morrowlife

Here’s Reader Number One practicing for a brilliant future in bank robbery. Best of luck with that. He might want to remove the tags before his first job.

Today went from a gray, rainy – but warm – morning to a warm, beautiful sunny afternoon. We’re not expecting the beautiful weather to last any longer. My friends at the Weather Channel are predicting daytime temperatures in the 30’s and 40’s with nighttime lows in the 20’s for the next several days. That’s more normal winter weather around here, but we’ve gotten to like the other stuff. It’s not normal to have spring fever in February!

The Dave Barry book is gradually improving. I’ve actually had more enjoyment than annoyance at the last couple of chapters. He’s just wearing his hatred for Ronald Reagan on his sleeve a little too much (the book was published in 1985). The ironic thing, of course, is that the things that Dave and all the other newspaper people were mocking President Reagan about turned out to have been brilliant ideas that liberated millions of people from Soviet oppression. That doesn’t leave Dave looking too bright, now does it? At least he had a lot of company back then.

I’ve been trying to get Mark’s school computer back on the road after a catastrophic hard disk crash. It’s taking a very long time, but the machine is now running and currently downloading and installing all the Windows patches (27 and counting). It refuses to install Microsoft Office, so we’ll have to call the K-12 help desk and see if they have any ideas, like another copy of the installation CD. It took quite a while to get the wireless card set up, but that’s working now. I first tried installing the driver from its CD, but that installed a bunch of garbage I didn’t want and that kept the Windows wireless manager from working. When I uninstalled the garbage, it also uninstalled the driver. So, I had to restart the machine and wait for it to ask for a driver, at which time I inserted the card’s CD and let Windows find the driver for itself. Voila! It’s working.

Now the biggest problem is unbelievably sluggish performance. Hopefully, we can work on some optimizations and get it back to working like it did before. Very odd, that.

Dessert time – we have some fresh-baked cookies tonight that are crying out to be sampled. Bye.

Here’s something a little bit different – an old tile roof. Talk about your Great Art, huh?

Came home from work early today. I was feeling pretty sick to my stomach, unfortunately. Things are much better this evening. Thanks for asking.

We went over to look at a very old pickup truck (an ’89 Dodge D50 built by Mitsubishi) for sale this afternoon. It looked pretty good for a truck with nearly 200,000 miles on it – no rust to speak of except on the bumpers and exterior mirrors, and it started right up. However, I think I detected a slight smell of anti-freeze in the exhaust, and the automatic transmission is slipping like crazy, making its value about negative $2000. No bid from me. Some friends have a minivan for sale that we’re now thinking about. I could probably use a pickup more than a minivan, but the price is pretty good and the van appears to be in pretty good shape. We’re looking for something cheap and reliable that Reader Number One can drive when he gets to the right age (soon), so its utility to me in the meantime is of lesser importance. Besides, who says you can’t haul a load of manure in a minivan?

Ice cream is waiting. Later.

Here’s the waterway they used to feed the waterwheel that powered the bellows at Hopewell Furnace. Pretty cool thing. And don’t readers One and Two look nice?

Busy day today. I’m trying to coordinate the signoff of one of my launch vehicle Interface Control Documents (along with about a ton and a half of other things) and I spent most of the day twisting arms on the phone, via email, and in person. I’m making progress, though. Strange as it may seem, I’m exhausted from the mental effort. I don’t want to think tonight. (Yeah, I know, why should tonight be different from any other night? Har har har.) Well, at least I’m home for almost all of the month of February. Gotta take my happiness where it presents itself.

Reader Number One and I visited the Beerys tonight. We’re ashamed because it’s the last day of the month, and we’ve promised ourselves to visit our Home Teaching families by the tenth. Our only excuse was that I was gone so much of the month and they were busy too. They’re a really nice family. Glad to know them.

Time for a bowl of ice cream, my new (old, actually, but I’ve never read it) Dave Barry book, and bed. A word about the Dave Barry book, though: it’s not nearly as good as his later work, which makes sense. It feels like he’s trying harder for laughs, and it also feels like he has a serious lack of good judgment. Still, I like Mr. Barry’s work in spite of what a dope he was as a younger man. Of course, he’s probably still a dope – he just learned not to show it in his work. That’ll have to do.

Ruins. An old coal-fired iron-making furnace that never worked out financially.

No blogging the last couple of days. I was in Denver and couldn’t get the free internet service in the hotel to work the first day and got home from dinner WAY too late the second. Not much tonight either.

I’m off to Cocoa Beach tomorrow, and I frankly don’t have very high hopes for blogging from there either. I don’t think my dialup account works anymore. Well, we’ll see.

There’s ice cream downstairs. Later.

I have good news and I have bad news.

First the good news: I’m back. It was a busy week in Luxembourg, but the meeting went well, after a pretty slow start. We shortened it from three days to two and accomplished everything that needed to be accomplished. The weather was cool, with rain one day and pretty heavy fog in the mornings. The travel was as comfortable as it could have been – I traveled in first class in both directions – so I can’t complain. Okay, yes I can. It takes too long to get there.

I don’t work at hard at these meetings as I did when I was with ILS. That’s a really good thing. I can get to the hotel from dinner at 10:00 or 11:00 and read a little bit and then turn in, as opposed to working until 2:00 every night just to keep up. We don’t bring our computers overseas as a general rule, so I can’t even work on emails. I check my phone messages and return calls as needed, and then an hour or two in the evening is free. On the other hand, I don’t get that elation when the meeting is finally over like I used to. It’s still a good trade, though.

Now the bad news. I forgot my camera! I was hoping to take a few pictures to post here. Not to worry too much, though – I’ll be back there in a few weeks. This year’s travel schedule is looking to be pretty heavy, and not just for me. We have four people in our group, and it doesn’t look like we’ll all be in the office at the same time all year long. The good thing is that we have seven launches scheduled this year, so we’ll be making the company a boatload of money.

Anyway, in lieu of Germany/Luxembourg pictures, here’s Reader Number One, with a glimpse of Number Four in the mirror. As with many photos featured here, it was taken during one of last summer’s camping trips. Specifically, at the Hopewell Furnace.

I started reading The Gardener’s Handbook, by Dr. Stefan Buczacki. At least he was the “consultant editor.” It was really written by Tessa Paul and Nigel Chadwick. As you might guess from the names, it’s from England. They write a lot of good gardening books there. Anyway, I guess Dr. Buczacki is world-famous in England as a radio and TV gardening expert. I’m only on page 20, but it’s starting out fairly well as a clear, concise how-to book for beginning gardeners, which is what I expect to be pretty much permanently. The book and the spring-like warm weather we’re having are making me anxious to see our garden start growing again, and for the fish in the pond to wake up. We’re still two or three months away from that point, but I’m just about ready for it.

Another book I really enjoyed during this trip was Engineering in the Ancient World, by J. G. Landels. It’s a well-researched overview of engineering accomplishments (and a few shortcomings) in ancient Rome and Greece. It covers power generation, water supplies and pumps, cranes, catapults, and sea and land transport, along with a few words on general technological development. There are many hand-drawn illustrations that, along with the clearly written text, give the reader a clear look at the state of the art a couple thousand years ago. In many ways, their work was quite advanced and they were able to accomplish amazing things. Sadly, their knowledge and skills were not passed on to subsequent European civilizations and things got much worse before they finally got better in the last 150 years or so.

Went to Costco for dinner tonight – hot dogs, french fries, sodas, and samples. It was great!

Enough for now. See you from Denver on Monday.