Spring has sprung?

Well, maybe not, but it’s definitely going to be a bit warmer than it had been the last two weeks.

But The Boy got sprung today. Seems the legal system still does most stuff by snail-mail, and the President’s Day holiday put all that behind by a day. But the judge’s office faxed the waiver to the jail after she signed it, and they turned him loose.

Naturally, Mrs. Fetched was stuck at the chicken houses, helping to bring in the new batch of chicks — so he walked to his apartment. She went by there later, and found nobody at home, so they must have gone out to celebrate or something.

I get a few days of freedom, too: Mrs. Fetched is taking Daughter Dearest to Savannah for the All-State Chorus performance. Well, I have to work tomorrow and Friday, so one day of freedom. If that: I’ve been committed to attend a birthday party. I’ll deal, especially since Daughter Dearest’s boyfriend is stuck here too.

Oh, speaking of freedom, M.A.E. moved out today. She really hadn’t been here much anyway, but she got all her stuff this evening. That didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would!

Hyacinth

Hyacinth

I got this for Mrs. Fetched on Valentine’s Day, and it had three blooms on it then. It has been busy in the last week!

I also got a shot with Clickzilla; it’ll be interesting to see how much detail got picked up on that film thing.

Best Euphemism EVER

“Accidental Ingestion of Airborne Protein” — it sounds so much more pleasant than “swallowing a bug.”

Visitation

We went to see The Boy today, on his scheduled visitation. He looked resplendent in his orange jumpsuit, let me tell you. He should be out either Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on whether they count Friday as a full day.

I can’t tell if he’s learned anything from this or not — he makes the right noises, but he’s good at that. I think he’s going to come home for a day or so then go back to his apartment. The bad part about that is that he’ll be back in with the same friends that got him where he is; the good part is that he’ll be closer to wherever he finds work (which is important since his driver’s license has been suspended for six months).

The preacher met us at the jail, and he gets a pass to come in any time, so he’s going to have some one-on-one with The Boy tomorrow. I hope that goes well.

Good News, Bad News

Bad news first. Things at work have been absolutely crazy the last week or so. Trying to catch up, I brought a couple of projects home with me that are getting down to the wire. I managed to finish the first one this afternoon; trying to decide whether I want to do more than poke at the second one tonight.

The good news is that the documentation projects have rescued me from a weekend of chicken house duty. Given a choice between the two, I’ll take the work work any day.

We have snow flurries outside, and a good fire inside. Stay warm. Family Man, do some extra slacking for me tomorrow….

Friday Night Cinema

Looks like the warming trend starts next week… right on time. But tonight, it’s too cold to get out and you have no cash anyway. Never fear, Friday Night Cinema brings free flicks right to your computer screen!

With The Boy in the clink for the next 5 to 10 days, maybe something longer than the usual short-short would be appropriate. How about…

A blast from the past, all the way back to 1938: yes, it’s Reefer Madness!

Days of confinement

Looks like this is more of a short-term kick in the head. The Boy reports to his probation officer tomorrow, a cop picks him up and carts him to the clink. He spends up to 10 days there, on a “2 for 1” basis: every day of good behavior is one day off. So if he doesn’t screw up, he’ll be there 5 days. He doesn’t get to smoke, so that’s probably going to be the worst part (immediately, at least).

More importantly, he loses his driver’s license for six months — and worst of all, loses the chance to have his record deleted after he completes his probation. No fun.

Hello Again

Guess who’s back at the free-range insane asylum?

Yup, M.A.E. her own self.

When we last saw M.A.E., she was on her way out the door to move in with her new boyfriend. That lasted all of a week or two, when she found out he had been playing around on the side all along (or was she the one on the side?). She wound up with her psycho mom for a while, then landed with some people in the next town south. That blew up last week, precipitated by the same thing that got her out of FAR Manor (spending the night with some “people” they didn’t know) and she finally got around to asking us over the weekend if she could come back here.

Mrs. Fetched and I were both against the idea. Neither one of us thought she’d learned much, or would be willing to deal with The Rules — but our renters need some help with their grand-triplets (the mom is there but not helping) so we thought maybe she could stay with them. That isn’t happening either. However, she’s lined up a place with some friends who have moved to Virginia, so Mrs. Fetched decided she could use FAR Manor as a staging area — basically, her tax return will pay for a bus/train ticket on outta here. In the meantime, she’ll be spending a couple of days per week dealing with the triplets. I think this will be good for her; she’s always fancied herself a daycare worker.

That’s the plan, anyway. I figure she’ll be here for months. Oh well: I don’t get to walk around in my undies anymore, but she always makes for interesting blog material.

Abandoned Farmhouse

Abandoned Farmhouse

This long-abandoned homestead caught my eye a couple of weeks ago on a sunny weekend afternoon.

How Much Weirder Can Life Get??? (UPDATED)

Here’s one straight out of the X-Files.

Russian fishermen don’t know what they caught, but they ate it anyway

This video is just… well, I hope it’s faked.

UPDATE!
The mystery is solved: Scott on Techcomm tells us, “It's a guitarfish (a.k.a. shovelnose ray, shovelnose shark), and they're actually very tasty fish.” Whew. Just knowing it's just strange instead of other-worldly makes me feel better. :-)

R.I.P. Lapdancer

The rework fix to Lapdancer, my iBook, seems to have been temporary — or rather, the fix let it live long enough for something else to happen.

I was happily plonking around online yesterday, playing some music, when I took my headphones off for a short break. Hearing the iBook fan humming along, I reached around to find things were pretty warm in the back. I decided to shut it down, but too late — it locked up before I could do it.

Coming back a few hours later, after things had cooled down, I started it up. I heard the chimes, but got nothing on the screen and the USB ports weren't talking either. I’m afraid that the heatsink I put on the graphics chips may have contributed to the problem.

So it’s definitely time for a new computer. Daughter Dearest’s iBook didn’t respond to the rework fix, although the technician told me to bring it back if it didn’t work and she would give it a second try. Maybe we’ll get one of them working.

Friday Night Cinema (double feature)

Too late to go see a movie! But don’t worry, Friday Night Cinema brings short flicks right to your computer, so you’ll still have time to brush your teeth and let the dog out.

Tonight, we have a double feature of commercials that (for whatever reason) were never aired — and both of them crank the laugh knob to 11!

Bottle opener

Answer the… phone…

Jailhouse Blues

I really don’t know how to finesse this one. The Boy went to his scheduled probation visit on Tuesday, they gave him a drug test, and you can guess how that went. They’re giving him until next Friday to report to the clink. He’s not too happy about it, obviously… and is trying to tell us he wasn’t doing anything like that. Um, yeah, right. Can second-hand smoke show up on a drug test? I really don’t know, but I still think he had a little something here & there. He just doesn’t believe in consequences.

He mentioned running, although Mrs. Fetched warned him what would come of that. I just wish they’d stick him in boot camp or something; he might learn to take some responsibility for himself.

Reality is Stranger Than Fiction

Here’s the plot. Work with me on this one, OK? You’ve got these three astronauts, two women and a man. One of the women gets jealous, drives 1600 miles to confront her, and gets charged with attempted murder. Great late-night movie plot, right? Oh, never mind.

All right, let’s say you’re a huge company and your product isn’t selling in Asia as well as you thought it would. What do you do: survey your potential customers to see what you could do better… or insult them?

Dang. It’s a good thing I never tried to become a novelist — you just can’t make up stuff as weird as what reality throws at you.

Surprised?

Looks like iTunes has problems with Vista. In other news, the sun rose in the east this morning and it’s cold in the winter. I don’t remember where I said it, but I had figured the development motto at Microsoft was “Vista ain’t done ’til iTunes won’t run.”

Microsoft, according to the article, “has a team working with Apple to make iTunes fully functional on Vista.” Call me cynical, but I wonder whether they’ll actually slow things down — whether they mean to or not.

In the News

From The Register, of course…

From the “Quit While You’re Ahead” department: you bet WHAT on that hand?

OK, I remember what high school was like. I could understand shucking your clothes and running amok in the cafeteria… but what’s with the grapeseed oil?

Questions abound.

Friday Night Cinema

Man, has this week ever gotten away from me — still haven’t finished the podcast, and now it’s going to be a January/February edition. I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t have time to sit through a full-length movie right now.

It’s winter out there, so let’s warm things up with a FLAMING TUBA!

Hello Wet Snowy February

This isn’t the first time a change of month has been somewhat dramatic.

4–5 inches of snow in front of FAR Manor

We were up pretty late last night; some co-workers drove all the way up to FAR Manor to avail themselves of Mrs. Fetched’s video editing services. As always, it took several hours longer than expected; they didn’t get out of here until nearly midnight (and she charges by the hour, cha-ching!). But they were happy, and that’s what counts.

So the weather dudes were predicting possible light icing and up two 2 inches of snow “in the higher elevations.” Oops.

The good part is, we were up so late wrapping up with file conversions that I needed a good excuse to sleep late this morning. Looks like I got it! Unfortunately, I have to get into the office today; I have a critical project that needs finishing and I have to deliver the video files to the co-workers.


I’ll wrap this up with some more snow…

More snow

A second picture of today’s snow…


…and a video clip of last year’s snow, two weeks short of a year ago.

Stay warm and dry if you can. (Yeah, yeah, Solar, I know you will!)

Dreams Deferred Are Dreams Denied?

Some mornings, I hold my nose and see what commercial radio has to say for itself. I just skip from station to station as the commercials come on, until I get tired of it and retreat to Album 88. But a part of a segment caught my ear earlier this week.

One pair of chatterboxes was talking — I’m not sure if it was about someone who called in or how they heard about it — about a woman who was pretty sure her boyfriend planned to “pop the question” on Valentine’s Day. Amazingly enough, she had a problem with it: while she loves him, she wants to be a stay-at-home mom, and he earns about half what she does. The callers were predictably falling into the “marry him anyway” camp, even the one guy out of the five calls they aired. My own thoughts were rather uncharitable as well. But something one of the callers said stuck with me, and it came back to mind this morning: it’s good she has this dream, but could they not put off having kids until they got more financially secure and then she could do the full-time hausfrau career?

When I got out of college, I had a few dreams of my own — but as John Lennon said, “ Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” I wanted to be completely debt-free by now, and on track to retire by 50: I have a mortgage that might be paid off when I’m 73. I wanted a place that was as energy self-sufficient as possible: no money for as much as a single solar panel. I dreamed of being able to schedule work around my life: our lives revolve around four chicken houses that don’t belong to us.

Mrs. Fetched wondered why I didn’t tell her I had these dreams when I was objecting to the runaway psychotic episode that ended with us buying FAR Manor. I did, repeatedly, and not just then. She just wasn’t listening.

So after thinking about it, I’m not sure what the right thing is for the woman in question. It’s good to love someone. And yet, if things don’t work out and she has to scuttle her plans — especially if her potential husband is the reason — she could end up resenting him in the end. But if she marries someone else simply because he can support her dream, where’s the self-respect?

I’m glad I don’t have to make the decision for her.

The Bane of My Existence

Courtesy of Google Earth

Look upon its evil and tremble! Approach only with your nose held firmly shut against its stench! Tarry not, lest you find your weekends sacrificed to its endless need!

(It's a pretty recent shot, judging from the debris on the north side.)