Working with a Family

I kicked off the week with a brunch date with my brother. We ate salads at the European Street Cafe then played a dice game called farkle at my house while drinking the chocolate drink yoohoo.  For work that night I went on a ride along in the northeastern region of the northwest side, getting to know the sketchy ghetto areas of Avenue B, Myrtle, Moncrief, Lem Turner, and Edgewood and the goings on of their crime and nonsense at 3am. Officer Snyder kindly gave me a tour of all the high crime areas such as the Raceway at 1040 Golfair, Washington Heights Apartments, and Cleveland Arms Apartments.  We always get 911 calls and officer onview calls out in those areas, so it was cool to experience it in real life. Nothing too exciting that night, just a lot of disputes and suspicious activity, an armed dispute, a couple traffic stops, baker acting an individual to the MHRC, and a motorcycle accident with injuries that was much less exciting than it sounds haha. The guy had ...

We went on our first family vacation! A coworker from the other shift needed last Friday off, so we traded and it gave me a three day weekend in the middle of this week. I had set a goal early this year to attend our church's temple more, and to turn that Orlando trip into a vacation for our family. We stayed at a hotel that was less than 15 minutes away from both Universal Studios and the temple. The grocery store Publix was also nearby. So beforehand, we planned to save money by buying groceries and cooking in the hotel rather than eating at the restaurants in Orlando. The food was fresh and delicious and Universal security even let us bring our food into the theme park. /// /// My first night off, we drove the 2 hrs 20 mins to Orlando and checked into the hotel. We were all tired from the packing and travel, so we slept really well. Since we didn't have a crib, we moved the two full beds together. Josiah slept between us, and we surrounded the edges of the bed wit...

We've been insured in medical and dental and vision now for over a year with my job, but I've only now been able to afford taking advantage of the benefits. Since we're long over due on many appointments and procedures , it's more expensive this time around..  but it will be more sustainable once we've taken care of all the major corrections. This week I took a lot of time off to focus on dental visits, dental work, car inspections, vehicle maintenance, vision appointments, picking up antibiotics at the pharmacy, and ordering glasses. When I would normally take overtime shifts, I opted to focus on catching up on maintaining our health and safety through reaping the benefits of our insurance.  While Rhea went out to run many errands herself, I was able to spend a lot of one on one time with my main man, Josiah. He's a mama's boy and spoiled in that his mommy is always by his side whenever he wants something. He hasn't had a lot of father son time, so I en...

This week was a cold one in Jacksonville. One of my bigger accomplishments for this week was getting my root canal completed. It's apparently been 7 weeks since they started my root canal and I was supposed to return after two weeks to complete it. In that time 1) I went to Oklahoma for my brother-in-law's graduation from pilot school 2) Thanksgiving 3) Finals for the three classes I took last sem 4) Pre Christmas preparation 5) Christmas 6) New Years It's been a busy time with a lot of holidays and even some traveling. After finals, I started to do a truck ton of overtime again, since I've missed out a ton of OT this last semester and we haven't been able to save as much as I would've liked. At work a few shift changes happened. We lost a few good friends such as Brian and Candace to red alpha and red mids, but we also got the Hurstons couple onto our shift blue mids. I moved to a new dispatch trainer Amber, but there's been a crazy plague in the ...

This week was a very exciting week. From Christmas with the family to New Years Day. We had the cousins and auntie over, as well as the missionaries for kamayan. Mom and dad have a new firepit and patio set up in the backyard, where we set up some long tables and set out rows of white rice, beef, pork, chicken, fish, shrimp, mixed mango tomatoes onions and eggplant, bagoong, and soup. Delicious, but very cold out, and the food lost heat before all the guests arrived. Maybe next time we have an outdoor kamayan, we’ll wait until after we bless the food to lay out the kamayan… and maybe have some outdoor heaters around the table. We played board games galore with the siblings and spouses almost every night. Kuya really got a lot of board games this year, and a lot of them were fun to learn and play. One of my favorite new games was citadel. Josiah climbed the stairs all the way for the first time. Camille and Andrew left for Arkansas in their new baby blue pick up truck early New Years E...