Mar 18 - around the house

I didn't go anywhere, nor did I do nothing. Figure out those negatives !

Actually it was a quiet day. I made bread. I made tapenade. I roasted coffee beans. I cleaned the boat -- that took a while. I worked on Arlene's PC.

I'd been leaving the boat with the bimini top up and simply using the shop vac to remove the leaves and other crap that would fall into it. That proved to be a good approach for the first month down here but since then the Live Oak has been dropping more and more crap and finally it's crappy (not to be confused with the fish) enough to start staining the vinyl and, believe it or not, the boat's fiberglass. Ok, time to clean up. Bleach did the job and a vacuum full of leaves and whatnot, and now I have the storage cover back on. The trouble with the storage cover is that a) it doesn't really allow it to dry, if it's wet; and b) it gets mighty hot under that cover with the strengthening sun as we get into Spring (two days from now). However, I don't want it to get stained, so have no choice. The long term solution is to have a shed roofy thingy without sides ... you know what I mean.

Arlene's PC ... hmmm ... where to I start. Well, I tried installing Windows on both of the hard drives, no luck. I swapped everything that I could think of -- memory, IDE connections, you-name-it but no luck. It would read the XP disk and then upon reboot, freeze -- symtomatic of an I/O error, but definitely not the fault of the hard drives themselves.

Next I loaded Linux ... successfully. Hmmm. Perhaps the Linux disk drivers are not accessing the same features as the Windows drivers ... and there is something wrong with the chipset on the motherboard. Hmmmm. I then upgraded Linux to the latest version and the network card stopped working -- driver not included in the latest update. Hmmm. I then tried re-installing the previous version and got an I/O error .... Hmmmm.

This morning, I tried a new tack. I have an old PC in the cabinet here with similar symptoms with a compatible CPU ... I dismantled it and swapped CPU's -- and it works ! I'm in the process of loading up all the drivers -- eg. sound card -- it could still fail at some point in this process but I'm further ahead than yesterday.

Sandy took Angelika to Orlando airport yesterday for her flight -- which turned out to be delayed three hours (but not two days like Marda) -- and she got home after 9pm. Sandy then went to Costco and picked up a few things, including a big box of peanut oil for our summer get-togethers. Right now she's off to return the door that I picked up yesterday from Home Depot (oh yes, I did do that) as well as go to Boaters World to get a new pair of sandals. It turned out that HD made a mistake in the door order -- not size but raised panel vs inset panels -- that I didn't know about when I picked it up. So -- they will credit us and re-order from Jeld-wen. I wouldn't be surprised if the door comes in after we leave for up north, but whatever ...

As for the sandals -- she always leaves her sandals at the stairs as you get onto the beach. I always tell her that someday someone will steal them -- oh no, who would take an old pair of sandals -- well, they were gone. Teva's are not cheap, nor do they really deteriorate unless you do a lot of pavement-walking -- so now she's buying a new pair. I hate to say that I told you so ... I hate it even more when it costs money ! Oh well, that's life. This happened when she went to walk the beach with Angelika. Luckily they had parked nearby rather than walking over from here or she would have had to walk home in bare feet -- or send Angelika -- or call me, who was probably out on a bike ride.

Speaking of bike rides -- I should really go out today but my stomach is feeling kind of funny. Not funny ha ha ... I need to be ok for Saturnday morning. Gainesville is far enough away that I'll be driving there tomorrow afternoon to be ready for the 4am start.

Ok ... back to Arlene's PC ...