Today’s featured image is of Josh and Chamberlain patiently waiting for their checkups at the vet sometime last year.  They’re currently overdue for this year’s, but I’ve been a bad dad and haven’t bothered to make an appointment for them.  Possibly because I haven’t had a day that I can take them.   Today, for instance, is my first actual day of vacation since I took a week off last October.  I don’t have the faintest idea at this point of how many days I actually get to take off now that I’m with The X Company, but I’m supposedly earning 15 hours off per month or something like that.  Not sure if I can take them before I’ve earned them.

Today, however, I’m getting a comp day because I worked on Good Friday, which apparently is a paid holiday at The X Company.  Since tax season was still going strong last week, most people worked.  I worked because I had no idea it was a holiday – though traffic was remarkably light!

I took today largely because the brass band is launching our “tour” this evening in Jacksonville, AL.  We’ll play at Jax State U. tonight, then in Huntsville, AL, tomorrow, and will close things out in Chattanooga on Sunday.  It will mark, I think, the 4th weekend in a row that I’ve had to do something.  I’d planned on taking a hike in the mountains next weekend, but realized on Tuesday night that I’ve got another concert next Saturday.  So…maybe the weekend after that.  Unless that’s when Riley is getting hitched.  Sigh.  As much as I hate them, there are times when I really miss how good I had things at ATT.

Speaking of “them,” I’m coming closer to firing ATT.  I got an email last week informing me that I’d paid my DirecTV bill, which – with my employee discount – had remained at $11.  I knew that the discount would end eventually, and I knew that the price would probably shoot up to $50-$60.

I was not at all prepared for it to shoot to $211, and I cancelled the service that night.

To replace it, I invested in an HD antenna and a Tablo 4-stream DVR device.  Using those, plus a 3-TB external hard drive and the Roku boxes that Mary and I already had, I’m able to get and record about 30 local channels, plus 42 other Roku “channels,” such as Netflix and Amazon Prime (for which I pay a whopping $150 a year or so – for both) and other free channels that may or may not include commercials – though not nearly as many as regular TV included when I had it.

It is, to put it mildly, fantastic.  News, sports, movies, soap operas, sitcoms….you name it, I get it.  For (basically) free.

I looked into changing my phone service from ATT to Verizon, but the Verizon dude ticked me off – and I’m not sure that they can support my phone – so I’m still with the big T for that.  My internet service, though….shopping around for that one.  I’ve got a pretty good deal with ATT still, but I’m not sure if/when that’s going to get jacked up (I’m sure that they’re discounting it because I had DTV and phone).  When it goes up – or even if it doesn’t – I’ll find somebody like Comcast, who can give me higher speeds even if it costs more.  Basically, I’m still really pissed off at ATT (as is most of the rapidly-growing pool of ex-Digital Life employees), and I don’t want to give them a dime if I can avoid it.

Work has gotten incredibly boring since the end of tax season, and “meeting the metrics” (8 hours on the phone, 7 hours of billable time, 10 tickets closed) each day is nearly impossible.  I’ve been having some text conversations with the area manager of the call center that I supported – his last day is today, I believe – and we’re trying to put together some sort of business plan to be our own bosses and work together.  Top of the list right now are starting a courier company or a home inspection company.  I’m also still trying to learn a bit more about the inner workings of WordPress (which this blog runs on), as part of a vague idea about creating/maintaining websites for people.  A friend of mine from Canada has been doing this for years, and I think it’s something I’d really enjoy (and, hopefully, be pretty good at).

Must get packed for this tour, so I’ll stop here.

So I’m sitting at work with very little to do. During the last couple weeks of tax season, accountants are more focused on actually doing taxes than on complaining about their software, so they don’t call in or open tickets unless they’re really stuck.

Figured I’d play around with a desktop blog editor (called BlogDesk) to see what kind of a job it does. There are some things that seem to be missing….I can’t set a featured photo for the top of an entry, but I can live with that if that’s the only drawback. The image that (hopefully) appears inline in this entry is just one that I had sitting on my work laptop. It’s part of one of the event logs that I was looking at a few days ago on a machine that was having one of those “really stuck” times. I don’t remember how I fixed it. Probably just reinstalled the Citrix receiver, which seems to fix about 90% of the problems that arise with cloud-based software.

Supposedly, we had nasty/dangerous storms in the Atlanta area yesterday. I did not notice them. It was breezy (as it is today), but the rain, thunder, lightning, etc., was not all that apparent to me. I’m told that it really uncorked itself overnight, but I slept very well last night. That in itself is kind of amazing, as I generally do not sleep well. Got nearly 4 hours of “good” sleep last night, according to my fancy-dancy sleep-tracking watch. Normally, I’m good for about 2 hours of deep sleep and 5-6 of light (or being awake).

Vodka. It does a body good.

The latest work-related affront to my dignity is scheduled to take place on (I think) Wednesday, April 19. Dubbed “The Annual Kickoff,” this apparently is something that this company does each year at the close of tax season and the beginning of a sales push to get new clients before the next tax season starts. It is a time of fellowship and relaxation – which, for a bunch of 20-somethings, means a picnic in the park featuring a kickball game.

Okay.

I’m 51 years old and haven’t played kickball since I was in 3rd grade. I don’t like to run. I wear five-finger shoes. Ain’t no way I’m getting involved in a kickball game with these people. I will eat a lot of hot dogs and drink whatever beer is provided. I’m told that an ice cream truck was also made available last year, so I’ll eat ice cream.

The office recently had a shuffleboard table installed in the break room. No kidding. I guess it’s for the people who are bored with ping pong, video games, and miniature billiards (I can’t make this stuff up). Someone has proposed (on our in-company Facebook-type website) that we have a shuffleboard tournament. Greg, the only person in this office anywhere near my age (he’ll be 52 in September), immediately came over to my desk and determined that he and I will enter this tournament as a team called “The Old Farts.”

That, I will do. Shuffleboard tokens, after all, are simply darts that are not affected by gravity.

I am still totally jonesing for some time in the woods. Thought I might be able to get out this weekend, but Jenny took a spontaneous trip to Greece, so I need to stay in town and take care of her cats. Next weekend is Easter (got a gig – not complaining about that), and the weekend after that is the GBB’s mini-tour through Alabama and Tennessee. Maybe I’ll be able to get out on the weekend of the 29th. I’ve decided that the worst part about losing the gig at AT&T is the fact that I’m starting over on the vacation scale. I’ve always been someone who works more for time off than for money, and I got very comfortable having 38 days a year off. Going back to 10 or 15 (and not having access to even THAT for another month) is making me a bit stir crazy.

I guess I’ve written enough now to test out how this BlogDesk things actually works when it comes to publishing entries. Here goes nothing….