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Brian Bilbrey

"A date which will live in infamy"

So said Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, after the attack at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Here is a transcript of his speech, courtesy of GMU. This important historical even seems barely mentioned by big media these days. I was pleased to see that the flags in Maryland are at half staff today to honor those who died in the attack. * * * Along with finishing up Marcia's quilting cabinet (see the December 4 post), and getting some house cleaning done, I managed to spend some time working on building a sump pit monitor…

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Brian Bilbrey

Catching Up

The calendar is catching up to the weather, in fact. On Tuesday into Wednesday, we're due for "wintery mix," which sounds much nicer than it really is. But 30's and 40's for December are just fine. It's the teens and 20's that make us cranky, here in Chez Bilbrez. * * * I've got the week "off" - burning some unused hours before I lose them to policy, come the end of the calendar year. Primary focus: finish building Marcia's rolling cabinet, which is do-able, methinks. Here's the carcass, much progress: In the last two days, I've got finish on…

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Brian Bilbrey

Winter is ... What? Over 70 degrees tomorrow?

Yeah. This week we spent a significant amount of time at or below freezing, including a couple of mornings around 20°F. But according to the various forecasts, tomorrow it's supposed to get up to 73°F. But two days later we're back down to the deep freeze, with potential snow/sleet on Wednesday. Very weird. I spent most of this weekend working in the woodshop on drawers and carcass for a rolling storage cabinet for Marcia, to use in her quilting space: Most of today was spent laying out and pre-drilling holes for the drawer mounting hardware. Then I'll finish the drawer…

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Brian Bilbrey

Jet Lagged in Seattle

That was me. The first five mornings of my seven odd days at LISA'14 in Seattle started between 0400 and 0430 in the morning, as my body insisted it was time to rise and shine. The most fun, though, was the wake-up due to SMS, when our garage door failed to open for Marcia. Turns out the spring catastrophically unsprung itself overnight Sunday night (though Marcia couldn't figure out the source of that noise until morning). Fortunately, "catastrophically" didn't include damage to either house or cars. She consulted, then called Overhead Door, who came out and made it all better,…

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