My OperaSmiley Moved Chapter 3
Thursday, February 22, 2007 1:59:35 AM
Yeah, I've been intending to get to this for several months now, actually right after we got the rubber stamp from Yamhill County saying it was okay to occupy our house. They call it Final Approval for occupancy permit and we got that back in July06. I see that when I wrote Chapter 2 back in February, I promised another report before 6 months was up. That would qualify as yet another broken promise.
The DSL and phone lines (a couple of hundred feet of Doc's shielded twisted pair) from Mom's house to our's is now buried in conduit across our yard, though only about 10" or so deep and the 70' of drain tile is buried 18" deep with the downspouts for the house and carport plumbed into it. We accomplished that before the horrible rainstorms and flooding that started in Sept or Oct, don't really remember which (might even have been before then). One of those storms pulled three of the four stands holding up the carport out of their piers and set them on the ground beside the piers. Hate to think what would have happened if the fourth and final one hadn't held, that would have been ugly. So I did an engineering improvement and ratcheted in a 3" long 3/8" thick hex head lag bolt through each of the aluminum brackets into the 4x4 blocks that are screwed into the metal brakets sunk into the concrete piers. The wind that will pull them out will probably dismantle the carport first.
We've settled into a routine of six different refuse disposals. Compost bucket under the sink gets dumped into two 3 gallon buckets in the carport which get deposited behind the barn into the "master compost pile" by yours truly for my wife and my mother. Mom's is on the back porch at her house and never has coffee grounds in it. Waste baskets only get "burnable materials" which at our house includes styrofoam and plastics though it doesn't at Mom's. There's a shelf spot for the "Goodwill box" in the utility room off the kitchen right above the two recycle bins for tin cans, cardboard and glass which are beside the box for pop bottles. Real garbage has to go out to the can off the back porch, this includes the little furry and feathered chew toys the cats bring in from the field.
The cats now include a pair of brothers we obtained from a shelter this fall. Esaq and Rasql are both pure black in color although Rasql seems to want to grow a pure white whisker (probably to facilitate identification) and they are responsible for the influx of chew toys. They just became a year old this month and are a constant source of entertainment. Smoqee (Russian Blue) and Breqfust (Lynx point Siamese) are still with us, but have slowed down considerably in their 17 and 16 years respectively. We share Mom's dog Lady (Austrian Shepherd) and enjoy watching her Llamas, Composer, Bravo and Harmony. We've also got a Barn Owl that lives in the hay loft.
It's kind of idyllic living out here now especially since we don't have to give up any of the high tech I've enjoyed for so many years. Our DLS pipe is somewhere around 386K up and 1504 down which is quite an accomplishment for Sprint given how many miles we are from the CO in Carlton. My brothers have been enjoying tapping it through the wireless router in Mom's dining room when they visit and let me know that I'm expected to supply internet access to my Mom and themselves when they visit. That part of the network has been working well since I taught Mom how to reboot the routers when she can't get her mail. The other side of the network at our house is a fairly ancient "b" wireless router supplying DHCP to four workstations on my desk; a 550MHz SCSI box running Warp 4.51, a 1.2GHz IDE box running Mepis Linux 6.0, a 3.2GHz SATA box running Win2Kpro and an 800 MHz box running RedHat Linux 7.3. Maggie is running Win2Kpro on a 2.4GHz IDE system and we're printing to the HP3si on top of the file cabinet that does duplexing. There's also an 800MHz Win2Kpro box at the guest workstation and a 200MHz SCSI server doing backups and mirroring the network drive. The storeroom/workbench hasn't yet been connected to the network because I haven't gotten to it yet, though the workbench is now functional and I've almost completed all the shelves and organizational discarding necessary to make it a place I'll want to start spending a lot more time. Ultimately it is going to hook into the network with a wireless bridge and hold up the internet servers I want to build back there. My ISP will let me have as many DHCP assigned public IPs as I want, so that's part of the future too.
Vehicles I'm not really going to cover with this report, suffice it to say that we've got two of them, they're both functional they each have 200K miles on them and we're putting over 1k miles a month on each. Refund check this year is going to get us a third early '90s Subaru wagon with a roof rack to accomplish my redundancy comfort level on that front.
The yard is still a disaster, I just plain didn't get to it before the rains came last fall and it is now an uneven muddy mess that I'm just now starting to confront because spring is threatening. 'Course that means we are spending lots of time pruning the apple orchard and it isn't going to be too many more weeks before I have to tune up and sharpen the lawn tractor preparatory for weekly mowing sessions. The shop is in pretty good shape now and I've got a mostly functional metal shop as well as a very functional woodshop. Floor jack and stands make it very useful for the constant oil changes I'm doing on our vehicles and I've got it layed out mostly the way I like it.
Mom had a killer harvest last year and I've been selling her walnuts for her at the counter at my old office as well as at work. We had two extremely successful Cider parties last year and everyone that came said they'd like to be invited again next year. It's really funny how much our friends enjoy coming out here to cut up apples and crank the Cider press after a pot luck dinner. I keep telling them that it is real work, but a good time is had by all. That same harvest cost Mom her prune tree though, so much fruit that two of the three huge trunks cracked and broke in a wind storm we lost several really large walnut branches to the same syndrome. Many of walnut trees on the farm my Grandfather grafted onto Black walnut tree root stock and the English walnut stock grew at a different rate than the root stock. This resulted in an eventual "girdling" of the tree and we lost two of them to this problem last year--actually three but we cut down two of them. We also cut down the pear tree in the back yard behind Mom's bedroom because it too had stopped producing enough to justify its existence.
Work is still in Hillsboro (hence the thousands of miles on the vehicles) at Convergys answering the phones for GM's customer assistance. Maggie and I both work "four tens" so we can get our 40 hours while only commuting on MOnday, Tuesday, Thursday and Fridays. It means we leave the house at 5:30a and don't get home until about 8p on those days, so there's not much time for more than playing our Global Wars on a BBS in the morning over coffee and going to bed when we get home. Our employer works for IBM whom got the contract from General Motors for the next five years and they have promised to shut down our site this coming September. So I spend every Wednesday morning at the McMinnville branch of the State Employment Department looking for work closer to home.
In summary, I'd have to say that life goes on and we're really quite content with the way it is doing so.
Doug
The DSL and phone lines (a couple of hundred feet of Doc's shielded twisted pair) from Mom's house to our's is now buried in conduit across our yard, though only about 10" or so deep and the 70' of drain tile is buried 18" deep with the downspouts for the house and carport plumbed into it. We accomplished that before the horrible rainstorms and flooding that started in Sept or Oct, don't really remember which (might even have been before then). One of those storms pulled three of the four stands holding up the carport out of their piers and set them on the ground beside the piers. Hate to think what would have happened if the fourth and final one hadn't held, that would have been ugly. So I did an engineering improvement and ratcheted in a 3" long 3/8" thick hex head lag bolt through each of the aluminum brackets into the 4x4 blocks that are screwed into the metal brakets sunk into the concrete piers. The wind that will pull them out will probably dismantle the carport first.
We've settled into a routine of six different refuse disposals. Compost bucket under the sink gets dumped into two 3 gallon buckets in the carport which get deposited behind the barn into the "master compost pile" by yours truly for my wife and my mother. Mom's is on the back porch at her house and never has coffee grounds in it. Waste baskets only get "burnable materials" which at our house includes styrofoam and plastics though it doesn't at Mom's. There's a shelf spot for the "Goodwill box" in the utility room off the kitchen right above the two recycle bins for tin cans, cardboard and glass which are beside the box for pop bottles. Real garbage has to go out to the can off the back porch, this includes the little furry and feathered chew toys the cats bring in from the field.
The cats now include a pair of brothers we obtained from a shelter this fall. Esaq and Rasql are both pure black in color although Rasql seems to want to grow a pure white whisker (probably to facilitate identification) and they are responsible for the influx of chew toys. They just became a year old this month and are a constant source of entertainment. Smoqee (Russian Blue) and Breqfust (Lynx point Siamese) are still with us, but have slowed down considerably in their 17 and 16 years respectively. We share Mom's dog Lady (Austrian Shepherd) and enjoy watching her Llamas, Composer, Bravo and Harmony. We've also got a Barn Owl that lives in the hay loft.
It's kind of idyllic living out here now especially since we don't have to give up any of the high tech I've enjoyed for so many years. Our DLS pipe is somewhere around 386K up and 1504 down which is quite an accomplishment for Sprint given how many miles we are from the CO in Carlton. My brothers have been enjoying tapping it through the wireless router in Mom's dining room when they visit and let me know that I'm expected to supply internet access to my Mom and themselves when they visit. That part of the network has been working well since I taught Mom how to reboot the routers when she can't get her mail. The other side of the network at our house is a fairly ancient "b" wireless router supplying DHCP to four workstations on my desk; a 550MHz SCSI box running Warp 4.51, a 1.2GHz IDE box running Mepis Linux 6.0, a 3.2GHz SATA box running Win2Kpro and an 800 MHz box running RedHat Linux 7.3. Maggie is running Win2Kpro on a 2.4GHz IDE system and we're printing to the HP3si on top of the file cabinet that does duplexing. There's also an 800MHz Win2Kpro box at the guest workstation and a 200MHz SCSI server doing backups and mirroring the network drive. The storeroom/workbench hasn't yet been connected to the network because I haven't gotten to it yet, though the workbench is now functional and I've almost completed all the shelves and organizational discarding necessary to make it a place I'll want to start spending a lot more time. Ultimately it is going to hook into the network with a wireless bridge and hold up the internet servers I want to build back there. My ISP will let me have as many DHCP assigned public IPs as I want, so that's part of the future too.
Vehicles I'm not really going to cover with this report, suffice it to say that we've got two of them, they're both functional they each have 200K miles on them and we're putting over 1k miles a month on each. Refund check this year is going to get us a third early '90s Subaru wagon with a roof rack to accomplish my redundancy comfort level on that front.
The yard is still a disaster, I just plain didn't get to it before the rains came last fall and it is now an uneven muddy mess that I'm just now starting to confront because spring is threatening. 'Course that means we are spending lots of time pruning the apple orchard and it isn't going to be too many more weeks before I have to tune up and sharpen the lawn tractor preparatory for weekly mowing sessions. The shop is in pretty good shape now and I've got a mostly functional metal shop as well as a very functional woodshop. Floor jack and stands make it very useful for the constant oil changes I'm doing on our vehicles and I've got it layed out mostly the way I like it.
Mom had a killer harvest last year and I've been selling her walnuts for her at the counter at my old office as well as at work. We had two extremely successful Cider parties last year and everyone that came said they'd like to be invited again next year. It's really funny how much our friends enjoy coming out here to cut up apples and crank the Cider press after a pot luck dinner. I keep telling them that it is real work, but a good time is had by all. That same harvest cost Mom her prune tree though, so much fruit that two of the three huge trunks cracked and broke in a wind storm we lost several really large walnut branches to the same syndrome. Many of walnut trees on the farm my Grandfather grafted onto Black walnut tree root stock and the English walnut stock grew at a different rate than the root stock. This resulted in an eventual "girdling" of the tree and we lost two of them to this problem last year--actually three but we cut down two of them. We also cut down the pear tree in the back yard behind Mom's bedroom because it too had stopped producing enough to justify its existence.
Work is still in Hillsboro (hence the thousands of miles on the vehicles) at Convergys answering the phones for GM's customer assistance. Maggie and I both work "four tens" so we can get our 40 hours while only commuting on MOnday, Tuesday, Thursday and Fridays. It means we leave the house at 5:30a and don't get home until about 8p on those days, so there's not much time for more than playing our Global Wars on a BBS in the morning over coffee and going to bed when we get home. Our employer works for IBM whom got the contract from General Motors for the next five years and they have promised to shut down our site this coming September. So I spend every Wednesday morning at the McMinnville branch of the State Employment Department looking for work closer to home.
In summary, I'd have to say that life goes on and we're really quite content with the way it is doing so.
Doug
