The woman is headed up to visit Heather again today so I've got the day to myself. I don't want to say I've wasted most of it, but yea, I've wasted at least 2/3s of it at this point.

The only success story so far (having gotten up late, watched some TV and gone to the local indoor range and give up due to the crowd of 10000 Asian gang banger wannabes in there) is getting an antenna for the Jeep. Now that I have a radio in there (vs just the amp for the HT) I keep the antenna on all the time. It's annoying though for two reasons, one being it whacks the door every time I go in/out of the garage and it bangs against the top, and two if someone tries to close the hatch with the glass open it bends the crap out of the antenna. It wouldn't seem like that would happen but it happens a lot in the field when the wind blows the gate around and in the garage when the woman tries to close it while I'm unloading things. I could take it off all the time but where is the fun in that? So, a quick trip to HRO (which like the range was filled with people, only this time it's fat old white guys eating the free donuts) and I got a Diamond 7k shorty:

Yes, that is rain on the Jeep, it happens here sometimes. This little guy won't hit the garage door and it fits under the open glass. Both problems solved, and it's still got some gain to it. Win. Perfect for most of what I do and I can stash the larger antenna inside if I go somewhere and want more gain. Then of course I should get an even larger one because hey, you can never have enough antenna. One of the old codgers said he has a 2nd antenna for every mount on his rig so if he's doing an event he can setup the big stuff and 'look like a tuna boat'.

Some random pictures to post up before I forget. First, yet another rabbit in the complex. This one is still in captivity but I suspect we'll see it hopping around the bushes at some point when it figures it can just hop down from the ledges. Next is an amusing sign I shared with the foo guys. I'm not the only one that refers to children by height rather than age as age is so hard to guess. Last is a really spicy ale I got at BevMo. I like Belgian browns in general; this one is a bit strange with the spice, sorta it's like someone put a shot of captain morgan in there? Maybe that's why I like it.

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Nothing too exciting this week, just more of the same. However, I did manage to catch the hamster yawning on video. Yea, that's quality right there. It's actually kinda a small yawn, usually he looks like he flips his head inside out opening his mouth so far.

The bike is starting to make some strange whining noise. At first I thought it was just wind noise, but it's too consistent for that. It's not in the engine, when I hear it I can pull in the clutch and let the engine idle down and the noise is still there for a bit until the bike slows down. Could be the chain, or it could be the wheel bearings. I swapped the KLR's out, haven't done that with this bike and I'm kinda unlikely to do so myself. It's going to be due for a valve check/adjust in about 3k miles so I'll have the shop give it a complete once over. You can tell it's getting more miles on it, not just from the tiny bit of oil it's using but because it's down on power. Still moves if you get on it hard but in 'causal' acceleration it's really lagging. Unlike in previous times I don't have an urge to replace it really, it does everything I want. I must be getting old.

The HARP refi is going through, we'll be down to 4.25% which will save us $400-ish per month which will be nice. I think we're going to keep the payment the same and just pay the extra to principle, but maybe not. Don't want to own this place if it falls over in an earthquake.

The woman said she got me some cheese and salami at the store and I was expecting something really awesome. I was half right. The cheese was some white cheddar-ish Irish cheese that was really good, but the salami was the pre-sliced greasy nasty crap. She said she thought I liked that kind of salami and I explained that's for camping or hunting use only, otherwise I'm too much of a foodie now to eat such pedestrian salami. :) The cheese was on super sale so we went and picked up a few more bricks of it. It's good for another 6 months even without freezing so I don't think we'll bother, if I can't eat 4 bricks of cheese in 6 months then something is really wrong.

Today's other activity was a bit of wine tasting. We went to BevMo last night and picked up some wine on sale at their 2 for 1 event but it is hard to buy unknown wine. We didn't want to take up the whole day with it so we just went to a few in the Santa Cruz mountains. We ended up with 5 bottles of wine somehow, which is a little shocking to me.

I tried to capture the view at the Loma Prieta place, you can see Santa Cruz proper in the distance by the sea.

Also last night we went to have coffee with one of the woman's friends who is moving to LA. Turns out she hadn't eaten and the only restaurant by the coffee place we were at was a vegetarian Indian place. Ugh. I choked down some crappy appetizer and a cup of Madras coffee, and of course now my jacket stinks of unwashed feet. I hate Indian restaurants.

I put the stock pack back on the 17 and it's ready to go hunting.... something. All the small game seasons are over the for the year so it's looks like it's just target duty until late fall.

Picked up one of the FasTrak transponders so now I can drive through the no-stop lanes on the bridge, but more importantly I can now use the Lexus lanes. They changed the HOV lane on 237 to a toll lane so now anyone who wants to pay $2 or $4 per trip can drive around the fucked up interchange they built. It saves me about 20 minutes on the bike doing that in the morning and now if I find myself having to drive in I can just pay the money and do the same in the Jeep. Handy.

Many months (6+) ago, there was this couple that used to workout with a trainer at the gym in the mornings. The chick looked to be late-30s early-40s, kinda bitchy but always flirting heavily with the trainer dude. The guy looked early-40s, very tall and reminded me of some sort of sales/marketing guy. Loafers, kinda slick-willy looking, always carrying a man bag around. Eventually they vanished, didn't see any of them for a while. Then the guy showed back up alone, and he was working out way harder than before. Actual cardio, actual weights, no loafers. After a couple of months he was gone again. This week the chick showed up again. No guy, no trainer, and she's really out of shape. Where she used to wear spandex and sports bras, she's now wearing sweats and t-shirts and you can see she's got a gut. So what happened I wonder? She finally put a move on the trainer (or her guy got tired of watching her hit on the trainer in front of him) and they broke up? He started working out in earnest to shape up for dating? She went out with the trainer for a while until it played out and now she's back at the gym trying to fix the damage not being at the gym forever has done? It's a mystery.

The chain on the bike went out of spec only 400 miles after it's last adjustment. The factory chain went 30k miles and this new one only has 10k on it and it's starting to act like it's on it's way out. I didn't change the chain care routine or products, and I've not changed how I ride, so it's gotta just be the quality or lack thereof on the aftermarket chain/sprockets.

I got my cloned disk to work yesterday, it boots like it should and everything works. I couldn't get ESXi to boot it as a "vm with a physical disk", it still doesn't enumerate the drives correctly. I may upgrade the kernel on the clone, it just might be that it's missing the SCSI driver for whatever card the VMware stuff emulates.

Got my next Israel trip scheduled and approved, I'll be in Austin for a few days next month, then Israel, then likely back to Israel in May. Woo frequent flier miles.

So sleepy. Been on a zillion calls today and running around chasing down finance people... take a lot out of you and now I just want to go home.

My first birthday gift:

Pic on the camera of one of the air handlers in the old data center. Not relevant at all, but I don't have a whole lot of pictures to share these days.

Saturday we went up to Auburn to visit Heather in the rehab clinic where she's recovering from her brain surgery. She's really not doing that well from what I can tell; I realize they say it's a slow process but you can really tell she's lost a lot of personality and emotion and just... something. Maybe it comes back in time, maybe not. At least there was one highlight, we went by Elk Grove so the woman could eat at Chick-fil-A, and the cow was there so she had to make a scene:

Making some progress on my "move everything to a VM under ESXi" project. It messed around with this for about 8 hours cloning my main drive so I could experiment without data loss. I've learned a bit more about how ESXi works, and am close to making things work. Another weekend session and I think I'll have my old physical disk images booting under VMware.

I put a coat of paint on the new .17 stock, Don says it looks white in the pic but it's really tan in real life. With it being so cold and rainy it's going to take a long time for the paint to fully dry, and I've moved it into the house so it's at least a little warmer. The woman didn't seem to notice the rifle stock hanging in the doorway in the downstairs bathroom.

Temp was 102F yesterday evening, feeling better today but still not feeling well enough to do much other than lay around.

I was going to go with the woman shoe shopping, my running shoes are worn out. Rather than do that I went to Amazon and after doing research on the 'runners world' website I found a reasonable pair. Way easier than having to leave the house feeling like I do. By the time they arrive I'll be well enough to actually use them.

One of the other NASCAR people took a photo of the woman hanging out in the garage at PHX las weekend. Was it last weekend? I can't keep up with things.

I've pushed through being sick on Thursday and Friday but today, I'm just laying around. Fever yesterday, not so much today but I am achy with a headache and upset stomach. Today's plan has me not leaving the house at all, so far so good.

I'm catching up on a ton of TV shows, most of which I would just normally delete but now suddenly they're the most interesting thing I can think of to do, without actually moving or being fully awake.

Was in Austin last week for 3 days, and went to visit my parents over the weekend but honestly nothing new or interesting happened. We did go to dinner at the actual Salt Lick BBQ place that was on Top Chef, but it wasn't all that. It was good, but about the same as Rudy's so it's more the experience rather than the actual food that could make it interesting.

Work is interesting as always, yesterday was the final reorg and I lost a chunk of my team and my title/position, but oddly I've got just as much work as before. Dbag has taken over, but won't own anything which means John and I will have to make things happen without his help. Becoming 'typical'.

Heather is recovering from her brain tumor surgery but isn't even close to being OK. The woman has been going up there each day to UCSF to visit and it's really taking it's toll on her seeing her friend near death.

This is all very depressing, I think I'll stop writing now.