Mission Fail

I gave Little Kat a directive a week or two ago. He was supposed to find the name and number of his case worker at school. Initially there were some excuses from Little Kat about not having enough time to do this job. I told him to make time. So he went to the front office.

Little Kat said he got the name of his case woker. But then he could not obtain the phone number. Later he was unsure whether the person whose name he received even worked at his school. I told him to get busy and find out the answer.

Little Kat returned to the main office a few times. He also wandered around the school looking for the classroom where his case worker or his case worker's boss was located. This resulted in failure.

Today Little Kat said his case worker came into his classroom and he got his number. But then Little Kat said the guy took back his phone number. All I got was an email address. So I emailed the guy and asked for a meeting. Little Kat needs to know how to get in touch with his case worker.

I tried to get Konner to learn how to obtain this information himself. But there comes a time when you need to step in, and that time is now.

The Avengers Cometh

I have been awaiting the release of two summer movie blockbusters to DVD - the Avengers and Battleship. Both released onto DVD today. I had these movies in my Netflix queue forever. Momoko also wanted to watch the Avengers. So she put the movie in her Netflix queue as well.

I normally watch my DVDs on Saturday. They movies go out in Monday's postal mail. Momoko watches her movies whenever. This past week she watched her movie and returned it in the mail on Saturday. This was a strategic return to hopefully time the release of Avengers and the shipping of the next movie in her Netflix queue.

Turns out Momoko was onto something. She got the Avengers. Netflix says they are delivering it to Momoko today. I was left out in the cold. Netflix now reports the Avengers as having a "long wait". In the mean time, I am scheduled to receive two B-movies tomorrow in the mail. What a fail.

If there is any consolation, a friend of mine told me she was buying the Avengers DVD from Amazon. She is going to loan me the DVD so my brother and I can watch it. Saved.

Two Hour Tour

This week we had a quiz in my community college class. The class only meets once a week. But the class lasts for three hours. The weird thing about our quiz was that it was a whopping two hours long. What kind of quiz lasts for two hours? Our's I guess.

The instructor provided a four question quiz. Three of the four questions were simple. The fourth one was massive. The instructor told us to read over the quiz and ask all questions in the first 15 minutes. I read over the big problem and found many issues. Some sentences in the description made no sense. Other requirements were missing. Some parts of the directions contradicted others.

I asked a bunch of question. Eventually I determined that the guy did not care what assumptions I made. Looks like he just wanted to give the class some experience dealing with real world problems. Because problems in the real world are always messy. They don't look like exercises from our textbook where everything works out fine.

There is a deaf guy that sits in the front row. His interpreter normally sits next to me. The deaf guy said he was going to be an hour and a half late for class. So his interpreter just left. Deaf guy showed up just in time for the quiz. He seemed to be scribbling a lot of stuff down on a piece of paper during the quiz. That was odd given that it was an online quiz.

In the end, the deaf guy was the first one to finish the quiz. I followed him out shortly thereafter. I figure the rest of the class probably never finished the quiz. That was one hard problem the teacher gave us. I liked it though.

Couch Shopping

We have two full size couches in our living room. Momoko sits on one of them most of the time. The kids share the other one. We purchsed these couches not too long ago. At first they seemed nice. However the cushions keep falling off the couch. The couch has also lost most of its support. In other words, the things were cheaply made.

Momoko proposed that we buy some new couches. Since we spend most of our time in the living room, I figured that was a good idea. We were definitely not going back to the store that sold us these defective couches. Momoko thought we could visit a new furniture store that has been advertising recently. Too bad their locations are all far away. Instead we went to an expensive furniture store nearby.

At least they were having some sort of sale at the furniture store. Momoko and I sat on every single couch they had in the store. It was a big store. We also layed down on the ones they felt good. In the end I narrowed it down to two couches. Momoko thought those were fine. But she thought two others should be in the running as well.

In the end, I decided to purchase two couches. I went for one of each of the two that were my top picks. We wanted the cloth couch to be green in color. The sales associate said that color change would cost an extra $100. Okay. Then she came back and said the extra $100 would be on top of the original non-sales price. Oh snap. That plan got rejected. The original tan color couch that was on sale was good enough. Luckily the leather couch cost the same regardless of color.

For an extra fee, the store would deliver the new couches, and remove the old ones. Deal. The couches are scheduled to arrive in 10 days. We can't wait.

Little Kat the Biker

Momoko and I were scheduled to do some shopping after work today. Little Kat was going to accompany us. At the last minute, Little Kat decided to stay home alone. He wanted to ride his bike. Momoko was worried that Little Kat was riding his bike with nobody home. The guy is in high school. He should be able to ride his bike.

I told Little Kat that he needed to lock the house door behind him when he left for biking. Momoko and I fought traffic to go shopping up North. In the middle of shopping, Kit Kat called us twice. Momoko got worried. She called Kit Kat back. She said that she came home from school. The shed door was open. The house door was open. But nobody was home. Kit Kat was disturbed.
Later Kit Kat got a call from Little Kat. He has crashed on his bike. Little Kat wanted a ride home because he was injured. But Kit Kat could not fit the bike in her car. So Little Kat had to hobble home. He said his leg got caught in his chain and he flipped off the bike. Some young kid came to Little Kat's rescue. The kid got Little Kat unchained from his bike.
Little Kat now says he has a sprained leg. I am now going to go pick him up a sub for a late night dinner.

Minecraft Server

Little Kat wanted Momoko to sign up for a recurring credit card charge. This was to pay for his Minecraft server. I guess that is some type of rented computer space out there on the Internet. They also probably provide some tools that let you set up a virtual Minecraft world that you can control. The thing would cost about seven bucks a month.

Momoko asked me for guidanceon whether this was a good idea. I told her that it would be better if Little Kat could figure out how to set up his own Minecraft server on his laptop or desktop computer. Little Kat said he tried many times. However other people were unable to connect up to his servers. The servers were also way too slow to host the Minecraft game.

I told Little Kat that he should try for a few more months to get s server up and running. If he cannot figure this out before my college class is over, then I would come in and give him some support. If we together could not figure it out, I told him we could eventually help him sign up for the recurring cost of a rented server.

Resignation

Kit Kat put in her two weeks notice last night for her weekend job. Things have been a bit crazy for Kit Kat. She goes to school a few day a week. She also works for her school in the alumni relations department. On top of that, she hung on to her summer job, working weekends. That meant she was working and going to school 7 days a week.
It was not just Kit Kat who was affected by her busy schedule. The family had to shuffle things around her schedule. We have two meetings a week to discuss our schedule and any issues. Those were moved around a bit because Kit Kat works on the weekend. There is a weekly shopping trip that could not happen on the weekends because of Kit Kat's job. All of that is changing now.
Kit Kat and I put our plans to teach her to drive manual transmission on hold for a while. There was just no opportunity to have Kit Kat go out driving in my pickup truck. Now I will give her a week after she ends her weekend job to celebrate. Then it will be time to get out there and learn to drive a stick shift.