I had a very busy weekend; Saturday I got up and cleaned the basement for an hour before I left for Jen’s house; we left for the Maryland/Clemson game in College Park at 2pm. The game was fantastic; we had the entire Lockard clan there save Rob and Annie, and Maryland beat Clemson’s ass pretty soundly. We were treated to the vision of the whole crowd rushing the field and taunting the assembled event staff surrounding the goalposts; I’d say about 5-7,000 kids then rushed the cops and overpowered them. The goalpost dipped under the weight of hundreds of kids, and then sank into the crowd like a torpedoed liner. We then returned to the parking lot and shivered over fried chicken and pasta salad.
Sunday I got up and headed back over to Jen’s place; after a fantastic breakfast we picked up supplies and I built a set of shelves in her pantry closet and another set in her outer closet, so she can actually store canned food near her kitchen, get stuff out of the blue bedroom, and store heavy stuff in the outer closet. When I pulled the shelves down in there, the wood they used to tack up supports were pulling out of the wall and about to fall down- basically 1/8 plywood-essentially veneer-over top of a few stringers held in with decking nails. The look on her face after she saw the shelves covered with cans was worth the whole day, but she made me a fantastic chicken dinner with scalloped potatoes and cold beer, and that made it even better. All in all a great weekend.
We found out about an hour ago that another plane fell on NYC. CNN is completely bogged down, but Dan came by and told me that robots.cnn.com is a search area backdoor for cnn, and lo and behold the page pulled up almost immediately. I’m also impressed with cbs’s online news site as well- it’s very comprehensive and came up quickly.
Jen’s neighbor is cleaning out her storage room, and was getting rid of an Epson Stylus Color 800, which I promptly snagged to bring home. It’s sitting here on the floor waiting for a mac printer cable, which I was not able to find this morning.
Great tools for searching websites: atomz.com | Also, these tools will have some relevance in the future on this site: Userland software wrote and builds a lot of XML/RSS tools for the web. At some point I’d love to have my portal page set up with a newsfeed from AP nad CNN.
I found this information on Friday when I had a half hour to kill. This story has always fascinated me, ever since I read Ploesti by Carrol and Dugan (no relation.) I can’t think of any better way to salute the men and women of the military than to educate and read about the sacrifice these men made back in August of 43. B-24bestweb | 98th bomb group | Yahoo Tidal Wave message board | heavybombers.com | Maternity Ward | Bomber Pilot | Into the guns of Ploesti
Last night I got the stairs re-installed, save the bottom and top treads. I still need to do the top kickplate, and cut a new bottom kickplate before the carpet guys show up on Wednesday. I was also able to mount the shelf in the closet firmly on the end, so there’s no more sag, and run two 4″ wood screws through the wall into the frame around the switchbox, so the closet pole is sturdy and ready for hanging. Now to just clean the rest of the crap from behind the workbench and give the place about an hour’s good scouring, and then paint the uncovered parts of the floor, and I’ll consider letting the cats downstairs.
The workmen out back had finished the wall in the backyard about 2 weeks ago, but are just now cutting the concrete pad out back to re-pour the footings (!!!). I toyed with the idea of bribing them to just leave the whole thing unpoured so I could set up the planters on my own time, but then decided against it. I’m just going to buy a bunch of used brick and build new planters over top of the pad.
Looking around the web this morning before I went to work: Laid off. | The Samuel L. Jackson Soundboard. | Nowhere girl, a really well-done graphic novel published online.
These are some truly heroic and very sad photos of the WTC, taken by a guy on his way out of the building.
Here I am at Breakaway, my first day at the new job. Looks pretty cool so far, although my temporary cube for the time being will be by a wall, and very dark. I’ll need to bring in a bunch of stuff to make it homier.
- A light.
- A power strip.
- The 4-port hub from Cidera.
- A few ethernet cables.
- My CD/Radio.
- A box for my junk.
- Some CD’s to listen to.
Robby told me Mike Coale knows of a guy who has an Arizona Scout he’s hauling up here and looking to sell. I might buy it if the price is good- otherwise I’ll let it go and save the shekels. I have a call through to Mike right now.
I also need to prioritize and purchase a few things to make life easier- that will be after I pay off the Texas trip tickets on the Visa card. I can continue to buy and install stuff in the basement but I’d like a few things to get bought to make my quality of life better:
| $200 | A CD burner, most likely for at work, so I can start burning copies of Robby’s CD collection and save money there. | |
| $70 | A Bikini top for Chewbacca, so that sunny day drives will be more tolerable. | |
| $170 | A CD player for the Taurus, now that she’s running good again. | |
| $1300 | An iBook. |
The burner presents the first hurdle, and is probably first on the list. I have the NT box at the house, but it doesn’t like sound cards. I want it to be compatible with my work 98 box and the eventual iBook so I can switch- because the iBook is way off in the future right now. I need to get all kinds of crap off the NT box at home (mostly MP3’s) and I’d like to be able to burn discs too while I’m here. Well, first, I need to get a computer here at work…
What else is going on? I talked the electricians down to $1,600, and hopefully that will get mailed out to me and be on the doorstep today. I need to stop in to Lowe’s (more money spent) and pick up a bunch of lighting equipment- two lights for the stairs, 5 monopoint lights for the main room, two for the closet, and four lesser lights for the basement rear (work area). I might actually go with a flourescent over the workbench and just put wide-spots over the other areas. We’ll see how that goes tonight, and what the damage will be to my pocketbook. More than I hoped for, but Jen did good and talked me down off the ledge- she pointed out to me that this work is an investment in something I own, and will only go to making it better, while other things I’ve bought-the shelves for the radios come to mind-were expensive but I didn’t freak out about buying them.
Got off the phone with Bill Tydings, the fellow selling (or facilitating) the sale of the Wyoming Scout. He says the owner is hoping to get $2,000 for it- Wow! I’m going to do some checking in to how much it would cost to ship the truck from there to here. Apparently it runs, it’s a V-8 Rallye (which means it’s at least a ’75+, I think) and it has 140,000 miles on the OD- pretty standard for a Scout. If I could get it shipped here for something like $1,000, I’d be ahead by a mile. Wow!
Some sites I found for quotes: The Express Auto or Moving Wisely – there’s a whole list there.