Rock Project "Day" Five

It's starting to look like something. I spent about four hours on a Saturday, cutting rocks for the second side, then another couple of hours finding some with specific shapes.

The "almond" color grout started out looking green when it first went in, but has lightened up overnight.

(Score so far: two sides have rock, using about one third of the total rocks available; one side has grout. Days left until Christmas: one.)

Are Some Visitors More Welcome Than Others?

Other than the obvious, we don't really know what happened... we found this destruction the third morning after the big snow storm.


The street had been clean for a couple of days, but somebody jumped the curb and went another ten feet before hitting our sign.


The car and driver disappeared, except for part of a bumper left behind.

Call it a Bad Left Turn.

Rock Project "Day" Three

Drew's saw blades work wonders. We finally have enough rocks ready for one side to be glued down.

Rock Project Day Two

Test of adhesive... New tube of Liquid Nails: never set up, the test rock fell off. Old tube of Nail Pro (next two rocks): held on pretty well, but still soft, can't find in the store. Polyurethane Premium from Lowes: looks like a solid winner.

We rented a grinder and used a masonary cutter to try cutting the rocks. Three hours (and $20) later, one corner piece is done:

It looks nice, but clearly, we need better technology if this is ever going to get done.

Tired Boys

Rock Project Day One

We brought a load of rocks back with us from Utah. (In an unrelated news item, we've replaced the transmission in the Caravan since coming back.)

Here is our rock cleaning station.

Seems like enough, doesn't it?

Here is one of two unsuspecting endtables that we bought at Big Lots.

Take the top off and turn it around. The front is the back and the back is the front.

The old back gets a new front. (Hey, Dave, there's your blood donation card.)

A little chicken wire, and we are ready to rock.

The New Garden

We took some time off from the construction projects on Saturday afternoon to plant bulbs in the new garden and transplant perennials.


We have high hopes that the chicken-wire cage will keep the squirrels from digging up all of the bulbs over the winter.


It has:

• A row of Drew's Irises
  
• Two rows of Grandma Oaks' Irises (Not sure if they are going to grow because they have been out in the garage for a year or two.)
  
• Unifolium Allium
• Golden Bells Narcissus
• Uva-Vulpis Fritillaria
• Tulip Angelique
• White Lady Narcissus

You can't see them yet, but these are Italicum Arum.





I also got a new electric stapler out of the deal.

How Old Do You Think It Was?

I don't know, but if you look closely at the service label, you can see that they only needed six-digit phone numbers in those days.

Out With the Old

Here goes the old furnace...



I'm sure glad that I don't have to go into the crawl space...

A Few Photos From The Trip

I think that I have finaly recovered from the trip. Here are a few photos from the drive back.



Deer Valley, between Heber City and Park City:



A dry creek landscape outside The Lodge at Stillwater:



Elk Mountain, Wyoming:



Platte River:



One of the many rest stops somewhere:

I'm Good At Taking Tests

Your Linguistic Profile:

50% General American English 15% Dixie 15% Yankee 10% Upper Midwestern 5% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

October Storm Cleanup

Have almost cleaned up from last year's surprise October storm. This is what the garden looks like now. The new "grass" is ready for its first cutting as soon as the rain dries up.

This is the closest I could find to a photo of the old garden. (Rumples on the left, old garden on the right.)

Another view featuring a rotting garage.

Cross-Country Drive

Here is Adam's "new" truck:

We were in a hurry, so sight-seeing was done out the windows of the truck.

Iowa:

Nebraska:

Wyoming:

The Western way of slowing down for construction zones:

Age of Empires

Kitchen, Fly, and Ivan

vs.

Maurice, Napoleon, and Isabella

Not many humans playing this time, mostly computers playing Hard. Isabella resigned after about 70 minutes game time. Fly resigned and went to bed after an hour or two. I defeated Maurice about 10 minutes later and went to bed. In the morning, I see that Ivan defeated Napoleon in our absence. I was still in it and moved up a level.

Who does Madelyn look like?

It looks like the same expression to me (with 30 years difference in available photographic technology).

Remembering the Old Timers

I was looking through the photos and thinking that these couches are like old friends. Do you remember them fondly?

First baby, first couch.


This was one tough couch that survived the 60's and then crossed the plains.

Second baby, couch in disguise.

Second couch, and a wonderful coat.


I think that we even paid money for this couch.

This is the 70's, can you tell?


In the future, when TV remotes were invented, this couch would suck them down into its big, inaccessible hollow spaces.

Third couch and a bunch of kids.

Past its prime, but still hanging in there.

Daylight Saving Time 2007 (Y2K7)

Congress has decided that we should all get up an hour early tomorrow. I kind of wonder who is making money from this little experiment. The one thing that I have noticed so far is that the summer gasoline prices are coming about three weeks early. And it is just an experiment: the Energy Policy Act said that they would evaluate the "energy savings" and possibly change it back.

We have spent a few months planning and preparing for this computer software change. Every system and application seems to have a different way of computing wall clock time. Windows, Exchange, Java... Kronos, Exchange, PowerChart... All this work patching and upgrading systems and on Monday everyone else (hopefully) will say, "What's the big deal, nothing happened!"

But even yesterday, vendors were giving us notice that their software is not ready. The GE PACS software has their own copy of Java that needs to be patched on workstations. I think that GE was already trying to tell us about this one, but the critical applications that are closest to actual patient care are supported by Clinical Engineering, not IST.

I've recently learned a few things about time zones and Java... but who is Olson?

No N00S is Good N00S

I spent the evening responding to a new virus. This one runs a program called n00s.exe and attacks Symantec AntiVirus on TCP port 2967. Nearly all of the machines in our domain have Symantec AntiVirus, so there is a lot of potential for destruction. Some machines get a message when Symantec's rtvscan crashes, but others get infected and go to the dark side.