Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Taking a Cue From Dakboy and What Happened To My Cell Service?

When I got home last night I had discovered that my wife had started the landscaping in the front of the house. She had trimmed all the shrubs but had not cleaned up the clippings or put down the soil conditioner and mulch yet. I was quite impressed that she went to Home Depot and picked up all the things we needed and even got the correct amount. She really did a good job.

Since she had spent several hours in the sun and at home depot, not to mention monitored the carpet cleaning team AND cooked dinner, I thought the least I could do would be to clean up the front. Now that may not sound like much, but cleaning up involved a bit more than just picking up the clippings. We have Japanese Holly and boxwoods, as well as some other shrubs that when trimmed, produce very small clippings that make it hard to clean up without getting a lot of the mulch as well. So with this in mind we clean out a part of the mulch every year and replace it with new. I got about 2.5 bags of clippings cleaned up when our son called us from AIT. He chatted to each of us for a while before he had to get back to formation. It is always nice to hear from him.

After the chat with our son, my wife joined me and we put down the soil conditioner (which is nothing more than the wet, semi-decomposed stuff you find on the forest floor) and the mulch and did a final cleanup. I broke one of the splash stones in the process, but it is hidden from view and will not be noticed.

After all that it was time to walk the dogs. I took "little man" first then I grabbed a shower. After my shower (9:30 PM) I realized that I was in the mood for ice cream, so I went to Krogers to grab a pint of whatever was on sale. Breyers was $1.79 a pint so I grabbed one (my wife said no when I asked her if she cared for any) and a Sobe diet green tea. I am trying to drink more green tea since it is very high in anti-oxidants. My total was $2.25, a bit less than I expected. My receipt showed that the ice cream was on sale and it was not marked as such. SWEET!

I got home and my wife asked me to walk the Golden a short walk. I walked her gingerly around the cul de sac and took her in. She was walking on all fours, not holding up the leg that was operated on. She was in a little pain, so I cut the walk short.

After I got finished with the Golden, I grabbed my ice cream and went into the office (which was packed with stuff we moved so the carpets could be cleaned) to do some bill paying. It did not take long and soon I was working on my finicky linux server. I have 2 Linux boxes, megaserver and geekbox. megaserver is a very low powered box, so the name is a bit of a joke.

I played until about 11:15 PM and finally went to bed. I was very tired and woke up the next morning almost as tired as I went to bed. A walk with the dogs and some coffee helped, but I am a bit run down. I really needed more sleep, but I doubt I will get it tonight. I am doing 1 on 1 Discipling, then I will come home and move all the furniture back once I am sure the carpet is dry. With the A/C and the fans running, it should be by the time I get home tonight.

Our cellular service has really be stinky the past 2 weeks or so. I know my phone battery (any my wife's) is going bad, but the dropped calls, poor reception, and missed calls are really beginning to make me angry. I missed 3 calls (my phone did not ring and the calls went to VM) in two days, causing the people who tried to call me to think I was not taking calls. I need to call Cingular and see what can be done and see if anyone else is having issues.

Our main work server (the one we log on to to do all of our UNIX admin stuff) is acting very funny and I cannot log on to it. No one else is here to ask and I have a couple of tickets to work on. Not that I am too worried. Our TL will most likely know what is wrong. He is a very smart guy. I admire him a lot. He may not be a strong leader, but he is a technical genius.

My company issues laptop was acting up quite a bit Thursday. We had a mandatory update that caused my machine to act up all day. This laptop tends to run hot and when there are network issues and the processor has to work harder, the drive will get to 50+ degrees Celsius in no time. It will run 45+ degrees most of the day and overheat when I defrag it or run a virus check. The HD monitoring software states that S.M.A.R.T. is reporting that it has about a year before it fails. I have only had this thing for about 2 years and that scares me. My desktop PC at home has 2 hard drives (1-80 gig and 1-160 gig) and both of them have at least 10 years on them, according to S.M.A.R.T.. I hope that my PC does not crash. I do not keep much critical data on it (most is on the network or my flash drive), but I do have some.

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