The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey

First Frost

We were supposed to make it down into the mid- to low-40's this weekend ... first frost wasn't on the horizon, far as I knew. But I came downstairs in shorts and a t-shirt, ready to make coffee and walk the dog (which is fine, in the mid-40's). But the thermometer said 38, and there was frost on the grass and the rooftops. Um, yay? Back upstairs for long pants and a sweat jacket. Yesterday it was mild, and we took the dog out for a walk around the Eastern Market. Fun. Lots of neat stuff that we didn't buy,…

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Brian Bilbrey

Last of the eighties

At least, one may hope that we're now done with high temperatures for the year. Both weekend days have got to 80 or thereabouts. I managed some yardwork yesterday, and a washing of the car today. Certainly not an interesting weekend by any stretch of the imagination. * * * Recent Reading - Terry Pratchett's Raising Steam In this latest Discworld book, pTerry brings back Moist von Lipwig and Harry King as chief protagonists in this tale of steam locomotives. Aided by The Patrician, The Low King, and an unexpectedly large assist from the recently ascendant goblins, von Lipwig battles…

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Brian Bilbrey

Gone Fishin'

Or more rightly, back from fishin' ... Friday we headed out of town, driving to Deep Creek Lake for a long weekend. We stayed three nights at a nicely-appointed lakeside condo in McHenry. Fishing on Friday evening, Saturday (on a boat rental) most of the day, and Sunday morning until the rains moved in. Nothing of real keeper/eater size was caught by either of us (though we could have kept Marcia's yellow perch, pictured above with captor). We cooked in most of the time, only going out to Ledo Pizza on Saturday evening. Oh, yeah ... and Marcia slaughtered me…

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Brian Bilbrey

Work Week Plus

The work week started early ... really early. I was up at 0500 this morning, and at my desk at the office by 0555. We had an 8 hour maintenance window to do a raft of VMware and other patching. Licensing issues prevent us from doing things the easy way, so we get outage windows and do things the hard way. That includes getting key virtual machines back online before 0800 on Sunday morning. It was actually a pretty good day - we finished up with two hours left in the maintenance window, which is good estimating. Had something gone…

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