HP Laptop maybe, possibly, perhaps working again

I bit the bullet and had the HP laptop repaired at my expense and am posting this from there (here) even though I still hate HP for not stepping up and taking care of the fried motherboard under their extended warranty. I missed out by a month and thus paid $348 to get it back so I can be mobile again, Still pissed though.

P.O.D.

Picture of the Day

Golf Mojo & Confessions

OK, so I have been ignoring this place for a while, spending most of my time rehabilitating the old garage into a usable space. Yesterday I took most of the day off and just allowed my body to recover a bit. I have been a little sore lately. Not sore in the angry or mad sense, just tired muscles.

Julie reminded me that we took a day off last week to golf, and I reminded her that swinging a club and rooting around in the underbrush is not the same as resting my body. I spend a fair amount of time looking for errant golf balls just so that I can walk them back to the fairway, drop them at arms length onto the grass and launch them to a new patch of forest closer to the pin. That is the hope anyway. Actually my game is improving after something like 17 or 18 total rounds under my belt. Sometimes I get my initial drive to land 40 or 50 yards from the pin, pitch it onto the green in two strokes, then completely melt down with three or four putts. Other times I am off in the woods off the tee box, finally get to the green in 7 strokes, then sink a long putt. Go figure. Most of this I attribute to having offended the Gods of Golf in some way by having unknowingly said or done something; like bragging, wearing the wrong belt, or using the wrong color of ball. These are all bad Mojo and cause havoc with the unachievable goal of reaching par.

All of this is unending fun.

When adult children move in --- Yikes!

I just kind of mosey along in my own personal fog most of the time and not much flusters me, but I have to say that having our Eric and Alsiha both move in with us while they reset their compasses has made me reflect a bit about how much I have slowed down from my youth without really noticing much. I have stopped trying to keep up with their energy levels.

We are in the process of gutting out the old garage and remaking it into something usable and not so nineteen fifty sevenish. The work is taking a toll on my knees mostly, but also on my perception my own mortal makeup. My body is asking for days off when there is far too much work yet to be finished. Screaming for attention! Me too, me too! The kiddos have done much of the heavy lifting, and I am thankful for that, but they both have jobs now and I cannot play without guilt until the space is habitable so I just work until my body says it is time for a shower and a glass of wine. When we recently took time to play golf with friends, parts of my anatomy protested, but I averted a general strike by slowing down my pace.

Anyway, spending time with our children has been fun, rewarding scary, and a blessing.They will always be our kids, but it is fun to get to know them as adults.

Time Crunch

With each passing year my perception of time changes. Things speed up and there often is not enough time to do all of the things I want to do. Right now, with the help of Julie, Eric and Alisha, I am in the middle of converting the old garage area into a real bedroom and bathroom space, along with a sort-of-space for Julie's treadmill and other related junk.

But this coming weekend is our annual Rhododendron Festival, so I want to get the DeLorean out on the streets of Old Town for fun and attend the car show. Of course some time at the Grape Leaf may be warranted just to pace the day properly. The trouble is I have been invited by Gary Nauta to go on a fishing raft trip down the Deschutes River for four days beginning next Monday and I may not have enough time to get my work done and do the Rhody Festival thing and still have time to pack. Everyone should be so unlucky! I suppose that the worst could be that the drywall guy may have to wait a few days until I get back and do the final work so that he can get started.

Deaven will be here for the weekend just to make sure that the little carnival is still doing what it is supposed to do - entertaining kids. And Alisha has taken on a job at the ICM Restaurant in Old Town, saving money for Grad school, so she will get initiated in the customer service side of the Rhododendron Festival, although she has never made it here to participate in the revelry in past years.

I suppose that all of us here have so many skinned knuckles that it will be a good time to recover and heal for a few days. Maybe that is why everyone just about pushed me out the door when I received the invitation to go fishing. Hmmmm?

The Gimp

I had a benign glomus tumor removed from my right pinkie finger last week because the random pain over the last several years finally was too much. Alisha has taken to calling me the gimp because I have been able to contribute very little to the house rehab projects we started before the surgery 7 days ago. I thought that I would walk out of the surgery center with a band aid on my pinkie and instead they immobilized my entire right hand! I will, hopefully, get my hand back in a couple of days.

In the process of learning about the bandaging technique and the reason for cuffing me, I have found out that there is a band called Bandaged Hand. Not bad from what little I heard online. Just one of those random bits of useless information.

One of the upsides of all of this, aside from the obvious absence of pinkie pain, has been the the DeLorean is running great. Before the visit to the room of masked people with sharp knives and debilitating, paralyzing drugs, the old stainless steel car was running really rough and blowing black smoke. I knew that it would be some time before the Doc would want me to get my hands all greasy so I did a tune-up and leaned out the fuel mixture. Now it runs better than it ever has, although my assistant, Eric, managed to drop a 7/8 inch deep socket into a virtually inaccessible part of the Lotus frame and I am imagining that I will hear it rolling around forever.

Typing this small post left handed is very slooow, although my speed is up to maybe 10 words per minute now after my week of practice.

Accounting Hell

I have disappeared this last week into the undesirable portion of our universe in which one must account for every penny of cash flow so that our government may take, yes take, what Congress considers their fair share. I have been entering the last three months worth of income and expenditures into the accounting system that almost every small business owner is slave to – Quickbooks ®. Amazingly it finally all balances with the bank statements, so if I keep it up for the remainder of the year, at the end I will be able to punch one button and generate the information our CPA needs to pay Congress once again. Whoopee!

Now I am going back to the DeLorean to take care of some maintenance issues in preparation for our big city wide party in May known as the Rhododendron Festival. It is a blast and I have come to really enjoy the relative insanity of it all. Thousands of Harley Davidson owners, as well as hoards of gawkers, show up for our two days of car show, flower show, slug races, small street carnival and general fun, topped off by our parade down Highway 101 and Old Town Florence.

Photo from 2002 just before the Rhododendron Festival parade.