Fortunately for me, the guys I was training had more accesses than my predecessors, though it still was not perfect. They were still missing a lot that they were needing in order to do the job that was being asked of them, or even me. But I did what I could.

I felt that I was far more busy than both of my predecessors and did my best to keep myself active and work with what I had. I sat in with each of them several times and gave help when I could. When that seemed down I gave them sample files to go through and look at and told them how to break the file down. Toward the end of the week I made up a couple of quizzes that helped them figure out some simple problems and helped me figure out what they already knew and where they were in their training.

I hope that I looked good to the people in Ohio and that they appreciated what I did for them. I think they did. Towards the end, they were talking about requesting us to come back in a couple of weeks after one person was back from vacation and the new people had more of their accesses in a row. My hope is that they ask for me specifically and that I get to go back another time. It would both look good for me in the company and it would also be a great chance for me to get a second vacation to Columbus. There was a lot more to see than I did.

Unfortunately, it was drizzling and cool for most of my time in Ohio. So after Labor Day, I really didn’t do a whole lot. I mostly found places to eat that I couldn’t catch here in Madison. The list of places I went to may seem stupid to many, but to me it was all about trying out something different. I mentioned previously some of the places I went. In addition, I stopped by a White Castle and California Pizza Kitchens because we have neither here. Love White Castle but overall disappointed by CPK, it was too expensive and the pizza didn’t taste that great for the price. I went to Whit’s Frozen Custard which was good and a decent price but I don’t think it was as good as Micheal’s here in town or even Culver’s really, but a worthy place to go all the same. I also tried King Gyros I think it was called. The Gyros weren’t as good as Parthenon’s here in town but it wasn’t bad and I would definitely go back. The Gyros were spicier and had a ton of lettuce but not really enough onion (though they used red onion instead of white which I actually think was a mistake).

One mistake that I made was that I misunderstood what the Easton Mall was when I looked at it previously. It looked like it was an outdoor mall, similar to Greenway Station just bigger. And to some extent it was, but it also had two huge indoor sections that were two stories tall. I found this out when I went to the California Pizza Kitchen, but I had ordered my Pizza ahead of time, so I had to go and pick it up instead of explore the mall. This was too bad because it could have been an indoor event and I had some disposable time on Wednesday night as well as Thursday night before the Packer game. I had I known,  I would have gone to just look around and do something more indoors. If I get to go back to Ohio, I will have to make an attempt to go there on a rainy day and see if I can find anything cool.

Not only did it give me time to explore Columbus, it also gave me time with my brother. My brother lives in Toledo which is about 2 and a half hours away. So with us being so much closer than usual, he drove his family down and spent the night last night here in town.

My first day, I flew in and was in my hotel and resting by 3pm local time. It was a pretty eventless trip and I was perfectly happy with it. I got together with my brother in short time and we headed over to a local ice cream chain named Graeter’s. The one we went to, my brother had previously gone to and had an tour of the place because they actually manufactured the ice cream there and gave out tours. Now however, they did not and it was just any other ice cream shop so it was a little bit of a let down. On top of this, we obviously ate ice cream and so were no longer hungry for dinner. We went back to their hotel and hung out for a little while but then headed back out and tried another local chain called Skyline. This is essentially a chili dog place which was good but not necessarily great for my stomach considering I hadn’t eaten all day.

Today, on the second day, we got up early and went to the Columbus Zoo. My brother and I had been there before but it was more than a decade ago and we didn’t really remember why or when we went and thought it would be a nice family place to go. I do think that the Columbus Zoo is among the nation’s best. Of particular note was the Kangaroo walkabout which lets you go in with the kangaroos as they hop in and out of the path. Their coral reef aquarium was also top notch. There were a few other things that we missed. This year’s big addition to the zoo was apparently the new polar bear exhibit which was way overcrowded and it seemed like it was badly planned as it put all the people in a very narrow area to view both the polar bears and the grizzly bears. But it may have been bad luck.

After the zoo, I went grocery shopping to get myself some basic foods so that I could eat in a pinch and save some money on drinks and breakfast. After an hour or two of rest in the afternoon, I went out again alone this time into Columbus. This time I went geocaching and I decided to turn my attention to Columbus’ Metro Parks. I heard about these parks yesterday from brother who raved about them and thought it was worth looking at and getting a geocache to boot. And they were quite impressive. The one I went to was essentially a huge chunk of forest with a bunch of paths running through it. The best I can compare it to was the forest section of the Arboretum in Madison except it seemed that the forest was more dense, more mature and likely bigger than Madison’s, and I’ve always marveled by the size of The Arboretum so that is saying a lot. There are about 5 or 6 other similar parks in the city of Columbus though I likely won’t go see the others.

This evening, I also went out to Donatos which is a local pizza chain.  They specialize in thin crust pizza that uses Provolone cheese instead of Mozzarella. I think this is an interesting idea and I thought the pizza was pretty good, but not great. I think you really could do provolone on a pizza though, I just think a better company needs to do it. It was worth doing as it provided me with a lunch and a half for the rest of the week.

Needless to say, I am actually falling in love with Columbus. It is a beautiful city with awesome parks and a bunch of stuff to do. There are big trees and chunks of forests everywhere, not just the metro parks. And the whole city is very clean. I really see Columbus as a city very similar to Madison, just on a bigger scale and I like that. I am halfway considering just moving down here if I could. Another plus to Columbus is that it wouldn’t have quite as harsh of winters, and honestly I’m sick of Wisconsin winters…

We have been to Devil’s Lake many times, it is one of our favorite parks to go to. The park is a big lake with no rivers or other lakes connecting it, so it is kind of a strange lake actually. It was created from the glaciers receding and it is surrounded by big bluffs. The water is generally clear, though I have noticed in recent years it hasn’t been quite as much as usual. Still, it is fairly clear for a lake and the park has many awesome trails going up the bluffs, and has vultures circling overhead as this is a summer roosting area for Turkey Vultures.

The one thing Devil’s Lake also has is people… lots and lots of people. It is a very heavily trafficked park by Illinois people. But it also tends to bring about lots of foreigners, I’ve never personally understood that honestly, but every time I go there are bound to be a bunch of different languages being spoken of tourists in bathing suits enjoying the area.

Because of the enormous amounts of people, it is often difficult to enjoy yourself. There would undoubtedly be someone right next to you smoking, or drinking, or being obnoxious in some fashion. And in the water was even less chance, often times standing room only, no real chance to swim or throw a frisbee or anything particularly fun.

The one thing about Devil’s Lake though is that there are two beaches. There is the North Shore and the South Shore. Well most people, us included, visit the North Shore. This is because it has easier access to the more leisurely trails, and has a nicer sandier beach. I think it tends to be easier to figure out how to get to as well. The South Shore however tends to be kind of rocky, but has a huge beach.

This time, we decided to bring some comfy lawn chairs that lay down and sit on the beach on the chairs so that we aren’t in the rocks. It turned out to be a wonderful idea, we spent the entire day there (about 6 hours). The beach was busy because it was a really hot day, but we didn’t feel stuffed in at all. We don’t even recall many smokers or even drunkards ruining it for everyone the way that we were used to on the North Shore.

We packed a picnic and moved into the grass under the shade of a giant tree and enjoyed that. It really was a nice little vacation and all for the low cost of a $7 day pass.¹ This averages out to be just a little more than $1/hour which considering there were 4 people cost us $0.29 per person per hour. A really nice sum. We did stop for ice cream on the way home but that wasn’t too expensive either. A worthy staycation I think.

The first thing of note is that I’ve begun to return to geocaching over the last couple of weeks. Over the last two weeks I’ve gone to about five or six geocaches with my daughter. I am not overdoing it or anything, I think my rate a couple of years ago was much higher, but I don’t want to overdo it and I don’t have as much time as I used to have since I work now. However, just getting back into it makes me happy, even if I only do a few a month, it is nice to get some exercise whilst visiting new and interesting places.

Work and Vacations

I stayed with my mom over the course of the two weeks while I was at work so that she could provide me free babysitting. In return, I chipped in for meals and helped make one. Now that I am working 10 hour days, it is much more difficult to deal with this type of schedule though. I started letting my daughter go to bed an hour later, but even so it was about 7:30 by the time meals were usually done and eaten and so only really had a short hour and a half to spend with her most nights, sometimes not even that if she wasn’t acting good. And this time, I was usually exhausted for so I didn’t really feel like I got much quality time with her. Although, one night my roommate and I met up with my mom and my daughter at the Mallard’s game and that was pretty exciting to go to. She got an ice cream sundae in a baseball hat which she was very happy about.

The 10 hour days did have one great benefit, it allowed us to finagle the weekend so that I got a 4 day weekend without taking any PTO. With this, we went up north to my mom’s cottage for a family reunion that was going on. I know I’ve been to a couple of these as a child, but I don’t think I’ve really gone since probably about 16. So it was weird to go. My brother was traveling up to go this year so I thought it would be a good opportunity for my daughter to meet him again, she’d met him once before but she didn’t remember. My daughter had a good time playing with her cousins, and it also marked the first time since my graduation that I had seen or talked to my sister’s family. It was a little awkward though I think we got along fairly well. We also found a few geocaches while we were up there, one day in the rain which wasn’t a whole lot of fun, but it was an experience.

Trying to get good behavior from my daughter

Overall, I felt my daughter was fairly good on the trip. She has her moments where she is extremely upsetting. Her continued inability to listen is really starting to get to both my roommate and I. She just refuses to do almost anything we say and while I’m at my mom’s house I tend to bare down on her a little more with time outs and forcing her to stay at the table to eat and what not. I find it harder to do this sort of thing at home because whenever I do it around my roommate she gets even more frustrated and I also feel she tends to cave in and make deals that I don’t want to make. I don’t like to reward bad behavior. For instance, my mom made pork chops one night which obviously my daughter didn’t like. I originally was going to make her eat half of it, but she put up such a fuss that I ended up making her eat all but a couple of bites. I feel my roommate might have bargained her to eat the half or less that she had to eat in the first place, but I feel like this just rewards it. I understand this philosophy, but I don’t know I just think with my daughter this is to her how she gets what she wants. She’s always trying to bargain things to swing her way and I don’t like it. If I told her up front that she only had to eat half she would have tried to bargain to a quarter. My roommate’s method should work with most kids, but it just doesn’t work with mine which sucks and it ends up frustrating all of us.

We did get a good last day together despite some rough days towards the end. We went to Flat Top Grille for breakfast on Sunday which really is a marvelous breakfast place, and my daughter had a great time and I think we all did becaucse of it. And then we went from some fairly frustrated shopping and finally came home and let her swim a bit and played some Super Monkey Ball together.

Overall, a good, yet difficult couple of weeks. Hopefully we figure out something a little more solid for a vacation for my next time with her.

My last day was a huge trial with my daughter. We have a new homework book to help her keep information she learned in school fresh, as well as aid her in catching up with the rest of the kids in her class. So far for the summer I had let her pick out 2 pages that she wanted to do at her will, this morning I said she should do the ones that the book picks out for each particular day of the summer. At first she was ok, but then she saw that one of the money counting exercises had a new coin in it, the half dollar. And that was the end of it, she refused to be helped and refused to try to add fifty cents to anything, saying that no one even uses those anymore so why should she have to learn how to add it! Well this was the end of everything, in no time she had to do an extra half page, as well as losing her rights to video games for the day. It didn’t end there and she was whiney and complainy the entire day so much so that my roommate is now fed up with dealing with her and considering moving out seperately from me if we have any indication that the increased time we have with my daughter is more permanent. I don’t necessarily blame her as I don’t particularly like dealing with my daughter who has always had these two issues as well as an inability to listen. I don’t know what to do with her anymore but at the very least she isn’t getting video games or TV anymore at my house as she needs to learn how to entertain herself and it is clear that she needs those things in order to be entertained. I am also going to be forced to be more strict with her, something I don’t want to do, but something she obviously needs as she hasn’t proven to be able to handle the leniancy we often give her.

The trip is a good 8 hours away and what I learned most on this particular trip is that it is high time I stop taking trips with my mother. I swear to god she acted as bad if not worse than my daughter almost the entire trip and I was just overly annoyed by her.

It is unfortunate though because there are quite a number of benefits for going with her. She pays for a good portion of the gas and hotel costs which lowers trip costs quite a bit. She also drives part of the way and on an eight hour trip, this isn’t a small deal. This may be negated however as she needs to stop 3 or 4 times along the way and dawdle at every single stop. Whereas I just want to get out of the car and to our destination. I don’t like to be in the car apparently she does.

The trip itself was ok. The saturday seemed kind of awkward, it really didn’t seem like my brother and his wife really wanted us around. Or maybe they felt the need to do stuff and they didn’t really like what we were doing, all we really did was go to a play land for one of their kids, went shoe shopping and then went and babysat the two kids. The Sunday went much better however, we went to the Toledo Art Museum which was surprisingly good, and then went to dinner at their house and chatted the night away.

Then I found a newly renovated hotel in Wisconsin Dells that just opened a new indoor waterpark that had a large glass roof so that you could lay out in the sun all year round. We thought this sounded like the perfect solution. We would get sun and have fun in a waterpark. We did want to go out further than the Dells, and we didn’t want to spend quite so much for a hotel, but it did give us something fun to get out and do at the same time. So less than 2 days later we were out the door headed to the Dells.

Overall, I’d say the hotel was ok. You could tell it was renovated, some parts still had their old feel and it felt like it was a hotel put together very piecemeal. It had several long chunks that made for an extremely long hotel and 3 waterpark areas, 1 on each end and 1 in the middle. This meant to reach one you would either need a ferry or to walk all the way to the other end of the hotel which either way was really inconvenient (really cold in swimsuit or long walk, we chose long walk). I think we both enjoyed Friday night the best. The hotel wasn’t quite as crowded as it was Saturday, and for some reason in the wave pool under the dome they had the waves going higher and more frequently which both combined made for a much more enjoyable experience in the same poolt han we had Saturday. We also tried their lazy river and hot tub in the middle park but the hot tub was too crowded, too chemically, and too cold so we quickly left. The Lazy river was nice but that whole area was really overcrowded. We wished that the hotel would have chosen to include another hot tub in the wave pool area to allow more places for adults to enjoy but if it was that chemically we probably wouldn’t have been able to go in anyway. Saturday we just decided not to return and stick with the wave pool. I feel bad though because I don’t like waterslides and wouldn’t go down any with my roommate who wouldn’t go without me so I feel like that was a wasted part of the trip. What we really enjoyed though was just lounging in the sun. It was very refreshing and relaxing and I am glad we were able to do it because i think it helped.

Unfortunately the day after we returned we received 1 inch of ice followed by 3 or 4 inches of snow which meant we were stuck in our apartment again which largely undid much of what  we got out of the trip. Still I am much better off, and though my roommate will not admit it I thinks he is as well.

On Monday we traveled up to Menominee, and did a few chores around the cottage like getting wood at a store, unpacking the car, and eating dinner. Then on Tuesday we went Geocaching to a local park that had four caches in it. We found three of them, but on the last one noticed that we had quite a few ticks on us.

We thought it was just 2 or 3 at first and drove to another cache on the way home that was near a cemetery. We parked in the cemetery and got ready to go when my roommate noticed that she had a tick going down her shirt. We both immediately got out of the car, took our shirts off and yelled noticing several ticks on both of our bodies under our shirts.

We quickly decided that we had enough geocaching and we got back into the car and drove back to the cottage. Now, I we both had Off on, with deet to stop ticks and still by the end of the day we probably had a good dozen ticks each on us. It was really the most horrifying tick experience that either of us had ever had.

Other than that the trip was rather uneventful. We only got one morning of sunbathing in due to bad weather. Even though we bought wood at a local gas station all the wood was still too wet to get a decent fire going. We went to a local restaurant that we  had never been to before and decided the portions were far too big (the biggest sandwich I have ever seen!) and far too expensive for the quality that it was. We decided if we ever went again we would either stick with appetizers or just split an entree. Otherwise it was good.

Even if things go bad when we go up to the cottage, it is just nice sometimes to get away for awhile.

Since I’m starting a new summer I thought I’d lay out what my goals for the summer are.

1) Calenderize myself. I’ve never been a huge fan of Calenders, but lately I’ve been forgetting appointments and birthdays like there is no tomorrow. I am sure it is my medication which causes memory loss, but it worries me to the point that I really need to become a slave to a calender. I’ve already set up a new iGoogle homepage with the calender on it, and installed a calender attachment to my browser, now I have to set up the calender. I think the calender could also help me keep on schedule with my writing and my exercising as well.

2) Ramp up exercising schedule. I want to get out and exercise at least every other day if not every day, so I’m gonna try to do that. Right now I’m thinking flipping between a walk and a geocache.

3) Work for my mom, again. Just to pick up some extra cash.

4) Finish my book. I need to get my book done over the summer so that I will have time to publish it and hopefully begin making money off it by the end of next semester.

5) Clean my house. In particular my desk which has become aweful due to not getting it completely clean over spring or winter break. Might as well give the rest of the house a good cleaning while I’m at it.

6) Finish random school things. I have a few random things to do for school like ensure that my geometry class finally gets transfered in without  making me have to attend 15 more credits in the school.

We left at about 7am, and made a stop about a half hour south in Janesville to pick up donuts for the trip. We stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts because we wanted to start the trip off right by doing something that we don’t normally do. We have no Dunkin’ Donuts or Krispy Kreme here in Madison. In fact the only dedicated donut shop I can think of is a local one that caters to college kids downtown. They have better donuts overall than either the two chains, but they often don’t have a decent selection. So going to Dunkin’ Donuts still has its appeal since they always have everything, plus the donut holes they have are very yummy.

When we got to Chicago, we went to the Museum of Science & Industry. Now to be honest, I think this choice of a museum was a bit of a mistake on my part. I was trying to bring my roommate to do something she hadn’t done before that would be fun, and I remember going to a museum when I was a kid in Chicago a couple of times with my Mom. The problem is that looking back on it, I think we went to the Field Museum so the Science & Industry Museum, wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be. Be that as it may, it was still quite fun and we saw a lot of cool things. They were rebuilding a number of exhibits, probably for the summer season, so that was a little disappointing, though we had fun at the new Body Worlds 2 exhibit which had real human bodies on display in various positions and forms to allow people to really see them. It wasn’t perfect, most exhibits we were disappointed in in some way. For instance, the Fairy Castle which while cool, was not about fairies which we were really excited to see. The Snow Story exhibit was about a book we hadn’t heard of before and was extremely small and uninteresting (though we thought it might be a good exhibit, it wasn’t). And while the Body Worlds exhibit was cool, it was a bit much and you were forced to see it all at once during a certain time. We would have liked to have gone, seen half of it, then gone to a different exhibit and come back later. However, this wasn’t allowed. There were some pleasant surprises in the museum however. They had an olden day town which was really quite cool to walk down the streets of. I thought going into the airplane was cool. And it was fun to watch the industrial robots draw pictures together.

After the museum, we went to a hotel we reserved in Elgin. We really wanted to make a hotel stay part of the trip because we wanted it to feel like more than just a day trip, which is what it really was. Plus we wanted to spend some time in the pool and hot tub. Elgin was convenient because it was only an hour away from Chicago so it wouldn’t be too far away from the Museum, and would also offer a fairly short trip home which it did. We spent probably 3 hours combined in the pool and hot tub both Saturday night and Sunday Morning. We lounged, we relaxed. It was nice. We had a good weekend and it helped us let go a bit.

Unfortunately last night’s return home was a disaster. We stopped at Olive Garden in Janesville on the way home because we wanted to have a nicer sit down meal to eat, and we knew we didn’t really have food at home. While the food was great, by the time we got home, my roommate had an upset stomach and spent 2 hours in the bathroom. Then I broke my injection bottle and had to throw it out and use my very last one instead (thankfully that one worked ok). And then my roommate decided to go shovel out her car a bit so that she didn’t have to deal with the new snow quite as much. Then went grocery shopping, and when we came back, someone had taken her spot. After finding out whose it was, she asked him to move out of the spot and he said he would find his keys and move it. She waited for him in her car for 10 minutes and then parked on the street, returning home crying because he just left her there and she spent a good hour shoveling that spot only to have some ass steal it while she went shopping. Another 10-15 minutes later, he still hadn’t moved so I went and asked him to move it, and he showed me an old chart saying it was open, even though it was an old chart and I knew better. So finally after about a half hour I started calling my landlord and left a message with his wife and on his office phone. It took the guy an hour and a half to find his keys and move his car. I was pissed. My landlord came in at about 9pm to see what was the fuss and basically said he would post a notice about it today. We’ll see how much that actually works. These people have parked in our spot a number of times in the past and we have left a number of notes on his car and he just doesn’t listen. He obviously is illiterate.

It is unfortunate that after such a nice little vacation that the whole trip seemed ruined by a disastrous homecoming, but hopefully the fun we had can still overshadow the awful night.