The Library of Congress posted thousands of copyright-free photographs on flickr recently. I thought that was pretty excellent. Check it out.

Treachery!

Man alive. Remember last month when I told you my life was playing April Fool's games on me? Well, that little pattern hasn't quit. Last night, I was fooling around on my computer when it froze up. This has almost never happened on my computer so I was a bit concerned. My concern grew when it happened again after I restarted. I kept trying various things to avoid the crash such as avoiding Firefox since it seemed to look up each time I used that program. Issues kept popping up though ranging from the Blue Screen of Death proclaiming it intended to do a physical memory dump to the boot screen declaring loudly that it wasn't aware of this "hard drive" I spoke of. I turned the computer off, and left it for the night in hopes that the problem would just resolve itself (I'm a firm believer that computers, like cars, are self-healing organisms).


The next morning the computer did in fact boot up okay and didn't crash right off the bat. I still avoided Firefox but apart from some lag issues nothing happened until around one in the afternoon when it crashed again. It started the same trend of blue screens and boot errors as it had the day before so I grew morbidly concerned. I told my boss that I would be offline for a while trying to get the computer back up to its proper health. After much coercing, I got it to start up again and immediately backed up all my work files (I'd backed up my personal files the night before) and tried running virus scans and spyware scans. The computer froze. I rebooted it and it insisted that I did not in fact have any hard drive. I spent the next several hours trying things like booting from a CD (fail), flicking the computer (fail), and reinstalling Windows to one of my external drives (fail). This was very bad because my computer is my livelihood and I can't afford to buy another computer at the moment. Eventually, heartbroken, I performed an autopsy and removed pieces of the casing. I took out the hard drive, did things like blow on it (old fashioned Nintendo cartridge-style) and then put it back in. Only when I put it back in, the pins pushed into the hard drive further than they had been when I had taken it out. I closed everything back up, rebooted and voila. It works again. Or at least it does so far. Its not lagging though or having any of the other issues it was previously. So, the moral of the story is, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by just poking at random bits of computer with my finger. So if anyone ever tells you that won't fix a computer then... like... punch them. Or something.

grass poop

I mowed the grass for the first time today since we sold Two Trees back in 2003 (I think). While Jim was in town he had planned on firing the landscaper because they were doing a fairly weak job. He offered to buy a mower and take $150 a month off our rent if Kurt and I wanted to do the job ourselves so I immediately accepted. He also bought a lot of weed killer and sprayed the yard and told us if there were any other materials we needed to just say so. So I mowed today. I decided to do so because I still had an hour of daylight left and thought it hadn't rained all day. I was wrong. I had apparently missed the rain and didn't realize it. So the mowing was a bit rough and the clumps of wet grass the resulted felt like dog poop every time I stepped on one. I raked the front yard and if it doesn't rain tomorrow I'll rake the back then probably mow it again this weekend. Surprisingly, I'm actually looking forward to having a yard to mow again. Its nice to push a mower around, get a bit of low intensity exercise, and get in some self-reflection.

breathe the pacific

My landlord came into town last night and showed Kurt and I a bit of the island today. I have to say, Jim is an amazing landlord. Apart from my mom (if you consider her a landlord from birth until about age 20) I've never had a landlord drive me around and show me the sights of a city, buy me a Christmas present and tell me that if we need anything around the house to send him the bill. We were going to try to get up to the Volcano but we didn't get to. We did, however get to see Rainbow Falls and the Boiling Pots which were pretty amazing sights. We also went to the Mauna Koa Macadamia Nut Factory where Jim's wife used to work. He said he'll be out to Kona again in February and we're going to try to get over there so he can take us scuba diving. I can't wait. Oh yeah, I also got to climb one of the most excellent climbing trees ever grown, as seen to the left.

Check it all out here. Just gotta get my Kentucky pics up now.

the kentucky moon

My my my, Kentucky was blast. I got in late the night of the 22nd, Yale and Keebler coming to pick me up. We actually ended up seeing Amanda Mills (Jesse's halfsister) at the airport. She was on her way back from the Bahamas where she had been for her honeymoon. We made a few calls and then headed over to a party to meet up with April and Shelley. The host of the party was apparently a wedding photographer and he had set up a photobooth in his living room. I don't know how it worked since the equipment was all boxed up but it worked fabulously and I got a number of new pictures to look back on in nostalgia. At then end of the night, I also had the chance to showcase my Rubix Cube skills.


So the following day, I traveled from Louisville to Georgetown to see the Willetts. It was the first time in a long while that all of the Willetts kids and all of the Adkins kids managed to be in the same place at the same time and it was fantastic. Topics of conversation ranged from time travel to television to books. Another one of the reasons I miss New York is having Simon around the same city. I headed back to Lancaster later that night and the following day was Christmas Eve. I spent most of the day shopping, as I hadn't done any Christmas shopping. Katie took me around and brought Leah with her along with her friend Eva's couple children. Leah is just as adorable as I remember her from last May. She greeted me with a hug and during lunch put her french fries in her hair. That night, Katie and Leah came to Christmas Eve Mass with my family and got to see all of my uncles, aunts, cousins and Grandmother at the same time. This was a first for her, and a welcome reunion for me. After mass, we went back to the farm and ate oyster stew. Again, this was a first for Katie (both seeing the farm and eating the stew) and I was really glad she got to spend the night with us. Jerry (who I'd met for the first time the previous night) brought a bottle of Elijah Craig which Kyle and I (and a number of my relatives) highly enjoyed.


Christmas was as it always is, my absolute favorite holiday. It consisted of snack foods all day, lots of wonderful presents, games of Balderdash, and a movie at the end of the night. The entire day was with my family and it was fantastic. We should have Christmas every month.


Most of the rest of my week was spent with my Mom during the day and with Katie and Leah for a few hours each night. A few highlights throughout the week were seeing Chris and getting drinks with him, Katie, Chris' lady and Ty, my mom cooking fried chicken and fettuccine alfredo and Katie and Kyle joining my family for dinner and a game of Apples to Apples and Taboo. I also got to go back down to my farm again for our extended family's gift-giving and Hot Wheels race. We actually managed to win first place in the race for the first time in fifteen years of racing with our car "Erasmus" (named after John Blackthorne's ship in "Shogun"). My last night in town I went to Winchester and helped Katie study for the ACT and said goodbye for a while. My final day in Lancaster was spent with my mom and we eventually said goodbye before I headed to Louisville. I'm really going to miss my mom over the next six months or so.



I got into Louisville and spent New Years at the Pour Haus watching some cover band that April and Shelley knew. They were surprisingly good for two reasons. One, they didn't bother doing their own "take" on the songs. When they covered a song it was as close to the original as possible. They also had an amazing stage presence. They were dancing the entire night. I even asked a random girl if she would take me on stage and she did. I stood there for a few minutes, waved to the audience, and then got off stage. I ended the night fairly early since I hadn't gotten a lot of sleep the night before and the next day I ate with Dougie and Shannon, watched football with Bryan and Keebler, went to see "I Am Legend" with Brian and Brendan, and then drove around in the freshly fallen snow with Yale. I actually got a bit worried that my flight would be cancelled because of how hard it was snowing at times.


The snow in Kentucky was magical because it came just in time for me to see it. If you know me, you know I love snow and that week was the only chance I'd really get to see snow the entire year and it was provided for me. Then I flew home and ended up seeing the snow covered tops of the volcano as I landed back in Hilo.