Saturday
- a long day. First the cats and I had coffee and bagels and chased
butterfly's in the back yard. Then I opened up the SUV, took everything
out - including about a month's worth of fast food wrappers and trash -
and headed towards Mohave & the Big Move.
My friend M had been living
there for five years in an old church - it was about a hundred years
old, decrepit, but cheap. But married a year and with a baby on the way
he'd bought a place up in Tehachapi, and rented a 27 foot U-haul,
talked a friend who owns an old school bus and trailer into helping,
and lured a bunch of the rest of us with vans and SUV's into the heavy
lifing, with the promise of free pizza and beer.
It was warm in Mojave, about 100F, but we got everything loaded in
about five hours, then headed up. The new house - and it was new, still
smelling of fresh paint - looks great, and at 2000sf easily held the
caravan of stuff. Somewhat less easily it held the 2ndcaravan of
stuff, that being the wife's stuff from out of state that was cached in
a (thankfully nearby) storage yard. But it all fit, although it's
unlikely they'll be parking any cars in the garage for a while.
A good days work. And the beer and pizza were delicious.
Friday
- put in a days work, did some banking, then hit the road back to Lancaster.
Sans laundry. I was at the bank in Camarillo after work and the 101 was
completely jammed going back to Ventura. Not wanting to spend an hour
in traffic I just headed home from Camarillo. I rarely take the 101,
preferring the 126, but it was interesting. Fast traffic, even on a
Friday, after getting past the grade. I suspect people are so used to
pressing down on the accelerator on that grade that they forget to let
up, thus ending up doing 80 and 90mph on top of the hill. Not me, I
baby my car, but people were flying past in the fast lane.
It was warm inland, from the shirt sleeve 75F in Ventura to about 85F
in Woodland Hills. I kicked on the air and forgot about it. As I was
pulling off the freeway in Lancaster I glanced at the outside air
thermostat readout - 109F. Wow.
After 10 days straight of work I just took a nap when I got home, then showered, and went out for a beer with some friends.
Tomorrow I help move somebody.
Thursday 24 July
2008
Thursday
- a pretty good day. Not footage wise, but when you burn the mapper
battery by noon you know you've been working. Anyway, got a lot done,
and they scratched some of the remaining inventory off, so the end (for
this part of the project) is finally in sight.
In a continuing series:
Darth Vader crossing the Delaware.
I don't know why these amuse me so, but they do. I found it at Worth1000,
which also has some other Stars War / classic art mashups.
He is also having electrical problems, not good for somebody who
doesn't know how to use a sextant. A complete loss of power is not
unheard of - Hancock mentioned it happening to him in a yacht delivery
in this year's Book #14Spindrift
and I've heard of it happening elsewhere. I wonder if he could teach
himself, from scratch, if he loses power for his GPS, his RADAR, his
SatPhone and SSB suddenly? He'd still need an accurate watch or a WWV
time tick, and a nautical Almanac.
He's heading into coral territory, in a fiberglass boat, maybe he'd better start studying...
Wednesday 23 July 2008
Wednesday
- not as long, but still tiring. Old, beat up channel with a lot of defects.
Bah.
The boss sprang for dinner, at a nearby joint, so that was cool. I
made the mistake of eating a Halapeno pepper, then swilling down Coke
to cut the burn. As as result I had a somewhat uneasy night.
Tuesday 22 July 2008
Tuesday
- busy. Worked a long long day.
I stopped by the library, but was too tired to select anything to read.
The particular branch library I was at was a bit odd, they didn't
segregrate. Science Fiction and Mysteries were housed with the rest of
the main collection. Good and bad. Most Sci-Fi is kept separate so that
the great unwashed don't get any unusual ideas, although you see the
really big sellers and the books with movie tie-ins housed with the
standard fiction.
No way to tell if it was respect for the sub genres or just laziness on the part of the branch librarian.
Monday 21 July 2008
Monday
- back to work. Working with the Thales Mobile Mapper is always an
exercise in (im)patience. Then the wheel started acting up, missing
it's count, and the camera mysteriously didn't record several video's
that I distinctly
remember making. And, to top it off, some of the footage done over the
weekend was supposedly not
county easement, although it is clearly
marked on the supplied map as so.
Mondays. Bah.
Book #35,
finished a while ago, was Mary Gentle's A
Sundial in a Grave: 1610: A Novel. It was pretty good - sort
of a cut rate Cryptonimicon
in a way, with adventurer's traveling all
the way around the world. The MacGuffin
was the idea of using math to tell the future, a bit like Flynn's In
the Country of the Blind, but with an undescribed addition of
astrology. It was marred, like a lot of her recent stuff, by
weird kinks. In this one a strange S&M
subplot. I
suspected that the math (also not detailed) of 1610 wasn't up to this
stuff, but John
Napier had discovered (invented?) a version of the
logarithm at around this time, so it's possible. I mean, possible
enough for a fantasy novel. Not a bad book, but hard to recommend...
Sunday 20 July 2008
Sunday
- worked a half day, then did laundry, shopping, and other errands.
I was going to watch teevee, but couldn't find anything I wanted to
watch. I'll have to catch up on the TIVO this coming weekend.
Along those lines, I did catch a couple of episodes of 'The Closer', a
while back, and enjoyed them. I've generally stayed away from the whole
wacky-but-smart-female-detective genre, but it seemed like a decent
enough show. I'm not sure what network it is on - not one of the 'big
three', I think. I've pretty much given up on Galactica, it's just
tripe these days. Too bad, there was potential there.
