Yesterday sucked turbo ass at work, today was almost worse. Yes, yes today was in fact worse. On a positive note I got my PC upgraded. No longer do I have a PII/450, but rather an, uh, Athlon 3500 or some crap. XP has a win98 mode so I'm happy with the interface.

Another Shasta trip, this time we've actually got water. Pics are here. I drank some of it, seems to taste like water. 30 gallons a minute which is pretty awesome, we were expecting at least 5 gpm but nothing like we really got. The loser neighbors only got 2 gpm. Ha. I'm not sure why those horses kept coming around bugging us, they really were interested in watching those guys work.

Today I got some time to myself and I washed and waxed the Montero to try to get some of the filth off it, and then played around with the loading bench (after doing my household chores). Don will be happy. 30 fresh rounds, ready to go. I reloaded the brass we collected last time, it was in really good shape and didn't have to be trimmed at all. The 210gr load is easy on the brass as well as accurate. Who could ask for more?

I put the two AVI movies up on the well drilling images page too. They're not that exciting but they are the start of the 3rd try on the well. It was really loud there, the mic on the camera must have clipped. Also, those pictures of the crappy blue car? That was parked outside the house on Wednesday from 7:30am till at least 8:45am when I left. I have no idea what those bozos were doing out there but I kept and eye on them just in case. One guy looked like he was doing homework so I'm guessing they're friends of the young rice boy looking people that moved in down the way.

I thought I did an update in here since Sunday, but apparently not. Last weekend was a driving fest. Saturday we drove all over the place looking at wedding sites (one in the mountains off hwy 9 again and one in Petaluma) and Sunday I drove up to the land to meet with the well driller on Monday. Images of both are linked from the front page.

There were two false starts on the well, the first I don't know what happened and the 2nd the dude broke a bit off while drilling through rock ($3000 for the bit apparently, glad I don't have to pay for that too). The 3rd try went perfectly and they found 25 gpm worth of water at 200'. They originally hit 2 gpm at 90' which wasn't enough so they kept going. I'll be going up there Friday/Saturday to meet with the pump dude and see what sort of real flow we can get and to test and make sure it's good water. This whole land deal could be closed up any day now.

The big all hands meeting is over, and all I can say is that our new CIO is 10000x better than the bozo we had before. This guy can plan and execute apparently and knows what the hell is going on. He's going to axe 25 contractors and 12 people from the web/business apps team which sucks for them but they deserve it. They're moving 50 jobs to India as well. Can't say I'm excited about that but it will take them 1-2 years before they get around to outsourcing us to India and I'll have a plan by then.

After much cursing and swearing I got the power steering hose installed. What a pain. I really do hate working on cars, especially things involving fluids (which seems to be just about everything). It doesn't appear to be leaking anywhere after my test runs so I hope it will hold together on the way to/from Shasta today and tomorrow. I also found the bent rim and moved it to the back so the wheel doesn't shake like crazy at 45mph.

I wish something more interesting was going on right now so I could journal about it, but life is pretty quiet. Next Monday I'm going up to the Shasta land to meet with the well driller dude and watch him start drilling the well. That should at least be a little interesting. I just hope it's not freaky hot, and that the Montero doesn't explode on the way up. I gotta swap out that leaking PS hose before the trip and rotate the tires. I'm pretty sure one of the rims is bent because I've had them balanced twice and it still shakes at 45mph. That's not good, so I'll throw the bad one in the back.

The guy from New Zealand that was on the motorcycle tour finished his article and sent us a PDF copy of the article. Both dad and I are in there. You can see me on the boat on page 5 (right next to Kristen's Nessie toy picture) and that's me on page 6 in front of the "otel" (where is the "H"??). Kinda cool. We're going to see if we can get him to send us a paper copy of the magazine too.

Hmmm.... what else. Not much really. My "medical" problem is clearing up. I hope to be able to ride again next week. Driving isn't all that fun.

I had to drive to work today for "medical" reasons (don't ask). It wasn't too bad since I had to come in early to do an interview with a dude in India (who showed up 20 minutes early so we're going to offer him the job), but it's going to suck going home in traffic. What also sucks is that the Montero is low on fuel, I'm going to have to buy some of this $2.95/gal unleaded. Man I should have bought a Geo Metro when I had the chance. Although, maybe if gas gets expensive and stays expensive then they'll bring in some of the cool Euro small cars that we can't get here.

Work is quiet, very quiet. I'm doing some perl coding, most my guys are out and the other side of the building is a ghost town. The CIO called an all-hands meeting next week, next Thursday in fact. My 1-on-1 with him is now next Wednesday so obviously I won't have any input into what he's going to talk about at the meeting the next day. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe he's just going to axe all the dudes on the web side?

I would like to say it's been a relaxing weekend, but I would be lieing if I did. One of Kristen's grandmothers is here visiting and we took her and my grandmother up to Carson City so they could gamble, and then to the cabin and then back here. Lots of driving.

While at the cabin we went over to check out the progress on my parents house. Those pics are on the main page, and as you can see the back of the house is WAY up there in the air. Dad put a roll-up garage door into the basement, it's got enough room down there to park the tractor. There will be a 2-car garage on the house and where that construction trailer is parked is where the 3-car detached garage will be. Lots of shop space.

The little plastic thingy that holds the CF card door on my camera closed broke and now the door pops open randomly and shuts the camera off. I'm going to have to tape it closed, how very lame.

I had to come in early today (and skip the gym) and stay late to do two India interview (2nd round stuff). The early guy, flaked and didn't show. The later guy? He flaked too. We called him and he said he "forgot". WTF? That's two flakes on 2nd round interviews, and one flake on a first round yesterday. Ed, my ever helpful fuck-tard boss, says "your standards are too high!" when I mention the hiring troubles. Again, WTF? Should I hire someone who can't even make it to the interview? What about the guy we did hire there last month who signed all the papers for the job, but then never showed up? How exactly is it my high hiring standards? Guess it's too much to ask anyone in India to actually show up for the interview or the job. Guess we should just start sending everyone who applies paychecks and see if they'll be so kind as to work for us. Man this sucks. I told him he needs to hire his manager over there (his threat of the week to keep the rest of us in line) and let that guy try to hire someone. Why are we going to India again? Oh yea, cost savings. If you can't hire anyone, it's really cheap.

I really should try to remain cheerful, but it's hard when your boss says the new CIO wants to hire 50-90 people in India to replace the IS team here (we're IT, not IS). First we're told they won't be touching IT, but then he forwarded us a presentation made by some outsourcing company to our CIO about how they can outsource our entire ops support/networking/security/corporate support/desktop group. Woohoo, watch me be motivated to do my best day-to-day while the new CIO figures out which of us can get screwed in the ass. I hope they at least give us a good package.

Sometimes I'm smarter than I look. I've got a few bad magazines for the Kimber that are just wearing out from all the use. I bought some replacements, but the question is, which are the bad ones? So, I've numbered all the mags with the magic marker. As I figure out which ones are bad, I'll just leave them on the bench when I get back to reload and pick up one of the new ones. That way I don't have to remember which pocket I stuck the bad ones in (which I can never do while I'm in the middle of a shootout :)

Isn't it ironic that after all Kenny's problems with that fancy ass HTML software that he finally come back to using a text editor? Welcome back to 1960, I've left an oil lamp on for ya.

The basis of my slackerness on the log updates is directly related to doing the job of two people at work. I've been playing manager and doing some serious tech work for weeks now. I don't even have time read Dilbert in the morning all of the time. Mostly it's because I refuse to give in and just stay at work all the time. I'm trying to leave before 7pm if at all possible, and it's worked most of the time. I have too much money in the bank to let work dominate my life anymore.

So, last Friday I had to go up to Berkeley to drop off a hard drive to Perforce tech support. We have some corrupt DBs they're supposed to fix and they're 107gb in size. It takes forever to FTP that sort of thing so I copied them to a hard drive and just drove it up. Sorta that "station wagon full of cart tapes" scenario from the college days. The woman knows Berkeley very well so she went with to make sure I didn't die. She's very afraid of my driving now, and to be honest she has right to be. I ride the bike so much and drive so little (the Montero has been dead for several weeks without a power steering hose I have but haven't installed yet) that I'm not used to the speed (or lack there of) or size of a car. I keep coming too close to people when I pass or merge because I forget how big the car is.

On the way back to the house, the woman hears some crying coming from the bushes on the walkway to the front door. She's worried that there are baby kittens in the bushes and ivy. Oy. After 45-60 minutes of me crawling around in the bushes and ivy, dodging spiders and spiky ass plants I managed to rescue 4 newborn kittens. They were scrawny, cold, covered in ants and near death. Their mom must have had them as she moved as they were strung out in a line on both sides of the chain link fence. We took them inside and tried to clean them up and then went to a 24 hour vet clinic to get some kitten milk substitute crap. The vet wouldn't take them. We got them to eat and Kristen work up every few hours to feed them during the night. One died over night, and we took the other 3 to the humane society. They'll either nurse them till they're old enough to be adopted (kittens are in high demand) or they'll just gas 'em. I would rather not think about it.

Saturday, after dropping off the cats, we went to the SF zoo for the woman's birthday. It was here that I surprised her with the ring and asked her to marry me. I had called her dad on Friday night and got the OK (but he still seems worried about it). She had no idea the ring was ready. It was really late from the jewelers, I just lied exactly about how late it was. October '06 is the tentative date.

Sunday we looked at Woodside which is this wedding place (the woman has been planning already) up by Alice's. It's not bad. In the afternoon we went to Alameda to the German place for dinner with her friends and then went into SF for a rooftop wine tasting thing with some of her shrink associates. I wish I had the camera for that, the views from the rooftop was amazing (even if the company was boring... think Lilith from Cheers and you'll get the idea).

This Friday we went to Cleveland to visit the rest of the woman's family and for her grandma's 90th birthday. I took only a few pictures there because I was busy playing "corn hole" which is this Ohio game. Sorta like horse shoes, you toss bean bags at a sloped piece of wood with a hole in it. 3 points for in the hole, 1 point if it stays on the board. All the Ohio folk are experts in this game but I held my own after a few hours of practice. They're going to bring the game to the wedding reception, much to Kristen's dismay.

Now, it's Sunday afternoon and I'm doing nothing. I took a 45 minute nap to recover from the flight and cleaned up some paperwork and that's about it. I was going to fix the Montero, but I'm sorta resting again. I've got some ribs defrosting and will BBQ them later on. Ahh.... a few moments of relaxation before the next hellish week.

Pictures are up on the main page. Some of the house shots are of the B&B we stayed at (that also raised Alpacas... which we saw at the zoo last week, why are there so many Alpacas in my life?).

Whoa, quite a while without an update. It's been crazy busy these last few days, or week.