revchris

Being a nice day, I started in on chopping drainage channels in the ice at the crosswalk on the corner, so that it'd drain and wouldn't pool new ice. Base channels took until lunch, and then after lunch, most of the neighbors were out helping each other shovel the piles at the end of driveways out into the street so that they'd melt, and people with short cars could see over them.

Then they all came over, and we pretty much destroyed the ice in the intersection (the contractors with the graders who do the neighborhood don't do a very good job of scraping the intersection bare), all the while talking about who's doing what and so on. We had 12-14 people standing around the intersection at one point, with ice choppers, shovels, and my digging bar (which destroys ice buildup), occasionally getting out of the way of cars.

Then I cleaned up some of the old seed, hulls, etc. under the bird feeder, until 'd filled the composter. If I do more, I'm going to have to start filling the neighbor's composter.

After that, we went to Menards for some shelf boards to do the closet in the computer room/office. We never put clothes in there, so we're going to put shelves at about 16" spacing to hold all the craft stuff and random electronics that have piled up there. I ripped the tongues off some old T&G boards from the garage, gut them to fit the sides and back wall as perimeter shelf supports, and then teeka painted them. They're currently out in the garage (with a heater) drying, albeit slowly.

Tomorrow we'll install the shelves, and clean up the room somewhat, and then we're probably going to clean the carpeting in the bedrooms and computer room.

They finished paving our neighborhood today. Base coat asphalt on Northland, Fulton, and Nancy, and topcoat on all three plus School. The roads really needed it, but it's also nice for them to be done. I'd guess that all the cones and barricades will go away either tonight or tomorrow. One of the neighbors said they were pushing hard to get it done so they didn't have to wait for things to dry out after tonight's predicted rain.

I'm over the swelling and most of the itching from the allergic reaction, now I'm waiting for everything to finish peeling and for the last of the red to go away. We're fairly sure that it was a reaction to something on the celery we bought for the potato soup. I was talking with John at Jim's Meat Market (where we got the Italian sausage), and he says they stopped using celery in everything a while ago. They used to fail a health inspection every year or two, and their health inspector suggested they cut out the celery, as it's apparently a common source of pollutants, including dirt and agricultural chemicals. John says they haven't failed an inspection since (he said it's been 10 years).

The cats spent the day at the vet for teeth cleaning. Jackie had one tooth removed, Marley had one canine and three other teeth pulled. The vet's pretty sure that Marley's weight loss is related to the dental problems. teeka got home with the cats shortly after I got home, and we shouldn't laugh, but Marley was frantically throwing food around because her mouth was still numb while she was trying to eat something (anything? everything? whatever a starving kitty needs!).

Yesterday I rebuilt my mother-in-law's computer. Her old one stopped working while they were trying to figure out what she'd need to do to run Adobe CS3, so they decided that it was time to upgrade. I picked a kit from Tiger Direct, and they went from a 3GHz Celeron with 512MB or RAM to a 2.2GHz Dual Core with 2GB. I built the new machine a couple weeks ago and swapped all the drives from the old one to the new one and traded video cards with her (I had a PCI-E/16 card and both AGP and PCI-E/16 slots, she had an AGP card in the old machine and a PCI-E/16 slot in the new machine, and both cards were similar quality), booted it up, and then went away while it figured out what drivers needed to be installed. Told it to cancel all it's install attempts, ran the driver disk, downloaded the video card drivers, a couple passes through Windows Update, and then boxed the new machine up to go back home.

I'm probably going to use the old machine and some of the accumulated other parts from home to upgrade Teeka's desktop the same way. She'll go from a pIII-900 to the celeron, which should make it a little less frustrating to use.

Anyone want to buy a camper? We've decided that we should try to sell the camper because we really only ever use it one weekend per year, and with ongoing maintenance and what we went through this time to get it hooked up to the truck, it's really not worth it.

I also learned how to cast "Summon Parent" over the weekend.

When the net-door-neighbor munchkin comes over to see what you're doing, you say "Kimmy, you need to stay over there so you don't get killed." And then you pull-start the chainsaw.

Jim the neighbor stopped by while we were unpacking the truck to see if we had a tattoo pen.

I had to tell him that that was one of the few things we didn't have, but I could probably find him a sewing needle and some india ink if he wanted to fake it.

They were getting ready for the Fair, and discovered that one of the rabbits that one of the daughters was showing wasn't tattooed. They headed out to the farm to remedy the situation, after letting us know that since we had nearly everything else, they figured we'd probably have a tattoo pen too.