Week eight

Working nights has been going well so far. No major issues. I have been making sure I get a little extra sleep overall so that I am not tired a bunch. It seems to be working.

This week I have got the urge to go to Israel again. I have talked to several people about my trip this week and have went back and looked at my pictures. Also my interest in learning Hebrew is back.

Directionally challenged

So I got lost in a park today. It was at least a big park.

Today I decided to go for my walk/run somewhere other than the neighborhood. I found a park in the city that had a 6 mile loop and thought that was good.

11 miles later I found my car.

There were no signs at all in the park. There were some posts where signs had once been, but the sign thief's took them.

I can't blame getting lost on much, considering I have been getting lost for as long as I can remember.

I needed the compass that Miller gave me, that he found in a CrackerJack box. :|

Week seven

So this was my first week working the shift that I signed up for with my new job. It was not that bad overall. The first two night were OK, there were enough things going on to keep somewhat busy. The third night was slow, so it drug on and on. It was a long night and I was ready for some sleep when I got home. The last night was semi slow, but I found some other things to keep me busy.

This first weekend, I am planing on just keeping with staying up all night and sleeping during the day. So I thought there was nothing to do in this town during the day. Well I have confirmed that there is still nothing to do during the night. If I wanted to go to a bar, or something like that I would be covered.

Since it has been cooling down a little bit, the bugs and birds have come out. Last week when driving on the freeway going downtown to hang out with Levi, there were so many butterfly/moths flying around, it looked like it was snowing brown snow. At least it was not yellow. ;)

Keep the license plate ideas coming.

First 'day' on nights

Well yesterday, no wait, yesterday and part of today, was my first day working nights. It went well. The place has a pace faster than a snail, but not where near as fast as the day. It was not boring and I did get a lot done.

This evening when I woke up, I had a sore throat, and was a little tired, but I got up about 5 minutes before my alarm. When ever I can wake up just before my alarm, it is a good thing.

Sleeping

So I am trying to go to sleep before my first 'day' on 3rd shift. But
outside my window is 3 recycling trucks idling and their drivers are
just chatting away. I am guessing they are on their lunch. I hope they
are on their lunch.

I am sure I will find the humor in this soon enough.

Guess I will read some more before I go too sleep.

Week six

So Levi was in town this week and I got to hang out with him in the evenings and most of today. We wandered the city and saw a lot of the touristy things, like the Alamo and the River Walk. It was nice to have someone to do things with.

All week we kept waiting to see someone fall in the river. Even today we saw a guy stumble down a set of stairs, and we thought for sure this guy would fall in, so we followed him. He lacked much of any scene of balance, but still did not fall in. We asked the waiter at lunch how many people fall in, and were told "oh daily" that some just fall and others jump.

Today we were looking for a book store so Levi could get another book just in case any of his flights got delayed because of the hurricane. We went to the big, think 5 stories, mall downtown. Guess what, there was not a single book store in the mall. So we asked some people where a bookstore was. We kept getting blanks stairs back from them. We then consulted the Google and got directions to a Barns & Noble. Well like all directions in SA, they did not get us to the place. It drove us to a dead end of a neighborhood.

At this point we are thinking that the state of TX must not know how to read. But we consulted Google once more, this time looking outside of the downtown area, and found one just north of town. We called first and made sure they really existed and verified the address. In SA driving direction style, we still got lost, but finally found it. And look at that, there are three bookstores right next to one another. They must have all got scared and huddled together for protection from the citizens. We asked the guy in the first one, if there was more than a dozen bookstores in SA. His response, "Not that he was aware of". Amazing, just amazing.

The wind has been blowing more today because of hurricane Ike. SA has been out of the path for a couple of days, but Houston and Galveston are his target. They are still expecting SA to get some rain and some wind, just not much.

So I am now officially on 3rd shift. I will be spending the weekend trying to get my body to sleep during the day and stay up at night. So tonight I will be staying up watching Ike and trying to keep my self distracted. So if you were going to call me, don't for the next week or two. Just send me an email and I will call you.

I am still working on running. I kind of took most of this week off because of Levi, but I still went out on Tuesday after work. Working 3rd is going to make this interesting, but I am going to keep with it.

I also donated blood today. Still could not watch the needle go in. They did it in one of the big conference rooms at work, and they had a movie playing. Sure made the time fly.

Well that all folks.

My first huricane... maybe

Update: 6-10-08 10:45pm CDT
As of tonight the current predictions have it now missing San Antonio. There is still 2 more days for it to change its mind.
- - - - - - - - - -
So hurricane Ike is looking more and more like it is going to go over, or at least near San Antonio. But everything is showing by the time it makes it this far inland, it will only be a tropical storm.

The best site that I have found is this.

http://www.stormpulse.com

But don't be fooled, this is the weather we are talking about.

License plate

So what should I get put on my license plate?

Several of the things that I wanted are not available, so I though I would ask you.

Leave a comment with your ideas and I will see if they are available and if I like it I may pick it. Six letters.

I figure that I have at least another month before I get around to getting this taken care of, so you have plenty of time to leave ideas.

I have also been thinking about going the route of not getting any plate or changing my license, and if I get pulled over and questioned, I would just tell the officer that I did not plan on staying long enough to justify getting one. :)

Week five

End of another week. This week was fun. I got to actually work. I got some planed stuff that was assigned to me done, and I got a couple of things that I took on my self done. I only had a three day week this week due to changing to a 4x10 schedule and Labor Day being on Monday. I actually thought about going in on Friday because it was a fun week. But I though, why ruin a good thing.

Next week, Levi is going to be in town. My first visitor! OK well he is getting sent to San Antonio by his new job for training. (I worked with Levi at Nautilus. We shared the same last day.) It will be nice to get to eat with someone that is not on the other end of a phone.

On Wednesday, the church that I have been going to for the last several weeks had sort of a game night. I had been wondering why they did not do more during the week, not just this church, but most of the churches that I have visited. Well it's because of traffic. Most people seem to have about an hour long commute in the evening. Some people did show up, bout 15 or so. It was cool to meet more people and just talk. I ended up playing a game of Mexican train dominoes. Towards the end I was talking to one of the guys and we got on the subject of the complete lack of indoor climbing gyms in the city. He too is just as surprised as I am that the seventh largest city in the US does not have a single one.

I talked to Jason for a few minutes yesterday, it was good to hear that things are coming along well with there wedding plans.

It is getting dark early now. The sun is almost down by 8:00pm. Once I change to nights, I will only get to see the sun for a couple of hours in the morning before I go to bed. That is going to get old quick I fear.

Why I am having issues getting around in TX

So I just figured out one of the major reasons I keep getting lost when trying to find a place that I have a map and directions to.

This is going to come as a shock to any of you that know me, so let me just say it... Google Maps is wrong.

OK, well to be more accurate, NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas two of the major sources of road data have a bunch of contradicting data. NAVTEQ data is used when you got to maps.google.com and are looking at things in San Antonio. Well what first clued me in to this is that there were two, yes two exit 566A going East on I-10. They are about 1/4 mile apart. You can understand how this could cause some confusion!

So as I was trying to figure this out, I came across the same place on the map that was using Tele Atlas data. (still on Google Maps) The issue gets even weirder, as there is not a off ramp for the first exit, but a on ramp!

My brain is all confused.

So I was thinking that maybe this is part of I-10 that has a 'upper' section and a 'lower' section. Yet more confusion. But I looked and the upper/lower debacle does not start till further East. Oh, BTW, if you start looking at this and wonder why I say I-10 East/West and not North/South (like the real true direction that you travel on it through SA) is because I-10 runs East/West through all of TX, just it goes North/South through SA.

At this point there seems to only be one conclusion. TXDot is messed in the head. With all of the crazy road designs that they use and the constant construction (if you can call it construction. It is not much more than lane closure and crap strung out all over the place, just never any one working on it and no progress. sorry) going on, no map data company can keep up.

Overall, getting useful search results from Google Maps is much more difficult in SA than in Vancouver/Portland.

So Google, I am not mad at you, just frustrated with something that is out of your control.

I was going to include pictures and diagrams to help explain this, I think that would have taken the geek factor of this post too far.

I am going to "try" to go to lunch now. I hope I don't get lost.

Fish on...

I think people have been putting the silver little ixthus fish symbol on the wrong part of their cars.

So you most often see the little guy on the back of a car when you are getting cut off by the driver as they speed off to what ever it was they are off to.  I think they should be sticking them on the steering wheel.  This might hopefully remind them that it is there for.  I was originally thinking they should put him on their rear view mirror, but I don't think they will look at it enough.

But serious.  So the symbol is to signify that the driver is a Christian.  (Not the original meaning of the symbol, I know) But because they put it on the back of there car, I don't think they see it enough to have it remind them.  If it was on their steering wheel, they hopefully would remember what it represents and then remind them how we should act towards others.  

If it reminded more people, and they in turn started driving nicer, this would go more towards showing God's love to others than just displaying it out back for people to see as they speed off.  Also if people were nicer to one another on the read, that would help reduce the stress of driving, and hopefully more people would then drive nicer as well.  Nice little snow ball.

And now the flip side.  So who am I to judge people on how they are driving?  I don't think that I am judging them any more than we all should be questioning the motives of other believers.

One Month In TX

Well, today is not only Labor Day, but it is also the start of my second month in San Antonio.

I don't really have much to tell. I have been bored for the last two weeks, so I have not done much. I can say that I think this has been the longest feeling month in quite a long time. I just seemed to drag on and on. It feels like I left Washington 3 months ago and is time to go back and visit.

The guy that I am renting a room from is in Hawaii this week, so I have the house to my self. I would still like to find a place by my self someday, but for now my living situation will just have to work.

I have started running again. I think it has been 5 months sense I was running on a routine basis. The gym at work is all torn up because of the transition to the new building, so I have been just running outside. Well I guess I should clarify, I have been running several blocks and walking many more blocks. One, I am out of shape and two, it is hard to run with it being this hot and humid.

The temp was about 100 today. It has not been that hot in a couple of weeks. Maybe in the 85-90 range. The Humidity has not been too bad this last week. There has been little rain. There may be rain on the way from bits of what is left of hurricane Gustav, but don't think much.

Another good thing about working the grave yard shift, there will not be any restaurants worth eating at open that late, so it will force me to start taking my lunch to work with me again. Eating better and saving money, both good.