while I still remember
Feb. 28th, 2009 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kip_w.
From this vantage point at the end of the week, I'd say there were some high points.
Nicer weather came. Snow melted. On Thursday I went out and kicked the snow piles down and scattered the white stuff around, and by the end of the day Friday, the last of the large plowed-up snow was pretty much gone. I also got a stick and putted the dog waste out of the yard. A thoughtful dog owner had left it in the gutter out front, and a helpful snow plow had deposited it (along with a certain quantity of snow) in our yard, where it was revealed by the melting.
Earlier in the week, I purchased a length of rope (two, actually -- one is for a jump rope for me) at Home Depot and took it out to the tree in front along with a ladder. I tied it around the large vertical branch that has been sitting loose up there for the last four months or so, got a good distance away, and pulled. I was able to make it swing back and forth, but it had a hold on something up there. I tried changing the angle, tying the rope to it in different places, and combinations of the two. Finally I extended the ladder to its fullest and took it to the other side of the tree, clutched the trunk with one arm and reached as high as I could to reach the parts of the branch that were hooked over another branch. After I broke those off, I went back down and pulled the rope again, this time wrapping it around another piece of broken off branch, and I got the whole mess down. Later on I'll clean it up again. This, incidentally, is where I got the putter for the first paragraph.
Between the warm weather and the rain, just about all the old snow was gone from the front, and most all from the back. Today it snowed again, but that melted off as well, leaving only a couple of snow clods where the biggest of the plowed piles was.
I've been scanning old negatives, mostly from November 1979. That's when I walked all over Fort Collins, taking black and white photos of stuff I liked, most of which seems to be gone now (but not all). A lot of these photos had never even been printed, as I was mostly getting contact sheets back then to save money. I'll be sharing some of these with Lost Fort Collins, a web site that seems to have been made just for me. Or at least it might as well have. The Northern Hotel??? Wow! I lived there!
I've also been converting some of my LPs to mp3 format for iPod listening. One difficulty with this has been that I use the PC for that, so I can employ SoundForge for the recording and cleaning up, but the PC has its problems. It wants only to shut itself down. Since the day I took the case off, things were better, and I came within about a week of having my first Mozy backup completed, but this week I hit another wall, unable to find a save point in Norton GoBack that would let it come up. [Tedious detail ahead.] With experimentation, I found that I could interrupt the startup with the space bar as if I was going to GoBack, then cancel out of that and have the option of picking much farther save points than GB was giving me. January 2 has become my standard fallback, and with its judicious use, I've been booting successfully with only the occasional lost day when it decides to update Windows while I'm asleep. I'm somewhere between 6 days, 5 hours and 1 week 1 day from finishing the first Mozy backup.
Also I have to keep a close watch on the power supply fan, which doesn't always start up with the computer. I've found that I can start it up by poking it just so with the skinny straw from the compressed air I use to keep it dusted (thanks, Shelly!). When the whole thing is backed up to my satisfaction, we might see about getting it fixed. I think I'd rather keep this one working than buy a new one. I like its audio-visual features. I can turn video output into files, and I can use SoundForge with it.
I haven't been swimming at all this week, because I banged up my right knee last week (my left knee, which I hurt slipping on ice in the driveway, was just about finished with the pain cycle) trying to show Sarah something interesting at the YMCA Adventure Center. So I've been taking her to Adventure Center to play instead of swimming with her. We had a very active time of it this evening. I chased her around, then we threw soft blocks to each other for a while, and finally played on the slide until closing time. She went right to sleep tonight.
I keep trying to find time to play the piano more, and have done so here and there. Last week we went to Borders because I had a 40% off coupon for one item. I bought the one-volume BONE collection, as I have been thinking for many years I should read that. 40% off is what it took. The only copy they had was flawed, so they worked it out that I'd buy it and it would come to me from another branch. It came in the mail a couple of days ago, and I've been enmeshed in it. I'm around page 900 now, and will finish tonight or tomorrow. I'm just as glad I could go through it all in one shot, as each chapter is a quick read. Gotta go. Bone calls me.
.
From this vantage point at the end of the week, I'd say there were some high points.
Nicer weather came. Snow melted. On Thursday I went out and kicked the snow piles down and scattered the white stuff around, and by the end of the day Friday, the last of the large plowed-up snow was pretty much gone. I also got a stick and putted the dog waste out of the yard. A thoughtful dog owner had left it in the gutter out front, and a helpful snow plow had deposited it (along with a certain quantity of snow) in our yard, where it was revealed by the melting.
Earlier in the week, I purchased a length of rope (two, actually -- one is for a jump rope for me) at Home Depot and took it out to the tree in front along with a ladder. I tied it around the large vertical branch that has been sitting loose up there for the last four months or so, got a good distance away, and pulled. I was able to make it swing back and forth, but it had a hold on something up there. I tried changing the angle, tying the rope to it in different places, and combinations of the two. Finally I extended the ladder to its fullest and took it to the other side of the tree, clutched the trunk with one arm and reached as high as I could to reach the parts of the branch that were hooked over another branch. After I broke those off, I went back down and pulled the rope again, this time wrapping it around another piece of broken off branch, and I got the whole mess down. Later on I'll clean it up again. This, incidentally, is where I got the putter for the first paragraph.
Between the warm weather and the rain, just about all the old snow was gone from the front, and most all from the back. Today it snowed again, but that melted off as well, leaving only a couple of snow clods where the biggest of the plowed piles was.
I've been scanning old negatives, mostly from November 1979. That's when I walked all over Fort Collins, taking black and white photos of stuff I liked, most of which seems to be gone now (but not all). A lot of these photos had never even been printed, as I was mostly getting contact sheets back then to save money. I'll be sharing some of these with Lost Fort Collins, a web site that seems to have been made just for me. Or at least it might as well have. The Northern Hotel??? Wow! I lived there!
I've also been converting some of my LPs to mp3 format for iPod listening. One difficulty with this has been that I use the PC for that, so I can employ SoundForge for the recording and cleaning up, but the PC has its problems. It wants only to shut itself down. Since the day I took the case off, things were better, and I came within about a week of having my first Mozy backup completed, but this week I hit another wall, unable to find a save point in Norton GoBack that would let it come up. [Tedious detail ahead.] With experimentation, I found that I could interrupt the startup with the space bar as if I was going to GoBack, then cancel out of that and have the option of picking much farther save points than GB was giving me. January 2 has become my standard fallback, and with its judicious use, I've been booting successfully with only the occasional lost day when it decides to update Windows while I'm asleep. I'm somewhere between 6 days, 5 hours and 1 week 1 day from finishing the first Mozy backup.
Also I have to keep a close watch on the power supply fan, which doesn't always start up with the computer. I've found that I can start it up by poking it just so with the skinny straw from the compressed air I use to keep it dusted (thanks, Shelly!). When the whole thing is backed up to my satisfaction, we might see about getting it fixed. I think I'd rather keep this one working than buy a new one. I like its audio-visual features. I can turn video output into files, and I can use SoundForge with it.
I haven't been swimming at all this week, because I banged up my right knee last week (my left knee, which I hurt slipping on ice in the driveway, was just about finished with the pain cycle) trying to show Sarah something interesting at the YMCA Adventure Center. So I've been taking her to Adventure Center to play instead of swimming with her. We had a very active time of it this evening. I chased her around, then we threw soft blocks to each other for a while, and finally played on the slide until closing time. She went right to sleep tonight.
I keep trying to find time to play the piano more, and have done so here and there. Last week we went to Borders because I had a 40% off coupon for one item. I bought the one-volume BONE collection, as I have been thinking for many years I should read that. 40% off is what it took. The only copy they had was flawed, so they worked it out that I'd buy it and it would come to me from another branch. It came in the mail a couple of days ago, and I've been enmeshed in it. I'm around page 900 now, and will finish tonight or tomorrow. I'm just as glad I could go through it all in one shot, as each chapter is a quick read. Gotta go. Bone calls me.
.
