2006, April
Sunrise: Photo by Gary Nieter
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
-- T.S.Eliot "The Waste Land" 1922
So what's going on in Winona Lake?
Photo by Kathy
Had a wonderful Easter program at church. Rich was in the choir, dressed in first-century garb; he looked like Abraham. Kathy found herself in charge of costumes for the choir (another gal did costumes for the drama). Funny how word gets out that people can sew.Kathy was also the wardrobe mistress for the spring play at the college, patching up rips and washing everything. The students love her; she also takes up cookies and other treats for rehearsals.
School is drawing to a close and summer is coming. Promises to be busy as usual.
Grace College
Rich took several students to a programming contest at Taylor University, about 70 miles southeast of here. We all had a great time. The problems weren't super hard like they are in the national contests, so the students actually scored. But they were harder than in previous years; the winning team got 3 out of 9. One of our teams got one problem within the time limit and the other got none. About 1/3 of those participating got none. These were mostly Christian schools from all over the country.We had the groundbreaking for the new Events Center with our administration, the Board of Trustees, and all manner of bigwigs from local companies here, like Biomet, DePuy and Zimmer, who are footing a lot of the bill for it. Biomet is doing very well, as is Zimmer. Paragon is expanding also, having bought three or four companies, and one of our students is being hired upon graduation to assist in getting all the data links to work right, between headquarters here and acquisitions in Utah and New York, in addition to moving everything to their new HQ building and production facility in Pierceton, about four miles from here.
Executives from a couple of these companies were grumbling that they hadn't been able to hire any of our grads lately because other companies were snapping them up. Know any prospective students for us?
Health News
Well, Rich is indeed feeling better after getting rid of that two-year infection. Kathy's foot is almost back to normal. They spent maybe $3000.00 (insurance money) on assorted tests and came up with no diagnosis; the one doctor made a guess and one of the scans proved him wrong. (Well, at least he made a guess, which meant that they could prove or disprove it instead of just charging $100.00 per "Hmmm...".) Only thing was a very short round of Prednisone that relieved the symptoms to where Kathy could navigate without crutches or a cane, and then it all got better by itself.After it was all over with, the routine annual blood test showed ... gout! After the other tests were negative for it! Oh, well. Web MD says that happens sometimes. Next time (and there will probably be a next time), we will know. Maybe.
Weather Report
We finally thawed for the last time although the winter wasn't bad and the woodshed isn't quite empty. Had some days in the 60s and 70s already. Just as suddenly as it dropped from 70 to 18 last fall, it shot up from 30 to 79. One day we have the heater stove going, the next we take down the storm windows and discuss whether to turn on the "air". April 13 was an important day; first time Rich actually got warm since sometime in November!
photo by Kathy (believe it or not)
Speaking of which, if you'd care to visit us between June 25 and July 23, and you like music, by all means let us know! Those MasterWorks "kids" (age 14 through graduate school) are the best of the best!
Geek Stuff
Hard drive started going "Klunk-a klunk-a klunk-a" about the end of March. We made a full backup as soon as we could get the machine to -ahem- find the disk drives again. Bought a brand-new Western Digital 250Gig drive (that's a quarter of a cotton-pickin' terabyte fer cryin' out loud!), divvied it up into a bunch of partitions, and put 3 operating systems on it (Linux, BSD and XP). Well, it's a lot quicker to say than do; had to install every one of them at least twice to get it right, but it works for the time being. Had the good sense (this time!) to format the 200GB data partition as FAT32 so all of the systems can read & write it safely.Then, of course, it took probably 10-12 hours to download the patches for Linux (SuSE 9.3) and another couple of hours to download the "critical" updates for Windows XP. And then I had to install all my software (Word, Excel, etc. and on and on) afresh. Took the better part of Easter weekend when I wasn't at church.
I may now have the only *triple*-boot machine in town. And every one of the operating systems is used for some purpose other than the great games that come free with Linux. Even my laptop from school is dual-boot (XP & BSD) so I can work on programs somewhere besides the office.