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Personal stuff
Now relegated to Blogblivion...Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Overheard In Our House, AI Edition
What I said in reaction to Kellie “the Hideous Pickle” Pickler being voted off American Idol:
“Oh my God, Sarah must be having an orgasm!”
Yeah, it was time.
I never wrote my AI post from last night, though mostly that amounted to ”what Dean said.”
I was unusually impressed with Taylor, as for once he gave some reason for his fan base to exist and keep him in it even when he’s awful.
I was unusually impressed with Katharine, though we still aren’t keen on Her Plasticity. Listening to the MP3 afterward made it more impressive. Watching the video afterward with no sound made her seem even more ridiculous than when there’s the singing to distract you.
Elliot did what Elliot does best, maybe more so than normal, but ultimately the song bored me no matter how well performed.
Paris was better on MP3 afterward than I credited her at the time, despite her song choice.
Chris was just perfect. Good choice of artist and apparently this time nobody minded the choice of a more obscure song. At least, I’d never heard of it. He not only had the voice, but he meant it.
Kellie was the particular blight on the evening, between song choice and performance. Unchained Melody is just too big, too famous, and too Not Country for her. For me it goes further, much the way Taylor did on Queen night.
When Taylor sucked doing Crazy Little Thing Called Love - which should have been a fine choice for him - one of the things that bothered me was that it’s a popular sing-along song for me. There are two dangers there. Once is changing it, and the other is being open for negative comparison to me. Since I thought Taylor sounded no better than I would singing that song, I considered it an awful performance.
Which led me to muse about the odd fact that one of my favorite songs to sing along with is Bridge Over Troubled Water, which led me to think a Simon & Garfunkel theme week might be entertaining.
Which brings us to this week, when Kellie did Unchained Melody, which I also particularly like to sing along with, though it’s more in the “difficult to do well” realm of Bridge Over Troubled Water than, say, Crazy Little Thing Called Love. Thus is offended me similarly to the way Taylor offended me a couple weeks back.
Anyway, only five to go. Wow! So that’s… four more weeks? Wow. Go Chris!
Ever get exactly the wrong amount of sleep?
It’s all I can do to stay awake today.
Every time I try to post my mind goes blank.
Like this:
Really, really blank.
*yawn*
I’ll have to get back to you after my nap.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Blah
I hate when Saturday comes and I need to work work work, or at least run run run, or both, but I’m just like “blah, let me relax into a human puddle” instead. So it is that I find myself still needing to go to the office at almost 1:00, with basically as much work as I care to do waiting for me there, and wanting to return a few giant bags of cans, and needing to make various runs to stores.
Sigh…
At least turning in cans is a productive space-maker for the office and leads to cash in hand, and the “as much work as I care to do” has billable stuff as the priority component. Maybe I can set a near record for billings in one month. Seriously, though, I feel bad because someone has been waiting almost a week longer than anticipated for the computer I will setup today, so I’d like her to be able to come in to it at her desk Monday. The cool thing is the machine can be formatting and installing most of Windows in the time it takes me to go turn in cans. It’s like being in two places at one time!
There’s always tomorrow, as Clarice would say. It’s going to be cold and quite rainy, which makes me assume the Easter egg hunt at my grandmother’s will be next week, leaving the day wide open to supplement today’s work.
Oh well. Off to the races…
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Time for Updating
I just finished the Massachusetts Form 1 and schedules C, E, Y, and DI, which left me with a blogworthy thing that irritates me each year. I mean, besides the whole legalized theft thing in general.
It’s the Massachusetts rental deduction.
We paid $13,125 in rent last year, which is more than my total income for most years prior to 1993. The deduction is half your rent, up to a maximum of $3000.
This particular tax deduction was part of the famous Proposition 2 1/2, which was inspired by California’s Prop 13 (which from what I understand was poorly written in a way that has led to increasing weirdness, but I digress). The law limited property taxes, benefitting homeowners and, of course, owners of rental property.
On the theory that renters wouldn’t get a break the way homeowners would, the benefit being absorbed entirely by landlords, a deduction of 50% of rent paid was included. Well, that and it helped the referendum pass because it gave many more people a stake in the outcome.
Circa the time of Prtop 2 1/2 my first apartment was $225 a month, $2700 for the year, which would have been a deduction of $1350. Great! But they slapped the maximum on it, and the maximum has had no relation to the reality of rents for most of that time.
And so it is that the lovely 50% rent deduction is less than a quarter rent deduction, with our rent low by many people’s standards. Nobody pays $500 unless they’re splitting a place or have some particularly fortuitous situation renting from a relative.
I think it’s time to go by the original law, or raise the limit to a more realistic amount. $6000 would be acceptable. If you’re gonna give breaks, you should do it right, and keep up with the times. Sheesh.
Monday, April 17, 2006
I Owe My Soul To The Elders And Poor
Oh wait, I am poor, relatively. Enough for my taxes to be a mere $981. Well, except for the other almost 89% of the bill that goes toward the folks on social security.
I love tax time.
I love getting everything ready to mail and then realizing I don’t have enough cash to mail the taxes and refill Val’s diaper supply today.
Sigh…
Friday, April 14, 2006
Work’s Been Taxing
So I haven’t even collated, stapled, signed and sent the partnership return yet, let alone done more than rough out what the damage will be for us on our personal return. Oddly, it looks like we’ll owe about $2500 less in taxes on about $6000 - 7000 less income. I thought you had to be rich for those kinds of marginal rates, rather than someone paying almost half their income in rent plus medical insurance, co-pays and deductibles.
But anyway, I am more relieved than usual to note the 15th falling on a weekend. Better still, Monday is Patriot’s Day in Massachusetts, so the personal tax return doesn’t have to be mailed until Tuesday. Woohoo! This doesn’t apply to the partnership return, as that’s going to Cincinnati rather than Andover, but still… very nice.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Gremlins
Today was going along okay, looking like I’d get done what had already been delayed a couple days. Then, most of the way through reinstalling that delayed workstation, it couldn’t see any printers or print servers. It also couldn’t see an unrelated old server on which I tried to map drive letter U, which goes to an individual, semi-private share for each user. Hmmm…
Rebooting the print servers and powering off and on the HP 8100, the main printer they use, solved that. The main printer is mainly accessed directly via TCP/IP, and it seemed to forget its address or something crazy like that.
Then I checked out the old server and it had no power. Oops. Power supply blew. This is an old Pentium 200 box that used to host the accounting software until the upgrade a few years ago. They wanted to keep it going for the couple times a year they might need to run the old software and look at legacy data. The secondary drive had enough space to let it keep hosting the U drive shares.
Just last night I remarked to myself that it was time to migrate those. When I upgraded the KVM switches in the server room, there were enough slots for 8 servers, so I left that, the 9th, and the odd one out, not hooked to a monitor. It already had a separate keyboard because it took standard rather than PS/2. Figured it was near time to retire it completely, and in the meantime I’d hook a monitor to it if and as needed.
I should know when I have that particular sense about something that I should really pay attention. At the very least I could on the spot have decided to copy the whole kaboodle over to the server where it will move. But nooooo.
And so today the drive on that old server that hosted the U drive shares died, along with the power supply. I hate it when I ignore the spidey sense and get slammed for it.
At the end of the day today I got diverted into completely recreating the fifty U drive shares on a different server and restoring the most recent good backup. I managed one shortcut though. I use login scripts to make sure people are mapped to the right network drives. Never included the U drive in that, because it’s different for each person. This time I used the %UserName% variable so I don’t have to go to every workstation. Trouble is, that doesn’t work on Windows 9x, and there are still a few of those. I can deal with that tomorrow, when I’m not ready to drop.
And the machine I have been attempting to setup most of the week can be deployed! Just a few minor details left, and files to copy from the machine it replaces. Yay.
No Saturday off for me this week. At least I should be clear for Sunday though.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Creating A Reprieve
Now that I’m done watching Idol and House, then surfing a bit, I thought I would follow up to this post in which the support person insisted we have to move to SQL Server this instant because MSDE is over the 2 GB limit and there’s no way to buy any time.
I ran the Verify and Shrink commands from the Management Console associated with the program and its database. For those familiar with Microsoft Access, it’s a bit like doing a repair and compact. I couldn’t remember their names, but I knew there was something like it - just not how well it would shrink things - so I had actually asked the support guy, who claimed there was nothing we could do.
Anyway, that brought the combined total of two data and two log files down to about 1.5 gigabytes, which is less than 2 gigabytes. Even if I have to do this regularly, it buys us time and we shouldn’t have to take expensive measures on the spur of the moment.
What I am waiting to see is if the database size resolves the problem. If not, they have to figure it out for real. The direction this had taken smacked of “can’t specifically solve it, so nuke it instead and chances are when the dust clears the problem will have too.” That can be a useful tactic. For instance, do you test every possible thing for 20 hours, or do you fdisk and reinstall when fdisk is virtually guaranteed to kill a problem? At the same time, it can be a way to get a customer you’re tired of off your agenda for a while, if not for good. If we aren’t all set tomorrow and it can’t be blamed on the database, or available physical memory,, the guy is going to hate me for making him have to keep figuring it out. Oh well.
I certainly beat their expectations. Buy a server and expensive software… Wait, nevermind!
And Not Getting Any Less Busier Fast…
So my big client’s upgrade of accounting software, originally triggered by the need for an unavailable electronic bill format by a small client of theirs, is still irradiating us with its fallout of Murphy rays. Those trigger everything going wrong for no reason, rather than triggering massive growth into a chaotically powerful green being when angered.
For days now they’ve been trying to figure out funky errors generated when editing “prebills.” Must not have enough RAM, or available RAM. Nope, but thanks for playing, and oh by the way what a lovely memory leak your software has introduced on the server since the update, thank you so much for ensuring I noticed.
Etc. and so forth, and suddenly the problem is that MSDE has a 2 gigabyte limit that we have exceeded.
Say what? And you, who got a copy of the data from us and massaged it to allow the upgrade to succeed, didn’t happen to notice then that it was just a tad large? They tell us the software warns you at 1.6 and 1.8 GB, but we must have turned the warnings off.
Suddenly it’s “you will upgrade to SQL Server immediately.” I know we promoted MSDE preferentially back when, because it was free and helped make the cost seem more reasonable, but really we should have told you this limit would come crashing down after a while. So sorry.
The silver lining is that they use SQL Server 6.5 and we have wanted them to upgrade almost since that was first deployed, since 7.0 was so much better. Sinking ten grand or so into this will not just allow them to do frivolous things like, you know, billing their clients, but also will improve the speed of their custom document management software. Assuming it will allow me to modify and redeploy it without freaking out! But hey, at least I should be able to take my time testing, while the old server remains up.
Meanwhile, I am trying to move machines from user to user, reinstalling as I go. The plan was to spend the afternoon doing one of those, even if I couldn’t quite get it deployed before leaving. Well, while I was caught up in the other excitement, the former owner of the machine realized she needed a file from her old computer. Luck! I’d not wiped it yet. Only now it won’t turn on for anything. Acts like the power supply is dead. Which is not what my power supply tester says, but I’m trying a new one anyway. And that’s when we got the news about the database size. I assume first thing tomorrow will be hectic with discussion of what to do and actually ordering a new server and SQL Server to go on it, given the need to fix things ASAP. Then at least we’ll settle down into waiting…
Money Is Good
When being busy gets old, at least I can tell myself that.
Of course, all well and good that I can do the math on my time for today and yesterday and say “cool, that covers the rent next month.” The flip side is for the client that’s a fifth of a normal to high normal month in two days. And I don’t expect this to slow down for at least another week.
I just hate to give them bills like the one when they got a virus and we did over 90 hours in one week and they ran up over 12k for the month. Ouch.
So… light blogging? Yeah, we got that.
Saturday, April 08, 2006
Still Poor
Along with a lot of other people who didn’t win Mega Millions last night. So sad.
Of course, at the rate work is going, being poor wouldn’t last. Too bad it’s all from one client and the boon can’t be expected to last more than three months, but even that’s a lot of extra revenue. Yay.
Of course, with the insane new MA insurance law we could have a lot more money by ceasing to buy insurance, letting the government pick up the tab, and paying the penalty that’s a fraction of what insurance costs. I could use another eight grand a year net.
Speaking of the MA health insurance disaster being foisted on us, Jay Tea has an appropriately disdainful post with an interesting comment thread, including my answer to the question of where employer-provided insurance originated.
Dean has a remarkably positive post with an even more extensive comment thread. Both are worth a look.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
It’s 10:30, Do You Know Where Your Blogger Is?
Or husband, depending who you are.
Why yes, he’s just leaving work!
At least the money is good. May as well get it while I can.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Hey Look, A Post!
So today we’re going to a get-together at Chili’s in Burlington at 2:00, for which we are getting ready now, followed by a stop at the giant Barnes & Noble in Burlington, which shares a parking lot with Chili’s, to use our $75 of Christmas gift cards finally. I got up just before 7:00 this morning and instead of blogging I did still more work. Tonight I’ll try to help with this week’s edition of CotC, which I am theoretically co-hosting.
Tomorrow we’ll probably go to my grandmother’s, since it is the Sunday closest to my and my mother’s birthday Monday. Let us eat cake. I may or may not try to fit in some work at the office. Monday or Tuesday I have to return a computer to Wilmington. I also should try to do billing this weekend so I can rescue cash flow.
Meanwhile, the newphew’s computer we rebuilt yesterday is balking about having an OS reinstalled. I forget what AMD it was before, but it was low end at the time, in an Epox motherboard. Since the power supply fried the motherboard, we got an AsRock combo board that takes either of two CPU types, a Sempron 3300, and 512 MB of 400 MHz RAM. I had kicked in a hard drive, external bay (which died), power supply, and the RAM, plus a special 2 hour round trip to get parts, labor and expertise helping, and hours of time in which billable work could have been done instead, in return for help he’s been giving me (which ironically his computer problems took an unexpected bite out of, setting me back, but there’ll be more for him to do coming up). I also built the original computer. At the time I had intended to give each niece and nephew a computer around the time they turned 14, but after the first two I stopped being able to afford it. There’s a bit of parental balkage at paying for the CPU and motherboard, which I was hoping to turn over immediately because my cash flow is dry. It beats buying a new computer, or having to pay someone to fix it. Anyway, the machine acting up got out of hand enough that I will need to commune with it again, and make certain no parts are bad. I seriously doubt it, but at least I’m already planning one return.
Without my nephew’s computer, billing and other unbillable work to keep things rolling, and the run to return the computer with the bad drive, I am looking at enough billable work, if nothing new comes up and I don’t start the next major project that is jumping up and shouting “me, me! Look at me!” before I am done, I have an easy seven consecutive days of work lined up neatly if I only do eight hours of it each day. Deb’s going to get really used to having me out of the house day after day.
So, like, see you now and then in this space. Sometimes. Maybe.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Still Poor
Nope, didn’t win Mega Millions last night, but hey, neither did anyone else.
Not that I would be posting it here right away the next day if we had won, but it would be kind of fun to blog about it once the details were handled in the aftermath.
Of course, if I always had as much billable work as I do now, the “still poor” post title would never apply. Well, at least not after a couple years of that, to catch up.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Yay For A New Day
So far it doesn’t feel like it’s going badly, apart from having been awake from 4:00 to 6:00 or so, then sleeping until after 8:30, and still having not gone to work yet to do the dozen hours or so of work I need to finish by 7:30 tops.
I meant to change the date on the server and retry the setup, but I tried a different workaround first, then gave up. I’ll do that this morning before anything else, but even if that’s no good, the plan is to install the offline timekeeping client for everyone ("offline" as in doesn’t maintain a connection to the database), which is probably about 10 minutes times 50, though may be doable in less, continue setting up the bookkeeper’s new machine and the other ones that will get swapped around, and then finish the server parts after talking to support in the morning. Worst case nobody can enter time or do accounting work most of the day Monday, and we’ve had worse happen before for less reason.
Off I go. If it goes smoothly, there probably won’t be any more posts from me because I’ll have nothing to gripe about…
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Murphy’s Out In Force
I’m at work with my nephew today, with overlapping major projects, plus his computer in which the power supply died and took out the motherboard.
Nothing is going right. Nothing has gone right since I got up, really.
I had spare parts that would match the dead motherboard and, if needed, AMD CPU. They were in a machine we built, that died, that we rebuilt, that kind of worked but ran too hot in the particular case, that was put aside for future reference and not touched since months ago.
Turns out it was in the room near the inventory that got stolen last fall, and I never even realized it was missing. Not a great loss, but it really made our day not to have the parts. Well, it means the value of what was stolen just doubled or so, but still, it was a troubled set of parts pretending to think about being a working computer.
That’s going to mean buying a motherboard and, in a fit of sensible “may as well because we’re not sure the old one is good and it’s reasonable to upgrade,” a CPU too. And further delay having the computer working again.
Well, then we started setting up a new computer for the big client’s bookkeeper, the idea being since we’re upgrading accounting software anyway, fell swoop it. Got XP all configured and on the network and the internet, activated Windows, started installing software and the screen went black.
Turned out the video is just fine. It simply stops producing any when the boot process turns itself over to the hard drive, which is SATA, and which appears to be detected just fine. By this time we’re already running even later than we were initially.
Even as I am typing this, the second of the new machines we are trying keeps having trouble reading what’s on install CDs. But hey, the video still works.
Staying in bed: It’s a Good Thing. Some days.
Friday, March 24, 2006
Not Baby Pictures
These are a couple of pictures of pictures of my late grandfather, my mother’s father, who would be turning 100 in August if he were still around. He died ten years ago. The pictures give some idea why I always regretted not having had kids while he was still around. I think pictures of him not holding a baby or little kid are rarities.
Speaking of grandparents, my late grandmother, my father’s mother, would have been 95 today if she’d hung around past her all too early expiration date, which was thirty years ago. She’s the short-lived anomaly among my grandparents, though I think middling among her own family.
Anyway, here they are, one size only…
Busy
Today I have to drive to Wilmington to fetch three computers and LCD monitors, which I thought would upgrade the last of Big Client’s computers, but I forgot one guy who is using a P133. Sigh… So I think I have a solution for that in the form of available parts and a machine under construction. Since these are the lower priority folks, they won’t actually get the new machines. Rather, we will shuffle things around. One of the new ones goes to the bookkeeper and dominoes down to a secretary/gopher with a P133, with the others not yet designated. At least one gets setup and the machines shuffled this weekend.
We’re also upgrading Juris, the accounting software, and the timekeeping software associated with it on every workstation.
We’re also upgrading the Sybari software that scans e-mail for viruses and filters spam.
We’re also completing an inventory of who has what precisely, which will help decide who gets the other two new machines and how the shuffling around flows.
We’re also rebuilding my nephew’s computer (he’ll be helping me with the rest), which had the power supply go and take out the motherboard with it.
Posting? Maybe not so much. Though before I head out, I just filled the camera by taking pictures of Valerie, downloaded them, and may post a few.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Four Weeks
Valerie is four weeks old today!
To celebrate, we got up at 5:30 or so to take her to her four week checkup, at 8:00. Go us.
Monday, March 20, 2006
A Good Day
First I bashed my left little toe against something, broke the nail and caused it to bleed. I didn’t notice the blood until after it had dried, but it hurt fiercely and at surprising length for a stubbed toe, so no surprise.
Then I tried to cut off part of my left index finger in an effort to prove that dull knives are indeed more dangerous than sharp, and that hands don’t always make good cutting boards. I was pleased to have the first aid kit so handy, and I showed Sadie all the blood puddling on my fingers and told her what it was and this is why we’re always telling her to be careful.
Deb suggests I not drive today. Heh.
Anyway, back to ordering a computer for my client…
Update:
Doh. I bled through the gauze pad I bandaged myself with, and got blood all over Valerie’s outfit and blanket. At least it’s not bleeding any longer, so the fresh bandage ought to hold up well. Yay for the bandage, because it hurts like hell when air hits it. It looks like I actually sliced off a bit of flesh. Ick.
And yeah, the client uses Windows. Heh.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Argh!!
We. Forgot. West. Wing.
We could have gotten home by 8:00 had we remembered it. I was done at the office soon enough and we could have fled for home more expediently.
We were home by 8:30 and could at least have seen half of it.
It’s just that we’ve never gotten used to the move to Sunday, which is traditionally a “nothing’s on” night.
Damn.
Anyone tape it?
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Done
Hooray! Except for transcribing a couple of the forms with crossouts, and printing the “other expenses” 1065 attachment, and of course making photocopies and filing the returns, I’m done with the business tax returns.
Even better, I completely redid my depreciation table spreadsheet so the expired items from 1998 and 1999 no longer appear on it and it’s more usable. I originally lumped together all the 5 and 7 year items and (now fully depreciated) listed property, then had to segregate it to get the numbers to plug into the return.
Now I just need to fix everything about how I handle inventory so that is friendly at tax time.
Sadie is going with me today while I drive to the bank, the office to make copies of K-1 forms, Burlington to drop the K-1 forms off, Woburn to get parts, and back to the office. She’ll love that, and maybe Deb will get a nap.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Fun
Today is my big push to get the 1065 and associated forms prepared. Yay.
And no, I will not file the Massachusetts return elecfuckingtronically. Find to your surprise that this is required, try looking up “well how do I do that” and find that it’s a ploy by the state to make you pay money to file your tax return. I figure they just assume everyone pays to have a return like ours done by a preparer already, so no big deal. Jeez.
Anyway, angry digression aside, this is why you can expect me to be scarce today and for that matter probably tomorrow.
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Doh!
Some time back, we ordered Firefly, and after a while started watching and got through all but the last three episodes.
Tonight, after a month or so away, we tried to watch one of the episodes on the last DVD in the set before Deb had to sleep to synchronize with Valerie and attempt not to be too sleep deprived.
We got the menu for the second DVD.
In fact, it was the second DVD. Our set has two of those. Doh!!
So we will be testing out Amazon’s exchange policies for people who may or may not have their receipt and didn’t learn there was a defect until 2+ months after the purchase. Yay.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
So I Never Expected…
That going to my aunt’s wake would result in running into the previous Valerie in the family; Valerie Ann Ellis, who married a guy named Curtis if I have my records right. The older Valerie is Sadie and Val’s second cousin once removed (the other previous one, Valerie Joyce, is first cousin twice removed, the aunt of Valerie Ann, and born 17 years earlier) and is three years younger than me. Unless I have the two confused. In which case Valerie will be happy I thought she looked so young.
What’s funny is I looked into prior usage of the name in the family, so I already knew there were others. We decided it didn’t matter because they were much older and from Canada. I figured it’d be years before there was an encounter, or even before the older Valerie learned of the younger one. This kind of thing always happens to me, so I ought have expected it.
Older Valerie will probably be along sometime to see pictures (hi!), so if you see comments she leaves, you’ll know who it is.
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
I Love Good News
The cost of adding Valerie to the health insurance? Zero. It’s already a “family plan” and covers multiple offspring for no additional money.
Maybe they really are cheaper by the dozen. Not that we’ll ever find that out.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Busy Weekend
So my nephew should be here at 9:15 to go to work with me, where he ought to be a great deal of help. He’ll get picked up from there about 5:30 - 6:00, which is all the better because I was going to drive him home. Before I can even go to work with him, we have to (or he has to hang here while I) go to Super Wal-Mart for some stuff I didn’t go get yesterday. Especially wipes, which are going even faster than anticipated with two squirts using them. Diapers for the new squirt. If possible, a thermometer for Sadie…
She’s very sick. Which explained why she slept 13 1/2 hours Thursday night, then napped for hours. My goofy forehead thermometer from the first aid kit says she’s not especially hot, but to us she felt (until the Tylenol kicked in anyway) like she was burning up. She hasn’t been anywhere to catch anything. Well, except the doctor’s office first thing last Tuesday for Val and Deb’s appointments. Could be that, or I carried something home. She’s never been so sick before. We were up with her at 5:00 for a while. She had a glass of mostly juice in bed with her (and had downed another before that), almost emptied it overnight, so I started her on a refill of water spiked with a little apple juice. She didn’t eat well for, heck, about the past 48 hours. The main thing she would eat was grapes, and bananas, until we ran out.
Anyway, I have to try to get spam filtering working for my client - again - without that breaking e-mail completely - again. There are some other things that can use doing, thus my nephew to help. We also need to find a way to make the house presentable. Nicole is visiting from Oregon, so she and three other friends are coming over tomorrow to see us, each other, and the baby. And Sadie too. I bought a big turkey on sale for 69 cents a pound, so I am planning to cook that and feed everyone, rather than the usual ordering pizza kind of deal. That’s another element of shopping this morning (which I could do tonight if we weren’t down to maybe 10 wipes); filling in missing stuff for dinner tomorrow. Plus a few odds and ends.
If I post nothing for most or all of the rest of the weekend, it’s because I am flat out with shopping, work, cleaning, cooking, and visiting. Plus poor Sadie.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Six
This is the number of hours of sleep I got. Without once waking up. And so I feel amazingly awake and refreshed! That’s so wrong, on a mere six hours, but it was six contiguous hours. Yay!
It’s pretty much normal for me to sleep no more than that, but it quite possibly has been months since I last got that many without interruption.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Still Poor
We played Mega Millions for the huge jackpot last night. Somebody won, but alas, it wasn’t us. Guess I’ll just have to keep working for a living, and the IRS will just have to keep waiting like a pack of slavering hellhounds patiently for me to accomplish the near impossible feat of catching up.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Positive Air Pressure
One thing that has always seemed strange about the smoke from the apartment downstairs is the appearance that there is positive air pressure. That is, it’s as if their apartment is being pressurized, or air in it fanned upward, so of course it gets forced up through any available opening effectively. Well, yesterday I noticed that the first floor apartment has forced hot air heat! The other two have forced hot water. That explains a lot.
Meanwhile, I did more sealing, mainly to reduce cold air drafts, and that has made the smoke worse. It doesn’t really get worse, but it stays more effectively, and is evident throughout more of the apartment. Doh.