Every weekend, Emma and I go out to breakfast. In fact, we usually go out both Saturday and Sunday, and usually we go to the 43rd Street Deli on 13th Street. This morning we were out and were chatting with the manager, Rick, who casually asked if we had seen his new commercial. “Commercial?” we asked…
Heheheh. Isn’t that great? A little overdone on the “don’t let the name fool you” bit, but really, not too bad, eh?
There is a family of sandhill cranes that live out near my folks’ house. When I came home this evening, I saw them sitting out in front of the house, under an oak tree.
There are a few more pictures over on Flickr, but none of them came out terribly well, I’m afraid. It was raining a little (hurray!) and I think the rain confused the autofocus. Oh well. Just don’t zoom in too much. 
Dear Blog,
Apparently I’m not so good at this whole writing-every-day thing. I have every intention to, but there are often days when I’m too lazy or have nothing interesting to say. I’ve written a half-dozen entries that, upon re-reading, have just been me whining, and I’ve deleted them in disgust. Every morning is a new day, though, and who knows? Maybe I’ll get better and realize I’ve written every day for a week. Or two weeks. Or even a month.
Last week I mentioned that we have a few new residents sharing our home, and wondered how they would do, living so close to us and our cats. Apparently they like where we moved their nest.
Can you see what’s in there? An egg!
And by the next day there were two eggs!
And then three!
So the thing that puzzled Emma and I most about this nest — which is clearly currently occupied — is that we had yet to actually see a bird in or near the nest. Admittedly our experience with birds is limited, with the vast majority of our knowledge coming from watching the chickens in the coop, but we still didn’t understand. Don’t birds roost? Emma had to work overnight this weekend and she would come home about 7 and there wouldn’t be a bird in the nest, but by the time we walked back outside later in the morning, the number of eggs would have increased.
Ah, but this morning! This morning we went out to breakfast after she worked, and when I came home the nest was occupied. I could only use my camera phone before she flew off, but take a look (larger version):
And, of course, she left an additional egg! Um, you’ll have to take my word for it in this next picture.
So, the mystery is partially solved. They lay eggs a little bit after dawn, then leave for the day. The roosting is still an open question, but the answer appears to be “no.” A little research in our Audobon guide suggests that these are Carolina Wrens. Very cute! And maybe there will be baby chicks in a couple of weeks!
Chirpily,
A.
Dear Rain,
Thank you for coming again, at long last. I think it’s been about three weeks since we last saw each other. It’s been awfully hot around these parts for the past week, so you bring a much-appreciated breath of cool air. Plus, it’s not so muggy now, which is totally awesome.
Also I’d like to thank you for waiting to arrive until the afternoon, so Emma and I could go to the Spring Arts Festival. It was fantastic, as always, and we bought some nice new objets d’artre. One of my favorite local painters, Peter Carolin, designed the poster this year, so I was very excited to be able to afford a piece of his art. Some day, when I have more money than I know what to do with, I’m going to buy actual paintings, but for now I’m very happy with the poster. I’ll want to get it framed, I suppose, but that can probably wait until my TA money comes in.
We also got some new pieces of jewelry. Emma got a new pair of earrings and a matching ear cuff, then convinced me to get an ear cuff myself. It’s blue rather than purple, and I think it looks okay. It’ll take some getting used to, but should stave off my desire for knuckle tattoos for a little longer. Heh.
Time to get a little more work done before the guild tries to knock off the last few bosses in Karahan tonight. Type to you tomorrow.
Torrentially,
A.
Happy day-after-Halloween, my friends! Emma and I had a few trick-or-treaters last night and are, naturally, left with a lot of leftover candy. Leftover Snickers ftw! We had about 12 actual kids come by and about 12 high-school age people who are really too old to be begging for candy. Including! Including two who didn’t even really try to wear a costume. We gave them a hard time for it. One was “a runner.” He wore, well, running clothes. Lame. The other was “a guy who hates Buchholz (one of three high schools in town and chief rival of the closest).” Super lame. You get Raisinettes.
Speaking of lame Halloween costumes, Jill Sobule has a lovely little song entitled “Women Whose Halloween Costume is Just That They’re Slutty — That’s Not a Costume at All.” Heh. She wrote it for NPR’s Byrant Park Project, which I think is their (NPR’s) attempt to get at a younger audience. We don’t get it here, naturally, but the song is pretty funny. You can hear the song at the BPP blog. I totally have to agree. Hot? Yes. Enjoyable to see? Sure. But a good Halloween costume? Not so much.
I actually did see a ghost yesterday, too! Well, a ghost from my past. I saw an old girlfriend from high school yesterday in the supermarket, but didn’t recognize her right away. Whoops. So there I was, walking away from the deli area and I notice a slightly familiar, friendly-looking girl staring at me. I look at her and she doesn’t break eye contact. Sadly, I still didn’t recognize her and figured that she was just someone I *should* recognize but didn’t, so I smiled and nodded, but kept walking. It wasn’t until I was across the store that I realized who she was. I quickly overanalyzed the situation and decided that I’d look like a complete tool if I went running back across Publix to say hello, and finished shopping and left. Idiot. Oh well. Hey, Alex! If you read this, send me an email! I mean, if you want to. And sorry I didn’t recognize you. I’ll do my best next time (or at least won’t wuss out of running across the store to say hello). 
Okay, enough for now. I should go do some more work. Happy Thursday!
I know that I live in Florida, which is essentially one giant swamp. I accept that. I am even somewhat mentally prepared to live in Florida when the air conditioner breaks down for the second time this summer. I’ve got a plan, even. However, the plan has one teeny, tiny, minor little flaw. What happens when the power goes out? Like it did last night. All night.
Last night has to be one of the most uncomfortable nights I’ve spent in…well…probably my entire life. I remember a few similar nights a few years ago, after the hurricanes (Charley, Ivan, etc.) when we were without power for about a week, but that was in September. Last night? Last night was not a September night. In fact, we’ve been having near-record highs the past few weeks, I think, and I know it was hot as balls yesterday during the day. Fortunately, we have the enclosed garage room with its own a/c (a little wall unit) where I can live until the main a/c is fixed. We have an attic fan in the main house, so at nights and in the mornings when it’s cooler outside than in, I can get a breeze going and cool off a little. Plus, we’ve got ceiling fans in almost all of the rooms at this point, as well as a couple of portable ones that can be moved around as needed, so it isn’t completely unbearable. In fact, we had a storm move through last night that probably dropped the outside temperature by a good ten degrees in about a half hour. Unfortunately, that storm also knocked out the power.
There I was, moderately cozy in the garage room, playing a little WoW. It was about quarter to ten and I was thinking about heading to bed. I had just killed the last mob of the evening and was about to head home and sell the crap that I had harvested when *poof*. No more power. Lappy still ran just fine, but that’s because he has mighty battery power. The DSL was off, so poor Waradwen was abandoned in the middle of the Arathi Highlands. Fortunately everything around him was dead and should remain so until the server realized I had disconnected, so he probably wasn’t in too much danger, but still. Suboptimal.
I fumbled around the house for a while before I found a flashlight. I walked around the house and made sure that I turned off all of the fans that I knew were on (like the attic fan), then settled in to the garage room to wait out the power outage. It was still substantially cooler in there than in the rest of the house, and with the rain still beating down outside I couldn’t really open any doors or windows. I found my cellphone and called the GRU hotline to report that the power was out. The automated voice told me that they already knew about the outage and a “crew was going to be dispatched,” with an estimated repair time of 11:38. Sucked, but tolerable. I tried to sleep a little, but it was so stagnant that I couldn’t really drift off. Finally, about 11:15 I decided that I had had enough of waiting, so I called GRU again and got the same message. I was a little concerned that the message still said that the repair crew was “going to be” sent out, but the repair time was the same. I decided to jump in the shower and cool off until the power came back on, when I could go to sleep.
I discovered a great setting on our shower head where the water comes out in a really fine mist, which feels fantastic when it’s 90-ish degrees in the house. I even went so far as to fill up the tub with cool water and tried to fall asleep soaking in the tub, to no success. By the time I finally climbed out of my shower/bath it was 11:45 and there was no sign of the power coming back on. I called GRU again, to see if there was a new repair estimate and was pleased to hear a different message than the previous one. Now the automated voice reported that repairs were underway, but declined to provide a repair estimate. I was so tired at this point that I managed to finally fall asleep, expecting to wake up freezing cold because the power was on and the little wall a/c was set to max. Not so much.
I woke up for the last time at about 6:30 this morning and decided that I’d just get up, rather than toss and turn in the overheated garage room for another hour. I got dressed, fed the chickens (who seemed to have weathered the storm just fine), kissed the kitties (who are *loving* the heat in the house), and headed out. There were eight GRU trucks lining 12th road when I pulled out of my driveway. I don’t know what happened, but it was clearly a pretty serious problem that knocked out our power last night. I treated myself to breakfast out and a drive in to work rather than a bike ride, and have been checking to see if the power was on at the house by calling and waiting for the answering machine to pick up. It finally did, at about 9:45 this morning, so we were without power for approximately 12 hours.
As you can probably tell by this rambling narrative, I’m pretty exhausted. I’m going to work for a few more hours, then head home early and crash for a little while before I do some other stuff later tonight. Stay cool.
As I may or may not have blogged previously, my in-laws have essentially moved out of town for the next few months. My father-in-law is working for the next three months in Akron, OH and my mother-in-law, who has just retired, is taking a long vacation. We’re not sure when she’ll be back, other than it’ll be before Thanksgiving. They’re planning to be away so much that they’ve moved the cat up to Akron to live with Vince.
Since they’re going to be gone for so long, they allegedly had hired a housesitter, someone from Abby’s work, to stay in the house and to keep Emma and I from having to get the mail, etc. daily. Actually, I think the mail is being forwarded, but that’s beside the point. I say allegedly because neither Emma nor I have seen any evidence of this housesitter actually being at the house. Neither of us have seen a strange car in the driveway and I never saw anybody at the house in all the hours I’ve spent working on the computer systems. I was even there after 9 one night, with no sign of anybody else being there.
Emma and I stopped by the house on Saturday morning after breakfast, because the router was acting flakey and Vince asked us (me) to reset it, when we had a chance. We stop in about noon and there’s still nobody there. This time, however, we notice that the house is freezing (the A/C was set really low) and Emma notices a bunch of odd food in the fridge. “My crazy mother,” she exclaims, “has left a loaf of bread on the counter and some really odd things in the fridge. Like lettuce. There’s no way that this isn’t going bad before she comes home. How crazy.” I may be paraphrasing a little there, but that’s the gist. And the bread isn’t even a kind that Abby would buy, which makes it exceptionally odd, given that we don’t think anybody’s living in the house. So we fix the router, make sure the computer is back online, and take the bread and a few Diet Cokes with us when we leave. The bread was going to go bad! At least it could go feed the chickens, right?
Yesterday morning, after breakfast and errands, we drove by the house again. This time an outside light was on. One that was distinctly not on when we left. Whoops. So now we’ve stolen someone’s bread (and eaten some, by that point in time) and Diet Cokes. More than just one or two…I had a couple when I was working late on the computer and we took a couple with us when we left and I think we split another one when we were resetting the router… At any rate, we’ve now stolen a bunch of this poor stranger’s food. What should we do?
I think that we’re going to replace the food, but be funny about it. We’re going to replace the loaf of bread with another, different kind. Something similar, but not the same. It was white bread, so I thought we’d leave some multigrain. Or maybe a box of crackers. And we’ll leave a two-liter of soda in the fridge. That’d be funny, right? Sheesh. We feel pretty bad.
My father-in-law is a computer engineer (embedded systems design) and runs his corporate servers (web, email, etc.) from his house, using a static IP address and a DSL connection. For the next three months, however, he is living and working in Akron, OH, so isn’t around to maintain the system. Because he’s sure that the system will go down at some point in the next three months — power outage, hurricane, whatever — and because he doesn’t want to burden anyone (namely me) with having to maintain the system — it’s an older Sun and I’m certainly not that good at Solaris…I can boot it up and check simple things, but that’s about it — he decided to buy colo service from his ISP, atlantic.net. (I’m not going to link them out of frustration, which will be explained in a few moments) It costs more than renting a dedicated server, but it’s far easier to set up. All someone has to do is to physically move the machine from his house to their data center, less than two miles north. Enter me.
He arranged all of the details of the move with someone at atlantic.net and my job last night was to shut down the machine, drive it to their data center, and bring it back up. Not a big deal. In fact, he even shut it down remotely, so that part of the job was taken care of. I go over to the house about 7:40 last night and make sure the system is down, then call the 800-number for atlantic.net to let them know I’m coming over. The data center is open 24/7, but it’s after normal business hours so I figured I’d just make sure someone was there and available. No problem. The engineer I talked to was very friendly and helpful, knew about the transfer, and all was well. “Do you know where we’re located,” he asked me as we were concluding our conversation. “I sure do,” I overconfidently replied, since we had done this move at least once before, after all of the hurricanes a few years ago. I lug the box out to the car, grab a keyboard, and hit the road.
Five minutes later, I’m at the building. Sure enough, the atlantic.net logo is still on the building sign, so all systems are go. The engineer said that there’d be a call box I’d have to use to call them, and they’d come down and escort me in. No problem. Well, no problem until I can’t find a call box. As the primary part of the building is a bank, I don’t want to act too suspicious by rattling all of the exterior doors so I call the engineer back. “No problem. I’ll come down and let you in. Are you at the main entrance?”
“I guess so. I’m by the drive-through.”
“Be right down.”
Five minutes later, nobody has shown up. My phone rings. “I just went downstairs and didn’t see you. Where are you again?”
“By the entrance,” I reply, getting rather concerned at this point. “You’re still in the bank building, right?”
“The what? Bank building? What street are you on?”
“13th street.”
“13th? No, we’re out on Kennedy Boulevard.” Kennedy Boulevard? There’s no Kennedy Boulevard in Gainesville. “You must be somewhere downtown.”
“Not really,” I reply, warily. “Where are you again?”
“13th street? You must be in downtown Orlando…”
“Um, no. I’m in Gainesville.” D’oh.
So, you see, it turns out that they had closed the Gainesville data center “years ago,” and apparently the salesman my father-in-law talked to neglected to mention that detail, and either didn’t hear or ignored him when he said that he’d like to colo in Gainesville. How terrible! How amusing now, after the fact, but how frustrating!
I call my father-in-law back and explain to him the problem, then drive the machine back to their house. He’s frustrated, I’m frustrated. Not terribly fun. I manage to get the box back to the house and running — not before a fsck had to be run, naturally — and we were eventually back online. He got concerned while I was running the check that he couldn’t ping the router, so he was convinced that the whole system was shot. Somehow, magically, it repaired itself once Timucuan, the server, came back online, but the end of the story is that he’s frustrated with and angry at atlantic.net and I’ve wasted the evening shlepping the Sun box around town. Which is not light, I might add. Oh well. It seemed like a good plan, but I really should have learned that nothing goes easily when it comes to his computer system. Nothing is quite as straightforward as it ever seems it should be.
Emma thought the story was very funny, incidentally, when I finally got home. “Why,” I asked her, “do I ever think that working on his computer is going to be as easy as it sounds?”
“Because you’re gullible?” 
I wonder if I’m coming down with a cold or something. I slept like ten hours last night and think I could go sleep for another ten. Well, two, at the very least. I woke up in the middle of the night last night with a headache and sore throat, too, which is what got me starting thinking along this line, but I feel fine today, other than wanting to sleep. Maybe I need more caffeine.
Emma and I had breakfast this morning at our favorite place, the 43rd Street Deli on 13th Street. We love going out to breakfast and are really smitten with the Deli. We’ve been going regularly for a few years now so we know most of the staff and they know who we are. Like actually know our names, not just that I’m “Diet-Coke-no-ice guy.” It’s sort of an odd set of relationships, though. I mean, we’re friendly with all of the people there but isn’t that a slightly weird wall to breach? I like the people there, I really do, and think I’d like to hang out with them *outside* of either of our work environments, but it still makes me feel a little hinky. Ah, it probably doesn’t matter. I’m too much of an antisocial bum (but not an antisocialist, which is what I first thought to type…that’s not quite the same thing; maybe I’m an antisocialite?) to ever do anything about it.
Work has been going reasonably well the past few weeks. Our high school student is finishing her time in the lab this week — this is her last full day, in fact — and it’s been nice having her here. Hopefully we’ve managed to keep her both entertained and interested in science. She claims we have and she says she has had a good time, so I’ll just have to take her word for it, eh? I do regret that we haven’t been able to get her any solid, conclusive data, but that’s Science. We’re definitely continuing the project she’s been working on — it’s our primary research goal on the Imprinting side of the lab — so we should be able to flesh out what she’s started over the next month or so. We actually need to get a manuscript together pretty soon centered around her project, so we’ll have to get some conclusive data soon. Tom’s at a Prader-Willi research conference this week talking about what we’ve found so far which makes this fair game for everybody else to duplicate our work and possibly publish it before we do. Tom’s goal is to have a manuscript ready to submit by mid-August at the latest. We have an ideal manuscript in mind but I doubt that we’ll get all of the data ready by then, so we’ll just have to submit what we have and keep working on the rest. Better two smaller manuscripts than trying for one really good one and getting scooped.
Okay, enough. Lunchtime. Dare I play a little WoW while I eat lunch? I dinged 33 last night and am hoping to hit 40 before the weekend is up. I think I just might…
Emma and I fixed our lawn mower this weekend, with the help and guidance of our friend Hank. The poor mower had been neglected over the past year or so, so Hank showed us how to open it up and where (and how) to clean it, and she’s running like a champ now. Woo! It’s very satisfying, reviving a piece of machinery. It had been a couple of months since we last mowed the lawn, which was threatening to engulf the house. The grass was so high, in fact, that it was covering Emma’s ankle tattoo completely:
The yard looks much nicer now, after we cleaned and mowed. I did most of the mowing and Emma played Destructor, Slayer of Weeds and Vines. The next project is to finish moving all of the debris to the curb before Thursday. Oy…
Overall the house is looking very nice, I think. The cucumber plants have succumbed to the heat and drought, which is a little sad, but the tomatoes are persevering. I need to remember to start germinating the plants earlier next year so it doesn’t take quite so long to start producing fruit. Oh, and transfer them out of the germinating tray at the right time, so they don’t get stunted. That’d probably be more useful.
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