morrowlife

Here’s an interesting sign from the railroad museum. The photographs were great, but the sign was merely facinating.

Back to work day. Things were fine there, if a little bit slow. Most people appear to be extending their holiday through this week. My boss was home with a broken house, so it was just me in charge. I responded to the challenge by going home a couple hours early. It was that dead.

Anyway. The commutes in both directions were the best they’ve ever been – an hour and fifteen minutes each way. I had seriously considered riding the train this morning, but things definitely turned out for the best. Still don’t know what will happen tomorrow. How exciting!

The Mac is scheduled to arrive tomorrow! Oh, the excitement! The suspense! The honor! The valor! The buttor! (Link warning – SBemail sounds and animation.)

And since I don’t expect to get much sleep tomorrow night, I had better get to bed tonight. See you tomorrow.

Here are Loyal Readers Numbers Two and Twelve enjoying each other’s company. LRN12 may be having more fun than her uncle, though.

Happy 2008! It was another pleasant day. We got all the Christmas decorations down this evening and I got the two new motion-sensing switches installed in the hallway upstairs. Otherwise, very little productivity.

Our New Year’s Eve with friends was fun. We talked a lot, ate some goodies, played a couple of games, and set off a bunch of fireworks at midnight. Then we came home and went to bed. This morning, Loyal Reader Number Four got up and turned on the Rose Parade. We enjoyed it.

Loyal Readers Numbers Three and Fifteen are heading back to Arizona tomorrow. Sigh. We had a great visit with them and are sad to see them go. Happy trails, Loyal Readers!

And tomorrow is back-to-work day. Double sigh. I’m not ready to go back yet, but nobody asked. So I’m back to work.

Better get some sleep. See you tomorrow.

Here are Loyal Readers Numbers Two and Fifteen, inadvertently revealing their true nature as zombies. Frightening. Picture taken Christmas Eve in a dimly-lit room at the Railroad Museum.

Happy New Year’s Eve! It’s been a beautiful Monday – sunny and relatively warm. We enjoyed it. Loyal Readers Numbers One, Two, and Three and I went shooting this morning at a range that turns out to be just about ten minutes down the road from us. We were hoping to borrow a shotgun and shoot some trap, but it turns out they don’t have any guns to either borrow or rent. So we used my .22 and had a fun couple of hours. I still need to clean and oil the rifle, which I hope to accomplish either tonight or tomorrow morning.

Happy anniversary to Loyal Readers Numbers Three and Fifteen. It’s been three whole years. Congratulations! And many happy returns. They’re out watching a movie or two and eating lunch. Presumably. I believe they’ll be back for the evening. Although it’s already after 6:00 and dark outside.

It was a nice weekend. We didn’t do much. We planned to go to a museum down in Modesto on Saturday but fortunately checked before leaving. They’re closed between Christmas and New Year’s. Sigh. Well, at least we’ve gotten to two museums this vacation.

We listened to an impromptu organ concert by Loyal Reader Number Two this afternoon. He and Loyal Reader Number Four went to practice for a performance at the upcoming stake conference, and the rest of us went over there a little later. Good concert.

The new Mac has shipped! The FedEx website reports that it should be here on January third. I need to rest up between now and then, since I’m practically guaranteed to be up all night that night.

Pretty much everybody but me around here has a cold right now. Wish me luck avoiding it.

We’re going over shortly to spend the evening with our friends the Hepworths/Englands. Looking forward to it.

Update – LRN3 and LRN15 just got back. Perfect timing, since it’s dinner time.

And it’s time for me to quit. Stay up late tonight! See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve making a quick call with her favorite Christmas present. She gets busy!

Wonders of Blogger today. I’m kind of surprised good old Anonymous missed it. Friday was our anniversary, and while I did fiddle with computers for quite a while, I didn’t find time to blog.

Speaking of fiddling with computers, I have a tragedy with a happy ending to report. First the tragedy: Loyal Reader Number Four’s computer has bitten the dust. It had been behaving erratically for quite a while – some applications wouldn’t start and others crashed a lot. I took a look at it on Friday and decided it must have gotten a virus or some other corruption, so I tried to reinstall the operating system. It wouldn’t install. I suspected a bad OS disk, so I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu Linux and tried to install it. It wouldn’t install. That disk had an option to verify the computer’s memory, so I ran it. It reported numerous memory problems, all of them in the same bit, which is consistent with a bad memory stick, of which the computer had only one. I tried installing again anyway and noticed the CD drive was making funny speeding-up-and-slowing-down sounds. Ubuntu reported that it couldn’t install because of a bad CD drive. At that point, I declared the computer dead. Services were held last night in Loyal Reader Number One’s room, at which time the 20 GB hard disk (which SpinRite had declared perfectly functional) and power supply were surgically removed for later transplant and the remains dissected for sport and frolic.

So much for the sad news. Now for the happy ending. Loyal Reader Number Three, LRN4, and I went to a few stores to look at replacement PCs. We saw a few machines she might have liked; the prices weren’t too great, but there were a couple of decent deals. She finally decided to take the plunge and switch to a Mac, though, so I ordered a new Mac Mini for myself (before the Loyal Readers get all huffy, that’s what she asked me to do!) and moved my existing Mini down to her desk. I’m in the middle of setting it up right now. All the software is installed and I’m now moving files – I especially hope to get Entourage to recognize the old Outlook mail and contacts files. Wait a minute – it’s ready for me to give that a try.

— Time lapse —

I’m back. I haven’t been able to get LRN4’s old emails yet, but I do have pretty much everything else set up. We’ve been through a little bit of Mac training and I think she’s going to like it. I have a couple of plans for getting her old emails into the system. They all involve opening them using various programs on Loyal Reader Number Two’s system and saving them in different formats.

And what am I doing for a computer now that LRN4 has my Mac and I don’t have my new Mac yet (it’s scheduled to arrive sometime between January 3 and 9)? Thanks for asking. I have Larry, my Linux server, set up as my temporary emergency backup computer. It has all my email accounts in Thunderbird and copies of all my documents. I’ll be fine. Really.

Otherwise, not much is new. LRN4 and I went out to the local Indian restaurant for our twenty-ninth anniversary celebration. We were the only people eating there, although a couple of people came in for take-out while we were there. I can’t figure out how some of these restaurants stay in business. I figure either they have a good lunch trade or they’re laundering money. In any case, the food was good. We ordered “medium” spiciness and got “outrageously hot,” but it worked out okay. Our mouths burned for just a little while after we got home.

LRN4 isn’t feeling too well today. She has my pity. She might go lie down for a little while to try to recover. Or maybe not.

My helicopter is broken again. It ran into a wall and the same part snapped off. Sigh. I’m going to try to fix it again, maybe more permanently again.

Have a great weekend. See you on Monday.

Here’s the aftermath of yesterday’s Great Art. Poor Loyal Reader Number Two is now nothing but nose art. Hopefully, he’ll recover soon. I’m sorry to have to share this tragedy with my Loyal Readers.

Loyal Reader Number Five has suggested that I number the list of my Loyal Readers over there on the right for your convenience, since the list is now so long. I’ve thought about it once before but rejected it, preferring to keep the mystery alive. What do my other Loyal Readers think? Would you like to see your names and numbers associated with each other?

It was another great day at home. We did get out to the Manteca museum for a little while this afternoon. It’s a fairly small building – an old church, actually – but it’s jam packed with Important Artifacts. The fun thing was that the docents were all long-time Lardville residents and they knew everyone and everything about this town. Most of it was probably true, to boot. We enjoyed the visit.

Right before our visit the water softener repair guy came and (finally) repaired our water softener. It had stopped working right a few months ago, and Loyal Reader Number Four called it in about a month ago. They came out and discovered that a rarely-broken part was broken; it’s a gear that makes the recharging cycle go. They didn’t stock the part (since it’s so rarely broken), so they ordered a new one. The wrong one came, so they reordered it. General Electric sent it to the wrong repair shop, so they reordered it again. It finally came, it’s been installed, and the water should be soft by tomorrow. We’re relieved.

And I have no more to write about tonight. See you tomorrow.