The Time Sink

Well, the rains are back! After three inches from last Monday to last Friday and one day of sunshine on Saturday, we're back to more wet stuff. ...but maybe only for a day or so; things look to clear up mid-week. It's been a strange one this year, with pretty much a slow start in Fall but one heck of a Spring. ...and with really different patterns like the 'bands' passing through; usually storms just come in and sit on us for a day or two.

...and yesterday's laser games? Well, let's just say I'm still able to both blade and play laser wars, but both are slowing down a little bit. I'm betting my stamina will pick up during the year for blading, but I got schooled during game two Sunday by ol' Brad: he and I got into a sniper session with each other and he scored something like two-hundred points on me! Yeah, and one was a shot to my back bounced off a mirror behind me!

Daniel and I teamed up in the first game and did okay once we took one of the high points and were able to hold it. ...but the second game degenerated into individual actions due to the presence of a group of very young players who tended to just roam about shooting everyone. I do realize that is the point, but hey! ...although one little girl was way past cute as she kept trying to shoot me after someone else had tagged me. My lights were 'off' so I told her, "Honey, I'm already dead." ...to which I received a very polite, "Thank you", before she moved off in search of more victims.

Yes, the rain has made me a bit crazy(ier?) than normal: they changed the forecast today to show rain most days this week and maybe all of next week! Arrrgh!! Okay, the farmers should be in decent shape this year; the increased snow pack should allow for some pretty late water deliveries. ...and there's no doubt some of this is getting down to the aquifer: we have standing water all over the area (and any construction in its early stages at a standstill until the ground dries out).

..so I decided I'm going to try to "counter program" the blog and put up shots from the sunny days last week (that would be Saturday and Thursday as I recall). ...and maybe a sunset shot from last night if one comes out okay (hmmm... have you noticed how some of us still use film camera terminology even in this digital world?).

Ya' know, I really, really disliked plugging numbers into the quadratic equation back in high school. This week I've found my opinion has not changed in forty years. Nope, it's bad enough coming up with the squares or rationalizing the expression, but the drudgery of the raw math involved was boring beyond belief...

That was the first time a 'computer' ever bailed me out of some repetitious work (if programming for hours upon hours to save a few moments of math counts <g>). My high school received an Olivetti-Underwood Propramma 101 right about this time those forty years back. ...and some of us convinced our Algebra teacher that programming the machine to churn out solutions to quadratics should count the same as actually doing the problems. I believe it may have been the first use of "If we can demonstrate we know how to work the problem, then the rest is just number crunching..." I do know we spent much more time entering instructions into the machine and checking the printouts than it would ever have taken to just do the problems. ...but I also recall it was very cool to be able to turn in the assignments as yards of adding machine paper stapled to the notebook paper we'd scawled the problems on from the board.

No post. Homework and tax stuff...

...channeling Eurythmics with "Here Comes The Rain Again". Yep, it's back, but it took too long and I had a chance to get out and blade this evening. Cool! Heck, it can rain all night now, especially since I ended up having to clean one section of rain gutters after I got back...

Our prevailing winds normally keep leaves and such out of the rain gutters on the north side of the of the house, but the storm winds of the last few weeks have reversed the pattern and loaded up both the pool and the rain gutters. I didn't catch on until I was checking the back side of the house and realized the walkway I'd swept just last weekend was solid with oak leaves again, all except for the southernmost section which was totally clean! ...and since I could be pretty sure neither of the boys had been out sweeping of his own initiative, it only took me a little while to realize the wind had done the work. ...which caused me to look about a bit more and find the one gutter pretty well full of leaves. Joy... A ladder, a bucket and a trowel. Not my thing to do as the sun is fading and the clouds are rolling in <g>.

Oh, and I'm way behind on emails after this week, and I'll be attempting to play catch-up this weekend... I do have projects on the back burner, but the lead item (besides rest!) is some slide backgrounds to create for church.

Whew... Today got away from me a little bit more than I'd have liked. I did get a couple of things done, but most of the larger projects didn't even get a first look.

On the other hand, the older neighbor across the street has his yard cleaned up, with round two scheduled for later this week. ...and the outside is cleaner in a few places. ...and the iMac is playing tunes through the garage stereo, and I'm thinking I need to see if I can locate an iTunes version for OS 9.2.2 so maybe I can play some tunes from an external HDD though the iMac and on the stereo.That would be cool.

Yep, Saturday got a little sideways on me and I did have to back off on a couple of things. ...but I did find out that Quicktime on the iMac will play mp3s. ...but I'm still thinking I want something I can pick and chose tunes from.

...and I'm way behind after today and more work on a major project. I thought I'd be done by now but it's turning into something a little different than I had envisioned. I'll have to catchup on emails and such Monday.

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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