Today is Friday the 13th and I started my day off by driving some friends to the airport. Last Saturday the ward had their annual Hawaiian party and added this year was a farewell send off for the Hill's.Here are a few photos from that night.






The Hill's flight was scheduled to leave at 9:50 am Friday June 13th. They are leaving for 3 years and will rent out their house while they are gone. Because they will be taking this extended absence they have been working for the last month to get their house ready to leave and have the renters move in. They have been up late every night as well as up early every day working hard to make sure every detail was completed. I'm not sure they got but a few hours sleep Thursday night. I arrived at their house just before 6 am hoping to drive to the airport before the traffic got to heavy for the morning commute. There was still a few last minute preparations to complete before the family could leave. Trying to pack for a 3 year trip and get your house in order for other people to live in is a tough and mayor undertaking, and it seems no matter how hard you try even the smallest of details can seen be over looked until the last minute. Lots of last minute cleaning and shuffling was done which delayed the departure to the airport. Once at the airport the family went to check in for their flight but found they were too late to make the flight. With more shuffling they were able to book another flight out of town although not a direct flight but a flight none the less. The grand adventure has begun and hopefully we will get updates on their activities while in Slovenia for the next 3 years. You will find those updates on their blog page. www.daveanddana.blogspot.com.

Back on the 20th of May I posted the gas prices that I see when I drive to and from work, well just 2 days after my posting the gas prices went up to over $4.00 a gallon. Costco and Sams club still had gas for $3.85 a gallon at that time. Well I went to get gas on Wednesday and at Costco and Sams club both the price for regular gas was $4.21 a gallon. As I was filling my take I listed to a guy who was on his cell phone talking to somebody, and he was telling that person that $4.21 was a great price. Can you believe it, saying $4.21 is a great price for gas? I can understand why he said it because all the other gas stations are at $4.45 to $4.50 a gallon. So it was the cheapest you could find it. It cost me $45.60 to fill my tank, gone are the days when you could fill up for under $20. These gas prices are just getting out of hand!!!

I don't know if you have been watching the news this last week, but Ca. has been having a lot of heat. We have been having record breaking and near record temperatures. I myself have been battling my own battle with the heat and my less than steller air conditioning at my apartment. Here are a few photos of my thermometers I have in my house. The highest was 89 degrees but I couldn't get my camera to focus to get a picture of that as it is even these pictures are not that great. The smaller thermometer is the one in my living room.
The other clock/thermometer is my alarm clock in my bedroom.

I will be talking to the apartment manager about having my air conditioner fixed before the really hot and long summer days get here in August.

Here is a bit of current news. How much are you paying for gas? Here are a few picture of the gas stations I pass on my way to and from work.

I wish I had a picture of the cheapest place to get gas, which is Costco as on Saturday the price for regular unleaded was $3.83, yes and I thought wow what a bargain. How sad is that? It will be over $4.00 by next weekend rest assured.

Well I have not posted this information yet, but my current job, the one that brought me back to Ca. is being out sourced and I will be out of a job shortly. At least out of the current job I have now. I am in the market for a new job so if anyone knows of any let me know.

We have a white board at work that we use to pass information on between shifts, mostly for status of ongoing projects that the next shift needs to be aware of, we also have a written turnover log that is to be checked on the computers. I am including a picture of this white board which has new information on it for everyone to see.

In the upper left hand corner where it says DHH that stands for Days Held Hostage. I'm not sure who came up with that number or from what date it starts, but I did hear it was suppose to be from the beginning of the year. The Days to go number is how many days we have left to work, or at least that is based on the last bit of information we got. However we do know that not everyone will be here to the end and we figure that is the end date for a few but most of us have less time than what the board shows. As you can see the on going project right now is a leaky air conditioner that we have a hose set up leading to a bucket, and every hour or so we have to go check the bucket and empty it as it fills up. Welcome to the world of Computer Operations! The graphics and word change are just the staff having fun. The Clock above the board lets us know what time it is in 3 out of the 4 time zones across the US and GMT, not that we need to know that time, perhaps it has something to do with our strategic partners in India, (That's what they call the contractors over seas. ) although it is not even close to their time as India is +5 hours of GMT so really it's probably just because someone thought it would be cool. Anyway so this is the big white board I face every time I go to work.