Lessons

 Monday.  The heat dome is gone... supposedly.  Daily highs are predicted to hover in the mid to upper 80s (F).  I can deal with that.  During last weeks high temps, the window unit in the bedroom seemed to struggle at times.  It is over 4 years old, and honestly, I have no idea how long a window unit is supposed to last.  I also realized I should have a thermostat on the 2nd floor to regulate the Central Air.  my downstairs was comfortable, while the 2nd floor would have gotten stinky winky without the window units.

I worked yesterday.  8 hours.  It was boring.  It was the 4th day without our sales figures being updated, so no one knew how well, or how poorly they were doing.  The store figures updated, but our sales figures didn't.

Because the necessary people weren't working yesterday, I didn't get to tell them that I went with Aspen Home Improvement for my windows.  In some odd way, I'm really looking forward to giving them that news.  It's nice to strike out against corporate greed in the names of all those  Mom & Pop hardware stores that were shuttered into non-existence.

I've hit 2 glitches in my replay of Fallout 4, and so, at least temporarily, I've changed to games to Lords of the Fallen, another RPG.  As a result, I spent an hour last evening learning new controller mechanics.  This is a good thing.  Learning creates new neural pathways.  Never stop learning.  

And I suppose everybody knows Justin Timberlake was arrested for DUI.  The young officer who pulled him over had no idea who he was, so Justin is learning a difficult lesson.  Because Justin refused a breathalyzer test, we'll never have any idea just how drunk he was, that, in itself is a pretty good clue as to how intoxicated he was.  Anyway, I don't know his name, but this is the young officer who became a teacher to Timberlake.

And, supposedly, Kristi Noem hasn't received vetting paperwork for the VP position.  Can you hear me laughing?  This bimbo, who went full Trumper in her attempt to get selected, never had a chance, and it wasn't because she shot her dog.  Look at her.  She never realized that the dyed, long hair that supposed to make her look like she's 21, was all wrong.  She should have gone for the porn star look.

Who will be Trump's VP pick?  Well, he no longer has to appeal to the Evangelicals since so many of them have already sold him their souls.  Rubio might help him rack in the Hispanic vote.  Vance might help him rack in the white, hillbilly trash vote.  And Burgum?  He's quite and unassuming.  Supposedly it's between one of these three, so what you really need to do is ask yourself which one is most like Pence?  Which one will disappear into the woodwork?  has anybody learned their lessons?

The Essence of Awesomeness

 The temps are supposed to climb into the upper 50s (F) today, it isn't until tomorrow that we're going to crack that 60 (F) barrier again.  Of course, after Wednesday, when I go back to work, they're supposed to do a shallow dive back into the mid 40s (F).  We'll have to wait and see if that's true.

As expected, yesterday things were somewhat steady in the retail world of home improvement.  I got my 3rd measure for the week.  I also talked to a gent who had no idea how heavy a 96 inch wide faux wood blind would be (about 50 pounds).  People don't think.  I also sold some vinyl tile to a New Orleans police officer who had relocated up to Harrisburg.  I brought up The Body in Repose, how it was set in the French Quarter, and had even created an Egyptian night club called the Amon-Ra.  He thought that was amusing, then said "it's nice for a quick touristy visit, but it's a bad place to live because of the crime."  Just passing this on to those who might be thinking of relocating to a warmer climate.

And, of course, there was something called the Super Bowl on TV.  Since I don't watch TV I missed it.  Instead, I played Fallout 4.  Some guy named Mahomes was the winning quarterback.  He evidently was spitting out flapjack comments about how God had was responsible for being there.  This was his way of saying that his universe does not extend beyond the 50 yard line, that it's very small.  That way he can be very big and very important.

And then there's this:

 UFOs abound around us.  In case you thought these babies were only soaring over the US, think again.  The Russkies are claiming they shot one down last month.  Yesterday the Hindu Times noted that the Chinese were going to shoot down another UFO over the Yellow Sea.  I'll be honest, these incidents remind me a lot of Star Trek.  I mean, how many times did the Enterprise send out unmanned, unarmed probes that were shot down?  And while it didn't happen in every episode, the shooting down of probes did happen frequently.  Of course, this isn't a movie, or an episode of a TV show.  Any species capable of traversing the space between stars would have no problem of exacting serious damage to the planet.

Of course, there's the gods of old have finally decided to show up.  Could it be that Zeus is testing the waters, thinking about making a come back?  Honestly, I think that would be the essence of awesomeness. 

Those Little Blessings

So, tell me, don't you think the week is simply zoomin' past?  I find it difficult to believe that's Thursday already.  As you get older, time passes faster than you'd like, especially if you're busy.  Then it's gone before you even know it.

My application to sign up for mail-in voting arrived yesterday.  I will go online and take care of it later this morning.  

I get to work this afternoon.  Only for 6 hours.  I like short shifts, especially when they start later in the day.  Morning means getting chores done at home.  Nothing really gets done if I get home from work after 7 PM.  If the dishes weren't put into the dishwasher earlier, that might happen.

The last few evenings I've been re-playing Fallout 4 on the PC.  This is my 3rd play through.  Part my decision to play this game again is that it's a great RPG, but another part is the series which is (as of right now) to premier on Amazon Prime later this year.  For years producers thought films were the only way to bring a game to the big screen, especially since we all have big screens in our homes now.  And the The Witcher happened, a very popular video game series premiered on Netflix.  Recently, The Last of Us premiered on HBOMax, and from what I've seen is also very popular.  This gives me hope for the Fallout series.  Next on my gaming list, after Fallout, is Atomic Heart.  This looks very interesting and arrives in3 weeks.

So, Kev McCarthy had a sit down with Biden yesterday about the debt ceiling.  He has been asked many times what the Republican plan is, especially since their tax break for the rich put the debt ceiling through the roof.  He always mumbles out some word salad that includes a number of adverbs, but no verbs, and adjectives that only modify the fact that he doesn't have a true subject.  For him, it's the process that's important.  He's hoping the end result of this process makes the administration look bad.  In a nutshell, that's what he wants, nothing else.

And now a bit about babies because it's important.  I suspect that one of the real reasons social conservatives are so anti-abortion is that they desperately want women to have babies, lots of babies.  They tell you babies are a blessing from God.  If that's true, they might want to ask themselves why both Hindus and Moslems are popping out babies like it's going out of style, while that isn't the case for Christians, especially American Christians.  Are Hindus more blessed than Evangelicals?  And you'll notice that I didn't even touch upon the subject that most of those babies aren't white.

 

Froggy Trump, and other things.

So, it's Saturday and I have to work.   Of course, I'm then going to have off for 2 days which is a nice thing.  The weather's been shitty: overcast, rainy, drizzle and cool.  People are not stopping in to buy carpet, or blinds, or flooring.  On a bright note, the woman who's unmarried and pregnant with her 4th is moving to another department, one where she's going to be on her feet for her 8 hour shift.  Bet that's going to change.  She sold carpet to 2 customers last week who opted to change the color prior to their purchase.  And she never updated the color change in the system.  And the installers showed up ready to install carpet that was... the wrong color.  And she did it not once, but twice.  Hhhhmmmm
I saw where Macron's campaign was hacked.  Of course.  I'd read that the American Far Right was pleased as punch.  For them the word Global is a curse.  They want another Brexit, except that's not going to happen.  Like I said, these people want things to back to the way they were.  And, of course, they're going to fail.  They hate the wonderfulness of Democracy.  They love the Idiot's Executive Orders because it's the closest they've ever been to a Republican Dictatorship.  When he squeaked into the Presidency through the back door they all danced around with glee because it's not just that they want to tell people how to live their lives, they dominate, and dictate, and say 'bend over buddy.'
I've nearly completed my play through of Mass Effect Andromeda - while there are some moments that are good, mostly it's lackluster and uninspiring.  Character Creation was dismal.  Usually when I play through an RPG I make myself hotter than hell - in Andromeda they didn't give you enough options.  Bioware touts the fact that you can have 'same sex' relationships - but there were some serious limitations here.  The Forums are filled with players and fans complaining about... well, everything.  I much preferred Fallout 4 where you could dress your companions up or dress them down, where there weren't any bad CGI cut scenes with CGI characters to constantly remind you it was a game.
And evidently some ingenious, creative person out there realized that the Idiot looks great with a Froggy face.

He looks so real, doesn't he?  As though this is how God wanted the Idiot to look.  Of course, maybe this is the way he paints his face when he goes to war.  I'm sure that after his supporters get a gander at this, they too will want to have their faces painted as well.  Here's a link if you want to see the animation of Froggy Trump.  And I would be surprised if the didn't start chanting 'Bud.... Bud... Weiser."

Just call him Rafael, also Fallout 4 mods

I'm off... actually, I took some vacation time and... of course, I got a text this AM asking if I wanted to go in and work, and... of course, I said I was busy.  It's not that I'm not loyal, I just need some time off, in fact I haven't had more then two days off since September.
This morning I was checking out all of the primary election results in Pennsylvania and had a good laugh.  You see, I looked at both the Democrat and the Republican tickets.  When I looked at the Republican results I saw that Trump really won big time in PA, but then I see this other candidate named Rafael.  Rafael?  Who the hell is that?  I didn't know there was a Rafael running for president... and then I saw his last name:  Cruz.  What a joke. he doesn't use his given name.  No way is he going to be known as Rafael.  Nope, he's Ted (short for Edward).  Of course, his father's name is also Rafael so maybe they thought two of them might confuse people.  Or it could be that he thinks Rafael sounds too Latino for politics, especially Republican politics.  This guy is not only a phony, he's a joke.

They're here...

And finally, and even more funner then finding out Ted is really Rafael, Fallout 4 mods are here.  What are mods?  Bethesda is one of those rare game studios which release tools for fans to actually modify the game.  In Skyrim, for example, one of the mods put hot-tubs in all of the Inns.  Some of mods available for Fallout 4 let you turn all of the players into hot guys, or hot chicks.  There's one that turns the map you look at into a Google Earth image of Boston.  You can change the music if you want.  Imagine listening to an opera by Verde as you blow up super-mutants, or chop the heads off of feral ghouls.  Neat, huh?  Right now the mods are only available for those playing the PC version.  Ain't life great?

the sun sets on inventory

Well, inventory is now over for at least a year.  Final results will be released to the store on 4/21, but preliminaries are very good.  Our shrink should come in under forecast, and, if the numbers end up as good as we're expecting, there will be no inventory next year.  You see, in spite of what some people may think, it's a waste of man hours.  We're not a high theft store.  For example, last year my shrink was .045 of my total inventory, and most of that was the result of damage:  people dropping paint cans, running a forklift into a pallet of caulk, and so on.  This doesn't mean people don't throw 5 gallon buckets of expensive paint into carts and push them past the cashiers and out the door, they do, but not on a regular basis.
Yesterday, my main job was to verify the RGIS counters (we call them Regis).  They were good.  They were fast.  And verification doesn't mean recounting, it means checking to make sure they counted every shelf in the bay.  You don't really think they'd have us count 5 million nuts and bolts for a second time, do you.

And the woman who's about to get terminated?  She spent the entire day worrying because they hadn't called her back to discuss the problems in her department.  And she had a lot of problems.  What saved her from that embarrassment were the 8 of us who spent most of Monday night prepping her department to make it countable.  Will that save her job?  Hell no.  Maybe she understands this, and maybe she doesn't.  I suspect it's the latter.  You can only flirt your way through incompetence for so long, and then it bites you in the ass.

Anyway, I got home yesterday, took a nap, and played some Fallout 4, including some modding, you know, getting Danse out of his power armor, which wasn't as difficult as I thought.  Now all I need to do is make him presentable.

Inventory, Kim, Trump & Nancy... and PC version

Well, we're in the middle of inventory season.  I hate it. My schedule is shot to hell.  Lots of very late nights culminating in next Monday & Tuesday, they will be bad.  I'm in the store for 11 hours on Monday and then back in the store 5 hours later for another 11 hours.  So, how pleasant am I going to be?
There was amusement this past week:
Kim Kardashian posted some nude selfies and while a lot of people looked many, many criticized.  And she got mad.  They pretty much called her a slut...  She is totally clueless.  She doesn't understand that she's turned herself into nothing more then a piece of meat, and more like chipped beef rather then sirloin.  She doesn't realize she really is about as interesting as chipped beef on toast.
Trump had to cancel a rally because all of his little Trumplodites were getting way out of hand; they wanted to riot in Chicago.  This is really funny because for years and years and years Republican pundits, while not advocating violence, have been force feeding hatred down the throats of their base.  Every time Breitbart, or Limbaugh, or Coulter, or Ingram, or even that horses's ass Palin opened their mouths they spewed hatred towards anything not not meeting their standards of conservatism.  They've been shitting in their pants for years and now the stink has finally caught up with them.
And Nancy Reagan died.  Oh, well.  I feel bad for her kids, I'm sure they loved her dearly.  Unfortunately her husband was deified by the GOP because of his landslide victory, and they did so without ever analyzing that victory.  They ignored the fact that his approval rating soared to 97% when he survived an assassination attempt.  And they ignored the fact that nothing went wrong during his first term in office.  He didn't really unify the country.  Lots of people voted for the old fart because they liked him and nothing had gone wrong.  His wife, however, relied upon Mediums to set his schedule and flip-flop of stem cell research when her dear Ronnie was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

And finally, I did buy and PC version of Fallout 4 so I can mod it.  It was actually cheaper then buy then buying the download version by about $30.  I'm going to give my Xbox One version to a guy I work with who's wanted to buy it but hasn't been able to afford it.  I'm never going to use it again.

Setting Danse free

Sometimes we just err in our judgement, I know I do... on occasion.  One of those times was when I decided to buy Fallout 4 for my Xbox One rather then buy the game for PC.  For those who don't know, there is a big difference.  Games look a lot better on PC's because they're written on PC's.  Also, and this is very important, some game studios, like Bethesda, allow you to modify (mod) the content of their games, and for that you need to own a PC version of that game.  For Bethesda, this  approach has been quite beneficial.  In 2012 they put out a game called Skyrim which is still in the top 10 games being played on Steam, mostly because of all the mods that were done.  You want your characters to be soaking up time in a hot tub, sipping wine and snacking on cheese?  Well, that's one of the mods for Skyrim.

In Fallout 4 there is a companion named Danse who will stay in his power armor the whole game... unless you mod him out of it.  After a quest called Mass Fusion he becomes about as useful as a storage shed... unless you mod him into action.  And because Danse is a very popular companion, I suspect Bethesda did this on purpose.  They're sitting back and letting the games modify Danse.  Oh, and if the mod is good enough, they will actually incorporate it into the game or, as in Gary's mod, becomes so important it runs as a stand alone game.

Anyway, since I bought a console version of Fallout 4 rather then a PC, modding is out of the question for me.... for the time being.  Eventually, when the price drops in a couple of months, I'll buy the PC version and set Danse free.  The gif below gives you an idea of what that will be like.

I'll bet you never thought video games could be so... interesting.

Dansing around a problem

I like to play video games, a lot, and right now I'm playing my way through Fallout 4 which takes place in Massachusetts 200 years after the great nuclear war of 2077.  When writing a game, the writers use a spreadsheet similar to this:

The story line shifts and changes as the main character goes on different quests and meets different characters, some of whom can be come his companion.  Now companions enhance the main characters abilities to do a lot of things:  some companions make it easier to find food, some to pick locks, and others may help with your fighting abilities.  Believe it or not, you can even romance some of them.  Mass Effect 3 was the first game in which there was same sex romance, how about that.

Anyway, I don't play games the way writers write them, sequentially.  I move around the map in a very nonconformist way.  As a result I didn't get to the Cambridge Police Station until rather late in the game, which means I didn't meet up with Paladin Danse until recently, and it turns out he's a good companion.  He even dresses up well.

Paladin Danse

And, unfortunately, I'm now involved in a quest in which his survival is at stake, and even though I make the game as individual as I can, I'm still forced to follow the path the writers laid out.  So now I'm Dansing through my few remaining choices just to keep him alive.  I may just have to dump my last 4 hours of game play in order to get to his personal quest sooner.

And so, 2016 begins

And, of course, I was fast asleep when that magic hour struck.  For those who don't know, I work in retail management which means, except for Thanksgiving and Christmas I don't get holidays, though I do have off today for the first time in years.  I had asked my brother if he and one of his sons could move some furniture out of our Mom's house and he said, "it's going to be tough, it's the holiday weekend."  So, I explained to him for the umpteenth time that I do not get holiday weekends.  While he, and just about everybody he knows, gets a 3 day weekend, I'm back at work tomorrow, oh, and I worked New Years Eve, which is why there's nothing really special about today for me.
While most people will kick back, maybe watch the Rose Parade, eat a New Years Dinner and watch football (something I never do), I've got a list of chores that need to be taken care of.  Like go to the supermarket, the dogs need food.  And stop by my Mom's house and pack up 5 boxes of dishes for Community Aid, and, of course, visit Mom.  I did spend some time talking to friends on the phone this AM, wishing them a Happy New Year.  I'm getting together with my friend Betsy, who lives down in York, on the 16th to see Star Wars (second time for me).
And then later this evening I will plop myself down and play some Fallout 4, which takes place 200 years after the 2077 nuclear war which devastated the planet.  This episode of the Fallout series takes place in and around Boston.

I've just managed to reach the safe haven of Diamond City, a town of survivors which has grown up inside Fenway Park.

Anyway, that's what I'm planning on doing this evening.  Tomorrow it's back to work bright and early.  We have some corporate people coming to town next week to walk the store so everything has got to be super duper neat and clean.  I am not excited.