Hark! The weekend approach-eth!

There is nothing quite so refreshing to me as a nice weekend looming large in the front view mirror of my week. By contrast, Mondays and Tuesdays are just big stumbling blocks to getting the week started.

By Wednesday I have realized that Monday’s stuff is still waiting to be done and that tomorrow is Thursday, already, so its time to get it in gear and just get it done before I have to waste glorious weekend time doing week day stuff.

But Friday morning is all about getting to Friday evening and the weekend. For some reason, what would have taken me hours to get done on Tuesday is a matter of minutes on Friday. Even the leftover Thursday trash work is dispatched with a wave of the magic weekend wand.  I guess that I don’t want anything hanging over our heads for our “together time” during the weekend (Merrily and Me, that is).

My oh my, why wasn’t I born filthy rich instead of so damn good looking?

I did get in a little more testing of the Roadrunner Turbo speed service on Friday.  Maybe its not quite as useless as I first thought. I may have had greater expectations than common sense but I really wanted to be blown away for $9.95 more per month and wasn’t.

I also discovered that my subscription to easynews.com was not automatically renewed due to my not having updated my credit card info on their site.  I don’t use it much anymore and may just let it go as a $$ wash for the higher speed RR “turbo-ish” internet service.

We’ll see.  I had about 500 gigs of download credits there and can pick them back up if I renew in the next few months. I just don’t find that much useful stuff up there in the news groups anymore and they have become real mine fields of trojans, viruses and worms… oh my!

Katie (the poo) continues to do well. I have adjusted her evening meds to make it so that she gets the Kepra right before bedtime. Maybe that will last enough to get her through the AM hours before breakfast where she seems to have the most seizures since her surgery.  Her attitude has been wonderful and other than occasionally abusing her power of the leash (she goes over and taps the leash when she wants to go out side), she has been perfect in every way.

We are trying to work out plans for a trip about March something or other.  Merrily wants to take a whole week and the two weekends to do it.  We are considering the Charleston area right now.  Maybe her brother and his wife will come up for a few days while we are there.

No update on our Smart car. Still expecting it on 2/18 but we have realized that it will have to be named just like Clifford and DakotR.  It has to be something that will fit on a license plate and not tooooo cute but clever. So far we have $mart A$$, Smartipi and Bitsey.

I am planning to go down to see my Mom once we have it delivered and road tested a bit. I doubt I will be able to get the loader built and installed before we take the March trip but who knows… might happen.

#1 son, Smith is home from the road for a few days. You can see more of his life in his blog . Besides being an over the road professional driver he loves trains and model railroading. He covers both in his blogs and on the Wilson Area Railroad Modelers website. They even have a few channels of video feeds available to watch live operating sessions on the weekends. Its quite a hobby.

Everyone else is off into their lives and being happy.  A parent can’t ask for more than that.

TTFN

Ok, spin the wheel of seasons… and today we have…. Winter again…?

So, let’s see what season it is…. Hi=71, LO= 52, Hi=32, LO=16, HI=64, LO=32…..  any guesses?….. anyone?

Me either.  My dogs are so confused they are shedding profusely while growing both summer and winter coats at the same time.

Snow the past 2 nights. Tonight clear and 16 and Saturday and Sunday will be about 68. I feel like a popsicle in a worn out old freezer.

On a more stable note, Emery and Christi got their pantry emptied of a collection of the past 20+ years and have it spread out in one of the empty bedrooms for me to go though before it gets pitched out.

Every day makes the house more theirs than ours and that is great.  I feel the burdens of years of accumulation gradually melting away. It is wonderful!

Randy was telling me how great Roadrunner Turbo mode is supposed to be. Presently, I get about 6 megabit download data rates and 350kb upload data rates.  Turbo is supposed to get me from 10 to 20mbit down and up to 500kbps upload rates.  What didn’t become apparent in this is that these seemingly wonderful performance goals are targeted only for gamers and really high large file downloaders. The average run of the mill web surfer, emailer, IM user and such will not see any noticeable improvement in web performance.

I still decided I had to know if it would be worth another $10/month to me so I turned it on yesterday.  First glitch was that they could not turn it on until I went down to their store and picked up one of the cable modems that Time Warner uses.  So I went down town, got the new cable modem, returned home, installed it and proceeded to see pretty much what I have been seeing all along in performance.

That is when I found out from their tech support about the performance improvements were only going to be useful to the gamers and big downloaders. humpf!  Well, I have 30 days to try it and then if I don’t think its worth it I can drop it for free.

Today, I have been too busy with non-internet stuff so I have not been able to really wring it out like I wanted but maybe tomorrow….

Meanwhile, I am still fighting the increasing struggles with the whole userid and password jungle.  Now that more and more checking and restricting is being done to make passwords more secure and less vulnerable to hacking or cracking, it is getting harder to just login.. anywhere!

I have over 800 userids with passwords that I use. It is impossible to make them all unique and still be able to remember them.  Heck, its impossible for me to remember any of them.  Then you get the sites that require you to change your password every so many days to a new one that has not been used before and pretty soon one has no clue what a password might be.

I have complained before about getting over 500 emails a day of which maybe 1% or less is not spam. Now, I have to ask for a forgotten password every time I try to logon to a website I have not visited today and I am getting more and more frustrated.

Sure, I have password managers that keep them all very secure but again, the increasing security blocks these from working so to even use them I have to manually open each one in the PW manager and edit it to see what my password is right now and then manually type it into the security prompt for that site.  That is bad enough but on the back side I have to manually maintain these passwords in the PW manager every time one must be changed due to the logon restrictions on the site. It’s impossible to keep it all straight and as soon as a couple of mistakes creep into the database, they all become suspect. 

This difficulty factor is doubled when they block the password you type in so you can’t see what you typed. Sure, I make typos just like everyone else so when it rejects my password I don’t know if I mistyped it, miscopied it from the PW Manager or have changed it on the site and now the PW manager does not have the correct current PW in it. To straighten this out I have to go to the site, say I lost my Password, get it mailed to me (or a new one if they only offer a reset function) then login to the site with the new one and also make sure to up date the PW in the PW manager for this site and all other occurrences of it (yes, there may be multiple PW entries in the PW manager due to different entry points to the site. Each will have a PW manager entry with userid, password and URL.  All have to be found and changed manually.

By now, I have totally forgotten why I needed to get into that site.

The only defense against this is to make the logon on all your sites use the same userid and PW. This, of course, makes it so unsecure that the web sites have to add additional complexity in the form of questions that you have to answer AFTER you have entered your userid and password. The questions change and are different from site to site so there goes the one userid and password workaround!

I have run into some of these types of sites that do not have any questions that I could supply an answer to that I would be able to remember a consistent answer to in 3 months. Other questions have no answer possible for me. One such example is “what is your mother’s middle name?”  My mother was never given a middle name.

The only common questions everyone already knows, like “your mother’s maiden name”, “your date of birth”, your high school mascot”  (heck, that was 50 years ago.. I barely remember the name of the school).

So, there you have it… Clearly, the more secure they try to make the logon process the more complex it becomes and the more complex it becomes the more people try to simplify it to keep it usable and that undermines the very security that was being attempted by the process.  Really dumb approach to security.  Like putting more padlocks on a wooden locker. If I can pick one I can pick them all or I will just bust the hinges.

The only people that are being blocked from getting into their accounts are the people whose accounts they belong to.

Enough of the rant.

Obviously, I am not in the middle of my happy place tonight so I will say TTFN until tomorrow.

Surprising Weekend

Whether one is a super bowl fan or not is irrelevant this weekend because it is going to be rubbed in your face until its over… and then they will rub it some more just to be sure everyone gets the point…

We do watch it, usually on ReplayTV so we don’t have to sit through all the dead air jibber-jabber time. We just skip to the next play action and go ahead.  This year, #3 son, Randy and his wife had just moved into their new house the day before and really wanted to share it and their new HD TV with us so who was I to turn down a free meal and a great visual experience.

Interesting game. At one time I was something of a Steelers fan (during Terry Bradshaw’s days) but I just wanted to see an unusually good game and I did. I would just as soon have skipped the half-time show but Merrily is a Boss fan so we watched it.

Still on our minds, though, was that our beloved Katie was spending another weekend in the vet hospital. She had another unending seizure about 3am Friday and it took the resources of the Vet Hospital's emergency room staff to get it stopped.  They say she is fine and are switching her meds for now to get a bit better control.  They are also sending home with her an emergency seizure kit in case she has another one like this. It should save another trip to the ER (and the $800 – $1500 price tag each time). 

I sure hope it works and her shunt does stop these once it closes down in 3-6 months. Meanwhile, we just have to hang on and watch her closely to keep her blood as clean as possible.

So far, her seizures and treatments have eaten up our down payment on the Smart car which was about 1/3 of the total price so it looks like that will be higher per month payment than we wanted to carry, too.

On other fronts we attended the second class of the Workamper 101 webinar series on how to find and get the right workamping jobs for us on the road. It has some good content in it and I already see some real benefits from its cookbook approach to this issue.

I guess it’s time to get some specifics done to move our plans along now that the family moves and crises are over. better get back to my to-do lists and get busy on them.

ttfn

Our Smart car is on the horizon

Wahoo!   We just got the notification that our new Smart Car is on a ship on the eastern horizon and headed to the port of Jacksonville, FL. for delivery on 2/18/2009. We have been holding our collective breath that our other two cars hold together until we get the Smart home.  Today, only a few people know what bailing wire is (basically, the predecessor to duct tape) but it is literally the ties that bind the 93 Ford Aerostar van together.

As a refresher on why a ?

To begin with, the Smart is only about 8 feet long and 5’ wide it can easily fit crosswise between the cab and the front of a 5th wheel trailer being towed without having to have massive modifications to the tow vehicle. Most small cars are over 10’ long including the Mini Cooper (12’).   This helps to keep the overall length of our complete rig under 65 feet.

It has an advanced computer controlled traction system to give much better traction with varying road conditions (wet, snow, gravel, etc.) so even though it is not a four wheel drive vehicle, it has better traction and control than most other 2wd cars.

Another plus (for me) is that it is quite comfortable and I am not cramped at the shoulders or legs despite my 6’ 2” x 300lb frame. They stagger the passenger seats slightly so that we don’t quite sit shoulder to shoulder and can comfortably fit within that 5’ width.

Also important is that it can be loaded and unloaded from the tow vehicle without having to first disconnect the trailer. This should make it much easier to dismount to do some scouting when coming into an unfamiliar area or just to do some sightseeing, grocery shopping or visiting without having to first setup in a nearby campground.

There is a forum dedicated to using HDTs (Heavy Duty Trucks) as great tow vehicles for large 5th wheel trailers. There is a lot more great information in that forum about the Smart cars and adapting a truck to piggy back one for full time rving.

It is not an overstatement to say it is the most nearly perfect way to travel and live the fulltime RVing lifestyle for many people.

Whoosh! ... and there went another weekend

So what makes one weekend go faster than another? 

I don't know, either, but I truly believe that it centers around the number of days one has left in their life.  More days, slower weekends. It's not proportional, though, so there must be some other factors that affect what should seem to be a linear relationship.

I have to really focus to get a square view of such fast times. 

Since I last posted (Friday, I think) several big items have happened:

• 1. Katie has returned home!  Wahoo! We picked her up and she was more than glad to see us, of course.  They thought she was picking at her wounds and bandages so the vet put an E collar on her before we left.  Poor thing could not get close enough to anything to lick it or even sniff it.  She looked like one of those automatic reversing toy cars that when they bump into something they back up, turn a bit and take off in a random direction. Between all of the hair that was clipped off of her to put in IVs and do the surgery, she looks like she got groomed by a 5 year old with electric clippers. The swelling has gone down, the pain patch was removed on Tuesday and she seems to be back to her old self of early 2008. She still wants help getting down from things like chairs and the bed but otherwise, the odd grooming and 7” incision are the only reminders of her ordeal of the past 3 weeks. A $pecial diet and meds will take her through the next 4-6 months and then we will see if she has any problem with seizures after that.
• The van got fixed. Turns out that an earlier repair of a coolant hose failed, blew the slick coolant all over the engine and belts and made the power steering pump slip. That is what gave me the moment of double panic when I was rushing Katie to the VET the morning of her unstoppable seizure.  Just a new hose splicer and its working again…. now I just need to do something about all the other marginal and sub par systems and components… like the dedicated vise-grip pliers holding the broken ground clamp onto the battery post, Manual windshield wipers, Open window air conditioning and shot bushings in the front end.
• Merrily, Carol and Shawna managed to get a fair amount done about my sister-in-law’s apartment and the massive amount of stuff it holds in boxes and stacked furniture.  It is certain that since her stroke she will not be able to live alone and definitely will not be able to navigate a two story apartment even with assistance.  New housing is being sought but it appears that she also needs more physical therapy. Unfortunately, Medicaid will authorize and pay for either physical therapy or an assisted living facility but not both. Odd place to draw the financial line… help you get better or store you in a rest home but not do both.
• The three of them also got most of Shawna and Randy’s stuff packed up and ready to move to their new home next weekend. I am going to miss them being so close but they will still be only  a few miles away. It not like I am losing a son and daughter-in-law….more like I am losing renters and a steady supply of leftovers-on-wheels.
• The X-rays of my back did not show anything definitive so I am now waiting for a MRI referral to see why I am having so much pain in my spine. This is real neurological type pain that happens unpredictably when I move and sends involuntary spasms into my rib muscles or down the back of my legs and hips. Pain meds help a little but don’t stop it. Neither do anti-inflammatory or muscle relaxants so I am stumped right now and not too mobile.
• We have been looking into the whole idea of Workamping (working while rving) when we retire. To help learn the ropes of connecting with satisfactory work the Workamper.com website has a Workamper University area that provides information and has even started an online course via a Webinar. The first session of Workamper 101 was interesting and a little bit fumbly but it was the first webinar they have done for this and had a few logistical and user issues to iron out with the attendees. There was even some impromptu entertainment when one of the male attendees failed to mute his phone before visiting his toilet. Good thing it was not on a video link. I am sure it is going to be worth the cost for the 6 sessions over the next 8 Saturdays to get us up to speed and help us to decide just what we might like to do and where.

Well, Merrily is up, now, and getting ready for work so I need to say TTFN.

TGIF

This has been a tough week. Katie’s surgery (she comes home in the morning), Sister in law’s new stroke, 6” of snow in Raleigh, NC, and some sort of back problem that has slowed me down so much that I am watching snails race past me. Not exactly a typical week but not that out of the ordinary, either.

After Merrily’s visit with Katie, yesterday, they told her that she was very sad after she left. They also said that Katie is getting very rambunctious in her cage and that means that she is doing well enough to come home (lucky us… we get to deal with the bolt of energy but can’t let her run, jump, climb, chase, pull or tug for at least another week, maybe longer).  I will certainly be glad to have her here, again.  I have really missed her by my feet every day.

Maybe that is why my back has been hurting so much  this week… just not having to bend over to pick up after her, clean her feet when she has been outside, leash her up for walks and unleash her after we return has probably made me stiffen up.

I swapped out an empty 40lb propane tank this afternoon. It was the last full one I had in stock so when the next one goes empty its off to F & G Distributing (the gas house) to get 3 empties refilled but that should be at least another week, maybe more.

Just 1 more week before Randy and Shawna move out and into their own place a few miles away. Their preliminary walk-thru went fine with just minor stuff to be addressed by the contractor.

Still a bit of snow on the shadowed places but the rest is now clear and daytime temps are in the 50s for a couple of days so I was able to hook the shore water supply back up and take a good shower this afternoon…. Now if the water heater just held more than 10 gallons… oh well, another project to be funded later on.

I am thinking about an Precisiontemp RV-500 demand water heater. I have heard no complaints from the folks that use them other than when one is boondocking it takes a little bit more water to run before the hot stuff starts coming out.  LP gas usage seems to be about the same as for a regular HWH, though, so I expect that because I can take longer showers… I probably will.

This snow has pointed out some drainage problems that I have ignored up until now but its clear that I should address them before we get on the road.  Just little annoyances like the runoff from the big awning cover drips right onto the tab that holds the front basement compartment door open. Makes a heck of a racket 24/7 and also, when freezing, builds a solid ice dam over the lock and release buttons for that door.

Same sort of issues a couple of other places so I will plan to fix those when I am next on the roof checking for places to be recaulked.

ttfn

Quote of the Day:
If at first you don't succeed… make sure nobody finds out you tried!
--Unknown

Getting back to normal

Katie, the cocka-poo is alive and well!  Her surgery went as expected and the liver shunt (a very large one) was easily found and corrected. Other than a little inflammation in her eyes and a very long incision she is doing great according to her Veterinarian.

She can have visitors today so I expect that Merrily will go over to see her at lunch time.  I am still sans-automobile and she works just a matter of blocks from the NCSU vet hospital and I doubt you could keep her away.

The snow is melting like the wicked witch of the west.. but more quietly.  An occasional chunk falls off the roof with a clunk but I expect that by this evening things will be back to normal.

More cold is expected but  not as bad as the last few days so maybe I can get a few outside things done, like fill the water tanks and dump the blackwater.

I have been suspecting that there was some pressure loss in the water system but the big icicle hanging from the shore water connector confirms its the inlet check valve that has gone south, first, and left us here.

During this “cave time” I have been installing Windows 7 beta 2 on my laptop. I installed it on an older laptop drive so I would not place my Vista ultimate system at risk and so far, it has been perfect.

It certainly seems faster in my environment than Vista (which was way faster than XP ever was on this same hardware) and so far, all of my hardware has worked ok on it.

Just prior to installing Win7 I had installed Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 on Vista and that made a lot of difference in how my internet browsing worked.  I will say that I have been using Firefox 3 for quite some time, more for the cool add-ons than for the “better browser” aspects.  IE has a growing set of accelerators that are similar to Firefox add-ins but not exactly the same ones. As for speed, IE 8 is definitely on a par with FF and the Windows 7 version (a different build of IE8 from the Vista version) is not pushing me to go back to Firefox without feeling that I am losing something.

Enough techie stuff. The Workamper 101 class is still set to start on Saturday night at 8pm EST and we are getting really excited. 

One other item on our list of preparations is connected to my Christmas gift to Merrily of dancing lessons for the two of us.

I figure that once on the road, there will be a lot of opportunities to go dancing and though I resemble a hippo in a tu-tu, I have been inspired by Warren Sapp’s performance on Dancing with the Stars this past season.   I think I can get it down well enough to not embarrass Merrily every time we go out.

The more different we can make our new lifestyle the easier it will be to not try to compare it to the past 60-odd years and to just enjoy it. We have never done dancing in our 30 years of marriage so it will be exciting and new to us.

We had intended to start classes a couple of weeks ago but things have gotten a little too busy for the moment. However, it will not be allowed to slip away into that vast vat of well intended but never implemented plans.

ttfn