What a Crazy Weekend!

It seems like it just flew by.

Working Saturday morning didn't help any either, but at least I only had to work until noon. I kinda figured that I'd be staying there until 2:30 like a normal weekday, but I guess everyone there was leaving at noon, so that pretty much decided it for me. My Saturday workday running the press started out pretty slow and frustrating. I had parts that were running that "looked" okay, but were barely within spec. From a company standpoint, that's fine as long as it's closely monitored. From my standpoint however, it leaves no room for error. Being the sort of anal perfectionist I am sometimes, I was constantly stopping the press and tweaking & adjusting it. After an hour of that crap, I relented and let it run... Keeping a very close eye on things. I had very little problem and ended up running a decent amount of parts in 6 hours so that was good.

When I went to leave, I loaded the pallets into my truck that I had been saving and took them home. I was originally going to just use a skilsaw and cut them up into usable pieces, but after I got them home and saw how easy I could knock them apart with a hammer, I decided to break them down first. After 5 hours the job was complete. I forgot to count how many there were, but I think it was 12 pallets. I ended up beating them completely apart with a big hammer, then ended up pulling all the nails out of them for the sake of safety and ease of stacking. I used my chop saw (or miter saw to some people) to do the cutting. I finished at about 6pm after cleaning up my mess. Oh, and during one point, a guy walking home with his boy offered me some more wood if I wanted it, saying it was just around the corner. I was going to decline, but when he said it was hardwood flooring cut-offs, I agreed. I drove the truck down around the corner and he loaded me up with a whole bunch of brand new oak pieces which I also cut up. All in all, I ended up with quite a pile of wood when I was finished. It may be somewhat hard to see well because of the picture size, but you can get an idea:



I was so dead tired by the time I was done that I was almost out by 8 o'clock. I managed to hang on until about 9:30 before I finally crashed.

This morning was a whole different thing. I woke up after getting a decent amount of sleep feeling pretty good. I spent some time chatting online with Rhon, which is one of my favorite things to do. While online, she's checking out Craigslist for a new TV set. She finds a hot deal on one, but it's up in Redmond, which is only about 2.5 hours from her there in Aberdeen, so I said, "Call em up... If it's still available I'll run up and have a look." Well, to make a long story short, I blasted up there after their first caller was a "no-show" and bought it. A 36" Toshiba for only $75!? How could I not... It was their only TV and was on when I got there so I knew how well it worked. As a matter of fact, her little boy got pretty tearful when she turned Arthur off and we started unplugging all the other stuff. I'll tell you--36" TV's are some kinda heavy! It's just shy of 200 lbs. I already knew that of course, because that's what size mine is. Fortunately I could get the truck real close to where we had to load it, but I went across the street and "borrowed" a guy that was out working on something in his driveway to help me load it up onto the tailgate. While I was over getting him, the first callers drove by. They were definitely looking for an address, and the lady said they fit the picture of who she was expecting. I'm glad for Rhon that I made it first, and I didn't make it by much. Ya snooze, ya lose. I backed up to my garage and offloaded it onto a work table that I have to keep it until such time we can get it to her house. We'll have to coordinate helpers (for that killer flight of old stairs) and watch the weather reports. It'll happen soon.

The rest of the day was spent going to grocery stores and shopping their "loss leaders" for hot bargains. I also hit the library and picked up three more movies that were in for me. I was going to go bother my brother for a wood stove lesson, but he wasn't home.

Well, back to work tomorrow. Odd... It seems like I just worked yesterday...