Happy New Year, my friends

This fall, Sunflower and I spent a weekend at Arbor Lodge. This is the home of Sterling Morton, the founder of Arbor Day. We get down there every every spring as the apple blossoms are at their peak, and every fall as the trees are turning. We arrived a little early this year, and our room wasn't quite ready, so we sat on a bench beneath a tree and took this picture from the camera built into my MacBook. Right now it is snowing lightly outside, and we have had some freezing rain, but the spring will come, and the apple trees will bloom......

Good morning friends,

It is raining here. The last weekend of the year looks pretty dreary. We have no great plans for New Year's Eve. We will probably go out early in the evening for a quiet dinner, then home to get out of the craziness. I am sure the college boys in the rental house a couple of doors away will have a house full of noisy, underage kids drinking vast quantities of beer, but this will be no different than any other given weekend. I see a few police cars in their near future.....

I hope you all have a lovely and safe holiday.

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them. (Luke 2:1-20 kjv)

Merry Christmas, friends

Well, a couple of weeks have gone by without a funeral to attend. We will see how it goes.

At one point, the company I work for was one of three locations. Fifteen years ago, my boss bought our location, cutting us off from the old owner. We have a pretty good working relationship. We do not encroach on each other's customers or territory, and once in a while, we order together to get the bulk discounts.

A couple of months ago, the guy who did my job at the Lincoln office quit, leaving them without a programmer. I have been rented to them off and on for the last month. I finished the bulk of the work today. Every day up there has just put me farther behind on my projects. Hopefully they will send someone to get some training, but it doesn't look likely. Today, I drove up there to load some programming. The panel was not done, and the CPU card was broken. The apparantly pulled the new card from this job and used it somewhere and didn't order a new one. I transfered the profgram to their laptop, gave detailed loading instructions and drove off.

More than likely, they will call when they get a new part and want me back up there. I don't think my boss will go for it. I hope not.....

The wake and the funeral are over. My nieces and nephew will now need to go through my sister's possessions and get the house ready for the market. Real estate is in a down turn here, so it may be a while before the house is sold. I have been speaking often to my sister in Texas. It is hard to imagine that we are the only ones left. She had planned to come this week for her daughter's Christmas party, and was unable to change her flight to get here for the funeral. I will pick her up at the airport Thursday for a long weekend visit. Possibly, I will have something other than depressing struff to post here soon.....

My sister had her carotid artery surgey a week ago today. A couple of days later she had a quadruple heart bypass. She did pretty good Thursday and Friday, but Saturday was when it started to get bad. Sunday evening she was in intensive care. She passed away this evening about 5:30......

Happy Thanksgiving all.

It was jsut the four of us today. One of our favorite retaurants had a dinner package available for just about what I would have spent at the grocery store. We picked it up last night, and just heated it according to instructions today.

Tonight, I have had too much good food and too much good wine. It has been a great day. I hope your day was great too.

It just continues. My sister, who is 63, went in for some tests. It was determined that her carotid arteries are plugged up. One is 90 percent blocked, the other 60 percent. Further testing found the need for a quadruple heart bypass. She will check in monday for the coarotid arteries, and stay in the hospital. Wednesay they will do the heart bypass.

Someday soon, I will post something upbeat........

Good morning friends,

I guess I am just getting to the age when we realize that we are not immortal. My friend Duane died yesterday of heart failure. Duane and his wife Pam have been friends of ours since our oldest children entered Kindergarden. We coached Little League with and against each other for years. Pam was a teacher's aid at the elementary school. One afternoon she held and comforted our oldest daughter, who had been injured on the playground until we were able to get there. Our familys have been joined by good times and bad.

Duane was a young auto shop teacher at the high school. On a field trip, he was discovered in a compromising position with one of the senior class girls (Pam) and fired. They were married a month or so later, and went on to thirty five more years together and five children.

He had heart bypass surgery a couple of years ago, but has been in failing health for a long time. I am glad he is at peace.

Good morning friends.

It would be great to have interesting and amusing stuff to post in my blog, but it just ain't happening. My trip to Fike last week to learn the Cheetah and Vesda systems put me a little more behind on my projects at the University. When I got back, I found that we have a new apprentice in our department. He seems like a nice enough kid, and he is willing to work. He knows nothing at all about what we do, do we can teach him from scratch.

It also proves that we do not profile our employees. He is in his early twenties, Arabic and his name is Jihad. Well, he will at least sty put. I am sure the Department of Homeland Security would not let him get on a plane,,,,,,

My brother Eddie died tonight.

Sunflower called me a few minutes ago. Eddie died of Lukemia. He was not actually my brother, but I have known him most of my life. He was the same age age my older sister. When he was sixteen, his mother got a job as a live in housekeeper. There was no provision for a teenaged son in her job, so Eddie was on his own. My sister brought him home, and Eddie slept on our couch for the next three years. This was forty five years ago. All these years, he has just been one of the family. I am stuck here for the next couple of days, so I am hoping the funeral won't happen until I get back. i'll sure miss him....

Good afternoon friends,

I am on the road again. I will be spending the next few days in Blue Springs Missouri at another programming school. This is for a type of system I have been working on for a few years with no training at all. So far, I haven't broken one, but I will be much better off with factory certification.

I have been pretty busy at the University. My esteemed competitor installed a system in a section of a building that was remodeled. It is incompatible with the rest of the campus, and I have been brought in to rectify this at my competitor's expense. Since this has begun, we have been given two of the other buildings to completely renovate. My competitior has been removed from the approved bidder's list.

A short trip to Blue Springs will be a nice break....

Good evening friends.

This weekend wil be one of the good ones. It is payday, i have a few extra dollars coming in overtime and commissions, and the best part: It is not my turn to take calls. we have tickets to Man of La Mancha at the local university, and plan to have a lovely dinner at our favorite restaurant.

The first Broadway show I ever saw was Man of La Mancha. It was on tour with Richard Kiley as Cervantes/Quixote and started my love of theater. Sunflower has never seen this play. it has been great to take her to various plays that she is seeing for the first time. Sometimes i envy her. wouldn't it be great to be seeing Damn Yankees, or West Side Story for the first time?

I hope you all have a lovely weekend too.

Good evening friends


The mac thing didn't work out. This afternoon I plunked down $2k of my hard earned cash and took my mac home to get started just like the commercials promise. right out of the box, step number 4 is to connect to the internet. Mac was able to see my home wireless network and prompted me for a password. Ten digits and click. fifteen seconds later, connection failure. I opened up my IBM thinkpad on the table next to mac and connected without a prolem. Five more failures, and I boxed mac up and took it back.

The store manager was sincerely trying to help and hooked me up with someone from the "genius" bar. He fiddled around about forty five minutes, and told me that I was good to go. Back home, mac would not even see my network until I forced it to. I entered the password, and recieved connection failure for my efforts.

My daughter's friend was around, and he tried with his mac to connect. Yet another connection failure. His mac dual boots in mac and windowsxp pro. He booted up in windows and was able to connect with no problem.

I boxed mac up one more time and returned it for my hard earned cash.

I guess my network just speaks windows. So much for mac advertising......

good afternoon friends, just a quick test post to make sure i remember how to do this....

it has been a long time between posts. when i came back from florida, we were a little behind on the work. shortly thereafter, we found that a competitor, who had underbid us for a project at the university, had ignored the portion of the contract requiring them to use the same technology as the rest of the campus. they have no one there who knows how to program this stuff. after a couple of rounds of meetings, the competitor refused to fix the problem. the contractor cut me a purchase order, which led to three weeks of pretty intense work to convert the new system to the older technology. now i am waiting for the program data from their system to be able to finish.

see, this blog can be just as boring as it always was.....

road trip!

sorry for the delay between blog posts. we have been working shorthanded, with much to do in a short time. we found a replacement for matthew yesterday. so far so good.

we have picked up a rather large account from a competitor. the drawback is that it is a product for which i have taken only the the hardware class, which is available as a "self study" course. this course is a prerequisite for certification, but will not allow us to properly serve this new large customer. i will be heading to the sarasota/bradenton florida area for a two week programming and network class june 5 to june 16.

eight hours a day in class plus homework hardly makes this a working vacation, but i plan to make the best of it.

good afternoon friends

lately, sunflower and i have been spending our saturday mornings going to estate sales. we really enjoy looking at the houses more than the stuff for sale, but once in a while we fid great stuff.

the first book i ever bought with my own money was a ballantine paperback edition of the beasts of tarzan by edgar rice burroughs. it was printed in 1963, and cost fifty cents. i still have it. over the next few years, i bought all of the burroughs stuff i could find, and i still have most of them. they are all rather battered and worn.

at one of todays sales, i found a complete set of the tarzan novels and about half of the martian novels (including two that i no longer had) from the 1972 printing and in pristine condition for fifty cents each.

i am looking forward to re-reading these. it will be like visiting an old friend.

good evening friends,

i have been pretty busy lately. we have yet to hire a replacement for matthew. this means that i am doing all of my job and at least half of matthew's. tommie (my remianing coworker) has been pretty tied up with his projects, leaving the incoming service to me. we have had a few applicants with no viable candidates so far.

the last guy we interviewed had been fired from one of our competitors because he was arrested right off of a job site for outstanding traffic warrants. this had resulted in a suspension of his driver's license. it is difficult to test and inspect fire alarm systems unless you can drive to the buildings they are protecting.

the polls for the governor's race that prompted my change of parties have had the candidates trading the front position by narrow margins. it will be close. maybe my one vote will tip the scale....

second attempt at publishing this. does anyone else use firefox? i had to go back to internet expolrer to publish this

good evening friends


After thirty four years as a registered independent, i stopped at the county election office today and registered as a republican. Over the years I have voted for the best person for the job regardless of party affiliation. I have never voted against my better judgment just because of the political ideology of the candidate. as an independent voter, i have never been allowed a vote in the partisan primaries.

The democratic candidate for governor has no chance of winning. Our next governor will be one of the three republicans currently running in a close primary election to be decided in a couple of weeks.

Our current governor was the lieutenant governor when mr. bush made mike johanns secretary of agriculture. Since then he has done a fine job.

Second on the list is a local business man. He is running third in the polls and is having some difficulty getting his message out.

The man with the best chance of winning right now is our third district congressman. He won his two house terms in landslide elections due to coaching our college football team to three national championships.

Our primary election is may ninth. While my one vote will not stop the coach from winning the election, I can not stand idle and let it happen with out trying to prevent this travesty from coming to pass.

My second issue is the senate race. Our senate seat up for election this year is currently held by a conservative democrat. While our senator will probably get my vote in the general election, it is possible he will lose his seat to the republican challenger.

One challenger is a business man running a very clean and positive campaign focused on the issues. The other is the former state attorney general who ran against our senator last election by one of the dirtier campaigns in recent memory. If our senator is to lose his seat, I would prefer the honest business man running the positive campaign to represent me in the senate rather than the mudslinging former attorney general.

As for our house seat, I will vote for whoever is running against our current republican sock puppet currently occupying the seat.

good evening friends,

it has been a couple of busy weeks. since matthew 's departure, i have been doing all of my job and at least half of matthew's.

spring seems to have really arrived here. we set a record high temperature today, and the trees are greening up nicely. it is a lovely evening to sit out on the porch and surf the net. tomorrow will be back to the grind, but tonight is wonderful weather, a lovely glass of spanish crianza and wireless internet....

good evening friends

well, we are back to two people in my department. matthew has some issues that have led to his dismissal. with as busy as we are, absenteeism really puts a kink in our customer service. mattew missed eight out of the first fifteen work days of the year. the boss was all set to fire him, and the service manager stepped in and gave him another chance..

we have been having some difficulty in seeing just what he has been getting done lately. monday, he skipped a service call to start on an installation, then bailed on the installation. tuesday morning he called me to ask a tech support question. that was the last we heard from him. he did not do the repair he had asked me about, and stopped answering his phone. i finished tuesday by catching the appointments he had made.

wednesday, he did not show at all, and did not answer his phone. we sent a couple of guys over to his apartment to see if he was there, and o.k. they could hear his phone ring, and someone moving around, but no one answered the door. the company truck was in his parking stall and unlocked. the guys brought the truck back.

thursday night, the service manager called the authorities. they found matthew at home, and seemingly o.k. the manager called after the police had been there and told matthew to come in this morning.

i missed the meeting, but heard later that matthew did not seem concerned that he had lost his job. he was very amused that the guys had been knocking at his door and that they did not know he was on the other side just laughing at them.

i hope he can get some help.......

all those years of sobriety, down the drain!

many years ago, when i realized how stupid i got when i was drinking too much, i gave it up. a couple of years ago i started drinking a glass of wine once in a while. i am partial to the spanish reds. a couple of glasses is about my limit.

last night, in an experiment, i exceeded the two glass limit. considering i was not behind the wheel or out in public, and that everyone else in the house had gone on to bed, it didn't go to badly. about halfway through the fourth glass, i dozed off in my chair.

i guess my capacity diminished over the years......

good evening friends

the refurbished "mint" condition thinkpad arrived today. it is even nicer than advertised. it is pristine. i was able to install my hard drive, battery and ultra bay floppy drive and start right up. not bad for sixty one bucks.


my next project is to take the other two laptops and tear them down and reassemble a nice working laptop from the parts. this will give me a back up machine for my critical applications. i should be able to do this with spare parts left over.

good morning friends

and happy saturday! this is one of the great weekends: it is payday, i have a nice chunk of overime pay and commissions on the check, i handed the on call responsibility off to matthew, and the used thinkpad i bought on ebay seems to be working fine. it is a little rougher in appearance than i am happy with, but performance is the important part here.

to solve this appearance situation, i have been watching ebay carefully. yesterday, i won an auction for another thinkpad. this one has been refurbished rather than listed as used. it carries a warranty and a return gaurantee. if delivered as advertised, this will give me a nice looking, functional laptop for work.

i can then take the rough but working laptop and the nice looking but non functional laptop and build a second machine to use as a backup.

some kind soul also auctioned off a set of technical repair manuals for these thinkpads.

happy computing!

good evening friends,

today, the ibm thinkpad i bought on ebay arrived. it started up fine, and seems to be working pretty well. this should allow me to just shift the hard drive from my broken thinkpad and get all of the programming i need at work to return to full operation.

not bad for 127.50

good evening friends,

today has been tax day at our house. i spent the afternoon with three sets of federal returns and three state returns. thank god for turbotax!

yesterday, it was a beautiful day. it hit sixty degrees and sunny. sadly i wasted six hours in a class i needed for the continuing education requirements for my electrical license. the guy who used to teach these classes retired and we had a new guy. he had copied a great deal of n.f.p.a.70 code into a power point presentation then spent most of the class time reading it to us as we followed along in the handouts he printed up from the slides.

great phrases like "the power sources of non power limited fire alarm circuits shall comply with chapters 1 through 4 and the output voltage shall not be more than 600 volts, nominal. these circuits shall not be supplied throug ground fault circuit interrupters (gfci) or arc fault circuit intrerrupters (afci)"

the challenge is not to understand the nature of non power limited circuits. the difference between power limited and non power limited circuits is a common discussion among fire alarm technicians. the real challenge is to stay awake while that guy reads this to us.

good morning friends,

after last night and the final minute of the ebay auction for an old, but working, ibm laptop it is easy to see why there are people who get hooked into ebay. i really needed this laptop. i have a particular set of aplications that will not run on anything newer than windows98, and will not even load on some of those. the laptop on its way is identical to the one i have been using that is now dead. i am sure that i can just transfer the hard drive from the old to the new and be back in action. well worth the $127.50 i had to bid

good morning friends,

tonight are the oscars, and having seen so few of the movies nominated, i will probably give them a pass. this last week has been constant computer repair. my younger daughter has been using a compaq desktop that i put downsatirs for her when i bought my newer computer. she asked me one morning if i had turned it off. i hadn't. "well,' she said "it is off and will not come back up" i have an old gateway that i have been using for network storage due to a failed video card, so i opened up both cases and started poking around. my older daughter called while i was doing this and told me that her computer "made a popping sound from the back and shut off and smells hot."

this gave me three computers on my desk in various degrees of disassembly. i bought one power supply and a cmos battery. a couple of days later, i have rebuilt two working desktops out of the parts from three that were not working.

now, if i can just win that bid on ebay for the parts i need to fix one of the laptops..........

customers suck!

friday, i am going to one of our customers for a meeting with the manager and their electrical contractor. they remodeled last summer, and the fire alarm suffered regular damage while the construction was going on. typically, i would get a call from the manager that they were having trouble. when i got there no one would ever cop to even peripheral involvement in the problem. i would spend a couple of hours tracing a circuit only to find out that "someone" had removed a few detectors. no one knew who took them out, or where they were. i would replace them with new detectors and get the alarm back to normal.

when i wrote the work ticket, the electrical contractor (who was supposed to be taking care of this system) would refuse it sending me to the facility manager, who would kick it back to the electrician. evidently, they have been arguing over who is to pay these bills ever since. i was unaware that we hadn't been paid.

someone is paying them friday! i don't really care who, but my boss has a mechanical lein all set to file. the facility is due for semi annual testing this month. if they owe us money, it will not be done.

someone around here won 365 million in the powerball drawing last night. it wasn't me.

aside from that, sunflower and i had a lovely weekend. it is pretty cold here, but we bundled up and braved the cold. with the increase in the cost of stamps, it has now become cheaper to drop our local bills in person, so we paid our utilities and a couple local stores. we stopped at an estate sale in the upscale neighborhood a few blocks away, but the stuff they had that was worth looking at was way overpriced. we had a late lunch at mimi's cafe in a room full of ladies in red hats.

sunday has been pretty quiet. comp usa had a pretty good sale and i picked up some parts for some much needed repairs on a couple of the desktop computers around here. i made a pot of chili, and now i am sipping a glass of geofranco wineries nero d'avola and relaxing in preparation of the coming work week.

mayby the next big powerball...........

good evening friends,

sunflower and i spent the afternoon at the home and garden show today. there are two of these, and there will be another in about three weeks. there was once a single show, with a single organizational committee. there was some sort of argument, and now there are two.

the most enjoyable part of these shows are the entries avaiable at each booth to win a new grill, or a new tv. by filling out these entries, you are guaranteeing that your name will be on the sales list for the booth sponsor for at least another year. i happily filled melvin's name , address and phone number on each slip.

you may remember melvin as the guy who tried very hard to interfere in my relationship with sunflower back when we were first getting aquainted. over the years i have made it a point to keep my practical joke skills sharp at his expense, sometimes pushing the envelope.

well, he will get plenty of phone calls from window, siding, roofing and various other home improvement firms, and i am sure he will enjoy the vacation plans offerred to him.

too bad it is illegal to sign the petitions to allow gay marriages, or to allow casino gambling in his name. when doing this sort of thing, it is important to remember what is legal. i learned this from my melvin campaign.

we have had a long run of unseasonable warm weather. there were a few days in january that reached 70 degrees.

winter came back today. we woke to a layer of snow with a slick icy base. the wind was out of the north and cut right through to the bone.

it is nice to be inside sipping a glass of gnarly head old vine red zinfandel.

so, what are you drinking?

too cheap to meter?

good evening friends,

i spent the day today testing some fire suppression systems at a nuclear power plant. back in t he beginnings of the atomic age, it was forcast that nuclear power could produce energy so cheaply that there would be no need to meter it. this did not come to pass.

our bill for the service we provide is pretty high. if these systems were anywhere else, it would take me half an hour to forty five minutes each to test and generate a one page report on the system status.

once the nuclear industry gets into the act, i have a procedure to follow that runs fifty or so pages. each and every step has to be verified over and over. i spent half an hour first thing this morning waiting for the shift supervisor to give his permission for an operator to give the tech i was working with the key to open the control panel. this is a standard key. i have a coffee can full of them. once, i used the key on my key ring to open one of these panels. this resulted in three seperate reports file to explain why we deviated from the written procedure.

the tech supervisor offered me a job today. i do not have enough patience to work in an environment like this. i am used to actually working and getting stuff done. these guys are way more concerned with the proper forms being filled out than they are with the proper operation of their fire suppression equipment.

yet another attempt to bore everyone to death. i sure appreciate all of friend tree's hard work at helping us all communicate, but it is time for me to try to manage this blog stuff on my own. the life i lead is quiet and peaceful as i can make it so there is not much exciting news coming from here.

today is the super bowl. not being a sports fan in general or a football fan in particular i plan to avoid it. i have a lovely bottle of spanish wine breathing, and i will sip it as i surf the net.

whomever you root for, i hope your team wins.