A sunny Sunday...

Despite rumors to the contrary, no storm manifested itself yesterday evening. I awoke before dawn and looked out my window and saw stars. Many of them. I saw a sudden flash and thought perhaps I'd seen a meteor, but the flash occurred again after a few seconds and I realized it was the reflection of the airport beacon from my venetian blinds.

By 9 or so, Drew, his girlfriend Shannon, and I were in Feht's car on the way to Durango, which qualifies as a Big City if you've lived in Pagosa Springs for a long time, but which really is a small town trying to be a college town for the students at Ft. Lewis College, and a trendy cowboy-and-California-chic town for the tourists.

Since visiting two years ago, I think the concentration of tattoo parlors and coffee houses has tripled. One thing for sure, there's a new Wal-Mart on the outskirts of town closest to Pagosa. This place is so big, that when you walk in, you are greeted with a smile, and are issued a shopping cart and a GPS unit and map to find your way around.

(Just kidding. They ran out of maps.)

We loaded up on food and other essentials and headed back to Pagosa, arriving in the early afternoon. The rest of the day was spent lolling around (when I knew I should be at the store and tearing into the all the nooks and crannies to find out what's where). The mountains were so pretty, I took a picture of them.

Galina called and left a message while we were out. Apparently, she'd gotten lost in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. By the time I called her back, she had found I-45 and was about 150 miles north of Houston. A few hours later, she called to announce that a pipe had burst in the house we'd just vacated, and that all the carpets were ruined. That news, of course, put something of a damper on the day.

Shannon's car is in pieces in the garage, so we're going to be depending on Feht's car until Drew fixes it. Among other things, it means that Drew and Shannon will have to come with me to open the store in the mornings, which is fine, except that I'm already starting to take a long, hard look at the payroll situation and our personal finances.

Since acquiring the store, we've already put an additional $3,000 into the enterprise, and I'm afraid there'll be more where that came from. There seems to be a nearly infinite sequence of charges that people keep levying as I go along, and deposits of various kind that, while they are evidently designed to protect the other guy in case I go out of business, nevertheless threaten to put me out of business by their sheer volume.

Then again, there are still ten days left in January. I have to get on the ball tomorrow morning and catch up on the financial analysis, and do a couple of postal reports. I've developed spreadsheets to help me, but one of the Excel files I brought home from the store computer was infected with something that McAfee can detect, but can't cure. (A copy of McAfee's virus software was one of the "essentials" I bought at the Wal-Mart today, BTW.)

Talking about software, I got sick and tired of not having my several machines networked to one Internet connection, so I made a couple of minor tweaks to my Linux box and found that connecting to an ISP who assigns an IP address dynamically is not any harder than connecting with the expectation of having a static address.

The tricky part of the whole deal was unearthing some code for my firewall script that determines the assigned IP address and then proceeds to establish the appropriate rules with that information.

The next major question to answer is going to be whether to install a bidirectional satellite link (50-100 kbps uplink, 150-500 kbps downlink) that will involve a $500 up front investment and $70 per month access fee, or whether to order a second phone line that will give me a mere 33 kbps (on a good day) pipeline to the world.

That's not an urgent issue, though. The flooded house is. We were expecting to have people renting it by now, but that will probably be put on hold for at least a month to fix the water problem. In any event, it's not worth worrying about right now.

Sleep is the order of the evening. It's going to be a big day tomorrow.

Cheers...