Brief
Our New Years celebration was mundane as planned. Once again I tuned into Dick Clark’s Rockin Eve hoping against hope that either Dick would not be there or perhaps another year of rehab had magically cured him of his stroke symptoms. I got neither. In fact if anything Dick was harder to understand than ever. It’s just sad.
I almost wished that at the beginning of the broadcast Dick would say something like “I know that I look strange and talk badly since my stroke. However let me assure you I am still all here mentally.” Instead, his nearly unintelligible speech and the facial contortions he has to go through to get the garbled words out make him almost seem retarded. He really needs to just past the torch to Ryan. I understand what Dick is trying to prove. He has subjected us to three or four years of this now. It’s enough.
On New Years Eve I submitted an application for the mortgage refi. We’ll see if we get approved. If it goes through it should open up for us a ton of financial flexibility.
I spent the first half of New Years Day in the office. I ripped apart the one server rack and totally redid all of the wiring in the back. It was a jumbled mess before I started. I installed the rear cable management arms and routed all of the wires through them. It looks and functions 100% better. I also removed the Symantec Exchange product and installed Sunbelt’s Ninja. The process went very smoothly and so far Ninja has been humming along without a hitch.
After I got back home it wasn’t long until we were right back out. Ali wanted to get more dirt at Home Depot for the garden, as well as some bone meal to fertilize the root based plants. So I grabbed 15 bags of dirt, bone meal and some more lettuce and a chocolate pepper plant. Before spreading the dirt at home I fought with the mini-tiller that we have to get it started. I probably yanked on that cord for a solid 10 minutes till it fired up. It was worth the effort. The tiller did a sweet job off turning over the soil in the unused portion of the garden in no time at all.
After tilling I started lugging in the bags of dirt while Ali spread them evenly with the rake. Once the new areas were leveled Ali transplanted a number of the beets and carrots there. A number of our carrots were deformed because the soil beneath them was very compacted. Their new home is very loose. While Ali transplanted I watered, weeded and kept myself busy.
Later in the afternoon I watched the Rose Bowl. Ugh. I bailed in the third quarter when Penn State was down 31-7. That was some UGLY football.
I upgraded my D-link DNS-323 NAS from two 500 gb, Raid 1 drives to two 1Tb drives, doubling my storage. I had about 100 gig of data, pics and movies to back off and restore which was a very lengthy process. It all appears to be good now however. Having that much storage space available is SWEEEEEET.
I started reading Artie Lange’s book, Too Fat to Fish a couple days ago. I have to be honest, I am three chapters in and have not been all the impressed so far. The book does an awful lot of fast forwarding and Artie’s writing style isn’t all that impressive. Howard wrote the forward to the book. Again, surprisingly, I didn’t think that was all that well done either. Artie’s book is large type that has wide spacing so it shouldn’t take very long to finish. Hopefully things get better as it goes on.
My dad arrives today. I am now off all of next week which will be nice. I’ll try to check in now and then with updates. Should be fun.