Monthly Archives: March 2010

An Interesting Year

Posted on by
4

I turned 51 a few of days ago and although the day itself wasn’t particular special (just the way I like it) nor thought provoking (gives me a headache), the thoughts have been slowly building within my wee brain since then. And after three days I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s been a very interesting year.

I had abominable abdominal surgery down in Boston, Ma. Woke up with a half a dozen tubes in me. My first major surgery.

Much to my surprise, after using and testing Microsoft OSs and programs for years, I made the switch from a Windows to a Linux based OS. First to Ubuntu and then, after a bit of distro hopping in between, finally settling on Linux Mint. I’m still surprised.

I had to come to terms with the fact that the surgery I had is not going to help as much as I had hoped, that there’s a good chance I won’t be able to become employed again. Sort of an early forced retirement if you will. Considering what has happened of late, I may be too busy for the next couple of years to maintain a job anyway.

Which brings me to the last bit of personal type major events that have occurred during the past 12 months—we had our home ripped out from underneath us by our so-called friend and, as a result, ended up purchasing our own home (well, almost anyway). Something that neither my wife nor I ever thought was going to happen again.

I won’t say it was “just by happenstance” or just by “pure, shit-blind luck” that we stumbled across this new place the same day we received the news that our current home was being sold as it’s been proven to me one too many times during my life that when disaster hits, an opportunity then presents itself. I also learned to never ask questions in these cases, just go with the flow and shut up.

But the personal type stuff isn’t the only thing that’s made the last 12 months interesting. Events in the old USA have been a regular cornucopia of entertainment now hasn’t it?

We’ve had a new president out there turning the government on it’s ear by, for all intents and purposes, doing his utmost best to do his utmost best. Say what you will but this is the first president that’s ever tried and (somewhat) succeeded in taking care of  the problems that exist right here on the home territory rather than just letting them slide like so many other administrations in the past have done. This guy has accomplished more good in the last 14 months than other past administrations have accomplished in decades. Not bad for someone who walked into an absolute mess the first day on the job.

And this set off a whole chain of events that kept my eyes glued to my computer display since I turned 50 last year. I’ll list some of them below that have really made the last several months so interesting for me.

There are those who have called our president a socialist, communist, fascist, Nazi, etc. Of course, those that do call him that are probably incapable of comprehending what a socialist, communist, fascist, Nazi, etc really is because if they did they’d never call him a socialist, communist, fascist, Nazi, etc in the first place.

I’ve watched the once respectable (if such a thing can be said for any political party) Republican party lose it’s collective mind and reduce itself into the equivalent of a bunch of spoiled adolescents stomping around and screaming their heads off because they didn’t get their way. The entire goal of the Grand Old Party has since been redirected to make sure that President Obama fails at all costs—including the complete failure of our own country if necessary. A sad thing indeed when they could have easily been part of the recovery process rather than defying it at every turn.

Then there’s the so-called “Tea Party”. I’m still not too sure what to make of these folks except that it’s formation pretty much came as a result of the “Fall of the Republican Party” as I like to call it. Okay, so people have a right to their own opinion but like most groups of this type, the intelligence level of the individuals involved is oppositely proportional to the number of people involved in the group itself. I mean, their role model is Sarah Palin? C’mon now.

Spitting on; yelling racial epitaphs at; throwing stones through windows of homes and offices of; mailing letters filled with an “unidentified white powder” to; those that voted for the Health Care Reform bill? Acts of extreme violence towards the government, government officials and law enforcement agencies plotted and planned by good, “right thinking”, Christians? Christians?!? Well, golly gee whiz folks, wouldn’t Jesus would be proud though?

Hoo boy, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey could never have topped this 3 ring circus no matter how many trained elephants, donkeys and clowns they had.

So it’s been a very interesting year to say the least. Never a dull moment as they say.

Now you might think that all this mish-mash of personal and non-personal upset has me feeling a bit insecure about my (our) well being and you’d be right. However, and this may come as a surprise to a few, it’s not so much the personal events that cause me to feel less than comfortable about things in general than it is the non-personal events that give me a profound sense of unease. I won’t trouble my readers with trying to explain though as this post is getting a bit long in tooth as it is. Some of it should be fairly obvious anyway.

You can take the above statement as you will but suffice it to say that I’m very glad that this new place we’re hoping to buy has new roofs, sills, windows, siding, a wood stove and a river nearby.

And I’m certainly not going to wonder what the next 12 months will bring as there’s enough to occupy my wee brain for the next few months as it is. In that light I think it’s best to stop thinking for now and, if all goes well, start thinking again sometime around mid-summer.

Who knows? The quality of my posts might actually go up if I don’t think about them first?

The Home Race

Posted on by
15

Things have been a might crazy around here lately. As some of you may know, our home is being sold out from under us by the friend (and owner) who gave his word it would never happen. Well, whatever. So much for the word of a friend. That’s just the way things are.

So now my lady and I are in a race…a home race. You see, the day we got the word our lovely old home was being put on the market, my lady came home from the quilt shop, went online and, just on a hunch, checked the local real estate listing and found a home for sale at a very reasonable price. A 110 year old house that had been massively updated 2 years ago from top to bottom, roofs to sills and windows in between.

To make a long story short, I used my VA rights to secure a VA backed mortgage and we put in a bid on the place. A bid that was accepted by the current owners. In other words, we found out we no longer had a home on a Tuesday and had basic approval for a mortgage by Thursday. For certain reasons not worth mentioning here, I find this truly amazing.

We’ve done 2 “walk-throughs” of the property already, one short and one much longer to work out a floor plan (where to put the stuff). All we’re waiting on now is the appraisal (April 8th) and the final VA approval and we’re good to go.

Now the race begins. Potential buyers for our current place are beginning to make inquiries, the first showing being tomorrow at 10:00 AM and you bet I’m going to be here. This may our “friend’s” property but it’s our home and I’m not about to let 2 or more strangers poke our our stuff without one of us being here. Besides, the cats might eat them.

Meanwhile, we’re scheduled to close on our new home on May 14th and the process of moving is sure to take 4 weeks as we have to do this ourselves sans moving company. So we’re basically looking at the middle of June before we’re quit of this place and into the other and I’d much rather get all of this said and done with without the hassle of a new owner to contend with.

Can we get out of here and into our new home before a new owner buys the place we’re in now? The odds are pretty good that we will but it’s race nonetheless but you know how things can change at a moment’s notice. After all, we didn’t expect we’d have to be moving in the first place now did we?

Hitting the Moose

Posted on by
2

We hit a moose yesterday on interstate 91 while on our way “down country”. And although I was fully intending to write a long, highly descriptive account of the incident including pictures with circles and arrows–I decided not to. I’m not saying that this won’t be a long post knowing how wordy I am but it’s not going to be what I thought it would be.

Does anyone understand what I just wrote? If not don’t worry about it–I obviously didn’t.

The fact is we hit a moose that bounded onto the highway directly in front of us–plain and simple.

I was driving my trusty old ’95 Jeep Cherokee and Laurie was beside me in the passenger seat. The whole incident from start to finish took around 5 seconds. And although hitting a moose isn’t that unusual in the State of Vermont, surviving the encounter intact and without injury is. But the fact that not only was the moose able to get up and leave the scene with no apparent broken bones or even a single wound and that we were able to get back in the Jeep and continue on our journey is positively uncanny.

Don’t get me wrong though, the Jeep didn’t get out of the close encounter of the moose kind without injury. It was still drivable, yes. But the moose had rolled up over the Jeep’s hood severely cracking the windshield (but leaving it in place) knocking off the rear view mirror in the process, taking out the passenger side view mirror, the radio antennae and the driver’s side turn signal/parking light lens assembly. It also damaged the cheap plastic grill in the front and cracked the fiberglass “header” that runs along between the front of the hood and above that cheap plastic grill. The strip that has the raised letters spelling “JEEP” on it.

Now since the moose had already left the scene of the accident and my side of the windshield was still relatively clear and the front wheels were still attached and pointing in the same direction, we decided to continue on our way although I did make sure that the damaged windshield wasn’t going to shred my windshield wipers into little pieces as it was raining at the time.

Once we arrived in Bradford we took the time to report the incident at the State Police barracks (which took all of 4 minutes) and then up the road we went.

The rest is pretty straight forward. Upon arriving back in Newport, I dropped Laurie off at the quilt shop and headed to my insurance agent’s office. Today, the Jeep is up at the body shop and I’ll probably have it back by the end of the week. The sun just came out, Laurie just got home from her day at the quilt shop, the birds are singing and everything is as it should be.

Can’t complain about that one little bit.

Egg Standing 2010

Posted on by
3

Yesterday brought around once again the inevitable egginox or, as some refer to it, the vernal equinox. This of course meant only one thing in our household–egg standing time!

This year we (“we” meaning Laurie of course.) got 6 raw ones standing upright on their pointy little bottoms. We would have stood more but we ran out of eggs.

Vernal equinox 2010 egg standing

No sanding, no gluing, no "shopping". Just standing.

Now there are those who will tell you that you can balance eggs on their bottoms any old time of the year but take it from a couple of experts. You gotta hard boil ‘em in the upright position first if you expect to do so. Go ahead, try it yourself if you don’t believe me.

And then there are those who might say this was a fine example of “Indoor Sports for the Feeble Minded”. If you’re one of those then it’s obvious you have no idea what it’s like living in Vermont on a miserable gray (snowy!) day during Mud Season. A much better phrase for it would be “Cabin Fever”.

Anyway, here’s to Spring!

What good is a post without a title?

Posted on by
5

I was going to write something today. Really I was.

Seeing as how I haven’t written anything in a few days I figured it was about time to start fumbling dancing my fingers over the keyboard, writing up another piece of brilliance for all to see. I thought that might be a good thing to do this afternoon.

But…

My first attempt had 3 typos in the first sentence out of 6 words total so I had to start again. Then an image I was attempting to crop and insert into the post wouldn’t cooperate even though I’ve been cropping and inserting images into my blog posts for longer than I can recall. So I gave that post a toss and tried another one. I figure if a particular post doesn’t want to get written then why should I force it?

So I worked my way through 4 paragraphs of yet another post when I realized that I couldn’t think of a title…

…any title…

…at all.

So after 5 minutes of trying T, T and T.O.T. I finally tossed that one as well. What good is a post without a title for crying out loud?

Three more attempts and 86 typos later I finally just gave the whole idea up for a loss. If my fingers and head aren’t going to join in this venture then there’s no reason to be trying to write in the first place. I kept thinking, why waste my time when time obviously doesn’t want to bother?

This bothered me though.

Lately, every time I’ve attempted to write a post about something rather than just jotting down whatever happens to pop into my wee skull at the time, I can’t do it. The thing is that I used to do it all the time. Things in the news, new gadgets, new software, fixes, tutorials, satire and such used to just pour forth without barely a thought about it. It was the most natural thing to do.

Now, when I read an interesting news article or come across a bit of “Hey, guess what’s coming in FooBar 3.0?”, it’s not just a matter of running into an advanced case of writer’s block but more like having the entire (1000 lb+) block dropped on my head altogether.

So instead of getting a rather insightful, thought provoking, comment generating post concerning a new gadget I read about today which brings invasion of privacy to a whole new level (except it might help Alzheimer’s patients a bit)…

…you get this post instead.

But at least this post has a title.

Goodbye Green Mountain Geek

Posted on by
6

Once upon a time, back in 2008 sometime, I had an inspiration to split off all my technical/geekish type posts from this site and give them a home on site of their own. Thus was born “Green Mountain Geek” (Okay, it was a stupid name. I was eating Brussels sprouts at the time I thought of it so I claim no responsibility.)

For awhile me and it did well enough, publishing posts about WordPress, Firefox, OSS (Open Source Stuff) and various other geekish and non-geekish type subjects of interest. People even read it.

Now it’s 2010 and the last real post to the site was back in the Fall of 2009 sometime. It became readily apparent to me that I really had no intention nor inclination to write anything more for my poor attempt at a (personal?) tech site. That was okay though. There are 1,536,679.5 similar websites out there already so I doubt anyone would miss it very much if and when I chose to take it down.

But I ended up leaving the site be since there were 2 or 3 of the more popular posts that were still getting a fair amount of traffic. It wasn’t costing me anything anyway to leave it online and the domain renewal was still months away. And keeping it updated with the latest WordPress bug and security fix point releases and plugins took up very little of my time.

Then it started to act up.

Strange things began happening. Things like empty directories and files being created within the WordPress core files, the Dashboard RSS feed widgets not loading when plugins were activated and just general weirdness within the WordPress Admin itself.

Since Green Mountain Geek was basically a duplicate of this site in every way, shape and form (albeit with different content), built with the same version of WordPress and plugins along with the fact that I couldn’t find hide nor hair of any sort of hack or SQL injection attack—I was thoroughly stumped.

It was sometime during the third day of working on the problem that it finally dawned on me that I was wasting a lot of valuable time on a site that I hadn’t actually posted to for months and that I really had no intention on doing so in the foreseeable future. So why am I trying to fix it? The time had obviously come.

So I rolled up the database into a nice .gz file and downloaded it, downloaded and zipped up the “Uploads” folder since the images might come in handy one day and stuffed both of them in their own folder located at the far end of my Home directory on my local hard drive.

Then I nuked the site. The resulting explosion was quite colorful.

No regrets. I came, I saw, I wrote, I quit.  Besides, a site with a name like “Green Mountain Geek” was probably doomed to failure from the start so no big loss there. I did learn one invaluable lesson though…

Never try to think up a name for a new site while eating Brussels sprouts.

Barium me not.

Posted on by
2

There are a few things in life that I’ve always hated doing that, over the years past, I always seemed to end up doing anyway. The top of my list of things I hate doing are:

  • Moving
  • Changing out drum brakes
  • Rebuilding Harley Davidson Sportsters
  • Drinking barium

So far I seem to have managed to distance my self from the top 3 but the 4th just seems to be coming back to haunt me on a disturbingly frequent basis. Like today for instance.

Today was another trip to the VA to be poked, prodded, peeked at and, yes, given a pint of barium to drink whilst doing various low impact gymnastics on a cold, hard, x-ray table. This was made all the more interesting by being occasionally semi-crushed with the x-ray machine itself while the doctor running it did his best to flatten me out like he was ironing some recalcitrant pair of pants that refused to unwrinkle.

This lovely adventure was filed under the phrase; “Upper GI”.

Anyone who has undergone this procedure will know well enough the joys of lying on a rock hard slab with your limbs and body in various unnatural positions and trying to suck down swallow after swallow of this amazingly thick, nasty tasting liquid through a straw while holding your breath at the same time.

I should get paid to do this I think.

The good news is that my last major episode with RLS (plus!) jerking me violently out of a sound sleep a few weeks ago didn’t appear to have damaged the fundoplication surgery I had done last May. The bad news is that I’ve been feeling more and more like I did before the surgery was done in the first place.

So the endoscope is next but that I don’t mind as much. They give me lots of good drugs and I don’t have to drink any of that bloody barium.

There was a bit if fun during the events of today though. While I was being maneuvered around on the table I found myself in a rather ridiculous position when the straw was once again thrust into my mouth and I was told to drink. Since this was near the end of the session the level of liquid was low in the cup so the x-ray technician assisting the doctor had to bring the cup to a more upright position. When she did so the straw, which is made of a much thicker plastic that your standard McDonald’s variety, flipped out of my mouth during a full draw, caught itself in my left nostril for a split second and then catapulted a full load of barium onto the ceiling above the x-ray machine.

The doctor and the x-ray technician were still staring at the ceiling when I left and muttering something about getting someone up there to clean it off.

Some people just deserve to be shot

Posted on by
7

Once upon a time, before I met my wife, she had a friend named “Joe”. Once I met my wife for the first time it wasn’t too long until I met “Joe” for myself. Then we all became friends.

Years passed and “Joe” began to dabble in real estate, the rental kind. One of his first purchases was this lovely old two story, single family home that had been separated some years back into a first and second floor apartment type setup. To make a long story short, 5 years ago he offered the ground floor apartment to us. He needed someone he could trust, he told us, and promised my wife that she would always have this place to live in for as long as she lived. He even went as far as to tell his son, who would inherit his estate and business when he passed on, the same thing.

Several months ago, “Joe” invested his hard earned dollars into starting up a business for himself–a sports bar and restaurant establishment right here in town. Unfortunately, once he started renovating the building he bought to accommodate his new establishment, he underestimated the cost of said renovations by a rather significant amount.

Now, by what “Joe” tells us, this money he scheduled to pay for the renovations is actually his own. No loans involved so far. And “Joe” has an excellent credit rating by the way. I know this because he had me use my computer to look it up for him. So now, he’s looking at taking out a short term loan to finish renovating his future sports bar and restaurant.

Apparently he decided not to go that route after all.

Instead, he’s decided to sell the house we are currently living in for some quick cash. The house he promised my wife she would always have to live in for as long as she lived.

Yes, it’s his property and yes he has every right to sell it but I also happen to take a man (a friend, no less) at his word. That plus the fact that he made a promise to my wife who had been his friend for years before he ever became her landlord.

And promises like that are sometimes more important and binding than obtaining some quick cash.

One question remains though.

Can I just shoot him?