The Morning Routine

With the exception of preparing their lunches, which Nightingale does, I am in charge of getting the kids ready and off to school.  Almost every day is a challenge, but different than the day before.  I get them up at 7 and ask what they want for breakfast.  They rarely, if ever, want the same thing.  

Once they are sitting and eating breakfast, I pick out Boris's clothes.  Natasha picks out her own, but left to his own devices, Boris would put on the worst mismatching clothes possible.

Then they brush their teeth and have some screen time.  Then it gets tricky.  Some days they are ready to go, other days I have to keep after them to finish getting ready.

I try to leave the driveway by 8:00 AM.  If I catch both traffic lights (small town, yo!), we get to school -- or prison, as they affectionately refer to it -- in exactly six minutes.  They call it prison because school hasn't been fun since the 3rd grade.  They are restricted on when they can talk among their peers.  They have a very short amount of time for lunch relative to everything else.  And they have to carry everything back and forth in their backpacks (11 lbs) because the school refuses to provide on-site storage like they did in previous years.  

Drop off takes exactly 1 minute, even with Boris dilly-dallying.  And I'm back home six minutes later.  

Pickup takes longer.  It took me over a year to realize that if I leave the house later (say 3 pm) then I don't have to wait in line so long because it does move quickly once they open the doors.  We generally get back around 3:30 pm and even earlier if I do get in line sooner.

*****

I'm a little giddy because the Bears are 6-3 and tied for first place in the division.  They are doing about how I predicted at this point, though not the way I thought.  Except for the game against the Cowboys, every win was close and could have easily gone the other way.  In a way they are looking like the 2001 team that went 13-3 but got exposed in the playoffs.  Heck, the last two games could be the equivalent of the 2001 Browns and 49ers games (whom they play later this season).

When the Bears win, I spend the week reading everything about them.  When they lose, I avoid the write-ups like the plague.  if the Bears play like they did in the last four games, they will lose this weekend because their luck has got to run out.

I have been able to watch at least half of the Bears games down here and will be able to watch at least three more that I know of, including this week's game against the Vikings.  This validates my decision not to invest money into being able to watch all the games.

*****

On 10/28, the recruiter for Big Bank called me.  He said they hired the person who got the contract job and wanted an additional member for the team, and asked if I was available.  I said I was, but big surprise I have not heard anything in the last 16 days,  I don't expect anything from that one anymore.  

Meanwhile a new recruiter has reached out to me about another contract role but I'm not holding my breath on this on either.  He reached out to me late Wednesday afternoon wanting to talk "today" and when we talked yesterday, he didn't really have a lot to ask.  He seems like he was just collecting resumes.  

Update from the future: He actually reached out late Friday via LinkedIn Messaging:

apologies for the delay in feedback. They are going to pass for now, but will circle back around for more functional roles open up! I will send you out to all our other Account Managers for openings!

Nightingale insists it's okay that I don't have a job and focus on being the primary child care person.  But I sense judgment from the family and a loss of power from not bringing in a paycheck.  While my kids refer to school as prison, I refer to Living in Mississippi as being in purgatory.  

Grill Deep Cleaning Time

 Last week, I finally got around to doing a really good deep cleaning of the grill my FIL gave us four years ago when we moved down here.

The reason is one part laziness and two parts, not doing it during the window when it’s not too hot and not too cold down here.  To be fair, I'm certain FIL never deep-cleaned it either. 

There was a lot of dirty, caked-up grease, charred food bits, ashes, and carbon.  

I watched a few YouTube videos on the best way to do this, and while most of them are fairly the same, there are some nuanced differences between content creators.

Some say it's okay to use an Easy Off-like product; others are purists and say to avoid chemicals.

I will note for next time that it is better to take the grill apart and work from the inside out instead of outside in, like in the videos.

Also, you are never going to get your grill to look like it did before you used it the first time, or even how it did the first month.  you have to decide how much effort you want to put into it and I decided six hours of scrubbing, scraping and brushing was sufficient to get me through another season.  I also opted to replace the rusted heat shields (or falvorizors as some call them).  

I will make an effort to deep clean more than once every four years, though.  Ideally, twice a year but since we don't really do as much grilling as we did back in Chicago, once a year might be enough.   

2025 Bears Predication Update: Second Quarter Results

The NFL season is about halfway over, and the Chicago Bears are a surprising 5-3, which is what I predicted them to be at this point of the season.  I'm 6 and 2 in my predictions.  The Bears could conceivably be 7-1 were it not for the meltdown in the season opener and the anemic offense against Baltimore.  They could also be a lot worse because three of those wins could have easily gone the other way.  Woulda, coulda, shoulda.

What's important is that after a 0-2 start, the Bears won four in a row, before choking against the Ravens.  Yesterday, they made it up with a nailbiter against the Bengals that should not have been that close.  

If the Bears can go .500 the rest of the season that would be 9-8 or even 10-7 which I think could earn them a Wild Card.  The division isn't off the table yet, but they probably need to win at least three of the four remaining division games and get a little help.  

For their next four games, I predicted the following:

Team        Record    Streak    Prediction

Giants              2-7        L-3            W

at Vikings        4-4        W-1            L

Pittsburgh        5-3        W-1            L

at Eagles          6-2        W-2             L

 

As always, I'm sticking with my predictions, but I'll be very happy to be wrong on two of these. These are not weak teams.  And the Giants won't want to lose a fourth game if they can help it.  The Bears' secondary has to get healthy fast.

It will depend on which Vikings team shows up in two weeks.  Hopefully it's the bad one.  

The Philadelphia teams are the strongest, but even they are showing some cracks in their armor. 

The Bears have played eight games, and I was able to watch 4 of them.  Three of the next four are Sunday nooners, with the Eagles game being on the Friday after Thanksgiving.  I should be in Illinois, headed toward Chicago, and be able to catch some of the game against the Steelers.  As for the Friday game, it's at 2 pm, which is prime in the middle of our last full day in town.  

Easy Come, Easy Go

Edit from the future:  This has been in my drafts for moths and I decide to just publish it as is.  It's too painful to try and proofread and see if I omitted anything of importance.  


A few Mondays back, I alluded to "some other news to share this week."  I am was employed again!  Alas, it didn't last and while I wrote up a draft about the adventure before my contract ended, I'm gonna whittle it done to the essentials.

It got off to a rough start because this hire didn't happen in the linear way most jobs do.  

I saw an ad for a help desk position in my industry.  I am hilariously overqualified for that position, but it was part-time nights covering the Pacific Coast Time Zone.  I figured they might give me a chance and whatever the pay scale, it would help pay for that bathroom remodel.  

My short-lived New Office

Instead, the recruiter at the consulting company (which I have interviewed with on two separate occasions since separation from Big Audit) reached out on Sept 18th about a position that is a little more within my wheelhouse.

It's a remote position, a W2 contract for at least 3 weeks, possibly longer. "This is a medical family matter, taking my senior person out of town to help with care. The situation is still developing, and it's difficult to determine the exact timeframe."

at face value, a 3 week gig at the standard rate would have knocked off about 25% of the bathroom remodel cost so I was open.  We talked on the 19th and I honestly cannot remember the exact details, but I told her my standard availability for interviews is 9-12 CST M-F with a day's notice.  I do this because, since most go nowhere, it's a waste of a shower and shave for an interview in the middle of the day.

She called back a bit later and said they would like to speak to me in 20 minutes.  I'm like, NO.  Then her boss BRAD called and said I was overthinking it, just have a conversation with their client.

I honestly cannot remember a thing from that call other than it was very pleasant and the client said he liked what he heard.  In fact, he mentioned that there was a permanent position and that the contract could lead to it.  The consulting agency immediately jumped in to protect their finder's fee and we left it at Boss and Client would work out specifics.

This seemed like a good situation.  Short term I can earn money to pay off bathroom renovation.  Long term this would be a path back to Chicago because they have an office there and I would have to move to a state they had an office for those good old tax compliance issues.

Unfortunately, what was supposed to be an immediate hire got delayed because Consulting Agency is very fly-by-night and they use a terrible background checking service.  It also took client a long  time to send me equipment and instead of a laptop (like everyone else sends) they sent me 2 sweet monitors, two sets of keyboards and mouses, and a very small desktop.  

I'm not sure what exactly happened.  I was onboarded by Consulting Agency but they wouldn't pay me for that time (realistically about 2 hours of my time).  Then they only wanted me to bill for the time I actually had something to do with the client, which was an average of 2 hours per day.  I objected and said my time is valuable and if I'm tethered to a computer, I deserve compensation for that.

Last Tuesday BRAD wanted to have a Teams meeting.  Here-to-fore, all our conversations were simply on the phone.  I asked if I should be concerned and he said "I do all calls on Teams, I like to see people".  Glaring Red Flag that I missed.  We had trouble connecting but once we did, he mentioned that he looked at my timesheets that I had saved but didn't submit and asked if I now had work.  I said there was still idle time but it had improved.

He said something about getting in front of something to course correct but he didn't elaborate.  I told him that the people I was working with are aware that I had idle time and were okay with my charging my time although obviously it was a Client decision so I told him to see if Big Client was okay with it.

That night I had sent a LinkedIn connection request to the people I'm working with.  The person who was out on Medical Leave accepted.  

Next day I get a call from Consulting Agency that Client reached out and said that things weren't working out for them so they were terminating my contract.  

The person who accepted my LinkedIn connection apparently has severed it.

And what sucks is I have to put this on my resume and LinkedIn profile to show that I have been hireable, yet at the same time I have to explain it IF I get an interview.

Because we live in a world where people are supposed to work from almost Cradle to Grave.  Gaps in your resume signal to employers that you are either a problem employee or, worse, that you don't actually need a job.  Employers hate an employee who could just walk away from a job.