Ladies and gentlemen, I am tapped. As if this time of year wasn't busy enough with birthdays, school starting, and the Holidays on the horizon, work has also picked up for me. Sort of. In the wake of my own employer (or at least the business unit I work in) being incredibly slow right now, I have been temporarily loaned out to another engineering firm to help them with a project they are behind on. I have currently been approved to work 70-hour weeks, although I am actually working closer to 55 hours. In addition to the ten-to-eleven-hour days, my drive time has also doubled, from about thirty-to-forty-five mintues a day to about one-to-one-and-a-half hours - still not bad by Houston Metro standards, but a significant increase nonetheless. I'm only having to leave the house thrity minutes earlier than I normally would, but it's amazing how profound a difference that small amount of sleep can make. The work is tolerable, but only just; when I was sent over it was understood that the company borrowing me was in need of a "CAD blaster" to help with picking up marks*. As unenthusiastic as I was at the prospect of going to work for another company, albeit temporarily, I was at least happy about the fact that the time should pass quickly if all I was to do was pick up marks for eight weeks. When I got there, I learned that such was not the case. Instead, I am helping with menial design work at the tail-end of a large project I am not familiar with. In addition, this is a type of project that I am not used to working on - a new offshore facility, whereas all of my experience is with existing onshore work. So, I'm trying to look on the bright side and view this as an opportunity to both get some experience working offshore and to make some extra money, but I am less than thrilled with the whole arrangement. Hopefully the eight week duration I was originally told will be accurate, although there is another guy from my company on his last week here who was supposed to be done last December.
Speaking of extra money, this heat wave has been rough on our air conditioner. Several weeks ago we had an AC guy come check everything out because it was taking a long time to cool down the house. He said the cooling coil in the attic appeared to be original, which makes it over 30 years old, and that it looked like it might never have been cleaned (although this is the same AC guy that replaced the furnace before I owned the house, so one hopes that he at least cleaned it then - but that was a long time ago, too). In addition, the AC unit is about 14 years old and could stand replaceing as well. All said, by his estimate, we are looking at $4500 to get the AC up to snuff. The problem being that we lack $4500. So, we are currently limping along with what we have, which means that the AC is running pretty much non-stop from about 8:00 a.m. until whenever we go to bed just to keep the house around 78-76. I don't know what that is doing to our electric bill (I'm too afraid to ask), but I'm sure it can't be good; we already have a larger water bill than normal from trying to keep the lawn alive, although Denine alleviated that somewhat by running over the sprinkler a couple weeks ago.
Ren's birthday party was the weekend before last, so we have the second of the three Summer birthdays behind us now. As usual, the party was a veritable blitzkrieg of six-to-eight-yer-old enthusiasm. All I remember is a blur of yelling, small people, and wrapping paper. And donuts. The overwhelming theme for gifts this year seemed to be crafts and jewelry. I've never seen so many beads and plastic jewels in all my life; I predict it should take her until sometime next week to use it all. We've still got Jamie to go, but he just has friends sleep over for his party nowadays, so it's pretty lowkey. I don't think anybody has bought any presents for him yet, and when we asked him the other day what he wanted for his birthday he just kind of shrugged. It's like he's turning into a teenager or something.
School started last week, much to Denine's relief. The kids were duly excited; they are both the type to bemoan school while they're in it, but admit that they are ready to go back after long breaks. Jamie seems to be adjusting to junior high well, getting into the groove of changing classes and whatnot. I was a little annoyed when I found out that the junior high students aren't allowed to carry backpacks to class. I was telling Jamie that I only used to only go to my locker four times a day (start of the day, before lunch, after lunch, and end of the day) to make the most efficient use of my time between classes, and he told me they can't do that because they can't carry backpacks - and they have way too much stuff to just carry around. So instead, they have to use part of their five-minute passing period to change out books between every class. Apparently the whole spiel they give the parents about teaching our children important time management skills takes a backseat to the paranoia of a child carrying a weapon to class. Oh, except for last period, when they make them take everything they need to take home to class with them, so they don't make the busses wait in the heat more then five minutes.
Apparently, it's a miracle the human race survived this long, because if the armed pre-teens don't get you, the oppressive heat will...
*For those who are not in the industry, this involves entering marks that engineers and/or other designers have made on hardcopies of electronic drawings into the drawings themselves; relatively mindless, though arguably skilled, work for which I have a proven aptitude.
