Last Friday the Thirteenth (insert doom music) was a little busy.  Not as busy as it was supposed to be, but I did get one major thing accomplished:  I put some water in my waterbed.  It had been getting a bit low, but now it’s perhaps a little overfull.  I need to burp it–a short project for tomorrow–a process where I open up the valve at the foot of it, stick a tube on it, and then roll slowly from the head of the bed to the foot.  This pushes the air bubbles which slowly form inside the bed to where the aforementioned tube is so my waterbed becomes air-free.  Or less air-full, anyway.  I did this burping thing right after filling it, but more bubbles are now waiting to be burped out.  The tube thing is actually a pump, but the waterbed is so full right now that if I pumped, all I would get was water.

 

Meanwhile, my paycheck reduction has occurred.  Since my full-time, direct employment with my employer started (as opposed to indirect, through an agency employment), I have had three sets of deductions applied to my paycheck.  Two of them started with the paycheck I received today.  The first was for insurance, the second for my 401K, and the last for garnishments.  For most employers, the last meant only child support, but for this one there is an old auto loan I defaulted on when the vehicle in question died.  It’s not much coming out of my paycheck, thanks to the child support thing taking up most (usually all) of the legally allowable garnishments, but it’s there.  On the bright side, I am still doing a lot of overtime so the impact of the garnishments is somewhat reduced.

 

I have finally started to make some progress on the Checkers applet I promised to write for a friend.  You can check it out at http://playground.shadowkatmandu.com/checkers.  It doesn’t do much right now, but you can move pieces around the board.  The allowed movements are, as the game goes, king-like–they can move forward or backwards–and it isn’t set up to take pieces, just move diagonally around the board, but it’s a start.

 

I received something yesterday I have never gotten before:  A jury duty summons.  It’s for June 13, so there’s a little time before it happens, and there’s always the possibility I won’t get chosen, but nonetheless I’ve never gotten a jury duty summons so it’s kind of exciting.  I have already talked to my boss about it, and he explained the work procedure for such things.  It’s pretty straightforward; I still get paid even if I am away being a juror.

 

One last thing:  EverQuest is up and running again!  I haven’t been able to play it much, but I hope to get in some good EQ time tonight and most of tomorrow.  One of the things SOE is doing to compensate for all of the downtime is a week of double experience, but I haven’t been able to enjoy that thanks to all the hours I work.  Tonight and tomorrow I’ll make up for lost time!

 

That’s it for this week.  See you tomorrow with a bit of poetry.