Work, play, rest

Personal,

This past week has been busy as I was back in IL for work, came home a little early as the battery went out in Kay’s car, then off to Huntsville for a hockey tournament. I left for IL last Sunday and was in the office on Monday morning. Was there through Thursday but left sooner than expected as Kay called bright and early as her car wouldn’t start, battery was dead. I headed back later that morning to pick her up from work and install a new battery, in hopes that was the only problem. It seems to be.

Friday afternoon it was off to Huntsville, AL for the annual Rocket City Hockey Tournament. I’ve been lucky to play the last three years and had a great time again. We played in the championship game Sunday afternoon, against another Nashville team, but lost. We spent all our energy the game before that morning and had nothing left, it was still a fun time.

I’m now back to playing catch up, which includes getting the back rested. Last Saturday, while family was in for CMA Music Fest, I decided to take some landscaping stones back to the store. Unfortunately for me when picking a couple up the back said nope !!!. It took me 15 minutes to get back inside and I was in bed most of the morning. Couldn’t get out without pulling my knees to 90 degrees and rolling sideways. By the evening I could move around a little, but had to pass on the CMA activities. It has been getting better every day and taking a week off from hockey should help.

Memorial weekend activities

Personal

While many looked to the memorial day weekend to get away and have some R and R Kay and I decided to start a landscaping project. The front of the house has some shrubs that are pretty tall and boxed in with landscaping timbers. They are all more than 10 years old and it’s time to replace them. The landscaping timbers a somewhat rotted and the shrubs dominate the front at eye level so we decided to take them out and put in flower boxes. Originally it was just the small box next to the garage but as I was digging those out Kay started choping on the other five. Needless to say we were only able to get original three next to the garage pulled and almost finished the new flower bed box which will replace them.

You can see a few pics in this Filkr feed. Using the landscaping bricks in that small area is a real challenge. It’s been very difficult to keep them level with the driveway sloping away from the house. We still have a long way to go but with any in a luck in a few weeks it will be finished. But now that I think about it we are out of town the first two weekends in June and will have company the third weekend …. hum that throughs a wrench in things.

The laptop lives again

Personal,

Seeing as it has been a month since my last post thought I’d get off my bumb and continue the saga of the laptop. A few weeks ago it died completely so I’ve been using the old IBM i200. Since email was really the only data of any size that I used regularly I purchased a $20 USB 2.5 drive case and stuck the 60GB drive in it. The quickest way to get email back was to add a symbolic link from .mozilla-thunderbird to the appropriate local folder on the USB drive. That setup worked for a while and still works today but the battery only lasts about 20 minutes and the fan runs constantly. So last week I finally took it on the chin and ordered a new motherboard.

It arrived yesterday and in about an hour I had it installed and everything back together. It was nice to see when pressing the power button the laptop sprung to life. It booted with no problems and I was back to normal. In the end I hope the money for the board is worth it. At one third the price of a replacement machine a few more years out of it would be preferred.

As for not posting much, just haven’t been “feel’in it”… so to speak. But that’s bound to change as every day is a new one !!!!

Long awaited update to post 29

Personal

Almost two years to the day I posted an entry about getting braces. Quite an event at 36 and today I’m happy to say they are off !!!!. A couple hours in the chair with some poking, proding, grinding, and buffing all that metal is gone. What a relief.

Now if I can only keep from getting wacked with a stick or puck… I’ll really need to pay attention now !

Latest happenings

Personal, ,

After my last post about problems with the laptop I headed off for a few days of r & r, a little skiing with my sister, brother in law and their kids. Kay isn’t a skier so she held the fort down at home. It was a great time no broken bones or bruses just one whoops !!!! on the last day which was a good laugh.

No pics to post from skiing as they are on the V2000 that’s acting up again. I’ll get them on Flickr by the weekend. It was working good without the battery in, only shut down once in a week, but yesterday it went down twice. Granted I put the battery back in and that’s probably the problem. It could be worse, the drive is fine so I’m not concerned about the data… a minor inconvenience.

Last week was one of catch up with work and one last hockey game before a few weeks off and another session starts. You know your getting old when guys come out to release frustration and your just out their to sweat and have a good time…. yes youth does make you brave.

I did finish getting a department intranet website upgraded so it will be interesting to see what anyone may have to say. The addition of OpenFire went over like a tree falling in a forest, but I didn’t expect much. At least with the site upgrade it’s on the current version of Plone and I’ve enabled anyone to join. Where before I needed to have local mail running, which would never have been validated on the network, I can now use esmtp settings. So we’ll see what that does to the traffic stats, maybe it will peak some other peoples interests.