Whatever you celebrate at this time of year, with or without family, with or without larger significance, please let it give you and yours both joy and peace.
I had a lovely few days off work. We spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time binge-watching The Great British Baking Show, and to join us in our turkey dinner today, we were joined by a Mister Bruce Springsteen, shown in the production filmed over a couple of nights of his Broadway run. What a lovely show.
We leapt out of bed this morning at the crack of 8:41, and once the dog was walked and breakfast/coffee consumed, we did the rending of paper and revealing of gifts thing. Marcia’s “big” presents had already been around for a bit, but I still had a couple of things under the tree to surprise her. She managed to steal the list I sent to Santa, and all of that was there too. Lexi even got a couple of new toys to abuse.
Winding down
This space is usually reserved for showing respect and final farewells for our troops dying in harms’ way, on our behalf. But today I wish to offer our deepest condolences and regrets to the family and friends of eight year old Felipe Alonzo-Gomez, who died today in CBP custody, separated from his family. This follows the death of seven year old Jakelin Caal Maquin on December 8, also in CBP custody.
Incompetent and irresponsible, this agency is. When your agency is given unethical and immoral policies to implement, consider pushing back. If you (being the agents and bureaucrats of DHS/CBP) don’t challenge this, I hold you personally responsible, along with the administration that issued the orders. This misguided policy of detaining asylum seekers at the border and breaking apart families must not stand.
Almost nothing to report, other than the continuing deluge that is our weather this year. Over the weekend, we got ANOTHER 2.6″ of rain, as measured in my back yard. And more rain due on Thursday and Friday. Lovely. We’re up around 65-66″ on the year, smack between the record-breaking DC and Baltimore totals.
Marcia’s been baking some wonderful things, and we also attended a fun Broadway Holiday production at Annapolis Shakespeare on Saturday evening. That was a total hoot, and there are two more of those to go, running in rep with their stellar production of A Christmas Carol. Both highly recommended!
Lexi
Lexi, warm and worried…
Reading
I’ve just finished reading Fran Wilde’s Cloudbound, the second book in her Bone Universe series. Oooh, does that woman know how to craft a tale! Continuing to build on the events that started in her superb debut novel, Updraft, Cloudbound gives us Nat as our central character, being twisted and thrown down by people wanting power, and people wanting what’s best (usually also, power). Dix made me so very angry, and still, how that ended made me a bit sad. Gosh, what a good writer Fran is. I’ve got a mystery to read, then I’m straight into Horizon, the trilogy closer. I know she’ll wrap it up real pretty, with a bow on and all … but it’s the getting there that has me on edge.
Computing
I picked up an Intel NUC, an inexpensive terabyte of SSD storage, and 32G of RAM to build a small VMware home lab. Next thing on that box: A FreeBSD 12 install.
Winding Down
Our condolences to the family and friends of Pfc. Joshua Mikeasky, 19, from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who died on Dec. 13, 2018, at Bagram Airfield, Bagram District, Parwan Province, Afghanistan, from a non-combat related incident.
Our condolences to the family and friends of Sgt. Jason Mitchell McClary, 24, from Export, Pennsylvania, who died on Dec. 2, 2018, in Landstuhl, Germany, as a result of injuries sustained from an improvised explosive device on Nov. 27, 2018, in Andar District, Ghazni Province, Afghanistan.
This was a productive week, but nothing especially outstanding. We’re mostly recovered from Thanksgiving, and getting ready to decorate for the Christmas period. We watched series four of Fake or Fortune, a show that works to establish attribution and provenance of artwork, presented by Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould. Great fun, for those who love Brits, European art, and art controversy.
I’ve got a lot of paperwork to do, wrapping up some stuff in advance of year end, both personal and work related, so that’s coming up this next week. Nothing else super exciting on the calendar yet.
Lexi
Lexi and the pillow fort
Winding Down
Our condolences to the families and friends of these fallen warriors, who died on Nov. 27, 2018, from injuries sustained when their vehicle was struck by an improvised explosive device in Andar, Ghazni Province, Afghanistan:
Army Capt. Andrew Patrick Ross, 29, of Lexington, Virginia.
Army Sgt. 1st Class Eric Michael Emond, 39, of Brush Prairie, Washington.
Air Force Staff Sgt. Dylan J. Elchin, 25, of Hookstown, Pennsylvania.
Additionally, I’d like to lower the flag in honor of the passing of former President George H. W. Bush.
Turkey coma, that is. We roasted a full bird for the first time in a few years, and it was certainly one of our best. We started with a fresh Butterball, and Marcia dressed it and put it in the roasting pan with a cup of water to keep the humidity up. That trick worked a treat, and the bird was flavorful and moist. The other winner of the evening was also of Marcia’s concocting: a wonderful apple pie. Since then, leftovers, including a turkey tetrazzini that I made this evening, using … the pasta that Marcia made yesterday. So good!
Apple pies by Marcia
We did make a few phone calls here and there, to family and friends. Happily, everyone seems to be in good health and spirits.
Lexi on watch
Theater
Saturday evening, we attended the official opening night (and press opening) of this year’s production of A Christmas Carol at Annapolis Shakespeare. Wonderfully, even better than last year! The marvelous Dexter Hamlett took Scrooge and made the character his own. The whole cast brought the show to life with a minimal set, and superb mood setting with judicious use of a smoke machine and back-screen projections to set the place for each scene. Highly Recommended!
Next up from ASC: A Broadway Holiday: song and dance on the main stage.
Work
I’ve wrapped up patching for the month, and I’m in the middle of my on-call week. One thing I’m looking forward to is spelunking through the Beta of the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. The thing they refer to as App Streams interests me most, I think, as it should permit use of newer applications than the RHEL series have been able to provide in the past. More when I know more.
Reading
On dead trees, I’m still reading Cloudbound, from the splendid Fran Wilde. On the phone, I’ve been reading The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of Holmes stories intersecting with multiple genres, written over the last 25 years, and edited by John Joseph Adams.
On the “other entertainment as required” front, our background noise over the last week or so is binging the first two seasons of Amazon’s The Grand Tour, in preparation for a probable early December start to Season 3.
Winding Down
Our condolences to the family and friends of Sgt. Leandro A.S. Jasso, 25, from Leavenworth, Washington, who died on Nov. 24, 2018, in Garmsir District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as a result of wounds sustained while engaging enemy forces in Khash Rod District, Nimruz Province, Afghanistan.
Last week, Veteran’s Day. This week: Thanksgiving. So, food coma pending. Just sayin’ … not that I can really do that, I’m on call this upcoming week. Still, we bought an actual full turkey for this week. In recent years past, we’ve only roasted a turkey breast.
All in, it was a good week just past. I spent most of it puttering around in a BMW X2 M Sport. My car was in for servicing the headlights. They ended up replacing at least one of the assemblies, possibly both. Downside of computers and motors (in the headlights!!!). Had the car not been under warranty, this would have been bloody expensive. Those things go for between one and two grand each on eBay. Cthulhu knows how much BMW charges for them. Still, Tuesday through Friday noon for headlamps. Maybe it’s time to trade in for a ’68 Camero. No computers. No tracking devices. Hardly any effective driving around corners. Heh!
Much of the extra hours of the week were given over to patching assorted UNIX-like operating systems, rebooting, and testing them.
Technology
Marcia’s seven year old Windows 7 laptop finally gave up the ghost. She needs a small, relatively inexpensive machine to haul around when she’s getting training on the software she uses to run her assorted sewing devices. So I toddled down to Best Buy and picked her up a Dell touch screen Inspiron 13″ Windows 10 laptop. She’s smart, so Windows 10 won’t cause her a bunch of grief.
Also dropping this week: the Beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. It’s been four years – a long time – since the last major release. I’m excited to see what’s new in this version.
Entertainment
The entertainment side of the ledger has two items of note. Well, three. First, we’re nearly done binging all of the modern era Doctor Who shows. It’s been really quite lovely.
Second, on the book front, I finished up J. L. Gribble’s Steel Victory. The first book in the author’s Steel Empire series, Steel Victory introduced me to Toria (mage and mercenary-to-be), Victory (Toria’s mom (?) and an elder vampire, as well as a ‘retired’ mercenary). They’re in Limani, smack dab between British and Roman forces, with a few choice local folks who want nothing to do with anyone or anything that ain’t human. Oh, yeah, in a post-nuclear war world, somehow. Weird, but it works.
I met Ms. Gribble (What an interesting pseudonym!) at her reading at Capclave this year. I enjoyed the excerpt she read from the third book of the series, so I bought the first volume from her to give it a proper try, and really enjoyed it. Yes, yes, yes. Vampires. Magic. Were-beasts of virtually every species. Brian (you say), not really your wheelhouse? No, but the story hangs together, it is very well written, and I found I cared about the characters. So, yes, I enjoyed it and I’ll be reading the rest of the books in the series. Only question – why didn’t I get her to inscribe the book when I bought it from her. Sigh.
Next up on the book front, I’m going to finish up Fran Wilde’s Cloudbound (Bone Universe book two), and jump right into Horizon, the third book in that series. I’ve had them in my stack for far too long (in hardbound, no less) and I only read hardbound at bedtime, so it takes me a long time. But I WILL get there, because these stories are great.
Upcoming – A Christmas Carol at Annapolis Shakespeare. Get your tickets today, we did already!
Lexi
Lexi, ‘wearing’ my sweatshirt
Winding Down
Take good care of yourselves, enjoy time with family and friends, try to mend any fences that have been torn by the politics of this loony era. But first, be kind to yourself. Then you may find you have enough left over for those that need it.
What with the northern half of the planet angling further away from the closest star, the light is weaker, and the cold is stronger. Tonight will be our second consecutive night in the mid-20’s. Even so, the dog finds a way to lay in the sun…
Lexi the sun dog
That said, she’s battling fairly severe arthritis, primarily in her left rear hip and knee. Poor pupper.
We’re at about 50% over normal rainfall for the year, with more still to come. I’ve simply got to get out and do some remedial grading along the side of the house – we’ve got just a bit of water intrusion into the basement, and grading should fix things up. I sure wish we could send a small fraction of the rain back over to California and dampen things up enough to get those fires calming down.
Winding Down
Monday is the holiday, observed, so I’ve stretched out the chores and did not as much today. I got in a few rare hours of game-play today, with Shadow Warrior 2, a silly, rude first person fighter. More house cleaning and the aforementioned outdoor work is on my queue for tomorrow.
Our condolences to the family and friends of Maj. Brent R. Taylor, 39, from Ogden, Utah, who died on Nov. 3, 2018, in Kabul Province, Afghanistan, as a result of wounds sustained from small arms fire.
Nope, this time I didn’t forget. I just planned on waiting until I got back from Nashville.
This was a 4 day trip to attend LISA 18, the USENIX Large Infrastructure Systems Administration conference. I think, though, that they dropped the long form a couple of years back. I hadn’t attended since it was last local, in 2015. This trip was great. The event itself is shorter, just three days of blended talks and short trainings, as opposed to the prior 6 day run. Looking back, I actually miss the dedicated training days, and the much more extensive training available in half- and full-day format.
That, however, is my only gripe. This event is organized and run with cheer and great professionalism. I attended programming continuously throughout the three days, and found nothing that disappointed me. Left me wanting more? Sure, why not. Also, a conference full of people I either know and like, or will know and like … all good. Met some wonderful new folks this go round. Smart, funny, smart, eloquent, did I say smart? I love hanging out and learning new stuff from people.
And Nashville: What a lovely town. I got out and walked a bit, mornings and evenings (except this AM – it was bucketing down rain). The tiny bits I managed to make it to were full of friendly people. I will note that a lot of them seem to have an affinity for country music for some reason…
Downtown Nashville from 19 floors up…
So, that was fun.
Vote
Have you voted already? THANK YOU!
Oh, yeah … and I made it home in time for us to get out for early voting, so we don’t have to brave the crowds on election Tuesday. Early voting has ended in Maryland, but whether you can still early vote where you are, or get you and all your friends and all your frenemies and your families and everyone out … VOTE. Give someone a ride and help them vote. Thanks.
It was Thursdays that Arthur Dent could never get the hang of. For me? Mondays. We slept in Sunday morning, a bit, and it pushed the whole day. Oh, well.
Got lots done over the weekend. The last of the parts arrived Friday, and I repaired my snow blower, thus staving of the return of Snowmageddon this winter. While I roasted some SO coffee beans from Burundi, I cleaned up the workshop and gave myself a haircut. I also made a delicious batch of chili with hot italian sausage, ground turkey, fire roasted tomatoes, kidney and black beans, and the very last of the bedraggled peppers from the garden. Yummy, and enough for an army (or us for a week).
Channeling Ed Sullivan
I’ve got my bit to do for a presentation this week, we’ve been in prep for the last week or so, and it’s coming down to suit and tie time. So of course I’ve lost track of the one proper tie tack I have, and while I can cope, I’d like a fall back for the next time I can’t find it. But I’ve searched, and no one is selling Weeping Angel tie tacks. I wonder why?
Winding Down
No other news of note, and thankfully, DoD has no new casualties to report. Be good to each other, and make sure to vote!
