Category Archives: Entertainment

3 June 2018

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Well, another wet week. We had, today alone, way more than the 1.5 inches the gauge shows. Over 12 inches of rain in the last month if my rain gauge (and memory) can be trusted. The good news is that, while muggy and warm yesterday, I managed to get all of the required outdoor work done: mowing, pruning, weeding, fertilizing.

Today, shopping and a couple of hours of remote work (patching) took up the morning. The afternoon … well.

Marcia’s been providing an extra bunch of hours to the theater for the last couple of weeks, what with people out on vacation, etc. Between the shows we saw on our own, and her seatings as House Manager, she ended up seeing Kiss Me Kate seven times. I broke down and joined in for this afternoon’s matinee – we saw the show close, and got to give all of these wonderful actors a big hug and congrats on a great, great show. What fun!

Thank you to the actors: Matt, Zach, Dexter, J.B., Nate, Robin, Christine, Julie, Drew, Allie, Ben, Jennie, Ian, Bethany, Joe, Alex, and Laura … as well as everyone behind the scenes: Sally, Marc, Jacob, Nancy, Sandra, Nate (again!), and Caitlin.

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Oh, hey. Did I mention that we celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary this last week? Yup. Clearly, she’s a saint! And I’m a lucky, lucky bloke.

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DoD announced no new casualties in the last week.

 

28 May 2018

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Memorial Day for those in the US. All respect and honor to those who gave their lives in service to our Country and Constitution.

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A busy week last week, building new systems for new services, retiring old systems, and generally doing modern system administration stuff. Continuing to build out the configuration management system to improve system repeatability, reliability, security, and availability. So there’s that. The three day weekend had a bit of lawn work, a bit of garden work, coffee roaster maintenance and roasting, etc. Oh, and a bit of old-school wood working:

Breaking out the block plane to smooth a small cutting board glue-up.

Breaking out the block plane

 

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I’m also signed up for this year’s Capclave. Such an awesome small literary speculative fiction (F/SF/etc) convention. Wonderful, supportive, inclusive, and diverse … and such a deal: 3 days of convention for $55 currently (it goes up in $5 increments as the last weekend in September 2018 approaches, but even at the door, it’s only $65!) Are you in the DC Metro area? Can you be, in late September? Join us!

Oh, hey: Annapolis Shakespeare‘s production of Molière’s The Miser opens tomorrow night for an 18 week run in the courtyard at Reynold’s Tavern in Annapolis. Exceptionally, for us, we’re going to miss an opening night, but we’ll see it soon. Gonna be fun! Dinner. A show. You should go!

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Our condolences to the family and friends of Staff Sgt. Conrad A. Robinson, 36, of Los Angeles, California, who died on May 24 at Camp Bondsteel, Kosovo, from a non-combat related incident.

14 May 2018

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A day late, and a bit more than a dollar short. We missed the storms this evening by attending the ASC Cabaret – lovely. Weekend: yardwork, getting a bunch of stuff done, but just one bed fully prepared, planted, and protected from the wrascally wrabbits.

2018 garden - one bed planted so far.

2018 garden – one bed planted so far.

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DoD reports no casualties in the last week. Ciao!

6 May 2018

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Whoops. One third of a year is gone. And we apparently went straight from Winter to Summer this last week. It was still Winter on Monday, with a frost coating all the lawns and roofs in our neighborhood. Spring lasted about 6 hours. I say this because, for me, Spring is the period of time between turning off the furnace, and turning on the air conditioning. That lasted about 6 hours on Wednesday (it was a 40°F wake-up temp), I figure the furnace was running until about 10 AM; I turned on the AC at 4 PM (it was 87°F out). Yay? Two days over 90 this week. Unusually warm after a long stretch of unusually cold.  On average: perfect. Grin.

Friday night we attended Opening night for Kiss Me Kate at the Annapolis Shakespeare Company. The 17 cast members gave us a kaleidoscope of song, dance, wonderful costumes and marvelous acting. In return, we gave them a standing ovation. Ben Russell and Robin Weiner shine as Fred/Petruchio and Lilli/Katherine. What a joy. We’re going again. Are you in the DC Metro Area? Join us and buy tickets – Annapolis Shakespeare.

Chores on the weekend, including getting the front porch hanging baskets fettled and hung, as well as lawns mown front and back. This evening, our neighbor from across the street joined us for supper with her 4-ish year old son. Good to spend some time with her, and her son is a hoot – high energy and fearless. Good news, too – nothing broken. I would not have been able to accomplish that at his age.

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Our condolences to the familly and friends of Spc. Gabriel D. Conde, 22, of Loveland, Colorado, who was killed in action on April 30 as a result of enemy small arms fire in Tagab District, Afghanistan.

29 April 2018

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Fun weekend. After the first full week back from vacation, I put in a grueling day and a half at BSidesCharm. Talks and panels all day and into the evening on Saturday, then I came back for half a day today. I missed a couple of afternoon talks and the closing ceremony so that I could catch up on the mowing, etc. Favorite talks: OSX/Pirrit by Amit Serper on Saturday,  and Effective Monitoring by Russell Mosley and Ryan St. Germain on Sunday (yep, I’m biased about that one). The Saturday evening Straight Up panel was a lot of fun, only slightly affected by all the folks who wanted to sit in the panel room but talk among themselves instead of being quiet so that others could enjoy the panel.

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Upcoming this week, Kiss Me Kate opens at the Annapolis Shakespeare Company. Get your tickets now!

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Kwanzan Flowering Cherry over mowed lawn

Kwanzan Flowering Cherry over mowed lawn

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DoD announced no new casualties in the last week.

1 April 2018

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I don’t have anything particularly amusing going on just now that is pertinent to April Fool’s Day, but there’s always an RFC, so here’s one of two from this very day: Internationalizing IPv6 Using 128-Bit Unicode. If those terms aren’t in your weekly vocabulary, then you’re probably not going to find much distressingly funny about the other end of the link, but I had a chuckle or two.

We had a lovely week, with my niece Alex joining us for much of it. She got some quality museum time in, and saw some friends from elsewhere. She also joined us at The Glass Menagerie Friday night at Annapolis Shakespeare. She found the play to be as powerful and strongly performed as we did. Still highly recommended, and there are eight shows left over the next two weekends! Alex also kicked our butts playing assorted board games (it’s good to be young, eh?). We also ate well this week: Shrimp scampi, chicken and 40 cloves,  spicy marinated pork chops … and pizza. Today we did an Easter brunch, which was also tasty. All good things come to an end, though: we put her on the plane this afternoon.

I spent a fair bit of time trying to migrate an old interactive site to a new platform last week, to no avail. Now I’ve got to figure out what Plan B is, since leaving it on the old platform for much longer isn’t really an option.

I did get the front gardening cleanup done, and first mowing of the lawn, too.

From last weekend:

Lexi, after vet visit

Lexi, after vet visit

Yep, betrayed, she mopes all the way home.

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Our condolences to the family and friends of Master Sgt. Jonathan J. Dunbar, 36, of Austin, Texas, who died on March 30 in Manbij, Syria as a result of injuries [caused by] an improvised explosive device (IED) detonated near his patrol.

18 March 2018

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Well. Busy week. Work and patching and appointments filled my week. We attended The Glass Menagerie opening night Friday at Annapolis Shakespeare. That show is a joy. All four actors nailed their parts, but special props to Claire Schoonover’s portrayal of Amanda Wingfield. She was triumpant!

I worked on chores and some infrastructure builds in the woodshop over the weekend. Up this morning at 0630 to finish up the production systems patching. And we just got home from the Broadway on Demand cabaret at the theatre. v.tired. More later or next week, but first…

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Our condolences to the families and friends of these fallen warriors, who died on March 15 when an HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter crashed in western Iraq:

  • Captain Mark K. Weber, 29, of Colorado Springs, Colorado.
  • Captain Andreas B. O’Keeffe, 37, of Center Moriches, New York.
  • Captain Christopher T. Zanetis, 37, of Long Island City, New York.
  • Master Sergeant Christopher J. Raguso, 39, of Commack, New York.
  • Staff Sergeant Dashan J. Briggs, 30, of Port Jefferson Station, New York.
  • Master Sergeant William R. Posch, 36, of Indialantic, Florida.
  • Staff Sergeant Carl P. Enis, 31, of Tallahassee, Florida.

11 March 2018

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The work week was productive. I’m planning a couple of patching and upgrade cycles that will call for a couple of weekend days work, and probably some travel in May. But the planning and prep documentation is coming along nicely. And, after last weekend’s excitement and manual labor filled days, I wanted to take it easy this weekend. So I did. Yesterday I dropped by the theater and had a long conversation with Sally Boyett that ended with me joining the Board. I sure hope that I can provide the type of input that she’s hoping for… one thing’s for sure, there’s always more to learn. Today was limited to shopping, roasting coffee (Ethiopian), putting up a lovely quilted (by Marcia, see below) wall hanging, and working on my Python chops.

Marcia quilted a new wall hanging

Marcia quilted a new wall hanging

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Upcoming at Annapolis Shakespeare: Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie, directed by Donald Hicken, is opening on Friday evening, March 16. It’s a four week run for Glass Menagerie, shows on Friday and Saturday evenings, matinees on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Also, on Sunday the 18th, one night only: Broadway on Demand Cabaret night.

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Our condolences to the family and friends of Sgt. 1st Class Maitland Deweever Wilson, 38, of Brooklyn, New York, who died onMarch 7 in Landstuhl, Germany from a non-combat related incident.

25 February 2018

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Okay, all good. Two three day weekends are now done.

Eight days ago, I started a house cleaning binge on the Saturday morning, expecting to get the house caught up so that I could do some other projects and have some relax time over the ensuing days. About midway through, I got to the living room, and decided it was time to swap out a couple of the pictures on the wall with more recent acquisitions. One of them needed hanging wire, so I went down to the wood shop to paw through my stacks of stuff and find the wire. I did find the wire, but first I found a lump of drywall laying in a puddle of water on the shop floor, with a slow drip continuing from above. Argh!

I’ll summarize the next couple of hours for you. Turns out that in the furnace area, a former whole-house humidifier (long since gone) had been supplied from a saddle valve, and connected with plastic tubing. The valve at the far end of the tubing had been shut off when the humidifier had been removed, but that’s it. Sigh. Plastic tubing *always* fails, sooner or later. A pinhole leak in the tubing was spraying into the insulation above a main HVAC trunk (square). The water ran along the top of the trunk for a few feet, then dripped into the trunk airway. It then continued running along the trunk, until it dripped out again, and onto some drywall. By the time the drywall failed, there was a couple of gallons on it, so splash. It did take a while to track down the source of the leak, and with some contortions, was able to get to the saddle valve and cut the water off at it’s source. That left a little time to get ready for attending Blithe Spirit again, that Saturday evening. Lovely fun show, better the second time around – it’s a fast paced show, and having it fresh in mind when seeing it the second time getting the lines and the beats a lot easier. Talented cast did stellar work, and the show closed today.

Sunday I spent getting bits, properly capped off that saddle valve, and removed the plastic line from service entirely. Monday was spent cleaning up the shop, and building a wall-mounted necklace storage thing for Marcia’s closet:

Marcia's new necklace hanger

Marcia’s new necklace hanger

I had a moderately busy, moderately successful 3-day work week, with an evening of Linux infrastructure and non-production system patching smack in the middle. This three day weekend was lovely. I would have liked to get out and start prepping the yard … but it rained all weekend. So I got some more of the cleaning done, gave the dog a bath, and sundry other chores, along with production Linux patching this morning starting at 0700. But we ended on a high note. Tonight was Cabaret night at Annapolis Shakespeare, “Broadway and Beyond”. Cast was Sally and four folks who are all going to be in the upcoming production of Kiss Me Kate. Good fun.

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Our condolences to the family and friends of Sgt. Christina Marie Schoenecker, 26, of Arlington, Kansas, who died on Feb. 19 in Baghdad, from a non-combat related incident.

11 February 2018

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Howdy. I had a decent work week, and a pretty full weekend. I’m not sure where yesterday went, entirely, though it was a lovely Saturday evening out to supper with my co-workers at a nearby brew pub. Good food and good times.

Today was chock-a-block: shopping, then for work: tickets, email, and some production system patching, reboots, and testing. Then I installed a replacement sump pump, since the old one wasn’t working so well anymore (short cycling). Then lunch, a spot of recorded TV, then exercise, an early supper, a shower, and off to the show. Tonight in the ASC Cabaret Series, we enjoyed an evening of That’s Amore (Opera’s Greatest Arias) with Madeline Miskie, Madelyn Wanner, and Mandy Brown singing, accompanied by Joy Mentzel.  We certainly aren’t deep opera fans of any sort, but their voices were lovely, and they took the time to set the scene and our expectations so that we could interpret *some* of the action, even though we have not a stitch of Italian between us. Yep, all Italian.

Speaking of which, the only thing I didn’t get done this weekend was coffee roasting. I absolutely MUST roast tomorrow night or … buy some coffee. <shudder>

Anyway, all good fun, a successful week and weekend, and time to get some sleep, and start all over again.

DoD announced no new casualties in the most recent week.