Oh, Would You Look At The Time Weather?

     I'd love to sit here and chat, but four inches of fresh-fallen show are tellin' me what I need to be doing is pulling on yesterday's jeans, stout boots, bundling up and getting out there and clearing the stuff away.

     Last night around about ten p.m. or earlier as I went to bed, the yard, sidewalks and street were utterly snow-free.  A generous sprinkling of fallen leaves over fading-green grass in the yard, pavements dry....  Woke briefly at two a.m. and peeked out the window to find a powder-sugar dusting of snow, photogenically pretty.

     What's out there now is to a "pretty dusting of snow" as a full-gown bull moose is to Bambi.  It's been falling fast, thumping down, since the tiny hours and it hasn't stopped.  Peering up into the still-dark sky, you're like an ant looking up at sugar pouring into a spoon.

     And like the proverbial ant, I can't fiddle my morning away but must, perforce, work.  To the shovels!

     Come back later: I may have some photographs.

Happy New Year!

     Hap-pee New Year!  Hooray!  A fresh, brand-new year! I'm a-opening it up and a-divin' in...!

     ...Hey!  Waiddaminnit...  This year's already been opened.  Dog-gone it, it's probably done gone flat.  Who did this?

     (Indistinct words from Tam, offstage)

     What?

     Tam:  You did!  You came home last night half in the bag and opened up the New Year!  Right at midnight!

     Oh.

     I guess that's how it works, innit?

     Okay, then.  Happy 12-hour-old year!!!

My Roseholme Resolutions For The New Year

1080p, 1080i, 720p, 480i....

     What, wrong kind?

    Okay, how about these:

     1. To replace my mattress.  Srsly.  It's hurting my back, it's over a decade old, it needs to go.

     2. To stop (or at least reduce) the nearly-every-morning stumble, fumble or domestic mishap that makes the last few minutes of getting ready for work a mad scramble.

     3. To Do Something about my MGB.  Probably sell it, as the cost of fixing it is likely to be way too much.  This makes me sad, but perhaps the car can make someone else happy instead of being all-but-abandoned in my garage.

     4.  More bicycle riding!

     5.  More motor-scooter riding!  (Took the last ride of 2013 only Sunday, during the very last of the unseasonably-warm weather, charging the battery and getting some storage-treated gas into the carburetor.)

     6. A. To finish the dining room/library bookshelves, clear the old table of correspondence, catalogs and general home-debris and set up the new table.
         B. To build the remaining shelves for the living room, uncluttering media and tall-book storage and rearranging the hi-fi components.  Maybe even tackle the large behind-the-couch shelving for my typewriter and Tam's small-computer collections!
        C. To build the short "wraparound" bookshelves that will link the living room and dining room bookshelves.  (See, kids?  That's what a bibliophile's  fate was before e-readers.  Read -- and learn basic carpentry!)

     7. To get my ham radio on the air more.  I have a setup for AM radiotelephone about 75% done.  It could be a lot of fun.  (I decided a long time ago, I wasn't going to use voice modes on the shortwave bands until I could do AM with the other old fossils.)

     8.  To write more -- and get better at it.

     Hey, you've got to have goals, right?

Always Check Your Receipts

     ...Over at Trailer Park Paradise, Sabra takes on a Left-wing pseudo-factiod about Your Tax Dollars At (almost) Work and discovers, lo, the numbers, they are made up.  A quick trip to to IRS website, some number-crunching and she's got the real story, along with some interesting conclusions.

     Shan't spoil it -- though I will note fed.gov is spending 23 times as much on drone-bombing losers (and bystanders) in the wastelands of Asia as they are on all of their science-y programs, including NASA. (All of that high-tech stuff?  1% of your taxes if you made 50K last year!  Just a silly millimeter longer.)  Hey, Uncle Sam?  As long as you're picking my pocket, couldn't we blow them up slightly cheaper and do twice as much science?

     Receipts.  Check 'em. Just sayin'.

Tamara Addams?

    Heard from the living room, where Tam is watching the morning newsthing:  "Yayy, avalanches!  --Gee, who's gonna go skiing in a Hellgate?  Wow, this guy's stuck in snow up to his neck!"

     ...I'm tellin' you, I've never known anyone who gets more enjoyment from the news.  (Per Tam: "You would have to have a heart of stone, not to laugh at that sight -- the guy just skiied right up to a head and waving arms sticking up out of the snow."  He was recording on a Go-Pro or similar camera on his helmet, and had set out to help immediately after the avalanche.)

Installing Update 1 Of 4,346

     Something like that.  Maybe it was just 64, but it lasted like thousands--  I  took my smallest (and rarely-used) backup netbook into work yesterday, intending, I admit it, to use the faster download speed to install a copy of Scrivener* during lunch. And, yes, to let Windows do the update thing.  Even using the "visitor" wi-fi, it's blazing fast during slow times like the days between Christmas and New Years.

     I started the process early on, just powered it up and let it seek out updates.  By lunch, it was still downloading in the background and easily accommodated the writer's story & word processor download/install process. (I already have Scrivener; one license covers all of the owner's computers, hooray!).

     About the time I was done with lunch, the Windows updates were downloaded and I told the machine to shut down.  This received the usual, "Just as soon as install these updates, lady," response.  Fine, fine, it had the whole rest of the day.

     Quitting time came and went.  We had a squirt-booster shuttle, er, microwave truck fail in the field and I had to work over, troubleshooting and making repairs.  Six hours after clicking the "Shut Down" button, the netbook was still chugging away, "Now Installing Update 1 of 64.  Do Not Shut Down Or Unplug Your Computer."  Yeah, also, "Please Sleep In The Office Tonight?"

     Hey, it's a netbook (a model 1025 Eee) with supposedly near-infinite battery life, so I stuffed into its cute little carrier and carried it home.

     Set back up at home, after a mere hour it proudly admitted, "Now Installing Update 2 of..."  By bedtime, it had struggled all the way to four or five, so I went to bed and left it percolating.

     Wonder of wonders, this morning it was All Done!  --Kind of: powered it up and it went through fifteen minutes of reconfiguration, self-analysis and probably self-Rolfing and preemptive Righthink before it would let me log on, and followed up with another quarter-hour of Agonizing Reappraisal once I had.  It appears to be back on the job of netbooking now, but to tell the truth, I'm reluctant to ask it to do much for the next day or two; it's just gone through the computer version of a couple of sessions of root-canal dentistry and I suspect it's a little tender and grouchy.

     Moral: Power up the spare netbook more than twice a year.
______________________________________________
* Scrivener is kind of a "plotting engine" or "outline-to-draft-MS" tool, about as handy to writing as really good spreadsheet/database software is to accounting.  Between Scrivener ($40 at this writing) and Q10 (a shareware full-screen, barebones word processor with a small set of writing-specific features), you can set up even a small netbook with flexible, useful tools for writing and not have to struggle with the clumsiness and cost of general-purpose Word.

I Asked Google About...

     ...The new seventeen-digit verification "word" for comments.  #1 response? "It rubs the decryption on its skin, or it gets the hose again."

     I ain't askin' no more.

"And Now, The News..."

     NBC news this morning promoted an upcoming story: "Swimmers attacked by a school of piranhas."  Tam's been sitting at the foot of (my!) bed ever since, eating breakfast with the happy innocence of Gomez Addams awaiting reports of a natural disaster, occasionally snarling, "C'mon!  Get to the piranhas!"

     Oh, the story finally came up; she just sang out, "Yes!  Here it is -- Fish attack...!"

     Never a dull moment at Roseholme Cottage, right around the corner from the big, decrepit Victorian at 0001 Cemetary Lane .

The Cardboard Box Office

     So, you've got 1. A new baby, 2. A just-moved household, 3. A few zillion cardboard boxes and 4. You're spending a lot more time at home (see item one).

     Do you do as generations of parents before you have done and A. Go quietly crazy -- or do you B. Restage famous movie scenes using whatever's laying around?

     Yeah.  I'll have some more from Column B, please!

First-World Solutions For First-World Problems

     Behold, the Perfected Cookie-Dunking Cup!

     From the same folks who brought you the panic-button lightswitch, as seen in Firefly ("Out Of Gas").  Not to mention the engineering drawings for common snack foods.

Where My Accent Is From

     As determined by a test at the website of the Noo Yawk Tahmes, of all places:

     They nailed it -- see that green circle around the dark-red blob in East-Central Indiana?  While I was born here in Indy, I did most of my growing up in Marion, Indiana, just about dead-center of  that spot.  (Those even-darker red spots around Wichita KS, Jackson MS and the far-West corner of South Carolina?  Darned if I know, though I do have some ancestors from that part of the Carolinas, just about the middle of the original Cherokee nation.)

     How 'bout you?
     Thanks to Jeffro, who found this.

Merry Christmas!

     Just for you, a present from the Hidden Frontier!