sailing the NorSea

x

WEEK 37 2009

Last Week- Sun- Mon- Tue- Wed- Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week

Picture of the Week

MAIN PAGE

Oxnard  Weather Underground
Click for Oxnard, California Forecast
Lancaster WeatherUnderground
Click for Lancaster, California Forecast 		Martinez WeatherUnderground
Click for Buchanan, California Forecast

First Post, 17 March 2002
 Seven Years Ago, This Week, 2002 Six Years Ago, This Week, 2003 Five Years Ago, this week, 2004 Four Years Ago, This Week, 2005 Three Years Ago, This Week, 2006
 Two Years Ago, This Week, 2007
 One Year Ago, This Week, 2008
 


Saturday 12 September 2009
Saturday - spent the day running various household errands. It seems like I never get much done, but I do seem to keep busy. Odd.

I did go over to Mike's place and help him with his wireless router, which wouldn't play nice with the new cable modem.  Essentially the problem was that his Linksys WRT54G wouldn't do the MAC address cloning thing properly. I gave him my old router, no longer needed since I use Verizon's EVDO through the Kyocera KR-2. When we went to hook up the Vista laptop wirelessly it got horribly confused, even though we set up the new router with the same SSID and WPA2-PSK as before. Deleting the old one completely, re-connecting to the new one, and four or five reboots later it was working.

Vista is such a dog. It is still better than Windows ME, but not by much. The beautiful new HP Touchsmart at work loses connectivity - wired connectivity - two or three times a day and has to be rebooted to fix it. A reboot takes more than five minutes.

Friday 11 September 2009

Friday -  a full day at work, then off to Lancaster. Quarterly taxes are due this weekend, got to look at some paperwork...

Kitten watching
kitten watching
Phoebe, watching the kitten (from a safe distance).

Thursday 10 September 2009

Thursday - I am beginning to have (bad) dreams about spreadsheets. But I suspect my co-worker would prefer it to what he's dealing with right now ;-)


Notes on Mondays remarks, incoherent in an Eats, Shoots & Leaves way:
Recent animal stories:


Book #52 was Brainiac, by Ken Jennings. Jenning's was the guy who won 74 straight Jeopardy competitions. As expected from a trivia master it was fast paced, entertaining, full of trivia...

Wednesday 9 September 2009

Wednesday - still grinding away.


Von's has been having a promotion, 10 cent per gallon off on gasoline, in a deal with ARCO, and since I had a lot of credits built up I went by to pick up a card. The promotion ends Saturday, so... Unfortunately it seems that the deal with ARCO fell through, and the only place to get the cost break was at a Von's gas station.

I've never seen one - and I drive about 35K miles a year - and so asked where the nearest was. 'Goleta' was the answer. Thats about 40 miles from Ventura, and I'm driving the Explorer this week, so a round trip would take about 4 gallons, costing, say, $12.00. If I filled up there with a full 21 gallons, it would save me $2.10, for a net expense of $10 or so.

I go to Von's because it's the closest supermarket to my apartment in Ventura, not for savings or promotions or coupons, so I don't really care, but I imagine this leaves a bad taste in a lot of peoples mouths.

Tuesday 8 September 2009

Tuesday -  back to work, mid-morning in Ventura.

I left the kitten with a friend - one can leave full grown cats alone, but not kittens....


Still grinding away on the open channel inventory, but it's 95% done now. The gentleman who was to do it was shanghaied onto another task, but a co-worker and I are coming up to speed on things. It's a bit easier for me, since I can (usually) read my own writing in the field notebooks and memories (faint) of what the channel looked like when I inspected it. But I'm not a detail kind of guy, really, and am glad that J is and I am delighted to have someone there to cross check my work!


 A friend of mine, C, hiked Mt. Whitney this weekend - twelve hours round trip. When Dave and I did it in 2006, it took us 23 hours.

 Monday 7 September 2009

Monday - still dealing with a nagging headache - I suspect it's really some sort of neck strain, but it is nauseating to exert much effort or even read. Laying down makes it worse, so I ended up falling asleep in front of the teevee Sunday night. An ice pack on the back of the skull & neck seemed to help.

In the late morning I went out to Fox Field and photographed some of the water bombers landing and taking off. There were a number of other people there, doing the same. Unfortunately they had coned off the end of the runway as 'No Stopping', probably to avoid distractions to the pilots, so the the best spot for photography without a long lens was lost. I have just the 15-55mm on the old Rebel Xt, but I'll download what I took and see what comes out. I suppose one of these days I need to get a good telephoto, there is a need for it just a few times a year, but I do tend to do mostly outdoors and it would come in handy.

Midday I was co-opted into a cake decorating class. A friend was taking the class, but they needed a fourth participant or it would be canceled. So, since I was offered the cake I was to decorate, the early afternoon was spent learning to make stars and rainbows the proper way...

By the way, the picture below of the smoke plume was taken in the Michael's parking lot in Lancaster, coming out of the cake decorating class.

Sunday 6 September_2009

Sunday - not feeling 100%, so just did minor chores and errands all day. And played with the kitten....

Picture of the Week
pyrocumulus of the station fire from Lancaster

Photo Notes: 'Station' fire - Pyrocumulus from Lancaster, September 2009

Last Week- Sun- Mon- Tue- Wed- Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week