The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey August 7, 2011

The True Cost

The true cost of this war is in the lives our our men and women who die doing their duty. This is a debt that we can never repay, yet we keep "raising the ceiling." Our condolences to the families and units of these fallen warriors: Sgt. William B. GrossPaniagua, 28, of Daly City, California, died July 31 in Kunar province, Afghanistan, of injuries suffered when enemy forces attacked his vehicle with an improvised explosive device. Pfc. Brice M. Scott, 22, of Columbus, Georgia, died July 31 in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, of injuries suffered when insurgents attacked his unit using…

Brian Bilbrey August 6, 2011

OMG, Tomatoes!

Yeah, forty or more pounds of tomatoes out of the garden today. And that was after a morning and early afternoon spent working with Marcia restructuring her sewing and fabric rooms. Tired now: I made gallon of salsa, and started another lobster pot of red sauce. Last weeks was down enough to transfer to another pot. I'll be freezing that batch tomorrow, and cooking down the new batch, too. But I've *got* to do some schoolwork tomorrow, too. I wanted to mow, as well, but I'm running out of hours and days ... less than 18 months if all goes…

Brian Bilbrey August 5, 2011

Agog, Shiny

Shiny is actually an attribute of the new machine, henceforth known as Agog. Agog was my state of being when kindness by others turns out to have been expressed in the form of a 13" MacBook Air. Core i7, 4G, 256G flash drive. Fast, light, and gorgeous. It's funny, really, that I should have decided, just last night, that the right choice was to get a new battery for Darla, the MacBook Pro I picked up in January of 2007. Darla runs OS X Lion just fine, if a little bit slow. But slow is relative. I executed a test…

Brian Bilbrey August 4, 2011

Ownage

Apologies - work and schoolwork have owned my days and nights. Project 3 is now in for the database class, and work remains busy. But here's the project that required slots cut into wood: A framed cork board to substitute for someone who wanted to stick cork tiles onto the gorgeous book-matched veneer on that desk you'll see when I can upload pictures again (/tmp is full on the server we're on). * * * Later: I executed an end-run by putting the picture on the static Orb site, then linking to it here.

Brian Bilbrey July 31, 2011

Seven Down, Five To Go

July is wound down, days are getting a bit shorter, and while the heat is with us for another month or so, I can already see the end of the year. Time seems to go a bit faster with each passing year, eh? But summer isn't over yet: the tomatoes, as you saw below, are in full production. I took most of that stack and made a red sauce yesterday: 20# of tomatoes, a couple of onions, a bunch of garlic, half a cup of olive oil, two small cans of tomato paste, five bay leaves, and a bottle of…