I hope everyone is having a great memorial day. Just be sure to remember those who gave their lives so that you can live free.
As for us, we are barbequing. It’s what you’re supposed to do on Memorial Day, right? Fire up the smoker and cook the meat. I’m going for 10 hours on the brisket today and I hope it will be good!
At least it’s not boiling hot up here – 70 degrees is nice!
Well, not exactly “smoking” but the charcoal is. We’re heatin’ up the ole grill and using it to grill some burgers and a kabob this time. We have some new metal grills to replace the old “well used” ones, so I’m really firing it up to season them. But, why waste a fire, yes?
Let’s cook!
Soon, it will be ready to grill and the meat will be sizzlin’.
It’s sure good to be home, now!
Normally, I like a little rain. It soothes me: restores my sense of balance. But not today. Today, It’s just caused me to be very late. Late because I’m supposed to be in the air right now. I’m supposed to be about to land in Newark on my way to Seattle for training.
That’s not happening. Instead, what’s happening is that I’m delayed. I’m sitting next to the gate waiting. Waiting on a departure in hopes that I can make my connection.
Now, the rain is not so soothing. I could have stayed home longer. I could have spent more time with Laura. But, no: the rain has conspired to keep me in a little chair next to a little door waiting to get on a little plane.
Fun. Not.
This afternoon, I sat down on my couch to watch a little TV and relax only to find to my chagrin, that the rather new Samsung LN46A750 turns itself on and off continuously! This is way not good.
A quick search online tells me that this is a known problem and that there is a fix for it by flashing the TV. Awesome.
Now if I can only keep the TV from turning off so that I can flash it…
That would be a “no”. Now, I have to have someone come and fix it. Grr.
I’m so glad this happened while it is under warranty!
Today, I went on a ride with my motorcycle club from South Riding to Frederick, MD. It’s not that long of a ride, but doing it with a group of 35 or so people takes quite a bit of time. In fact, the round trip plus lunch took over 6 hours.
That wouldn’t have been so bad except for one thing: it was over 90 degrees outside today! Ouch! It’s not so bad when you’re moving, but once you stop, the heat gets very uncomfortable.
Anyway, it was all in all a great ride except for the heat. Then I got home. Seems that even though our HVAC has been repaired, that I forgot to reset the thermostat and put it on Auto instead of Heat. Well, it’s over 80 in the house now and it’s still uncomfortable for me to move around.
Maybe I’ll just go lay on the tile floor… too bad it’s fake tile. Won’t really be cool enough.
Okay, so I don’t post nearly as regularly as I should, but at least I do post and I try to do it at least once a month.
So the AC is now finally fixed and operating as it’s supposed to.
And I’m sore like I haven’t been since high-school spring football [and not recovering near as fast] due to some increased workout activity. I’ve been doing a little of that P90X workout once per week and it really tears me up. Maybe one day I’ll be able to do it 5 days per week.
So, we went out and got great pictures of cherry blossoms.
Now, all we need to do is post the thousands of remaining pictures…
Over the last couple of days, we’ve noticed that our heating and air-conditioning system was not functioning correctly. On the one hot day, we couldn’t get it to cool [luckily, it wasn’t that hot – only high 70s] and the rest of the days, it seemed like it just wouldn’t get warm.
After playing with it a little bit and smelling some strange electronic burning smell, we discovered that while the main furnace/AC was functioning, the fan system was not blowing. It was getting hot inside the furnace, but nowhere else. We had someone look at it today.
Sure enough, it was a bad circuit board – the one that switched the fan to “on” was broken. The technician bypassed the board for today and ordered the part. It should be in next week.
For now, we have heat – which is great since it got below 60 in the house this morning. I think we might be up to 68 or so by now. All this means that I had to work at the house today [since Laura had been called on to work an emergency shift due to someone’s illness I think and wasn’t able to be home] and sit freezing in the basement most of the morning. Hence my ability to take 5 and blog…
Maybe I’ll even get some of my work administration done. Status reports, research, etc. Stuff that normally doesn’t get done in a timely fashion when I have to sit with the customer all day.
Tomorrow, we’re going on an outing to hit DC before sunrise and take some pictures of the cherry trees and monuments. This is not a normal “get up” time for us by any means, but we will head out from the house about 4:15AM [ouch!] to get downtown about 5AM.
We’re going to take some low-light pictures first, scout out the area and then take some sunrise pictures of the trees.
So it’s off to bed early so I can get up!
Getting back from Vegas means going through stacks of mail and entering many transactions into Quicken.
I think I’m finally done. It’s taken all evening to work on and now I don’t have a pile of debit card receipts in my pocket.
Returning from travel also means returning to work, and work I did today. Especially since I had so many unread emails to deal with.
Returning to work means EXPENSE REPORTS! Yay. Fun. So, I’m now done with that, too. I learned early on in my 100% travel days at IBM to not dally with the reports – it only hurt me in the end. I now stay clear. Zero balance on the Amex once the reports are approved.
So now I’m done. And I’m tired.
Normally, most of my business travel is, well, business travel. This time, though, as part of the convention I’m attending, I opted to stay in the convention hotel – which is a Casino/Resort. I have to say that it’s a couple of steps up from my regular hotel fare. The room is larger, more fancy, and the clock radio is a Bose wave-thingy which is a CD player with an MP3 input jack. Sweet!
Some of the decor is over the top, but I expect that as it’s Vegas and it’s a “resort” [which I think in Vegas just means fancy casino].
So Laura is exploring right now and I’m in a hands-on lab getting some good “experience” with Microsoft’s upcoming ILM “2” product. Fun! [… if you’re into that kind of thing like I am…]
We took some pictures yesterday of our room and we’ll certainly be taking more as we visit some more places.
And now, back to my geek time.
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