Jan 11

COLD today. Went Out Anyway!

Danged if it didn’t start snowing about 2000 or so; snowed for a couple of hours.  Kinda funny as the Weather Guessers for two different channels said it wouldn’t snow at all. It didn’t really stick; except it got so cold that all that snow has frozen. Nice, mostly sunny, but cold day.

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SWMBO took me to breakfast at the Family Pancake House in Port Orchard. I had the “Senior Breakfast”: two eggs over easy, two sausage links, Hash browns and ONE piece of toast. I mean, come on. ONE piece of toast? I’d have gone another $.20 for another piece of toast.

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Made our usual stop by Safeway. Didn’t spend as much as we don’t really need that much. Nor can we afford that much anymore. Ah well. Luckily, our freezer is still mostly packed with, well, frozen stuff that will last us awhile. There’s still about 30 lbs of chicken in there! Various veggies and other meats. Should last awhile…

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Not much going on this evening.  Our son cooked dinner for us. Dishes are going now. Listening to the News (but don’t get me started).

Installed Picasa 3 and have it running my scans directory. LOTS of duplicates! Damn!

Anyone know how to fix a 55” Plasma TV? Would be willing to trade working on your computer or Large Lazy FatAss Cat to get this thing fixed. (It’s blocked my pool table long enough!!!!)

Jan 10

Cold Out Today! At Least It’s Dry(er)…

Started my day as usual: sitting before this danged computer checking mail, news & jobs. No important mail, the News isn’t, and there aren’t any jobs for an old guy that’s been out of work for awhile.

Who Is This?

One of the pictures I just newly scanned after setting up the negative scanner. Hadn’t seen this picture in about 35 years! I don’t remember this girls name. Friend of ours brought her over when I lived in Virginia Beach way back in 1976 or so. She wore a nice blouse, but, she had one of the most beautiful faces I’d ever seen! (Until I met my lovely young bride: SWMBO) Yeah, I got in a lot of trouble with my future ex- for taking this picture. Green with envy
So, spent most of the time between my earlier remarks and now (pause) scanning all the OLD paperwork from the MC-ARC (of which I am the Treasurer) and trying to get all that straight. Scanned everything to PDF files. I can see NO reason to keep hardcopy unless you’re going to have to send it to someone; and even then I’m sure that they can handle PDF files. But some places (don’t get me started!) still like actual paper for some reason. I may even “waste” some time tonight and convert our membership form to PDF so people can download it, fill it out, save it, then e-mail it back to us. Or print it out and bring it in. (In which case I’d rescan it to a PDF file.)
Downloaded the statements from the MC-ARC bank account back through Jan 2011; and plan to get earlier if I can for our records. Got all the money straight and reports printed (yes, printed) for the meeting next Saturday morning.
Still haven’t figured out what to have for dinner yet.
We all went for a tour of the back-40 earlier and it was FRAKKIN’ COLD! A mere 28 degrees. Won’t snow though… HEY, it’s trying to snow out there. Occasional snow flakes. Cool!
Chilidogs & bakes (as opposed to FRIES) for dinner.

Jan 10

Yes, I Live The SSDD Lifestyle…

Meaning: Just not much happening around here. Y’all *do* know what SSDD stands for, right? Smile

Really rained here yesterday and last night. Windy. My one antenna wire that’s hooked to the top of a 90 ft tree, hanging across the lawn and over the house to another tree, was really dipping down. Weather-guessers still can’t make up their minds if it’s going to snow anytime soon or not. I wish it would as I’m sick of the rain.

Spent most of yesterday setting up multiple VMWare Virtual drives to do different things. Then spent time setting up my negative scanner and scanning my 35mm negatives. Lots of old photo’s there. (Found some of my Ex- that she would NOT like! Smile with tongue out Although there are a couple that I still like even though I cannot stand the woman herself now.) Gotta find my slides…

NOT my Ex-! Girl on the beach in Jax, Fla. 1975?

Now I need to get a 110 film strip scanner. And one for those (Kodak Safety Film) I have absolutely no idea what size (smaller than 35mm but way larger than 110 film) scanners. I also have some large format negatives from when I went to Upward Bound the summers of 1968/69. Would be lots nicer to scan the negatives than to have to make prints then scan them.

Installed Mandrake Linux 2010.2 to a virtual machine last night also. I’m getting pretty good at installing the different versions of Linux; but need to learn more about the internals and the different commands. So far I’ve mostly just been setting them up like Windows with point-n-click and work in a “Terminal” only occasionally. I’ll get better at it though. It’ll be kind of like learning DOS all over again.

Man, I totally wrote all this yesterday morning, minimized it to do something, wound up re-uploading all the WordPress files cause someone got in AGAIN, then went to bed. So it set here all day and all night

I’d better post this before I forget about it again!

Aug 02

Where Does The Time Go? I’m “Retired” DangIt!

Well, lots has been going on even if not much of it is even worth writing about. Things have been mostly SSDD around here even if the weather has been getting better. At least it isn’t raining constantly!

Radio “stuff” is going pretty good. Been talking to Australia & New Zealand, Canada and all over the US. Pskreporter.info even said my signal has been heard in Denmark a  couple of times. (But I haven’t actually talked to anyone there. Yet.)

Been participating in our local “Nets” on Sunday thru Wednesday evenings. Trying to get my grand-daughter, Lexi, Interested in getting her ticket. She’s been too shy to talk on the radio so far. How to encourage her without discouraging her? (Or seeming pushy.)

Been busy around the house trying to get all my outside stuff done while the weather is not bad. Cut up a tree that I had knocked over a few months ago to put in our garden beds and took the cut pieces over to a friends house that has only a wood stove for winter heating. One more tree to go!

SWMBO made me blueberry muffins the other night using blueberry’s we picked from our own bushes. They was good! Surprised those blueberry bushes have produced this much being only a couple of years old.

Took the digger up and helped a neighbor flatten a place to put one of those canvas covered carports. He’s found a couple of trees he’d like me to push over. I’m pretty sure I can do it, safely, but these are some TALL trees. Not very big around but about 100 feet tall. I have pushed over bigger…

My other neighbor called me over to his house and showed me some Bear Poop in his yard. Dang! Bear is getting brave. It has to go past our other neighbor’s and our house to get to his place. Now we gotta be extra careful to make a lot of noise when we walk around the back of the property. Better than being eaten by a bear!

Oh, still going to both Ham Radio clubs; the one here (NMARES) and the one in Shelton (MC-ARC). Still the Treasurer for MC-ARC. NMARES messed up and voted me their President for the coming year. Really! We’ll see how THAT goes!

So I’ve been trying to get into that without being too pushy and working on the new web site for NMARES. It’s going well, so far. And the web site is starting to look good too.

There’s probably eight hundred and six thousand things I’ve forgotten about that I could probably post about; but I can’t remember them. Probably not very important. We lead pretty boring day-to-day lives around here.

Oh yeah, the garden(s) are doing well. We actually got maters and corn this year! SWMBO’s peas are doing excellent!