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Easily distracted...
Jan. 7th, 2001 09:54 pmMy Windows box appears to have not survived the trip from Texas, as every time I boot it now, the wavering blue line at the bottom of the Windows 98 logo freezes a few seconds into startup. Attempts to reinstall the operating system failed.
I know this because I spent most of the day trying one thing after another in and out of "safe" mode in an attempt to get the machine to boot. No joy.
I'm wondering whether it's worth the effort to try to overwrite the existing version of Windows with Windows Me, which is still available at a promotional price of about $50 online. The other alternative would be to try to back up my data from the machine, and then reformat and reinstall everything from scratch.
Yech. With the possible exception of having watched this evening's episode of The X Files, I'm not at all sure this day could not be noted down as a colossal waste of time.
Then again, I am in Colorado, and the rest of the hardware appears to have survived the trip with no ill effects.
While walking Ming this morning - he prefers to lead the way down the driveway to the road, where he can do Anything He Wants - I noticed some fairly large paw prints frozen in the ground. My trailcraft is a bit rusty, but I do believe they are feline prints, but whatever they may be, the animal that made them appears to have been following an elk just shortly before the ground froze for the night.
I went up to the house to get my camera, so I could photograph the prints, and as I did so, I heard a very strange sound that resembled a wheezing washing machine. I looked around and saw nothing, despite the fact that the sound was all around me. I looked again. Nothing. I looked up, and saw a fairly large bird lazily beating its wings about 40 feet in front of me and about 30 feet above me, headed away. The noise faded as the bird flew on. My eyes told me the source of the noise was the bird; my ears and my guts refused to believe that, preferring an explanation that involved something bigger that moved on the ground.
I bent again to my task. Again, the noise rose from nothingness and surrounded me. I quickly looked around to make sure the source wasn't ground-based, and then looked up. There, about 30 feet above me and about 30 feet to my left, a second such bird was flying past me. Eerie. I shall have to ask around about this bird. Drew says it's a crow, but I am skeptical.
I mentioned elk a couple of paragraphs ago. They are all over the place at night (I saw two herds on my way home from Feht's the other night), but disappear during the day. It's that, or I just don't look hard enough. At any rate, this aspect of life in Pagosa is very appealing.
Talking about Colorado, I ended up somehow with a keychain trinket that's round and halfway filled with fluid, in which float a number of plastic sparkles and a plastic chip imprinted with the image of a skier. (If you would like to see what it looks like, try the illustration next to the entry for "tacky" in your dictionary.)
A small label on the split ring proudly announces that this geegaw was "Made in China." Assuming that it was assembled by hand, I wonder what, if anything, its assembler might be thinking about "Colorado Ski Country" as a result of having made this piece of junk.
While I was at the store yesterday, Andrew finished unloading the truck, and we eventually got it back to the rental place about 15 minutes before it was due. Unfortunately, there was nobody there to accept the truck, so I parked it and dropped all of the paperwork and key off in the drop box. (Wouldn't you know...upon coming home, I found three more rented pads in the garage, so I'll have Andrew stop by early tomorrow and return them.)
It feels a little strange to return to this house after 5 years. Apparently, we left a few things in the house when we departed, and while some seem to have been adopted by the former tenant (a stack of old paperback westerns, for example), other things remain. (now I know what happened to my old Commodore 128!).
Unpacking is going deliberately slowly, and there is a lot of heavy furniture still staged in the garage after having been unloaded from the truck. I found the Franklin Planner pages for 2001, which is a good thing to have done now, rather than a month from now. As it stands, I have only a few days of details to catch up with.
There are a lot of things to place on my to-do list for the week. Probably the most important is to get the daily accounting and money-handling procedures down pat and to augment them with software where possible. The current owner does everything by hand (skillfully, I must admit), but I personally hate tape-fed adding machines, preferring instead to feed numbers into a spreadsheet.
At any rate, I plan to get up early and arrange my thoughts for the day. Time to call it a night.
Cheers...
I know this because I spent most of the day trying one thing after another in and out of "safe" mode in an attempt to get the machine to boot. No joy.
I'm wondering whether it's worth the effort to try to overwrite the existing version of Windows with Windows Me, which is still available at a promotional price of about $50 online. The other alternative would be to try to back up my data from the machine, and then reformat and reinstall everything from scratch.
Yech. With the possible exception of having watched this evening's episode of The X Files, I'm not at all sure this day could not be noted down as a colossal waste of time.
Then again, I am in Colorado, and the rest of the hardware appears to have survived the trip with no ill effects.
While walking Ming this morning - he prefers to lead the way down the driveway to the road, where he can do Anything He Wants - I noticed some fairly large paw prints frozen in the ground. My trailcraft is a bit rusty, but I do believe they are feline prints, but whatever they may be, the animal that made them appears to have been following an elk just shortly before the ground froze for the night.
I went up to the house to get my camera, so I could photograph the prints, and as I did so, I heard a very strange sound that resembled a wheezing washing machine. I looked around and saw nothing, despite the fact that the sound was all around me. I looked again. Nothing. I looked up, and saw a fairly large bird lazily beating its wings about 40 feet in front of me and about 30 feet above me, headed away. The noise faded as the bird flew on. My eyes told me the source of the noise was the bird; my ears and my guts refused to believe that, preferring an explanation that involved something bigger that moved on the ground.
I bent again to my task. Again, the noise rose from nothingness and surrounded me. I quickly looked around to make sure the source wasn't ground-based, and then looked up. There, about 30 feet above me and about 30 feet to my left, a second such bird was flying past me. Eerie. I shall have to ask around about this bird. Drew says it's a crow, but I am skeptical.
I mentioned elk a couple of paragraphs ago. They are all over the place at night (I saw two herds on my way home from Feht's the other night), but disappear during the day. It's that, or I just don't look hard enough. At any rate, this aspect of life in Pagosa is very appealing.
Talking about Colorado, I ended up somehow with a keychain trinket that's round and halfway filled with fluid, in which float a number of plastic sparkles and a plastic chip imprinted with the image of a skier. (If you would like to see what it looks like, try the illustration next to the entry for "tacky" in your dictionary.)
A small label on the split ring proudly announces that this geegaw was "Made in China." Assuming that it was assembled by hand, I wonder what, if anything, its assembler might be thinking about "Colorado Ski Country" as a result of having made this piece of junk.
While I was at the store yesterday, Andrew finished unloading the truck, and we eventually got it back to the rental place about 15 minutes before it was due. Unfortunately, there was nobody there to accept the truck, so I parked it and dropped all of the paperwork and key off in the drop box. (Wouldn't you know...upon coming home, I found three more rented pads in the garage, so I'll have Andrew stop by early tomorrow and return them.)
It feels a little strange to return to this house after 5 years. Apparently, we left a few things in the house when we departed, and while some seem to have been adopted by the former tenant (a stack of old paperback westerns, for example), other things remain. (now I know what happened to my old Commodore 128!).
Unpacking is going deliberately slowly, and there is a lot of heavy furniture still staged in the garage after having been unloaded from the truck. I found the Franklin Planner pages for 2001, which is a good thing to have done now, rather than a month from now. As it stands, I have only a few days of details to catch up with.
There are a lot of things to place on my to-do list for the week. Probably the most important is to get the daily accounting and money-handling procedures down pat and to augment them with software where possible. The current owner does everything by hand (skillfully, I must admit), but I personally hate tape-fed adding machines, preferring instead to feed numbers into a spreadsheet.
At any rate, I plan to get up early and arrange my thoughts for the day. Time to call it a night.
Cheers...
