Rhonabwy

Now it gets hard!

Do I get a new MacBook or not… That’s a nice lookin’ laptop. I wonder what the heat and battery life is like?

Its just been a blur of a day… Running around, catching errands, remembering the eat the periodic meal. Wow.

Looks like I’m wrapping up the technical work for the evening though, so it’s off to the bus and maybe a little more science fiction before I pick up Karen from her classes.

Not really related to programming, but it’s geeky.

Check out the SkyScout. That’s an incredible idea! Take it out to tiger mountain or the western side of the olympic penninsula sometime in summer and have an incredible time with it!

Water, that fine insidious beast, is coming back. Well, we’ve been walking under it pretty steadily since we came be to Seattle actually. But now it’s making inroads again into our basement. This time, however, it’s not coming from the back drain area. In fact, I’m not sure WHERE all it’s coming from - there looks to be multiple locations all generally upwelling from just plain ole oversaturation of groundwater.

I think we’re going to have to consider some constructive and innovative landscape ideas to make this all work out. Not really sure what we’re going to do, but it’ll probably involve way more manual effort of grading soil than I’d like. Heh. At least I’ve done it before, even if it is a terribly tedious and annoying job.

Since Karen and I have been home, we’ve been smothered by cats. They are VERY happy to see us, and sitting anywhere in the house - or even standing still for a few minutes in one place - is enough to invite them. At least one, and more often both of them, jump up, claw up, or head-butt around trying to get some attention. My poor sweatshirt is covered in cat hair, but I’m happy - they are warm and aside from the oversharp claws (I’ve GOT to trim those) pretty friendly guys to hang with.

My left arm is tired of holding Pooka while I write this though.

I found Dave Hayden’s blog (one of the Panic guys), and was reading through it when I saw an entry saying that he would be crewing the Lady Washington this may!

The Lady Washington is a lovely brigantine that I had the pleasure of watching sail around Lake Union a few years back at the tall ships festival (along with the Hawaiian Chieftain). If I read the schedule correctly, Dave will be crewing while it is at Coos Bay, Oregon (makes sense, that’s pretty close to Oregon). Both Karen and I had thought about getting involved, and even applied to crew, but we never heard anything back.

In fact, you’ve probably seen her if you’ve watched Pirates of the Carribean - she was one of the vessels - the HMS Interceptor.

Have a great time Dave, that’s so cool!

Back to my promised geekery!

I’m a member of the ACM, and periodically as a member, you get the “Time to renew!” emails and letters. Well, it’s that time again. Coincidentally, the latest Communications of ACM is a really interesting issue. It is focused on personal information management (an interest of mine), and has some updated articles on some of the more interesting (and slightly - but only slightly - out there) concepts.

And on that note, I’m off to bury myself in a science fiction novel…

Home again, home again, lickety split.

We’ve made it back to Seattle. A trip south from Burlington, IA to St. Louis, MO - then back north to Chicago, and across the plains and mountains to Seattle. Sort of amazing how fast you can move around compared to even a hundred years ago.

Lela’s doing pretty well, although she had another bout of blackout due to low blood pressure. When we called this evening, she’s already talked to the nurses and her doctor, and they’ve reduced the medication some more to try and level her out.

It’s really nice to be home again. Time to get back into the sort of normal sequence of things and settle down a bit. We have a pile of mail (only a few bills) and the usual set of phone messages to work through.

Thank you to all for your wishes during this trip. I didn’t know what to expect, and frankly expected the worst. It’s clear that getting ourselves and meeting my brother there for New Years was the best possible medicine. I’m probably lay off the daily updates on my grandmother … since I won’t have daily updates so much now. That’s the thing - blog for instant family updates of happenings. Heh. Time to get back to my geekery…

Clinton (probably best described as my cousin) shot a nice buck this year. With a bow:

14 points - he was pretty pleased. I was planning on showing he and Tom (his father) where “the farm” is located, but I suspect I’ll have to wrangle some email mechanism to get them there. I have some GPS points at home in a notebook, so I bet I can come up with something with Google Maps…

The one day we (Ben and I) had planned to take him up there, it had thunderstormed the night before, and neither Ben nor I had any clothes that were really suitable for tromping around in muddy fields.

The funny story with this buck that was getting passed around was that Clinton was in the stand, trying to wait until it died so he didn’t scare it off and have to track it for miles. So he was on his cell phone calling everyone. The most amusing was the taxidermist (he’s having the head mounted) who said “when are you going to bring it in?”, to which Clinton replied “When it’s dead.”

Maybe that’s just really midwest humor, but I keep snickering at that one.

Karen and I work on returning to Seattle tomorrow - flights down to St. Louis and then from there to Seattle. So today has been a blur of getting everything set for when we leave. Our flight leaves out of Burlington around 11:30am, and it’ll be a full day of travel to get back.

The reduced medicine has improved the blood pressure levels to where Lela isn’t passing out when she stands up, but it’s still pretty darn low during the day. I expect it’ll take another week or so to get that all levelled out to a reasonable dose. In the meantime, Louise will be staying here after we leave through the weekend, and then we have some professional services folks who’ll come in for the next week and be here to assist around the clock.

All that being said, Lela was up moving around much better today. She came back into the office to see what havoc Karen and I had made of her room and to clear out the backlog of mail. I went shopping and bought a little more food. I’ve found that I am WAY out of the habit of “stocking up” that I used to do when I lived in the midwest. You just get really spoiled when the grocery store is all of four blocks from your house.

So now I just have to remove the plethora of software that I installed on her PC so that I could work remotely. I’ve been using the Netscreen VPN client extensively this week, and aside from the damn thing wanting to reconnect constantly after you manually disconnect it, it’s been a gem. Pretty darn quick, low impact - a little bizarre to set up, but not really bad when you consider the alternatives. I think I’ll quietly leave Firefox installed here though - just because I can’t quiet leave anyone with just IE. Seems sort of criminal.