Today out the in freezing cold (although with no snow unlike the Northwest folk) I went to the comm van training. They showed us how to fill out the paperwork, pre-flight the van, fire up the generators, etc as well as had us learning to drive it. Lots of backing up and parallel parking and making tight turns without killing cones with the rear wheels, etc. I did OK, enough to pass and it's really, really unlikely I'll ever drive the thing with all the cool kids around. You can't see it in the pic really because the sky is washed out but there are at least 10 antennas on top of it and at least a dozen radios inside. Some you've got to attach the antennas to the roof once you get stationary.

Even with the install being a pain in having to go back to the shop twice, I'm really liking the electric fan setup in the Jeep. It has only a mild effect on gas mileage so far, but it takes away a ton of noise from the engine bay since it's not turning all the time and got rid of a lot of drag on the engine. It's not making the Jeep faster or anything but it takes away that low speed hesitation. Worth the money I say. Now I just need to tweak with the set point when the weather gets warmer as it's hard to get the engine to start to overheat when it's 45F out.

One of the things I managed to do this weekend was get the packet radio stuff working. The software the guy wrote for the county packet is really slick and installs easily. With only a little tuning help from the guys on the yahoo packet group I got it sorted out. Now if I can just figure out how to actually do the weekly packet check-in I'll be set.

I did have to throw some more money at the radio stuff as part of the packet setup. My battery on the charger method doesn't work under heavy usage. Since the battery was pretty weak to begin with the constant TX-ing the packet setup needs taxes it and it can't keep enough voltage to keep the radio functional. Watching it work each packet TX drops the voltage by about 0.5v so after the first 6-10 packets the radio crashes. The guys at hammie hut were happy to sell me a power supply that can run my current radio and packet modem, has a cigarette plug so I can run my HT adapter and has larger terminals out the back and 30A sustained output so when I go HF I'll have a supply to turn my real radio.

Per our usual Thanksgiving tradition we went to the auto show on Saturday. We got to drive the new Nissan Leaf around inside one of the big ballrooms and it was actually a really nice car. Otherwise nothing else was to impressive, liked the new STi sedan and the volt looked interesting but you couldn't touch it. Mitsubishi and Mercedes were missing from the lineup and Jeep had a limited presence. BMW didn't have a 1 series on display, just 5s and 7s and one crappy 3 convertible. Guess the 1s are too cheap for the SF crowd. Went to Chevy's afterwords too just like always. :)

The woman still likes the Kia Soul, and she really likes the hamsters in their commercials. She had the guys at the booth trying to figure out how to break into the display to get her the stuffed hamster but none of us could figure out how to open the glass without removing all the screws holding it in. Hopefully you can just buy the hamster at the dealership.

I asked my dad if he could get me Grandma's favorite painting and since none of the other grandkids had claimed it yet he managed to get it for me. The woman hates it but I think it looks fine on the big empty wall in the bedroom. It would look better if this was 1988 but whatever, it's an actual painting and not just a print. Dad's got the receipt in with grandma's papers so I'll get that and stick it on the back showing when it was purchased.

Last bit of picture fun is of the cabinet dad and I installed. It's a shitty sheet metal box but it's approved by the CA DOJ so it at least looks like I'm trying to keep my home defense weapon safe. I'll feel better knowing that the 12 gauge is available instead of just the .45. I've tacked a weapon light onto the pump and put the side shell carrier on so it's got 7 in the mag (using 3" shells) and 6 on the side. Plenty.

The last errand of the weekend was to go get new rain gear before I get caught at work in the rain on the bike. Instead of gray and black, this time I got bright ass yellow. No one will miss me when I put that gear over the top of my gray and black jacket.

Tomorrow, it's back to work. Not looking forward to that at all!

It's annoying that I can't do anything around the house. Part of it is because I'm feeling sickly, part of it is because if I do anything not related to the holiday people get all cranky. I did manage to clean up my pocket knife by also sharpening all the kitchen knives, and when taking the garbage down to the garage I managed to sneak 5 minutes to repaint the clip on my knife. After carrying that thing around for the last 11 years it's stripped off most of the coating. Not bad though for something that gets banged around every day. The texture on the handle underneath the clip is actually worn down a little, that's hard to do with how tough that plastic material is when it's just rubbing against the cloth of my pocket. No wonder I've worn the pockets of all my pants. :)

Another quick photo, from lunch at the 'hi-life'. It's been in SJC forever and it was on a TV show so the woman's parents wanted to go. Steaks and ribs weren't bad, but they were way over priced.

This 'vacation' is mostly useless. I'm still sick so I don't feel like doing much and with the in-laws here even if I wasn't sick I couldn't go to anything fun. Guess it could be worse, somehow.

After 2 days and 2 trips to the 4x4 shop I've got the electric fan installed and working. They tapped into the wrong circuit so when the engine heated up the fan came on and the rear defroster turned on to. Doh! They moved the tap to the right fuse and all is well. It makes a huge difference without the mechanical fan in there. The engine runs way quieter and I can feel it not being so bogged down at low speed as that fan drag is gone. I'll be interested to see if it has the desired effect on mileage.

Wellington stopped by and picked up my dad's dirt bike gear, kinda odd having people drop by two days in a row. Don stopped and dropped off some goodies yesterday while I was out.

Downtime was worse than usual, but I won't go into that noise.

I've upgraded my laptop at home to snow leopard finally since the corporate guys cut off iCal support for leopard. It's doing some strange stuff, but I did get the NFS bits working again. Always forget to use the -P flag to keep it on a reserved port. I've taken out some of my cron hacks, let's hope we don't have to keep pinging and doing arp deletes to keep the network running after it goes idle.

So much has happened over the last week, I've just been too busy to write about it. Honestly though I've been dreading writing about it as well. Not just because it's got a lot of death in it (the funeral) but because I was reading back through my old journals looking for some pictures and I really don't like what I'm seeing. Other than some good photos and funny bits, most of my journals are just a bunch of whining and whatnot. Perhaps part of the reason I feel so guilty about everything is because I can't escape my past. It's not just gone and forgotten, it sticks around as bits on a disk forever. I've not been at this as long as Dennis but still my journal goes back 10 years, that's a lot of history to want to forget.

I don't remember if I wrote about it, but I traded my older M700 to Gianni. He gave me $700 and a brand new M700 308 with a really skinny/light barrel and I gave him the trued up M700 and my HS stock with the badger bottom metal and trigger. He was ecstatic to get a .5 MOA rifle and I was happy to get something that's really, really light and easy to carry and 100% stock. He said the rifle had 20 rounds though it but I don't believe it's even that many, the barrel still looks completely fresh. Guess I can't usually see into my new barrels because they always have muzzle brakes on them. So far the only issue I've run into with this setup is that my old Hogue stock off my VTR, which I really like the look of, is a POS. It's not straight, as you can see with the really thin barrel that the stock is off-center. No wonder the VTR wouldn't shoot with the stock pushing on the barrel randomly. I know I'm going to keep this one 'stock', but I still might get the barrel cut down a few inches and get 1.5" taken out of the stock itself so it fits me better. No custom triggers or bottom metal though, that's money that's not needed to be spent for the purpose this rifle is supposed to serve. I'm likely to put that scope up for sale and buy something smaller and lighter and lower power, again I shouldn't need 20x on a hunting rifle, I'm not taking 800+ yard shots on stuff.

We're in the middle of a downtime right now, about 7 hours to go before we're done and can try to go home for the holiday. I'm really, really getting stick though. Pounding 'emergency c' and tea and throat drops to keep moving but I know I'm going to just fall into a heap and sleep for the next few days. At least it gives me a reason to not be social with the in-laws who are in town for the whole week :(.

Oh, and I finished Ringworld, reading it for the first time in, uh, 20 years. No, make that 25... 26, whatever. The book is actually pretty short and simple, I seem to remember a lot more stuff going on but perhaps that was in the sequels. Thanks to someone and their pirate account I got all 4 books on epub so I can read them on the phone. I don't feel bad about it though, I paid for all 4 books once already (one even in hardback!) so I figure I'm due a re-read at no cost to the publisher.

Ah, SJC again. I've never flown AA outbound before, it's usually Alaska out but they don't run the direct flights on Sundays so I'm stuck on another airline. What's really interesting to me about all this flying is that ever since I started carrying this camo backpack I've not received a single 'additional screening'. Before I had at least a 50% or greater chance of getting the extra anal probe. Now I think there are enough military guys in the airports (2 in full camo in the area I'm sitting in now) that a single male traveling alone isn't so strange and that the backpack makes me fit in. What's really interesting too is that they don't even hand search the bag after xray even though it's packed with questionable stuff like my radio gear, medical kit (with scissors!), enough wires/USB/sprint wireless widgets to choke a horse, surefires, etc. Nothing 'dangerous' but everything so different from the usual drek that people are hauling through airports. Again, maybe it's just normal now with all the military guys in here.

Yesterday was our CERT class final. We extracted people from collapsed 'structures', did team search and rescue in a house while blindfolded, did medical assessment on a bunch of 'victims' and put out fires. The fire departments extinguishers are way cooler than the ones you get at home. More effective and less mess, they don't seem to throw up the useless cloud of irritants that don't do anything except make it hard to breathe. Makes sense they would have higher quality chemicals than you get at OSH. The backpacks of gear they gave us were pretty skimpy, no medical supplies at all and the flashlight and gloves were so crappy as to be unusable. Fortunately we've already got better stuff in our own kits at home.

After class I went to 4 wheel parts to schedule the install of an electric fan setup for the Jeep (getting rid of the mechanical fan on the front of the engine is supposed to bump MPG by 2, we shall see). The next stop was the ham hut to get a headset and some random adapters and a portable j-pole 2M antenna to put in my emergency kit.

The big failure of the day was when I tried to cut into the closet wall to install that gun cabinet. The stud I found turned out to not be anything of the sort, it's just a 1x2 nailed to the sheet rock, it's about as structurally sound as you would expect a 8' piece of 1x2 to be when held perpendicular to the long side, ie one push and the whole thing would snap. While it was easy to cut my 8" square hole in the wall with the sheet rock saw, it's going to be harder to put that piece back in and patch it. While in the wall I was shocked at the lack of insulation too, with that hole there was a steady cold breeze blowing back into the house. I realized the attic isn't sealed, but I figured they wouldn't let outside air sit right against an uninsulated piece of sheet rock. No wonder the closet and bedroom are so freakin' cold in the winter, they're basically exposed to the outside all the time. I'm going to insulate that wall before I close it back up, maybe some triple expanding foam is in order here! :)

We went to dinner on Wednesday at a place called "Station 1" in Woodside. They're so new they don't have a sign, or a real web site or anything. It's a $50 fixed price menu that was surprisingly good for south bay food. OK, they're not exactly south bay, more like mid-peninsula but whatever, it's not SF. Woodside is very swanky though, and it really is where all the old white people are. Other than the wait staff no one but was was under 65 in there. I didn't take many pictures (should have taken one of the menu had I know then web site would be devoid of such details) but here is a pic of the woman's wygu (sp?) beef.

I've officially taken my first steps toward being the real life cleric in our CERT team. No, not the kind of cleric who gets dumbasses to blow themselves up in exchange for virgins, but the healing style cleric. Obviously the CERT medical training is just the first step in all this but its' at least got me some basic wound care knowledge and got me to resupply my first aid kit. It all fits nicely in the lower compartment of my fancy backpack so I'll have it with me most everywhere I go.

The big backpack makes it way too easy to carry stuff around. In addition to my first aid stuff, my radio (with 2 antennas even), flashlights, basic personal hygiene products, a small spotting scope, etc, I've found that I've even got a spare shirt, socks and underwear stashed in the bag at all times. I still need to get one of those small ponchos in case I have to walk somewhere in the rain.

The weekend sucked, spent most of it working on the cabin. We made our last dump run for a while, managed to compress the rest off their leftover furniture into the trailer (a 14 lb sledge makes fast work of disassembling press board entertainment centers :) as well as all the carpet. Pulling up the carpet was gross, you can see that their dogs pissed in every room and all down the stairs. Only 1 closet was spared. The hallway had so much piss in it that the subfloor was not only stained but it was still wet. Yea, after over a month it's still not dry. As you can imagine the smell was wonderful. I suspect we're going to have to replace some of that subfloor, you can't get that sort of damage out without replacement. How do people live in such filth? Even the hamsters go outside their hut to pee.

Multiple deaths in just a few days, it's crazy. Grandma finally died on Wednesday after a few days of hospice and the crazy morphine drip they give you to shut your breathing down. Then today I hear that my uncle (the one that got the west nile virus thing) also died today. Dad's sister gets the double-whammy losing her mom and her husband in the same week. She's a total loser, but even she doesn't deserve that sort of trauma.

An advantage to having an adventure touring bike is that you don't have to wash it; they actually look better with some dirt and wear on them. I must say though knocking the layer of road grime off the mirrors and gages makes it seem like a brand new bike.

With dad dealing with the funeral stuff my weekend is going to be taken up making dump runs at the cabin and driving around a lot. That sucks.

Two random pics, first two from the office. My Taos mug mysteriously jumped off the shelf and shattered. Not just broke, but actually shattered and there are little shards of pottery all over the place (and likely will be for months since they don't vacuum the offices anymore and I'm unlikely to bring a vacuum from home anytime soon). The second is just a shot of my desktop the other day, I realized I really am a manager when I spend more time working on spreadsheets like this than I do anything else.

Friday night I drove up to Sacto so that I could go to the woman's horse show on Saturday. She was there 3 days but I only had to put in 1 days worth of 'husband time' and man what a miserable day it was. Cold, raining, everything was muddy, etc. They ride rain or shine and fortunately for her some of her classes were in indoor rings and others that weren't were at least running when it wasn't raining. Some girls didn't get so lucky and had to ride during the storms. There were a lot of down riders on the higher courses, really shocked they let them run that high and fast with such poor footing. In her little puny classes she did OK, took 4th overall in a 4-part class and a bunch of 6th and 7th place stuff (out of 20+ riders so it sorta kinda means something). The hideous bamboo plate with the horse head on it was for the 4-part class. 3rd place was a cooler, 2nd place was $500 and 1st place was a golf cart. She was too many points behind to take 3rd but she held off the 5th place person by only 2% so she really did earn that slot. Out of 26 riders in that class she did really well considering she doesn't own the horse and only rides a few times per week.

If you look closely at the ribbons you can see one says "reserve champion" (in case the first 3 people are unable to perform their duties?) and the white one clearly says "31 and over". She's with the old folks, they have under 12, 12-17, 18-30 and 31+. Sometimes there is a 50+ class too but she's got a while before she qualifies for that.

Saturday night after dinner with the horse people I went up to the cabin to help clean that mess up on Sunday. I managed to get the primer on the exposed wood and dad got it painted after the sun finally came out and dried the primer. We also got a trailer load of junk loaded up for the dump; next weekend or whenever I can get up there again will be the second load and then we get to pull up the carpet.

I picked up a 1200 baud packet modem yesterday, hopefully I can find all the serial bits I need and get a cable wired up for the 7100 so I can check into the packet net next week... or at least get the software loaded and get the thing talking.