Archive for December, 2006

Nuk girl

Friday, December 22nd, 2006


Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve once again, sucking her Nuk and getting back to her favorite hobby. The rebellion is over. Photo courtesy of Loyal Reader Number Five, as usual.

I’m using the Wonders of Blogger again – there was a movie on last night that kept me too distracted to blog. No problem, though – it’s a nice quiet Saturday morning and very conducive to creating Great Literary Art.

Work is over for the year! I left at about 11:00 Friday morning and have been enjoying the day ever since. Now we can start having fun.

Speaking of fun, Loyal Readers Numbers Three and Fifteen arrived this evening after a safe but long trip. Everybody’s here now and we’re having a great time together. LRN3 and LRN15 brought us our Christmas present – a cute little corn snake named Fluffy. She (we have no idea which it is, but we’re calling it a girl) also came with a cage, fortunately. We need to get to the store sometime today to buy some bedding and frozen dead mice for her – yum! She has to be fed on Monday. And what better way is there to say “Merry Christmas” than by watching a snake eat a dead mouse?

– Later –

It’s Saturday evening now and it was museum day, just as Loyal Reader Number Sixteen mentioned in her comment to yesterday’s post. They went to the Henry Ford museum; we went to the Cable Car museum and Chinatown. It was fun going down to San Francisco. We went over the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. We saw the piers along the Embarcadero. We had a view of Alcatraz way out in the bay. We ate lunch at an outstanding Chinese restaurant in the heart of Chinatown. We drove down Lombard street.

And we enjoyed the museum, although its scope was somewhat limited. It had only three actual cable cars, including the oldest one in existence. There were several very nicely-made streetcar models that were only rendered slightly irrelevant by the fact that they were models of electric streetcars, not cable cars. There was an interesting historical movie, some great photos of the devastation from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and a fairly large gift shop. But the best thing by far is that all that stuff was on the mezzanine overlooking the actual motors used to run all the cables that drag along all the cable cars in San Francisco. It was kind of loud but very industrial and cool. I’m glad we went.

And that’s enough for today. Look for an update on Christmas day and have a Very Merry Christmas!

Rebel yell

Thursday, December 21st, 2006


Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve yet again, this time in protest mode. Fight The Man, LRN12! Power to the people!

Okay, I admit it. She was just yawning. But it kind of looks like she’s Fighting The Man, doesn’t it? Photo courtesy of Loyal Reader Number Five, by the way.

Well, well, well. What a red-letter day it is. We have two more Loyal Readers, bringing the total to a nice, round nineteen. Welcome to Scott and Matt. I’m delighted you’re here. As is usual, your names are Over There On The Right, and your Very Special Days will come as soon as I receive/find a picture. Feel free to send one that you think shows you in a positive light (if possible). Otherwise, I’ll try to dig something up. At any rate, thanks for reading, and stay Loyal!

I’m pleased to report that we got our testing finished up and shipped our software this afternoon. That means my Merry Men can take the day off tomorrow. And I can take half the day off. Not too shabby. Well, not as shabby as it could have been, anyway. After tomorrow, I’m home for a week!

I have plans, big plans. I’m planning to stay up a little too late and wake up a little too late. I’m also planning to get some work done on all of the cars. And I’m even planning to make some things, starting with a pummer or two. Not to mention doing some cool things with my Arduino and playing with my mountain of Christmas presents. And of course I’ll be generating some Morrowlife Great Art. Those pictures don’t just take themselves, you know. The days will just be packed.

We finally got a little bit of action from the moving company on paying for all the stuff they broke and/or lost last August. No, they didn’t actually send a check, but they did send a nice letter telling us they plan to send a check Real Soon Now. That’s progress, anyway.

Congrats to Loyal Reader Number Seventeen on her major award. A thousand bucks is a pretty cool Christmas surprise. Send me a present! Something extravagant would be appropriate.

And many thanks to Loyal Reader Number Sixteen for her highly effective recruitment efforts. The Morrowlife blog has never had it so good. Maybe you should consider going to work for the Marines.

And how nice it is to hear from Loyal Reader Number Seven. I had a feeling you were still reading but just not finding time to post.

Time for bed, once again. See you tomorrow.

Chair nap

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006


Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve engaged in one of her four favorite hobbies (the others are, of course, eating, pooping, and looking cute). Photo courtesy of Loyal Reader Number Five.

In an incredible development, we have yet another Loyal Reader! Everybody give a big hearty Morrowlife welcome to Jane, Loyal Reader Number Seventeen. If I’d known LRN12 would pack ’em in like this, I would have gotten grandchildren sooner. Anyway, LRN17’s name is now officially Over There On The Right, and her Very Special Day will happen as soon as either she sends me a picture or I find one in my Voluminous Photography Archives. Or both.

Busy day today. We’re working like crazy to get an important product released tomorrow so we can all take vacation on Friday. We’re getting close and I think we’ll get there. In the meantime, it’s noses to the grindstone (which would hurt like crazy, and I can’t really see the point of it anyway, can you?) for my Merry Band at work.

Traffic was a little worse than usual on the way home. I left the office late, which may account for it, and it’s getting close to holiday travel time, which may also account for it. All I know is that I had about twenty minutes at home before I had to go to my Wednesday evening meeting. Fortunately, that was enough to eat a little dinner (curried beef – very tasty, thanks for asking) and write out some Ward Mission goals for next year, which were due at 8:30. Fortunately, I knew pretty much what they would be but hadn’t put them to paper yet.

The goals are in addition to the Ward Mission Plan that I’ve been working on for months now. I came up with a modest suggestion that was roundly rejected by everybody else. In its place, we have a very nice but overly vague statement of desired outcomes. Unfortunately, there’s not much there that can be measured, and you can’t control what you can’t measure, so I wrote down some much more specific goals too.

Anyway. It’s late now, and I’ve committed to getting this done tonight in five or ten minutes. So I’ve gotta go. See you tomorrow, and thanks for being Loyal Readers. Tell a friend. Maybe we’ll get the roster up to twenty.

By the way, do you think I ought to add Scott to the list, seeing as how he posted a comment on Tuesday’s post?

Loyal Reader Number Sixteen

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006


Here’s Loyal Reader Number Sixteen, stopping to smell the roses along the way. Ahhh!

That’s right, I now have sixteen Loyal Readers! I snared LRN16 with cute pictures of Loyal Reader Number Twelve. Very tricky. Don’t worry, LRN16, cute LRN12 pictures will be back tomorrow. And thanks for reading. And enjoy your Very Special Morrowlife Day, complete with your own picture and your name over there on the right on the actual Internet! Wow.

No post yesterday. I was . . . thinking. No, that couldn’t be it. I spent Sunday and Monday evenings until late into the night trying to get my email server working for the HRVA. I got the web server up on The Computer On a Dime a little bit earlier in the weekend. It’s working now, although all it consists of is a link to the old HRVA site. Time to switch.

Anyway, I had a much harder time getting my COaD email server up. I made it even harder by trying to use a woefully incomplete and misleading internet-based guide (to be fair, though, the guide does have some configuration guidelines that are useful after the server is up and running). On Monday, I switched to the excellent guide from linuxhomenetworking.com and got to work. I finally got it to receive emails last night and then got the sending part figured out earlier tonight. Now I have email accounts at: (1) work, (2) gardenvillesoftware, (3) morrowlife, (4) hrva, (5 -7) gmail, (8) juno, (9) yahoo, (10-11) hotmail, and (12) comcast. No shortage there. To paraphrase an old chestnut about TV, twelve accounts and there’s nothing to read.

Looking back at Friday’s post, I had high hopes for a productive weekend. On the one hand, I did get several things done, including a very nice baptism, a decent Sunday School lesson, and all my Christmas shopping. I also checked the pool water. However, the cars remain unwashed, many things remain un-put-away, and the Taurus remains unrepaired. There’s always next week, when I’ll be hope celebrating Christmas and enjoying being with the family. Maybe I can even get some of them to help me with the fun parts, like fixing the Taurus.

And now it’s late again and I really have to get to sleep. See you tomorrow.

Closeup

Friday, December 15th, 2006


Here’s Loyal Reader Number Five, ready for her closeup. Maybe I zoomed in there just a little too much.

Worked pretty much a full day for free today. I could have used the day off today. Lots to do.

So, I’ll have to get it all done tomorrow. I need to fix the Taurus’s blinkers, find out where it’s leaking antifreeze from, install a new blind, do all my Christmas shopping, redesign the Gardenville Software website, prepare for a baptism on Sunday, prepare my Sunday School lesson, put a bunch of stuff away, get a car or two clean (rainfall permitting), check the pool, and I don’t remember what else.

Sooooo, I’ll spend the rest of the evening doing something fun and/or relaxing. Have a great weekend.