Squash and work update

I have harvested five squash off the plants so far this year. That one batch of squash, cooked with onion and seasoned with nothing but a little butter, salt and pepper, was the most delicious squash that I have tasted in a very long time. And it wasn't just because I knew that I grew it - it really did have amazing flavor. The 100 degree heat is here now and I suspect between that and the squash borers we may not see any more fruit. I did another BT injection on the plants on Monday, but it doesn't seem to have worked as well this time. Ah well, I still consider the squash planting to be a great success and next year, I'll be wiser and maybe do even better.

Work has been a real pain in the ass, but at least it's been a pain in the ass at home and not the office. Working at home really does make it easier. One good thing that has come out of this was that I discovered just how much I really do know about this kind of stuff. I don't have any formal training or certifications, but have been doing this sort of support in one form or another for over 20 years, even if it wasn't my official job title. I started poking around on the internet looking at the certifcations that are available, thinking that might be a ticket out of this current job, and I found couple of practice tests. While I certainly have plenty more that I could learn, I do manage to pass the practice tests for some of the certifications right now. But I pass those just barely and running out and taking a test tomorrow isn't something I'd want to do since the tests are too expensive to take a chance on it. It will take me some time anyway to save up the money to pay for certification testing and I figure I can spend that time studying. Maybe in a month or two, I'll have some initials after my name that will look good on a resume.

Speaking of studying, I got a good laugh last night as I was reviewing a CCNA web-based course that had a demo available for a chapter on the OSI model. As luck would have it, this is one part of the test that I don't need to study, but I watched it anyway to get a feel for the type of study materials this company offers. It was lecture based with slides and rather boring (hopefully just because I know this stuff already.) Anyway, the instructor kept referring to sending to "the other side" when talking about sending information to another computer and each time I'd get a visual of that psychic that used to have a show that would come on late at night. It was one of those shows that I'd kind of half-watch while half-asleep because I knew if I got out of bed to turn the TV off then I'd wake up too much to fall back asleep. I don't remember the guy's name, but he was always helping people from the audience talk to dead family members on "the other side". So being bored, I kept thinking of the sending computer as being in the here and now and the other computer being off there on "the other side" and that meant it was in the ether (as in, the heavens) so then the ethernet cable was, of course, the ether-net! Haha! Okay, maybe you have to be in my head for it to be funny.

Anyway, I need to run to bed. I don't know what my boss was thinking to schedule me at 7:00 am on a Monday morning. That only gave me one day off (today) and I haven't worked at 7:00 am in years. Gah! And I have something very, very important to do tomorrow (my normal day off) so I might just have to work an hour or two, then clock out and let them put me on probation for the absence.