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2003, December

(Week after Thanksgiving)

Well, we survived Thanksgiving. Let's see, there were 12 for dinner, the next day there was a birthday dinner for friend Rachel, Saturday was son Jon's birthday so there was dinner up at Shipshewana (Amish tourist trap) and strawberry pie, then all 4 houseguests left on Sunday after church and I weighed in 4 pounds heavier. Too much eating, not enough working. Faculty-staff Christmas dinner Tuesday evening didn't help a bit. Still have about 2/3 of that maple tree to split, which will help. Electric company will just have to deal with less money now.

Weather has been slushy, if you get my drift The snow is pretty but after the Christmas concert last night I built up the fire and we both put our feet up on the footstool to dry them out. There was also 2 1/2 hours of Handel's Messiah last Sunday evening which was wonderful but those chairs got tired of us.

Kathy's birthday wasn't really passed by; I got her a cheesecake and cherry pie filling to pour on top. That doesn't do much for the weight loss either. Her "present" is bass lessons during the spring semester.

Rich and a student putting up the "tree"
Musical Christmas Tree is still under way. Got the radio station playing music from the computer sound card and almost all of the functionality of the lights transferred over. New system runs under Linux, not DOS, so the changes were severe with all the usual kinds of bugs. And everything is in C++, not Turbo Pascal, quite a change. But now the computer can play the music, run the tree lights, and I can play Solitaire all at the same time. Seriously, I can work on a new program while everything is "running" outside. Still haven't quite got it 100% coordinated. There is a bundle of half a dozen cables that come up through the basement ceiling and emerge right beside a heat vent, so my "control room" is on the main floor and the electronics are in the downstairs "machine room" with the heat pump, water tank and all that stuff. Pictures from last year and this year here Looking back at the construction photos, I seem to recall that we waited until Thanksgiving to put it up last year. See the snow and the earmuffs? Well, we started the day after Halloween this year; temperature in the 60s, much better.

Bit of excitement this week. I installed Windows 2000 on a new disk drive and had a bit of a problem with the modem. Took it out, jotted down model, serial number, all that stuff, and put it back. Now it won't work at all. Tried a phone on the cable. Deader than a doornail. Found a phone off the hook, hung it up. Modem still dead. Tried another cable. No luck. Tried yet another phone cable. Still nothing. Plugged old phone directly into wall jack. Dial tone, no problem. Three bad cables in a row! Fixed that. Modem still won't work. Kept son Jon up until midnight while he talked me through tests using Hyperterm -- oh, my! Gotta take this up with U.S.Robotics. Went to Staples, bought a "cheap" WinModem to tide me over.

Next morning, computer wouldn't boot. (Home office computer, not the Christmas Tree one) SCSI cable not terminated? Switched it off. Got down on the floor, poked around inside the computer case, saw nothing. Smelled hot plastic. Odd. Switched computer on. Saw a little spark inside. Oops!

Pulled out SCSI cable. Burned in half lengthwise for about the last 2 feet! Replaced it and all seems to be well, for now anyway. At least it wasn't the same cable with the hard drives. Also explains why the CD-ROM drives have been slightly flaky for a while, duh! Think I'll be a little more careful to turn stuff off when I go to work.

(later)

Lots of late nights and early mornings here lately. Got more bugs out of the Christmas Tree program. Seems that the media player can be run from the command line, so a simple script is adequate to start the light show simultaneously with the music. As an added bonus, if either the lights or music crash, the next song won't be off but will start correctly. In some cases, the music for one song is simply interrupted if the light program crashes. (Not that we ever expect a crash....) Occasionally the music hiccups (swap file access?) and the lights aren't synchronized for the last so-many measures, but as I said, the next song is OK since the light program actually starts the music, not vice-versa, and any songs still playing will be interrupted. And while the whole thing is running, I can be programming or playing solitaire. Just for good measure, I put in a 3-second "delay" program that turns on our "trademark" pattern and blinks the star a couple of times between songs. It also allows more "graceful degradation" whenever a glitch occurs, sort of 3 seconds of "padding" in between before the next song elbows its way into the player. Might not need the padding if I quit playing solitaire....

Got 5 songs running now, more in the works. All use the same source code as before, with the "cruft" taken out. I had patches upon patches to make the tree routines handle bushes, wreaths and all that; now those "peripherals" are built into the language so the patches have to be removed. I had written separate functions for each non-tree decoration; now the decorations are simply listed at the top along with the light "structures" (rows, columns, diagonals, etc., and now bushes, star, swag_lights, etc.). Still gotta get those three-foot wreaths up on the house and lighted garlands down the porch posts.

(12/11)

Now as if we didn't have enough company, there's an annual Christmas party for the Resident Advisors (R.A.'s) and their managers. (R.A. used to be "floor proctor" or some such back in the Dark Ages at Whitworth College. Not "house parents", there are some of those, one set to a dormitory, and they are called "Residence Directors" or "R.D.'s". Sort of like the housewife who is a "domestic engineer" but I digress....) Anyhow there's a case of strep throat at the home of the Dean of Students where this usually takes place, so Wednesday morning Kathy volunteers our house and Thursday evening 40 people show up. We cleaned and rearranged furniture like mad, and they brought in pizza and all kinds of food. The cats and I hid in the bedroom most of the time. I did know some of the students so I wasn't entirely antisocial. The cats were very antisocial, as in scared spitless ;-)

And then Friday evening we went to another dinner where I'm sure I gained another pound.

On Friday afternoon, we took pity on a gal who was stuck here when they closed the dorms and turned off the heat. No, they didn't toss her into a snowbank, but the heat in the dorms was cut off immediately when the students were supposedly all out for break, due to a 60% (!) increase in natural gas prices over the past 10 days and they're trying to save on heat as much as possible. (My office up there is now set at 60 degrees; glad the computer is portable. Get my E-mail and hurry back home.) Dorm "parents" (R.D.'s) have been given heaters for their apartments. Hope the pipes don't freeze. Anyway, this gal is a basketball player from Chicago and her mother can't leave the state to come after her (parole, I suppose) so her boyfriend got off work at noon Saturday and came after her. She huddled in an afghan on the couch watching TV and we kept the fire going and she got thawed out before bedtime Friday. She got out an extra blanket for the guest bed, bless her heart. Temperatures are probably upper 20's most of the day, about 95 degrees near the wood stove.

And to think, we seriously considered a gas fireplace insert before we went with wood....

Oh, but the good news is that our pastor "locked in" the gas price for his home and for the church by agreeing to a slightly higher rate back in October. That will save a bundle! Unfortunately, that's mostly for residences and the college didn't get that deal.

Musical Christmas Tree is more or less running on automatic. Sometime during the day I tell it when to start, and when the time arrives it repeats for about 4 hours and then turns itself off and goes to sleep. (Very simple; see UNIX "at" command.) Radio station switches over to a disk full of Christmas music (about 10 hours worth), as though anyone is listening in the middle of the night. But I rearranged the antenna (again) and it's polarized vertically for better car radio reception, to where you can listen to it parked outside my office. Automation sure beats sitting there tapping the keys in time to the music. Had to rearrange some of the hardware (cables, plugs, etc.) today and make some software changes to match, but it all works, at least for this evening. We've had several visitors already who dropped in after watching the show. The hardware is really impressive to the kids, mostly "boys" between 10 and 70 years old.

Kathy has been baking so much stuff for dinners and parties that the leftovers are going stale. Remember that she's German, now, and you can see lots of bread pudding coming up. Slices of Swedish tea ring oddly enough make marvelous French toast; almost don't need syrup with the fruit filling and all that. And the kitten (now almost 6 months old) has discovered that she likes pizza crust and bread just like old Shreddie did. After the party here the other night, she stuffed herself with pizza crust, and at breakfast this morning she wouldn't quit bumming until she got some French toast. She goes in for her "little surgery" in about a week. Oddly, she hasn't tackled the Christmas tree yet. Hasn't developed a taste for candy canes I guess.

Candy canes! We've had the same ones for several years (10? 15?) and wouldn't eat them on a bet, but we discovered several of them mostly gone, as in, wrapper pretty much intact except for a tiny hole in the end. One wrapper still had an ant in it. Little buggers had eaten several ounces of candy canes over the summer. The surviving candy canes have no holes in the cellophane wrappers. Now we know an "ant test" for durability of candy wrappers....

(12/18) Haven't sent this yet?

8 songs now running for the Christmas Tree. They're all very smooth with an occasional "Hmmm" on the timing but we're leaving it alone. Put a manger scene (the one from Toppenish) out next to the mailboxes with a sign "Musical Christmas Tree Next Left".
Got the paper this evening and there we are! Photographer came by last evening when we weren't looking and got a really nice photo that ended up at the top of the front page maybe 4 columns wide with a short description. Got our lighted wreaths up on the front of the house and assorted lights on the 8 bushes around the yard; they're not part of the musical program, though. Folks are probably wondering what our electric bill is, but I'll say it's a lot less than last year by 1/3 to 1/2 due to the wood heat. Just ordered another cord delivered to tide us over until someone else nearby has a tree cut down in their yard, or until February whichever comes first (your mileage may vary, void wherever taxed or prohibited, not warranted for any particular purpose, etc.).

A lady came by last evening and brought us several cans of hot chocolate mix (raspberry/choc, mint/choc, etc.) and a couple dozen cookies, just because they enjoyed the program so much. So Kathy served hot chocolate and cookies to maybe 15-20 cars. There were more than that, but some turned it down (just had supper) and some just kind of drove by and looked, probably on their way to or from somewhere, before Kathy got out to them. The newspaper picture isn't on the Web because our paper only puts the text of major stories out there (small town). Sorry... but we have a couple of friends this evening helping pass out cookies, hot chocolate and programs while Kathy is in the kitchen frosting more Christmas cookies and I'm printing more programs, 60 so far this evening (12/19) on this old 1992-vintage Laserjet printer. (Well, Laserjet IIP clone anyhow. Slow but sturdy and cheap to run.) Picture in the paper really stimulated the traffic.

Speaking of which, the same paper today reports that Grace College just got a $3/4 million grant (Lilly Foundation, not Uncle Sam) to prepare students for working in local industries (bio-whatever, we're the artificial kneecap-ital of the world, about 2/3 of all prosthetic knees made here locally). Don't know what that means yet, exactly, but it sounds good. I had heard that something was in the works. Essentially they want workers who can rede & spel gud, can communicate effectively and "don't steal our yellow pads." (Direct quote from one of the CEOs) Basic knowledge (bachelor's degree) of computers, accounting or whatever is fine, and they train them further in their particular area as necessary. That covers 4/5 of our major liberal-arts goals for all degree students; or we could say that we try to cover everything non-technical that they want.

The kitten came back from the vet, minus "the little part that makes kittens." Also minus some fur on the tummy, but she's doing fine, loving us up one side and down the other. All inspected for ear mites, parasites, Hittites and Amorites (little Biblical humor there) and smelling faintly like flea powder "just in case." Gals in the vet's office said she wanted to be held, not choosy at all by whom. This has continued all day long; whoever is sitting down suddenly has a cat on the lap. She also stretches out by the wood stove, her little shaved tummy toward the fire. She knows which side her bed is buttered on, so to speak.

Well, Merry Christmas y'all. I keep thinking of that old Yorgi Yorgeson song, "I Yust Go Nuts At Christmas" and it's quite dated (1950's?) in some ways; replace Gabriel Heatter with your favorite news anchor and it's current events set to music. We're going Nuts and enjoying every minute of it. Next year we hope to be promoted to Condiments. Yee haw!

....

Almost New Year's Eve. Went up to campus and got nearly 3 weeks' E-mail. Haven't been online literally for days. Having too much fun. Had some folks over for Christmas, stopped "running" the tree on a regular basis. Son Jonathan came for a few days and helped a bit with the computer end of the blinkenlights.

Wired up a motion-sensor light with "3-way" switches on our (dangerous!) circular stairway. Rope lights underneath the front of each step. Very elegant but kind of obviously a do-it-yourself job. Disassembled the railing for the front stairway so Kathy will be able to varnish it and paint where the old lattice work was removed. That lovely super-hot faucet sprang a leak under the sink, which took half a day to fix, a year and a day after I installed it; when steel against brass gets wet, it sort of rots. Got replacement parts and I'll have all of it back together again "soon". At least we have the rest of the water working.

One of these days I'll get to a job where I have to use our main Christmas present -- a miter saw. But I got some train videos for Christmas so I may slow down on all this DYI stuff.

Hope y'all had a good Christmas and we certainly wish you a prosperous 2004. (Also happy, but that comes and goes.) We haven't mailed Christmas cards or letters yet; maybe we'll send Valentines....

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