The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey September 7, 2014

Late Summer

With three weeks to go in Summer (proper), summer in terms of weather and humidity finally arrived this week. A few days up into the low 90's brought us some unpleasant heat and occasionally lots of rain. Last night we had 1.3" here alone. I didn't look at the weather radar at the time so I don't know how broad that front was. But we had lightning and rain for the best part of three hours. Leading up to that, I spent about 5 hours working out in the yard. Some of that was regular stuff like mowing and cleaning…

Brian Bilbrey September 1, 2014

Labor Day

Labor Day. It means "do chores at home instead of working at the office", I think. I certainly did. Marcia asked last night if I'd put up my usual Sunday post. I figured that since it was a three day weekend, I'd put up my post on the last day of the weekend. Yes, that's reasoned procrastination. So, chores much of the weekend, working in the basement on the floor, etc. We have new neighbors across the street, which is nice (and they're nice, too). Tonight, I grilled some chickens, and now I'm here. But I'm not going to drone…

Brian Bilbrey August 24, 2014

Yellow

Unlike Arthur Dent, I won't be seeing yellow (first) on a Thursday, but on a Monday. The buses start rolling tomorrow: screwing up the traffic, and taking kids to the place where they can practice disrespecting teachers, learning, and each other every day for the next 9 or so months. Actually, for PG County kids, it's the 7th, 8th, and 9th graders getting accelerated remedial disrespecting tomorrow, then ALL the kids are on the bus come Tuesday. The weekend was full of chores. Saturday was house cleaning. Today was yard work. I should have roasted coffee today, but fell asleep…

Brian Bilbrey August 20, 2014

Back in the Groove

After several weeks of very intermittent exercise, and some backsliding on the dietary controls, I'm back in the groove, I think ... Good exercise days - two days running at almost precisely the same pace. Excellent! * * * I use OpenSSH for nearly all of my computing platform access, except for that OS from Redmond. Secure access to commandline environments meets about 90% (a made up number, gut check says "true") of my requirements. It'd be more, but I access a lot of monitoring services via a browser. But close to 100% of actual work is done via commandline…

Brian Bilbrey August 17, 2014

Push Through

I'm tired. There's been a fair bit of unscheduled work over the last few days, leading to sleepus interruptus. But I got done what must be done, and a fair bit else besides. The big project of the weekend was a bit of reconstruction on the front step, which has been sinking away pretty much since the house was built. For some reason, they didn't rebar the step into the concrete porch. What I need to do is break that old step out, drill some holes into the porch and epoxy in some rebar, then pour a new step. But…