We’re Moving Up in the World

I thought that some of my democratic friends would find this interesting. This guy is our client and he has a B-E-A-UTIFUL house.

Happy New Year

It’s 2006! We had plans with our friends from WV for New Years but we ended up having to cancel because we were having, what I am going to call, an “inter-family issue”. I am not really going to go into depth about it because frankly it pisses me off. So, Boo-Boo and I played therapists and after that we brought in the new year in front of the TV with Dick Clark. Did anyone else notice that he sounded like crap? I think I recall something about him having a stroke but I am not really sure. They didn’t really keep the camera on him for too long so I don’t know if he looked like crap too. I don’t make New Years resolutions because I don’t ever keep them so I just try and set goals for myself in the hopes that I can meet some of them. I have a few goals that I have set for 2006 and they include: losing ten more pounds to get to my third goal weight since I started my weight loss about a year ago, supporting my husband in pursing his new career, buying a house and paying off my truck.

I watched the entire first season of ER in the last week. I am a huge ER supporter but I didn’t get into ER until, well I don’t know really what season. I didn’t see the first or second season (which I am about to start once I finish this blog) because I watched Chicago Hope which was on against ER and was also canceled because it went head-to-head against ER. There are a lot of differences in the old ER and the new ER and I also got a look into their concept of making the show which is very interesting. The screenplay for the show was written in the early to mid-80’s but got put on hold because when Michael Crichton presented the idea to Stephen Spielberg, Spielberg asked what else he was working on. Crichton said Jurassic Park and of course that is what they concentrated on making. ER got put on the back burner for ten years and then Spielberg though about making it a TV show rather than a movie. They really want to present the show like a documentary so that people got the feeling that they were really involved in what was happening. Hence the moving cameras in and out of rooms instead of just stationary shots. When they presented the pilot to NBC they did not get good reviews because the network was concerned that it was too fast paced, that people wouldn’t be able to follow the action and “form relationships” with the characters. NBC gave them a shot and put them against Chicago Hope to see if they would be able to make it. The pilot aired and of course the rest is history. Anyways, enough about that.

It’s back to work tomorrow. I have a Phase I (that’s the Roman numeral one) that I have to get out this week in order to impress a bank so that they continue to give us business. On top of that I have to get a lot of other things scheduled for upcoming jobs so the homeowners stay happy. I guess this is where I have to let go of the control and delegate some tasks, I think I can do that. Well, I am off to begin watching Season 2 of ER before I watch a new episode of Medium.

I’m baaaack

It has been quite a while since I blogged mostly because I have been super busy at work this week. At the end of Wednesday I had put in 31.5 hours of work time and the earliest I had got home was 8 pm. Needless to say I didn’t have time to blog at work and I didn’t feel like doing it when I got home, all I wanted to do was collapse and go to sleep. I guess I will walk you through my week.

Monday I worked the same spill that occurred the previous Friday. I got home a little after nine, did my blog complaining of my day, took a shower and went to sleep.

Tuesday I had to go back to the same facility and finish the clean-up. It should have been a two hour job but it turned into a pain in my butt because our intern left the ignition engaged on the backhoe and its battery was dead. So, we had to jump the backhoe before we could load the truck with the contaminated soil. I then had to go to a site where a spill occurred a year ago and re-route the blower that we had set up there. Why did I have to re-route the blower you ask? Because petroleum vapors were back in the house for like the third time. We didn’t get to the house until 3ish and we had to dig a six foot hole, drill a hole in the house and then route PVC through the hole to pull from under the slab. Needless to say we did most of the work in the dark with flashlights and I didn’t get home until 9:30. You can guess what I did once I got home.

Wednesday I had a geoprobing job in Warrenton. I had to geoprobe to find a place where the groundwater isn’t contaminated with MTBE so that we can drill the homeowners a new well (their current one is contaminated with MTBE). Overall the day went well but geoprobing in itself is a slow process. On my way back to the office I found out that a client was going to be coming to the office to sign the VPSTF papers and get them notarized and he wouldn’t be there until about 6. Guess who the notary in the office is…you guessed it, me! So, I had to wait around for him to notarize the papers. That night I got home around 8, ate, took a shower and went to bed. Wednesday was also the one year memorial for Nick Mason a soldier in the Army National Guard that was killed last year in the Mosul attack. Nick was a good friend and fellow HS wrestler of my brother-in-law and the son of one of Boo-Boo’s former co-workers.

Thursday I was supposed to have another geoprobing job but this time at a home built on a mountain in Madison County. We got to the site and saw that not only do they have a beautiful view of “Old Rag Mountain” but that same mountain keeps their yard from getting sun. Their entire yard was a sheet of ice and it just wasn’t safe to have the geoprobe rig on the ice so we called the job off. I came back to the office and worked on some reports and actually got to leave at the normal time. When I got home I was able to wrap the rest of the presents, including Boo-Boo’s, and cook dinner all before Boo-Boo got home. Boo-Boo was working in WV with our friends that started their own medical billing company about a year ago. They have expanded so much that they have started to hire outside help and offered both of us a job. I had to turn them down but Boo-Boo accepted, we figured that he can still help them out even when he becomes a police officer because he gets multiple days off in a row.Today has been uneventful work wise but I have put in 42 hours already this week and no matter how much I work I only get paid for 40, the beauty of being a salaried employee. The exciting thing that happened today was that our photgrapher

called and said that our wedding album, printable CD and DVD were done. When I got there she had made us an additional smaller album with pictures other than the ones we chose for our big album and she also couldn’t decide which picture to make an 11 x 14 so she gave us four at no extra cost. Now I am just sitting here waiting for Boo-Boo to get back and for the Explorer to get its oil change and then I can go home. We are celebrating Christmas with Boo-Boo’s family tonight, which I have never done, so it should be an interesting experience. Tomorrow we leave for NC to celebrate Christmas with my family and we will be back on Tuesday. I will do my best to blog while I am at my parent’s house but no promises, otherwise check back on Wednesday. Merry Christmas to everyone!

One word for you…

…EXHAUSTED!!! I just got home from work, 13 hour day and its only Monday. I knew this week was going to be crazy.

I just finished my Christmas shopping, thank God. I don’t know what I would have done today if I didn’t have my good friend right there with me. I am not much of a shopper and I can’t stand to shop for more than an hour, I get totally uninterested in the task at hand. If she hadn’t been there giving me ideas for people, really good ones at that, I don’t think that I would be done (thanks Aminallady for all your help). Now all I have to do is wrap all the presents, we bought presents for 22 people (this includes buying one present for all the kids that are under 16, which is five children) and some of them got multiples. At least I have a week to wrap all the presents before I leave for North Carolina. We got the Explorer back yesterday. That is another stress that is done with, I didn’t know how we were going to get to NC with all the presents and the two dogs in my truck. Now I don’t have to worry about it because we have the Explorer back. I am so happy that the transmission guy found out that our warranty was still good! The total bill for rebuilding the transmission came to a little over $2,200 and we only had to pay our deductible. I love my truck to death and I wouldn’t trade it for the world but we really need the larger vehicle to get places.

Work this coming week is going to be busy, busy, busy. We try to get as much done before the holiday’s hit because we all know we aren’t going to be motivated the last week of December and first week of January. So, I have something planned for every day next week and that means running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Work yesterday was totally nasty, I came home smelling like fuel oil and I didn’t get what I wanted to get done, done. Which means that all that work has to be put off until next week, hence why my schedule is CRAZY. Anyways, back to what happened yesterday, one of our fuel oil companies that uses us as their environmental consultant had a fuel oil leak in their yard and it was just disgusting. We spent all day using sorbent pads to get the fuel oil out of puddles, keeping the fuel oil from getting to the neighboring creek and getting the leak stopped. When I got home, every time I closed my eyes all I saw were red puddles (fuel oil is dyed red for tracing purposes), it was quite disturbing.

I don’t understand why people have to be so grumpy when they are out shopping, it’s not my fault you waited until the last weekend before Christmas to finsih your shopping. I wasn’t grumpy today because I knew that I did this to myself and the quicker I found what I wanted the quicker I got to go home. I was on my way home today and I was sitting at a light, I happened to be the car that would block the intersection of people turning left into the strip mall on my right. I however did not block the intersection while my light was red, people were turning in and out of the strip mall just fine. When my light turned green I pulled up behind the car in front of me and lo and behold someone came and wanted to turn left into the strip mall and at that point I was in his way, even though I was at that second moving up. He turns to me and says “you know, you aren’t ever supposed to block intersections”. So what does he proceded to do??? He pulls in front of the car behind me, which happened to be my friend, and blocks her from proceding to the light. Would those five extra seconds that he had to wait made that big of a difference? I think not…hello people its the holiday season, you know the season for giving and holiday cheer! Again I just don’t understand.

We have made a decision on what we are going to do about the Explorer. Boo-Boo took it to the transmission place our friends father recommended for him to give us a quote on what it was going to cost. He asked Boo-Boo to bring along all his paperwork from when he bought it because he said sometimes he can find a loophole in warranties. When Boo-Boo bought the Explorer he got a 24 month or 2,400 mile warranty and we have put well over 2,400 miles on it since we bought it. Well the guy called that evening and said to Boo-Boo “do you know that your SUV is still under warranty”. Boo-Boo was like what are you talking about, the guys said you bought it with 47,000 miles on it and you now have 63,000 miles and your warranty is for 24 months or 24,000 miles. Apparently from the get go Boo-Boo just totally missed a zero, I saw the printout it is easily missed. Now we have our answer, we are going to rebuild his transmission. Heck it isn’t going to cost us anything so we might as well. Plus we had looked into the blue book value for it and there was no way we were going to get what we owe on it if we traded it in. Thank goodness for small miracles.I LOVE BEING A WOMAN! I have had this conversation with my boss multiple times. He says that he would never want to be a woman. I ask him why and his response is always “beside the obvious, the world is my urinal, I pee when and where ever I want”. My response to that is always well at least I don’t have a little soldier running my life and pitching his tent whenever he pleases. Well yesterday my boss called me and my female co-worker and said that we needed to get dirt to a site because the contractor we had hired had yet to do it and the homeowner has been waiting for weeks for the hole in the ground to get filled. He told us to go to the construction site across the street and see if they would give us half a dump truck load of dirt and to let them know we would accommodate accordingly. The guys on site made a bunch of calls and we were told to come back at 4 and the truck would be ready for us. When I called my boss to let him know the dirt would be there late afternoon he asked how much it was going to cost. I told him we didn’t discuss that and they didn’t seem concerned with it but I would offer the driver money (normally in these situations you just pay the driver what he would make to haul the load). We came back, took the driver to the site and he dumped the dirt. I asked him what we owed him and he said “nothing honey, following two beautiful ladies was enough for me.” He then proceeded to offer to bring more dirt and gravel for the driveway if we needed it, again at no cost. This morning the boss man asked how much it ended up costing us, I told him NOTHING. He wanted to know how we got away with that, the answer is simple because we are women. I told him OK, you can pee when and where ever you want but I get shit for free, I think my deal is better.The finale of The Amazing Race-Family Edition was on last night. I was overwhelmed with joy because the Weaver’s 

 

 

 

 

 

did not win. However, I found myself torn at the end when the Bransen’s and Linz’s were neck and neck doing the North America puzzle. I thought that I was completely set on the Linz’s winning…just so you know I have compared that family to what it would be like if me, Boo-Boo, child #3 and child #4 decided to run TAR together…but the closer it got to them finishing the puzzle I really just wanted Wally to pull out all the stops and beat the Linz’s. Wally was hindering his daughters at the beginning of the race but in the later legs he really starting pulling his weight, there were some challenges that they would have struggled to finish if it wasn’t for him. I got over it though and ended up very happy for the Linz’s, does the second place team get a lesser prize like in Survivor?

Has anyone else noticed that it is cold as piss outside? I was collecting samples from groundwater monitoring wells today and while I was bailing the twine was freezing and my tools were frozen to the ground.

One Year Update

So, I had my review on Wednesday, one day after my one year anniversary. Everything went very well and it wasn’t something I should have been stressing about. I guess I already knew that but the fact that I had never been through a review was stressful. Thanks for the advice EC. The raise is going to be a welcome site but we already have plenty of things that it is going towards.We both are having car problems, Boo-Boo more than myself. He bought his Explorer less than a year ago and we are having major transmission problems. Apparently the problem with the transmission also causes fuel economy issues, in other words shitty gas mileage. His mpg has been steadily decreasing in the past few weeks. When we first bought the Explorer it was getting 22 mpg, now it is barely getting 15. When the problem first arose we figured that we would just let the transmission go and then rebuild it because at the time it wasn’t causing any other problems. Now that we have taken it to a reliable mechanic, yes there is one out there (a friends father), we know that the problem is worse than we thought and is the direct cause of the poor gas mileage. With gas prices the way they are no one can afford to be pissing gas away. So now we have to decide if it is more beneficial to rebuild the transmission or sell the damn thing. My truck on the other hand just has some minor repairs in comparison to the Explorer. I need to get my accelerator plate cleaned because I have a sticky gas petal that is also causing some idling problems, I need new tires, new rotors and probably new brakes. Other than that I think my truck is fine. Aren’t vehicles a pain the in butt?

All four of our animals also need to go to the vet in the next couple of months. I have heard about a vet here in the area that doesn’t charge an office visit. I am going to go and speak with her in the near future about what she charges and also her knowledge on Boykin Spaniels. I am extremely anal about who I take my animals to because I have worked with every vet they have ever been seen by. I want my vet to be knowledgeable about Boykins so that they know what to expect as they get older, the tend to have hip and back problems. Georgia has started to develop noticeable problems with her hips and I expect my vet to know more about the breed than I do. Anyways, beside that taking four animals to the vet is a pricey situation so that is something else we have to look forward to.

 

 

On top of all that, Christmas is approaching and we have a boat load of people we have to buy for, I guess it doesn’t help Boo-Boo has nine brothers and sisters. Well enough bitching for the day, life is great despite all my complaining.

One Year in Review

I have been working my current job for almost a year now, next Tuesday is my one year review. With my first job out of college, which I worked at for a year and five months before I walked out the door one morning and told the boss to go f*#$ himself, there was no review. It was pretty much here is your raise now get out of my face. My first boss was an ass and I don’t feel bad that his company went under. From there I moved on to UNC pretty much for a temporary time because I already knew I was going to be moving to Virginia. Three months after I moved I landed this job, how lucky am I to have fallen into such a great situation? We plan our days, my boss is a total goof and stays out of our way as long as we get our stuff done and the office environment is quiet and enjoyable. My plan going into college was to become a vet and make the “big bucks” but I soon learned that I didn’t want to be the person responsible for “fixing” peoples animals. I love animals and I would rather help to find them good homes than be the person that instills fear in them. So, I got involved in the environmental side of biology while I was in college and apparently I majored in the wrong concentration. My two main jobs out of college have been in the environmental field and I really feel that this is what I should be doing. So that brings me to the review I have next week. I don’t really know what to expect since I have never really had one done. We are a small company and I feel that I am valuable and I contribute a lot to the company but could it be possible I am a little biased??? I sit here and say that and look what I am doing and have been doing for most of the day. I expect everything will go fine and the raise will be welcomed…trust me, people in the environmental field make NO and I repeat NO money. It is just something you accept about the field. Does the satisfaction of making a difference in the environment make up for it all? For most of us I believe it does because we truly love what we do.