I loaded up all the remaining landscape blocks, all 70 of them, onto the trailer, plus the old wheelbarrow, then headed out.
It was a very slow trip, with a great deal of traffic. Semi-trucks were going faster than me, but that was all right. What is truly
frightening is the car attempting to use the slow lane to pass the
traffic in the fast lane. The fast lane is probably already averaging
in the high seventies to low eighties, so these really impatient people
are coming up behind me and my trailer at perhaps 90mph. Some misjudge
or lose their nerve and hit the brakes when they can't safely pass, but
other's brazenly cut over with a half car length or so to spare.
I saw another roll-over this trip, a small wagon (Subaru perhaps) off
the shoulder and down a slope to a field, upside down, cops and
ambulances already present.
At one time I would tell my father of these things that happen; but it
grew to worry him that I was putting myself at risk to visit, so I
stopped mentioning them.
Friday 12 November
2010
Friday
- I picked up the edger. It works, sorta. There is a plastic pulley
that is worn, and the manufacturer no longer has any spares. The
mechanic found a used one (that works after a fashion), but there
wasn't much he could do.
I suppose I could machine one out of steel or aluminum....
As I am heading north tomorrow I checked out the lights (and had to
move the license and its' light) and bought some cargo netting to cover
the landscape blocks. It doesn't pay to attract Johnny Law's attention
these days. Plus, it's nice to be safe.
Riley, Phoebe, and Big-Stupid-Cat.
Thursday 11 November 2010
Thursday
- back to Lancaster.
Wednesday 10 November 2010
Wednesday
- meeting with the client, a little show-and-tell about the weekly
reports, some discussion of what to do next, then over to the office
for some other stuff.
I wrote up a little "to do" list about the morning's meeting and sent it off. Heh. Within an hour I was getting a notification that something in their requirements had changed.
Tuesday 9 November
2010
Tuesday
- down in Ventura, working on generating some reports for the client.
A cool night. For once I wasn't too warm in the sleeping bag on the boat!
Monday 8
November
2010
Monday
- not a lot to say. Cleaning up, getting ready to head down to visit with the client tomorrow.
I picked up the lawn mowers, and they both work. I mowed the front and
back yards - good to have that done. The boy wasn't available (school)
so I did it myself.
Pleased with the results I took the old gas powered edger in for
repairs. There is something wrong with it's starter clutch, and it's a
real drag to use the electric mower and it's long cord (pun intended).
Sunday 7 November_2010
Sunday
- Cold and windy, clouds. There was supposedly a chance of rain, but I did not see any.
The garage is looking better, but I'm still cleaning.
I took the old Teevee, a 36" CRT to the local ewaste disposal
yesterday. It was a beast to get into the SUV by myself, probably about
100 pounds, but I managed. The guy getting it out really struggled, so
I feel a little less antique now. I'd have liked to have kept it, but
it wouldn't fit in my stereo cabinet where the current 29" CRT resides,
and its size wasn't enough greater to warrant buying a new cabinet.
Plus, at 10 years of age, it has very limited input/output, RCA and
Svideo only.
There may be a flatscreen someday. The problem is that a lot of shows
are now in wide screen - the World Series was - which results in a
12.5" high image on my current system, impossible to see unless one is
sitting directly in front of the teevee. Even a standard broadcast is
less that 17" high and I have increasing difficulty in seeing the
picture from my favorite chair.
I tried installing my old Mint main disk on the Xubuntu system I've been building, as a second drive, to see if the files were still readable.
And they are! I had first tried on an older distribution (Hardy?) and
it did not recognize the ext4 filesystem. Xubuntu 10.10 did recognize
that type, but made me mount the drive manually. I then tried backing
that Mint drive up onto an external USB - and that was a failure. Even
a small set of folders, 200MB or so, wanted 19 hours
to transfer. As I said, it's an old system - it's probably USB 1.0.
Still, it's progress. I can probably take the Xubuntu boot drive and
put it into the 3.2GHz system and use the USB 2.0 hardware to backup
the drive before trying to fix GRUB on it.
Book #73 was Jack London's The Cruise of the Snark,
which I'd never read before. Inspired by Joshua Slocum's (then) recent
circumnavigation he has a boat built and sails to the South Seas. This
is about 1907 - the building of the boat is actually interrupted by the
Great San Francisco Earthquake! It's a fun short but read, as seamen
(but not navigators) London and a friend have to teach themselves
astrogation by sextant on their way from San Francisco to Hawaii. The
boat is nowhere as well built and seaworthy a design as he planned,
which is amusing to read about, but probably a lot less fun to deal
with in mid ocean. This is common, many sailor's discover that even a
few days trials turn up unexpected problems - but London apparently
didn't bother with them, or if he did doesn't mention it.
London does pad the book a bit with digressions on various things -
more or less interesting. As a journeyman writer he could make most
stuff interesting, but he was paid by the word. In particular he got
very ill in the Solomon Islands and spends a bit too much time on the
various ulcers and fever's he and his crew get there. Indeed, it's hard
to figure out exactly what he was up to there, but in the end he was so
ill that he had to cancel the voyage and spend months in hospitals
getting well.
The poor Snark was sold off, spent some years in island trading, and finally sank, somewhere off Vanuatu.
Picture of
the Week
Photo
Notes: Cayucos beach with marine layer, 2010.
