We have an assembly engineer who has decided to take a job elsewhere, some place a lot closer to home. His last day is this Friday. It is also the last day of our payroll clerk and for her there is any number of little tributes and sharing of food stuffs, unfortunately for him, nothing. So Donna asked me to make up a little farewell card for him.
We had breakfast at DD this morning and after walking out on Saturday morning because no one wanted to wait on us in a timely manner we were glad to see the little older woman behind the counter. She, unlike most of the younger kids that man the register, can enter our highly complex order* without hunting for several seconds looking for the right button to push. Not only that, she seemed to be the only person in the store and we got our food and drinks in a more timely fashion than usual.
On her badge, there was a label, right under her name with her title, SHEFT LEADER.
*Small Coffee, cream & sugar
Small hot Chocolate, no whipped cream
Coffee Cake Muffin
Plain Bagel, toasted with butter
Today is the last day of Mardi Gras. The day before Ash Wednesday and the start of the 40 days of Lent for those of a western Christian beliefs. Donna grew up in New Orleans and remembers while in high school actually participating in some of the parades.
When Donna and I lived in New Orleans in the middle 80’s my idea of a Mardi Gras parade was more of the ones put on by small artsy organizations that marched through the French Quarter. I really wasn’t too excited about the whole St. Charles Avenue or Metairie big parade thing. If I was still living in the Big Easy today I probably would have wanted to attend the Krewe Delusion parade on the 4th, but I definitely would have attended the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus parade last Saturday.
One year my mom and her sister took the train down from New England to New Orleans to enjoy the festivities. We had a good time showing them the sites, dining on spicy seafood and taking them to a couple of parades. But I think both women felt that the party atmosphere on the train trip down generated the best stories and oddball memories from the trip.
From left to right in the photo above: a small glimpse of our 1983 Honda Prelude, me in my quasi-Miami Vice attire, my Mom, and Virginia, Mom’s sister, my Aunt and mother to Martha and Louise.
After barely having any winter during the first 1/2 of its allotted time slot, it looks like we are going to have some this weekend. Our normal overnight lows for this time of the year are 35°:
Dad was an only child and Mom had one sister, so the sum total of my first cousins is quite small. The woman on the right in the photo above represents exactly one half of them, meet Cousin Louise, fledgling snowbird.
When we received her annual Christmas letter this year she mentioned that she was tired of the winters in Maine, so she was going to rent a house in Florida from a friend for the months of January, February and March. She had gotten her nurse’s license for FLA and planned on finding some work to keep her kind of busy and recoup some of her rent money. Turns out the town she was renting in was a mere 15 miles from where Donna’s sister Sandy lives, so we told her we were going down in February to visit Sandy and some of Donna and her cousins when they returned from a cruise* and we would stop in and visit. We also offered up a free night of room and board at Casa de Bogardus if her drive down brought her our way.
*Maybe we should check on those plans, as they may have decided on something different after the Costa Concordia thing.
And at the beginning Louise was going to pass right by here as she traveled from Virginia Beach to Atlanta visiting friends, but when we checked in with her the day before her scheduled arrival, she mentioned that she was getting anxious to get to her destination and was going to keep the car pointed south instead of jogging west our way. Seeing as she was going to have to pass right through South Carolina on the way. We plotted a likely point for her overnight stay on Friday and because we had that afternoon off we’d drive over and meet her for dinner.
Serendipitously, it turned out to be a town that we are intimately familiar with meeting cousins in. It is the same city where we usually meet Donna’s cousin Laurie at a Cracker Barrel in Florence, SC. So we made some reservations at a hotel that fit our one important criteria, be within walking distance of a restaurant that served wine. We each agreed to ask at the front desk to see if the other had checked in yet so we could get together.
Donna and I took our time on the way east on I-20 doing a few a few park & grab geocaches. When we got to the hotel I told Donna we would first circle the lot looking for a car with Maine plates before checking in. We didn’t get very far, there was a red Toyota Prius under the entrance awning. We did some catching up, then a lot more family stories over dinner. There was a bit more chatting at breakfast on Saturday in the hotel before Louise continued flying south for the winter and we geocached home vowing to meet again in February.
With the new PC in hand and all my files transfered over to it, it was time to wipe the hard drive so I can pass it along to a co-worker.* I use a program called KillDisk to over writes everything on a drive with zeros, then re-install the operating system, so that the next person starts with a clean slate.
*I was going to donate it to Goodwill, but found someone here at work who is starting a Tax Prep business and needed to keep that stuff separate from the household PC.
I made a bootable USB drive to erase the hard drives, but for some reason the PC wouldn’t start up using it. So I installed the Windows version and it wiped the secondary hard drive and it wiped the second partition on the main drive, but would not commit suicide by wiping the drive it was installed on. Not unexpected, the computer was just obeying the 3rd Law of Robotics: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
I ended up burning a CD to kill the main drive.
We rode the tandem to work today and had the afternoon off, so as I gathered up Donna to go change for the ride home, I overheard Trina, another planner in the cubicle behind her, say to Ian, “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
Now, taken out of context in an office environment, you just might wonder what was going on there…
Fridays at ASCO for lunch we get Mexican brought in. We don’t have a cafeteria, but the sister of a woman who works on a Assembly line fixes the food for delivery to the Valve Store(R). It started small, just the folks that work on her line, but once word got out how good the food is, especially the green chile sauce, it has branched out to all around the plant.
Us office types give our order to Ian, one of the Assembly Engineers, who gathers the money and gives the order sheet to the woman. I was kind of bummed that I missed out on the Mexican this week as one of the offerings was a burrito with white rice and the green chile sauce on the side and this is my favorite. Apparently Trina is fond of the sauce as well, because her container was not full to the top. She was complaining to Ian about the quantity of it and he must have been dismissive of her concern. So that is why she said, “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”