Sunday.

Rebooted the diet.  Gained 10 pounds on the road.  I'm going to be strict about the carbs for the next few weeks and keep it under 20 per day and lose the weight I gained back and then some.  

Found a galvanized 6 foot stock tank 2 towns over. I don't think I"m working tomorrow - well I'm pretty sure about that since it's 3:00 pm and no word from anyone about it - so I'll go get it tomorrow.  I have to wait for a new UV sterilizer to come in before I will fill it up with water, but I can figure out what I'm going to do for a "lid" for it in the meantime.  

Birds ate most of my fish, I figure to use PVC piping and create a cover that birds cannot get through. Something light and easily removed yet good enough to keep these giant fishing birds from taking my rather expensive fish out of there.  Kind of defeats the purpose of a Koi pond when birds of prey are eating them up.  

I think I will also get another kind of setup where I can order 300 2 inch Koi and grow them in the tank and sell them.  I was going to have Maria do it and earn some money, but she didn't want anything to do with it.  Fine.  It's not gong to make me rich but if I keep them in there until they're 4 or 5 inches long I can snag a good price for them. They're hard to find in this region and there is a market for them.

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Monday.  Day 4 from being back, no work sent to me.  I haven't exactly been asking, but it's time to go back to work.  I'll probably use some vacation time to cover these days off.  I only asked for a couple of days off after getting back.  

My manager texted me this morning asking me to come to work and get this paperwork stuff done. Yes, well to get paid I had to do that. So, I hooked up the trailer fully expecting to go pickup a galvanized stock tank, went to work and turned in all of my receipts.  Almost $700 worth.  He also gave me a generous amount of travel time - apparently that's not paid out the $300 per day, but I came out ahead on that situation by $70 so I was okay with that.

And then i was handed a random drug test.  He said he'd actually received it for me while I was in Vermont, but decided to make me wait until I got back.  He looked at me and asked if I even could pass one right now?  Lol, yes, I don't take drugs and I haven't had any alcohol, I'm good.  It's the first random they have given me since I started working there, which is getting close to 3 years.  So, you go straight to the drug testing place once they give that to you, if you don't they - get upset.  It didn't take long and then over to Home Depot.

Where I saw the stock tank on sale.  But, of course, they don't even sell stock tanks.  Lol.  Okayyyyy. I searched the entire store, I had looked these tanks up online and it showed that the Longview location had one.  Whatever.  Over to Tractor Supply, who did, indeed have one and at a better price than the one listed at Home Depot.

And after paying for the tank and waiting in the parking lot, a rather odd event occurred with an older lady driving a giant, brand new ford F250 pickup attempting to back out of her parking space.  I posted all of that on my Facebook, don't really want to go into all of that again, but she got out of the truck, acted like I was blocking her - which i wasn't, demanded I move (instead of simply asking nicely) - I said sure - IF you ask nicely - she refused, called the cops and...whatever. Cops never showed, I just sat there and waited to get into the tractor supply yard in order to get my tank.  She easily  could have maneuvered her truck out of there.  She was a real piece of work.  Annnnnddddd. this woman just had to come into the yard and tell me "I won, you lost!". Juvenile, erratic, stupid behavior by an at least mid 60's individual. 

Home after that.  Not any hurry to set it up, I have a UV sterilizer coming, I won't fill the tank up until I have that sterilizer set up, otherwise the pond will turn bright green and algae everywhere.  I also want to fashion some sort of screened top for it.  I'll get the thing in place at least tomorrow.  And figure out how to set up the waterfall filter. It's going to have to be a couple of feet off the ground.  I'm not really sure about the screen covering yet, I'd really like some pond plants in there which would mean a bit different setup than what I had originally thought of doing.  

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Tuesday.

Play time over. I'm going to contact the disptacher today and ask when she intends on sending me back out on a run and inform her I've been sitting 5 days as of today. I really didn't mind this unasked for time off, to be honest so no biggies.  Just emailed the payroll department to see how many vacation hours I have left this year, going to take some of it to buffer these days off and not just lose that money in not working.

In looking up the yellow bellied water snakes, yes they do like to fish and yes they will clean out a Koi pond. I feel like I have no choice but to either catch and release them somewhere else or kill them.  I'll start out with cheap goldfish when I get the new pond setup going - if they eat those no great loss. Koi, even small ones, are like $10 a piece.  And then when they grow a few inches they're worth even more. The larger they get, the more they're worth.  I ordered a fake Blue Heron to set up next to the pond to deter those birds at least. They do work, I have one at the house in Phoenix and the herons stay away from the house.

But snakes post a different problem and they already live on the property. They sell snake traps, Im not sure I want to go to any expense in dealing with creatures that I very much dislike.  There are things I can do to try to keep them away from the pond, there is a stream that goes through the back yard which is what attracted them here in the first place. But, shedded snake skins on the pond I have now show they love the in ground pond and they may actually be the culprits that were eating my fish. A pond cover might keep out birds, it won't keep out snakes.  

The problem is these snakes set up shop underneath the concrete slap on the rear carport long ago.  There are urine smells from certain animals you can buy that allegedly scare them away.  I dunno.  Others say they will not necessarily eat your fish. Well something ate most of them.  There are things you can put on the bottom of your pond that the fish can hide in.  I might go that route, just try to keep count of the numbers of fish in there and see if they start disappearing.  

Anyway, I'll get out back and get the thing in place today and do some cleanup out  there - we did get storms coming through with the remnants of the hurricane and of course the yard is messy.  One good thing I can say is the neighbors next to us on the uphill side finally had a crew of people come out and clean the yard up.  There is still a lot of debris on the ground over there, but it's better than the nothing they had going before.  It's very disconcerting to spend hours cleaning up a yard, have  a storm come through the next day and have the yard look exactly the same as it did before you cleaned it up. It happens so often I finally gave up on it.  

I've lost 4 pounds since I started back on the diet 3 days ago.  I've been watching the carbs and keeping it down, the diet doesn't work unless you keep the carbs way down.  Keeping your carb intake under 20 per day may sound easy to some people, but go ahead and try it for a few weeks and then you'll get an idea how difficult it is to keep up with.  

Meanwhile, I'm watching democrats blame Trump for the violence. These are the same people that proclaimed the rioting that has been going on is actually peaceful protesting. Then some of these idiots said that there is nothing wrong with violence and where does the right come up with this narrative?

Well, that "narrative" come from the Constitution of the United States.  They obviously haven't read it or don't care what it says.  Trump proclaimed himself the candidate of law and order and that stand is resonating with most Americans.  Nobody wants to wake up in the morning to find rioters in their city has burned down even more buildings, killed more people and assaulted more cops and citizens.  

And I believe swing voters aren't near as dumb as these democrats such as Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi think they are. They have completely flip-flopped in their statements.  Their true colors are flying for everyone to see. You also have Pelosi attempting to blame Republicans for the impasse on another stimulus bill, when it's clearly Pelosi who is refusing to negotiate, at all.  "We came down". Well your initial and secondary "offers" are mind blowing amounts of money. Even the 1.3 trillion the right has moved it up to is a ridiculous, unfathomable amount of money.  

I personally don't care if they can't pass any new stimulus bill.  I also wish Trump would start talking about reducing the deficit and actually starting to pay off the national debt.  That apparently isn't popular with Americans? I dunno, but Biden is promising more taxes and contrary to what he states, it will affect middle class and even some lower class income earners.  

I guess in the end, it's going to be who do you believe?  

Anyways, with Taylor's negative outcome of virus test, the kids went back to school today.  She did not go back to work.  It's been stated that some people get a test, it comes back negative, another one, another negative and then a third that shows positive.  I guess these tests aren't very reliable.  In any case, having to wait 3 days for a result is a bit much knowing that they have tests that take less than 30 minutes out there.  

It's really one of the reasons I didn't go back to work or ask to. Come home from Vermont, find a person that just got sick with a fever and has had that fever ever since.  When that happened I thought, geeze, i should have just stayed up there another week or two.  I'm glad to be home but yeah, I'd rather just stay away from it if possible. 

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ABout time to end this one lol.  Still not dispatched and just decided to take vacation hours to compensate.  I'll definitely ask tomorrow cause' it should mean get dispatched and be home for part of the weekend maybe.  I dunno.