Eat and Eat some more

Some people might think I am referring to Thanksgiving with a title like Eat and Eat some more, but that was just the start of a weekend of food.

Thanksgiving began the medley, the veritable cornucopia, as my college RC would say. We had the standard Thanksgiving fare, turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and bread. Well that is my requirements for a successful Thanksgiving dinner. In addition, we had orange apricot jello, stuffing, candied yams, and sweet potatoes. Friday was a day of rest, at least from vast quantities of food. The big meal on Saturday was pancakes for breakfast. We recently picked up a lot of pancake mix from some family friends who moved from the St. Louis area and have been working our way through it without much of an end in sight as of yet. Then on Sunday we went back to large family meals. Both of my uncles came into town for my grandma's birthday. So we went to my grandma's favorite restaurant, Cardwell's. I branched out from my usual order of fish and tried the flank steak which was surprisingly good. Cardwell's has a bad tendency to make weird food. For desert, my mom made a burnt caramel cake, at my grandma's request, and an angel food cake, for those of us who are not as big a fan of burnt caramel cake. Then today we went to Kris's steakhouse after a little gentle prompting from me while at Cardwell's for one of my uncle's birthday. So tonight I ate a prime rib, twice baked potato, rolls, a little cheesecake, and some decadent chocolate cake while at Kris's.

This post would have been done a little sooner, but I had to stop for a nice big piece of leftover angel food cake. Can't pass that one up.

Black Friday

Fist Fights. Diving over tables. Screaming. In general, complete mayhem. Or at least that is what I was expecting from the build up about Black Friday. Unfortunately, not even one argument all day. I heard that people started the line by 2 pm on Thanksgiving (15 hours before we opened), but the line was not really that long when I arrived at 4:15 am to start working. When it came time to open, at 5 am, I was ready for a blitz of people scrambling to scoop up every last item in the store. I also expected it to last all morning. The first 15 minutes looked promising, I had people on all sides asking me to point them in the right direction for the deal that they wanted. but then the people all started to leave and move on to other stores. By 8 am, we were already sending people home who had split shifts. They had all been scheduled to help out until 10 am.

My favorite question of the day, and most popular question to ask was, "Do you still have this computer?" Pointing to the computer on the front page of the Black Friday ad, the one that people lined up outside the day before to make sure they got. We had ticketed that item and handed tickets out starting at 2:30 am. The tickets were good until 9 am at which point they were released for anyone to get. When people found this out a line started to form in order to get first shot once they were released. This line started forming at around 7:30 am. Despite the fact that they were all gone by around 10 am, people were still hoping to get the computer when I left the store at 5 pm.

In order to ensure that the Best Buy employees were able to keep a smile on their face throughout the long shifts, they offered two perks. One was free Chipotle. It was delivered every two hours and available for lunch. The other was a masseuse. She arrived at 10 and was just there in the employee break room giving out massages all day.

All in all, people were in a good mood. I met one lady who told me she was leaving for Venezuela on Wednesday and was buying a computer for her 52nd anniversary gift. I only encountered two people who were less than happy. One was upset because we advertised a computer on a two day sale but sold them all. He felt that if the computer was on a two day sale, then we should still have them in stock for both days. He did not seem to understand that we had the minimum number of the computer and we had sold them all. The other dissatisfied customer was upset that we advertised 2 GB of ram on sale, but it was a package of 2 1 GB sticks of ram instead of one stick of 2 GB ram. But other than those two incidences, it was a pretty pleasant day.

After 12 and a half hours in Best Buy you would probably not expect me to return to another Best Buy again in the same day. But alas, we went to Chesterfield Commons for dinner and some shopping at Best Buy. I bought the Olympus 1030 sw camera that I plan on using while SCUBA diving. It is waterproof to 33 feet, shock proof to a 6.6 feet fall, crush proof for 270 pounds, and freeze proof. It also has a manometer to measure the altitude or depth of your picture.

Then I went to bed at about 10 pm while watching Blue Planet: Seas of Life, the tidal seas episode.

A week of night

This past week was the first week in quite a while were I actually had hours at work. The catch, I started at 10 pm (7 pm on Sunday) and finished around 9am every day. I volunteered to work the night shift in order to redo the entire computer department. The original layout made the department feel small and there was no visibility to know what was happening throughout the department. There were high bays that were about ten feet tall holding all the product. The good thing about these was their ability to hold lots of product and overstock on top them. They also were the reason that the department felt so small.

For the whole week, we would take down a high bay and all the product on it and build smaller gondolas. We then would try to make everything fit. Not only were we changing what was holding the product, but just about every item in the department had a new home. So we moved everything sometimes everything multiple times. The printers got moved a total of 5 times. Any time something heavy needed to be moved, they would find either my self or the other volunteer from the computer department. It did not take long for the both of us to become rather sore from the lifting.

One night we got to move the speaker displays. They are all on shelves with a sub shelf designed to hold all of the wiring and a circuit board to allow them to be tested. The best hand hold on the shelves were holes in the side that you could fit three fingers in. It was not a comfortable grip and the shelves weighed quite a bit. The Bose display was set up on a 4 foot by 1.5 foot particle board base with another particle board 4 foot by 1 foot back. This one was by far the heaviest and when we were setting it up, we got one side of the shelf in place and I was not able to get my side in place. The person helping me came to help and we moved it just a little and the whole shelf came out and the Bose display fell leaving a rather large dent in the base of the gondola. But nothing on the display broke because it was all bolted to particle board.

It was surprisingly easy to adjust to a night schedule. I found that when I got home I was not even all that tired, until I stopped moving, then I fell asleep fairly easily and then wake up in time for dinner, or breakfast as the case may be.

Rescue Diving

Who would of thought that becoming a rescue diver would require so little diving.  The course took three days.  Day one was classroom time.  It was not too terribly exciting.  We went back over all of the questions that we had to answer prior to class.  There were 5 chapters and 10 questions for each chapter.  In case anyone is mathematically challenged, that is 50 questions, each one with a short video segment from the Rescue Diver DVD to reiterate the answer.  Once we went through all the answers, we had a test, also 50 questions.  It was a standard multiple choice, true/false test.  The whole class combined only got three wrong.  We each could have gotten 12 wrong.  Obviously it was not a hard test.  The whole thing took about three hours.  

Day two was in the pool.  We practiced the skills we would need to use in the open water session.  The skills you learn during Rescue Diver include how to tow people who need help making it back to safety, how to bring an unconscious diver to the surface, how to stop a panicked diver from making an unsafe ascent, how to escape from a panicked diver, and my personal favorite how to ride a panicked divers tank so that they cannot get to you.  The pool water was nice and warm and clear.  That would not be the case for day three.

Day three was in Goose Creek.  It was a clear, windy, cold October day, I even wore a sweatshirt.  We started by going over our emergency contact numbers and the emergency action plan and how to perform an expanding square search pattern.  Then it was time to get in the water.  We had four scenarios that we had to go through.  Scenario one was an out of air simulation.  The hardest part of the scenario was finding the person who was going to be out of air.  As soon as you dropped below the surface, visibility dropped to less than a foot.  The only way to find them was swinging your arms around until you found an object, and hope it was the person you were looking for.  Scenario two was approaching a tired diver who turned panicky why you got there.  This one was on the surface so it was much easier to complete.  Scenario three turned out to be a mess.  We were supposed to locate a missing diver, who looked oddly like a bucket.  We were supposed to perform the expanding square to find the bucket.  It did not really work to well.  I could not see the compass to use a heading to make a 90 degree turn and could not see far enough to have any sort of orientation for turning.  After several failed attempts at an expanding square we tried a different approach.  We created a line by holding onto the octopus of the person next to us and swam forward.  Then spun, and headed back in the opposite direction.  We completed this pattern somewhat successfully, but swam right over the bucket without ever seeing it.  The last scenario was an unconscious diver at the surface.  

After completing all four scenarios, we went to the assistant instructors house to dry off and warm up.  The water temperature was a balmy 53 degrees.  One instructor was wearing a dry suit and I was wearing a 7 mm wetsuit with hood and gloves.  Overall, I spent less than half an hour underwater.  However, each scenario counts as a separate dive, so four dives in less than 1000 psi of air, talk about efficiency.  

What is the Date Again?

And I thought I just had a bad dream about Aliens.

Since my last post a few things have changed (other than now being an intergalactic traveller). I am soon to be an employee of Best Buy. This process required three separate interviews, a drug test and a background test. This is more hoops to jump through than Brittany getting a job with Watson Wyatt. That is not it either. I now have three weeks of training ahead of me starting on Sunday where Brittany only needed two. Moral of the story, it is harder to work at Best Buy than be an actuary.

I also postponed my Rescue Diver class by about a month. It will now take place on October 20, 22, and 25 so you will need to wait a little longer to read about being a Rescue Diver, sorry about that.

Finally, I submitted my registration form to Divearth to begin the final arrangements of my internship in Honduras. So if all goes according to plan I will plan on flying down on January 10th to begin my training to become a dive instructor.

Fall Begins

Although it may not feel like it everywhere, fall is beginning in Missouri. With the rain from Gustav, the temperature has dropped and this weekend my family did two things that help close out summer and begin fall.

The official close of summer for my family is the closing of Barney's Bar-B-Q. It is a restaurant that only opens on the weekend during summer. It closes this weekend and we went there twice to bring the summer to a close. The second night the owner's whole family was at dinner the same time we were. This is the family that hired me to firebreath last summer and it ended poorly. We had a good time reliving the experience and hearing about how the whole incident made me a hero. If you do not know what happened you can see the experience here.

The second event of the weekend was apple picking. This is another family tradition. We went up to Principia College to pick up my brother just to find out that he could not make it because of a survey. So my sister, dad, mom, and I went to Yate's Apple Orchard to pick apples. Last year they did not have very many apples at all and told us that whatever we could find we could take. This year the apple crop was much better. We picked a bushel and a half of apples and then went back to the college to get Michael for dinner. On the way back the Garmin led us in a new way that we had not driven before. On the way, I saw the place where I asked Brittany to go on a date with me, just one date that is all, and she denied me, shot me down right where I stood. We drove up to Pere Marquette for dinner where we had a family style dinner of fried chicken although it was the sides that made everyone happy. They brought out rolls at the beginning of dinner that they could not keep filled. They also had cole slaw, mashed potatoes and gravy, and green beans. And yes Brittany, I ate some green beans for you.

So now it is officially fall and I can smell the apples being baked already, apple pie and apple sauce.

Repulican National Convention

I watched the Republican National Convention this evening. I came in during Rudy Giuliani's speech. and stayed through voting for the Republican nomination. Governor Sarah Palin made a very strong speech. She had a good time making fun of Obama and promoting McCain. It was a speech that was very entertaining.

When they got to the point where they started the voting I was excited to hear Alaska give five votes to Ron Paul. If you don't know, one of my friends and roommates in college was a strong supporter of Ron Paul and was very vocal supporter whenever a political conversation came up, or really whenever he brought up politics. Since I got to hear all about Ron Paul all the time I became interested in his campaign. Hearing him get votes made me happy. Anyway, Alaska gave five votes to Ron Paul. Then voting continued for a long time. It made it to Montana and McCain was only 21 votes from clenching the nomination. Every single state and territory was called and passed so that Arizona had the right to cast the final votes to make McCain the nominee. As the rest of the states continued in their voting, a few states voted for other candidates. The lady responsible for repeating the vote counts must have been falling asleep. She regularly messed up in repeating the vote count. When all the votes were counted McCain obviously won, but I was disappointed when the final count did not match what was said by the delegates. They only awarded the 5 votes from Alaska to Ron Paul and 2 to Mitt Romney. I know for a fact that Ron Paul received 12 votes, Romney 2 and I missed where 4 votes went. If they felt it was important enough to cycle through all the states before going back to Arizona and wasting a lot of time, why do they not feel it is important to at least get the vote count correct. I know it is a minor detail but it is disturbing the poor math skills demonstrated with this vote. It is ok very shortly afterward there was a movement to make the vote unanimous. It was an oral vote, most people voted yes. When they asked if anyone opposed there was a very distinct no in the background. Followed by, "Then the vote is unanimous." I just think that it is funny since there was a loud no right before saying the vote was unanimous.

Anyway that is how the Republican National Convention voting process went this year.