johnridley | Reading

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Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

billroper

The business meeting is over with no casualties and what looked like smooth participation from folks on line. The rest of the weekend should be pretty relaxed.

jennlk

Last Sunday morning it was 55F and sunny. We had snowflakes Sunday evening. Now they're telling us that we will probably have snow accumulating on Sunday morning before the temperature rises to around 60F. Today it's not quite 40F and very windy with occasional bursts of precipitation. The cushion box on the deck has been blowing around, and the freestanding fire pit is now in the pond. Lots of branches down, but I'm not going to deal with them until tomorrow when it's warmer and less windy. I was going to do laundry today, but the washer does not deal well with power flickers, so I think that, too, will wait until tomorrow.

We do have crocuses and snowdrops in the doorside garden. Wednesday morning I saw that the reticulated irises in the E garden had bloomed (they were green stems on Monday am). The crocuses close up when it gets cold/rainy/snowy, so they'll be fine tomorrow. The irises, on the other hand... The ones that have not been eaten by bunnies have been shredded by the wind and rain. :( The daffodil patches in the NW garden are about 4" tall green stems, but it's another couple of weeks before they usually bloom, and right now they're very sturdy.

I saw redwinged blackbirds in the yard Wednesday morning. I'd heard them carrying on earlier in the week, but hadn't seen them on the ground/at the feeders/bathing until Wednesday.

Monday, the township hall hosted an election 'equipment certification day' for the west side of the county. (and by hosted, I mean that someone at the county said "we'd like to do Thing at this Place on Thisdate. Any objections?") I had no idea what to expect, not having done Thing before (it's periodic, and the last one was before I started at the township), so we were somewhat unprepared. (Turns out that I needed to haul folding tables in from the shed and move tables and chairs in the boardroom, as well as prepare all of our equipment.) I was able to pull a lot of things out of storage and put them into the shredding bin, so that was nice. I got the storage area more organized, as well.

Current Music: wind roaring through the trees

billroper

I *think* that I have everything packed for the trip -- save for my electric shaver, which I'll be using in just a minute. Whether this means everything will make it into the car is another question.

Meanwhile, I am not sure where all of the recycling on our block is, but given the wind, it's possible that it is on the street...

billroper

I am trying to figure out what I am going to forget when I leave for Thing tomorrow.

If I'm really lucky, the answer will be "nothing".

We'll see how I do. :)

johnridley

I finally got another platelet donation done, the 3rd for the year. The last success was on January 29 so it's been a while. I took a week off as planned, then had a schedule conflict, then an infection, then I failed at hemoglobin levels, then the return of the infection, and here I am 6 weeks out from the last donation.
I did get a pretty cool shirt. Green for St Pat's day, long sleeve hoodie T shirt. I've never owned a hoodie T shirt before.

billroper

Time keeps moving. The things that I need to do remain piled up. And I leave for Dorsai Thing on Friday, which will be fun, but doesn't move a lot of things in the pile. :)

Ah, well. You only live once, right?

mrs_sweetpeach

( Click here for Week #10 )

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: My home office
Crossposts: https://mrs-sweetpeach.insanejournal.com/806356.html

billroper

There is a substantial temperature gradient across the Chicago area tonight, which means that there are thunderstorms. We are happily on the cold side of this development which means that we are not getting the tornados that are blowing through the Kankakee area to our south. But there has been a lot of weather tonight and that has resulted in a lot of our favorites TV programs being preempted for storm coverage. This is understandable, but annoying.

Tomorrow, we will be watching a bunch of Hulu.

*sigh*

johnridley

I spent yesterday cleaning the garage, cleaning motorcycles, picking up sticks from under trees, picking dead leaves out of the pond, trying to prep the pump for the waterfall, and other such spring type things.

I rode the 1980 Honda to rehearsal last night (30 miles one way). The little wind deflector that I was trying is OK on surface streets but definitely not good enough on the highway. At 75 MPH riding against that wind gets tiring.

On the upside, the bike is doing OK with the electric fan conversion, though I think I want to get a new temp sensor, the one I put in comes on at 200*F and the needle gets a bit higher than I'd like at stoplights. I mean it's probably fine but I'd prefer it stay closer to what it did as stock. I'm going to try switching from a 200*F switch to 190*F.

On Sunday I went to help a friend from choir strip the carpeting from a condo she just bought. There were about 7 of us there and it went well and pretty quickly. The truck and black trailer together held all the debris and we were able to dispose of it in the facility's dumpsters. Now comes replacing the flooring - she's getting laminate and there are 3 floors to put down. Probably a day of surface prep first.

I'm trying to get my cardio endurance back up - 3 months of just doing resistance at the gym and I'm not good for the running distances I used to do. In a couple of weeks I'll need to start doing 10 mile hikes with a loaded backpack, getting ready for Isle Royale in July.

billroper

Well, sadly, there were a number of bugs in my check in that automation turned up, so I spent today fixing those. Happily, none of them were overly complex.

Let's see what we get tomorrow.

billroper

I dropped K off to catch her bus back to college -- once the bus came to the correct stop. It went to the one that they went to *last* semester. *sigh* But the offspring was eventually successfully dispatched.

I'm assuming that they got there. I haven't heard otherwise...

I came home, did two loads of laundry, and finished looking at the APBA cards for the upcoming draft.

Tomorrow, it will be back to work.

And I think I get to work on something new and interesting. We'll see. :)

billroper

Tomorrow I drop K off at the bus to go back to college. It's been fun having her home, but there are nearly two months remaining in the semester and they still need to be navigated.

We had some of the ginormous brisket for dinner tonight. We will be having more of the ginormous brisket for dinner for quite some time. I have purchased some lovely Turano French rolls for making sandwiches, which will be the first step in the process.

And I sat down with K and we got her income taxes for her summer job filed, which is a good thing.

I've started looking through the APBA cards in preparation for the upcoming draft. I have a bit more scouting to do, but the end is in sight. This is good, because it will allow me to pass them along to the last manager in the league who needs to see them in advance of the draft.

Tomorrow, I will get to go find all of the clocks that don't automatically reset themselves and make the necessary adjustments for Daylight Saving Time. And then I will happily enjoy the extra hour of sunlight at the end of my work day. :)

billroper

And thus, we arrive at the end of another work week -- and probably at the end of the short project that I took on, which seems to be working pretty well. We will, of course, keep an eye out for bugs, but I should be able to work on something different next week.

Tomorrow is the last full day of K's spring break, so we are making a ginormous brisket for dinner. We are also working on getting her income tax return filed for her summer job.

And anything else that needs to be done. Whatever that may be. :)

jennlk

Chilly and damp, but no new snow since Sunday. It rained yesterday - never really hard, but we got over an inch by the time it stopped. Most of the snow has melted -- only the remnants of snowpiles, and the drifts in shaded areas. The cats are not terribly pleased with this -- they want *dry* weather, thankyouverymuch.

The sandhill cranes are back - they were in the yard on Sunday morning when I went out to fill the birdbath/hang the birdfeeders. I haven't seen them yet today, but they sometimes get a late start when it's dreary.

DC was out sick this week, so I got to do her things as well as mine (payroll and filing, mostly). I had to have J come in and put on his IT hat so I could get software installed on my computer. sigh.

Rehearsals for the next LCCB session started this week. I will not be playing that concert (the Farmington concert is at the same time!), but I've been asked to play tenor for a few weeks to get the new guy familiar with the music. They have Jerry Bilik coming in to work with them in April, so I'll stay through that, then step away until late May. Section leader thinks I may be playing TSax this summer.

billroper

I got the notice that our replacement mattress has shipped and should be here in a week. My lower back is greatly looking forward to this -- except, perhaps, for what it's going to take to get it upstairs and onto the bed. The shipping notice says that the mattress weighs 150 pounds. Whee!

billroper

I've merged the reference counting changes to our code so that we can build it for testing. There will be a brief shakedown cruise, but I think we'll end up with things being much more stable once we finish this up.

mrs_sweetpeach

( Click here for Week #09 )

Current Mood: distressed
Current Location: My home office
Crossposts: https://mrs-sweetpeach.insanejournal.com/806014.html

billroper

Today was another day of mild refactoring around one of my classes at work. This included adding a reference counter (which I had removed in an excess of enthusiasm for Java reference counting that was not entirely warranted) and changing many of the calls that fetch a member of the class to use try-with-resources to guarantee that the close() method will be called and the reference count reduced.

Tomorrow, I hope to start testing this. All of the unit tests are running, but that just proves that nothing acutely stupid is happening. It's the *system* tests where all of the action will be here.

And I want to see if this runs or just sits there and starts smoking. :)

billroper

The treadmill left for its new home today and the library looks a good bit less crowded. This is good.

In keeping with the theme of moving things, today at work was largely spent rearranging things so that I could combine two classes into one. I think that's done and I can move on to the next bit of this project tomorrow.

Yay, me!

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johnridley

Dragonfly DIY

March 2026

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Reading

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Performing some traffic maintenance today

Various Things

Welcome to March in the upper midwest.

Packing It In

Decisions, Decisions

Platelets again

Time Keeps Ticking On

Project 52

Thunder and Lightning

Spring stuff

Back to Bugs

Back to Work

Back to College

End of Week

Not quite winter anymore....

Rest Easy -- Later

You Can Count On It

Project 52

Refactoring

Moving Things Around

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March 2026

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