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Rich singing Frosty.
Christy Barlow at left.
December, 2004
Heh - Well, at least I didn't have to get a series of rabies shots. That's
the good news.
Not the only good news, of course.
The Christmas production at church went well. I sang Frosty the Snowman and
they did that nice thing with reverb and turn up the bass and I actually
sounded good. One lady said she'd like me to come and sing in her kitchen
every day. I'm still trying to figure out what that means exactly. The kids
loved it, "that low voice" as they said. There were probably over 600 people
there, total for the two nights.
Kathy baked 130 dozen cookies both for church and to serve to people who
came to watch our Christmas display. There was a nice article in both of
the local papers -- the one that costs money as well as the free one. They
even put my picture in along with a picture of the display. The pictures
aren't on-line, though, probably costs too much. The text of the article
is at the Times-Union site
and I may scan in the pictures from the paper. Between
the church and the newspaper, I'm becoming notorious around here. On Dec.
15th, "The Paper" (the free one) ran the article and two pictures, and that
night the attendance just about doubled to 20-some cars.
White Christmas
Got out into the yard a few times to continue cutting and splitting wood.
Downstairs stove was running full blast every day, and the woodpile was
shrinking. The "office" where the computer is located, doesn't benefit
much from the stove, so I had to find the breaker that controlled the
electric baseboard heater in that room. (I had turned off all of the
heaters last summer in order to work on the kitchen, still almost got
zapped.) Turn on a breaker, wait a little while, see if the heater is warm,
go back downstairs, try another.... The last one left to try, it was a
breaker clearly marked, "OFF". I'm not sure what that was supposed to mean;
I thought it meant that the breaker should be left off. But now I know which
one is the office heater because of the odd marking.
It snowed a few times and the weather keeps getting colder on average. The
snow set a very Christmasy mood for the party at our house, for the "Student
Development" people, which includes the health, security (used to be known
as "campus cops"), what used to be called "house parents", staff from the
Doon of Steedents as we sometimes call him, all those folks. We took some
of the furniture out of our living room and set up tables. With the aid of
some folding chairs and tables from the school (and some very nice $3 each
red tablecloths on sale at K-mart), we seated 35 staff, spouses and kids to
eat. Next year there will be even more people since they are hiring a new
chaplain and I forget who-all else. (Jack Rantz resigned as chaplain and
left a short time back. No hard feelings, the Lord led him in a new
direction, that's all. We were sorry to see him go. His son and
daughter-in-law still work here and were at the party.) Anyhow, we all had
a great time, and after the eating and "pictionary" games were over, people
started drifting out, like Paul, who had to get back into the police car and
drive around looking for trouble. (Didn't find any, but occasionally
someone's car won't start in the cold or something like that to relieve
the boredom.) Then Kathy and some of the wives realized that "us men" were
conspicuously missing.
Well, you see, Kathy had me put some track and an HO passenger train down
the middle of one set of tables as a decoration, and so we got to talking
about model railroading, and we kind of wandered downstairs and admired my
far-from-complete setup (pictures at http://users.hoosierlink.net/rdbarnhart/rail.htm ).
Everybody seems to have an old Lionel O-gauge train in the attic; maybe we
should buy a bunch of track and set it up in the gym. One of the guys has
some HO stuff but mostly HOn3 (narrow-gauge), and we're going to get
together "soon". His wife is a part-time nurse and works with Kathy a
couple of days a week. So the wives found about 4 of us guys in the coldest
place in the house, the back garage, talking about how the line across the
field from our house used to be a Pennsylvania RR mainline with the Broadway
Limited coming through at 80 MPH on its way from Chicago to Pittsburg. After
that, we fired up the amplifiers and played 2 or 3 songs for them, including
White Christmas of course. We are *so glad* we have this house. The party
has outgrown everyone else's houses and most of the rooms on campus except
the main dining hall. We'll put seating for 12 to 15 downstairs in the
"music room" or something next year if necessary. (We had Christmas dinner
in the "music room" so we know it will work.)
"Cause and effect, chain of events,
All of the chaos makes perfect sense."
-- 3rd Rock From The Sun
Or, Bats in the bat-room
About the rabies shots: Kathy kept hearing this rustling, scratching noise
in her bathroom vent. Cats were very interested in it. I removed the cover
and there was a tiny little bat caught between the squirrel-cage fan and
the motor. As I unscrewed the motor frame, he was working his way loose,
so I put the whole assembly in a grocery bag and then placed the whole
shebang into a garbage can. Next morning he was still trying to hibernate
in the fan so I had to pry him out with my bare hands and the little guy
bit me! (A nick the size of a pinhead.) Well, he was trying to hibernate
and here is this huge creature bugging him. He's about the size of my right
thumb not counting his wings. However, I suspect that I managed to break a
couple of those little wing bones and he was probably doomed anyhow, which
is what I keep telling myself. So we put the little guy into a cottage
cheese container and took him to the county health whatever at the
courthouse but on the way stopped at the county health clinic and got
me a tetanus shot. They took the little bat and had to remove his brain
and test it to make sure he wasn't rabid. Most excitement they had all
day, maybe all week. (Ten days later they finally called to tell me I
didn't need that notorious series of rabies shots. I could have been dead
by then, for all I know!)
But wait! there's more!
When I got the tetanus shot, Kathy was in one of her more talkative moods
and was chattering about our Christmas display. She knows the nurse who
gives the immunizations because of sending students over there (measles
shots mostly I think) but had never met her in person. She also knew the
receptionist by voice, and we were talking about this Musical Christmas
Tree, and the receptionist asked whether we had entered it into the contest.
What contest? Well there is a TV station (WNDU - 16 connected with Notre
Dame University, NDU, get it?) up in South Bend having a 10 county Christmas
display contest. So I E-mailed them a JPEG image and also a 7-second MPEG
video. There's some serious competition out there, like the one with the
Web cam and you can view the site live and even turn the lights on and off
by pointing and clicking. How about that?
So without the bat bite we wouldn't have entered the contest. Didn't win,
though. We're probably too far out in the sticks. But later, someone told
me that he saw a still shot of our Christmas display "on a Fox station" and
that would sure enough have been WNDU.
Anyhow, we took the rest of the day (Friday) off, it being almost 4:00,
and went up to, speaking of Notre Dame, the University Mall next to their
campus, did some shopping. Got back home, discovered that all 25 programs
(bulletins) that Kathy had set out for the Christmas Tree were gone. Hmm.
Must have had over 25 cars.
Next evening (Saturday), we're about to eat supper at 6:00 and Kathy says,
"There are cars out there already!" So she trots out with cookies and
programs, keeps trotting back for more, and I make a run to Staples to
print 100 more programs just before 7:00 and happen to think of cookies so
I stop at 6:57 at the super-cheap grocery store that closes at 7:00, get 3
packs totaling maybe 8 dozen cookies, good thing, too. Had nearly 50 cars
and lots of kids so the cookies were going fast. It's those articles in the
papers that caused this sudden onslaught. Next year we are going to limit
cookies to 7:00 to 9:00 and stop and get your own programs before and after
that. And also, cookies only from Dec. 15 to 25. We actually run it after
Christmas but no cookies then. I looked for some of the Rice Krispy bars on
Sunday evening, that Kathy had made in the afternoon, and they were already
gone. People are nice though. We never ask for contributions but people have
given us, um, $42.00 I think, which pays for "scratch", as in "making cookies
from scratch", or we could say it just about paid for printing the programs.
Oh -- Kathy munched a little something but never did get a proper meal
Saturday evening. We ate earlier on Sunday. We ended up having passed out
something like 478 bulletins, one per car, and 110+ dozen cookies.
Speaking of Sunday, it was that Sunday that we were officially presented to
Winona Lake Grace Brethren Church as new members. Pastor John Teevan came
over on Saturday and we made it official. Like, we're already into
everything over there, may as well do it right. We didn't walk to church
that day, though, with high temperature for the day at 16, winds to 23 MPH
and chill at 0 to -1. Associate Pastor Bruce Barlow used to be Greg Stamm's
roommate back in the Dark Ages. He's really nice and his wife is a bundle
of energy. She has to be; she's into kids choir, singing solos and with a
group, popping up everywhere. Bruce has been teaching our class lately and
he read some Psalms to us in very rusty Hebrew, which was interesting.
Computer stuff
After installing XP Service Pack 2, there was a dearth of updates for a
couple of months until the crackers could catch up. Then alluvasudden there
were about 4 updates in mid-December. Be sure you have them.
We're doing Windows programming in one class, under XP and .NET. It's a
pretty nice system and the students were able to create some nice programs
with text boxes, buttons and all that good stuff. There are still a couple
of "bugs" to be worked out where one part interfaces with another
(Microsoft's problem, not ours), but the students can do much more
"realistic" programming now than a few years ago. .NET ("dot NET") has
almost arrived where computing should have been 20-30 years ago but
everybody did their own thing and programs just wouldn't cooperate with
each other. 25 years ago, every machine used a different kind of diskette
and you couldn't even transfer data (much less programs!) without buying
special software. Not that I'm a big Windows or Bill Gates fan, but I've
heard a lot fewer complaints about Microsoft in recent months. They almost
have their act together and, having set a standard, other machines like
Macintoshes and Linux computers can read and write Windows disks.
(You understand, of course, that I'm running Linux for the Christmas Tree
and that isn't going to change for a good long while!)
One cold day (like -6 in the morning) after Christmas, I spent the day by
the heater, going through electronics catalogs. Next day, I sent in an
order for computer lab supplies and an order for stuff to repair the
Christmas Tree electronics. This year I built patch cords to wire around
the problems, but there comes a time....
And so it ends
End of the month found us re-stocking the wood rack in the garage. It holds
about 2 1/2 cords and had maybe 1/2 cord left. It was on one of those winter
days when the temperature shoots up about 30 degrees (like from 9 to 39)
warmer than a couple of days before. I loaded the wheelbarrow and hauled
wood and Kathy stacked it. In the morning, I had to spread ashes on the ice
to keep from sitting down involuntarily, and by late afternoon it was turning
into a sea of mud, just a few hours before it started raining lightly. Narrow
window of opportunity there. We hope for another in a few weeks when we need
it again. Temperature was high 50s, almost 60 to finish out the year, and not
a trace of snow. When all this mud freezes again and then thaws in March, we
may have to park the car across the street to avoid sinking in up to the
axles.
Hope you all have a great New Year and also a great 2005 for that matter.
P.S. Found another bat in the bathroom fan on New Year's Eve....
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