morrowlife

Thanks to the wonders of Blogger, I’m typing this Friday post on Saturday evening. It’s been a pretty decent weekend so far. As predicted on Thursday, I stayed home on Friday. It was nice spending the day at home. I spent a lot of the time working on getting ready for Loyal Readers Numbers One, Two, and Four. I also drained about two inches of water out of the pool. It had gotten overfilled during the rainstorm the other day. Then I welcomed home the family! A couple of hours later, Loyal Readers Numbers One and Two left for a church overnighter, which they enjoyed.

Today, LRN4 and I got a bunch of things done. She straightened up the game room, in which I set up our old relic of a crib. It still looks pretty good, though. She also shuffled the guest room furniture around, after which I put up a couple of pictures. It’s great getting ready for company – you finish things that have been hard to get to. We also got the pool water tested (too much chlorine – I guess I shouldn’t have shocked it yesterday) and did a bunch of other little things I can’t remember right now. And now we’re watching last year’s Monk Christmas Special, which we all agreed was one of the lamer episodes. So we’re watching it again. Hmm.

I think I’ll get back to Monk. See you tomorrow.

From the look of things, you’d think Loyal Reader Number Twelve doesn’t do anything but sleep. I hear otherwise. But they sure like taking her picture when she’s asleep.

Missed my train this morning, so I didn’t get to write anything. The good news, though, is that I’ll actually be taking my off Friday off tomorrow. I do need to dial in to the daily meeting I chair and do timecards in the afternoon, but I can be at home! Hooray. Now I can pick up all my toys before the family gets here.

Yes, you heard it right. Loyal Readers Numbers One, Two, and Four are coming home tomorrow! I’ll be delighted to have them home for a few days, and then also delighted to have all of us go back down to Sugarloaf for Thanksgiving with the family, including LRN12! Ought to be great.

It’s 9:00 and I want to go eat dinner, so here are a few more things to watch. First, the B-52’s (link warning – music):

Next, Randy Newman – the Monk (link warning – Monk video with sound) song guy (link warning – beach scene):

And finally, a man who needs no introduction:

See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve taking a quick nap. She’s probably saving up energy for the middle of the night. Isn’t she cute? Answer: Very yes (link warning: hilarious cartoon with sound).

I attended correlation meeting at the church tonight. It went fine – thanks for asking. It was already late when I got home and it’s later still now. Can’t write much today. I think I’ll ride the train tomorrow – I need to go through a bunch of email in the morning and it’ll give me a chance to write on the way home.

Until then, have a great day and thanks for being Loyal Readers.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number One with a couple of his birthday presents last month. He got two forms of transportation. See if you can pick them out.

I’m including a picture of the car because I’m delighted to report that it’s on the road again! I guessed yesterday that it was the starter motor. After work tonight, I jacked the front end up and got under there and tested the starter motor. It didn’t appear to work. I removed the starter motor (two bolts and a wire – just about the easiest thing to fix on a car these days) and tested it on the bench. It didn’t appear to work. I took it to an auto parts store and had them test it. It didn’t work. I bought a new one (which I had them test as well – I’ve bought way too many electrical auto parts that were DOA), bolted it on, and started the car right up. How odd that my first diagnosis was the correct one. I guess there has to be a first time for everything.

I’m still trying to track down the coolant leak. It’s not too serious, but I want to get it fixed. Scott, one of my coworkers, has promised to lend me his coolant system pressure tester tomorrow. I’ll try to find some time over the weekend to check it out.

My secret clearance was re-approved today. I had gotten it downgraded several years back when I went into purely commercial work. Now that I’m back working on a DoD program, I needed it again. It really didn’t take too long, considering that the government ran out of money for clearances a couple of months ago.

I’ve been talking with Loyal Reader Number Five pretty frequently lately. Loyal Reader Number Four’s cell phone doesn’t work at LRN5’s house, so I have to call LRN5 when I want to talk to LRN4. It’s nice to have the bonus of talking to both of them at least once a day.

No time for more blathering. I really need to get some sleep tonight. See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Five on the day before Loyal Reader Number Twelve’s birth. She and Loyal Reader Number Four went for a long walk by the lake to encourage things to move along. It appears to have worked – Mia was born the next day. Isn’t that a pretty town behind her? It looks like a great place to live.

It was rainy today and I stayed at work about an hour late, so that was a double whammy on the trip home. I got here a few minutes after 8:00. Today was the last day the Deseret Industries trailer was supposed to be at the stake center, and we had a nice kitchen table and chairs to get rid of, so I loaded them up in the Suburban and went over there. No trailer. Sigh. I came back home and found a convenient place to get rid of the unwanted furniture. I can’t say exactly where, but I will mention that we are still living in a construction zone and construction zones have dumpsters and our friendly builder offered some time ago to let us residents get rid of a few things when we need to. You’ll have to draw your own conclusions.

Anyway. After the disposal, I had a look at Loyal Reader Number One’s car. It wouldn’t start on Sunday morning when I tried using it, so I did a little bit of diagnosis tonight. It appears to me that the starter motor is dead, but that’s far from certain. Starter motors are really easy to change, so I might crawl under there tomorrow night and get the old one out and have it tested somewhere. It’s just a question of finding the time to get it done. Don’t know when.

Worked on the website all weekend. Morrowlife is working fine on Larry, and Apache is patched and secured, with nightly updates of its mod_security firewall data files. I don’t think we’re much of a target, being a tiny little website with only fourteen highly-influential readers, but every webmaster should do his best to be secure.

Had much more trouble with the HRVA. I thought I had it set up a couple of times, but the database keeps getting corrupted. It works perfectly on gardenvillesoftware.com. Maybe it’s Larry’s 64-bit software that’s causing the problem – some things just don’t work right with the 64-bit version of Linux (although it works much better than 64-bit Windows). I may have to get Moe fixed up a little bit and get the websites moved over there after all. As of now, the HRVA is still on gardenvillesoftware. Fortunately, I have about six months to get it done.

And that was my day. It’s time to get cleaned up and go to bed. See you tomorrow.