Marcia ⁽⁷⁴⁾

Brian Bilbrey June 26, 2016

26 June 2016

A week off, and away ... in Maine, visiting with Marcia's sister. We brought Lexi with us, and actually took her out on the boat on Sunday. She and I were out on the front deck of the pontoon boat (aka "party barge") when she decided something in the water looked interesting and leapt into the water, while the boat was underway. Good thing I had her leash on - she would have been canine frappé before Nancy cut the prop power, otherwise. I leaned forward to find the little dog swimming forward for all she was worth, trying to…

Brian Bilbrey May 29, 2016

29 May 2016

Exercise this weekend was due entirely to yard work. The Fitbit reports that I managed nearly 32,000 steps in the two days, and based on activity, gave me nearly an hour of heart rate + activity actual exercise time each day. So that counts. The garden itself has really appreciated a week of sun and warmer temperatures. I lost a couple of squashes and all of the cantaloupe to the month of rain and lower-than-normal temperatures. The cantaloupe I replaced today, but here's a snap from yesterday afternoon: The tomatoes have gained a lot of ground in the last week…

Brian Bilbrey April 10, 2016

10 April 2016

A good week, overall. I was on-call for the first half, which is tiring, even when nothing happens. Yep, I sleep a lot more lightly when responsibility requires it. But one week out of every few weeks ain't bad - and our monitoring and remediation are in a state of continuous improvement, so we get far fewer alerts and calls than in years past. All to the good. I also executed terminal retirement on a stack of former virtualization hosts. Spin down, uncable from last network connections and from the SAN, spin up again with a DBAN disk in the…

Brian Bilbrey February 28, 2016

28 Feb 2016

One more day to go ... in February. So very odd. Did I mention that Marcia baked and decorated a wonderfully delicious cake for me to take to work in celebration of a recent parenthood event? Yeah, this is it: Well, that's part of the cake. We'd already started digging into it before I was thoughtful enough to take pictures of my own. Delicious: chocolate in many ways, plus raspberry compote layers in between. And I'm told there are very few calories involved. I should believe that, I think. * * * Yesterday, I got the new over-the-range microwave oven…

Brian Bilbrey September 6, 2015

Magic Blue

Or some silly color name like that. Anyway, that's the exterior color of Marcia's new car. She decided that hauling around her quilting friends and her quilting stuff in a low-slung, two door convertible was getting less and less convenient. So after driving a few different vehicles, she ended up with a Volvo V60T5 - one of their little sport wagons. Nice lines, I think, and she's happy, which is a good thing. I've spend a number of hours this weekend working on a project for $OFFICE, and got the front yard brown stuff mowed a bit flatter, too. Mostly…