Iced Tea Forever

Last fall we were gone over a weekend, and when we came home there were skid marks across our yard and hole in our tree.

The ground level branches were broken off where a car had crashed into the tree!

I checked the front door, and sure enough there was a note. It basically said, sorry, we hydroplaned, here’s my phone number, sorry.

The funny thing is, my wife was telling a friend of hers about it and they were discussing the name (it was signed with a first name only), handwriting, and color of the car (there were a few broken pieces left under the tree), and they figured out who it was! They had gone to school together years ago.

I’m just glad I wasn’t getting the mail or something.

Church has been canceled now two weeks in a row. A week ago it was ice, yesterday it was snow. We got dumped on Saturday night.

Jewel came home from work in the morning and couldn’t quite make it into the garage. I offered to take over but she wouldn’t let me.

Here’s what the front yard looked like from the shelter of the garage.

Click to see large versions.

My wife really wanted a birdfeeder for Christmas, so I got her one. We’ve been enjoying watching all the birds in our backyard. We’ve seen a lot of different kinds.

Apparently though, we’ve attracted some of the neighborhood psycho birds. There is this one red cardinal (fittingly the Hoosierville state bird) that hammers our windows. Over and over.

For weeks this mentally challenged bird has consistently been nailing a very small ground-level basement window. For long periods of time. Once in a while just for variety, he’ll tap a bedroom window, or sometimes the front screen door.

My wife said that he was banging on a window once so she scared him off. Then she claimed he followed her around the house watching her through windows. He’s psycho, I tell you.

The past few days he’s starting to frequent the basement egress window right around the corner from my desk! I’m about ready to grab a 12 gauge and put an end to this, but I guess that would probably be illegal.

I wonder of there’s a mental impairment clause to shooting state birds.

Last Sunday evening all the youth from church came over to our house. There were lots of people here. Lots of shoes too.

One thing that took me quite awhile to get used to here in Hoosierville was the shedding of the shoes. Any time you go over to someone’s house, you take your shoes off just inside the door. That made me uncomfortable for quite awhile, but I’m getting used to it.

Isn’t that like an Oriental custom, or something? And there’s not much about Hoosierville that’s Oriental, so it seems pretty weird to me!

It reminded me of when I was young and wild.

Edit: I have had 8 large cups of hot tea in the last 24 hours.

I’ve been getting some complaints from high-ranking and influential ITF constituents about being greeted by an evil, wicked, vile snake when they first arrive at ITF. So it’s time to move the snake down the page, I guess.

My wife just left for work, and I just ate supper. I fried the last of the hamburger that was in the fridge, along with some of the sausage. I tore half of an onion into petals and threw it in the frying pan also. Now that I have finished eating everything I wish I had more.

I will try to resist.

We’ve had some guests recently at the ITF headquarters. The baritone was here a couple of nights ago, then his parents came to visit last night. We had a great time with them.

The last few weeks have been unreasonably and uninhabitably cold. Wind chills have been well below zero a few times, and one night the temp dropped to -8 F. I have been staying indoors as much as possible.

Awhile ago events occurred to make me realize the immediate need for much more storage. I run a recording studio out of the Iced Tea Forever.com office, and I was running a bit short on gigabytes.

My main computer had roughly 200GB split between two EIDE hard drives (at that time), but that was just enough to get me by for that machine. I needed a bunch of digital real estate where I could park some serious data. The motherboard on my primary work station has the capability to add a few more SATA hard drives, but that’s a little over budget right now.

Enter my buddy Hans and his Used Computer Parts Repository! (Motto: We Ship Fast, but Not Next Day.) He agreed to unload a couple of EIDE 160GB hard drives on me for a nominal fee. What a great solution! This allows me to make use of my old computer for very little additional money and leaves me considerable space in my new one for upgrading further in the future.

The plan was to stuff the twin 160GB’s into my old computer tower and throw it on the network. Then I could just dump stuff I want to backup and archive onto the old machine sitting out of the way in the back room.

The two drives were formatted as NTFS, and I needed to use Win98 on this machine. I researched on the internet and figured out how I could convert NTFS to FAT32. Oh boy. Looked like I needed to completely wipe the drives and reformat. Ok, no problem, I did that and tried installing Win98.

I didn’t get far. While running the Scan Disk at the beginning of the installation, it would hang at the “Media Descriptor” part of the scan for one of the partitions. I eventually went back and used FDISK to delete the offending partition.

One of the limits of FAT32 is that it can handle partitions no larger than 32GB. You can only have 4 Primary partitions, and 4 x 32 is only 128GB out of the 160GB drive. Trying to circumvent this, I created 3 primary partitions and then made an extended partition out of the remaining space. In order to convert it to FAT32, I had to further divide the extended partition into 2 logical partitions. It was one of these logical partitions that was causing all the Scan Disk problems.

What a confusing mess. That’s what I get with using such an archaic beast as Win98. But, in the end I got it all worked out.

Since my new motherboard has wireless onboard, I left the wireless card in the old machine. I threw it in a corner in the storage room and plugged it in. No mouse, no monitor, no keyboard, nothing but the tower and power cord.

Once booted up, I use TightVNC to control it from my main desktop. I back up all my files to it over the wireless network, it’s slicker than slick. I’m very happy with how it turned out.

Since we’ve relocated the ITF office, I now have it set up in the back room with a monitor and user input devices. I still primarily access it through the network, but if I need to do any troubleshooting it’s nice to be able to have immediate access to it.

Mom and Dad and Linda came out for several weeks to help us move and get the new house ready. They just went home a week ago Tuesday. And yes Mark, they mentioned seeing you at the airport!

I don’t know what we would have done without Mom. We probably still wouldn’t be moved in!

We painted

and painted

and moved

and moved.

A ton of work, but it was high time it happened. Thanks for helping, Mom. See you next May!

Here’s what our backyard looks like right now.

We got maybe 5 inches or so today (Thursday). Cold and wet. Slick roads. Miserable.