Weekend update

My son had his Blue & Gold yesterday, which means he is moving on up to a full Boy Scout.  He had a rough patch there when he wanted to quit.  He said he was bored with it, although I suspect the reason was deeper than that.  Anyway, I half persuaded and half forced him to stick with it, and after last week's meeting he seemed to be revived.  I think he has more fun with it when I involve myself more.  So today we did an "engineering" project in which we made a "blueprint" of the house.  His den leader said it didn't have to be to scale, but there's no point in doing it sloppily, and it took us two sheets of graph paper taped together, but that sucker is to scale.  I think when he goes to Boy Scouts and gets to where he isn't constantly having to get something done to move up to the next level, he'll like it even more.  I wasn't able to be in Scouts when I was a kid, although I wanted to.  There was no organization where we lived, and we would have had to drive to another town for me to take part in it.  They did attempt it briefly one summer and I became a Webelos for a few months, but it never went anywhere.  I don't think the people trying to organize it really knew what they were doing.  I still have my old handbook, which I read from cover to cover more than once when I was his age.

Not much else going on here lately.  The weather has been nice, and this past week at work wasn't too bad with little rain and cool temperatures.  I got my numbers this past week, and I had 95 errors last year.  I don't have an exact number of total reads, but it's somewhere over 120,000.  My error rate put me at 14th in the department, or about in the middle.  They're going to a different method of ranking next year which considers more things than just errors.  They showed me that if we had been using that method for the past year, I would have been all the way up at #8--in the top 10!  So I'm hoping I can get even fewer errors this year--I already had a much better January than I did last year.  I also had 2 unscheduled absences last year (sick), so this year I'm going to try and schedule a "get well" day ahead of time if I feel myself getting sick.  I have plenty of what they call "personal leave" to use for this.  I get both "personal leave" and "vacation leave," which are two different things.  The vacation time has to be scheduled more in advance than personal time, and I can get paid back for up to 40 hours of unused personal leave at the end of the year if I want (otherwise it rolls over, and I've been rolling it over since I started).

Here's what I've been listening to via YouTube lately.  Arkona is either a folk metal or pagan metal (depending on who you ask) band from Russia, and they sing in Russian, but the music is so cool I don't really care.  The video below is one of their shorter songs and has some good examples of the folk instrumentation they use.  The title translates as "wall on wall," which is what that form of fighting is called, and is apparently a sport, I think.  Their lead singer, who calls herself Masha Scream, is one of the few female metal vocalists who both sings and uses death growls.  I don't think this track has any of her growling in it, though.