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WEEK 3 2009

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Saturday 17 January 2009
Saturday - off to Martinez. Good weather, not much traffic...

Friday 16 January 2009

Friday - I packed, and then headed out for a partial days work, up in Thousand Oaks. The commute took about an hour longer than I expected - there was a terrible accident on the 101 that delayed things. Looks like a tractor-trailer wrapped itself around a stanchion. I worked until about 3:00, then headed up to Lancaster for dinner with friends, and a good night's sleep with very happy cats.

Thursday 15 January 2009

Thursday - Not much to say, just another day at work. Balmy weather mostly, if a bit on the warm side.



I received an email from my old boss, Dr. Kajal Gupta, passing along the info that his old professor, Dr. Olgierd Zienkiewicz, had passed away. I met OZ a couple of times, he was a cheerful and intelligent fellow, clearly a man of remarkable parts. I have several of his textbooks.



You know, I've been waiting to meet Umslopagaas again, he of the axe. It seems that memory has failed me, and he appears, rather,  in Haggard's Nada The Lily, and perhaps Allan Quatermain, rather than KSM or She. I read all these books years ago, at the Martinez public library. Umslopagaas was good with the axe, as I recall, but had a trick wherein he used the pointed back to deadly effect.



full moon
A pda pciture of the biggest full moon of 2009.

Wednesday 14 January 2009

Wednesday - Warm, 85F and higher. But nice, not too humid. There were some winds - breezes really - so it was not bad. Actually it reminds me of my teenage days in Martinez, for some reason.



I am working through H. Rider Haggard's She on tape, my commute book. And...it's bad. Terribly written. Not nearly as good as King Solomon's Mine. Example: our intrepid hero, having survived various adventures and battles is about to meet the fabled Ayesha for the first time. The tension builds...so Haggard goes into a dissertation on Holly's clothes, those being a business suit that he's brought to the wilds of Africa (gray flannel, weighing four pounds, by the way).

I did note that Tolkein borrowed a bit from the description of Ayesha - Galadriel's viewing fount, for one, is a direct copy of that described by Haggard, though Haggard explicitly dis-allows viewing the future in it while Tolkein's Galadriel merely says that any depicted future is "one that may be".

Tuesday 13 January 2009

Tuesday - .I hear that the Electoral College has voted, and Obama is now the President Elect, rather than Presumptive President Elect.

Warm today, balmy even. Shirt sleeve weather in mid January.

 Monday 12 January 2009

Monday - a long day at work. Not too much to say there. It is getting warmer, so that's a plus.

Cleaning up around the house this weekend I ran across a book I read, sometime over the holidays.

Book #3 is Hanging Woman Creek, by Louis L'amour.

Sunday 11 January 2009

Sunday - not much to say. Lots of errands and chores done.

I went to Costco to (1) renew my membership and (2) get my prescription for new glasses filled and (3) get new tires on the Explorer. Sadly (2) and (3) did not get done - I forgot my prescription and it turns out that the spare tire does not have the correct rim - and one of the four is bent - so that had to be put off until I get a new rim. Tires are 119.99 each, plus $11 for installation, balancing, stem, etc. So a fairly costly endeavor, but they are getting down to the wear lines, and the bent rim means I am continually putting air into that tire.

Several visits to various stores - I tried to get a haircut but the barber wasn't in, and some cleaning up and laundry (six baskets!) about the house. I also turned on my sprinklers, apparently they had been off since the Christmas snow, or possibly before.

I did get an external network attached disk, with FTP and Samba, but haven't really had a chance to configure it yet. It works, pretty much out of the box, with Windows.


Too bad about the Chargers, I had hopes.  As the last west coast team they were the only team I really had any interest in. Oh well.


Picture of the Week
Sunset, with smoke from the coastal fires
Photo Notes: Desert sunset, with smoke from a fire.

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