In which you can hardly tell it’s the weekend.

Today is the first day of our third week in Indy. I feel both as if I just arrived, and as if I’ve been here forEVer.

BoSe and Bread had a nine o’clock this morning. I tried to get the bid done last night, but it’s hard to work in the evening because the boys wanna relax and keep popping in and out so it’s hard to get any questions answered, like, “What the fuck is a D&R wrirmiumumm?” or “Don’t you know how to spell chimney?” or “Is this a 4 or a 9?”

So I had the bid nearly finished except for calculating the siding (damn gable ends, man) when I went to bed. Which means I got up at 7:30 this morning to do math.

Math, people.

Actually, I made Bread do it. But still.

I got the bid finished and printed for the guys and turned in our expenses to Dee all before 8:30 in the morning. BoSe ran for coffee, so now it’s nine and I’m listening to Mozart In The Morning and sipping a hazelnut latte and the door and window are open and the guys have five appointments scheduled for today and I’ll probably be alone much of the day. Unless Truck or PaKa come over to hang out.

I don’t think I have anything in particular to work on, so I guess I’ll troll Xactimate’s built-in Help system (I totally RTFM) to see if it can teach me how to make it calculate siding easily without having to draw the entire goddamned house.

Sunday, of course, is laundry day. I hope to God we manage to actually sleep in tomorrow.

In other news, Bread had one of those disturbing anxiety dreams that make you feel all discombobulated when you wake up. Apparently he dreamed Indiana had weird laws and his mom called to warn him but he got arrested anyway and was in one of those paper suits, handcuffed into a paddy wagon, and kids were asking him for cigarettes. He said he felt all weird all morning.

In which I woke up on the wrong side of the bed entirely.

I woke up totally fucking aggro this morning. Then my computer was acting like a slow piece of shit while I was trying to produce some printed bids. Then the guys were freaked out about this thing and that thing (this gig is incredibly talky — everyone’s always talking, and either freaking out or reassuring each other in turns… I think it’s a sales thing). Then Bread had said last week he would for certain take Bowling Jesus to the airport this morning, but then he changed his mind and left for a scope with BoSe so now I have to drive to the goddamned airport and I don’t want to do it.

I hate it when he flakes like that, especially when he expects me to unfuck it for him. He does it to people all the time, but if someone flakes on him you never hear the end of it.

There are still contract issues between WGC and 2X4, and our ‘team leader’ is maddeningly vague about it. We keep hearing that “everyone’s making ten grand a week here!” but no one admits to it. Who the hell is this nebulous “everyone”? It’s frustrating and maddening and we’re all vascillating from really feeling confident that this was a good idea to feeling convinced we’re being made chumps of. The emotional rollercoaster, while interesting, kinda sucks.

You wouldn’t believe how much talking goes on. We’re all living in the same motel, so every evening everyone comes back from the various corners of the city, changes into shorts, pours a drink, and starts making the rounds. There are guys wandering around for hours, chatting and chatting and chatting and chatting. It’s a huge game of “so-and-so said this, did you hear what what’s-his-face said?” and information and gossip swirl around like oil on a puddle, forming and reforming into different configurations.

I’m the defacto software expert, so people call and drop in all the time looking for help with Xactimate. Rarely do they actually need help using the software; usually they have a policy question but they don’t know enough to know the distinction. I’ve helped people put images into Word documents, I’ve designed and distributed templates for business cards, I re-wrote the 2X4 flyers into 4th grade English, and I’ve helped my team leader on his bids more than once. PaKa is coming over in a few minutes because he doesn’t know how to calculate drip edge or water&ice or something.

I’ve been drinking too much coffee. Grrr.

Update: It’s gotten worse. The talk-talk-talking, the rumours, the crazy girly insanity. This whole scene is driving me nuts. One guy was ousted today; he was attempting to do what I do — support salesmen by doing back-end data entry and officy stuff — but the team leader told the guys who were using his services that they’d be fired if they continued to do so. It’s worse than high school, peeps. If we don’t get that check today I’m gonna go postal. I think it’s time for a drink.

In which it takes money to make money, and I’m loving not living in the country.

We’ve been here for eleven days now.

We’ve got a gas grill set up, and bought speakers for the laptop so we could enjoy tunes in our room. (The built-in speakers were like listening to iTunes through a telephone handset.) There’s food in the fridge, and we’ve even been to the laundromat.

We’ve been to OfficeMax and Office Depot more times than I can count. We’ve purchased reams of paper and cardstock, pre-scored business card stock, Sharpies, highlighters, notepads, files and hanging file folders, and more. We’ve got a plastic file bin with actual files in it. We’ve got two printers, one color inkjet and the other a B&W toner jobbie, that print, scan, copy, and fax. We’ve got two laptops, mapping software with a GPS receiver, and half a gallon of margaritas in the fridge.

We’ve got an entire little office set up in this hotel room. I am not shitting you. It’s totally legit.

Last night Truck and Bowling Jesus came over to our room, and all the guys grilled bratwurst, zucchini with butter, baked beans, and sauerkraut. (As the token vegetarian, I nuked some soup and had a few potato chips.) I put on JTQ‘s In The Hand Of The Inevitable and boogied around. Such a smokin’ album. [Thanks, Jay-rob Jethro! I love this fuckin’ album, bro!] People were eating, drinking, talking, the tunes were smokin’, the weather had cooled off and a storm was rolling in, and I felt great. Happy. Comfortable. This is my scene, man, groovy folk hanging out and talking, food, tunes… At some point I realized that I actually like living here better than I like living in my real life.

It’s a lot like dorm life because people are always popping in and out, and because the space is small and requires one to be extremely tidy and organized. Also, we don’t have that much stuff with us; a week’s worth of clothes, the office equipment, and a few toys like my guitar and the laptop speakers and the gas grill. It’s so clean, pared down, simple. Light.

To compare and contrast, at home people rarely if ever pop in because we’re 13 miles away from town. We don’t own a stereo. (Actually, we do, but Bread plays the TV through it. There’s no antenna on the receiver, and our CD changer died years ago, and I never did buy a cable to connect an iPod to it. Due to the house’s layout you can’t really hear it unless you’re in the living room with it anyway.) The place is huge, which means it’s been filling up with shit since we moved in and it’s not tidy and organized and it’s not clean. And it’s under construction. And it’s out in the country, so my toenails always have dirt under them. (My feet are clean right now, people! Clean. I’m barefoot as always, but it’s all manicured grass lawns and pavement and sidewalk, not actual dirt I’ve been walking on.)

I now realize that I prefer having a small area to manage. Turns out I am still an incredibly organized, tidy person — I just don’t know how to manage more than a thousand square feet. I don’t like accumulating a bunch of shit; I prefer a small amount of functional and/or meaningful stuff to an assload of crap I don’t really care about but which causes me vague anxiety when I realize I don’t even know where most of it is, let alone what it is. (My dad’s been sending me “family” stuff and I haven’t even opened the boxes. They’re stored in a closet somewhere.) I like living in a highly social situation that I need to occasionally escape from instead of an isolated situation that lets me mope and dwell easily.

I’m in total denial, of course, about shit like the overcrowding and pollution and rush hour traffic because I hardly ever leave the hotel. 😉

In which I’m startin’ to miss good ol’ CAT-5.

The wireless here at home sweet hotel has been sketchy. Er, maybe not ‘sketchy’ so much as ‘completely down’ for the past day and a half.

It’s back up now. FINALLY.

I have to go sketch two roofs in Xactimate now, and then finish the door hangar layout that BoSe started this morning.

But first, an update! Bread bought a tank of LP yesterday, so last night we BBQ’d. I went to the store and bought stuff for baked potatoes and a big salad, along with steaks for the boys and some salmon for PatKa and me to share. BoSe and I called everyone in the hotel we know and invited them to bring something to grill.

When I got back from the store, the room was full of men. The whole crew was here. Some had brought burgers, others beer. We cooked and ate and talked and drank and it was really fun! The guys who have been here the longest — and eating three meals a day at restaurants — were really excited to hear we’d leave the grill in the ‘yard’ outside our room and that they were free to use it at their leisure.

Anyway, off to work. Ciao, babies!

In which I’ve been busy, but not too busy to blog — except I couldn’t ’cause the wireless is crap.

Our home sweet hotel seems to have a limited number of AP’s, so I haven’t been able to get on the Internet since I rebooted Saturday night after installing a Delorme mapping program. This makes me sad. I hate being denied the Internet.

Our sweet suite is still sweet. I live with two men, so I clean it twice day but it’s so small I don’t even notice I’m doing it. I spend most of my time hanging out here with the door open to the little yard area, computing and printing and talking on the phone. It’s way laid back and fun; it’s just like an office job except I’m drinking a mudslide! (Oh, and not getting paid for it. Yet. But whatever.)

Saturday Bread and BoSe went along on a roof sale with our team leader guy, GR. I stayed here and did office stuff. They came back all juiced because while they were there estimating the roof and meeting with the client, the guy across the street came over and asked to have his roof done, too.

State Farm estimates that the hail storms in April were the most damaging in U.S. history. The local building supplier estimates that 300,000 homes were damaged and they have a gigantic warehouse lot stuffed full of roofing supplies to meet the demand. My guys drove by there the other day and told me that same company is in the process of ‘dozing another lot to store even more materials. (Apparently big supply companies have spotters & estimators on their staffs, people who go out after weather events and determine how much of which type of materials will be needed to meet the construction demand. Who knew?)

This all means that they’ll be selling roofs until the cows come home, basically.

I did my first estimate data entry project yesterday. It took me two hours and I made a couple of mistakes. In my own defense, the damn shed had a gambrel roof and the scope notes they gave me didn’t have all the necessary measurements! But still. Something of a steep learning curve on this software – it took half an hour to figure out which heading “R&R vinyl dryer vents” was under. HVAC? Appliances? Siding?

After accidentally deleting my template, I got it rebuilt and I think after learning most of the line item codes I’ll be cranking out estimates by the pound.

THERE IS A BUCA DI BEPPO HERE!!! Saturday night, we rounded up Truck and Bowling Jesus and PK and went there for dinner. It was expensive, but oh so very worth it. We drank 3 litres of the house red wine, we had garlic bread and calamari and bruschetta appetizers. We ordered and shared pork, eggplant parmesan, manicotti, mashed potatoes, and green beans for dinner. We laughed and talked and all the guys fell in love with the waitress. It was delicious and so much fun. I love that restaurant.

Sunday and today I’m office maven. I’ve designed and printed business cards. I’ve edited marketing copy and printed 200 flyers (Bread, BoSe, Truck, and Bowling Jesus are all out canvassing right now.) I made them appointment sheets, too, and made sure they had all the appropriate tools and paperwork on the off chance that they actually sell a roof by accident while they’re postering. They all think I’m a genius.

I’m the only person from the office planet here so they all pop in and out all day. It’s pretty fun, actually. They’re all using my business card template now.

Anyway. Today’s Monday. The hotel’s wireless is still down so I called T Mobile for a free day pass. I have to remember to cancel it before this time tomorrow or they’ll charge me $40 for the month. Hopefully the hotel’s geek will show the fuck up and install those APs ASAP ’cause I’m fuckin’ dying here.

The night before last there was a big storm. Briefly the wind blew so hard that a table, two chairs, and an ashtray all ended up in the hotel’s pool. They took the furniture out, but the pool’s closed until they can get it cleaned out. Which means no swimming for the Mushlette today.

Today I had breakfast at a Waffle House. Yum. Also the TV just told me to expect 60 MPH winds and dime-sized hail in downtown Indianapolis within the next five mintes. I called the boys and encouraged them to park their rig under something so the windows don’t break if the hail actually hits. Here in Greenwood, though (a suburb SE of Indy), the day’s still lovely.