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WEEK 20 2014

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First Post, 17 March 2002

Twelve Years Ago, This Week 2002

Eleven Years Ago, This Week, 2003

Ten Years Ago, this week, 2004

Nine Years Ago, this week, 2005

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Four Years Ago, This Week, 2010

Three Years Ago,
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2011

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2012

One Year Ago,
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2013

Saturday 17 May 2014

Saturday - Did yard sales with my friends in the morning, picked up a couple of small items. One place had this handsome guy outside:

An odd day weather wise. It started out as if it was going to be in the 90's, then cooled right down and was overcast by sundown. Huh.

Book #19 was Like a Mighty Army (Safehold #7), by David Weber. Another in the 'Safehold' series. If you've read one, then you've read any of them. I long ago gave up on buying them, but it showed up at the library, so....

And, I almost forgot, it being Week #20:

#1 A Talent For War (Alex Benedict #1) #2 iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, 3rd Edition #3 The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce #1) #4 The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag (Flavia de Luce #2) #5 A Red Herring without Mustard (Flavia de Luce #3)	#6 I am Half-Sick of Shadows (Flavia de Luce #4) #7 The Dead in their Vaulted Arches (Flavia de Luce #5) #8, The Judge of Ages (Hermetic Millenia #3) #9 Rising Tides (Destroyermen #5) #10 Firestorm (Destroyermen #6)
#11 Iron Gray Sea (Destroyermen #7) #12 Broken Homes (Rivers of London #4) #13 Existence #14 Storm Surge (Destroyermen #8) #15 The Lure of the Basilisk (Lords of Dus #1)	#16 The Seven Altars of Dusarra (Lords of Dus #2) #17 The Sword of Bheleu (Lords of Dus #3) #18 The Book of Silence (Lords of Dus #4) #19 Like a Mighty Army #20

I'm a book behind, but whatever...

Friday 16 May 2014

Friday - Did some yard work, but my hands are aching again. Guess I overdid things this week.

I did pick up some marigolds, which I'm going to pot, and then rotate between the sunny back yard and the shady front yard. The bugs and shade mean it hard to grow anything colorful in the ground there, so this is a workaround. I had some rather beat up plastic pots from a 'curb alert' a month or two ago, and they rather smelled of dog urine so I washed them in soap and water and Petzyme. I picked up some spray paint and gave them a coat, inside and out. That seems to have done the trick. They need a little more paint, but I can probably start using them this weekend.

I also, as long as I had vehicles out of the garage, painted the handles of various yard implements. The wood handles were bare, and the fiberglass handles were leaving slivers of glass fiber in my hands, so it was time.

Thursday 15 May 2014

Thursday - Another warm day. But the humidity is also low, in the 10% range, so the swamp cooler is working well.

S got a call from her mother, with all the fires in San Diego she had evacuated to a friend's house, then tripped on their unfamiliar stairs and broke her wrist, and spent an uncomfortable couple of hours in urgent care alongside some fire victims. It never rains but it pours.

It's crazy down there. I said years ago - decades ago, now - that we need a dedicated water bomber in the 1,000 ton class. The State of California needs it - but what we are getting is a bullet train to nowhere. Every time I see a newscast video of WWII era bombers and helicopters doing the firefighting I cringe.

Wednesday 14 May 2014

Wednesday - Not too much going on. Some app stuff, a few discussions with Tim about work. Warming up - I had the a/c on.

Tuesday 13 May 2014

Tuesday - Vacuumed and dusted the downstairs and stairs, much to the cats dismay. They are getting braver however, and ventured out from under the bed after I stopped in perhaps half an hour.

Ten years ago I'd just finished repainting the house eaves here. They're holding up pretty good in general, but the eaves in the back that face directly south need a redo. I painted the patio eaves last year, I think, but the underside white coat on the patio needs a redo as well.

Also, I noticed that the trim paint is completely gone on the chimney trim. I can't recall if I repainted that or not in 2004 - it'd be hard to get too. In any case it's pretty much bare wood now.

Afternoon was spent on app stuff, mostly.

Tim called, he's in Ventura, and we discussed the inspection results for the levee stuff .

Monday 12 May 2014

Monday - It's supposed to warm up, but it's only getting into the 70's currently. Nice.

I couldn't stand looking at the long grass, so I mowed the back yard. It's hard to enjoy your morning coffee looking at fescue a foot high and going to seed! I may have lost my yard workers - they live a long way aways and I can't expect them to show up like they did when they lived two miles away... I took it easy, tied the safety bar so that I didn't have to clench it, and pushed the mowed with my body as much as possible, and took it easy manhandling it through the turns. And I wasn't too much in pain afterwards, so that's good.

Afternoon was app stuff, reading up on iOS Core Animation mostly. Also installed Drop Box and Google Drive on the machines I'm using.

Sunday 11 May 2014

Sunday - Another cool in the morning and windy later day.

I didn't actually do much. Still resting the hands. Fiddled with little stuff, sprinklers and so on.

Kirk had given me a tough Calculus problem on Saturday night. It took me a couple of hours to solve, I'm so rusty. Essentially it was a 'change of variables' double integral problem. After the first change it looked like you needed to do another, but that was a red herring. Actually you just needed to expand out the polynomial - 5th order I think - and individually solve them. You ended up with an term involving ln|x| from 0 to 1, which is undetermined at zero, making you think you were doing the problem wrong - but there was a similar but negative term in another portion that canceled it out. All in all fairly tricky for someone who last really studied this stuff in the 1970's...

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Seen at a yard sale, the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, children's book.

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