morrowlife

Here’s the Loyal Pet apparently doing a little fishing. She didn’t catch anything. Didn’t even see anything. Photo taken at Big Sur.

Speaking of camping, we’re heading back into the wilds this weekend. Loyal Readers Numbers One and Two are coming to work with me on Thursday for Take Your Kids to Work Day, or Young Minds at Work, as we call it for some reason, possibly involving the fact that it’s too hard to figure out who is whose kid these days so they’ve given up trying.

Anyway, we’re planning to finish up a little early that day. After we get home, we’re heading out to Caswell State Park, which is less than half an hour from our house. We’ll be coming home on Saturday. We’ve never been to the park, but Loyal Reader Number Four wants to go check it out, since she’ll be taking her Girl’s Camp group there a month or so later. So we get to go this weekend.

No post Friday. We went to the Boy Scout spaghetti dinner and I never got to it afterwards.

Not that I didn’t have plenty of opportunity – it was my off Friday and I was actually home! And I only worked about two hours! How unusual!

So what did I do on Friday (and Saturday (and Sunday))? Well, let’s see. Loyal Readers Numbers Five, Six, and Twelve came over and spent the day Friday. They even stayed the night and went home on Saturday morning. We were glad to see them, and were pleasantly surprised to see LRN6, as we thought he had some work to get done at home. It was a nice visit.

I bought and installed a new coolant overflow tank on the Sable. The coolant level sensor had failed, and it’s a permanently installed part of the tank, so I did what I had to do. Both Loyal Reader Number Four and I are quite relieved to have that little job done – the light and bell had gotten to be quite an annoyance.

LRN6 and I also tried to replace the headrest speakers on the Miata (finally!). Sadly, the very nice – and very nicely priced – speakers we bought really didn’t fit and I wasn’t willing to make the modifications needed to make them fit. So I returned them and ordered some properly sized new ones online. I hope they arrive sometime this week. And maybe I’ll get them installed Saturday afternoon after the camping trip!

Let’s see, what else? Oh, LRN4 and I went to Costco and bought a new palm tree. This one is roughly eight feet tall and is now safely planted behind the pool. I believe that’s exactly what that spot needed. We also worked on the drip system for the garden in the back yard.

Oh, and we bought and I installed a new ceiling fan for the family room.

So it was a fairly busy weekend. Sunday was the usual – more meetings than would be consistent with a truly restful day, but not bad.

Oh, and I called Loyal Reader Number Twenty Three yesterday – it was his birthday. Happy birthday, LRN23!

And that brings us up to date. Time for Home Evening. See you tomorrow.

Here’s a nice distant shot of the Pacific Ocean at – you guessed it – Big Sur. Taken from the hiking path going towards – you guessed it – the ocean.

Extremely Short Shrift tonight. I just got home from my Tuesday evening meeting, chatted with Loyal Reader Number One for a few minutes, and played with my VMWare installations of Ubuntu Linux and Solaris Unix. Now I have to get to bed. Need to get up at about 5:00 to pack my bags for tomorrow’s trip to Edwards. As (probably) mentioned previously, I’ll be back late Thursday night so I don’t miss a single minute of my Off Friday.

I’m kind of looking forward to the trip and kind of not. I like Edwards and these meetings have been instructive and useful. I also enjoy a road trip from time to time. On the downside, I have plenty to do at work and not enough time to do it, and it doesn’t help to be gone for a couple of days. But I’m going anyway.

Tomorrow night’s dinner: sushi.

Blogging will continue from the remote location. See you tomorrow.

I saw this fungus (or whatever it is – link warning: sound!) growing on a log during a camping trip and loved the colors. It looks good enough to eat! But I don’t recommend it.

Yea! An official welcome goes out to Reader Number Seven – our good friend Hannah from Colorado. Check out the list on the right. Now we just need to get you to send us your picture so you can be Prominently Featured. Send it in!

Reader Number One noticed that I omitted links yesterday. Sorry about that. I didn’t see anything to link to at first glance, but I was definitely wrong. I’ll make up for that today.

Went over this evening to visit my good friend Mike – Andy and I home teach his wife Teresa and him. They both have lots of physical challenges, but you never, ever hear them complaining, and they manage to do a lot and to enjoy themselves. It’s one of the highlights of my week when I get to go over and visit them. The conversation is always fascinating and the energy level over there is high (they probably think just the opposite, but they’re wrong). Mike doesn’t just have every gadget there is, he has eight of each. Pretty cool.

Today’s bad news is that I had to stay at work a couple hours longer than usual today. I’m traveling to Europe on Sunday night, and I just had to get some things done, not the least of which was a little fire drill on a requirement change our launch vehicle supplier is proposing to incorporate. They hadn’t gotten around to mentioning it until today, and we needed to run it to ground as quickly as possible. It looks like everything will be fine, but we had to run around and panic a little bit first.

Today’s good news is that tomorrow is my off Friday. I’m going camping with the scouts in the afternoon, as mentioned before. I need to make a quick list of things that need to be done before I start my mega-travel and work on some of them tomorrow morning. There will also be a few hours on Saturday afternoon, but that’s about it, what with the camping trip taking up all morning and the stake dance in the evening. Then I’ll pack up on Sunday morning, go to church, and head for the airport immediately after. Or maybe even during.

It’s supposed to get down to 23 degrees tomorrow night, and up to about 40 on Saturday, with rain in the afternoon. It sounds just a little iffy for the campout, but certainly not bad enough to entertain cancelling. The show must go on!

I’ll try to remember my camera for the campout. The blog photo list must be fed!

The book club should go up tomorrow. Possible guest bloggers next week. See you Friday.

Here’s Reader Number Four with her hand-made rock scuplture. It kind of looks like a duck, doesn’t it? Good work, Reader Number Four!

We have a very mysterious comment on yesterday’s post. Somebody is claiming to be Reader Number Seven! Naturally, I’m delighted. However, it would definitely be a good thing if that person would identify him/herself. That way, we could give him/her proper credit over there on the right and do our traditional feature picture. Speaking of which, I’m still hoping Reader Number Six will send me a picture of himself for his traditional feature.

I’ve been indulging in a little fantasy this afternoon. We learned today that our company is going to be laying off a substantial percentage of the workforce. I doubt it will affect me, but it occurred to me suddenly this afternoon that if we worked the finances just right, got a couple of good breaks, and were careful spenders, I could just retire. I wouldn’t have to work another day in my life if I didn’t want to. Of course, we’d have to make a lot of changes, and I might get sick of being retired after a couple of years, but it would sure be cool to try. Besides, I could get another job in a couple of years if I wanted to – maybe be a high school physics, math, or computer science teacher. Then I would still have summers off. Let’s hope they lay me off! No, not really, I guess. Things will probably stay just exactly the way they are right now. There will probably be a better time for retirement in a few more years.

Still, it would sure be great to be permanently at home while Mark and Andy are still there too.

Not too much else new today. Scouts went okay, I suppose, but our Woodworking merit badge counselor didn’t show up, so I had to punt. We did a little bit of first aid that was received pretty well. We also named our large camp stove. It’s no Mahonri Moriancumr, AKA Moe. Great.

Back to ENIAC. I’ll work on the book club soon.

Here’s Reader Number Two climbing around on the rocks at Worlds End State Park. What a great park! I really want to go back there again. I really want to go camping anywhere. With my family that is.

I already have frequent chances to camp with the scouts, which is also a lot of fun, but it’s a different kind of fun. We’re going this coming weekend, although we’re only camping on top of the septic system at the church, since we’re working on our video on Saturday morning in church kitchen. We’re planning a paper airplane flying contest in the Hall of Culture on Friday evening. Since we’ll be at the church, we can’t have a campfire, of course, and we need to be particularly good neighbors, so we’ll find fun things to do inside. It will be fun regardless.

But the real camping fun this year will be our family trip to Ohio and Illinois (along with other possible destinations) in the first two weeks of August, as mentioned in a previous column. I’m ready to go right now.

Elizabeth, my friend and co-worker from San Diego, Denver, and McLean, came up to Newtown to work on an ICD with me today. We had her come over for dinner this evening too. It was really nice to see her and catch up on things. Today’s work went really well too, and I got a great sushi lunch out of it to boot.

I listened to a new podcast tonight. It’s called Daily Giz Wiz and features Dick de Bartolo and Leo Laporte. de Bartolo is a very entertaining guy who discovers and writes/talks about all kinds of neat little gadgets. He used to appear on The Screensavers pretty often, along with several other more networky shows. He’s also a longtime writer for Mad Magazine, which I really enjoyed as a young person. His website is here. Anyway, the podcast was pretty cool. It’s supposed to become a short daily show, and I’m really looking forward to hearing it every day.

Right now, I’m listening to an old Charlie Chan radio show. Very entertaining. I’ve found a website or two with some old shows available for download. Unfortunately, they’re pretty heavy on Red Skelton shows – not my favorite – and too light on Bob Hope and a few others I enjoy quite a bit more. I would love to find some old Blondie shows. Readers are invited to let me know where they are (for free, of course).

I finished reading The Psychology of Everyday Things. It wasn’t exactly what I had thought it would be, but it was fascinating nonetheless. It’s basically a treatise on what makes for good design, which it basically defines as ease of use. I especially enjoyed the early parts of the book where numerous examples of bad design are given. The examples hit pretty close to home. If you look around a little bit, you can find practically unlimited examples of hard-to-use things, including such commonplace things as doorknobs and telephones. Very amusing and informative. I recommend the book. Just don’t expect it to be a psychology book – it’s more of a human factors engineering treatise.

Having finished that book, I’ve started Eniac, by Scott McCartney. It’s a history of Eckert and Mauchly, the designers of the first digital computer. I’m only nine pages into it, so it’s way too early to tell if it’s any good, but the subject is a fascinating one to me – the history of computing and the people who were there from the beginning. I’ll keep my loyal readers informed of my progress and opinions. I’m sure they’re dying to know.

It’s just a few minutes after nine o’clock, but I’m really sleepy, so it’s time to quit. Besides, Charlie Chan is done. I was too busy typing to find out who done it, so I’ll have to listen again soon. The suspense is killing me! Good night.