I like short work weeks and this is one of them. Thursday is Thanksgiving and we’ll be visiting Pennie’s family. It will be fun to see Amaya, who I haven’t seen in 2 months.

On Saturday as I was clearing what I hope is the last of the leaves from our yard, I passed Pennie’s car in the driveway and noticed that her left front tire was flat. It was getting late, so I left it until Sunday. In the morning, I pulled out the donut spare and pulled off the tire. There was a screw embedded in the flat of the tire, so a plug would have handled it quite well. Unfortunately, the tire was pretty bald and there were some cuts and a quarter sized chunk of rubber gouged out. These were probably from the accident she had a number of months back and they should have replaced both tires and not just the passenger side front tire. I headed down to my parents’ house to clear leaves there and noticed that the tire place by BJ’s was open. I stopped in on the way back and got a price on the replacement. I put away the mower and headed back out with the flat tire. I had to sign up for a BJ’s membership, but I figure we’ll make good use of that over the next 14 months as they do have some pretty good prices there. I put the new tire on and feel much better that it is taken care of. It is actually good that she got the flat as that tire was just not safe!

Other than a load of leaf clearing and the tire, I didn’t do much else this weekend. It felt pretty relaxing, actually. I decided to stay out of the forums all weekend, so I’ll be playing catch-up today and probably the rest of the week, unless traffic is light in them. I had wanted to upgrade the rest of the network this weekend, but it will have to wait a bit longer. And I still need to get the Thinkpad to the final of Windows 7 as it is still running the RC version. I can then get the Office 2010 beta on that machine. I’m also planning to swap out the hard drive on the HP Tablet and put Windows 7 on it. I’m not sure when I’ll get around to that task! Looming ahead is a task I’ve been putting off for years, but now needs to be taken care of soon. I’ve been running Microsoft Money forever and the database file contains some corruption that doesn’t cause any issues with the numbers, but causes an error dialog for every entry and navigation and causes a real slowness of the program, especially at startup. Since Microsoft is ending all support for Money, causing the online bits to stop working, I’ll be switching to Quicken, but first I need to go through a lengthy process of exporting the data and rebuilding the Money data file from scratch so that I can upgrade it to a more recent version and then import the entire file to Quicken. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Not!

I’m hanging out downstairs with the dogs, who are all sleeping on the couch and chair. Pennie is down south for the weekend to visit Amaya and will be returning home tomorrow. The dogs have behaved themselves very well since she left on Friday, although I didn’t get much bed space last night.

This past week was fairly uneventful, which I suppose is a good thing. It was fairly quiet at work and also at home. The week started on a sour note when I called my father and got into another junk mail argument, but I decided to not dwell on it. I call him each day and I do my best to keep the conversation pleasant, but he has a habit of bringing up his mail – mentioning either the volume of mail or that he did some correspondence, or something else that gets me started. Unfortunately, his junk mail is the primary focus of his life after Mom. I was successful in keeping the calls light the rest of the week and also Wednesday’s visit.

Yesterday morning I took him shopping, as usual, and also avoided discussing mail. I simply tossed everything he had not yet dealt with and intercepted Saturday’s mail delivery.  

It was Halloween yesterday and we had very few trick or treaters stop by. I answered the door a few times around 3 PM, but then got the idea to set a bowl outside with the bags of pretzels that I had purchased to hand out. I put a sign in the bowl wishing them a Happy Halloween and suggesting that they not be greedy. I didn’t have to answer the door at all for the rest of the day and I still have tons of pretzels left. The lack of little goblins was likely due to the weather most of all. It rained on and off all day and in the evening it rained quite hard. It was pretty warm, though, so when there wasn’t a shower, the kids were able to go around in costumes without jackets. One tradition that I kept up was to place my noisy door mat out. The speaker box was hidden behind a broom leaning in the door frame and when the kids step on it, it screams, scaring the smallest kids and making everyone else chuckle. I took a few photos of the setup on the front porch.

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Because of the rain, I didn’t get a chance to address leaves today, but I managed to get many cleared up on Friday evening before it got dark. The front yard is mostly clear, but the big maple next to the house and the others in back are still dropping leaves like crazy. One clear day isn’t enough to dry the big leaves out to let me use the Snapperizer to crunch and bag them. I did, however, dust the basement thoroughly today, including the baseboard molding. The dogs were quite interested in what I was up to.

And then, of course, was the time change. I hate Daylight Savings Time and find it to be a pointless exercise to have to adjust all the clocks twice a year. I didn’t bother setting the clocks until I got up this morning – early since the dogs have no clue about changing clocks.

I’m on vacation this week.

I was originally planning to take off next week, but switched it first to straddle this coming weekend and then to be this week instead. I made the latter switch because Pennie and I were going to be out late on Sunday. That didn’t happen because the flu nailed her on Saturday, unfortunately. She’s doing much better now, 5 days later, but she had a rough weekend.

The change to straddle the weekend was because I’m going to NYC tomorrow for the Windows 7 launch festivities. I have no idea what to expect, but figure that it will be crowded. I’ll be leaving home about 8:30 or so and heading to Hoboken, where I’ll take the PATH train to Christopher street and then walk about 8 blocks or so south on Hudson street for the big event. Doors open at 10, so I think I’ll be showing up around the time that the doors are opening or shortly thereafter. It should be fun!

It was still hard to get up this morning, but much better than Tuesday. Tomorrow morning I get to sleep in a little longer since I have a doctor’s appointment at 7:45 and I need to fast as they will be drawing blood. So, that means getting up at about 5:45 to have black coffee and get the morning reports done remotely for work before a shower and the appointment.

Waiting for me when I got home yesterday was my 2nd 2009 MVP Award gift. Microsoft changed the beginning of the award cycles year this year. I was awarded last October for the first cycle of 2009. All awardees in October 2009 are once again 2009 MVPs. The January awardees will be the first group of 2010 MVPs in the first cycle of the new award year. The gift is quite nice. It isn’t much different than the one from last year, but I actually like it better. The only problem I have is that I don’t have a good place for the award. Both last year’s and this year’s awards are on my desk, but they are behind the 23 inch monitor, so you can only see them from an angle. With two laptops and the big monitor on the desk, it is already a tad crowded. I’ll figure something out eventually.

This evening Pennie is heading to the movies for a girls’ night out. I’ll be bringing the house plants in from the screen porch and the orchids will move to their winter home in the basement. Frost and freezing temperatures are predicted for tonight in advance of a very rainy and windy couple of days. Fall is most certainly here!

Pennie and I took a road trip yesterday to Sugarloaf for a crafts festival/street fair that was taking place. Sugarloaf is just past Warwick, NY and it was a lovely day for a drive. We took the back way over local roads and timed our arrival quite well, since traffic was just building up in the area. When we left a few hours later, parking was much worse than it was when we arrived. We had a great time, walking along the road stopping in the shops and browsing the vendor tables. Pennie got a really funky hat for herself and we picked up a lovely sweater/jacket for Amaya. On the way back we stopped at a hopping coffee shop in Warwick and picked up something to drink. On a whim, I stopped at a garden center in West Milford to buy some mums for the front steps and a pumpkin. Pennie picked out a neat one that has little “warts” all over it. All in all, it was a very enjoyable Sunday afternoon.

The evening was another story, though. At around 5 PM I thought that our neighbors were blasting music outside my office window. Actually, it was from the parish hall on the other side of the house, up the hill, and several hundred feet away. There was another one of the monthly dances/parties attended by the local Mexican population. The church really needs to get a handle on the groups that use the hall. The volume of the PA system was incredibly loud. When I went to bed at about 9:30, the volume was lower, but I could still hear it through my earplugs because the bass was thumping through the ground and resonating through every fiber of the house. Add to this that the loud family, who live between us and the church, were outside in the evening and the kids were wilder than usual, running around the house and screaming continually for an hour or more. Retirement to a farm in VA or anywhere were the neighbors are very far apart sounds really good about now.

Since last Wednesday I’ve been having issues with the AT&T connection for the laptop. I have a USB device called the Quicksilver that plugs into the laptop and lets me connect to the Internet pretty much anywhere that there’s a cellular connection. At work there is now a decent 3G signal, so it is worthwhile using the AT&T connection for daily use. The connection started having big problems at around 9 in the morning on Wednesday. I was planning on joining a Live Meeting at 11, so I poked at it a bit, until I decided that it wasn’t going to work and figured that it must be a network problem. What happened was that I’d have a connection and usually was able to browse and check email for a minute or so, but then all network activity would stop, despite having a strong signal showing. I used my office LAN to attend the Live Meeting and then called AT&T support after the meeting. The tech had me reinstall the client software, reinstall the drivers and even use the connection manager provided by the device manufacturer, but nothing worked. He decided that it was a hardware problem and a new device was shipped out. I stopped at my parents’ house, as usual, on the way home Wednesday. My sister had provided a link to some photos of her family at Disney World, so I figured I’d try to connect from my parents’ house to show them to my father, since I actually believed that the problem was not hardware, but a network issue. Sure enough, the connection was perfect.

On Thursday I had no issues at all. The replacement device arrived at home, but I figured that I’d be sending it back unused. Fast forward to Friday morning. I was unable to get a connection, it threw a generic error 635 that I had not seen before. I called AT&T again. I worked with a tech for another hour and after some further troubleshooting steps, we were able to get it working again. Unfortunately, what we did was switch devices. I was now using the replacement unit, but we had done a number of other things, too. That was, however, short lived. At about lunchtime, the connection failed again. This time the signal strength dropped to 0 bars first and when I disconnected and tried to reconnect, I was greeted with the 635 error repeatedly. I tried the other laptop and it also threw the same 635 error. Another call to tech support and more troubleshooting. Finally, the tech was able to open a network ticket because we could make a 2G connection, but never a 3G connection with the Quicksilver. I was able to make a 3G connection on my PDA phone, though. When I got home on Friday, I tried connecting and got the same error. I tried again on Saturday and Sunday, with the same results.

So, this morning I’m fully expecting to be tethering to my phone or puttering along at 2G speeds until they fix the network problem. I tried connecting anyway and was met with the 635 error on the first attempt. I switched the card to 2G only and connected. I then disconnected and switched to 3G only and it connected. It dropped a little while later, but I was able to get reconnected immediately. We’ll see how this goes or I’ll be calling AT&T again to check on the status of the network ticket. Isn’t technology fun?

Last week, while we were down South celebrating Amaya’s 1st birthday, my cell phone rang. It was the Saturday caregiver from my parents’ house. I had offered to go grocery shopping for my father Thursday evening before we left or Monday evening when I returned, but my father insisted on going himself on Saturday. Unfortunately, while backing out of the driveway, she sideswiped the parked car belonging to the caregiver. My father had already told her that he’d pay for the damage and she told me that she wouldn’t bother going through insurance for it. I saw the damage on my father’s car on Wednesday. The passenger side was scratched and creased from the back corner to the mirror and the mirror was cracked. The mirror itself was still firmly attached, at least. Well, on Saturday I got to see the other car. As soon as I looked at it, I estimated close to $2,000 in damage. Her SUV had a light crease in the rear door on the driver’s side and a large crease and some scrapes on the rear quarter panel. The bumper and tail light were intact, at least. Sure enough, she had gotten two estimates. The first was for over $2,000 and the second was for slightly less. That was an expensive shopping trip for my father. On Wednesday I asked him if he was going to admit that he was no longer fit to drive or was I going to have to fight him over this, too? Of course, he responded that he was fit to drive and that he would relinquish the keys when he decided he was unfit. I’m not ready to fight that battle with him.

I’m still having trouble with his junk mail obsession. The pile of mail that I have to go through each time I’m there is incredible. The only positive thing is that he doesn’t send as much money as he did. There is the occasional check going out, but a week can often go by with none being sent. I’m hoping that the warning about his Visa and Discover cards has sunk in. If he used them for responding to any of the junk mail in the past month I will be contacting Visa and Discover to cancel both cards. And that’s not something that I look forward to dealing with as I’m sure that it will mean sending a copy of my POA and filling out forms and such. Plus, he’ll be very upset about it, of course.

Mom’s condition hasn’t changed much in recent months. She’s pretty quiet most of the time and is generally healthy besides the Alzheimer’s reverting her to the mental state of an infant. I wish that my father would accept the fact that he needs more help than he is currently getting, but that’s a battle that I’ve been losing for a very long time now. At this point, getting more help would be to help him, not her. I don’t like that he’s alone with her for 20 out of 24 hours each day and 24 hours on Sunday. Until such time that he’s completely incapacitated, though, I will not change his mind.

On Thursday I received word that I’ve been re-awarded as an MVP for Windows Live for the 6th year in a row by Microsoft. It is a nice recognition for the time I spend helping people and Microsoft in the forums and newsgroups. With the release of the final version of Microsoft Security Essentials on Tuesday, the traffic in those forums has been quite high. Fortunately, my fellow moderators do a great job of helping out, too.

It’s Fall now and the leaves are beginning to drop. I mowed the yard at our house today and will probably need to attach the leaf mulcher to the mower next weekend to do our yard and my parents’ yard.  I normally love this time of year, but…. Let’s just say that life could be a bit better all around.

The long weekend in Virginia was quite nice overall, despite the fact that it rained all day on Saturday for Amaya’s 1st birthday party. The day was still a whole lot of fun. Sleeping was not the best until Sunday evening, though. I had one of the two bedrooms in the house and had Ruby and Lily in with me. Finnegan stayed with Pennie who had the couch in the living room. Since Ruby is a bit of a nervous dog, she couldn’t get comfortable overnight and spent a great deal of time pacing on the wood floor. Sunday night was much better since she was getting more used to the arrangements and there were far fewer people in the house. Lily, on the other hand, was quite comfortable snuggling under the covers with me all three nights.

We left for home at about 11 on Monday morning. The drive wasn’t bad, though we ran into rain for a good portion of the trip. The dogs were incredibly well behaved in the car for the trip down and the trip back. It was quite funny how they seemed to know that we were getting close to home as they all started moving about in the back of the car when we got within a few miles of home. They happily ran into the yard when we opened the back of the Vue and all was well with the world for them. Pennie and I unpacked the car and settled in, while the dogs settled into their routine almost immediately. As I sat down with a cup of coffee to start synchronizing files from the laptop to the desktop and servers, the power blipped off for a moment. The UPS upstairs that provides power to the network switches up there didn’t fare too well with the interruption. The lights on the unit were flickering and no power was being provided to anything attached to it. I swapped it out with a new unit from downstairs. I need to swap out two more units in my office soon, as both aren’t supplying more than a minute or two of power, though a blip is still okay for them.

Since we were away on Saturday when I usually do the grocery shopping with my father, I needed to run out and get a few things to tide us over for the rest of this week. None of it was critical, but it was going to annoy me as I ran out of bananas, yoghurt, and apples within a day or two. Yes, I’m a bit crazy, I suppose. I also filled the car up with gas and stopped in at my parents’ house for about 5 minutes to say hello and make sure that all was well.

This morning I was up at my usual 3:45 to start the work week off. I discovered, much to my chagrin, that the cable was completely out when I sat down to check email and such while having my breakfast and coffee. It must have been down for maintenance, though, since it came back up at 4:30, just as I was about to call the cable company to check on the area status. TV and Internet were down, so it was a total disruption as opposed to a weak signal issue. Today looks like it will be one of those days as my AT&T data connection is acting flaky here at the office this morning, too. Oh, well.

It has actually been a long while since I last posted. And the last post was a whole bunch of pictures of our grandbaby, Amaya.

Amaya was with us for an entire week, heading home with her mom last Thursday. Amaya was a joy to have around. Pennie was funny on Sunday when she commented that she doesn’t know how she did it with her own daughter and that she didn’t know how Melissa did it day in and day out. My role was the doting Opa, playing with Amaya, but I didn’t have the other responsibilities of getting her fed, changed, or ready for bed. Assuming that all goes well, we will be heading down to visit for her birthday at the end of the month. We’ll be taking the dogs along for the visit and will drive down on Friday and back home on Monday.

So far, and my fingers remain crossed, I have not had to go to Newark for Jury Duty. I checked in on the Friday before I was scheduled to start, as instructed, and the message stated that I needed to check back on Wednesday evening. On Wednesday, my instructions were to check back on Friday. Last Friday’s message was that I needed to check back again today, Tuesday, after 5 PM. I’m hopeful that today’s message tells me that I’m free and clear for the rest of the week. It would suck to have to report and then get picked for a trial that begins at the end of the 2 week standby term. So, my fingers are crossed.

There’s nothing new with my father or mother. I’m still having issues with my father and his junk mail obsession, but it is mostly under control. He still answers too much of it and he still sneaks out a payment now and again for both donations and scammers. Mom spends most of the day and night sleeping. My father is less and less capable of taking care of her and even himself, but I know that I won’t be able to change his mind. I continue to go over twice a week and do what I can. Last weekend I mowed the lawn and pruned back more of the bushes and plants. I’ve got a few saplings to take down in the back yard and much more to prune back all around. I’ll be attacking it a bit more as the Fall settles in with cooler weather.

I enjoyed the 3 day weekend that we just had. On Saturday evening we went to dinner with a couple that we met through a friend of mine a number of years ago. We had a great time chatting on our porch well into the night, too. Sunday was a lazy day for the most part. Monday started out kind of lazy, but then I attacked our yard, weeding all of the flower beds and pruning the shrubs out front. It felt good to get that chore completed!

Somehow I’ve managed to continue to do my workout routine throughout the summer. I generally skip Wednesdays and either Friday or Saturday most weeks, but I have been religiously heading up to the attic the rest of the week to ride the exercise bike and to use the SoloFlex on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. I must admit that it is much nicer to workout when the weather is cooler. Although the attic fan does a good job of keeping the attic at a reasonable temperature, when it is over 80 degrees, the bike ride is tough!

Pennie has been doing very well with transitioning off the medications she had been taking for depression. She’s been in a program for over a month that includes individual counseling and monitoring, plus group therapy sessions. The medication that she was prescribed a few years back wasn’t doing the job for her, but they were also addictive and difficult to stop using. She’s been cutting back the dosage weekly and dealing with the symptoms of withdrawal for a day or two at the start of each week. I’m really proud of her for taking the steps to do this. This week began her first without that medication. I expect that a new prescription will be given that won’t be addictive and she’ll be monitored closely to make sure that the dosage is correct for her. I’m very happy that she enrolled in the program and that she’s well on the road to recovery and a happier day to day life.

We’ve had a particularly cool and wet early summer. Now that we’re half way through August, though, summer is finally here and I’ll be glad to see it go again! I didn’t mind the cool part of the summer that we had, but could have done without some of the pretty constant rainy days. I really dislike heat and humidity, though. Saturday was pretty toasty, Sunday was about the same, though it seemed a tad less humid and today and tomorrow will both be pretty hot again. Personally, I’d like temperatures to stay below 80 degrees during the day and have them hover around 60 overnight, preferably even in the 50s.

I took two days off at the end of last week, so I just came off of a long weekend. Pennie was dog-sitting overnight from Wednesday through Friday night, so that meant that I slept in her bedroom with our crew those nights. Rather than get them up at 4 am and into kennels for a long day, I figured it was a good time to use up two vacation days. I still worked from home each morning for an hour or so, but we got to sleep in and their kennel time was greatly reduced.

Just because I took time off from work didn’t mean that I accomplished anything at home, though. I relaxed for the most part. On Saturday morning I took my father shopping as usual. When I arrived at his house, the caregiver wanted to bring mom outside for a bit to enjoy the sun and fresh air. She carried mom and I followed with the wheelchair. She seemed to enjoy her time outside, even if it was only for a short while. We carried her back in within an hour’s time. I brought a chair over for my father so that he could sit with mom outside and then I headed out back to cut some of the overgrown vegetation back. I didn’t spend much time on it, but sliced my way through quite a few weeds and plants that had taken over the back yard. I need to cut some more down next weekend using clippers and a saw as there are some small trees growing in the garden that need to be removed. And I need to gather all of the cuttings together to put onto the compost pile or put in cans to be collected by the town’s recycler for garden waste.

I’ve been having a hard time dealing with my father lately. I truly think that he needs to have someone there every day, preferably 24 hours per day, but he refuses. He has trouble getting up and down the front steps, he gets winded very easily, and he can’t hear or see very well. I went over on Thursday afternoon to collect the trash and take the recycling to the curb so that he didn’t have to. Since he doesn’t use a garbage can, but places the trash in a bag at the street, his habit is to collect it Thursday evening and bring it to the curb in the morning when he goes out for his paper. He had been complaining that his back was hurting, which is why I went over on Thursday to take care of this for him. However, he was pretty adamant about not putting the trash out early, so I told him repeatedly that I would take the trash to my house and add it to the can that I’d be putting out for our collection. When I came back home from an bringing Pennie to her program on Friday morning, there was an anxious message from my father asking me where the trash was – that he had looked everywhere for it. I called him right back and reminded him that I had taken it with me, per our discussion. Conversing with him on the phone is increasingly difficult as he can’t hear too well and often he doesn’t answer the phone since he couldn’t see the caller ID. Yesterday afternoon’s conversation was unbelievably frustrating for me as I had to repeat myself many times. It is making me crazy. I really don’t know what else to do as I know that I cannot go back to stopping in daily as that was killing me when I did it a few years back. I am winning the battle, ever so slightly at least, on the junk mail front, though I haven’t won yet. I yelled at him again last Wednesday when I looked at his Discover and Vista bills. I hate yelling at him, but at least I know he hears me. Comprehension is apparently something altogether different. How a man on fixed income feels the need to send money to charities, political organizations, and psychic scammers is beyond me. I gave him another warning this time. I told him that if he persisted in using his credit cards for any of the above reasons I was taking them from him and having the accounts closed. We shall see, I suppose.

My desktop PC NIC has been acting up. I mentioned that a week or so back when it began needing to be reset after it woke from sleep daily. I checked and found that I had not updated the driver at all, so it wasn’t a driver issue. I swapped the cable to a different port on the switch, updated the driver direct from Intel rather than via Windows Update, but the problem persisted. I ordered a new NIC this weekend. It should arrive tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ve turned off the Ethernet port and switched on the wireless adapter. One of these days I really need to switch the router and switches. The router is ancient and is surely limiting my Internet speeds as I’m getting less than 1/3 of the advertised speed on the downstream. I have a new D-Link router in the box, so I need to knuckle down and attack it. I need to get the settings from the existing router and then configure the new one to match. One of these days…

As the work day winds down I think I’ll be more successful. Of course, Pennie just commented on Facebook that we’re having one of my favorite dinners tonight, so that will help reduce the grouchiness.

The weekend flew by and ended much too soon. I did manage to get two PCs onto the RTM version of Windows 7 yesterday. And, I also cleaned up my brown original Zune 30 and set it up for Pennie. The software installed great and she had fun digging through the Marketplace for podcasts, which was her original intent for having an MP3 player. When I signed her up for the 14 day Zune pass free trial it kind of went downhill fast. She gets an error that points to an issue with DRM components being out of whack. After an hour of poking at it last night I gave up. I might give it another look tonight with some additional information I have for trying to resolve the specific error, but I’m not holding my breath that it will be easy.

Adding to my grouchy mood for a Monday is the fact that one of my Windows 7 machines and my main Vista machine are both exhibiting network issues. The Vista machine is really intermittent and I’m wondering if I made a mistake and downloaded an updated NIC driver from Windows Update recently. If I did, I’ll need to roll it back. The Windows 7 machine is another story. The beta build had no drivers for the NIC and the RC build had a driver, and it worked well. The RTM build apparently ships with a driver from June and there is a new one available via Windows Update that installs right after the first login. Both drivers have the same issue – disconnects under load. The first backup to the WHS box failed overnight and when I woke the machine I saw that the network wasn’t active. I reset the NIC and restarted the backup, only to see connectivity drop a few minutes later. I managed to babysit the backup, resetting the NIC several times, but didn’t get a chance to dig out the older Vista driver for the box.

And then here at work, my AT&T 3G connection is failing continually, which makes me crazy. Signal is good – 3 bars most of the time, but it just loses the ability to talk to the gateway, so it appears to be an AT&T problem with the tower I’m connected to or further upstream. It is quite annoying since it means disconnecting and reconnecting to get things reset.

I uploaded some new photos this weekend of our flowers. That does make me happy. :-)

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Another Monday and another back to work week. The morning has been surprisingly quiet. I hope that the rest of today goes the same.

Tomorrow I’ll be leaving the office by noon. I will be taking my father to Morristown once again for a checkup. I often wonder why I continue to take him since nothing ever changes. This is the kidney specialist who asks a bunch of questions, takes my father’s blood pressure, makes some recommendations about getting more exercise and continuing with the pills to remove the water from his system, and sends us on our way with a follow-up visit in 3 to 6 months. My father hates taking the pills and has only taken a walk once in the last few months despite my urging. Oh, well.

There was a change of plans and Amaya and her Mom are at our house for another day. They will head South tomorrow morning. It will be nice to see Amaya when I get home from work today.

With the passing of the days I’m doing considerably better regarding our loss of Razz early this week. I know that she’s at peace. Pennie picked up her ashes last night when she brought Finnegan in to have the staples from his spleen removal surgery removed. She picked out a lovely urn that Razz’s ashes will go into.

Tomorrow I will be taking my father to Pearle Vision before we go to Shop Rite. He has been complaining that it is harder to focus these days. His glasses are probably over 5 years old now and he hasn’t had an eye exam in a number of years. His ophthalmologist retired and he hasn’t gone to anyone else. He has a lens implant in the “good” eye following cataract surgery. He can’t see out of the other eye, except for peripheral vision, due to macular degeneration. Unfortunately, there was nothing that could be done for that eye since he waited a few days to have it looked at when he suddenly lost sight in the eye. The retina specialists needed to wait for the eye to clear to see the retina. If it had been caught earlier, laser treatment might have been used to save his sight. Needless to say, I’ve been increasingly frustrated by my father’s delay in having someone look at his “good” eye to determine if there is some medical issue or if he simply needs a new eyeglass prescription. 

We’ve had a fairly hot week this week – until today. It is dark and dreary out today and quite a bit cooler. We had some heavy downpours earlier in the morning around here. It is supposed to do that on and off all day long. Tomorrow should be sunny and warm again – which is good since I need to mow the lawns!

Pennie’s daughter is coming north today to spend the weekend with us. We’re looking forward to seeing her and Amaya, our granddaughter! I put the air conditioner in the spare bedroom last night and set up the portable crib. I also tested out the baby monitor that Pennie picked up a few weeks back. I’m not sure when they will arrive, but expect that they will be there when I get home or shortly thereafter.

It has been kind of quiet at work. I need to spend some time later today reformatting a slew of contact data. We are switching providers for our emergency call notification system that I use. The new vendor will import our existing contacts and groups, but we will need to set up the messages and scenarios manually. The annoying part of this is that we didn’t get much notice about the change and we didn’t get a say in the vendor selected. The new vendor’s system does not have the same functionality as the old one, so there will be some tradeoffs. Even more annoying is the fact that the new vendor’s import process needs the data in a format that differs dramatically from the format provided in the export from the old system. I’ll be tackling that this afternoon and expect to be done before I head out the door.

I need for it to be the weekend already.

The overactive fan in my car was finally fixed yesterday at the Saturn dealer. They had to order the control module and it came in yesterday morning. I called and was told to come in at 1 PM to get it installed. It was supposed to take about an hour to install and program. It took 2 hours, much to my chagrin.

Finnegan is healing really well from last Thursday’s surgery. Razz is doing better than the weekend, too. On Sunday she could barely walk, had lots of trouble standing, and couldn’t get on or off the couch without falling unless she had help. For the past few evenings, she has been trotting through the yard when I take them out in the evening. She didn’t fall down when heading up the two steps from the basement to the back door and she trotted out ahead of Ruby to remind her that she was still the boss of the pack. I’m hopeful that she will continue to do well.

On my way to work this morning I had an interesting car experience. As I pulled onto the highway I noticed that it was pretty breezy in the car. I had a window  cracked open and the sun roof was tilted open for ventilation. I soon realized that it was the air from the heating and cooling system that was blowing full blast and it was quickly getting chilly. The odd part was that the fan was on the low position. So, I switched it to off and there was no change. No matter what I selected, I got high. I redirected the flow to the floor and turned the temperature setting up a bit. When I got off the highway, I shut the car off and back on again, thinking I might reset it. When I shut the engine off, the blower kept pumping air into the passenger compartment!

When I got to the office, I powered the car off and the fan was still cranking, I pulled out the manual and eventually found the fuse under the hood that controlled the blower,.If I hadn’t pulled the fuse the battery would have been drained in short order! I called the Saturn dealer after they opened and they had me bring the car in. It needs an oil change, too, so I’ll get that done while they have it in for service. I’m waiting for a call to let me know what they found and how much it will cost. I’m also hoping that the car will be ready for me when I’m ready to head home. I’ll need a ride over to the dealer, but it is close by.

Update:  I called the dealer and it is the heater/ac control module where the 3 dial switches are connected to in the dash/console. Of course they don’t have that in stock, so I’ll have to go back in a few days when it comes in. I looked the part up online and it goes for about $175. Add the installation to this and we’re probably looking at close to $300.

On another note, I received a lovely jury summons on Friday. I’ve been called to serve in US District court in Newark for 2 weeks beginning 8/31. I get to call them after 5 on the Friday before to learn if I need to report at 8:30 Monday morning or get instructions for what to do next. The choices would be: report on Monday; report on a different day; call back for further instructions; or not needed for the duration. I, of course, would like the final choice, but I’m thinking that won’t be the likely outcome.

It started on Friday evening. Pennie let me know that Finnegan wasn’t feeling well. He was drinking lots of water and looked like he might be suffering pain or discomfort when urinating and might also be uncomfortable in general. She was going to watch him and probably take him to the vet in the morning. When I took the mutleys out to the yard in the late evening, he added diarrhea to his symptoms and he had consumed loads more water. We agreed that it might be important to get him looked at right away. She called the emergency vet and they told her to bring him in. I decided to drive, since I knew where the vet was located and I figured that it would be a late evening. They did some tests and took x-rays, but nothing revealed the cause of his symptoms. He was given a prescription of antibiotics to treat a suspected urinary tract infection. There was another problem, though. In the x-rays a mass could be seen on his spleen. The vet indicated that this was not uncommon in large breeds, but suggested that it be looked at via an ultra-sound and consideration be given to having surgery to remove the spleen. She also said that this was almost always benign, but that a biopsy would confirm it. Taking no action was not recommended since it could rupture and cause internal bleeding. So, today Finnegan is going to his regular vet and I’ll know more when I get home. We were taken aback by the cost of the emergency vet. I had anticipated several hundred dollars, but the total was $750 for the visit and the tests. Ouch! it all happened for a reason, though, since it is unlikely that we’d have gotten x-rays if we waited until Saturday, so the mass would have remained undetected. At least we can now deal with that. It was a late night on Friday, with us getting home shortly before 1 am.

Saturday was mostly routine. Shopping, lawn mowing, laundry, and some cleaning took up most of the day. I went to bed fairly early, trying to recover some of the previous night’s missed sleep.

Sunday looked to be another nice and lazy day. That is until about 2:30 in the afternoon when Pennie discovered that there was water on the floor. I had run the dishwasher and we had another sewer main clog. We mopped up the water and called the sewer company. The guy came at about 4 and left a little over an hour later. Our line has been well snaked and confirmed to be clear. It was roots once again at about 60 feet out. Compared to the previous two guys who came in December and February, this guy did a great job. Apparently, the other guys didn’t use the cutter on the snake, while this guy did. We should be good for a while now. I asked about our options with so many calls in the past year and he suggested an old “Italian” trick – once per week, put 1 cup of bleach in all drains, followed by 1 cup of water. Let this sit overnight and then run the water for a while to let it flow through the pipes. He said this will help clean off the pipes inside and should help to slow the fobrous root build up in the sewer main. I hope he’s right, since I don’t relish the thought of spending upwards of $10K to get the sewer main replaced or lined. It would be cheaper to schedule them to snake the line 3 or 4 times per year for the next 10 years!

It turned out to be an adventurous weekend from beginning to end. Finnegan seems to be doing lots better, so it probably is a UTI.

It is Thursday once again, meaning that we’re heading towards the weekend. I don’t quite know why, but it been a hellacious week for me at work. It actually started last Friday and continued into Monday due to an incident that I had to track and report on. Tuesday and Wednesday were quieter. Perhaps they were too quiet, actually, which made the days sputter along. Today has been mixed so far. My neck/back/shoulder pain is flaring up and that means I have to avoid extended periods of computer use lest the pain increase. I’m tracking only one minor issue at work. I should be working on another SharePoint workflow, but I’m not up to that today. I’ve got the framework set, so it means lots of clicking and typing to build it out. I might attack it later or tomorrow. I’m in need of more sleep. Last night was a good sleep, finally, but not long enough at all! It’s been cool at night, so I’ve had the windows open in the bedroom, which makes the cats happy. On Tuesday night, though, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a storm coming through. The rain was pounding down and the wind was really howling. Once I realized what had awakened me, I jumped out of bed to lower the window. That was a good thing, since the rain became more intense – it would have splashed inside had I left the window open. That sleep intermission has taken its toll, however. I’m still tired now! I think I’ll go get another cup of coffee.

I came home from shopping with my father and mowing his lawn to find a voice mail message from Pennie. She’s on the way home a day early, likely to beat the traffic, and she’s coming home without Amaya. I’m not sure of the reason for that, but I’ll find out later, I’m sure. The dogs will be thrilled to see her. I’m anticipating her arrival shortly after they have dinner at 6 PM.

I mowed our lawn after taking down the temporary fence. The dogs will get to explore the “new” expanded yard in a few minutes. Of course, that means that the lovely new lawn will begin to develop dead spots, but what can you do? The tomatoes are growing like crazy with all the rain that we had, so today I tied them up so that they are supported as they continue to grow. There are a few tomatoes already growing on the plants, which is pretty cool.

Since Pennie is coming home today, I didn’t get to vacuuming he house, but I did dust the basement for her while the laundry is going. The window a/c that I installed down here last weekend is keeping it pretty comfortable down here, even with the dryer going. I’ll probably vacuum and dust the rest of the house tomorrow and will spend the evening today relaxing after I get my work for the office taken care of after dinner.

Pennie headed south on Wednesday to return the rental and pick up her repaired car from the body shop. She returns on Sunday with our granddaughter, Amaya. In the middle of next week Melissa will come north for a visit before returning home with Amaya. That means that I’m home with the dogs again. This time the whining has been pretty minimal, but I’m spending the evenings downstairs at the table, using the laptop, while the dogs stretch out on the furniture and the dog beds. The sleeping arrangements have actually worked out very well these past two nights. I’ve put the air conditioner on low since it has been rather humid, though not hot. That’s made for comfy nights even with Finnegan pressing up against me at the beginning of the night and Ruby joining him on the bed during the night. Lily and Razz stay on their beds on the floor. Razz hasn’t cared for getting up at 4 am, but the others don’t seem to mind getting up early at all. Of course, none of them are happy when I head out the door to go to work. They won’t have that problem for a while, though, since it now the weekend.

We recently decided to start leaving Razz out of her kennel when we are not home. She and Lily get to move about. Technically, we could probably leave Finnegan out, too, but we had a few issues in the past with him not waiting for our return to go to the bathroom. The other reason he stays in the kennel is that Ruby absolutely can’t be trusted out of her kennel. I don’t trust her for even a short time without supervision. She is much better, but she is still the destroyer. We lost a throw pillow to her when I was working on the hallway last month and she’s chewed the piping and ripped the chair cover the we got for the basement furniture. At this point that cover is probably beyond repair, but I’m a bit shy of spending close to $100 to replace it right now. Anyway, that’s why they don’t get to stay out when we’re not home.

Not much has been going on since the last time I posted. There’s been no change with my parents and work has kept me busy along with lots of forum activity since the 23rd of June when Microsoft Security Essentials beta went live. Traffic has slowed down for now, but that’s also because the beta was closed the next day and remains closed to new participants for now.

For the weekend ahead I don’t have anything major planned. It begins with grocery shopping and then probably some lawn mowing. I need to do laundry and I’d like to clean the house before Pennie and Amaya come home. Since Amaya is crawling now, it’s probably a good idea to wash and wax all of the floors.

Well, the hungry mutleys need to be fed now, so….

Yesterday my lovely wife and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. It is actually hard to believe that it has been 10 years. The years have brought many changes to our lives, but the one thing that has remained constant is that we have each other. She surprised me with a box of Godiva truffles. I did my best to resist the temptation, but gave in an opened the box after looking at it for several hours! They are delicious. To my credit, I didn’t consume the entire box yesterday. I may even be able to stretch it out for a few days or more! To prove that we are more alike than we can imagine, in the morning she asked what I thought about getting Indian takeout for dinner. On Saturday evening I had thought that it would be nice to have Indian food for dinner on our anniversary, but I hadn’t mentioned it to her. So, yes, we had Indian food for dinner. She placed the order, I drove to Fairfield to pick it up, and we sat at the table in the basement with the mutleys begging all around us and the NASCAR race on the television.

I normally head up to the attic to work out at about 6 PM. Yesterday I went up at 4, knowing that I’d be needing to go out to get our dinner. I started with the usual 15 mile sprint to nowhere on the exercise bike and then did the 3rd routine on the Soloflex for the first time ever. The first exercise involves hanging by your knees from the bar and doing sit-ups. I had avoided the 3rd set for years since I wasn’t sure that I would ever want to try that out. Well, I was successful in completing the entire routine. A few of the other parts of the routine were also hard. I’ve never been able to do pull-ups, but I attempted it anyway. I managed to squeeze off a few in decent form. It will take months of effort to do more than a few before dropping down from the bar, but I will keep trying. I did more yesterday than I was ever able to complete in the past. The frontal squat wasn’t as bad as the pull-ups or upside down sit-ups, but it was also pretty tough – using muscles that I hadn’t worked in the past. I’m glad I took the plunge to introduce the variety into the routine. I’ll be repeating that set again next Sunday while doing the other sets on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Overall it was a good weekend, despite the rain on Saturday. Sunday was actually a beautiful day, after some rain in the morning. It stayed clear until just about 9 PM. I didn’t do any major projects this weekend, but did run the Roomba on the main floor and bedroom floor. The battery doesn’t hold a charge to do more than one room at a time, so it took a few cycles to get through all of the rooms. However, they have now all been vacuumed.

I don’t know why I haven’t updated here in over a week, but there you go. I have no excuse and there was nothing stopping me.

Well, the lack of posts at the beginning of last week can be chalked up to a complete lack of sleep. I was up late on Sunday night a week ago, getting only 3 hours of sleep at the most. It took days to recover from that. I had a good week despite the incessant rain. According to the news, we’ve had rain on 13 of the last 15 days. And some of that rain has been pretty significant. Yesterday afternoon was a case in point. The skies opened up and dumped a tremendous amount of rain on the area while I was heading home. I have never seen so much water coming down before. The first stretch of the drive was through the woods, so I was shielded from the heaviest rain. The road was recently paved, too, so water didn’t puddle on the surface. There was only one section that had some roadway flooding. However, when I got onto the highway for the stretch between Oakland and Wanaque, driving was downright treacherous. I didn’t go faster than 35, yet the Vue was having a heck of a time staying in the lane, I was hydroplaning and being tossed about – it was pretty scary. Getting closer to home there was a patch of flooded roadway with water rushing through the yards and over the road surface as it sought the path to the river about a mile away. With the crown of the roadway, it was mere inches deep in the middle of the road, but it was over a foot deep in the yards on either side of the road. I’m assuming that the water was coming from this hills behind those houses. If these houses have basements, I’m quite sure that they were under water.

Other than the rain, it was a pretty normal week or so. Pennie’s cold is getting better slowly. My father continues to answer junk mail, sending money to some psychics, political action committees, charities, and minor contest scams. Mom hasn’t gotten any worse in quite some time and appears to be mostly content. The dogs and cats are doing well. I haven’t started any new projects, but I did attack the back yard brown spots again this weekend. I suspect that I’ll be fighting the burned pee spots on a weekly basis. We planted some tomato plants the weekend before last and they are already growing fast. I’m still working on the SharePoint form process at the office and the latest part of it making me crazy is related to permissions. It now works perfectly, with one minor exception. Unless I assign a higher permission level to users, they can’t submit the form data. I’ll get that worked out soon, I hope. I now have to add a whole other process piece, though.

On Sunday evening, after the usual workout on the bike and Soloflex, I decided to try the third exercise rotation on the Soloflex chart. Since I do the Soloflex 3 times per week, it makes sense to do the 3 sets on the chart. However, I’ve avoided the 3rd set of exercises because it involves pull-ups, which I’ve always sucked at, and the first exercise has you hanging from the cross bar by the knees to do a hanging sit-up. I didn’t do the routine, but I tried each exercise in the set and was able to do them all. The hanging sit-up is a bit hard, but it is do-able. I’m going to be doing that full set on Thursday. Then I’ll start the 3 set cycle on Sunday which will have me doing the same set on the same day each week.

Okay, it is time for another cup of coffee and then back to work. In the meantime, I’ll keep waiting for the sun to make an appearance. It is still cloudy, but they claim that it won’t rain today. We’ll see.