I got up early this morning when I didn’t have to. The dog decide to bark at something, he usually sleeps in late. But I got up and around, checked my email, the news and my blog. Not much happened since last evening on the blog, so I went to get some other things done. I come back in 1/2 hour and the site is blocked. Good April Fools prank, but I couldn’t find the back door. Oh well, I had things to do.

Laundry check, dishes check. Pick up daughter, oops she was still in Fort Wayne. Check
Movie with friends Check. All told a very good evening.

Tomorrow I’ll may write about my new toy. But I may be busy with it instead.

I made chicken for dinner and thought that it would taste good with some salsa on it. It did, but I put on a bit much. Now I’m paying for it. Up late at night waiting for antacids to kick in. You can’t put it back in the jar after it hits partially cooked chicken. And it was the good stuff too, lots of heat.

Ahh, the joys of aging. I still like all the spicy stuff, but it doesn’t like me as much as it used to. The cast iron stomach seems to have some rust.

On another note, I miss my laptop. Even though I got the tower up and running again, it was so easy to have the laptop with me wherever I wanted to be. I have an old machine going, but it is very, very, very slow. I think it is slower than my internet connection. I do have it loaded with a full version of Unbuntu Linux at this time, maybe that is pushing it a bit. I wonder if it would work with the netbook version of that OS. I may have to try it and find out. I need to get a list of USB or other wireless cards that work with Unbuntu or Puppy Linux. I have two old laptops that I have installed Linux on and only 1 wireless card that works. The newer of the two laptops has an internal wireless, but Linux doesn’t like that one either. I even tried a backdoor way that was supposed to allow the use of the windows drivers. No go. I guess for now I share. I really can’t use two laptops at once can I?

As March comes to a close, I need to reflect or dream about the first part of April and the coming Major League Baseball season. While I have followed the spring exploits of my favorite team, I can’t really get excited about spring training. Until this last week of spring training, we hardly ever see a complete starting lineup. There are a variety of minor league prospects, players past their prime and those with little or nothing to offer all trying to get the the 25 player roster. Those that have it made are just getting loose for the coming season. Some good ball is played, but as it is often said, it doesn’t count.

Next week the real games start. I will be following every score. Grumbling at losses or poor play. Feeling aggravated when a star player is hurt or not doing well. Cheering for every win.

So if you follow baseball, this is the time of year you’ve been waiting for. If you don’t, your time will come. 😉

My promise to myself. I’m going to go to at least 1 major league game this season. I don’t know when or even where, but I will do it.

And to my fellow old-time tangenteers, Good luck to your teams, until they play my favorite team. 😉

Go Tigers.

Well, I received an email last Friday. It was a request for my ‘acting’ ability. I have been on a self imposed hiatus from theater, so I didn’t think I would be doing any sort of acting in the near future. I was wrong. I will be the understudy for one of the actors. He can’t do all of the performances, so I will do the one he will miss. I’m just lucky it is a small role with very easy dialog. I get to be a love struck honeymooner. I’ve done that role once in real life, I think I can handle it. I played that role for 20 years.

This will be a little different. It is a dinner theater with audience participation. I’m looking forward to it. The audience will be sitting around and in the middle of our acting. Should be fun. The character I have doesn’t have too much interaction with the audience, but I do have to be aware of where they are located during my various scenes.

I will have to get some information as to the cost of the performances. Should be interesting.

I’m making sure that the internet access and printer are hooked up for my youngest at college. If this posts, I know everything works.

So the drive was very damp as rain fell during the entire trip. It is sometimes fun to drive on the expressways when the rain falls. The trip today was uneventful.

Yesterday’s trip to and from Toledo were not as uneventful. I saw two semis driving erratically. One on the way in and one on the way home. The one on the way home bothered me enough that I pulled into the rest stop to let him get farther ahead.

Well, I made it home so that may have been a good decision.

Another year gone, and the Williams County Maple Syrup day is over. We ate more pancakes, sausage and real fresh from the tree maple syrup. I’m still not sure when we started doing this, but as ia family we’ve been doing it for years. Another ride out to the sugar shack, where they make the syrup and tap the trees. The family seemed to enjoy themselves.

This year additional family friends showed up. My children went off on there own to be with their friends. I had many pancakes, sausages and cups of coffee. Yum. Of course I purchased some syrup to have the rest of the year and some maple sugar candy to have a bit later.

This day of course reminds me of days gone by. We spent many days like this with family and friends. It was a time to celebrate good food, good friends and good family. These days, from maple syrup days to days at the fair, were days to bask in our lives together. The family we had, the friends we made were the good things in life.

And who says there is nothing going on in the boondocks. 😉

It has been 2 years of blogging for this old man. Sure I like tech stuff, but writing about this or that was never something I thought I would do on a consistent basis. But 543 blog posts later, I guess I surprised myself.

I’ve rambled on about many things. Life, family, friends, movies, food, theater and the list could go on.

As the background of our little blogging world is changing (Not a bad look either), I’m wondering what direction to take my own blogging efforts in the next year. I’m sure I will continue to write about things I find important or interesting (I wouldn’t do this otherwise), but I wondering about content. During the first 2 years I said very little about two subjects. Part of that is something I learned in my youth. “Every topic is fair game except Religion and Politics”. These two subjects seem to bring out the best and the worst in some people. In like minded people, the discussions can be calm and rational. In other groups, the discussions tend not to be so rational. Provoking confrontation was not something I wanted in my blog. So I tend to avoid those two subjects. Is this good, bad or indifferent? I’m not sure, but since I usually avoid those subjects in real life, I guess it is me. So that is not a direction I will be taking.

What is left? More of the same? I’m not sure at the moment. I guess we will see.

It is a cool, wet, dreary day. I have a fire going and the house is warm and comfortable. As I sit and watch the clouds gray thoughts find their way into my mind. I have thoughts of little gray mice and large gray elephants. Gray skies and gray tree trunks. It is spring time, but the green has yet to bloom forth, so I am here with gray.

I have a picture of a sunset. I’ve talked about it before. It is of a sunset in these very woods. I’m not sure if that was a spring time sunset or not, but there are no leaves on the trees, so I will ‘assume’ it is spring. Since I was the one who took the picture, I know the day was cool, but not too cold. So either spring or fall works. That picture is full of reds, oranges and yellows. That is not today. Today is a gray day.

Gray can describe a mood, or just a color. Today is all about the color. In the early day of computer screens and graphics our displays were in gray scales. There was the same type of thing in early TV, movies and films. Black and white mixed give us various shades of gray. In a colorful world those shades of gray are often missed and ignored. But in the black and white world of old graphics and the new world of e-book readers their are gray scales. Those scales brought realism in a time of black and white movies and TV. They are not the color of life, but they are the shadings of life.

Gray had me thinking a bit today.

I’ve been complaining that my laptop is broken for some time now, but I never used that opportunity to fix my Power Box. I’ve had stuff to do on it for a couple of years now, but it just wouldn’t boot up properly after I installed a new hard drive. I thought I knew what the problem was, but I never undertook the job of actually looking at it. So today I did.

Yes, the problem was exactly what I thought it was. It was trying to boot from the old disk drive. Unfortunately, this drive no longer had any operating system on it. It was still formated as a bootable drive, but there was nothing to boot to. Quick spin through the bios, and that drive is no longer on the boot list. YEAH.

Now I just have to find all of the stuff I needed to do and finish it up. Yes, there may be a Godspell video in there somewhere. I guess I’ll have to stop blogging after my software updates from more than 1 year of inactivity.

More work for me. I’m glad I took a break from theater for a while… 😉

For a while, my laptop’s screen started working again. I took it in to have it checked out, and they cleaned some contacts in hope that it would solve the problem. It did for a while. Buy now, it stopped working again. I guess I need to fork over some cash now to get a new backlight.

Right now I have it hooked up to my TV, but I have to sit too close so I can see the writing. Just not a comfortable way to do this unless I move the couch to within 2 feet of the TV, or set the screen resolution to a bigger size, so I can see the print from across the room. Oh well, I hope to back up the drive tonight and take the machine in tomorrow.

I also finally hooked up a wireless keyboard to the machine. This actually works very well. I’ve had the keyboard/mouse for a long time, I just never bothered to hook it up. I was hoping to be able to sit across the room looking at the TV screen.

I just set the screen to a different resolution, and can almost make out the print from across the room. I could definitely play computer games this way. I just don’t play that many computer games.

Maybe I could use this to watch baseball soon. If my connection speed is still good, I may have to sign up for the MLB package.