Saturday
- made scrambled eggs & bacon for breakfast, and some more muffins.
Muffins, apparently, have a low vapor pressure, sublimating at room
(kitchen) temperature...
Or there is a mouse. I'll have to get some poison, and find a safe spot for it, away from the dog.
I finished re-cooking all the turkey, and freezer bagging it. Finished
washing all the left-over plates and dishes. But there isn't room in the trash
can for all the left over boxes and debris since I was here last - odd.
My brother's Thanksgiving dinner turned out fine:
"Well, here's
my turkey candidate, the first I've ever cooked, that is, and it came out
great.
Tender, juicy, AND WELL COOKED. Beginners luck, I
guess."
'Beginners Luck'. Well, humility, is good. But did you ever notice how
difficult it is to tell true humility from thinly disguised gloating?
The Linux box here failed, it comes up very slowly into the Busybox ram
file system, then won't do anything else. A bit of online digging
suggests that this is due to a bad shutdown and lost system files. But
Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon) runs, I
thought, a journaled file system, so system disk files shouldn't be
corrupted. Hmmm. I was doing an Update last time I was here, perhaps that had something to do with it.
In any case, I think I will replace it with Poseidon Linux
(GIS and science oriented), but I don't have any DVD's to burn the
ISO image too, and really don't want to go to the computer store right
now.Yesterday was Black Friday, today is probably Somber Saturday.
Friday
- My brother is cooking a Turkey today, at his place, for some friends. Hopefully it works out better than mine.
Heh. I put a query into Ask.com, recooking turkey after carving, and as well as a bunch of useless results I got the following Related Searches:
Those Ask.com guys are weird. A friend told me that what to do: put the sliced turkey in
a pan, on a rack, with a little bit of water and heat at 350F for 45m
to an hour. So I did that, and Dad and I had a turkey dinner, with
cranberry, stuffing and mashed potato's for dinner. No vegetable needed
- there weren't any womenfolk present.
Thursday 27 November
2008
Thursday
- Well, it was a quiet Thanksgiving. Me, Dad, my brother Bob and sister
Virginia. The bird was not quite the success of previous Thanksgivings.
For some reason it would not cook. I baked the d**m thing for seven hours, and it was still pink. We watched almost two entire football games and Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull (On Demand) while it sat and did nothing. We did eat all the stuffing, all the johnny cake, and some mashed potatoes.
Oh well, the company was pleasant.
I was listening to Ben Bova's Moonrise, on cassette, on the way up. It was Thanksgiving appropriate - it had Gobblers.
Though, in a twist, these gobblers ate people rather than the other way
around (nano-deconstructors). Not done yet, so it isn't Book #50.
Another patriotic Martinez liquor store:
Mom used to buy her lotto tickers here.
Wednesday 26
November 2008
Wednesday
- I left about 10am for NorCal. My friend S cooked a home made pie, and
I wanted to wait for it :-) Also, after several late nights it felt
good to sleep in a bit. It started raining on the way out on Ca-138 and
pretty much sprinkled and rained all the way up the valley, and to
Martinez. There was quite a bit of traffic, and it crawled at times,
and came to a stop several times. One was a multi-car collision, all
off on the center divider, the others just ??? Anyway, eight hours for
350 miles, so an average of 45mph.
Beats walking.
After 9/11 one of the local liquor stores painted a giant American flag
on the side of their building. I thought it a patriotic gesture, my
sister thought it a reaction of fear, the owners being immigrants. The
difference between conservative and liberal viewpoints I guess:
Solidarity or Victimization?
When I was a kid, walking to high school, it was the Goodie Hut, and I'd often stop to get a pop or a Big Hunk bar. Now it's the Golden Vintage Market and the only reason I go in is when my father needs cigarettes.
The thing is, there are several other liquor stores in Martinez with
giant flags on the side. Here is a shot of Martini's, where it's on the
back of the store:
And here is a question: It's right next to a Safeway - so how does it
stay in business when Safeway sells everything it sells and at a lower
price?
Tuesday 25 November 2008
Tuesday
- finished the report, 7am to 8pm, ate lunch at the desk.
The
rain was late, not starting until about 4pm in Ventura, but it was
fairly heavy, and continued well into the evening. It was raining in
the Antelope Valley when I got home about 11pm.
Off to Martinez, tomorrow. Heh. Glad I didn't unpack my suitcase
yesterday...
Monday 24 November 2008
Monday
- back at work. It's taking longer to get down to Ventura - well over
two hours. I blamed it on fires last week, but it took just as long
today, so that can't be it. Perhaps it is just the darkness, slowing
traffic a bit.
Anyway,
a fairly productive day. I worked until dark, making my way back to the
Explorer by flashlight (pda light, actually). Then I went to the office
and worked until about 11pm, starting a report that is needed for FEMA.
It's for the levee inspection guys, but it pays the same.
They
are predicting rain tonight, and tomorrow, so I'll be in the office
working on the report. If lucky I can head north to Lancaster.
Sunday 23 November 2008
Sunday
- various errands. It all takes longer than I plan. A beautiful day,
warm and sunny, almost no wind. Home Depot was nearly empty, though the
clerk claimed they'd been busy before lunch. Walmart was busier, but
not much - I had my pick of two unoccupied cashiers when leaving with
my 40 pounds of kitty litter.
It turns out that my little Zen V player will record on line-in to a
WMA format. It means I can back up tapes to digital, which is nice.
Unfortunately it does this in real time, as the tape plays, so it's
rather slow. But the tape machine does have automatic reverse, and the
little player is smart enough to interpret the silence at the reverse
as a new file, so it creates two 45MByte files for each tape. This is
probably overkill since audio narration doesn't require 128k fidelity,
but there doesn't seem to be any way to reduce this sampling rate. Oh
well, good enough.
I was trying to figure out what sound system the Explorer has. Poking
about online it seems to be either the Premium or the Mach system, but
there isn't any way to tell without pulling the unit out and looking at
the serial number information on the back. I think it's Premium, that
it never had a sub-woofer or remote, but the while the connectors on
the back are different the fronts are identical..
Crutchfield has a lot of options for both, though I would like to get
another AM/FM/CD/Cassette, possibly with satellite radio, HD radio and
bluetooth...
OK, I'm being silly. But I would like the Cassette option, and a CD
player to recognize MP3's.
It's clear that the old display problem - that is, no display, was a
design failure of the unit. Lot's of people had it, and the later marks
are advertised as not having that problem. It never bothered me much,
I'm either a go-to a present or scan kind of guy, not a "tuner" type.
The clock display would have been nice though.
