The National Weather Service claims we will be inundated with heavy rain, thunderstorms, the possibility of hail, and other unspecified biblical plagues. On the basis of their advice, I left the Scout home for the second full week and played it safe. However, my morning commute was full of sunshine.
We’d better get some category 5 hurricane shit up in this mutha by lunchtime, or I’m going to be pissed.
Early Afternoon Update: I’m officially pissed.
4:30: We got showered upon, and now the skies are sunny. Radar shows the worst of it is off to the east and there’s nothing on the horizon. Still pissed.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Oh, crap. Late Blight Fungus Threatens Tomato Crop in Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.
“…the outbreak spread in part from the hundreds of thousands of tomato plants bought by home gardeners at Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Kmart stores starting in April.” We started a bunch of ours from seed but two of the ones I’ve got in containers are organics from Home Depot.
Here’s info on identification and treatment.
After about four months of suffering through a faulty email setup, I got tired of manually marking and deleting junk mail every half an hour. So today at lunch I finally nuked my main account and set it up from scratch. The way mail.app handles IMAP accounts is confusing, to say the least, and Apple’s explanation of how it interacts is pretty thin on details. (Most searches, predictably, focus on setting up Gmail for IMAP on mail.app). I’m still having some hiccups here and there but all seems to be better in my email world now.
Finding a decent video encoding scheme for Flickr has been a huge nightmare. I’ve found that the default encoding from our Canon SD900 (AVI format) works flawlessly, while almost every encoding schema for Flip video footage processed through Quicktime Pro looks like garbage. I’ve got a ton of footage that gets pixellated and blocky as soon as it hits Flickr (or, alternately, bonks out with a yellow “This video cannot be processed” message). I’m going to keep working on this and hopefully find a solution I like.
The heat has returned to Baltimore, and with it, our peculiar pattern of hot, muggy sunshine in the morning, cloudy afternoons, short, violent thunderstorms towards the evening commute, and unbearably humid evenings. I may have to put the full soft top back on the Scout in order to drive it to work once a week; nothing sucks more than driving home in the rain.
This next clip is sheer genius. I was confused, at first; I hadn’t realized Sarah Palin’s “Speech” was so disjointed and illogical until I read the actual transcript.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Boy, I’d love for this to be her first actual words.
This will make your head explode: Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit Up. I didn’t think it was possible to mix oil and water.
This picture is actually from the weekend, but it’s a good illustration for this morning. Mama, Finn and I got up early and took advantage of this freakish beautiful weather to got for a walk around the neighborhood, something we have resolved to do each morning as a family. Finn is rocking a new backpack carrier, one that distributes her weight more evenly across the back, shoulders, and waist—and one I paid $8 for at a neighborhood yard sale a few weeks back.
She spent a good bit of the weekend accompanying me to the hardware and auto parts store, and was happily content to watch everyone walking by, examine the merchandise, and play with her fuzzy elephant. When it was time to examine something in better detail, she would hoist herself up, grab both my ears, and lean forward over my shoulder until I held up the spark plugs or paint can or shovel so that she could see what I was dithering about.
Wow, this is pretty amazing: Why I won’t be at my high school reunion. My high school experience wasn’t nearly as bad as this one, but I echo the sentiment at the end: Our kids will have some kind of kung-fu lessons and be able to finish physical conflicts on their own terms. I think that kind of self-confidence is essential in this day and age.
I’m backing up Jen, who is on a deadline this afternoon, because our childcare had to cancel today. So I woke with the girl and she took me for a walk up to the state park and back after breakfast, and we enjoyed the quiet before everyone got up and went to work.
Important Milestone Alert: This is the 1009th entry of this weblog, something I only realized as I was tidying things up this morning. That’s roughly 19 entries a month since March of 2005, when I stopped writing pages by hand and installed weblogging software. We’re also at 1001 comments over the same period, which means I need to work on my community-building skills!
In the very near future, I’ve got an overhaul planned for the site which will involve a CMS change and a design facelift. Now, to find some spare time…
Thanks to Mama for the excellent photo!
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.