the boredom of ramfree17

Most things they said are sweeter the second time around, but having snake visitors is not among them. After more than 4 years, our house had another snake visitor. Neth is the lucky one to have found it and this time it is between the door and the door jamb leading to the side laundry area. She couldn’t close the door and frantically called me when she finally realized what is jammed in between.

Not wanting to have a repeat of the in-house hide and seek, I opted to forcefully close the door and pin the snake in between. I was hoping that it will have its head out in the open but when I circled around the house I only saw its tail and a part of its body wriggling on the other side of the door. I don’t want to risk it causing more panic in the house and I am not equipped to handle snakes so I took the garden shears and cut the exposed body part into two. Hopefully by tomorrow the snake will already be dead and it would be easy to dispose it.

Sorry snake brethren, you shouldn’t have picked our house as your vacation spot.

[Nov-7 update] I got pictures! Pardon the quality as they are taken by my aging K618i phone.

Plastered

Laid out

ciao!

Tags: Garbage by Erin
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During this lifetime I have heard people say a few times that their work is too stressful that they want to vomit. I didn’t realize that this morning it would be a literal thing for me.

I went to sleep at around midnight after a healthy dose of boring reading material (aka project work package aka contract) for some big shot discussions this week. At around 2AM I suddenly awoke with a jerk with the words UAT[1] in my mouth and the feeling of having a lot of bile in my throat. Thankfully the trash bin was on my side of the bed so I swiped the cover open and started dry-heaving on it. The icky and rough feeling on my throat was not going away so I ended up drinking a lot of water and munching on fried and salted corn kernels to get the taste of bile away.

Now I can, with credibility, say that I can related next time I hear somebody say they are sick and tired of their work that they want to vomit.

[1] User Acceptance Test

ciao!

Tags: Garbage, Work by Erin
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In a nutshell, Murphy’s law states that whatever can go wrong will go wrong and at the most inopportune time. This day for me seems to to be the most literal example of that law and it seems to crown a really crappy week:

• My “so called” team has never been complete the whole week.
• Nothing seems get to the state that can be called as “done”.
• Screening of the “fit to contribute” recruits across the company isn’t going well.
• Issues germinate like dormant spores and each one comes unwrapped with a tag of “URGENT: RESOLVE IMMEDIATELY OR GLOBAL MELTDOWN IMMINENT”
• I have had the introduction to the project incident report template and mastery of accomplishing one in a single week.
• I got tagged for not finishing the work I wasn’t even scheduled to do on time even if it would supposedly only take a few hours (and which task isn’t supposed to get done in a few hours?)
• A little storm called “Basyang” decided to kill the power and water supply in our area w/c forced us to stay in an overpriced hotel-esque place. This reminds me that I need to create a mini-review for that place.

Those are just some examples for the week and just for today:

• My “change” can’t be completed because it hasn’t passed UAT execution because…
• The environment decided to crap out the whole week and be excessively stubbon today that no requested build from me ever finishes successfully. It doesn’t matter that I went to the office earlier than usual to get the testing done.
• I got tagged for not being prepared to present items in a meeting attended by the client. It doesn’t matter that the list items magically appeared in the list and it hasn’t really come into my attention.
• My change suddenly had a twin ticket that I wasn’t aware of, and the approach is still dubious as it smells of too much patch-me solution.
• Everybody is too busy to submit admin requirements. And that is because I really don’t do anything each day but be a PHB and think of useless things to assign to my team.
• I said I will leave at 7:30PM, announced to the powers-that-be that I will leave at 7:30PM, and then get stuck in ten thousand little important tasks that made me walk the hallway with the powers-that-be at 8:15PM. The powers-that-be are on their way to a meeting that I declined because I need to go leave at 7:30PM!

And to top it all off, I still don’t feel like I am contributing anything. This is the feeling that I really, really hate. Life is getting consumed by work that is starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth because I don’t feel empowered nor ingenious enough to really make a difference.

Oh life… I just need to accept that this is one of my “Shit Happens days & it will keep on pouring”.

ciao!

Tags: Rubbish, Top of my head by Erin
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Who said being together for 10 years can diminish the sweetness of a relationship? The conversation below that Neth and I had while having dinner last night is a contradictory statement to that premise. Names were abstracted to protect the innocent.

X: Nakakapagod kang mahalin?
Y: Bakit?
X: Kasi napapagod na ako tapos mahal kita, kaya ganon.
Y: Ganon ba? Then I am sick and tired of you.
X: Bakit naman?
Y: Kasi I am sick; I am tired; and I am with you.

I know it doesn’t make sense but aren’t those declarations sweet?

ciao!

Tags: Garbage, Humor by Erin
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I came across this Window Farming site which promotes growing some of your food on your home/apartment windows if it gets enough sunlight.

Image courtesy of Britta Riley’s Flicker Account

My gardening interests have grown dormant and my mini-produce plot has grown brown because of a couple of reasons like being away too long, extremities injury, etc. The most notable reason is still that nobody will water the plants when me and the wife are away.

The Window farm is a hydrophonic variant of home gardening and it uses an ordinary water pump (like the ones used in aquariums) to pump the nutrient-rich water into the recycled water-bottles that have been re-purposed as hanging pots. The pump makes sure the owners don’t forget to water the plants but that still means there is an electricity cost involved. I am thinking that coupling the pump with a solar panel would negate the electricity cost if there is ample sunlight and space. I haven’t gone through the manuals yet but in case the hydrophonic plants require 24×7 water flow then it might be a workable compromise to have the water pump working in the day and then adding some water retentive materials in the bottle-pot (e.g. coconut husk threads or rice husks if available) so that the plants would still have some accessible water at night.

I wonder how much solar panel is required to power an electric pump… Btw, watch this video for more information…

Tags: Top of my head by Erin
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