Weekend!
We know the usual story: You go away for a week, you get back, you find that everything is on fire.
That wasn’t my story, though. My fan belt has been screaming like a banshee first thing in the morning and it has been going from it squealing for a second, to two seconds, to, like, 10 seconds and stopping for a second, then starting again when I back out of the driveway.
So, last Friday, I talked to my supervisor and said “hey, I called the place and they don’t have an appointment available for me on Friday… can I take my day off on Monday and come in on Friday instead?” and she made noises about whether I’d really want to come in, wouldn’t I want to use a vacation day instead? Everything is fine, so on and so forth and I said that, no, it’s fine… I also wanted to check in with my various teammates and projects and see if I couldn’t get started on the process of turning the crown fire into a brush fire again.
And I get to work and… everything is mostly okay? Apparently, the various managers of some of the other teams also took that week off and anything that caught fire was not fanned by management, and so somehow managed to take care of itself. “I thought you were on vacation this week!”, my boss said to me as I sat down in the lab. “So did I!”, I told him.
So I got to work on stuff and get into a nice solid groove and things felt good, everybody went out to lunch, and we get a call at the restaurant and OH MY GOSH IT’S ONE OF OUR OFF-SITE TEAMS EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE and, right there in front of my boss, me and my main man took care of it on speaker phone in the restaurant (can we get a to-go box?), on speaker phone in the car, and then on speaker phone once we got back to the lab.
And off-site said that everything was fine right as the weekend started.
As we were leaving, my boss pointed out that it was fortuitous that I just happened to pick the day that he’d get a call from off-site.
And I am so very tickled about that that I had to share the story.
I figure that it was a better one than the “I sorted laundry today after a week of being back at work and noticed how many more button shirts there are in it compared to last week when there were practically nothing but fuzzy pants and hoodies.”
And as such, this weekend, I will spend it doing laundry with button shirts in it.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Image is “Play” by Clare Briggs. Used with permission of the Briggs estate.)
We have our monthly Lunch Club tomorrow with family. We take turns picking new restaurants to try and unbelievably we’re still going strong after 4 months. It can’t last but still fun to introduce my picky family to more adventurous choices.
And then tomorrow afternoon I’m taking one of the nephews to the National Farm Machinery Show so he can climb all over $100K tractors and I’ll buy him a Pioneer seed hat and a soft pretzel as big as his head and he’ll tell his parents, “Uncle Mike is the best uncle ever!” Or so I picture things in my head.Report
Saw Lego Batman… thought it was more Duplo/Playmobil than Lego.
Some funny moments, if you grew up watching the 60s batman (i.e. the real batman); if you didn’t not sure how you could sit through the boring story… and the earnest preachiness.
Voice acting was also quite weak… Will Arnette was fine (whisper growled like a champ), but Zack Galifianakis was wasted as Joker and Michael Cera was miscast as Robin, Rosario Dawson would have been better served as Rosie Perez.
My ruminations on voice acting lead me to believe that the animators still need to match the character with the voice… that is, Michael Cera cannot play a bubbly earnest Robin, but probably would have been a very funny angsty ironic millennial Robin. Similarly with Galifianakis; actually Galifianakis’ voice might not work in animation at all without being able to see him… much of his humor is body driven (I think). Absent that, he sounded like Random Guy #2 reading a script.
Which is just to say that other than the dozen or so scripted jokes the movie was totally flat.
{Lastly, holy Daddy issues, America.}
{p.s. I thought it was funny after the fact to learn that the (minor) part of Lord Voldemort was played by Eddie Izzard and not Ralph Fiennes, who played (the Real(?)) Lord Voldemort… probably some contractual issue I suppose}Report
Well, it’s a movie that I kinda want to see and I’m keeping two things in mind:
1) There are 50 ways to do Batman and all of them work
2) It’s a feature-length film from (some of) the guys who do Robot Chicken
Given that I don’t smoke weed, I’m not sure that #2 is a plus or a minus in and of itself but… Batman was the best part of The Lego Movie (which I *LOVED*). I could see how 90 minutes with him might wear thin, but I could also see how it’d be a good way to spend 90 minutes.
Plus, hey, Batman.Report
On the plus side, they did about 20 of those ways… it was the best leitmotif of the movie.
The original Lego movie also never forgot it was a world of Legos and many of the jokes worked around that… I won’t say Batman forgot so much as wanted to transcend the Lego limitations. They wanted to make a movie in a Lego setting, which is not quite the same as making Lego Batman.
Definitely cable worthy…Report
I saw Lego Batman last week. It was terrible. Batman was a real Dbag and the story was boring.Report
Part of the issue of Batman is that, yes, he *IS* a real jerkface.
They explore the whole issue of how that’s required for him to do the things that he does and, periodically, they have Nightwing or somebody stand in for him and they’re a lot nicer and that, of course, comes back to bite everybody in the butt.
Everybody prefers the stories where Batman is just punching people. Easier to compartmentalize.Report
Jay,
not nearly as bad as IronMan.
“I just saved your life. Now you work off your debt to me!”Report
Your work stories always make me question whether I’m a bad employee or you’re a bad boundary-setter. 🙂 Love you, Jay!Report
I am a bad boundary-setter. I work for a company that does stuff like invite me to stuff like “our baby’s first birthday is Wednesday but we’re having the cake smash on Saturday, show up at one!”
Instead of saying “I just spent 40 hours with you people. 45, really”, I say “oooh, I need to go to the stuffed animal store and find a stuffed animal.”Report
me and my main man took care of it on speaker phone in the restaurant (can we get a to-go box?), on speaker phone in the car, and then on speaker phone once we got back to the lab.
Man, I wish I could make a joke about Trump.Report
Manicures with the girls Sunday, but the rest of the weekend is all mine. I’m either too nauseous to eat or stuffing myself with pregnancy cravings. I try to keep a good balance. For example, today I’m eating chocolate while walking on the treadmill.Report
Chores chores chores.
On my 2nd round of litterbox washing (there are 8 of the cussed things and only 2 tubs we don’t use regularly ourselves), the handwash dishes are done, about half the laundry is put away. Oh, and we submitted our taxes.
Then comics and anime and other diversions in between bouts of housework.
I reckon the rest of the weekend will go similarly, only with bills instead of taxes.Report
I hope this is my last working weekend for a while. I was busy from about 9 am until after 5:30 pm. And a lot of it was sort of thankless volunteer grindwork.
I will say the women at my workplace were way overrepresented and the men were underrepresented at one of the volunteer efforts. I think that needs to change next year.
Also, I totally forgot how absolutely nuts seventh graders are and I am now somewhat traumatized from having to deal with a bunch of them for an hour.
Today? after church, I’m not going to speak to another human being for the rest of the day. Yesterday was Introvert Hell and I need to recover before I go back to work tomorrow.Report