At work today we had an all-day waste of time meeting at a hotel about two miles from the office.
We had our first break about 10 minutes into the meeting. That’s when the facilitator mentioned that cars which didn’t have a special ticket on display would be towed and half the people in the room ran out to their cars.
(They probably should have printed that on the ticket….)
I don’t have anything to add to this. Apparently politicians and serial killers have similar personality traits.
Any comments I might add would just be superfluous.
Wylie and I generally go out for a walk three times a day. If the weather’s nice and things are calm, there’s sometimes a “bonus walk,” but those three core walks provide a sense of normalcy no matter what else may be going on.
The early morning and late afternoon/early evening walks are really just a chance to get out and stretch our legs while Wylie checks his messages at various neighborhood hydrants. But there’s nothing routine about our evening walks. Those have become the stuff of legend.
During this past Thursday’s walk, Wylie was very intent on cataloging all the new scents around the neighborhood. It had rained almost every day for the past two weeks (and indeed, most of the past two months), so the scents were particularly fresh, to the point where even a human such as I could appreciate some of them.
So intent was he on the scents of the grass, earth, and trees, Wylie completely failed to notice when he walked within 10 feet of a deer.
On the one hand, I really do believe it’s commendable that Wylie is able concentrate so intently on a given task. I’m a little jealous of his powers of concentration.
But I sometimes find myself thinking ol’ Wylie needs a seeing-eye dog.
A busy day today. So far today I’ve walked the dog, done some light grocery shopping, bought gas, fixed the lawnmower, mowed the lawn, and dug up the garlic crop.
And now it’s time for lunch. (No connection to the garlic.)
I’m not overly impressed with T-mobile as a cellular provider, but I am quite amused and delighted by some of things my G-1 phone can do. This “phone” is really a full-blown handheld computer.
Back in October, there were zombies at Whole Foods. (I maintain that the other shoppers’ failure to notice anything unusual is proof that I wasn’t the only zombie in the store that night.)
Last Friday, the Seattle Police Department arrested a zombie. True, it was a misunderstanding involving a promotion for a horror convention, but it’s worth bearing in mind:
I took a few moments out of my evening tonight in order to update to the most recent version of the Mozy Home backup software. The dense legalese on these click-through licenses is almost impossible for us mere mortals to understand (I can’t find the citation, but evidently the courts have ruled some of them to unenforceable), but I’ve fallen into the habit of skimming them just in case something leaps out at me. And sure enough, every so often I find evidence that the lawyers are out of control.
Mozy’s terms of use include this paragraph (Unnecessary capitalization is theirs. Red and bold is mine.):
THE FOREGOING LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY SHALL APPLY WHETHER THE DAMAGES ARISE FROM USE OR MISUSE OF AND RELIANCE ON THE SOFTWARE OR SERVICE, FROM INABILITY TO USE THE SOFTWARE OR SERVICE, OR FROM THE INTERRUPTION, SUSPENSION, OR TERMINATION OF THE SOFTWARE OR SERVICE (INCLUDING SUCH DAMAGES INCURRED BY THIRD PARTIES). DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN BALL. SUCH LIMITATION SHALL APPLY NOTWITHSTANDING A FAILURE OF ESSENTIAL PURPOSE OF ANY LIMITED REMEDY AND TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.
The paragraph before that states: “FURTHERMORE, YOU AGREE TO USE THE SOFTWARE OR SERVICE EXCLUSIVELY FOR GOOD AND FOR AWESOME.”
And then we’re back to the usual idiocy:
THE SOFTWARE AND SERVICE ARE NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN CONNECTION WITH ANY NUCLEAR, AVIATION, MASS TRANSIT, OR MEDICAL APPLICATION OR ANY OTHER INHERENTLY DANGEROUS APPLICATION THAT COULD RESULT IN DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE, OR MASS DESTRUCTION, AND LICENSEE AGREES THAT LICENSOR WILL HAVE NO LIABILITY OF ANY NATURE AS A RESULT OF ANY SUCH USE OF THE SOFTWARE.
When I came home Friday evening, the first thing I did was to head upstairs to take down the gate so Wylie could come downstairs. For the second time this week, I reached the bottom of the stairs just in time to see Wylie come out of the bathroom, leading me to chuckle at the notion that I’d just missed catching him with a newspaper.
Wylie’s not a big fan of violent weather; distant thunderstorms upset him and when the big storms come into the immediate vicinity, Wylie heads for someplace safe. Usually this means he comes looking for the alpha dog, but when I’m not around, the upstairs bathroom becomes Wylie’s storm cellar.
We’ve had a few big storms lately; this week they’ve included heavy winds and a bit of thunder.
After a little while I happened to glance out into the back yard and noticed that the storm had broken one of the trunks on the crabapple tree. Looking a little closer, I saw a big pine branch laying on the other side of the fence.
I have a couple large pines near my house. A particularly large one is just to the side.
Going out into the back yard, I discovered that in addition to the crabapple tree, two large pieces had broken loose from the pine next to my house. Along with the branch which landed behind the fence, another was laying in the yard. It looks like they were probably the same branch, somehow falling in two places. Judging by the hole it left in the ground, the piece in the yard missed my deck by less than six inches.
After taking Wylie for his late afternoon walk, I got the ladder out of the shed and checked out the back part of the upper roof. Everything looks to be OK, but I’m thinking it’s a good thing I trimmed those branches last weekend!
So it appears that “clean up storm debris” has been added to this weekend’s list of chores.
The North American letterbox once ranged across the continent in herds so large as to darken the plains from horizon to horizon. These gentle beasts had no fear of humans and would frequently wander into population centers. It was once common to find clusters of letterboxes on street corners in urban areas.
By the beginning of the 21st century, overgrazing and invasion of their habitats by other communication media had resulted in a massive decline of the wild letterbox population. Today the largest populations of North American letterboxes are found in zoos such as the one below.
The letterboxes shown here are part of a herd being kept at a postal center in Rockville where scientists are attempting to repopulate the species through a captive breeding program.
Rachel and Evangeline seem to have chosen as their favorite “Uncle Blair story” the tale of the time back in college when I was trying to get some peace and quiet so I could study. In an effort to get away from their father and their Uncle Steve, I finally ended up going out on the porch roof at which point they locked the window behind me. This didn’t bother me over much, but when they kept annoying me by banging on the window, I finally lost my temper and banged my elbow against the window. An important lesson my nieces have hopefully taken away from this story is that tempered glass doesn’t hold up very well against elbows.
I needed to do some home maintenance this afternoon, cutting back some branches that were brushing up against the roof. Although this post was written from the comfort of my home office, I’d like to think that Rachel and Evangeline will appreciate the fact that I sent their father a copy of the photo below while sitting in the exact spot where I’d taken it just a few moments earlier.
