For reasons yet to be explained, I’ve been very, very busy. So here’s a picture of a new neighbor – a 10-week old shiba inu named Roxy:
New neighbor dog
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Our condolences to the family and friends of Master Sgt. Peter A. McKenna Jr., 35, of Bristol, Rhode Island, who died on Aug. 8, in Kabul, Afghanistan, of wounds when he was attacked by enemy small arms fire.
Lexi, protected from peas
There’s better be a pea under there…
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Dragonfly
Last night, when all was quiet, I finally got a around to putting together the Metal Earth Dragonfly model that I picked up from Amazon weeks ago on a whim, inspired by Jenny’s 1000 Ferris Wheels post. It’s good to have a focused distraction from time to time. The work took me away from myself for a double handful of minutes, and reminded me that I can focus when I make the effort. There’s been so much going on that I’m spending more time putting out fires than planning and tending what is needed, long term. But all will come right again.
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Yesterday: more plumbing – I replaced the last of the original faucets in the house. The master bathroom was the sole holdout with a builder-grade piece of crap. But now I’ve got a shiny new two-handle Kohler in its place, and I replaced the drain as well, since that was past due, too. Today: shopping, harvesting tomatoes, making salsa, and attending a birthday barbequeue for a friend was the fullness of the day.
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DoD announced no new casualties in the last week. Ciao!
Five Gallons of Veggies
That’s the big fun: I pulled a five gallon bucket of veggies out of the garden today. But … that’s the only fun. Busy bloody weekend is over, thankfully. Fixed a leaking fridge water feed, which now looks like this:
New fridge water feed
A ball valve and a copper feed pipe is much better than a vampire tap, a needle valve, and a plastic feed line. I got the leak stopped and water back on in the house by about 8:30 Friday evening. The water to the fridge was restored by Saturday mid-morning.
Thereafter, yard work on both days. I’m exhausted and ready to get back to work so that I can relax and recharge.
In other, most excellent news, it seems that Bloom County is returning to life. Huzzah!
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DoD reported no new casualties in the last week. Ciao!
Yes, yes, according to the calendar, it’s called Summer. But around here, it’s Stormtime. The calendar season of Summer coincides with the combination of heat, humidity and passing fronts that yields lovely, lovely thunderstorms. Well, *I* like them, more or less. Lexi, however…
Lexi hates thunder
For a while, she just sat there in the corner of the sectional sofa, facing the cushions, and shaking. Finally she yielded and tried to hide behind me (or between me and the cushions). That may have involved trying to excavate a cavity either in a cushion, or through my kidneys. Hmmm.
The other less fun thing about lightning is that the excess electricity can cause problems. Turns out one of the really loud flash/bangs was lightning striking a neighbor’s house. No fire, thankfully, but half of their electrics are out, and the surge cause me some interesting issues. I was working remotely at the end of the storm … then I wasn’t, when the FiOS connection went dead. No phone, no Internet, no TV. Normally not a real problem, since books are good. But I had remote work to complete last night, and remote work to do this morning. I did all of the reset steps – no joy. I did them again, no joy. So I sent an email via my phone, waving off the second stage of last night’s remote work. This morning I was up at 0600, and at the office before 0700. Did all of the work that needed doing, and simultaneously spent an hour on hold with VZ, only to find out that the earliest tech visit was to be on Tuesday afternoon. Sigh.
I came home this morning after completing three hours of patching, rebooting, and testing. I walked the dog again, then went out to do the shopping. Back home at a little before noon, I executed another deep reset of the ONT (the external FiOS equipment), and wonder of wonders, it worked! Yay! So I cancelled the tech visit for Tuesday, and sent an email noting that I would complete a specific task myself this evening for work.
I did get the mowing and other outdoor work done yesterday, better done when the lawns are drier. Yesterday’s storm dropped over 1.5″ in about 2 hours. I hauled a bunch of zucchini and a few cucumbers out of the garden, and made some neighbors happy, as well as having zucchini for supper here.
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Our condolences to the family and friends of Pfc. Monterrious T. Daniel, 19, of Griffin, Georgia, who died on June 12 in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, in a non-combat related incident.
It turns out I didn’t break my WordPress install. But my home IP address *had* changed, and I have lots of things locked down to specific IP addresses for access. So I’ve got two of the three sites puzzled out. But one of them appears to have a broken theme directory. I’ll be looking into that now…
[A few minutes later, after looking at logfiles] Yup – the twentyeleven theme needed fixing on another site – I refreshed the whole thing, and I’ll keep a close eye on it in the next short while. I don’t remember mucking about in there … but it’s possible.
First, exercise. I’ve been pushing a lot harder the last couple of weeks. I’ll do 20-30 minutes of alternating stretches and exercise (squats, sit-ups, push-ups), followed by 45+ minutes on the elliptical. My “best” day of the week was yesterday: I managed 60 minutes, 8200 strides, 1000+ calories burned on the machine. I probably pushed too hard – it hurt when I did a normal workout today. But overall, I feel better, and I sleep better. Those are both good things.
I skipped a day on Wednesday. The body was demanding a short break, and the UP24 was mis-behaving. Taken together, those are good enough reasons – I only managed about a total of 4500 steps that day, which dragged my daily average for the week down to 13,500 steps a day. The week before was nearly at 15K steps daily.
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Turns out that among certain circles, last year’s Hugo winners were seen as an upsetting bunch of diverse and progressive upstarts. So this year, the upset ones decided to mount an outright campaign to return the awards to people they like (which appear to be mostly conservative/libertarian white folk). This, while playing within the rules of the Hugo nominations, has now upset a bunch of the progressive wing of SF&F (authors *and* fandom). Here’s an article on io9 that might bring you up to speed if you care to know more. Me? I liked many of the stories that were nominated last year.
More to the point, there are an unlimited amount of fucks I don’t give about the politics going on. There are lots of wonderful people and authors in SF&F. There are some who are … less wonderful. Some are outright assholes. But, importantly, what I want is good stories. Since I’m not a good enough writer to make them myself, I want other people to write them. I don’t care (much, if at all) about the politics, gender/sex orientation, race, or anything else about an author. What I care about is that the author has one job. ONE JOB. Entertain me. For their sake, I hope there are lots of other people that they can entertain, too, or they won’t eat well.
So this year, for the first time ever, I’ve become a WorldCon Supporting Member. This means that I can vote for the Hugos in the way that’s most important to me: The stories. The stories. If it turns out that the stacking of the nominations means that the stories I like are written by people who dislike diversity and people having sex with some old white guy non-approved person … oh, well – I like the story and it will get my vote. IF, however, the stories suck … it doesn’t matter who wrote them. No vote for you.
If you’re a Science Fiction fan, and want to make a difference in the fiction that’s rewarded by fans, in a way slightly less important than, say, buying the author’s work, then register for this year’s WorldCon – Attending if you can, Supporting if you can’t. And vote. If you want to vote on the politics, fine. If you want to vote on the stories, well, that’s what the Hugo’s are for, and I’d like you to do that. But you can’t make a difference if you don’t register and vote.
Also remember – the most sincere way you can register your love of an author’s work is to support their anti-social writing habit by buying the stories they produce. If you like short fiction, subscribe to those markets (I’m a fan and subscriber of Clarkesworld, myself). If you like novel-length work, buy the books. Support the authors so that they can write more. Hugos are nice on the mantle, but royalty checks can feed the family.
Oh, yeah: As a favor to me, if you do register, remember that I’d like it very much if you voted to bring the WorldCon to Washinton DC in 2017. Just sayin’.
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Last week, I impact tested one of my remote backup disks to the point of failure. So I bought a new 1TB drive, which should arrive tomorrow. I’ll talk soon about how I’m encrypting these backups.
Also coming up, a new table is getting ready to emerge from the woodshop. I’m also putting another new handle on one of our kitchen knives, since the plastic is crap was cracking.
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No casualties were announced by DoD in the last week. Yay. Ciao!
It’s a long list of small-ish chores that got done this weekend, too dull to enumerate. But lots got done, which is good. We’re hopeful that by next weekend, Marcia will have the sewing room and fabric room reassembled and nice enough to show y’all a picture or two of how it came out. But right now it’s a slice of Hell for the compulsive tidier…
It was pretty cold this weekend – hovering around freezing. So, no yard work (not that I had time for any). On the exercise front, I’m back in full swing, however. According to my Jawbone UP24, I did a shade over 100000 [Corrected to 100K+ on 3/30] steps in the last 7 days: Monday through Sunday. Whoa!
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Still no new casualties to report, according to DoD.
Yep. On the day that encompassed the Spring Equinox, we had an inch of snow. Lovely, really. More to the point, it never really shifted over to warmer rain and melt away before Spring proper. So, Winter, still, then. Lovely. A couple of school districts closed, several were delayed by a couple of hours (until the snow started falling … odd, that), but other than that, nothing too exciting.
My week was full of working each day on things that I hadn’t planned on doing. Like most weeks, really. The weekend, though, went exactly as planned. Several hours of remote work getting things done, and the balance of the time in the basement, helping Marcia move stuff back in, or building additional bits for storage of stuff for Marcia’s sewing room. Pictures when it’s done – now it is a right mess.
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Gladly, still no new casualties reported by DoD since 14 December 2014. Ciao!
Sewing room, reassembling
I’m still recovering from a weekend of painting and remote work … but Marcia’s sewing room is coming back together. Saturday I did the walls and bulkheads, cutting in by hand then rolling out the flats. Sunday, after several hours of remote work, I crawled about on the floor, painting the trim. Sunday evening, I moved some of the cabinets in, and started moving in tables and equipment. Marcia’s happy, I think. Me? I’m just tired. Sorry for missing last night.
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Three months with no casualties reported by DoD. Huzzah!
Ciao!
But let’s do this the other way around: International Women’s Day. The joke du’jour involves “of course it’s the day with just 23 hours” (in most of the US, anyway). But frankly, with women being treated badly in every old way, and in the various new ways that the Internet has spawned, it needs more than a day.
Women are people. All people deserve respect. That’s the bottom line. And when people like Brianna Wu (Chief Panjandrum of Development at Giant Spacekat, @spacekatgal on teh twitters, outstanding geek feminist, and recipient of death, rape, and family threats daily) continually has to deal with shitty Internet trolls and modify her agendas and lifestyle because at least one of those trolls might be a for-reals psycho … well, that sucks.
For every woman who speaks up about the unconscionable behavior she endures (one way or another), there are many, many who don’t speak up. To keep the job, to keep the family together, or because there aren’t any other alternatives. It shouldn’t suck to be a person, to be a woman. It also shouldn’t suck to be differently gendered, or developmentally challenged, or any of the other divisive modes that people (and most easily, the anonymous angry denizens of the Internet) use to spew hatred upon others for “fun.”
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As a very-nearly unrelated side note, I’m generally not much of a casual gamer. I’m more on the hours-at-a-time solo FPS or RPG on the PC gamer. But I downloaded Giant Spacekat’s game Revolution 60 (free to start), and purchased the full game. I’ve been enjoying the gameplay. As usual, I don’t choose a single path, but somehow I always end up either chaotic good or chaotic neutral. Just who I am, I guess. If you play games on the iPhone or iPad, give the game a try. I think you’ll like it.
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Spring may, in fact, be approaching. Temps got up above 50 today, and a lot of the snow from this last week … Well, did I mention that we had 8 inches of snow on Thursday. Um, yeah. Well, anyway, much of that snow melted off today. On a walk, Lexi has places to sniff and pee, again. Tonight is supposed to just edge below freezing. But for the next week, nothing below freezing is predicted. How nice that will be.
I’ll need to get the spring fertilizer put down on the lawns, and turn over the garden beds pretty soon. But what to plant? More when I know more.
* * *
I spent a fair bit of time this weekend working on the walls and ceiling in the basement. I ripped out a crappy electrical fixture box, and cut a large enough hole in the drywall to put a much sturdier mount in, for the fixture that goes over Marcia’s sewing table. Patching and painting finished up that job. I also got all of the wall and trim caulking done today. During the week, priming and painting, if I can find the energy after work. Otherwise Marcia waits another week for her sewing room.
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Still no new casualties reported by DoD in the latest week. Ciao!
