After that, I went down to visit my sisters. K and her family are back from England, and her friend C was there as well. We had a nice visit with a good game of SCRABBLE, and I had a chance to see some of the very nice house work that my sister V has been doing.

After that we sat around and watched the bee's and hummingbird's in the back yard - it's been quite hot and they are congregating about the bird bath.

I asked Bob why he hadn't taken any pictures with the camera. He pointed out that while I had given him the Olympus 360L, I hadn't given him a download cable... Hmmm. I have only the one cable, and I need it for the 3040Z, since my USB is out on the home PC. I suggested he get one of those USB Key-drives. It's much faster, although I suppose you could eventually wear out the smartmedia card, inserting and removing it a lot.

Tuesday - I finished the front deck, and as I had some extra paint, also did a bit of trim and a couple of doors. It looks quite nice, if I do say so myself. It was a much cooler day, perhaps in the low nineties. My dad and I sat outside, enjoying the warmth and watching Pegg, the dog, crash around through the bushes, chasing lizards and what not. She is a black ( actually black and subtle shades of chocolate ) terrier mix of some sort, described by my father to the inquisitive as a 'lizard hound'. Some of these folk nod and say "Ahhhh." whilst others chuckle.

Apparently Pegg caught a squirrel the other day, laying it next to her water dish in the house, the same place she laid the rat she caught a couple of years ago. She is fascinated by small game, squirrels, lizards, and the like - and indifferent to birds and such. Go figure...

Pegg's a good natured dog, unless you get on her bad side....

My brother in law has set up a wireless network in his house. I've been thinking of do that myself, on the grounds that it's way too much effort to walk the twenty five feet to the computer from the living room. I asked him about security and he just said that if someone hacks in he'll reinstall system... These britishers are such jokers - it turns out that he has a firewall. He has written books on computer security, and I get the distinct impression that he feels that the security flaws in WEP and in most modern OS's are there by design...

Anyway, my half hearted effort to get the old Sony laptop onto (wired) ethernet has failed already, so I'm thinking of writing over the windows installation ( 98v1 ) with Redhat Linux 7.3. Question is, is there a good wireless card/access point for Linux? I imagine there is.

I found a couple more spots on the deck that needed painting, and also did the front door, which looks better now. Probably I should have used something besides deck paint, but it's what I had. If I go over it later with a nice glossy paint it'll make a nice base coat, right?

We then watched the 49'ers squeak out a win against the NY Giants. Both teams were rather unexceptional in their performance (first game of the season, after all) but you wouldn't know it from listening to the ghastly ESPN announcers. Every thought, every player, needed a superlative in the description, even if it meant actually ignoring reporting the plays on the field. As pointlessly gassy as the Monday Night Football announcers can be in the second half, but right from the beginning of the game.

Pegg found a skunk during the night. Fortunately it missed spraying her, but some portions of the rear patio are whiffy. I was going to sweep and clean, but thought I'd let it air for a day or two first. Yuck.

Tomorrow I mean to get down to the boat...

The Oakland A's finally lost, after winning a record 20 games in a row. I imagine the team is a little bit relieved - they can now concentrate on very good baseball, rather than perfect baseball. Of course these players are all tremendous competitors and would deny such a thing, but they were clearly pretty flat the last couple of games. On the other hand they lost in the dome in Minnesota with the horrible Astroturf - it's almost not baseball at all there but rather some horrible satanic imitation. Sort of like Canadian or European football is to real football.

My Dad had a story about building the front porch. The house next door was being rebuilt at the time and the workmen there asked if he was a professional carpenter... Now that's a real compliment.

The A's and the Giants both won, so that's good. Unless you're a die-hard Dodger fan, unlike me. I'm a fair weather fan for the most part, I just enjoy whichever is winning the most...

We were watching the game on tv, and there was a commercial where some sea bird lands on an island shaped like the Shell Oil Company logo. I've no idea why because we had the sound turned off. My father said it reminded him of Saipan, and that he had thought of revisiting there after the war. Which reminded him of the day during the invasion when a Japanese plane strafed the beach. There were about five hundred landing barges there, each equipped with two machine guns, each gun manned by a seaman first, and every one of them opened up. After the plane flew away, untouched, the petty officers spent hours going around to the boats and instructing them that the guns were only to be used against land targets... A thousand machine guns, manned by untrained personnel, all firing at once over each others head...

Photo Notes: Here are a couple of nieces of mine, sitting in the Poppy fields outside of Lancaster. In a good year it can be a really spectacular sight, flaming colorful flowers for miles. Lancaster even has a Poppy Festival, that has become larger and more elaborate each year.