Ahh.... vacation. Yesterday was my last day at work until the 11th. Today I'm just hanging out helping the woman clean the house and getting my stuff ready to pack. Tomorrow I'll finish packing and then it's off to Scotland. Very exciting.

So yesterday was a bit of bad news. Turns out the realtor lied and the property is not zoned "rural residential" at all, and after talking with the county zoning office it's clear that we can't have horses on it at all. Bummer. So we had to cancel the deal and it's very likely we'll just end up eating the $2k for all the tests we've done so far. At least it was a learning experience?

Last night we went for sushi and ran into Troy and his woman which is always entertaining. My woman wanted me to put in the journal that I "saved" a bear. What really happened is that someone dropped a stuffed bear out of their car and then ran over it. She got all freaked (at first thinking it was a small cat or something) but then still wanted me to get it out of the street. I grabbed it and set it on one of the planter boxes in the strip mall. She says I saved it, I pointed out that it's not alive in the first place and that she is just nuts.

Way, way, way too much driving this weekend. Friday we went up to Shasta and stayed at the cheap motel so that we could get to the land in time for the perk test and the well dude to show up on Saturday morning at 8am. The perk test was successful, it took the guy a few times to find a good spot but in the end it worked out. We also learned a little about soil science. Interesting, but seems like it would get boring in about a week. The well guy found a spot he wanted to use and we had the back hoe do some quick work to make a road into the well spot. None of it was cheap, but at least it's done. Things are moving along nicely. Pictures of the perk test fun are on the main page.

Saturday night we stayed in a hotel in Petaluma. We almost didn't get a room, the place the woman booked on-line didn't actually get the reservation (we weren't the only one to get screwed) but even though it was NASCAR weekend the hotel guy found us a room in another hotel. Whew. We were in the handicap room so you know they were getting desperate.

At the NASCAR thing, I participated in a little push-up contest in the national guard booth (they sponsor a car that's currently in first place for the season, who knew?). You had to see how many push-ups you can do in 30 seconds. I managed to do 54 (he only counted 52 but whatever) which wasn't good enough for the top prize, but I was the best in the "over 30" category. Oy. I was bested by 2 push-ups but some 23 year old punk. Guess doing those 150 push-ups every morning at the gym came in handy for something. They gave me two t-shirts for the effort though (don't know what 1st place is, maybe a tour in Iraq or something equally bad, I doubt it was an M16 or the hummer they had parked there). The t-shirts came in handy to use as padding on the concrete benches that were out seats. I also saw that they had the shirts on sale for $25 in the driver's trailer. Damn, I should have hawked them for $20 each and made some cash. :)

The race was boring as expected. The woman's driver crashed on lap 2 or 3 or something so he was out of the competition. He came back out and finished the race in 42nd out of 43 drivers. At least they got him running again by managing to swap out the transmission and fix up the body work (sorta) in 15 laps. That's fast. Pictures are on the main page of course.

Reading back over this I've realized that my written English is getting pretty bad. Lots of little chopped up sentences... probably should work on that some.

Oh, and the huge pills the doc gave me on Friday seem to be working. She got on my case for waiting 5 weeks to come in, but I really though those nose thing would go away. It didn't seem like a real sinus infection this time. I've got a 10 day regime of pills to take but I should be easily back to 100% function before Thursday (and the flight to Scotland!).

Today I got to go to Taos and be the 'demanding customer'. I think it went well, I didn't ask for anything really strange, just that they're more clear in their communications, and that perhaps we write stuff down so no one can forget it (me) or change it (them).

Today was also day 2 of my attempting to follow the military style weight training. They don't do low reps at high weight, they do zillions or reps at low weight and get cut instead of buff. I want cut. So I'm doing their 150 push ups. I can do a set of 40, then 30, then sets of 20-25 all the way to 150 but it's work. 150 yesterday and 150 today, tomorrow I rest.

I was thinking of setting up another linux box. I would NFS mount (read only) the web pages to the other box and have it serve up the content. That way if someone hacked the web server they couldn't really do anything to the content. I suppose I could make the web docs just read-only to everyone but root as the web server is already running unprivileged, but I suppose they can hack apache anyway and get root somehow? I don't really know that much about hacking web servers. I probably should upgrade ssh too while I'm at it, that's probably more of a risk. I kinda do want to setup DNS, NIS and NFS here at the house, just because I've never had anything really complicated running at home. Gives me something geeky to do. I've got two open ports on the router still so no worries there.

The woman says I should put in here (she doesn't get to read it but she knows I'm typing something) about my strange dream last night. I woke up, jumped out of bed and ran around making noises like a turkey and yelling about the bees getting me. I woke up by the time I make it half way out of the bedroom. Very odd.

I took Friday off and went up to the Shasta property to meet with the survey people. Pics are up on the main page, but they don't mean too much without a lot of supporting description. I mostly took them to show the woman what happened. I actually drove up on Thursday night and stayed at the "Howard Johnson Express" which was the cheapest hotel around. I wanted to see how good/bad it really was. It's not the worst place I've stayed, and I think the woman can stay there when we go so that's good. I did find an add for "exotic massage" on the Montero in the morning. The woman was not amused. She did like the pictures of the neighbor's horses though. Why exactly do all my picture dumps have horses now?

On my way back from Shasta I stopped at the DR site to swap some dead power supplies and drives and do some quick maintenance. I forgot to bring extra pants and shoes, so I had to go into the DR site wearing my muddy pants and boots (it rained a lot during the survey). I went from wandering around in the sticks dodging poison oak, to trying to remember which eye to use to get past the retinal scanner into the data center in Sacto. Fortunately no one came close to me while I was there so they probably didn't notice my filthy pants. I knocked the majority of the dirt off.

Saturday I cleaned house why the woman rode, and then we ran some errands. I picked up the parts from the Mitsubishi dealer and stopped by Kragen so I have all the stuff I need to fix the leaking transfer case. When I'll do it I don't really know. It's not leaking that bad... not enough to make me get all excited about getting it fixed. Sunday I put up one of those rolling screen doors like Kenny has and went for a ride with dad for father's day. I also sorted out the ammo in the safe. Turns out I have 5500 rounds of .45, and 3000 rounds of .223 on hand. That's nuts. I took some of it over to my parents and put it in the old safe which I've got at their place. Handy to have all that off-site storage.

Check out this snake the woman found on the patio when she was watering the plants today. I must be rubbing off on her, the first thing she did after she found it was grab the camera. :)

This one looks larger than the little black and gold snake we had a few months ago. Hopefully this guy doesn't get killed like the last one. If there are rodents or whatever around for him to live on I would rather have the snake here to eat them than have the rodents in the house. The snake won't eat wiring or get into boxes in storage like a rodent will.

The woman got an appraiser scheduled to come to the Shasta property at 6:30am on Friday. Cool that it's Friday, but 6:30am?!?! Man these people start work early. I'm going to have to drive up Thursday night and stay in a hotel or else figure out how to get my ass up at 2am to drive up. I wonder if the Montero can make it again without that seal exploding? I could ride the bike up, but I have a feeling I'm going to be up there all day long and want to have a cooler of drinks as well as food along which is harder to do on the bike. Maybe I can rent a car or something if I'm feeling uncomfortable about the Montero.... naaa... it can make it. I'll throw a pump and some extra t-case fluid in the back and top it off if I have to. :)

Ah ha! I almost got the HR reps to admit that the new focal process is not fair to all employees. Those of us who were due a raise in April are getting back pay for the raise we missed, but those due in October are just getting a raise 3 months early. In the end, one group gets what they deserve, one group gets 25% more. I get nothing either way, but I just wanted to at least get someone to admit it rather than the usual poor PC cover up crap they try to pull.

The horse weekend is over. Whew. My butt doesn't even hurt all that much after over 15 hours in the saddle. Pictures are up on the main page. It was fun-ish, but I was very glad to get back home and cleaned up. There was a hot water equipped shower in the camp which I made use of, but there wasn't any time to just 'relax'. Sitting around reading or doing nothing is important apparently.

I was looking through Dennis' pictures of "sequim" (which sounds vaguely religious to me for some reason) and those shots of the inside of the ferry are cool. I want to go somewhere on a ferry. Also, notice that when there are wild animals outside the vehicle, or a chance of it getting dinged in transport, they take the woman's car and leave the BMW at home (or I'm guessing it's the woman's car since I don't recognize Dennis has having a Jetta).

Kenny is the biggest log slacker of all. Go write an update!

My legs and lower body are really, really tired from the gym this week so I'm not going today and will spend the morning before work lounging. I'm going to get plenty of a lower body workout this weekend on the horse trip. We're leaving tonight, picking up one person on the way up and will be staying in a hotel somewhere up by Redding. The woman has it all planned out, I just need to follow along and not get killed.

Work sucks, blah blah blah. What didn't suck was that we did a BBQ tonight. Troy and his woman and kid came over and I BBQ-ed ribs and potatoes while the woman made some baked chicken and her strawberry salad. Tasty stuff!

NVDA is user attack! Some spammer figured out how to get a bunch of stuff past the spam filter and they're getting people to click on bogus links. It's very obvious to those of us with older mailers that it's busted, but apparently new versions of outlook just do the wrong thing and make it look legit. Whatever, it gives the windows guys something to do.

I had Griffith pull up the property maps of the campus at work. The NVDA campus is 14 acres for the main site and an additional 2.5 acres for building E. Wow, so our 20 acres is larger than the whole NVDA campus. That's just nuts. The whole block we're on (so us, NEC, Peribit and some other warehouses and small industrial shops) is 42 acres. I'm getting excited about the land now, I want to walk around with the surveyor and just see how big it might be.

Crapola the cable modem is slow. Like 1200 baud slow. I would complain, but it's too slow to pull up comcast's page to file the complaint. Handy. I could call them, but I really don't want to play phone tag with the droids who will have me reset the modem and reboot my computer (already done all that stuff).

The realtor called, the seller accepted the offer. Now we have to do all the crazy stuff in 45 days, including getting a survey done, testing for septic, putting a well in and having it tested (part of the offer was that a well would produce at least 5 gallons per minute at a depth of 300' or less), etc, etc. I looked up Dixon Park (which is right across from the townhouse complex) and according to the city, that park is only 11 acres. Wow, we weren't even close to reaching the end of the property when we were walking around. I guess 20 acres is larger than I thought.

While yesterday was busy with horses and errands around the house (like adjusting the garage door, it now opens 4" higher than before), today was a motorcycle ride with the BMW club and mostly being lazy. I like lazy. I can't sleep in anymore though, I was still up at 6am even though we went out to dinner last night. Weird. Must be getting old.

Well that kinda sucks. Ed told me that our buddies in HR say I shouldn't get a raise this review cycle (which is 3 months over due) even though I'm up for one because I got a promotion last month. Whatever dudes, I didn't get that much of a raise. Sigh.

I sold the last of my pre-IPO shares on Wednesday, so I'm pretty much out of the stock game. I wanted to take the hit now when they were close to $30 which is about the highest they've been in 2-3 years. I'll pay the taxes and squirrel away the excess in case I need to drill a well....

... for the land up by Shasta. We put an offer in on the 20 acres up there just today. If they take it, it's a happy thing. If they counter, well, there is always more land elsewhere I guess.

Only 4 weeks to go before the Scotland trip. I'm starting to get excited and thinking about what to pack. I probably want to go get another 512mb or 1gb compact flash card. I think office depot at 1gb cards for under a hundred bucks or so. That must mean they're super cheap elsewhere. No reason to skimp on the big pictures when memory is so little. Holy crap I just checked price watch. They're like $60, and a 2GB is $130. Wow.