football, meeting, weather

Sometimes you win …

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 … and sometimes you lose. Meeting tonight was canceled when one of the other committee members could not make it. So we put it off a week and adjourned to go watch football.

Speaking of football, does anyone else find this year uninspiring with the possible exception of three teams. Even the Broncos are so inconsistent that one is never sure which team will show up in any given game. Fortunately they play in a division where the other teams seem to have self-destructed early and often. So barring a really odd occurrence, they are in the playoffs. The three teams I find interesting this year? The Giants, the Jets, and the Titans. Oh well.

I love the odd weather this time of year around here. Today breezy and overcast, tomorrow up to the mid 60’s, followed by Wednesday when it is not supposed to exceed 30 degrees all day. It could be worse, we could already be buried in snow and the temperature could be in the teens.

Back to the salt mines. The Monday Night Football game is not interesting enough to waste the time watching.

crown, dentist, numbness

Return of the Dentist

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I write this with a numb half face. You know, the kind of face you get when you’ve been to the dentist and are wondering if you’ll ever feel your tongue and cheek again. Today was the preparation for the crown to replace the tooth a I broke back a while ago (Described here and here and here.). Now all I have to do is live with the temporary cap for the next month (until January 5th) as the crown is made and the Holidays pass. If it is like past occurrences, the temporary will last about 2 weeks and then I’ll have to have a new one put on. My bite tends to grind holes in the hollow temporaries.

We finally got a tiny skiff of the snow that raged around us over the weekend. Not enough of a trace to even tell whether it was snow or just the hoar frost blowing into the cracks. As I walked to the dentist’s office this morning I was debating with myself whether it was snow of the hoar frost. There wasn’t much in any case. The dental nurse said that there was more to the east and west of us and that it was definitely snow. Typical for the valley we live in here. As my wife got ready to return to the mountains yesterday afternoon, we kept an eye on the road reports since some of the interstate route closed briefly due to the snow and ice in the mountains. She got back to the mountains in good shape and reported they had 2-3 feet of new snow. We are still awaiting our first real snow out here on the plains. If it wasn’t for the fact that the farmers need the moisture, I could be happy that it hasn’t snowed yet.

Well, off to return phone calls and get the reports done for tonight’s Boy Scout Committee meeting. Hopefully my face will have returned to normal by then. Right now the front and lower lip is still numb enough it is hard to even drink my morning coffee. What a disaster – a morning without coffee!

NaBloPoMo

Made It!

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This is just a post so I can do my celebration dance for having made it through NaBloPoMo . (Nobody really wants to see me doing my dance. It’d be a lot like watching the dance of some NFL lineman who recovers a fumble in the end zone – not pretty and not a sight for the weak of heart! But I am happy to have managed a post a day for the month of November.) 

It was actually kind of fun and I may do it again next year. The main impact on me was the occasional post done at 10pm rather than 2am just so it would be on the “right” day.

Back to the regularly scheduled football game …

blah, football, weather

Blustery Saturday

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Today the wind was howling and the weather was cool. Our compatriots to the northwest in Wyoming and to the west in the Colorado mountains got snow and ice, but no snow here. Just cool and blustery weather that made you wish it would get over its pique and just snow already.

For some reason I also couldn’t get inspired by the football games on TV today. Maybe it was a sense of “I don’t carism” for the dregs of what the BCS is becoming this year. Maybe it was just that none of the games involved a team near and dear to my heart. Maybe it is just sadness that my alma mater had a perfectly disastrous season this year – they went 0 for. They got beat by every team they played. You have to understand that during my youthful years we were often 11-0 and vied for the Lambert Trophy for football supremacy in the east. Now, … I hope that the current coach (who was a player during my last year) can bring the program back to its former levels.

Maybe my blahs for today are due to the fact that my lovely wife will be leaving early tomorrow and I’ll be batching it again. On a strange note, she will be back next Friday because she has a jury summons for … wait for it … municipal court for next Friday. Just to be clear – I didn’t do it. The municipal judge may indeed be one of only three direct employees of the Mayor and City Council, but I have nothing to do with jury selection. (For the curious, the direct employees of the Mayor/City Council are the municipal judge, the city attorney, and the city manager. All other city employees are indirect and report officially through chains headed by the aforementioned three.)

Oh well – time to go see if there is more of the Thanksgiving pie hiding out in the refrigerator. And maybe the Oklahoma versus Oklahoma State game will heat up a bit more.

cocoa with santa, day, nerd

What’s a nerd to do?

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So what does a died-in-the-wool nerd do on a day like today. Well …

I spent time with my spouse. It is so nice to have her home for a few days. Nothing can compare with that, but I won’t let it stop me from boring you with the rest of my day.

I watched a bit of the CU versus Nebraska football game. Interesting to say the least, even if Nebraska did win. Out here in the part of Colorado known to some as the armpit of Nebraska, the division is probably 60/40 for CU over Nebraska, so some people we a bit unhappy at the ending.

Journeyed down to the church. This evening was Cocoa with Santa. The youth room in the church is decorated as a north pole fantasy with a live Santa to give a small gift bag to every child. Out in the kitchen they had pie and homemade cookies and cocoa and coffee and gingerbread cake with whipped cream for all to indulge in. My better half convinced me to have some coffee while she snarfed sampled the cookies. Got a chance to visit and watch the kids in line as they waited for Santa. The church gets 300-400 kids every year for the event (and probably twice as many adults).

Visited the phone store to investigate the options for our son. He’s tied up working in the mountains over the college break and wanted us to check on changing his phone since his current one is on it’s last legs. Of course it involves an upgrade in capability and service, just by chance.

Went shopping and spent longer in line waiting to check out than shopping. Makes one wonder why stores can’t plan ahead a bit and have enough cashiers on hand for high volume days. Some people abandoned their prospective purchases and left. $$$ out the door if you are a retailer.

And finally the real reason I’m a nerd – I spent most of the day re-writing my backup software for the network here at the house. After upgrading the servers to the latest and greatest Solaris and moving to ZFS based file systems and adding in a few different windows platforms, my old backup software based on ufsdump/ufsrestore just wasn’t an option anymore. It isn’t a lot of data since the disk farm is less than .5TB, but I like to keep it all backed up to the tape library with copies transported off site for safety. You wouldn’t believe the number of times my mania for backups has saved the rear-most portion of my anatomy. I’m getting too old for rear-end-ectomy, so I just do the backups. Time to return to watching the tapes cycle through the tape library robotic loader – excitement beyond belief!

Things Done Right