Squaring away the packing now. Laurel has a load in the dryer and one waiting in the washer to go next. I just have to drop my folded clothes in my suitcase and load my carry-on.

About an hour ago the combination of low caffeine, changing air pressure and menstrual cramps had me curled in a ball trying to peek at the laptop to make sure it was good to go. Two ibuprofen and a 12-hour Sudafed have me back on track. Drinking flat bottled Dr Pepper though, bleh.

Laurel is too excited to sleep, but I'm not too worried about it. Our airport shuttle will arrive between 0345 and 0400 (our flight leaves DAL at 0635) so I expect her to sleep in the shuttle and maybe in the airport; she can fall asleep just about anywhere so I'm down with that.

Re the laptop, we wound up dropping in a new hard drive and running the system recovery discs. I installed Windows updates today plus my preferred apps and some PopCap games for Laurel. For all my worry about poking around inside the laptop, it will be easy to add RAM later and I'm good on drive space now (new drive is 5x the capacity, woot). Also installed the wireless-G card I picked up as an open-box find at our local electronics store to free up a USB port from the older wireless adapter.

Off to double-check the toiletry bags and make sure I have enough zip-lock bags for my compulsive compartmentalizing of the carry-ons. If I don't post again before I leave, I'll post after we get to Colorado!

<voice type=Professor Farnsworth>Good news, everyone! </voice> It's warming up in Dallas in time for me to leave town for the holidays! At least I won't be going downstairs to meet the airport shuttle early Friday morning in sub-freezing temperatures.

I had a followup with my GP today and -- no surprise -- the lump we felt at the last visit is gone. I think she believes that I have ornery boobs now. (I reiterated the family history of fibrocystic breasts, the only incidences of breast cancer being in advanced age, etc.. I sound cocky about medical issues, but anything out of the ordinary would be promptly imaged.)

My secondhand laptop that has been retired from everyday use since we resurrected my desktop system won't boot. It posts, but doesn't see the hard drive. It's set to auto-detect in BIOS setup, it doesn't see it. Bah. Since it's a relatively tiny (20 GB) drive, Vogon picked up a larger one at Fry's today, we'll hook up the current hard drive to the 2.5" drive hookup in his computer to see what TestDisk can see on it. Worst case, we'll put the new drive in and reinstall fresh.

As a reminder, I'll be in Colorado from the 19th (late morning) until the 31st (early morning). My schedule is still open, less Christmas morning and a possible lunch with ass_, if you want to earmark any of it.

Laurel fussing at her computer not doing exactly what she wants when she wants has been making me feel unreasonably irritable. This will be relieved soon with upgrading of her computer (whee sale finds at Fry's) but I am leaving that to Vogon since I do not have a good track record of putting new components together. (I am fine with adding something to an existing system, but the last few times he's left me to assemble an entire system it has ended in frustration and him doing it anyway.)

Right now there are five CPU cases in our main living area. Three are new (for a file server and new builds/rebuilds of Laurel's and Vogon's systems) and two are old pending recycling (my-just-replaced tower and a ten-year-old Dell case). Also four boxes that cases came in and their *cringe* Styrofoam packaging. It's like Christmas without the stockings and extra teeth-skreeking Styrofoam. And I have to continue reinstalling applications on my just-replaced system, so I am currently just puttering along until I remember "Oh hey! I don't have [x] installed yet" and get sidetracked doing that. It's not bad, just funny that I haven't realized what applications I depend on and how often until I want to access them.

...

We took the Squeaky to the vet on Monday morning. Everything's normal (no sign of worms!) but he's a few pounds over where the vet recommends he weigh, so we are introducing Hill's Prescription Diet w/d to up the fiber in his diet and see how that helps his digestive issues. Squeaks also rode in the carrier without messing in it, a first for him. Thanks, radixx, for suggesting we put a bit of food in with him to prevent that.

I have a working webcam now and it looks like HAL. Thanks, R.

I have been walking around all day saying "Ongawa!" and laughing at myself since reading a post in which a friend saw a license plate bearing that personalization and in sharing with Vogon, he automatically associated it with the 250' jump tower at Fort Benning. Old paratroopers never die, they just go to hell and regroup. (Speaking of that, I have some material fomenting on the upcoming anniversary of the invasion of Grenada, but it's harder to get him to talk than it was to get my older relatives to talk about family history.)

I wore my Weapon of Math Instruction shirt all day today and nobody said a word. One of the elementary school math teachers chuckled at it, so at least I amused someone with it. I am now debating pre-ordering one of the LibrArian tees because the librarian battle rap in Little Dee has been hilarious. Where else would someone rhyme anything with "foie gras"?

I started watching the load balancer page at pleasehold.evenue.net count down and reload every 60 seconds at 1030 Central Time. I think it broke around 1105, as I've mostly had to reload manually since then.

My F5 finger is getting tired.

Man, Joybubbles died.

...and I heard about it from NPR.

Being able to blog from the couch is almost as good a feeling as new glasses. Thanks, little sister. (She's upgrading to a tablet, so it's a win-win for both of us.)

This weekend's objectives include getting the helium tank filled, ordering a boxed lunch for myself for next week's field trip I'll be a chaperon on, making bread and putting finishing touches on the two gift baskets I coordinated for the silent auction at next week's school carnival. And finding a webcam for the amusement of a good friend under the impression that I'm cute. (;

I'm particularly proud of the baskets: a hermit crab starter kit with kid-appealing accoutrements my Cub Scouts picked out and a toddler girl's selection of handmade dresses and accessories. I'll post photos next week.

Last week's Arrow of Light ceremony was chilly so any pictures of me in my Scout uniform have my purple Polarfleece jacket over my uniform shirt. Once S. burns me a CD with the photos she took with Laurel or me in them, I'll post those too. She took a couple shots of the kiddo with bluebonnets at the park, which is great since I was so cold I only took a few photos of the cakes I decorated.

If you use Automatic Updates, Microsoft has probably already sent and installed the update patch.

You can get the update as a support file from Microsoft in Knowledge Base (KB) article 92838, 2007 time zone update for Microsoft Windows operating systems, or you can do it manually using the instructions in KB article 91437, How to configure daylight saving time for the United States in 2007.

Microsoft has a less technical article about the time changes here: Preparing for daylight saving time changes in 2007

If you're sticking with Windows XP for awhile, please note that the dates for daylight saving time (DST) are different this year in the United States and Canada: DST will start on the second Sunday in March and end one on the first Sunday in November.

Automatic Updates in Windows has probably already sent and installed the update if you use it. (I don't on my own computer, but I have it enabled on my family's computers.) You can get the update as a support file from Microsoft in Knowledge Base (KB) article 92838, 2007 time zone update for Microsoft Windows operating systems, or you can do it manually using the instructions in KB article 91437, How to configure daylight saving time for the United States in 2007.

Microsoft has a less technical article about the time changes here: Preparing for daylight saving time changes in 2007

Carry on.

Upon finishing her homework this afternoon, Laurel dashed into her bedroom and started clicking the power button to the monitor on her computer furiously, followed by an exasperated sigh.

(Until I can afford to replace the motherboard in my computer, I've been using my old computer, which had been in her room. I got tired of having to sit on her bed to use it, so I unplugged the tower and hooked it up temporarily at my computer desk.)

Now she is throwing a tantrum and crying on her bed while I keep my headphones on and let her fall asleep on her own.

Oh, the terrible deprived life of a six-year-old.

Replaced the PSU in my computer. We've got power but no booting. Yet.

In the meanwhile I am gimping along on my old system and using VLC to make screencaps for MuppetWiki. Today, it's an Elmo's World DVD I hope to send back to Netflix tomorrow.

Expect a more meaningful update tomorrow.

After I woke up this morning, I noticed my computer had turned itself off sometime during the night. Pressed the power button -- nothing. Got under the desk and checked all the cords, the PSU switch on the back of the case, and reset my power strip before pressing the power button again -- still nothing. The numlock light on my keyboard /is/ on though, which I find confusing but hopeful. Until I call down to Altex for a quote on looking at Linden, I'm back to using Naess, my old computer, in Laurel's room.

Biko has pitched in her support by moving her stealth operations from under my computer desk (the "cat cave") to Laurel's bed while I am using her computer. This has led to me typing this and eating refried beans in the bedroom while Biko grooms her hind legs and shoots me "I'm gonna come lick your hairy legs" looks.

Some good things I have done this week:

• I completed a survey at Lightspeed Consumer Panel to earn the last few points I needed to redeem them for a $15 PayPal credit.


• I found my missing school directory from last year so I can call Laurel's best friend's mother to discuss setting up a play date for the girls.


• I organized all that program paperwork into a folder in chronological order to keep with the notebook I've been using for same.


• I installed the 3D Groove player on the computer in Laurel's room so she can play the 3-D games at Nick Jr. Playtime. (I highly recommend that section of the Nick Jr. site for younger kids if you have a broadband connection.)


• I picked up one Circle Ten CSP through Buy It Now and another an hour from the close of its listing on eBay for my Scout uniform so I've finally got everything I should have on my uniform shirt. It should arrive in time for me to sew it on prior to School Night for Scouting so I'll look all spiffy at the table for the age group I'm working with this year. This is important because recruiting an excited, committed to the program parent to be the den leader this year is an important part of the den's success and retention.

There were some other things, but they fell out of my head.

Also, stuff:

• This is the doorbell I would have in a utopian world.


• My finds at pallid_regina's LJ yard sale last weekend arrived today and now I am bouncing around between "Yay! Ben Kweller!" and "Yay! Aristocrats!" and beaming at the anklet because the dangly beads look like the cutest Cthulhu ever! Yes, I realize they're probably some culturally significant symbolism I don't recognize, but they look like Cthulhu to me and I /love/ that. And it fits! I am so excited by that, too, since I'm used to anklets and bracelets coming in one-size-that-does-not-fit-me.

A few days after trying moist burn pads on the patch of psoriasis on my arm, the overall constant itching is down, but I'm keeping my arm wrapped to prevent unintentional scratching. It seems to have accelerated the loss of a couple layers of plaques (scales) as the itching spikes periodically then, when I unwrap my arm, it sheds like varnish flaking off an old piece. It's weird, but the wrapping is helping the broken skin heal.

I finally got my wireless headphones tuned back in after retrieving them from the study a few weeks ago, but there's still a very narrow high-pitched tone, similar to the noise a TV makes, that's annoying the dickens out of me. (I unsuccessfully tried to tune them back in after I retrieved them before I figured out that if I have the audio splitter switched to the headphone jack, it cuts off the signal to the wireless headphones since they're plugged in as my primary speakers. Duh.)

My sleeping schedule has been borked for over a week now. Vogon has been sleeping in the study since he was sick last weekend and I have trouble falling asleep in the master bedroom on my own. It baffles me because the idea of having an entire queen-size bed to myself is an amazing luxury, but I can't seem to fall asleep alone there unless I've run myself so down I start nodding off sitting up. I've been alternately running myself down like that, which I know isn't good for me, and sleeping on the couch, which irritates him. I think I'll start taking melatonin at bedtime again after vacation. For now, I'm sufficiently run down enough to sleep. 'Night.

Today I had to walk the entire distance (1.3 miles) out to Laurel's school because Vogon had a last-minute meeting in another DFW suburb and I just barely missed both of the ladies I can usually catch a ride over to the school with. Luckily, I'd just refilled my water bottle, wore a wide-brimmed hat and caught the neighbor we could catch a ride home with after I got to the school. While we were waiting with the neighbor for their older child's class, Vogon called on his way back from the meeting, offering to pick us up and get a late lunch since he needed to eat. He also thanked me for making sure he had breakfast, because his blood sugar crashing could have been even worse without it. (He missed lunch at its regular time due to a business meeting.)

Later that afternoon, Laurel got fussy because she didn't really comprehend that waiting for the hottest part of the day to pass meant that we weren't going to the pool right after school. After the sun went low enough that there was some shade near the pool, getting into the water really took the edge off the heat and making Laurel propel herself more than I pushed her around in her pool ring will help her sleep better tonight.

Two moderate annoyances from today are that I found my Gallery installation is temporarily broken (geek.net moved to a new server earlier this week, resetting my file permissions and I keep getting a "can't display directory listing" FTP error when I try to log in to chmod things back appropriately) and I dropped the bottle of amoxicillin while shaking it, losing 2-3 doses on the floor and my clothing. I've e-mailed the server administrator about the former issue and I'll call the doctor later about the latter. Thankfully, it was the emptier of the bottles and we've got almost another week's worth of doses in the other bottle, so replacing it before Monday isn't critical.

The annoyances are generally ameliorated by the bottle of chocolate mint Bailey's waiting for me, but I've been instructed to not overindulge until Aunt Flo arrives in the next few days. Funny, I figured chocolate and liquor would be great for PMS. (;

Part of the reason why I enjoy scanning old photos is having the opportunity to play around with them -- touch up dust spots, minimize creases and stains, draw goatees on people I don't like ...well, you get the idea. Today my sister sent me a few dozen photos our cousin had scanned and two were earmarked as ones that had been chosen to go in the booklet for Grandma's memorial service. Naturally, I jumped at the chance to see what I could do with them before they went to printing.

Before-and-after samples:
( Two images, 180 kb total )

Exactly what can be saved off the won't-boot hard drive will remain a mystery for awhile longer. After a recovery program that hummed along for 26 hours last week finished and was waiting for Vogon to look at it after he finished working that day, Laurel helpfully turned off the computer despite having been instructed repeatedly to leave it alone.

In the meanwhile, watching TV with captioning on makes for some hilarious commercials. I just spotted the line "Pre-tuned by German engineers." from the end of a Volkswagen ad remain on screen throughout an eHarmony; the other day, "Ask your doctor about Nasonex" remained in the middle of the screen through commercials for a car dealership and a clothing store.

The dresser we looked at the other day is no longer on sale, but the same size dresser from IKEA is 20% less than the non-sale price of the Target dresser. It's still a crapload of money to me, but anything over $20 is a lot of money to me.

...

And now for something completely different: the mantid egg pods Vogon bought a few weeks ago have started looking ready to hatch, so he decided to buy a second tank to keep the two pods separate. That led to buying crickets to feed them after they hatch and food and plastic cages for the crickets. He put the larger cricket cage down where both Laurel and Biko could watch it, which was nice, but I thought one might have escaped when Biko pounced into the (closed) study door for no reason that I could see.

A few minutes ago I walked by the spot where we keep shoes near the entry and thought I saw something move there, nudged a few shoes and lo and behold, there's a cricket in there. Vogon's in the study and didn't respond when I knocked on the door and told him I think we've got loose crickets.

How would you catch the crickets and get them back into the cage without harming them? What can I do to keep them in the cage and not escape?

The dress for the volunteer sewing turned out to be more challenging than I had expected. The pleated crepey fabric was so hard to keep square while cutting it out that I was dubious about following the pattern directions to make the lining free from the dress except at the neckline, so I densely pinned the crepey pieces to the cotton lining fabric keep the pleats in the fabric even and the whole shebang square, then serged all the seams I could. (Read that as "everything except the zipper insertion, attaching the straps and hemming".) I won't see how the finished pieces look being worn until the cast photos come back from printing since I was helping with food sales at the meeting and was in the foyer during the show, but several people that saw the show Tuesday night told me the pieces I made look fabulous. Phew.

edit, 16 March: here's a photo of swatches of all three fabrics used in the dress.

...

At the pack committee meeting this week, I was asked if I'd like to work with the Tigers after my den crosses over to Boy Scouting next month. I said I'd be happy to, but if another den that has a new Scout who's an ESL student could use me more, I'm reasonably fluent in Spanish. One of the committee members asked, "Is there anything you CAN'T do?". I replied that I haven't learned how to drive a stick shift yet so that's why Vogon drives me everywhere. They laughed. I was serious.

...

This week has been interesting for computers.

( The new system is *much* faster, but it won't recognize my old hard drive. )

...

A few links blogged for future reference:

- The Best Word Book Ever,1963 and 1991.
- How I Gamed the SAT
- Are You a Marryin' Fool?

Apparently the interlocking bookends I keep trying to retrieve from the glurge of my long-ago library memory are Miracle Bookends. I would request a Brodart catalog but I suspect that after it arrived I would just want to stroke it tenderly and wish I knew how to quit it.

From SugarBank, a blog about the business of pornography: A Pornographer's Guide to Protecting Kids from Porn Online. (This specific post does not contain explicit content.)

It's nice to see someone else saying the same thing I was saying to a newsgroup in 1999 about safe surfing needing active supervision more than filtering software. My favorite lines from Sam Sugar's article:

"Protecting children who aren't actively looking for sexual material is as simple as good parenting."

and

"When minors are interested enough in sex to look for it online, the rules change. You can't treat pornography as something they're innocently stumbling into, and you can't expect them to ignore the mental and physical aspects of puberty until they're legal adults."

Things are presently subpar around here on many levels, from simple things like the latest version of Semagic not installing properly (I've downloaded it four times from different servers and gotten the same error about a specific file not extracting every time) to more serious stuff some of you have already heard about. I'm going to keep my mouth shut about it from here on out and hope it gets better.

...

Now that our Arrow of Light/Cub Scout graduation ceremony plans are more concrete, the den I work with is getting ready to enjoy our pack's Blue & Gold banquet later this month and they'll be going to the Scouting Museum next month.

Scouting for Food bags were distributed yesterday, so please fill them with canned items and put them out on your doorstep next Saturday for pickup! If your bag isn't picked up then, you can take it to any Tom Thumb store and deposit it in the Scouting For Food barrels that are in their stores this month.

...

Some other good things:

I got a new (remanufactured) toner cartridge for my printer last week. It's really nice to skip removing and gently shaking the cartridge from side-to-side every time I want to print something. Thank you, Vogon!

It's not too late to get your sweetie a Bowling For Jesus Black & Red Swingmaster (item no. SMSBRBFJ) from BowlingShirt.com for Valentine's Day... or you can get ready for St. Patrick's Day now with an Irish Drinking Team Green & White Classic or O'Malley's Alley Green & White Classic.

Over a week later, I'm still giggling at spasmsproject's short story "Thanks" and these 2003 Messages by Carl Kasell.

If you're looking forward to Valentine's Day as much as Laurel, you'll probably also enjoy these Countdown to Valentine's Day printables from Family Fun magazine.