Summer Waxing Green Corn Moon
This is yet another color, black. Is this readable?
Category Archives: GeekWorld
Fade to Black
Summer Waxing Green Corn Moon
The demon of blackness has chosen many screens as his domain, at least many domains that read this blog. I’ve changed colors here to see if it helps. Please let me know if it does.
Gadget
Summer Waxing Corn Moon
A.T. got a Blackberry. He’s not proud of it, but the life he’s chosen for the next couple of years, especially the Sierra Club part, will require maintaining a calendar while away from home, checking e-mail and using the internet. A phone with those features made the most sense. He thinks. Only use will tell.
A.T. also got a new watchband. But, sadly, no ring has turned up or come out. That means soon we’ll have to face the question of how to reband (rebrand?) him. A ring carries important social and personal meaning. A.T. feels weird without his wedding band.
Can You Read Me?
Summer New Moon
Are any of you out there having trouble reading Ancient Trails? One user on a Mac finds the website totally black, not as that’s existential, dude, but as I can’t see what you’re sayin’ man.
A.T. wants to know if you find the site hard to read for any reason. Let him know.
Waving As They Left
Summer Waning Summer Moon
Duffel bags and cloth grocery bags went into the plastic Yakima carrier on top of the Colorado state car, the Subaru. Ruth got in her car seat with the two spongy plastic balls Grandma bought her. Gabe crawled through the morning grass and got some cutting on his Gap jeans and his pale blue shirt the color of his eyes. Herschel came out, bounded up in the front with Ruth, then went, reluctantly to his place in the rear where he has a small fan to keep him cool. Finally, Mom and Dad got in the front seat and the Olson family headed out for points west.
Grandma and I stood, waving as they left. We were sad to see them go. Jon will have surgery on his shoulder on August 12th, surgery made necessary by his joint crushing fall now over two years ago. Jen starts her work in a new school at the end of this month and she’s excited about that. Ruth and Gabe will continue to head across to Marcella’s, or Humphrey’s as Ruth calls her long time day care provider.
We’ll seem them again sometime in the fall; I may go out for a visit after Jon’s surgery to help out for a bit. It still feels a bit odd to be the Grandparent, the one visited by the kids after a long drive away from home. Odd, but good.
Last night I scored a minor geek triumph. My photoshop elements ceased functioning a good while ago, over three weeks. This is a program I use a lot. I got so frustrated with it that I took it to the Geek Squad. They fixed my disappearing optical drives, sold me two more gigs of RAM but said pass on a photoshop fix.
The guy suggested a repair install or a remove and reinstall. I did both. No joy. I went through all the diagnostics I know the machine has available. None there either. Finally, late last night I went back to the chat rooms and found, on an Adobe forum, a possible fix. I tried it. Damn. It worked! Satisfaction. Felt pretty damned good.
Installing the two gigs of RAM was the first time in my long experience using computers that I had cracked the shell and done any work inside. It took a bit of time and care, but, by god, I got them in and now this computer has three gigs of RAM. More satisfaction.
123456789 Tomorrow
Summer Full Summer Moon
Woolly Mammoth Tom Crane sent this interesting note:
I’ve been alerted to an event that will take place later this week, something that happens once and only once over the course of history. Shortly after noon on July 8, comes the moment that can be called 12:34:56 7/8/9.
Don’t forget. A once in our calendar moment.
Now that the mulch pile has been moved I can turn my attention to other garden tasks like weeding the clover, checking for new potatoes and looking at the garlic. Weeding vegetables and perennial flowers. Harvesting vegetables. Thinking about how to fill in that spot in the year, late June, with flowering perennials next year.
Jon has one more carpentry task. We want him to wall in a portion of our utility room to create a cool storage area for fruits and vegetables, an inside root cellar. I don’t think it will be too complicated for him. He’s very skilled when it comes to handyman type work. Thank God.
One of these morning we’re going to the zoo to see the grizzly bears. I love to go to the zoo but its so far from here in Andover, almost 50 miles.
Woollys, Grandkids
Summer Waxing Summer Moon
Tomorrow we get the full on Summer Moon. We’ll have a warm, but not hot night with a brilliant satellite. No good for astronomy, but great for moon viewing, a favorite activity among the Japanese.
Woolly’s met tonight at the Black Forest. Mark, Stefan, Bill, Tom, Frank and myself showed up. Mark got the dam site job. He reports next Monday morning to Lock and Dam #1, the first official lock on the Mississippi River. The job runs until the river ices over and the barges cannot come. Stefan’s been giving himself fits over his children. A potential liability of parenthood.
I showed off the Kindle. I’m a fan.
Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe are back from a weekend in Chicago. There was a Bandel family reunion with rooms at the Doubletree and visits to Grandma and Grandpa, Ruth and Gabe’s great-grandparents. They are back here for four days, then they strike out for home in Denver.
Gremlins or Demons or Bugs, oh my
Summer Waxing Summer Moon
This morning the temperature has fallen back to 65. Good garden weather for moving mulch and repairing netaphim.
Electronic gremlins have given me fits for weeks now. Not strong fits, but sure annoying. A while ago my computer refused to recognize my disk drives. On a day to day basis this is not a problem, but on those days when I want to play a CD or reload software or look at photographs saved to disc, on those days it’s a total frustration.
Then, sometime after returning from the trip to South Carolina, Georgia and Florida my photoshop elements photo organizer seized up. It opens with a large rectangle in the upper left of the screen and a smaller slice vertically to the far right. Nothing happens after that. Again, on a day to day basis, not a big problem, but when I want to manipulate photographs, something I do often, particularly to make them smaller so they’ll fit on this website, I’m shut out completely.
In all these cases and the one below I try to sort stuff out myself. I have a pretty good, but not perfect track record at this. I never could figure out how to set up our wireless router, for example. Geek Squad. I may have to take my computer over to best buy.
The last couple of days, too, I’ve been bothered by a diminished stream. No, nothing that Flomax could cure. I’m talking about irrigation system. I’m very familiar with the amount of water that comes out of a given spray head. When it comes out in a weak flow, something is wrong. It happened last week and I called the well guy to check the well reservoir. Works fine and he did not charge me. Whoa. Again, this morning a weak flow. Hmmm.
Kate said, “I know why it’s weak. The front sprinkler is on.” Now that’s just strange. This should never happen, two zones on at the same time, unless two different programs are scheduled for the same time. Nope. I checked that, not the problem. Zones run in sequence. 1 runs, shuts off, then 2 runs, shuts off, then 3 runs and so on. Why this should happen, I don’t know, but I hope the folks at Rainbird can explain it to me.
Take That Hose And Grab It
Summer New Moon
A bit of a disconnected afternoon. A long nap followed by working for a while in the heat trying to figure which zone on our irrigation clock corresponded to which actual sprinklers. This was necessary because we got a new clock and the guy joined the wires in roughly the same order as the old one. Roughly.
The stimulus for this work came from Kate’s discovery that our new puppies get excited when the water comes through the netaphim line we just had put in our orchard. By excited I mean grab the netaphim and run with it, chewing all the while. Netaphim is a plastic tube about half the size of a garden hose through water drips onto plants rather than sprays. It works great, but better without teeth marks.
Tomorrow I’ll put all the netaphim lines on a schedule separate from the rest of the sprinklers and start them early enough in the morning that their work will be done before the puppies get up. That should solve it.
Decipher Hunt
Beltane Waning Dyan Moon
My e-mail accounts have slimmed down after post-vacation bloat. It always takes me a while to delete and save e-mails after a time away from the main computer. Done now and feels good.
The whole pre-Raph show work has begun to heat up and I plan to do some library time on the paintings I plan to feature on my tour. Not sure yet, but I’m leaning toward: Awakening Conscience, Sheep, Mary Virgin, La Dolce, Afterglow, Finding the Savior, Light of the World and Lady of Shallot. As to theme, not sure yet, but something to do with sight, like New Sight, Clear Sight seems possible or symbol, Decoding the PRB, or Decipher Hunt.
Right now I’m trying to kick my weather console and its data-logger (internet link) back into consciousness. Gonna try it again right now. Looks like its back. I missed its linking to the national weather observer network. Now it will get back on in a bit.
I have finally learned my cell-phone number. My sons will be so proud.