Modern Geekery

The Garbage Fairy strikes

Today we did some cleaning up around the house. We'd bought Paul and Elise's old futon for our library, so we could get rid of the ancient, ugly sofa we had down there. That sofa and its accompanying chair were found at an estate sale for Sarah's first apartment in college. I think she paid $10 for them. We'd kept them covered with some plain fabric, in order to hide the truly hideous upholstery.

We called the city to schedule a pickup, after determining that Goodwill and the Salvation Army weren't interested. We placed them out on the curb, along with an old bedframe that we had no use for. We weren't terribly pleased at the prospect of junking them, but they were taking up space and we couldn't find a charity to take them.

Less than four hours later, when I went outside to roll the trash can around front, the bedframe, sofa, and chair were gone. Now, we live off the beaten path a bit, on a loop off the main road through our neighborhood, so I was quite surprised that the garbage fairy found us so quickly.

After the fact, I discovered that Asheville has a Freecycle group. I'm on the mailing list now.

Apple Picking

I took the week of Labor Day off. Fortunately, we'd planned to spend the week in the area, enjoying the Asheville area and all the things it has to offer. Pictures and commentary follow.

On Monday, we went to Sky Top Orchard to pick apples. Meg enjoyed the experience, running all over the 40 acre plot. We managed to convince her that it was ok to ride in the wagon, especially if she wanted to see everything. We were too early for the Fujis, but got a peck of Mutsu greens for baking and Cortlands and Honey Crisps for eating. The Gala trees were in sad shape - the apples had some sort of blight on them.

I got a chance to go hiking with Brent Brown at the Turkey Pen area in the Pisgah Forest. Excellent hiking area. The trails follow the South Fork of Mills River and wind upward away from the river to a ridge. Brent and I both got some fabulous pictures.

Friday night, I went to see Rathkeltair play at Jack of the Wood. I saw them play two sets before I started getting tired - it was almost 1 AM. Collier was not with the band; instead, they had a session bassist from Chapel Hill. Neil told me before the show that Collier was in Scotland getting married. I figure that's a good excuse to miss the Asheville show.

Today, we went to the Mountain State Fair with Meg. She loved seeing the various farm animals, especially the goats. The folks from Spinning Spider Creamery in Marshall were there. These guys bring goat cheese to our local tailgate market every Wednesday and are great folks.

Spinning Spider has been sharing a tent with some folks with fresh seafood at our tailgate market. I bought two fabulous tuna steaks from them this week. I coated the outside with soy sauce, ginger, and red pepper and seared the outsides. We served them with a wasabi cream sauce and a sauté of mixed vegetables from our CSA (Green Toe Ground CSA, in Burnsville).

Travel to Dallas

I spent last week in Dallas visiting a vendor. Aside from the usual comments I could make about Dallas just being too hot, it was a good trip. It was interesting to see the outskirts of the city from the air. The fringes of Dallas look like a suburban cancer growing into perfectly good pastureland.

New trail

We went hiking today on Bad Branch trail. The trailhead is difficult to find: you have to take a dirt road off of the Blue Ridge Parkway, down to the edge of the Bent Creek Forest. The trail heads down the side of the ridge and meets Bad Branch, which it follows almost to Mills River. We didn't make it quite that far. The end of the trail near the Parkway has a truly phenomenal slope and we knew we'd have to climb back up. I have pictures, which I'll post sooner or later.

Some hiking pictures

We've been on several recent hiking expeditions that I photographed. Many of them were nothing new for us - two trips through the Bent Creek Experimental Forest, for example. We did, however, go up to a trail in Madison County that followed Laurel Creek. I took some nice pictures of the creek and the children.

Esther and Meg, hikers in training

Laurel Creek rapids:

Poison Ivy, reprise

One of the sure signs of spring seems to be a poison ivy rash breaking out on my forearms. The previous occupants of our house left us a good deal of poison ivy climbing various trees and now that Meg is more mobile and wanting to play in the backyard, I'm having to dig it out. One of the more majestic specimens of the toxic weed was climbing my tulip poplar. The vine, though cut and dead, still measured over 1" in diameter. I pulled enough of it away from the tree that even I couldn't touch the bottom of the vine, then dug the decaying root out away from the tree. I took reasonable safety precautions, but I'm still breaking out on my left arm.

Time - the only scarce commodity

As the huge gap in my blog attests, I have had very small amounts of free time recently. The server logs reveal that readership of this blog has dropped from marginally tiny to vanishingly small. Obviously, the right thing to do at this point is to make a better effort to find ways to blog anytime and anyplace, rather than only at home at night.

This weekend was beautiful. We spent most of it outside, as we've tried to do every warm weekend recently. We hiked a relatively long (5.2 miles) loop in the Bent Creek experimental forest, I planted some herbs in pots, and began working on tearing out the honeysuckle in my back yard, which has returned with a vengeance.

Every tiny millimeter of root I left in the ground has sprouted a little bundle of invasive, tree and shrub-killing joy. I've been researching ways to permanently put paid to the weed's account and discovered one clever idea. Take some of the Roundup concentrate, put it in a small covered container, like a cream cheese or yogurt container, slit the top and stick a cut vine in the slit and down into the liquid. This is more targetted than spraying Roundup everywhere, which tends to create a fair amount of collateral damage. We'll see how this goes.

The capriciousness of technology

I'm in the market again for a digital camera. My trusty Nikon has failed spectacularly, and I'm looking at a 3-4 week turnaround on a repair that could cost as much as a brand new camera. I've pretty much decided to replace it and if its cheap to repair, I'll sell the old one.

Work has been incredibly busy over the past two weeks. The end of the year, apparently, is the time when everyone wants to have the "Let's see where we've been and where we're going" sort of meetings. Lots of them. Somehow, I'm still managing to get some science done. Woot.

Meg is now 13 months and walking. The amount of destruction a toddler can wreak at this stage in development is truly profound.

The weekend plans

Last Thursday and Friday, I attended the annual meeting of my regional microscopy society in Boone, NC. I'd heard a great deal about Boone from friends, but whether due to the lack of chance to really explore the city, or the fact the local university was on fall break, I left unimpressed with the city as a whole. Too many strip malls, not enough cool indie stuff. Although, there was a lovely bookstore on King St. that I spent some time in.

Part of the issue may have been the comedy of errors that was my attempt to access the internet while there. The Broyhill Inn, the university's 'luxurious' conference center, was just sad. They had a wireless access point in the lobby, but had outgoing mail blocked at the router. I pointed out to their manager that if they were going to provide internet access, the one thing that every single user would need was access to their email. Both checking -and- sending. The mouth-breather then proceeded to lie to me about the situation. I also couldn't use my cellphone to connect, because I had absolutely zero cellphone coverage. Nada. I wound up sneaking out after the banquet to a hole-in-the-wall coffee joint to send the emails I needed to get out.

On Sunday, we went up to an orchard in Henderson Co. and picked apples. We filled a half-bushel basket with mainly Arkansas Blacks, as they were the most plentiful, but with some Pink Ladies and a few Granny Smiths. We're intending to make some apple butter from them.

I've not posted pictures in a while. Look for some new ones soon.

Someone broke my toy

One of the toys I get to play with at work is a very nice, very large wide angle x-ray scattering (WAXS) unit. Today, the service engineer was supposed to come and do some preventative maintenance and check out an annoying, but non-critical problem we were seeing. Last week, I had some trouble with the automated calibration routine on it, so I asked the guy to check it out. Apparently, one of the control boards was dodgy, so now the machine is completely non-functional. Whee!

The commute

I've been a bit scarce over the past month as I've been settling into the new job. The commute is very long, yes. But there are some wonderful things about it. I've been able to use the time in the car to "switch gears" and finalize my thoughts about work for the day before getting home. That's a real luxury. I'm still looking for voice dictation systems though.

I've found another person who lives in the area who works where I do. We're carpooling twice a week, which makes things a bit easier on both of us. There's also a dad in the babysitting co-op who commutes farther than I do. Its nice to know I'm not the only crazy one.

The black locust tree that I had to take down out of the back yard is still piled up neatly. We'd offered it to a friend, but they've been slow about picking it up. We had someone make us another offer, so we have to decide whether to take that or not. Decisions, decisions.

Fortunately, that black locust is still the only tree problem we have. The two storms have left us with quite a few limbs down, but no major damage. That's a lot better than many around here have fared. Between Ivan and Frances, there have been quite a few trees down in addition to the flooding.

Losing a few trees, of course, is nothing compared to what the floodwaters have wrought. There is so much damage, and with the Parkway in such bad shape, there will not be much in the way of tourism here this leaf season, which will not be good for the local economy. We'll see how much the FEMA rebuilding funds can do over the course of the next three months, but I expect this will be a very lean year for the city, the county, and everyone here.

Everything is new

Meg is going through a spurt of new-baby developments. She's begun to pull up and stand semi-unassisted, which is somewhat amazing considering that she doesn't really crawl yet. We're going to have to switch out our coffee table, as it tends to topple with a baby pulling on it.

This whole "pulling up to stand" thing sometimes confuses her, though. Last weekend, she tried to pull up on the coffee table (we'd stabilized it so it wouldn't topple) and we watched her lift her chin up over the edge of the table with great effort. We noticed shortly thereafter that her feet were not on the floor and she had, in fact, just done a chin-up.

Meg's vocabulary is increasing, as well. We've added "kitty" and "doggie" to the repertoire, as well as some sounds that may or may not be "Max" and "Esther" (two of her friends.)

My new job is going well. Its keeping me busy, but the people are great and I think it will ultimately be extremely rewarding. There is something about this "new job" feeling that is exciting; my position is somewhat unusual for the company so there is ample room for me to "write my own job description," as they say.

End of the vacation

Tomorrow, I'm starting a new job. This has been in progress for a while and I'm excited about the prospects that this position offers. In many respects, it was simply the right offer at the right time, but during the process, I was seriously negotiating with one other company. One thing that struck me was how different these companies approached the prospect of hiring me. The company at which I'm starting is an extremely large company, the other company was tiny in comparison - less than 1% of the size. Yet, the larger company was able to make a quick and effective decision in terms of their needs and back that up with an offer. The smaller company was sincere and eager to have me, yet their internal communication was so ineffective that they spent weeks trying to figure out if my skills were as good of a match for their needs as their director of research thought they were. In the meantime, they kept coming back and asking me to delay making a decision about the offer I had in hand from the larger company. Eventually, they exhausted both my time and my patience.

I'm reminded of the Cluetrain Manifesto when I think of this. Size of the company means nothing: all that matters is how well you communicate, both internally and externally. My new employer understands this. They devoted an embarrassingly extravagant amount of their employee's time to making sure I had answers to any question I had. They interviewed my carefully and thoroughly because, as their research division president said, they intend for their research associates to be around for a long time.

The group I'll be working with is young, creative, and frighteningly intelligent. I'm looking forward to it immensely.

I am looking at a much longer commute now, though. I'm looking for some recommendations for CDs for learning foreign languages - spoken only. I can't be looking at books, obviously. I'm also looking for recommendations for computer-assisted dictation systems. I want to be able to record myself in the car and have a computer transcribe it to text. I'm already familiar with the system from MacSpeech. Does anyone have other suggestions or experiences with this system?

Sarah, Meg, and I have done several hikes over the past couple of weeks. Read on for some pictures.

We did two hikes along the Shut-In Trail. Both times, we started from the Sleepy Gap overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway. We went towards Pisgah the first time, which is a pretty hilly hike. Very fun, though. We ran into a yellowjacket nest slightly off the trail, but the bees didn't bother us. We were a bit concerned that it would rain and that the trail would become treacherous, so we only hiked about 3 miles round trip.

The second time, due to the rain from Hurricane/Tropical Storm Bonnie, we went the other direction, towards Walnut Cove. The trail is much safer and flatter, so we were able do a 4 mile hike quite easily. Meg loves riding in the pack, although she will shortly outgrow our current one. We're looking at a Kelty Kids pack to replace it.

This weekend was the Sourwood Festival in Black Mountain. We went over there to see what was going on, heard some decent local music, ate some greasy festival food, and perused the crafts stalls. Meg loved the sights , all the people, the sounds, the smells. She cackled most of the morning and charmed everyone she met. The child is such an extrovert.

Give it to her. She'll eat anything.

I was keeping Meg yesterday for lunch. I'm on vacation now and am trying to spend as much quality time with the wee one as possible. She was eating her "crunchies," i.e. the little melt-in-your-mouth crackers for babies, plus some organic corn and kamut puffs. I'd made a bowl of curried rice and was eating it with Sambal Oelek, which I've also heard called Red Rooster. This stuff is one of the most potent hot sauces known to man, and it particularly complements curries since it pretty much just adds a rich chili heat to things. Well, Meg saw my rice and started going "MMMMMM MMMMMM," which is her way of telling me that she wants some of what I've got. I started feeding her clumps of rice, elicting more "MMMM"'s as she stuffed her cheeks. Unfortunately, my efforts to keep the hot sauce out of her mouth must have failed. Her poor eyes were watering and forehead was sweating. She grabbed her sippy cup of water and with a little help, got the fire cooled down.

I figured she'd break into tears at this point. I was feeling pretty rotten about letting her have the chili paste, since chilies are not on the list of foods appropriate for 9 month olds. I waited and watched her for a moment. She looked back up at me, started cackling madly and made a lunge for my rice bowl. "MMMMM MMMMM MMMMM."

That's my girl...

A day at the games

Today was the annual pilgrimage to MacRae Meadows for the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games. We had our friend Meredith come along and help us manage Meg, which was made the day absolutely a joy. Meg loved the music, loved the attention (and there was a lot of it!), and generally had it made. The adults enjoyed the music too, as well as the congenial company. Details and pictures inside.

We got there early so we could park on the Meadow, and got a great spot. The morning was bright and sunny and the weather cooperated wonderfully. (Unlike last year, which was sopping wet, and the year before, which was freezing.) We played around in the merchant's tents for a bit and then wandered in to the Games themselves. We're music geeks, so we intended to spend most of the day hanging in the Groves, which are where the stages for the musicians are. We slipped by Grove 1 to see if Scooter, who was there with Henri's Notions, but who we know from Full Moon Ensemble, was hanging around. He was on stage doing sound check, so we didn't catch him then. We looked around for Allison King, also from FME, since she showed up and sang with Henri's Notions last year. We found out later she wasn't planning to come at all. Bummer. We did get her contact info from Scooter later on though. Scooter came by Grove 2 later on and met Meg, and we found out that FME is getting back together for a few gigs, including a trip to Scotland. Keen.

Grove 2 started out with some power issues. The power to the Grove had been out, and they weren't sure they'd have anything at all, which wouldn't have harmed The Rogues, who are loud enough without a PA system, but would have (and did) really put a crimp in Rathkeltair's day. The power kept crapping out during Rathkeltair's first set, and they cut it short, which was disappointing. I had been very interested to hear a lot of them, since I've been fans of other bands that their members were parts of: Celtic Soul and Seven Nations, and they're fronted by the indefatigable Neil Anderson. Most of their songs were things I'd either heard from Celtic Soul or from the Neil Anderson and Friends performances. I picked up their new live CD. It is well worth the money, having three of my favorite NA&F songs and schticks on it: Jerusalem Rap, In Each I Know, and the (infamous) Crab Song. I prevailed upon Trevor to sneak back to their truck so I could get a copy of an older Celtic Soul album with the Rathkeltair album.

EJ and The Rogues put on two great sets. Last year was The Rogues first appearance at GMHG and they were billed as "The Rogues, featuring EJ Jones." EJ had joined The Rogues full time since then, so he didn't get name billing. I forgot to ask him if he was competing in the pipe competitions this year. EJ continues to be one of the pipers I most enjoy hearing and his musical flexibility, his talent for composing music, and his raw skill with not only the Highland pipes, but the smallpipes and flutes as well, makes him a joy to see on stage. (Shameless plug: EJ makes pipes as well. If you want a great set of smallpipes, check out his website.)

The other bands sharing the stage at Grove 2 were not really interesting for me. Off Kilter plays a goofy mix of "rock and reel" and stage comedy. Unsurprisingly, they have a standing gig at the Canadian pavilion at Epcot Center. Their piper is pretty good and their fiddler has a son about Meg's age and is a neat fellow. I just found them a bit loud. Meg didn't really care for them much either. She slept through the part of their set that we were in the Grove for. The band sharing the stage with Off Kilter was Gael Warning. They sort of played a Celtic smooth jazz sound. Not my taste. Their piper also played an electronic bagpipe for their first set. I thought that was kind of lame and pretty silly considering that the Grove was still having power issues at that point. Sarah, Meredith and I grabbed lunch and fiddled around the merchant's area during their sets. We also snuck back down to Grove 1 to hear Henri's Notions play with one of my favorite Scottish folk singers, Ed Miller.

By the end of the day, we were pretty exhausted. The picture on the right is Meredith after all day helping us keep up with the Meglet. She looks a lot less sunburnt that I do, I will note. After the last set in Grove 2, we chatted with EJ and Holly at The Rogue's tent a little and then snuck out. We passed Clann an Drumma on their stage. Clann an Drumma is possessed of a marginal amount of musical talent, but a wealth of marketing skills and a costume design philosophy of "leather and skins." If you're into music, take a pass on them. If you like seeing guys (and one gal) in leather kilts pounding on drums, then Clann an Drumma is for you. Judging from the number of breathless lasses in Ren Faire garb that were watching them, I expect they did pretty well today.

After we left the Meadows, Meredith and her mother, Brucie, had invited us over for dinner. Brucie had made a lovely beef stew and salad, which we followed up with ice cream and strawberries. She really knew how to set a spread, for sure. It would have been nice to spend more time chatting and enjoying their hospitality; however, we were starting to get delirious with exhaustion at that point, and Meg had completely melted down, so we regretfully hoofed it back home.

Sarah and Meg getting a better view

The Rogues (L to R: Nelson, Randy, Lars, Jimmy, EJ)

Rathkeltair (L to R: Trevor, Neil, Nick, Collier)

A view of the mountain

Beautiful day

Christine and Robert came up yesterday to spend the 4th with us. I was hoofing it back from Raleigh as well, having gone down the mountain to visit with the posse from my undergraduate department. Sort of a mini-reunion. We had a lovely dinner at the 42nd Street Oyster Bar downtown. Going with a sushiesque theme, I ordered the special, which was a seared filet of Ahi tuna, with a ginger and wasabi cream sauce. Delightful. I intend to try to duplicate it in house.

Last night, I got to cook one of my favorite dishes, eggplant parmagiana, for Christine and Robert. The dish turned out pretty well, even considering that I cheated and used oil when baking the eggplant instead of butter. We'd planned to go hiking this morning at Chimney Rock Park, but I wasn't sure the weather would cooperate. Fortunately for us, it was a lovely day, and we had a blast. We took the Hickory Nut Falls trail to the base of the falls themselves, which is a beautiful walk - about an hour - and then drove into Lake Lure to have a picnic in a gazebo by the lake. Pictures follow.

This is the platform at the end of the trail we hiked. Hickory Nut Falls is behind us and the whole area was just lovely. We chatted with a neat couple from Florida there who had just adopted a Russian child. The girl was about 8 and absolutely enthralled with Meg. The little girl and the older sister kept playing peekaboo and tickling Meg while the parents chatted with us. Meg seemed to find it quite amusing.

This is the view of Lake Lure from the top of Chimney Rock itself. Meg didn't seem particularly interested in the lovely vista; instead, she found the small children scrambling about to be much more fascinating. The scrubby little spruce growing out of the rock also got her attention. We didn't spend too much time up there, since it got crowded quickly and we were getting hungry. The gazebo at the Marina where we ate lunch is just off the edge of the photo to the right.

Johnny Cunningham

I just found out today that one of my favorite fiddlers passed away late last year. Johnny Cunningham was an incredibly talented and versatile musician. His solo album, Fair Warning, was my first introduction to the folk music of Scotland and Ireland, which quickly became one of my avocational passions.

It was disturbing that he'd been dead for over 5 months and I'd not heard. I guess that between Meg, the house, and the insanity at work, I've lost track of the Celtic scene more than I'm willing to admit. Whether or not you are familiar with Johnny's music, or are a fan of Irish and Scottish traditional music, please take a look at Johnny's website. There, you will get some small sense of how profoundly he influenced the modern Celtic music scene.

Leaps and bounds

The little one has made great progress this week. She's now very stable sitting up, instead of having the tendency to topple if she tries to reach for something. She's also made a breakthrough in the self-feeding, having figured out how to pinch-grab and put things into her mouth. So far, this works well for her organic brown-rice rice krispies and small pieces of whole spelt bread. It works less well for the pureed veggies, although that certainly doesn't stop her from trying.

We've gotten her this thing called a baby safe feeder. Its a pretty clever contraption that allows you to put some larger pieces of solid food in a mesh bag for them. She's been gumming away on baby carrots and teething biscuits in hers.

She's been having a fair number of playdates recently. This latest picture was taken with her friend Esther. Esther's mom and Sarah have been trading a morning of babysitting each week so that each of them can get some writing done.

Yard work

I spent most of the day in the yard doing the yard work I failed to do last weekend due to a nasty summer cold. I stacked all the firewood from the black locust I had cut, which was a great workout, if a tad annoying. I then set about clearing out the tangle from the front part of the back yard.

The tangle is what could be a beautiful bed of azaleas and rhododendrons that is right outside of the back door. Unfortunately, the previous owner's neglect had turned it into a slightly unhealthy mass of azaleas slowly choking in honeysuckle and being crowded out by butterfly bushes (buddleia davidii.) The butterfly bushes were planted along the fence to create a hedge, but the volunteers are everywhere. I cut perhaps 30-40 quarter-inch or smaller sprouts today. And filled a 50 gallon trash can full with honeysuckle.

Paradoxically, the tangle now looks less healthy and pretty than it did before. The removal of the honeysuckle has exposed the choked azaleas, which I carefully pruned. With any luck, the azaleas will start to thrive again and turn that portion of the yard into something beautiful. I am quite sure I will be pulling honeysuckle out of that area many many more times this summer and in years to come. But the worst is gone.

I still need to prune a dogwood in my front yard - I took care of one that was trying to grow in the kitchen window today - and a butterfly bush near the lower front entrance to the house that is approaching 10 ft tall. I also want to cut down the 5 butterfly bushes along the rock wall next to the parking area. First, they obscure the wall, which is pretty. Second, as invasive as the darn things are, I'm afraid of them undermining the wall. Lastly, I have so bloody many of them, I'd like to add some variety. I'm thinking of replacing them with liriope, which would cover the entire grassy strip there. Of course, I could put in the liriope and leave the bushes if I wanted, but they'd still obscure the wall.

Etiquette in the 21st Century

We entertain at dinner fairly often (although less so in recent months, between the baby and the move) and it struck me this weekend how things have changed with regards to dietary restrictions. We made a delightful roasted herb chicken with sweet potatoes and kale for my parents who were visiting. My mother has been dealing with diverticulitis and thus cannot eat any seeds or nuts. I should have known this, but it didn't occur to me. It also never occurred to my mother to remind me. The first time it came up is when I was adding a pornographic amount of minced garlic to the pan for the kale.

Most of our friends here in town make sure that any host is aware of dietary restrictions. Most everyone here has at least a minor restriction - from allergies to Atkins and everything in between. It's a matter of pride for me to be able to construct menus that are interesting and tasty while still respecting people's dietary needs and preferences. And most people my age here tend to have this same attitude.

After thinking about this for a bit, it occurred to me that my mother would think it was rude to impose upon a host with special dietary requests, while my friends would think it was rude to show up without having shared them. It makes me wonder when this shift in attitude occurred. And what is the appropriate etiquette? Personally, I think it is the responsibility of a gracious host to inquire after any restrictions that might be an issue, but I certainly don't consider it rude for someone to inform me of an issue if I neglect to inquire.

The mixed blessings of trees

One of the reasons I love the lot that my house stands on is the fact that the previous owners left most of the trees. This has led to some interesting problems, since it is apparent that the previous owners also did not take care of their trees so well. One such problem was a dead black locust tree in the very back of the lot.

The tree was leaning precariously, apparently being held up by a large hickory tree. In the path of its fall was my storage shed, which was a cause of much concern. The neighbors, ever conscious of an opportunity to point out misfortune, continued to gleefully tell me how they heard the tree creaking, how they were sure they saw roots pulling up out of the ground, how confident they were that all this was the fault of the previous owner.

I'd called the arborist on Thursday to come take a look at it. He gave me what I considered to be an absurdly low estimate of the cost, and told me he'd try to work me in sometime in the next week. Much to my amazement, he called the next morning at 8 AM to tell me he'd be there in 30 minutes to start cutting. He managed to get the tree down without crushing either my fence or the outbuilding that the dead tree was threatening. He admitted after the fact that Friday was probably a little more exciting than he'd been expecting. He did an incredible job, leaving me with a nice pile of firewood-length locust segments.

In any case, if you're in the Asheville area and are looking for an excellent arborist, I can give you a recommendation. He gave every tree on my lot a cursory inspection, pointing out things that I might want to do or would need to do in the future and was quite pleasant and efficient.

Back from hiatus

While I realize that no one is probably reading me anymore, I felt like I should give a word as to the reasons behind the hiatus. First, right after my last post, I closed on a new house. My first house, in fact. Terribly scary, terribly exhilarating. I've been painting, sanding, hammering, digging, etc., doing lots of handyman-ish stuff.

As if that weren't enough, the little-un is making leaps and bounds in progress. She's keeping both of us on our toes these days. And to top it off, I've had to rebuild much of the site from backups, since Interarchy fscked up my site. Word of warning. Do not buy this product. It isn't worth the price. I used Anarchie, its predecessor, through version 3.7 and loved it. Interarchy 4.0 was great. Once OS X came along, the program's author apparently imploded. Interarchy has become confusing and dangerous, while the price has gone up. I upgraded to 7.0 because it looked like a rational user interface was finally put on it, but the behavior of FTP synching is totally broken. And the user interface, while much improved, still sucks. I'm still waiting for a decent Mac FTP client that supports scp. Maybe I should try Transmit.

What to do on a warm winter's day?

It was 60 F/15 C today, bright, sunny, etc. All the hallmarks of a day that Should Not Be Spent Indoors. We decided to take Meg on her first hike. We'd planned to do the low trails at Mt. Pisgah, most likely one of the portions of the Shut-in trail. Unfortunately, the Parkway was closed beyond the French Broad overlook. So, we did the easier trails at the North Carolina Arboretum instead. For the interested, there are pictures.

This Christmas season, be sensitive to the godless heathens amongst your co-workers

My brother is a real artist, having spent four years at art school. One of the highlights of the holiday season are his Christmas cards, which are always hilariously snide and/or sarcastic. This year was no different. At the top of the card, in very cheerful lettering was the word "Happy," followed by checkboxes next to a lengthy list of winter-esque events: Bodhi Day, Chaunukah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, Winter Solstice, Generic Nondenominational Festival, and Other.

The story behind the card was more amusing than the card itself. Apparently, his place of work issued a memo urging their employees to be sensitive to cultural differences amongst the staff. It began, "During this Christmas season, we ask that you be considerate of other cultures, and use such greetings as 'Happy Holidays' instead."

Oh, the bitter irony.

A Comedy of Misfortunes

On Monday, Dec. 23rd, I experienced one of the most terrifying sounds an avid computer user will ever hear:

whirrrrrrr-CLICK-whir-CLICKITYCLICKITYCLICKITY

Oh yes. Hard drive failure. I suspect that the heat from my internal CD writer eventually caused the drive's death. In any case, my backup drive, which was no more than a week old, was at home, not at work, so I attempted a full recovery. This proved to be exceptionally difficult. At one point, I had the drive out of my laptop, connected to the board for an external Firewire enclosure, with a mylar-wrapped freezer pack resting on top of the drive, trying to keep it cold enough for me to retrieve all the data from its dying carcass. I succeeded.

I was quite fortunate that I did make a full copy of my drive, considering when I got home and tried to psync my new drive to the backup disk, my backup drive failed to mount at all. Looks like I'll be ordering a second replacement hard drive.

This was, of course, after I had hit some piece of road debris last week on the way to work, slicing a 2.5" cycloidal gash in one of my tires. (Result: 4 new tires, since the other three only had 2 mm of tread left.) A day later, Sarah's glider rocker spit all of the bearings from its swivel mechanism out onto floor. (Note: without those bearings, it ceases to glide, and begins to clunk.) Fortunately, the friendly and helpful staff at the local Babies R Us were able to exchange the swivel unit for us.

More baby pictures

I've just posted a selection of pictures from Meg's 3rd and 4th weeks.

Life in the fast lane

Its fascinating to me that at this point in my life, with a new daughter here, that I'm feeling so many urges to branch out my interests.

Discipline rules, however, and I'm restraining my starry-eyed-ness to some extent. I'm looking at a continuing-ed program and I've started outlining I book I've had notes on for months.

Slow blogging week

Its going to be a slow blogging week. Here's why

Welcome

So, this is it. The new blog. If you came here looking for the old one, you can find it linked on the right. We'll be keeping the news there about the baby, so keep checking it.

I still have a laundry list of things to tweak here in MT, archive pages and whatnot, and I know I've forgotten some people who ought to be in the blog links. At some point, its better to say what you have to say than to spend more time screwing about with how to say it.