Weekend Check-In [NOT 22/5/21]

illustration of happy potato

Hi, friends! How is your weekend going?

I am exhausted today. It’s the first day (I think?) this year where it made it to the upper 80s and heat index hit the mid 90s. Mom and I did some yard prep work and then did our Lowe’s trip and that took seemingly forever. It really didn’t but the checkout lines were horrible. Lowe’s folks did a great job with checking people out, it was just a lot of people with lots of stuff, often being slow.

And then we went to lunch at a restaurant I’d been meaning to try. They’re also a butcher shop, and wow my burger was great but holy fuck the French fries…. transcendent. They fried them in tallow instead of oil. I just… didn’t know that was a thing you could do. Makes sense if you’re also a butcher shop and have materials to render your own tallow.

Anyways, I’m gonna eat my salad soon and try to stay up until like 9:30 pm tonight. I’m old. I like sleep.

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

40 Comments

  1. Just discovered that my dishwasher isn’t draining properly. It’s old, and I brought it from my apartment since they were redoing it, so it was probably the cheapest model they could get. I’m not going to bother getting it fixed. 

    • Pumpkin Spies — not draining properly like leaking or just being a douche about not draining?

      Also yeah if it’s that old and crummy of a model, I feel like a repair is throwing money away. Might as well put that towards a new dishwasher (or whatever else if you’re aren’t bothering to replace it). 

    • @PumpkinSpies I just had this same problem. Google tells me it’s from using detergent pods, that the covering isn’t completely breaking down. I used some Draino in the dishwasher drain and it’s working fine and I’m going back to powder detergent. I hope that helps.

        • Sometimes if your drain is starting to clog or your garbage disposal is not working right it happens too.  If you are not wanting to replace it right now, try taking off the clean out & clearing it.  Or use it as a great excuse to upgrade to a nice new dishwasher.

          • The garbage disposal is new, had it replaced when i moved in (so, 3yrs?). And since I just had to do all my dishes by hand i got to see that my sink is draining just fine 😸

            • …I vaguely recall that the first dishwasher my folks got required something called dishwasher salt that had its own little reservoir that got topped up desperately to the detergent stuff & had something to do with both stopping glasses going sort of milky looking instead of clear & also preventing the thing from getting clogged up but I don’t think it’s been a thing for a while

              …there was also something a brand called calgon used to sell that prevented things getting furred up the way an element in a kettle does from boiling hard water but I think that was different…maybe not…it was a while ago?

              …that said I think you can get stuff that you stick in a rack in its bottle & run in an otherwise empty dishwasher to “clean” them which might help shift whatever is that’s backing it up at least to the point that it might work long enough to tide you over while you pick a replacement?

    • You probably don’t need to see half these suggestions, but here are some troubleshooting things.
      https://www.bobvila.com/articles/dishwasher-not-draining/
      https://howtofixit.net/samsung-dishwasher-not-draining/
      I had the same issue late last year and nothing simple worked, but then I ran into a random video about how you could take the dishwasher out from underneath the counter, tip it forward gently, and then return it. Somehow that readjusted the water levels such that whatever sensor was keeping it from draining reset itself. It might help?

  2. Anyways, I’m gonna eat my salad soon and try to stay up until like 9:30 pm tonight. I’m old. I like sleep.
    i hate you…you know that right?
    anyways..all good here my pick actually won eurovision…and in f1 the ferraris are fast
    shit all i need now is for rossi to win a race in motogp
    then i will truly be living in bizarro world

    all things considered….this is a pretty good weekend so far 🙂

  3. Hauled a bunch of rocks and watched cicadas. I left the wheelbarrow sitting for a few minutes and they started landing on the handles. They are oddly clumping, covering some things and leaving others alone. Our dog seems to ignore them, which is good but a little odd, since she loves to chase flies and eat worms. They’ve really started buzzing in the past couple of days, but there is a wall of sound some ways off that must be deafening wherever that’s going on.

  4. Taught my Saturday tai chi class in town this morning, did the grocery shopping, then farm work for a couple hours and finally settled down to watch some Eurovision silliness.  Italy won by the way, so go team.

  5. Isn’t tallow something they make candles out of? Too lazy to google.
    In retrospect I did not have the productive day I thought I was having. Putzed around cleaning and taking down storm windows and replacing with screens. Every May is the same, cold, rainy, damp then suddenly, hot and humid. That 75 degree F sweet spot is where I live, very rare.
    NYY shut out the white sox, though, so all is right with the world.

    • Tallow is rendered fat from ruminants. So cows or maybe sheep. It’s like lard, but lard is from pigs.

      Why we can’t use the same fucking word for all of it, I got nothing. Probably something stupid like lard comes from some French word and started getting used during the Norman Conquest when the British nobility spoke French and the peasants were speaking some Anglo-Saxon Germanic language. 

      Tallow was used for candles in ye olden days, yes. 

       

  6. Well, after the work trip down to Cape and then the interpreting calls that required just enough of my attention yesterday, i didn’t get the chance the work on more than a couple of the translation files last night. Plus, today I spent two and a half hours on the first part of a Zoom course as a way to get my yearly CE credits out of the way, so now I’m having to hustle to try to finish both quotas for yesterday and today. I’m just hoping that, if I’m still up and working in the middle of the night, the pages don’t somehow turn into endless permutations of All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

  7. welp…its almost 5 am and im getting the party started 😀


    huh,,,thats almost like the little big of old…cept metal
    whilst i love their funny cutesy videos,,,ive missed ye olde little big

  8. Tomorrow is my day off, so I’ll be doing homework, and also reaching out to my old grocery manager, to see about him acting as a reference for me…
     
    Apparently I seem to have pissed off the grocery manager, and his assistant so much at my current store, that I’ve been told I am no longer *allowed* to touch anything in the grocery department… 
    The thing that pissed them off?
    I checked dates on a bunch of granola bars, when I had downtime at the register the other day, snd made sure that all the ones expiring on the 26th & 28th of this month SELL before they’re expired, by moving them to the markdown shelf, then leaving a box of each with a note on the desk of our pricing team…
     
    And last week, I pulled all the marshmallows which were days past THEIR expiry date, and got them into boxes to send out to Second Harvest Heartland, since we’re not supposed to sell them past-date.
     
    I HAD permission from the assistant store director, to pull things within a week of their expiration dates,and get them to that markdown shelf, so that we don’t  lose them to expiration… 
     
    But apparently that has been rescinded now… I don’t get WHY, since we have SO.MUCH.SHIT in that store that’s either dying (date-wise) in the basement *or* upstairs on the shelf because it’s never rotated… but for whatever reason, our grocery manager HATES items getting put on the markdown shelf, and ESPECIALLY when it’s pulled as expired…
     
    I mean, I get that he’s most likely worried about our “Shrink” numbers…. but you fix that by tightening UP your inventory movement and making sure the shit that hits the floor is sold… not by letting it die, then throwing it OUT.🙄😒🙃
     
    My old store–where my grocery manager understood how my brain works and let me USE my “stupid human trick” to the best of our abilities had good shrink-control before I started. Iirc,the shrink at that store was at about 1.5%
    After my old grocery manager & I teamed up, and I got to start doing pulls, got the expired stuff out, and we started hitting hard on the close-date markdowns (things started at 50% off, then moved down as the dates got closer), we went down to a shrink # of 1.19% or 1.12%–i can’t remember *quite* which, but it was enough that corporate was wondering what in the hell we were doing, because THEY didn’t think it was possible to run our ship *that* tight.😁
     
    When my grocery manager uttered had a chat with them, about *how* we pulled that number, and that we nearly always  either got the items back to Reclamation or out to Second Harvest, so were barely trashing  anything anymore, they were impressed😉
     
    I don’t know quite yet, if I’ll try for a transfer to another of our stores, or if I’ll see if I can get in at one of the local franchise stores… 
     
    All I know is that I DO intend to transfer, and that I REALLY want to have a chat with the store’s Manager when I eventually leave, to let him know exactly *why* I’m leaving, and that even though he was REALLY excited to have me on the team when I transferred over, I never really got to utilize any of the skills he had me come in for–and frankly, I’m gonna TELL him how much we’re losing, because we aren’t running any sort of inventory control.
     

    • @emmerdoesNOTrepresentme that’s fucking ridiculous!

      Managing shrink like that saves the store so much money! Also I guarantee no one ever wants to get home and realize they bought expired food, even though expired doesn’t mean spoiled for most goods. 

      Years and years ago I worked at Target right when the local market switched over to having an expanded grocery section and rotation and checking dates was crucial. 

      Your store manager is being a bag of dicks because they feel like you finding so much product reflects poorly on them for over-buying/mismanaging inventory. 

      • Thanks Brighter! 
        And sorry I missed your reply, this week was BUSY, and I haven’t had much downtime, so what I had was used on school.
        I ended up running up to my old store, to chat with my old managers, and to get some numbers on Tuesday evening.
        I stewed/pondered a bit, until Thursday afternoon, when I decided to just “rip off the bandaid” and called my store manager to see if I could meet with him on Thursday before work…
        Found out a couple things in that meeting that were…interesting, to say the least (it basically boils down to him being a VERY nice man, who I feel like has ZERO clue about the shenanigans going on *underneath* him.  He’s 100% the “honest & above board” sort himself by all accounts, soooo he believes what others say to him IS the truth, since he doesn’t lie/dissemble… I’ll be working on my relationship with him & my ASD’s, so that I can bring up my concerns later on, once they understand I’m an honest player here, who’s main focus is the bottom line.😉)
        Basically, I was told by the Store Director that I got moved off grocery because “grocery couldn’t accommodate my hours”…
         
        I dunno how availability EVERY evening but Tues & Weds after 5 pm during the school year (with an earlier start availability on Sat & Sundays–but that i DO need 1 day off every 14 days!) and availability until 10 pm Sunday-Th evenings and midnight (or later!) on Fridays & Saturdays–when we have grocery load STILL left to do during literally ALL of those days (except the *very occasional* Thursday!), was “not available enough”…
         
        But I’m pretty sure he wasn’t TOLD that part.🤔
         
        But I AM now going to be moved over to the Instacart team😁😉
         
        And we’re… talking/negotiating about FINALLY using my skills in the “downtime” during the Insta shifts, to pull close-date items for markdown, get things rotated on the shelves, and pull the dead stuff for scanning & sending back to reclamation or on to Second Harvest (tightening up that shrink!😉😈)
         

Leave a Reply