Stuff Archives

Sadly it has been brought to my attention that, since taking on semi-retirement, one of my parents has taken to “beering it up.” It appears that the call of the pint has become too much and they spend a lot of their time seeking one out. Pictured below at recent family get together (wedding I think - I wasn't invited, but that's another topic), the offending parent can be seen “sneaking in a quick one” leaving the other to follow round finding something else to do (appears to be photography).
When asked about the problem, we unfortunately mentioned the term “bag lady” and got the reply “Bag lady. I'll give you bag lady. When I ran a charity shop I used to sort through a hundred bags every day. And that was in the morning before my first cup of tea or any of the help had arrived.” Clearly knowing that we'd said something wrong, we decided to tread lightly, but were then growled at with something that sounded like “geroffmeangingbaskets”

Those who know me will be aware that I have a deep rooted background in fashion. Once upon a time I was part of the design team for my father's empire designing high quality fashion items such as acrylic cardigans. You hear about all the cut throat activities around the catwalks of London, Paris and Milan, but let me tell you, designing for the blue rinse posse of Skeggy is just as hard.

So, what's all this got to do with the price of cheese. Well, I remember many years ago as a lad, we'd sit there and people watch (as everyone does from time-to-time) commenting on what people wear. Many a time would we say of folk older than ourselves “at what point did you think you would look good in that?”

Which leads me to the big question of “at what point did you think it would be OK, let alone look good wearing a cowboy hat?”

Well folks, the answer to that one is 38 years, 5 months and 18 days. I can't really say when the transformation occurred. What I can say is that I was innocently in a hardware store buying some drill bits and they had some cowboy hats on a rack. I picked one up and tried it on, then put it back. Strange that somewhere in the back of my mind was this nagging thought that I bet I look good in that. So I searched for a proper shop - yep, I used and Internet search engine to find my local cowboy hat and went out and bought one. And sadly, yes, I'm wearing it most of the time I got out (with the exception of for work).

The big plus side is that William really likes it. Also strange to think that he likes it now, but wait until those teenage years when he's embarrassed to be seen with me and will just hate me for everything I wear, let alone the hat. Can't wait - it's going to be so much fun, especially as I've saved a bunch of compromising photos from his childhood that I will put up on a projector when he brings his first girlfriend home. (We have a lot of out of work therapists around here so I'm sure I'll get a good deal). Anyway, here are a couple of images of Billy the Kid in my cowboy hat.

Couple of things to note. First is that the hat doesn't look big on him (little fathead). Second, Mum, I wasn't joking when I said we'd got some pretty good cactus plants.

There's not a lot to say other than congratulations to Michael Phelps for a feat that may not be beaten for a very, very long time (if at all). Amazing to think that he's won more gold medals than some countries will.

After everything that's been going on with me I can probably be forgiven for asking myself the question “am I dead yet?“ (the title of a song by GBH) particularly when I woke one morning this week with several vultures circling overhead.
Turns out that one of the deer featured in the Bar-B-Que article I wrote a couple of weeks ago has died in the garden. It's actually in the open part of the garden, not the bit that's fenced off. Very difficult to tell what happened - it may have been hit by a car and then crawled down to the bottom of our garden where it died. Anyway, I thought about taking a photo of it, but thought that too grim. The photo below was a great idea, but it didn't come out very well. It's of the two turkey vultures in the photo above sitting on a branch above half a dozen wild turkeys. You're kind of going to have to take my word for it as you can't really see either the vultures or the turkeys very clearly. If it came out well, I was going to put it up on the caption competition page with something like “Mother: I've told you not to play with your food. Child: It wasn't me - it just got up and walked off.”
Anyway, even though I didn't get the photo of the turkey vultures above the turkeys to come out, I did spot my little offspring on the sofa in my office when I grabbed the camera and here's what came out with a one off shot:

Many times over the last few weeks I've challenged Karen over the ability to picture things dimensionally. A good example of this has been when we've been cabling the house and I've said that all you need to do is drill through this wall and it comes out in the garage and then you just run the cable down and through the wall into the crawl space here ... and she's kind of looking at me with a blank stare of “if you say so.”

So why is it that when I just went to Home Depot to buy some piping to use as an umbrella stand (long story - I've mounted a pipe on the railings of the balcony so that we can put an umbrella in it to keep off the evening sun so we can eat outside) ... so why was it that when I bought the piping that comes in 10 foot lengths did I get to my car before I figured out that it wouldn't fit inside. To give me a little credit, I have a convertible and I'd thought that I'd just take the roof down and have it hanging out a little - I just hadn't realized how much. Thankfully nobody had a camera (that I'm aware of) and I just went back into the store to get the pipe cut in half.

About the only thing more embarrassing would have been to be walking down the street and to look up, at all things, at a Macy's sign such that I walked into and tripped over a fire hydrant. But that would never happen ... would it?

Spam, spam, spam, spam ....

As well as being a cool song and sketch for Monty Python, it's also the name given to unwanted mail - particularly electronic mail. I'm not telling you anything you didn't know.

When I was in hospital my doctor emailed me and it got blocked by my spam filter. Ever since then I've gone into my “spam box” to check that other important mail is not being filtered out.

I do find it interesting how some of these mail messages are being titled. I commented somewhere about getting a message to “increase the size of my banana” which was one that caught my attention. And I have to say with my lack of musical talent, I have no idea why I'm receiving a bunch of emails offering me a bigger organ. I dread to think what noise I'd make if I was let loose with one.

Anyway, sticking with the same theme, I had a bout of emails with the title “update your penis” like it's some sort of software. Maybe even a piece of hardware that's now due for a firmware update which, if you read in all the puns, is probably what they're getting at. But it did get me to thinking what if you could just update your penis? Would you see someone in the toilets taking a quick glance to the side and exclaiming “oh my god! You've got the new penis 2.0”. The person with the update being really happy that somebody noticed but not really wanting to let on - “err, yes”. Then you'd get into some surreal conversation around “well, how's it working for you? I'm thinking of getting one myself.”

Then I thought - that's probably why someone invented spam filters - to stop me having stupid thoughts.

I posted some pictures last week of some of the visitors to the garden. Well, we've had three deer (mother and two babies) decide to pop round and eat some of the plants and trees in the garden.And the number of wild turkeys have increased to about 15.So don't be surprised if you stop round and get offered venison or a turkey burger.

As I've moved into the new house I've started to do some DIY jobs in order to get things sort of looking how I want them. Basically an excuse to play with power tools. Probably not the most sensible thing given I'm on blood thinners, but it's boys with toys and you just can't suppress that urge.

Now, most people probably grew up with their fathers passing on the philosophy that if you're going to buy a tool, spend the money and buy a decent tool that will last you a life time. Well, me being me, I've completely ignored that advice and gone with the theory that a) I'm really not going to be doing much DIY and b) so long as the person who I pay to come out and fix the mistakes I make has the decent tools that's all that matters. Just so you can get a sense of the quality of products I'm buying, I bought a jigsaw for $15 the other week. Mr O asked whether it as a 700 piece floor jigsaw, but, joking aside, a jigsaw puzzle would cost a lot more that $15.

Anyway, armed with my new jigsaw I set about cutting back a cabinet to fit a new TV that I'd bought. This lasted all of two minutes until I realized that I couldn't fit the jigsaw in to cut round the bit I wanted, so I ended up using a sawzall which is even less refined than a jigsaw. Good job I didn't want an even line - I'm sure that would have been easy to do. I've gone for a more wibbly-wobbly look so that it looks a little more creative.

The other thing I've done is Cat-6'd the house so that I can channel TV through the house over a computer network. Very clever setup, I've got two networks - the primary takes the main computing so this server, work computer and Karen's computer to the Internet (and the phone as we use VOIP). There's then a secondary network for the TV to keep the streaming separate from the Internet Traffic. I've got two digital TV feeds into a computer (with the new ATI TV wonder digital decoders so that you can get premium channels) through Windows Media Center (by far the best thing Microsoft has produced). This computer is hooked up to the main TV and then I've got two linksys media center extenders and an XBox 360 feeding another three TVs. One of the connections is wireless and, for the most part, seems to stream HD OK. Really just means I can use a computer as a DVR and feed TV, music etc. through to any room in the house. (With the ability to change channel in any room of the house and not having to buy a digital decoder for every room). With the house being on the side of a hill, this kind of made it easy to do the cabling as you can stand up in the crawl space under the house. Below is a quick picture of the cat-6 between the two routers and a printer.As it happens, he is the sixth cat I've had although technically he's the seventh I've been around as my folks had a cat when I was born (many, many years ago).

So, what's gone on since the site was last up? Well, one of the things that's happened is that it's now against the law to talk on your mobile phone in California. Something that's been against the law in the UK for many years ... apparently as nobody really seems to take it seriously.

Well, it's caused a little stir over here as some people are complaining that it targets only one specific distraction. Some people have also made the point that it's OK to use a computer to send an email, but not to talk on a mobile. That said, I doubt there's really that many people on the roads checking email otherwise they may have targeted this.

Anyway, not one to want to break the law, I've thought I'd give a go at shifting things around. It's not illegal to eat in your car so I thought why not get all my calls done, then take lunch whilst I'm driving - should still be able to get the same efficiencies. Obviously it needed to be something simple, so I thought a sandwich would fit the bill. Nice thought, but I cut myself twice whilst trying to cut the baguette, got butter smeared all over the passenger seat when I had to slam the breaks on as I nearly ran a red light and lost a piece of cheese somewhere behind the seat as I was trying to grate it. And if you think that's bad, you don't want to know how much mess just having a drink caused. Freshly squeezed orange juice maybe good for you, but it's a nightmare to keep the squeezer steady whilst you're driving.

The housing woes seem to continue. I suppose woes is too strong a word as it's really not that bad. Our buy seems to be fairly straight forward - we got ready to go on that a while back - sorted the mortgage out and removed all the contingencies etc. etc. Really just waiting for the cash from our sale to seal the deal and move in.

The sale of this house has been problematic in the sense that our buyers struggled to get a loan (apparently due to the banks imposing more restrictions post the sub prime collapse, but I'm not really in a position to comment as we didn't see this ourselves) and then there seems to have been some confusion over the actual close date. We'd been working off the one in the contract which strangely is the right one. Anyway, it seems as if it's all worked out. The close date on the contract should be tomorrow on Monday and it looks like everything's going to work out on that date. So really it's getting exciting.

We were over to sign our documents on Saturday and decided to go out for one of our walks. For anyone interested, I'm using the Bay Area Hiker website to find these trails. It's a great site that gives you details on what to expect. So, why was I surprised when I ended up absolutely knackered after walking a trail for 1.7 miles with a 500ft elevation change? I don't think I actually realized what I was embarking on until it was too late.

The trail was at the Huckleberry Botanic Regional Preserve and is really nice. It's a path about a foot wide wandering through the thick wooded area of a hillside. Great trail to walk and we heard lots of birds, but unfortunately you couldn't really get any clear pictures as they were just jumping from branch to branch inside the trees. In fact I only managed to capture two birds.

Interestingly though, the first one is a Spotted Towhee - something I've not seen before. The second is an American Tobin which is very common.