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by M. J. Young

Roamin’s

May 23, 2008 in Blogs

I am not even entirely certain myself what happened to yesterday.  It was one thing after another, and then when I finally returned from the last thing, picking up a son who wanted to come home for a few days, I looked at a clock which made it nearly one thirty, and I gave up the day without even starting the morning Corinthians study.

Today is a bit easier to explain.  The car trouble was getting worse, not better, despite home remedy efforts yesterday, and I was anticipating making a major trip north this weekend for which things needed to be right.  Thus I took my two and a half hours of sleep last night, and dragged myself into clothes and out of the house this morning (which took much longer than it ought to have done), taking the car to a mechanic who does reliable work quickly.  It proved to be the water pump, not, as had been hoped, one of the hoses; but it is working now.  Since I am no longer in the sort of shape that makes hikes of over five miles reasonable affairs, I spent the morning in a diner a block from the shop, working on editing my Romans work while drinking coffee to stay awake.  When I got home (by way of a grocery store to pick up something for a couple of suppers), I was too tired to think and too tense to sleep, so the rest of the day was lost.  Then, maybe an hour and a half ago, I realized that I was waking up a bit despite not having slept, and I determined to do at least a bit of what I would otherwise have to boot into tomorrow, my off day.

However, tomorrow will be early, even though I think I have been saved from having it be long.  There is a morning trip scheduled relative to helping someone with transportation but making sure that we have the vehicles we need for the work we have to do.  There may be more than one such trip, but everything changed this evening when a call came asking that we reschedule our northbound trip to next weekend.  This was originally proposed as a way to help us with our transportation problems, but when I announced that we had resolved the repair of the car and that next weekend would be worse, it came out that people we are visiting are not well and would like a week to recover.  Thus I think it will be next weekend–although things change so abruptly around here, that nothing can be certain.

And for this reason I am going to nip my efforts short tonight, finish the barest essentials of what I missed yesterday and today, and see whether my body will let me sleep.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Another Friendly Interruption

March 27, 2008 in Blogs

I had finished the regular work last night, and was working on proofreading the Faith and Gaming collection (which I finished earlier this afternoon), when a call came from a young lady, a dear friend of one of our sons who has found herself living in our living room (odd that it should fall to that purpose) before.  She had been evicted from her apartment, an hour away in Philadelphia, and needed to move herself and her things immediately.

I agreed to get her.  I called my wife, who was finishing up at work, to let her know my intentions, and she said to wait until she called me back.

Oddly, while I was awaiting that call, I came upon the old article, Faith and Gaming:  Friends.  I say it is odd, because the piece recounts another night, years ago, when it was my wife who was taking the truck to go help a friend in need in the middle of the night, and I who was accommodating her.  The article speaks of unbalanced ledgers, and how it is not the point of friendship to look for balance, that what we gain does not always equal what we pay.  It was an interesting and indeed timely reminder.

My wife insisted I take the boy along who is most closely her friend, and he agreed that he should go despite the fact that this would mean being crowded in the unheated cab of the truck.  We at the time did not know how crowded, nor how complicated, this would be, as in addition to the girl we also picked up a cat in a carrier and a ferret on a leash, and there was no place to park along Tenth Street south of Mifflin in Philadelphia even at one thirty in the morning when we arrived, so I was sitting by a fire hydrant with the back end of the vehicle extending into an intersection for most of an hour while they first carried boxes and packages to the truck and then attempted to coax a ferret out from under a neighbor’s balcony so he would not be left behind.  We also had to feed the young lady on the ride home, at almost three in the morning when all we could find was a McDonald’s Drive-thru, even in so busy a place as the Deptford Mall area.

I neglected to mention that our eldest and his wife, who missed Easter with us because of his work, managed finally to make it down, arriving minutes before the phone call which took me away.  They were still here when I returned; in fact, it was after four when I finally got to bed, and they were still here when I awoke shortly after five to get boys to buses.  Thus I did not see much of them, but my wife did, and that’s a reversal of the usual circumstance, so that’s good.

I probably did not get eight hours of sleep before I was folding laundry (another thing I tucked into that time) and trying to start my day, but I’m not slowing down yet.  I have a Collision rehearsal tonight, and it happens to be Baxter’s birthday, so I’ve asked our resident cook if he could make a cake just in case Baxter makes it.  Meanwhile, I’m hoping to get everything else out of the way sooner rather than later, so I’ve got time to do some other stuff at some point.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

I’m Here

March 26, 2008 in Blogs

I’m here.

I’m not at all certain what I should be writing here tonight.  I did a few important errands, but otherwise all I can remember that I’ve done since yesterday’s blog is more editing the Faith and Gaming book.  I’ve not done much of that, either, just a quick breeze through one or two of the fifty articles while getting dressed.

But I’m on schedule for today, even if there are a dozen things I wish I’d done, so let me try to stay that way.

–M. J. Young

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Looks Like I Made It

March 25, 2008 in Blogs

If you were with me yesterday, you know that I was very concerned as to whether I was going to finish everything yesterday and still be able to deal with today.  It seems that the e-mail, while not exactly light, was not so heavy as I had anticipated, and I managed to get everything finished before I was completely exhausted.  I got the one kid who had school today awake in time to be there, and got a bit more sleep before dealing with my morning and my mother-in-law, and retrieving the son from his work address to return home for a few days.  It’s not even really all that late, but I’ve a fair amount still on my plate, including dinner (although my dinner plate seems to be in use somewhere, so I’m waiting for it to become available before I eat).  We’ll see how the day goes.

In addition to what I anticipated doing today, I got a bit of editing done on the Romans notes, which I am eager to finish but not quite three quarters through yet.

I also had a few people offer to help with cover art for the Faith and Gaming book, and so I’ve asked them to tell me their thoughts.

–M. J. Young

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Sort of Backwards

March 24, 2008 in Blogs

I am still recovering from Easter; I am not certain when I actually got to bed last night, but I did not budge until the afternoon alarm, which awakens those on the three to eleven shift.  From there, I stumbled around a bit, trying to find my voice (I am battling an upper respiratory infection, and with the aid of the marvelous tropical fruit flavored Cold-Eze™ zinc and C drops I seem to be winning, but please don’t ask me to sing tonight).  Before I’d really figured out what I was doing, I was informed that I had to take a truckload of empty boxes to a frequently helpful friend half an hour away who is moving.

Thus it was after seven before I was actually on the road to take my mother-in-law shopping and deliver my son to his brother’s house for work tomorrow.  It seems both of them need me again tomorrow–she because she has run out of checks and did not realize it today until it was too late to get to the bank, he because he is working tomorrow morning and then off again for several days.  I’ll lose a few hours to that, but it will be good to have him home.

Home is where I finally found myself at one in the morning.  I immediately did the last thing I do each night, posting to the Corinthians list, so that I would not have to do it when I finished whatever I managed to do.  I then came here.  I have not yet done the e-mail, and possibly I won’t; given my condition, I might not finish the forum–but I have already opened it, so I will at least start it.  We’ll see how far the second wind in my sails carries me.

I did a bit of editing on the Faith and Gaming book.  I had expected merely to read a few of the articles while getting dressed and eating lunch, but in reading I found places where I needed to add footnotes, delete extra line breaks, and make a minor correction or two.  So today is not completely without progress.

–M. J. Young

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Paging a Post

March 19, 2008 in Blogs

I am looking at the upgraded version of the software that runs this site, and being the sort of person who does not always react favorably to change (particularly when it is not readily apparent what advantage it has), I find myself hunting for the features I already use, which have been moved, and trying to identify those features which are apparently new. It tells me that I am in Visual mode, but it’s not letting me switch to HTML mode, which is the mode in which I usually type these, so it’s probably going to be pretty messy, and I’m going to wind up spending some time trying to get it cleaned up. I will, however, adapt. I had to log in afresh, but my password organizer recognized the login screen and took care of the information for me.

I am not at all certain what the difference is between a post and a page, but I’ve decided that what I want to write is a post. It took a bit of effort to find the categories so I could mark this as a blog, but they’re in the Tags section once you expand it. It looks like tagging articles has become a tad more difficult, but I haven’t gotten that far yet so I could be mistaken–if I’m seeing correctly, I’ll have to add tags individually, instead of in strings as in the past.

That’s all right. Today has run reasonably smoothly. There was not that much e-mail, since I checked it all yesterday; I did get to my mother-in-law with postage stamps, but not as early as I’d planned since my wife is ill today and needed some extra help. I got a bit of Romans editing done while on one errand. There is not that much left to do, so I might even get to bed early tonight.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Another Monday

March 10, 2008 in Blogs

It was like most other Mondays, really. I got through the e-mail, which is the bulk of the Monday workload, and I took my mother-in-law shopping. At the same time, it was not like other Mondays. One of my sons is sick, and no sooner did I have the others on their respective buses but I was out of the house and on my way to get medicine for him.

Even though I did get back to sleep, that put me back a bit on schedule. Further, our oven has decided to give us trouble, and the repairman will not be here to assess the situation until tomorrow morning, so since over the weekend we used the rest of the stove top foods and there’s nothing suitable for grilling, I had to bring food home for the masses. This put me back further–although I did get a bit of Romans editing done.

My breathing is rough, and I am tired and have an early day tomorrow (for the aforementioned repairman), but let me attend to the rest of today’s affairs before I crash for the night.

–M. J. Young

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Where the Heck Have I Been

March 2, 2008 in Blogs

It’s been a crazy week, to the point that I cannot even remember all the things that have conspired to delay my work here, let alone sort them into days.

I lost a good part of Friday to driving, picking up a son’s girlfriend who is staying the weekend and going back on Monday. I had managed to catch up the e-mail before I left, but by the time I returned it was too late to consider seriously doing doing much more.

Thursday night I was hoping to play catch-up after the Collision rehearsal, but our chief computer technician decided that this was his best opportunity to try to figure out what was wrong with the CD-RW on the computer, which effort left me without access to the computer until late Friday afternoon, in an already tightly-sandwiched situation.

I cannot even recall which day was largely lost to the medical attention of the child in our care. He needs a particular medication once a day in order to function appropriately in school, and to get it he must be seen by a doctor (actually, it was a nurse practitioner) every other month or they can’t write the prescription. Between waiting at the doctor’s office to be seen briefly and waiting for the pharmacy to fill the prescription, I lost a good part of whatever day that was. I did manage to get some Romans editing done in the cracks.

I also managed to do some serious backing up of files. This involved acquiring a small flashdrive–the new computer does support such technology, where the old one always had problems–and using it to carry files physically to another computer with a CD burner. This effort included burning copies of what is now the complete set of Collision practice recordings, so that each member of the band can hear what each song is intended to sound like, once these are fully distributed. Audio files being relatively large, this required several transfers; I believe those are now fully preserved, and I can set aside that particular project for the present.

The CD burner was restored to operation by late Friday. It seems that the IDE support on the new motherboard has a flaw, and it is thus good that we got the IDE card–each IDE cable from the motherboard supports a primary but not a secondary drive, so despite having purchased an IDE card we can only run four drives on it. At the moment, that means the new hard drive with the new operating system, the two old hard drives with all the data, and the CD-RW; the DVD drive was chosen as the superfluous one. However, the old primary drive is small, and I am seriously considering transfering everything from it to one of the other two drives and removing it for use elsewhere. There is not much advantage to having a DVD reader on my computer, but there is the fact that my wife’s computer has a DVD burner, and she could save files to DVD in such a fashion that I would need a DVD reader to access them. It is also the case that it’s much quicker to copy a CD if you have two drives than if you have to move all the data to the computer and back again–although for that, I can remember running copy programs on my Commodore 64 where one had to swap the original and copy disks back and forth several times to move all that information from one to the other. I got a bit more backup work done yesterday, although I’m not entirely certain what still needs to be saved.

By last night, I was exhausted; I think I have caught up on the lost sleep, but still have much to do. Here’s to the doing of it all.

–M. J. Young

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Shut Down Before I Started

February 26, 2008 in Blogs

Yesterday was one of those days when I just could not get started. I thought about staying up after I got a boy on a bus, and I thought about getting up more than once after that, but even after I got to my room I found myself dabbing at this and playing with that, just not turning my attention to anything that really mattered.

Part of it was that I knew I had overbooked the day–in addition to taking my mother-in-law grocery shopping, I was planning to do some grocery shopping myself (she shops at a relatively expensive store, I at a surprisingly cheap one), and stop at the bank, and stop at another store to look for a specialty lightbulb, on top of doing the work here. Yet I was not turning my attention to any of these tasks.

Finally I left, later than I’d intended, to deal with my mother-in-law’s shopping trip. It was already nearly evening, and I had already left instructions for supper and then delayed my departure yet again. However, I went there and did that, and returned home.

It was by this point ten thirty at night, and now that I was moving I was wondering how I was going to finish what I had not yet started. I was stopped at a traffic light perhaps two miles from home, listening to the local radio station whose transmitter I had just passed, trying to sort the work in my mind.

Quite abruptly, the traffic light and the radio station both shut down–along with every light within view but for those connected to vehicles.

By the time I called the electric company, they knew that all of several towns were blacked out, and were predicting half past midnight as the restoration time. Several of our emergency lights were missing, but we have blackouts frequently enough that several were still available, and there was enough light for our purposes. I realized I was not going to be able to do much even if the estimate was accurate. I pulled out the Romans editing and worked at that by electric lantern light, then got dressed for bed.

The lights were restored mere minutes before one in the morning; I took the opportunity to send my daily post to the Corinthians list, and went to bed.

This morning I got my laundry going that absolutely had to be done last night, so I’m a step behind even now. Also, while I was getting students started for school, I finished the last of the Collision repertoire recordings. At that point I figured I might as well just stay up and see what I could accomplish, which has not been as much as I might have liked, but I’ve finished the e-mail (including a letter from someone asking my input on General Relativity, which is not really my area). I still have to do that grocery shopping trip, and stop at the bank, and there’s another appointment this evening, but at least I’m moving.

–M. J. Young

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Artificial Retardation

February 24, 2008 in Blogs

We still don’t have everything functional with the new computer, but we’re getting closer. I’ve determined, in connection with the CD-RW, that it sees no disks at all; I’ve also realized that in that technical information that flies across the screen during boot-up, which is gone before the monitor has warmed sufficiently to display it if it’s a cold boot, there’s a message to the effect that there is no channel 80 connection on the primary IDE, or something like that. I copied the message and delivered it to my primary computer guru, who is working on what it means in terms of what is actually wrong. I do not know whether the two items are connected, but since the CD drive is hooked on an IDE line, it seems reasonably likely that they might be. Some trouble-shooting guide somewhere suggested that the problem was probably that I have five IDE drives and most PCs only support four, but since I also have a second IDE driver card installed and three unused ports there, I’m thinking that’s probably incorrect–there wouldn’t be much market for IDE cards if they didn’t work, and I’m pretty sure that the non-functioning drive is not the one on the card.

I’ve also been dabbling at the Romans editing while running errands, including taking my sick son for medical testing Saturday morning instead of being in church. Also, since I’m dabbing at musical recordings and arrangements in my odd moments instead of playing computer games, I’ve finished more recordings from the Collision repertoire–recordings which remain on my hard drive, since I have not yet gotten the information to reconfigure my FTP program and my CD burner is still not working. I’m also locked out of the Valdron development forum because I don’t have my ID and password, and apparently I don’t know which mailbox was used to register me there. I’ve got to get someone to help me with that, I think.

There’s a rumor about that one of my sons is coming home tonight, and that I am driving him. I do not know whether either of those statements are facts, but probably will learn the truth shortly.

In the meantime, let me accomplish something.

–M. J. Young

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