ahh Friday at last and finally I really think I can tank  today. But one look at my living room when I woke up and I immediately grabbed a broom to at least sweep and start putting away some of the mess. I'm not even going to mention that I didn't wake up as early as I would have liked meaning that I would have missed getting a preferred tee time but then since I booked at Altadena there was no need to get up as early. Still needed to get a day pass for Lisa though and I was greeted at 8:10 by a text that Johnnie's school drop off - on crazy hair day - had some drama. Only Lisa. Apparently Johnnie had gotten embarassed about his hair, Claire the dog had gotten loose and the kids had to catch her and the other parents had to help coax Johnnie to come out. I mean what-in-the-fuck??? Lisa and drama. Hand-in-hand. The parents must know that my rather bland and boring and very fast drop-offs are way different right? Anyway, I went on to morning and I actually planned on dropping off the iphone that I don't use and the mini-PC that I don't want to use at Westlake North and then be back home for the FRB Birthday deal. Except... I got it in my head that I could actually turn my mini-PC into an Ubuntu server myself and turn THAT in all loaded with all the software I want. After all, I let Noriel try to do that and it took him WEEKS to do! Weeks! I had it in my mind that I could get my PC rebuilt inside of a couple of hours. However, it HAD been a really long time since I had actualy done that. And the mere act of downloading the right files and making a boot disk on a USB stick already took me to lunchtime.  And then I  headed out to get some Yoshinoya beef bowls to eat. After all, I had all these coupons.  MUCH better than Taco Bell let me tell you. And then I went at it again and this time I at least got the OS to load. Still had a whole bunch of software to install and I had to do them all manually. And then it was 2 pM already and time for the FRB Birthday deal. HR was in charge today and they had a Jeopardy style game on tap. Of course I had to attend right? Fortunately, HR only had that one game lined up and it took all of 20 minutes to finish. And so I still had time to keep working on my rig before picking up Johnnie at school. 

As it was I did pick him up and we had no time to get him lunch and so I geared him up right for swim class and headed off to the pool. This would probably be his last class on Fridays at least since Stacey is going to have a change of schedule as well. Still he did pretty well! He was able to swim across by himself and he knew when to turn over and catch his breath and he actually looked pretty comfortable in the water until he started getting cold again. But this time I interrupted his pattern by making him play the rock game. I took a rock and threw it in the pool and made him get it at the bottom of the pool. And boy he had a hard time doing that! That's because he would easily swim back to the surface by lifting his head! And wouldn't you know he learned 2 things: it would be hard for him to drown and that he can actually submerge in the water! Of course he still has to learn to dive down and stay down and so it took him a while and many attempts before he was able to actually pick up the rock. But I am giving myself a pat on the back for actually coming up with a game that made JOhnnie forget about being cold, and made him actually stay in the water! Even Stacey actually kept on playing the game with him! It was well past 4 PM when we got done. I got him dried up and dressed up and made him some hot chicken noodle soup and pizza for a very late lunch/early dinner.  Lisa never did show up for the swim class and I just assumed she was working away. She actually did come by around 5:45 to pick up Johnnie finally.  I did appreciate that I got to spend some time with him today and that he had fun at the pool. And he got to watch some videos and do his SeeSaw homework as if it was a weekday <which it is LOL>. He has one more week of school left. And so I waved mom and son off and we talked about picking him up for a few hours again tomorrow morning for Saturday routine.  I overheard her say 'Im sorry Johnnie for working too much:." I thought to myself yeah you BETTER apologize. And when he prefers to spend time with me you'd better not say anything either. I took a walk around the block to finish off my steps. It was a beautiful afternoon after all. AND THEN I went back to geeking out on my rig. It turned out that the software I wanted to install wouldn't work on the newest version of Ubuntu server that I had loaded. Damn. BAck to the drawing board. Gotta start all over with the older version.  That version was much easier to install though and I got done within an hour. THAT is more like it. I walked to Ralphs to finish my steps for the day, made myself some nice chicken dinner at 7 PM and by 7:30 I pronounced myself done with the PC Project. It took all day. But i got it done. It was sort of like "I still got it" kind of thing for me. So no excuses for my team to get what I wanted all done. Finally I thought about cleaning up the apartment some more. But all I could do was to wash dishes before I was ready to conk out. Hey, it takes a lot of brain power to do the rig that I just did! I needed to chill the rest of the evening. Veg in front of the TV, which by the way I had commandeered as the monitor for the mini-PC since I wanted not to touch the existing laptop configuration in my room. It's all good. A geek is a geek is a geek. NOt apologizing for it one bit.