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Apparently a lot of it just north of the state line at the moment, but just an occasional flake here. At midday today, though, it was coming down hard. I had to sweep off my windshield when I left work at 12:30. Woodpeckers are busy. We put out suet for them, and it is already attracting hordes of them. The Red bellied and Hairy are the largest, but the Downy are the most numerous. We also have dozens of chickadees and finches right now, and plenty of white breasted nuthatches. One red breasted nuthatch has been around. I hope he stays, they are one of my favorite winter birds. Bluejays and mourning doves are about, and a few juncos. Normally we have a lot of juncos as soon as the snow arrives, but they've been scarce so far this year. Thought about putting a blanket on Tess and turning her out this afternoon, but I didn't. She hasn't had a blanket on in years, and I'm not sure how she'll react to it. I think I'll wait until I'm not alone to try that. Found a Forth interpreter that loads on my old Tandy word processor that I used for NaNo. It's quite tiny, only 6200 bytes, but claims to be a full ANSI standard implementation. Got it to run, but I know nothing about Forth other than that it's stack-oriented RPN like PostScript. Have to find an introductory book and see what it can do. It's 28F and dropping outside. Guess I should go start the woodstove and curl up there with a book. Tags: birds, geekery, horses, weather
Current Location: Frozen oak grove
Mood:  tired
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Good thing I have that rug on the loom. I can go pound it for a few picks to empty out some frustration. Not exactly writer's block, because I know what I want to be writing. The problem is too many threads at once, and (unusual for me) I'm having trouble focusing on one at a time. There's also a need to get into the head of a real villain, since he's writing a journal that will be found and read later so the content is visible to the reader. This is not easy for me at all. I know I can do this thing. Progress is slow, though, and things are not coming out in the order in which they will finally be presented to the reader. That's why I haven't been uploading anything much yet. There are fiddly details too. Probably don't matter to many readers, but they do to me. For instance, dates. OK, it all happens in the city of Chatton, so we can assume chronology based from the supposed "founding" of the city, three or four centuries earlier. But there are two timestreams, separated by somewhat more than a century. The lunar calendar in use has been "reformed" in the intervening century. This is part of the actual plotline, but it necessitates two dating systems. The old system used an intercalary month just before the spring equinox to adjust new moons to the solar seasons. This month was a second Wolf Moon, so in years when it was used, the Wolf Moons were designated as First Wolf and Second Wolf. The new system eliminated the intercalary month for political and social reasons, and switched to an intercalary period of varying length, inserted every year after the fall equinox, and called "The Stag's Leap." This is a festival time treated as a holiday outside of any regular month or week and featuring celebrations to cross between and level the economic and social classes of the city. It runs from 16-18 days, depending on the lunar cycle in the given year, and has no weekdays at all. So if the last day of the Harvest Moon was a Sunday, the first day of the Beaver Moon is a Monday, and the festival between them is literally "outside" calendar time. This may all seem like pointless detail, but since we have characters who believe they are transformed into wolves at the full of the moon, the lunar cycles matter quite a lot. The murders in the earlier timestream took place during the double wolf moons, while the crimes in the second timestream happen during Stag's Leap. Anyway, I find myself getting bogged down in calculating this calendar stuff, which slows the actual writing. I suppose I should just stick in dummy dates and work them out later, but I'm afraid of messing up some key detail that way. Perfectionism is sometimes a curse. Tags: geekery, nanowrimo, writing
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood:  aggravated
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The bizarre weather just won't quit. Another inch of rain overnight. We have no flooding, fortunately, but mud is soft and ankle deep all over the place. It's like late March rather than late October, which is usually pretty dry here. It has also been fairly warm. This morning at dawn it was well over 60F here, and 100% humidity so that I got soaked with sweat just doing feed and water chores. Rain continued much of the day, but not really heavy. Now much cooler and getting pretty windy. Installed replacement hard drive in the public internet server, reinstalled software, and it came up just fine. Why their tech support kept asking me to try yet another time to reinstall the software onto the dead hard drive, I have no idea. They've been silent since I told them I was ordering the replacement drive anyway. Fortunately, I didn't need them to get things running again, but we could have saved two days of outage if I had ordered the drive Monday rather than late Tuesday. Certainly it wasn't the fact that a replacement drive would be costly. It's a Western Digital 80GB IDE/ATA100 and it cost me all of $49.95. The hardware was out of warranty anyway, so they weren't going to have to pay for it. The outage time and my wasted hours were worth a heck of lot more than a measly $50. And this happens just a week after spending an hour on the phone with the manager of their tech support explaining to her why I think they are doing a poor job... Argos is beaming a warp using sectional techniques. This is a procedure designed to make it much easier for a weaver working alone to get a wide and possibly long warp onto the loom with little waste and the same tension all the way across. It's pretty clever but looks Rube Goldbergish. I hope tomorrow to have some natural light to photograph a bit of the process so Argos can post to his journal. For those who will begin the NaNo on Sunday, remember not to cross the starting line until Saturday Midnight your local time. Speaking of time, daylight "saving" ends at 2 am on Sunday in the US. Clocks go back an hour then, which is going to make sunset ridiculously early here. I'll be driving home in the dark now until some time in March. When I came to Illinois for graduate school in 1971, it took me forever to get used to the early dusk. Actually, Illinois (or at least, the Chicago meridian) has a normal time of sunset. The thing is that I was accustomed to Michigan, which is in the Eastern Standard zone for no particularly good reason, so it's on a sort of daylight saving all year round. When daylight saving is applied on top of that, the state is almost two hours ahead of its correct local time. Summer sunsets come very late at night. Tags: geekery, nanowrimo, time, weather, weaving, work
Current Location: Soggy oak grove
Mood: tired
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Or at least rumors of it as I watched others complaining on twitter and various blogs through the day. Seemed as though everyone was either having technological disasters or else trying to undo those disasters for someone else. Mercury is NOT retrograde, as it turns out, so there has to be some other explanation. Sunspots? A large and active new one appeared just a few days ago. maybe that's it. We've been without them for so long that we've forgotten what it feels like to have them around? ;p My day was quiet on the tech front, actually. Everything that was likely to break already broke, I think. I'm in the lull while waiting for parts to arrive, at which time I'll have to repair the broken stuff. I actually cleaned up a little in the weaving room today and we moved the big (55 inches wide) loom out from the wall so I can get a warp onto it. Or so Argos can, at least. And at the end of a long day, as usual, my brain is mush so I don't have much more to report. Tags: geekery, weaving, work
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood:  exanimate
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It has been raining more or less continuously since last night. Sometimes just light sprinkling, other times a deluge. Gary drained a half inch from the rain gauge this morning, there was another 5/8 inch at sunset, and it hasn't quit raining since then. Supposed to rain all day tomorrow and probably into Saturday. Of course, if all this were to be snow, we'd have more than a foot. Hmm... Maybe just as well we called off that trip to Ohio. Tentatively reset for second full weekend of November. I'll have to miss a guild meeting, but that's OK. If we go then, we get to visit the Ft. Wayne hamfest, giving me a chance to sit for my long-delayed extra class exam. I have the week before that off work, ostensibly to work on the NaNoWriMo but should also give me time to brush up on the exam questions. After 27 years as a licensed amateur radio operator, I really should finish off the exam cycle and get the highest available level. Most folks were held back by the 20 wpm morse code test, but that has been abolished. I actually was able to pass the code test, but distaste for the pointless grilling about satellite operation modes and memorized frequency tables was what kept me out of the exam room. The added privileges, though there are some, are of little value to me, and I have no interest in changing my station call sign. The extra class does add a little more credibility to your status as a radio op, I suppose. Since I'm not going to Ohio, the day off I scheduled for tomorrow will not be taken up on the road. That means I get to either squander it on nothing or do something useful, or maybe a mix of the two. UPS say they will deliver some weaving tools I ordered tomorrow, so I should probably clean up the weaving room and make room to try them out. On the other hoof, I just started reading Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood and it's off to a good start, so I could just sit inside where it's dry and read. Hmm. Hard decision. The sound of the rain is not unpleasant, except that it brings back the worry about hay. I think it unlikely that there will be any more hay made this year. The forecast calls for rain every day well into next week, and temperatures are dropping so that hay cut now will probably not cure properly. We can still get more hay from storage, fortunately, but the excess rain makes the approach to the barns soft and treacherous for a heavy-loaded vehicle or trailer. That means probably we will have to wait to take delivery until the ground freezes. The first delivery that we got is enough to last until New Year. We'll need at least two more that size or three smaller ones to make it into next year's hay season. Tags: books, farm, geekery, reading, weather, weaving
Current Location: Soggy oak grove
Mood:  weird
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Too tired to make a real post I am. Oh, it's Wednesday again, no wonder. Looks like we need to add memory to about eight machines at work in order to get around some limitations in the new version of Userful software. Fortunately, they're old Pentium III class Dells, all the same model, and the memory upgrade will cost about $18 for each machine. That I can do without busting any budgets. Their tech support has a hard time understanding why we don't just buy new machines. After all, these are "so" old. But they still work just fine, and it shouldn't be necessary to use some turbocharged overpowered equipment just to fetch catalog records. The difference between $150 to upgrade eight machines' memory or a minimum of $8000 to replace those machines is not insignificant and especially not in the current economic climate. After I said the foliage colors were disappointing here this year, today I drove from Woodstock to Harvard on US14 right at noon with the sun out and the sky clear. There was a lot of color on that route, plenty of reds, oranges, yellows and rusts. Missing were the pinks and purples we sometimes get, but still the display wasn't bad at all. Trip to Ohio is in the balance due to a vehicle failure (not mine.) We may still be able to go, but if we take my car, then the desired cargo definitely can't fit. It will be just the two furries and luggage. To be decided... Tags: geekery, weather, work
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood:  calm
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