Trash Pickup Day

I've got a lot of meetings at work today. Luckily the first one finished before the appointed end time. I heard the noise of a big truck outside. So I came upstairs to watch. The garbage pickup team was there. They parked their truck in front of my neighbor's house.

One guy ran over to my trash cans. He had pulled out the trash bags. He then proceeded to throw the trash bags over to where the truck was. I guess it is costly to move the truck to each person's house. Then he grabbed the last few bags and tossed them into the truck. He picked up the bags he previously threw, and put them in too.

The loaded so many bags into the truck, that when they used the truck to compress the trash, bags wanted to pop out of the back of the truck. They somehow knew how to keep them in. And then the team was off. They always hustle. Looks like a very demanding job.

I went to pick up my trash cans. That's when I found that they did not even open two of my smaller trash cans. Total of four garbage bags were left behind. They were small light bags of trash. I stuffed them all into one of my taller trash cans. We will leave them there until next week's pickup.

Elle of the Mills

I had been noticing pictures online on Twitter and iFunny of this weird girl. I have come to find out she is Elle Mills. She has a successful Youtube channel and goes by the handle Elle of the Mills. I think this girl is going places. Last time I saw pictures of a nobody going viral like this, it was of Kim Kardashian. And before that, it was Paris Hilton.

Elle is originally from the Philippines, but she grew up in Canada. She seems to live with her single mom. She also lives with her younger brother and half sister, who are both featured prominently in her videos. She recently broke the 1 million subscriber mark in Youtube.

I am not quite sure what is so appealing about Elle. On the surface, she seems like a normal, albeit overweight young college girl. However she has the knack of video editing. And she seems to come up with great content ideas. Occasionally she shares very personal things and comes off very genuine. It is not just me. Other followers of her notice this too.

The best video I have seen of her was when she challenged her two sibling to make music videos in one day. Elle did "Touch" by Little Mix. To be honest, I had never even heard of Little Mix before. But Elle likes them a lot. Now I am coming around to being somewhat interested in this music group.

Elle has a lot of other things she likes a lot. She drinks Coke. She eats Wendy's cheeseburgers, especially if they have bacon on them. And her idols are Selena Gomez and Zac Efron. No surprise there. I am very interested is seeing where this girl winds up.

Government Shutdown

Due to budget problems, the government actually shut down yesterday. My pay at work is ultimately driven by a government customer. So I was worried this might impact me. Found out that my project is an essential one. That means we continue on whether there is a shutdown or not. Sounded good to me.

There was one caveat. Due to the shutdown, the bean counters in the company came out and inspected all our contracts. Seems mine was not up to snuff for the new year. Therefore, until that is sorted out, I could not work. The company is still paying me. So I decided to just study up on some programming.

Even when the shutdown ended, I was still in limbo for a bit. Finally my company worked something out and I was authorized to get to work. Wouldn't you know it? For some reason, I could not log into the customer network. Took a long time to get some help. But even the help desk could not resolve my problem immediately. It is rough.

Case of the Mysterious Clump of Leaves

This season I was diligent in raking up leaves that fell from the trees. Got the entire fenced area of our property cleared. Started making dents into the large area of our property behind the fence. Then I went on vacation. Afterwards, I started back on the area behind our fence. I came upon a suspicious mound of leaves directly behind our fence.

At first I was worried some animal had made this pile as part of a nest. So I poked at it with a large branch, separating the leaves until I was sure no dangerous animal was inside. The leaves were heavy as they clumped together with some water. I bagged up the leaves in 5 large paper bags (30 gallons each). I was still perplexed by this pile.

I asked the family. Nobody confessed to dumping leaves over the fence. Little Kat postulated that maybe the gutter cleaners did it. Before going on vacation, I hired a team of window washers to climb up on the roof and clear the leaves from the gutters. They usually bring their own heavy duty trash bags and haul the leaves away. Maybe they had some extra leaves that did not fit, and they decided to toss them.

Consider this case closed. Next time I will have to schedule the gutter cleaners while I am home so I can keep an eye on them.

Dairy Queen Disaster

I was in the mood for some Dairy Queen. There was apparently one in a mall close to my friend's house. Momoko drove us there on the weekend. It took a while to figure out which entrance to use in the mall. It is a big mall. We tried one that I thought was close to the food court. Mistake. It was not close to the food court. And Dairy Queen was not even in the food court.

Once we found the place, it was just in the middle of the mall. No place to sit down and eat. Limited menu with no hamburgers. We had to pass on it. The other restaurants in the mall seemed lacking. The restaurants around the mall were expensive. What should we do? Momoko asked if I liked Italian food. The answer is yes. She had me locate the closest Italian joint and we headed in that direction.

Luckily I recalled that we were relatively close to a Steak and Shake. I rerouted the GPS and got us there. We dined in eating double burgers. I opted for fries with the parmesan topping. Momoko had a side salad. We both drank their large milk shakes. Dairy Queen disaster averted.

Fiat 500 Air Pressure Issues

Momoko and Kit Kat went to see Pitch Perfect 3 at the theater. I could not go as I had too much work to do. First up, the Fiat was warning me that my tire pressure was too low. I tried checking it out with my tire gauge. The thing was too cold to read the air pressure.

So I put the gauge in the house and let it warm up. I carted out bags full of leaves that I had in the back yard since last year. Tomorrow is the first time that they are doing yard clippings collections in a few week. After that, I checked my tires. They were all low by around 3 to 4 pounds of pressure.

Went to the local gas station. Couple cars were filling up their tires with air. I gassed up and them took my turn. Filled all tires up a few pounds above recommended value. Then I let the air out until they were all exactly at the recommended pressure.

I did a couple loads of laundry today. Hardest was the absorbent socks we have in our bedroom window sills. They soaked up water. But the water froze. I ran the socks under the hot water until the ice melted off. The I ran the socks through a laundry cycle.

Long Vacation

I arranged to take off the last two weeks of the year from work. Momoko and I went to visit her parents. I got us some early boarding passes. Tried sitting in a new location in the plane - next to the emergency exit doors in the middle of the plane. This had the added benefit of there only being two seats in the row instead of three. The person behind me did have to store their belongings in the seat in front of me to the right.

We rented a Nissan Pathfinder to drive. It had a small third row seat that Momoko's brother-in-law sat in during trips. Saw a lot of movies during this vacation, including Star Wars, Downsizing, and Jumanji. Also rediscovered Church's Fried Chicken. They had a lot of good priced specials. I mainly ate their Mega Bites.

Coming home, we got onto a plane that felt new. Momoko declared that it had more room. Kind of like a business class seat. I knew something was up because, although SouthWest has a general admission seating policy, the rows were and seats we numbered. This time around I sat with Momoko in her row. We left the seat between us empty. Nobody came to sit there. My brother picked us up at the airport since everyone else was working.