Thursday
- back in Lancaster, a bit tired. Watched the Battlestar Galactica on
VHS that I recorded from last Friday. What is with teevee and all the
torture these days?
I listened to more of 'Founding Brothers' on the way up and down,
another trip should do it. It's interesting, Jefferson really is coming
off as something of a jerk. And there is far more information on
Washington's Farewell Address than I ever got in school. Of course,
this is all Ellis's opinion - you can't take anything a single
historian says as gospel.
In other news astromers have now discovered an entire cluster of invisible
galaxies, thus surpassing last weeks announcement of a single invisible galaxy.
Wednesday
2 March 2005
Wednesday - the new range has arrived, but
since the gas line is not yet done it will have to just sit for a few
days. So it goes I guess.
Back on the road, down to Lancaster again.
Tuesday 1
March 2005
Tuesday - trying to do a spot of work. The
FORTRAN compiler on the Linux box seems to have issues - it wants to
interact with the gcc environment for some reason, and couldn't. I
could run 'cc' manually, but never did get the compiler running
properly. Linux, just not ready for prime-time still.
I did get the streaming music player to work though. Yay for me.
In the evening we watched 'The Italian Job'. It
was a fun movie, full of heists, treachery, and paybacks...
Monday
28 February 2005
Monday - I went out and looked at gas
ranges. The old range was a 'slide-in', which are rare these days,
costing about double a free standing model, so we decided to go with
the free standing model. It seems you can pay anywhere from $350 to
$2500 for a range. A spot of research on line and locally resulted in
the decision that Sears had as good a price as anyone, so I went by the
store in Pleasant Hill and picked one out. Not fancy, but adequate to
the relatively minor cooking chores a house of bachelors demand of it.
Since there was a rebate on delivery - making it free - we went ahead
and ordered it to be delivered on Wednesday.
This all entailed a little bit of demolition and carpentry on my part,
to remove the old 'slide-in' stuff - not a big deal. It seems as though
the gas line would need to be moved - it comes in under the center-left
of the floor space, which isn't good for a free standing range. I then
crawled under the house to inspect how the gas line might be rerouted;
over, under, and around various wires, furnace flues, pipes and bits of
odd wood and wire. Amidst mud and spiders I may add. Ugh.
Sunday 27 February
2005
Sunday - my brother came by, and he and
my father played cribbage while I cooked us a nice dinner. It came out
well enough - pot roast, potato's and vegetables, blueberry muffins.
Unfortunately the stove had problems. First it would not light, then it
would not go off. Finally it went off, or so we thought. Walking through
the kitchen an hour later I noted that it was on again! This time we
just turned it off at the in line valve.
It's an old range, we bought it back in the 1970's I think. I can
recall driving over to Berkeley to pick it up. Time for a new range!
Picture of
the Week
Photo Notes:
Pilings from the old pier, Martinez,
California.
