Yearly Archives: 2006

A Dull Entry

Not too much to say today.  Yesterday was a mix of being rough and easy with the boys.  They managed to find stuff to do most of the day (of course I helped), and didn’t miss the camping too much.  But, no matter how busy I kept them, they still found time to get into a couple of fights/yelling matches.  Fun for all!

I’m still trying to get the house back in order after the camping trip.  Hopefully I can get all of it done before Marnie figures I’m slacking off too much.  And, I may have been.  I worked most of yesterday trying to get VMWare Server running under AMD64 Gentoo.  It’s working now, and should let me bring my number of servers down a bit.  I’m still not sure I want to though.  Hmmm.

Reading
Soul of the Samurai (Thomas Cleary)
– If anyone can point me to an authors web site, I’d appreciate it.

Back from Holidays

We are back from our holidays, and tomorrow we’ll be back into the regular grind.  The camping trip was a smashing success, even though we got hit by a bit of rain.  We ended up having an absolute blast with the swimming, hiking, and canoeing.

On the day we went canoeing, we stopped on a small island and had lunch.  The water was so clear that all of us basically jumped off a rock and went for a swim.  We brought the boys’ floatation vests, and they took to the water like fish.  Whenever we went swimming locally, they never really left the shallow end.  This week, they easily swam in 15 to 20 feet of water, and loved every minute of it.  Jared even swam with his face in the water, holding his breath.  Wow!

Since this was our first camping trip with the boys (except when they were very young), we weren’t sure what to pack.  As it turned out, we packed too much, and not enough stuff.  Too much food and not enough toys.  Too much cookware and not enough utensils.  Thankfully a couple of other campers lent us a bottle and a can opener.

The hikes we did were quite small, when compared to the 3.2 kilometer one I did with the boys a few weeks back.  Still, they were enjoyable and the boys loved them

Basically the trip was full of great memories, not enough pictures, and fun fun fun.  We can’t wait until we do it again.  Next summer, we’ll head out on more than one trip, and we may even try to squeeze a short one in before school starts in three weeks.

Reading
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Stephen King) (one day for the novel)
The Stay-at-Home Dad Handbook (Peter Baylies)

Writing
I didn’t manage to squeeze in any more writing, the kid time was too precious.  But, I can honestly say that the novel and short story in progress were never far from my mind.  I think I’ve come up with some interesting stuff, if I can figure out how to squeeze them in.

Camping

First off, I’ve made another executive decision concerning this blog… all entries will be time stamped with CST, no matter what time zone I’m in. For example, it’s actually 10:24 PM where I am, but this entry is marked as 9:24 PM.

This was our first full day camping. It rained last night, quite a bit, but the tent stayed dry. I suspended a tarp over it before we went to bed. Right now, I’m sitting in front of a camp fire while Marnie and the boys are in the tent telling each other ghost stories. Jared likes to go on and on; maybe he has the story tellers blood. I would be proud.

The morning was spent in the van, mostly. With the rain and the wet, we decided it would be a good time to visit the local touristy area. We did, it was. The end. By the time we got back to the campsite, the sun was out and the day was beautiful. We had a quick lunch and spent the day at the beach. The boys made instant friends, which means Marnie and I got a chance to talk to other parents. One of the parents we spoke to lived only 5 miles (the next farm), from the child that was kidnapped and sexually molested a few weeks back. Bad juju.

Tomorrow we plan a hike and more beach time. More fun should be had.

Reading
The Stay-at-Home Dad Handbook (Peter Baylies)
(although I didn’t read a page today)

Writing
Outlined scenes 36, 37, 38, and 39 in the novel, then I got too tired. It’s wierd, the thoughts just flowed and the words in the outline came easy, but then I hit a brick wall. I need to sleep.

Computers are Weird

Well, I’m not sure what happened to my systems.  People in the neighbourhood say there were no power failures, and my clocks verify that.  Damn weird stuff.

I also lost a drive on my RAID 5, which was no big deal.  I decided to put the new drive into the system on it’s IDE ATA controller, and, believe it or not, it is slower than when I had the drive on USB.  It looks like I need to have a special ATIIPX module to get DMA on my harddrives, which means a kernel compile that I can’t/shouldn’t do during a RAID rebuild.  Sigh.

We’re off on holidays for the next week (camping).  No internet access, nothing.  I’ll bring my laptop anyway (I can’t seem to write longhand in notebooks), so there may be some post-dated entries when we all get back.

Reading
The Stay-at-Home Dad Handbook (Peter Baylies)

A few days rest… maybe

We are back home, for a day and a half. I’ve brought the systems back online. We must have had a large power failure to shut everything down.

Most of the systems came up fine, but the LinkSys 4 port router failed to come up, and hence we appeared down.

Of course, it took me over an hour to figure out that’s what it was. Sigh.

Reading
The Stay-at-Home Dad Handbook (Peter Baylies)

Lazy, Hazy Days of Summer

Today was a nice slow holiday type of day. The boys got haircuts, I read my book, ate too much. Life is good.

I also modified the CityDesk Blog template so that blog entries are time stamped, which allows multiple entries per day.

Reading
Blue Bamboo – Japanese Tales of Fantasy – Osamu Dazai

The Flow of Time Changes on Holidays

Well, holidays are proving themselves to be tough on writing (and blogs)!  Let’s see if I can quickly summarize what’s been going on…

I drove into Saskatoon yesterday, for a quick visit with Ann and Pauline.  It turns out that I managed to land on Pauline’s birthday for the second year in a row.  Dumb luck, I call it.  The date is now in my calendar, so instead of fluking into it, I can actually plan it out next year.  Since it was her birthday, I picked up lunch.  And, since I picked up lunch for Pauline, I got Ann’s as well, which kinda threw Ann into a funk.  She recently got a part time job, and with the extra cash she was making, wanted to pick up the tab for all of us.  Me, being the thick skinned scum-bag that I am, didn’t pick up on her sense of pride, etc, etc.  I’m hoping by the end of the visit, she was over it a bit.  My bad.

Darryl and Diane came over for a two day visit before that.  That can make Gramma’s house a little tight, let me tell you!  We ended up with six adults, two kids, and Abby (yes, they brought the dog).  Abby was brought up to be a house dog, unfortunately she is quite large, which can be problematic at times.  She’s a great dog though, which helps a lot.

That just about summarizes the last three days.  I’m actually posting this on the fourth, in the morning, but I’m going to date it to yesterday.  The eternal optimist in me thinks I may actually get out another blog entry today.

It looks like I can’t post this at all… the server seems to be down, although every other system appears to be up.  Figures.

Reading
Blue Bamboo – Japanese Tales of Fantasy – Osamu Dazai

Writing
I haven’t actully gotten any writing done, but I have managed to think up another sub-plot for the novel.  It should increase the scene count, which should in turn increase the word count a bit.  At my current scene count (outline only), I’d guess I’m at about 80,000 words, and I need to be at 100,000 at least, so the extra scenes should help.

Climb On!

This was Gregors last day in town, so we went rock climbing. We picked up Rob and Ev on the way, and ended up having an absolutely wonderful day.

We started by eating lunch and having a couple of beers, then Gregor tried to lead Weasel Crack (5.7), and got suckered in. For a 5.7, it’s a tricky, deep, off width crack. If you get the sequence wrong, you end up too deep. Which is exactly where the damn thing wants you, so it can spit you out. He bailed, and I finished the lead for him, making up for my abysmal performance on it a couple of weeks ago.

I was feeling pretty good, so I decided to do Gimme Gimme Gimme (5.10). It really has only one 5.10 move on it, and it’s protected by the only bolt on the route. Still, I must have fallen at least a dozen times. Gregor was my belayer, and had the patience of a saint. I finished it, and brought up Gregor and Rob. Fun stuff.

That ended up being it for the day. We ate a bit more of our lunch, finished our beers, and swam in the lake (not neccesarily in that order).

Reading
Kushiel’s Avatar (Jacqueline Carey)

Writing
nope, again