The Time Sink

Am I ready to go back to work??? Heck no! Remember? It kicked my tail last Friday (I'm moving supplies from one room to another after clearing the first room's cabinets and setting up the second room). ...and today promises to be more of the same.

...and I have to be somewhere for dinner this evening! So it's lookin' like I'll be blasting home for a shower first...

Yeehaaa... They're finally saying that we're going to get some rain here! What? Waddaya' mean you've had enough? Well, yeah, if you're in Texas, you're just about done with rain for the entire year. ...and I may be singing that song shortly, since they're talking maybe an inch in two days. But here's the thing:

Yeah, the front door. ...after a week. We live in a valley here. ...an ag valley. Lots of crops. Lots. ...and the rain that usually shows up in September was a no-show this year. So all the dust from the discing and industry and construction and every other thing going on is just hanging in the air...

I was telling someone the other day about an ag burn I was looking at the other afternoon: the local college torched a pile of prunings. No big, other than the smoke was lost in the haze about fifteen feet up. ...and dust stirred up by the truck driving off mixed in around ten feet up.

That's all more or less livable; but what isn't is what the dust load in the air is doing to people with asthma and other respiratory conditions. I know I don't dare go blading as much as I'd like, but I'm small potatoes: I've tripled my stock of the primary medication we use for respiratory distress at the office. ...and they're still stripping my shelves.

So I was talking with Dave the other day after he posted the bit about Freesco 0.3 being out... I was wondering if my habit of coloring outside the lines was getting out of hand: Since Freesco seems to support Samba, I was thinking of using a second one of those web pads (the first one is headed for router/firewall duty) as a file server with Freesco as the OS...

I mean, the main use I have for the current server is to shove downloads, camera dumps, web sites, and local files to it, pull them back, or serve them up under Apache. That almost sounds like the job description of an mp3 server, -eh? ...and since Freesco has a web-based interface (and telnet), I don't even need to compile in ssh and such. How about a server with an OS footprint under 2 meg? (I've posted some resource links in Whitenoise.)

"Captain, there be rain here!!!" Yeah. ...and early! Keri Beland wrote in yesterday morning to say the rain had already hit the Seattle area, so I was hoping! Yesterday the forecasters started waffling about just when; and by last night had moved it up to this morning.

Well, they got it correct. ...and I'm glad Shelley has the day off since it let me get out and beat the traffic on the way in. ...and drop by Starbucks and try out their seasonal "Gingerbread" latte. Hmmmm... Not bad!

"When the rains came..." Oh, yeah, Seattle on Wednesday morning, The City sometime after midnight Thursday, Central Cal by Thursday morning, Nevada by Thursday afternoon, Southern Cal by Thursday evening, and Colorado is waiting for it to hit Saturday morning...

Heh. I picked up some flowers to plant if it ever stops...

The weather report? Yeah, well, considering we haven't had any rain since April, please indulge me <g>...

This morning we awoke to clear skies and the rediscovery of the mountains that border the eastern side of the valley. Yep, the rain may be gone for a while, but it sure cleaned the sky out. I went blading for the first time in a week and it sure felt good to be able to draw non-dusty air in!

We ended up with an inch of rain on Friday, giving us a two-day total of 1.38 inches. That more than played catchup with our normal 'year to date' average (remembering that we are actually in a desert here). It's so nice to have the sky clean again...

A lazy day here... I'd been up much of Friday night with Shelley (cold/sinus/back/insomnia) and it caught up with me last night: I headed off to bed hours before midnight. Hours...

Now, it's an hour or two later. ...and even with coffee and a coupla' breakfast burritos on board, I still feel like I'm ready for a nap! Not even... There's cleaning and the Moving Of Things to do...