Nocturnal Visitors

About a mile South of us is the Stake Hospital. On the grounds of the Stake Hospital is a grove of apple trees. It looks like a herd of deer live in the orchard, there are deer crossing signs up over there.


Our neighbors have two apple trees that they don't seem to pay much attention to. Sometimes I have the girls pick up the rotten apples from the ground and toss them in the green recycling, and we did it once this year, but a lot of apples were left on the ground and the tree this year.

I have seen some deer tracks in the snow of our front yard this year, but didn't think much of it. Last week, Tara and I saw a really big deer having a little snack. Tonight when we got home, another deer was having a snack. I guess they like the apples, maybe the green apples taste better than the ones they can get at the hospital. Sorry the pictures are not good, it was dark, and I didn't want to spook the thing too bad.

Restaurant review

Rice King
Downtown Provo

My friend Dick down the street has been trying to get me to go to this place for about a year. (He hasn't been trying that hard, but he talks about it a lot.) I watched the girls for Tara today so she could go off a day long library seminar thing. This evening Tara told me that I deserved a special treat for watching the girls, and I should go do something. I think she was just trying to get out of paying the babysitter...

I thought about heading up to Rocky Mountain WingShak, but then I decided while headed to the freeway I really didn't want to drive up there, so I stopped at Rice King.

I ordered General Chicken and Kung Pow Beef. I asked how spicy they made it, the guy told me they could make it as spicy as I wanted. Their spicy scale is 1, 2, 3, or 4. I told him I would go for a 4, he talked me out of it, saying 4 was very, very spicy. I went for 3. When the other guy came out of the kitchen with the food, he said "Extra spicy, enjoy." I reserved judgement for the tasting, since some people don't really know what spicy is.

It turns out that they know what spicy is. "3" was pretty spicy, getting lots hotter the more you ate it. I really liked it. My head didn't completely implode, but it was spicy. Tara almost could finish her plate, washed it down with plenty of milk. It was really good Chinese food.

They have a $5 lunch special. I will have to go back some time and try the "4", but only when I don't have anything to do the rest of the day...

Sing it.

When I bought Tara her desktop last month, Dell promised to send a $50 Dell certificate. The certificate came a week or two ago, but I couldn't really find anything that struck my fancy on the site to get.

Tara took a look, and decided on the Wii game "Disney Sing It!". The game came yesterday.

This morning, I told the girls that they could have a singing party tonight if they cleaned the back room, and the three messy bedrooms. They didn't really start cleaning in earnest until their little cousin Jennifer showed up, then they cleaned everything in about an hour and a half so they could play the game with Jennifer. (You got to love finding the right motivation...)

Anyway, the way the game works is they have music videos from Disney channel shows and movies, you are supposed to sing along with the song, and the closer you are to the song, the higher your score.

The problem with 6 girls (5 sisters and a cousin) playing the game, one at a time, is that you have to play the same song over and over and over while they all try it. I kind of have a headache now from the 90 minutes of Disney songs. I'll have to encourage the playing of the game when I am not home from now on.

Zork!

West of House

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

Infocom is currently offering downloads of Zork I, II, and III for zero Zorkmids. Certainly a good deal. Somewhere around here I have (official) CDs with these games on them, but I may download the games from the site anyway, just in case.

Ah, the days of my youth, sitting in front of the computer. Lost in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Then my lantern goes out. It is dark. I am likely to be eaten by a grue. I spent many hours trying to figure out what that little wind up chick was actually for. (It never really occured to me what I was actually supposed to do with the stuff, making things occassionally frustrating.) There is nothing like a good text based adventure game...

Funny Comic

This is today's comic from the webcomic xkcd. (http://www.xkcd.com) Every once in a while the guy gets a pretty funny one. I liked this one, I'm not sure why. Back when I worked in the data center, I logged into a machine sitting next to a guy, just to get it to play a .wav file in an effort to drive him nuts.

I finally won the battle with my phone

I have had my phone for over a year now, and have had a little problem with it until today.

The phone has a little touch pad on the front of it for you to start playing the music in your library without opening the phone. This is fine, except I carry my cell phone in my pants pocket, and occasionally the phone will start playing music out of the blue. This is ok, but can be inconvenient at times. (During church, quiet periods during a work meeting, while you are taking a
Christmas tree down) Lily was impressed yesterday when my pants started playing music.

The biggest problem with this, is you can have the phone on full stealth mode, and you think you are safe, and suddenly the Beatles are playing, interrupting the Priesthood lesson. This morning I finally figured out how to turn the volume down on the music, and get it to stay that way. I have the music turned all the way down. Now, when the music started, no one can hear it. The phone can go ahead and play the music all day long. I got a call this evening at 6pm, and after the call the phone wanted to know if I wanted to resume the music. Problem solved.

I (continue to) void warranties

With the acquisition of a new mp3 player, and because the old one didn't really do anything but drain the power out of a little battery by lighting the screen up, Tara didn't really want the old one anymore. What do you (meaning me, really) do with a mostly broken mp3 player? Take it apart, of course. No warranties were actually voided during this process. It was just a tag line to catch your eye... The mp3 player would not respond when being plugged into the computer, and acted like the thing was full. Windows would not reformat the drive, and linux would only mount the thing read only. Then the thing stopped booting up, it has been like that for about 3 or 4 weeks at this point. For anyone else's reference, this was a Sansa c150, which died after a years use. (But it was a lot of use in that year, and we got it on a deal last year...)

It took me a little bit to figure out how to get the cover off, but eventually I found a little battery in the device. My theory very quickly became that if I could get the battery out, the thing would reset and I would be able to plug the unit into the computer again. The battery was very well secured into the place it was in, so I took the little LCD screen apart to see why there was white light leaking out behind it. (They had a silver paper over the back, with a white LED that backlit the display so they didn't have to make it light up as much. I assume it was a power efficiency thing.) Eventually I got back to the battery, and could not get it safely off the little thing, so it got torn out of the unit. I tried booting the thing up after that, it still didn't work, until I shorted the connections where the battery used to be. The thing browned out, and booted up. The first screen told me that I needed to free space on the device. It booted up, but where words used to be on all the menus, there was blanks. (It still does that, for some reason.)

Linux kept reporting the right device when you plug it in, but gave a bunch of I/O errors when the system tried accessing the disk. The system eventually gave up on the drive because of the errors. After one of the brownouts, the system didn't fully give up on the device file itself, so I got linux to delete the disk partition on the thing. Suddenly I was able to start and stop the device normally, and didn't need to keep shorting out the device. I put it back together without the battery. (Not sure what the function of the battery is, really.)

After deleting the disk partition, I wasn't able to get Linux to mount the drive. I booted to Windows, which pretended to see the disk, but would never mount it as a disk, either. I tried doing a SanDisk firmware update, but that failed.

At this point, the radio works. I am thinking about putting it in the freezer for a while to see what happens...

Phun at the Pharmacy

Last month, Adam and Lily had a well child doctor's appointment, things went well. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I have a vague recollection of Tara saying something about the doctor's office sending prescriptions directly to the pharmacy, so we wouldn't have to worry about losing the prescription. Or I dreamt that part.

With 8 people in our family, I am over at the pharmacy more regularly than I would like to be. (I really should switch a couple more of my prescriptions to mail order...) The pharmacy people know who I am. (They call me Mr. Payne, sometimes it bothers me when they know me on sight.) I have been over there a few times since the prescriptions were sent over, but I didn't know/remember to ask, and they didn't offer. On Monday, they called and reminded Tara that there were 3 multivitamin prescriptions sitting on the shelf waiting for us.

Tara and I went over there Tuesday night. (We had a babysitter, I went to the Stake center, Tara went to the library. We got home at the same time, and decided to sneak off to the store together. We are rebels.) We got to the pharmacy at 9:04pm. The place was closed.

I went on Wednesday evening. There was a lady in front of me. There was something wrong with her prescription. The pharmacist ended up on the phone for about 10 minutes talking to someone about it. In the end, she got a bunch of stuff, and spent a full 5 minutes trying to get exact change out of her purse to pay for it. (I only had 45 minutes to get over there and back, and had Ruth and Adam with me.)

I told him I had a bunch of stuff to pick up. He wasn't listening well, and said "Just the one thing, right?", I had him look again, I had two prescriptions for me in there, and wanted the pile of multivitamins. He found my other prescription, and eventually found the other pile. Then he tried to add Adam to the computer to authorize his vitamins with the insurance. He kept getting a "Not on insurance" error, or something like that. I had him check the birthdate, which was right. Clearly this wasn't the pharmacists night. I had about 6 other people waiting behind me, so I told him to set it aside. He asked if I could call my insurance and get it figured out, and indicated that he would be in all day Wednesday. This was fine, I didn't want to pay $20 for the vitamins. All told, the prescriptions totalled $50. I got to use my new flexible spending debit card. Sweet, no more reimbursements to submit.

Yesterday, I called the insurance company. They saw 5 authorizations for the thing that got denied, and one after 7:30pm that was approved. (I left the place at 5:45pm) I called the pharmacy, they said the thing was all ready to go, $5.

I went over there this afternoon, and the other pharmacist was there. He couldn't find the prescription on the shelf. Now, I like a good running gag, just as much as the next guy, but this was getting silly. I tried to explain what happened on Wednesday, but they weren't listening. The pharmacy tech offered to refill the prescription, since it was from Dec 16th, and the pharmacist went to find the vitamins. I told them they wouldn't be able to refill, it would get rejected by the insurance, since the first fill had just been done on Wednesday. The pharmacy tech went over and found the prescription on the shelf.

Why do we need prescriptions for multivitamins you ask? Because the people around here (I assume it is 'seasoned' people in the community) voted down adding flouride to the water last time it was up for a vote. They didn't want poisons added to their water. Clearly these people are not drinking the water from the fountains at my office...

2009 goals

This year, the goals are simple:

• Reduce our family debt by 5 figures. It should be 5 figures lower than right now. I think it is doable, especially where our car and house payments are.
• Watch more baseball on TV
• Finish some unfinished projects:
  

The little path right behind the house. Sorry about the snow. You can't really see the problem with this little path.

The garden wall. Again with the snow.

Our closet.

My 200 puzzle sudoku book. I have only done 40 so far.

Our little closet thing behind the washer and dryer. This is really an unstarted unfinished project. I want to put shelves in. And maybe take the door to Lily's room out.

That thing around the dishwasher. No reason for this to be done.

The shed. It is in bad shape.

The mission journal. Someday this will be done.

Wii games. Not included here, Super Mario Galaxy, which we do not currently own. I am about 90% through both Mario Kart and Star Wars.

Snow

It has been snowing here. The kind of snow we only get about every 10 years. It snowed a couple of days before Christmas, they shut campus down that afternoon because of it, and sent everyone home. My shovel cracked that day. It has been cold enough that most of that snow is still with us, even if it is now ice.

We have discovered that our big 15 passenger van is not all that good with the snow. Mostly because we don't get our streets plowed or salted around here. Tara took it to get Emma from school today, and got stuck. Not happily stuck. The Stake President's wife eventually came around and helped get her on the road.

Tara and the girls played out in it this afternoon. They seem to have had a good time. I ended up getting Kate and Mary from school later in the truck, which really doesn't have the same problems. Tara and I spent about an hour and a half shoveling this afternoon, in the hopes of being able to get the van out easier. I took the van to the Stake Center this evening, but it took 5 minutes to get it out of the spot in front of the house. I parked it in a place at the Stake center I thought I could get out of easily, but no dice. I had to get towed 10 feet to get out of the spot. The van has "Stabilitrak" which I think it GMC's version of traction control, but I think the thing engages just a little too early. The thing really cuts the power to the tires, it feels like if I had 5 seconds more, I could get out of both places I was in. We didn't know how good we had it with the MPV. I would say we need snow tires, if it weren't for the fact that it is usually only this bad for a few days every winter, not 2 weeks or more.

Yesterday morning, I parked the truck in the underground parking on campus, I was hoping all the snow in the back would melt so I could take some of the stone out of it to put it in the back of the van. No luck yesterday, most of the melted, but it snowed like crazy last night, and there was more snow in it this morning than melted yesterday. I parked there again today, and a lot more of the snow melted. I found an exhaust vent to park near. I put about 200 pounds of stone in the back of the van, but it didn't seem to help any. Maybe another 200 pounds would do it.

We had a power outage on campus today, the rumor going around was that it was a car plowing into a power pole. We were in the data center at the time, not really any of our stuff went down, but the bookstore called me about 20 minutes later, one of their servers would not boot back up. They bought a UPS a couple of months ago, but I couldn't get them to take the time to plug their servers in. (They didn't want to schedule the downtime.) The server that was down was their production machine, and the system board was fried. I spent some time getting the server running on another piece of hardware. Fun for me, fun for them.

Muted New Years Eve

New Years Eve seems to be less and less of an event here.

For Y2K, Tara and I spent the night in the computer room, watching absolutely nothing happen. (We did have a server with a failed disk that night, but it was unrelated to Y2K. I was not salaried back then, and made an extra pay check in overtime from Christmas through Y2K.) Farrell did make us have 500 feet of extension cord and plastic tarps ready just in case. I'm still not sure why he got the tarps...

We used to have pizza and wings for new years, but I can't eat pizza any more, so that little tradition is kind of gone. We are currently out of wing sauce, so no wings, either. (I ate the leftovers from Rocky Mountain WingShak the day before.)

One year, we just went to bed at 10pm. The fireworks downtown woke us up for a few minutes.

Generally we try to play card or board games on New Years. Last year we had Steve and Missy over to play. This year, we played Catan the Card game, and a new game I got for Christmas called Shoot the Moon. Tara let me win both games.

We watched some dude on ESPN jump 100 feet on a motorbike. That dude is crazy. At 12:10am, we realized it was New Years. That was it, it was all over. No fanfare. No fireworks this year. (It was cold and snowy out.)

Not that there is anything wrong with that.

2008 Goal review

OK, here were the goals at the beginning of last year, and how I did with them:

1. Post a goal update to the blog at least twice a month. I guess I got worn out in the middle to end of October. I was doing well with this until then.
   
2. Don't let a post go by without some progress to report.
3. Stain the play set. I got this done in the Spring, and I have a t-shirt that looks pretty nasty as a result. I still sometimes wear the t-shirt...
   
4. Finish the retaining wall. I got oh so close on this one. I am about 5 feet away from being finished, I have all the stone I need to wrap this up in the back of the truck, but it snowed. And it snowed. And I am waiting for it to melt so I can finish up. By the way, I think it looks very nice now, and I added about 200 square feet to the garden. I am planting corn this year.
   
5. Finish the mission journal. I don't even think I opened the file at all.
   
6. Build a bunk bed for Emma and Ruth. I didn't get this done. I didn't even get this started.
   
7. Stay under the 210 weight. End of the year - 207. Put it in the books.
   
8. Go to the temple at least once a month. Through October, we were 8 out of 10. That was it for the year.
   
9. Take Tara somewhere for our 10th wedding anniversary. We had a really nice vacation to Florida.
   
10. Read 18 books. I read 17 books, only one in the last 2 months. Unless you count comic books.
    
11. Plant something other than tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, green beans and peas. We also had green peppers, yellow squash, cilantro, and a couple of things that didn't actually grow.

I guess I did something this past year. Just nothing in the past 2 weeks.