I may be in transit at the Atlanta airport, but that didn’t stop me from checking out the new Apple stuff and posting about it all on my Treo. My old G4 original Titanium powerbook is barely still alive. Slow, overloaded, and now perminantly docked to a monitor because the screen is flaky. Once things have stablized at the new place, orders will be placed. But for now I still must wait. Sigh!
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There were several posts I had wanted to make before leaving town, but time got away from me and I did not get to them. And that despite a slight delay. I was supposed to fly to Seattle Sunday and start Monday, but there was a hold up (on their side) with some paperwork, so my start date was delayed to Wednesday… tomorrow. In just a few minutes I leave for the airport and fly out to Seattle. At the moment I don’t yet know when I’ll get to fly back on a weekend to visit Brandy and Amy. As soon as possible, but it will likely be at least a few weeks. The longest I’ve been away from them since we were together. But that is how things go, and that is what phones, emails and IMs are for. :-) Anyway, thus begins an exciting new chapter of my life. I don’t know when and how often I’ll be able to post updates on how things are going, for the moment I don’t have a personal computer for the West Coast (although undoubidly I will have one for work.) So we shall see. But I will update when I can. Wish me luck everyone! This should be fun!
Cynthia was in town visiting from the 2nd to the 5th. She was supposed to arrive on the 1st, but got held up. On the one hand, I was really dissapointed, because it meant a day less of the visit, but on the other hand it let us get a lot further in getting the house in order, and finishing putting tile in the room Cynthia slept in. Speaking of the tiling, that was another down side to the visit. Brandy had been really looking forward to Cynthia’s visit and had taken time off work to spend with the three of us. But it was not to be. Just as the whole tiling and grouting of the guest bedroom was almost completely done, she moved wrong and threw out her back. She was stuck in bed for the entire week. Even now she is not fully back to normal. This has been a longer and worse episode than she has had before. She’s arranging with the VA (disabled veteran and all that) to go get a whole new workup done soon to make sure the current state of the damage in her back. Unfortunately, it is a degenerative condition, so it will only get worse. Sigh. We’ll check into what the current options are based on the current state of things and any advancement in medical technology since she last had a full workup when they told her there really wasn’t much that could be done other than just live with it. In any case… Cynthia, Amy and I spent a lot of time together doing a wide variety of things. One of those was an airboat ride through some local wetlands. We saw a lot of wildlife. Lots of gators. A bunch of interesting birds too. (Cynthia had a field guide and was circling everything she could identify.) Etc. It was a blast. The last picture and this one were both from that trip. Lets see, what all did we do… A bunch of meals, some out, some cooked at home by AMy with Cynthia’s help, we went bowling, we walked the dog a few times, we did the boat trip, there was a movie in there somewhere, and a short walk in a bird sanctuary… we tried to ride bikes but the tires were flat and I could not find the bike pump… and there was of course some just hanging out watching TV and such too. Good time. Cynthia was very good with Amy too I must say. And Amy really likes and looks up to Cynthia. And Cynthia was very helpful with anything that needed help around the house. It was good to have her visit, and I hope it will not be as long before the next visit. She’s growing up fast that one. Turning 16 in a couple of weeks. Wow.
Oh, and I ruined New Year’s for the second year in a row. Last year, we had waited until just before the ball dropped in NYC to set up the DirecTV dish. We hadn’t had a chance yet to perminantly mount it, which we eventually did, but rather we just made a quick hole in the ground and shoved the poole with the dish in the hole and aimed it at the sky by hand. Well, we didn’t have the hole quite deep enough, and the slightest breeze was knocking the dish off. At the moment the ball dropped, Brandy was outside wrestling with the dish while I was inside yelling if we had a signal or not. Ooops. This year everybody was there with our little flutes of champagne and/or sparkling grape juice, and the Tivo decided it wanted to change the channel. But our remote extender wasn’t working, so I ran into the other room to tell it not to change. While I was there, I noticed the other TV was on. I yelled to Amy that she had forgotten to turn off the other TV. She started yellign at me not to turn it off and generally having a fit, I had 33 seconds to spare, so I ran to turn it off. I got back into the room just in time for 5… 4… 3… 2… but Amy was still upset and not paying attention, and we basically missed it again. Nobody was happy. Of course, the whole thing is moot anyway, cause 2006 had really started 5 hours earlier, but for some reason people wait 5 hours to do anything about it, and I hear where I am moving they wait a whole EIGHT hours past the real new year’s to do anything. Anyway… after that I made Amy happy again by going out with her to set off a couple quick mini-fireworks. One of them is above. The streak going off to my left is me retreating with the flashlight and match quickly as to avoid losing my hand. Brandy on the other hand now is undoubidly convinced that I ruin every New Year’s eve. Although I think the New Year’s eve that started 2004 wasn’t all that bad. Anyway. Oops. Sorry. Will do better next New Year’s! Well, at least if we celebrate at the real time based on UTC, not some silly local time zone. I think it is waiting several hours after the real time to do anything that throws me off. :-)
But then we got to spend a couple hours sitting down to dinner with Ron. That was good. It had been several years since I had seen them in person although of course I’d talked on the phone and emailed many times. So I had some pasta and talked to Ron. Amy, Brandy, Ursula and Paisley entertained themselves for the most part. :-) Of course on the way home it took over an hour just to get off Disney property again. We ended up not getting home until around 7 UTC. We were very tired. But it was good to see Ron and family again. I’m glad we made the drive, even with the insane New Year’s weekend traffic.
Oh, perhaps that would be “wrapping”. Same thing though, no? So, a couple days before XMas, I take Amy to the mall to get a few things for Brandy. After we are mostly done shopping, Amy sees the charity gift wrapping booth. She gets a couple things wrapped, but then asks me “Can I ask them if I can help?” I am dubious and say I think you have to sign up for that in advance. But she is persistant. Eventually I say she can of course ask, just be prepared for them to say no. A few seconds later she comes running up top me “They want to know how long I can stay!” I say we could probably manage at least an hour. She runs back and tells them, then she is back to where I am jumping up and down saying “THEY SAID YES!!!”. Amy then proceeded to spend the NEXT FOUR HOURS wrapping gifts at the mall charity gift wrap counter. Until the mall closed. I stayed for the first half of that or so, then switched off with Brandy who watched her for the rest of the time. The whole time she was increadibly serious and professional and very intent on doing a good job and being helpful to the customers… not a bit of squirming or playing or getting off task. Just four hours of wrapping. And then she was BEGGING to come back the next day to do more. Yup, that’s Amy for ya.
It was just pointed out to me a little bit ago (I did not remember on my own) that today was an anniversary day. I tried to check the exact one year date and time, what with the whole year is 365.242198781 days, not what the calendar actually says thing, but there was the little problem that neither Brandy nor I remember the exact time of the event. But just guessing, it still puts the anniversary today. Most likely sometime in the next hour or so. So I shall post… It has been exactly one year since we closed on the house here in Palm Bay. The picture above is from the golf course out back. Note the screen is finally on the house. Woo! Anyway we still love the house, but it has not been trouble free. With the unmet expectations at work finances were always tighter than what we expected. The screen destroyed by the hurricanes in 2004 was finally fully replaced just last month (and the contractors did not do a perfect job). We have fought with roofers over a persistant leak on the flat roof over the lanai. And because the screen wasn’t up we didn’t use the pool as much as we thought. Oh, and just today after struggling with various people to get the pool heater up and running for Cynthia’s visit we were informed that the propane tanks and lines and maybe the heater itself needs to be replaced. (Serves us right for not even looking at the heater until a couple weeks ago.) Anyway, all that fun sort of house owner stuff. So, we’re ready to move on and find something nice, albeit a bit smaller and with no pool no doubt, in Seattle. Which brings us to… what was the one significant thing I did today, on this one year anniversary? I talked to the relocation coordinator that has been assigned to me to help get this place sold. Just the preliminaries. We’ll have a real meeting with him Monday. Perfect timing, eh? :-)
So from pop Physics to an old school 1978 era hard scifi paperback. This kind of story really excited me as a teenager. There is practically no plot. Here, let me give it a shot:
Yup, that’s it. The whole plot. Now, that is not all there is to the book, it just isn’t a plot driven book. It is pretty much all about exploring an idea and some scientific “what ifs”. Over the course of the book the author goes into more detail and reveals more of the puzzle as his characters go through the investigative process. But mostly we have exposition. I kept seeing the big flashing “exposition” sign as I went through the book. Whole discussions that you would read but think, these characters would not actually discuss this in this way, they are reviewing facts both would know. This conversation is for the reader’s benefit only. But that’s OK. This is a sequel to Inherit the Stars. And then there are three more in the series after these two, the most recent of which was published just this year. I’d read the first three as a teenager. Haven’t ever read the last two. Together they tell the story of scientists uncovering the past history of the solar system. The biggest surprise being the true origins of humanity and how they interacted with a race called the Minervans in pre-historic times. Then it explores some of the impacts of what happens when the two species meet again. At least that’s where it is as of the first two books. It didn’t capture me quite so much as when I was young, but the whole construction of the scenerios and the slow unwrapping of what happened still facinates. As I said, it isn’t about the plot, it certainly isn’t about the characters, both of those are just the bare minimum needed to support a construction that will allow the exploration of a few scientific ideas. “What would an intelligent species act like if it evolved a non-predator species”. “What would the process be to unravel information about a past society if we found just a few remnants”. Etc. You don’t really need the story part, but it makes it a little more “fun” than if it had just been written as an academic paper. But yet, it is that academic speculation that is the core and what makes it fun and worth reading. I’ve been meaning to write an update on this almost since my post back a little over a month ago. As you all may remember, I dropped my Treo in a bucket of dirty mop water. It stayed there for a good half hour before it was rescued. I was convinced it was dead. Well, in fact, about a week of drying later, I put the battery in, and while a little wet, it worked!!! I was shocked, but yes, it was a fully functioning Treo! Uh, well, mostly. Every once in awhile it just resets randomly. At first it wasn’t that often, but now it seems to be happening pretty frequently. I may have to use the insurance I have on the thing, pay the deductable, and just get a new one. But I’m not giving up on it quite yet! I just got a bluetooth headset for it for XMas, and a few days earlier I’d finally gotten MobiTV up and running and working on it. And after having not had it set up for a bit, I put SnapperMail back on it and am getting my personal email on it again. So it deserves a shot darn it! I can live with the occational random reset! :-) Seriously though, I imagine I’ll have to do the replacement thing sooner rather than later and be on to yet another Treo. This one has managed to live through a lot though, what with me dropping it in the pool once and in mop water a second time. It is remarkable it works as well as it does! |
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Yesterday Brandy, Amy and I drove over to Disney to meet 
