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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Kevin Standlee's LiveJournal:
| Saturday, May 17th, 2008 | |
| 10:11 pm | Lisa Update Mere moments after I posted my last message. Lisa called me. As usual, before I could actually answer the call, it rolled to voice-mail. (As far as I can tell, I have about one ring to answer calls on this phone before voice-mail. Sometimes it's zero rings. From experimentation, I've also found that callers can end up hearing three or four rings on their end before my phone rings. But I digress.) She left me a message. At her request, I'm posting Lisa's progress so far. She continues to have problems with fuel from the starboard tank, but is otherwise making good progress. In case the starboard tank quits feeding entirely, she says she's going to buy a siphon hose so she can siphon fuel out of that tank to move over to the other one at need. She also pointed out that she used her last quarters (cheaper than using the phone card, which she reserves for use only when coins aren't accepted) to call me instead of using them to play the Creature from the Black Lagoon pinball machine at the truck stop, and that I should be duly grateful. Current Mood:  relaxedCurrent Music: Super 14 Rugby on MediaZone |
| 9:34 pm | Mehama to Klamath Falls Lisa and I left at just about Noon and started working our way over Santiam Pass. We stopped a lot, as is our wont. We stopped at Detroit Lake to look at how much water was being released (a lot) and at the Marion Forks Restaurant along the Santiam River for lunch. (Lisa's late mother had always favored this place, so it has sentimental value for Lisa.) Driving up into the mountains, we had the odd experience of being in bright sun on a warm day, but surrounded by snow. We took advantage of this after lunch, where we walked over to one of the sheltered snowbanks and scooped up some snow which we put in Lisa's ice chest to cool down bottles of water. The weather was fairly pleasant over the pass itself, but got progressively hotter on the east side, as it does in central Oregon. We stopped again an hour later so I could take a blood test, and again in Sisters so Lisa could buy some fuel-system cleaner in the hope that it will help clear an apparently partially-clogged fuel line (about which more in a minute). And finally we stopped at a vista point along US-20 in order for me to give her some stuff that should have been loaded in her little pickup rather than my minivan. Then it was in to Bend, where we parted ways. ( Adventures with Chipmunks and Casinos ) ( Lisa's pickup is being cranky ) I finally rolled into the Holiday Inn Express Klamath Falls just before 8 PM, having covered 254 miles in eight hours, for an unimpressive 32 mph average speed. As it happens, eight hours was about what I predicted. ( A bit more about K-Falls ) All in all, this hotel appears to be decent value for money, and I'm feeling pretty relaxed and happy. I have a lot of driving ahead of me tomorrow, but it is pretty straightforward work. Current Mood: relaxedCurrent Music: Super 14 Rugby on MediaZone |
| 9:21 am | Moving Out In a few minutes, I will shut down my computer, pack my gear out of Lisa's father's house, and finish loading my stuff into my van. With luck, sometime in the next couple of hours, Lisa and I will set out on the first leg of our respective trips. Lisa has the longer trip as she is driving to Columbus, where I will be flying on Thursday. Our paths match as far as Bend, Oregon, where I will turn south toward California and she east toward Ohio. If all goes as planned, we'll stop for lunch in Sisters. Last night Lisa tested the radios, whereupon we discovered that my 2m amateur rig is no longer speaking to the antennas. The CB radio works, so we can stay in contact while convoying, but it's annoying. And there is not enough time to troubleshoot the problem. We'll just have to live with it until the next time my van is in Oregon. Current Mood: busy |
| Friday, May 16th, 2008 | |
| 6:58 pm | Hot, Hot, Hot Wow, did it ever turn too hot too quickly up here. Even with the air conditioning in the van on full maximum, it still seemed too hot out there today. What I wanted instead of running errands in an overheated Salem, Oregon was to take a siesta. But we stuck with it and got the things Lisa needed for the trip. Now she's packing and I'm finishing up a loose end from work. Current Mood:  hot |
| 12:49 pm | Departure Plans Lisa continues to prepare her little pickup truck for the trip to Columbus. We took it out for a spin last night, and while it was mostly okay, a non-functioning turn signal indicator on the dash (the signals themselves worked) led to a couple of hours' work tearing the dash apart and putting it back together again. The current travel plan is for Lisa and me to leave mid-day Saturday, traveling as a convoy to Bend, Oregon, where I will turn south toward California and Lisa will continue east toward Ohio. I have a hotel reservation at Klamath Falls for tomorrow night, and I'll make the rest of the trip to Fremont on Sunday, where I'll have a full day to travel. The purpose of this convoy plan is to provide for some back-up should any problems turn up in Lisa's pickup during the first leg of the trip. It will take me only a little bit longer to drive south via the inland route than via I-5, and Klamath Falls is about as far south as I'd originally intended to stop (Medford) in my original plans. Now I need to hurry up and finish some stuff for work so we can run into Salem (again!) to AAA and pick up some maps for Lisa. Current Mood: busy |
| Thursday, May 15th, 2008 | |
| 1:04 pm | Money Down the Drain Neither of the sets of Giants tickets I put up on StubHub sold, even when I priced them at less than half face value. That's $66 each that Cheryl and I wasted on that season ticket plan. In the end, we'll end up with exactly one pair of tickets we could use. If we wanted to spend $99 each on a pair of Giants tickets, there are much better seats than LB 135 we could have had! It shows you to what depths the Giants have sunk that there is a glut of tickets on the market. StubHub shows a lot of tickets, many of which appear to be selling below face value. If you do want to attend a game, regardless of the poor state of the team, now would be a good time to buy. Current Mood:  annoyed |
| Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 | |
| 8:05 pm | A Walk in the Park Both yesterday evening and today, Lisa and I had enough time to take this walk through John Neal Park in Lyons, which is across the river from Mehama. As you can see from the map, this is a 5.4 km loop, and that's a pretty good walk. This park has a bunch of ponds and streams through it. There are ducks, geese, what I think might have been a Blue Heron, and several more interesting things. Yesterday evening, we spotted two or three deer across a stream from where we were walking, and I've seen what I think may be a beaver in one of the ponds. No sign of the deer or beaver this afternoon, however. All of the nature walk is a nice counterpoint to the frustrations of trying to get things to work on Lisa's old Panasonic CF-27 under Win2000. Current Mood: pleased |
| Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 | |
| 10:05 am | MARCON Schedule A few days ago, I received my schedule for my Fan GOH appearance at MARCON. This schedule is, of course, subject to change. ( I still don't understand why they put me in an autograph session ) It appears that there won't be sufficient program time to show my two Doctor Who movies, which are 60-90 minutes each, but that we'll only have time to show the "Making of 'The Zombie Legions,'" assuming they have a VCR. (I've not yet managed to get any of these videos transferred to DVD or other digital formats.) Current Mood: chipper |
| Sunday, May 11th, 2008 | |
| 9:18 pm | Frustrating Weekend We got most of our errands done, and some of the around-the-property chores complete, but not all of them. But one of my important tasks, which was to get more of Lisa's computers running, ran aground on technical problems that I do not understand. ( Fighting with computers ) ( Lawn? That's more like a small golf course! ) I can't say that this was a terribly successful day's work on the computers. We did, however, set up one of the T30s to do a clean install on a drive we think is clean. The installer appears to be doing a low-level format on the drive, however, and it looks like it make take all night. We'll leave it running at her father's house and see what it looks like tomorrow when I come back over here to get to work. Still, even if none of the computer work I did this weekend was any use, I still have a new 160GB hard drive that I can probably install into one of my two Dell laptops -- assuming I can get a DriveClone run to work on it! Current Mood: frustratedCurrent Music: Hard drives spinning |
| Saturday, May 10th, 2008 | |
| 11:12 am | Be Afraid I have no work-related tasks hanging over my head. I will be here all weekend instead of having to fly back to the Bay Area on Sunday. It's not raining. Lisa has an eager look in her eye and a list of chores that need doing. Don't expect to hear much from me this weekend. Current Mood:  anxious |
| Friday, May 9th, 2008 | |
| 8:12 pm | Bit of a Scare We went into Salem and did all of the errands we'd planned for today, including filling up one of the propane bottles and picking up some miscellaneous electronic parts for a project on which Lisa is working. Driving back to Mehama, we saw that there was some sort of social event -- a barbecue by the looks of it -- going on at the church across the street. Unfortunately, that meant that, as usual, people parked in the middle of the street (it's a dead-end gravel road), blocking access to our driveway. As I was easing my way in to try and find a place to park, Lisa gave out a shout. "We left the front door wide open!" was her horrified cry. Sure enough, the door to our trailer was standing open. I stopped the van and we rushed over, fearing the worst. Amazingly, our home had not been ransacked, and indeed there was no sign that anyone had come in at all. Upon examination, we believe that when Lisa was locking the door, she actually threw the bolt but that the door was just barely ajar when she did so, so the bolt didn't actually go home, but kept the door slightly open. Also, there's a fair chance that the door sat there mostly closed for quite a while, with a gust of wind finally pushing it open. Looks like we got really lucky. We unpacked the things we'd fetched from town, and while we were doing so, the person who had blocked the driveway came out and moved his car, so I was able to put my van away where it normally lives while I'm here. We're a little shaky at the close call. Ironically, one of the things we went to get today was a new door latch for the trailer, and it's the one thing we did not get, because the only replacement door mechanisms at the RV supply store were cheap Chinese junk. The last time we checked, there was still one US manufacturer of those latches, but actually finding one in stock at a parts store is difficult, because apparently the stores assume that their customers only want the cheapest possible junk. And order by mail is sometimes a problem because the vendors online rarely say where the part was built. She'd much rather hold the part in her hand before buying it. Current Mood: relieved |
| 1:53 pm | Errandry My work has reached the point of letting a very complicated optimization model run for several hours. This means I can go ahead and leave it alone and go into Salem to accomplish the things we weren't able to get done yesterday due to bad timing. And I need to remember that I promised an short article for Denvention 3's Souvenir Book editor about what the Mark Protection Committee is and who is on it by the end of this week. Current Mood: busy |
| Thursday, May 8th, 2008 | |
| 8:17 pm | So Much For a Post-Lunch Walk Just after making my last post, I realized that there were some errands that needed to happen today, so we had to run into Salem before the last mail ran (it was already too late in Mehama, where the mail drops at 4 PM). Fortunately, everything we had to get done today, we did. Unfortunately, not all of the other errands we were trying to efficiently accomplish on the same trip got done. We got the closing times wrong on a couple of places and ended up wasting more than an hour slogging through Salem's rush-hour traffic only to show up at each of them just as they were closing. Had we known their hours better, we would have skipped the 5:30 closing entirely and gone straight to the 6 PM place, where we would have had 30 minutes, which would have been enough. For future reference, I need to remember that last call at the main Salem post office is 8:30 PM. Current Mood:  tired |
| 11:37 am | It Figures I travel heavy. Especially when driving instead of flying, where I have far fewer constraints on weight and bulk, I have a tendency to try and have backups for everything, usually due to past experiences where I needed it. That includes carrying a spare computer when I'm going to be working from Oregon, besides a clone of the work machine's drive made just before leaving on the trip. So of course on this trip, what should fail on me but one of the few things for which I didn't carry a spare. Due to a tendency to develop blisters on the bottom of my foot (particularly since I've started walking more often), I wear some relatively inexpensive foam rubber metatarsal pads that loop over the middle toe on each foot. They wear out after a few months, so I buy them in medium bulk. But I forgot to toss a spare set into my growing sack of stuff to carry Just In Case. Naturally, it was the toe loop on one of the pads that failed, so the pad will not stay in place. It's not quite annoying enough to justify a rush order to the supplier, but it's a minor hassle. The way I keep accumulating things to take along makes me sometimes feel like I'm living in the world described in Take a Spare Truss. (It's a pity that none of the sites I searched for this had pictures of the cover or interior illustrations of this highly entertaining book about Victorian travel.) Current Mood: annoyedCurrent Music: Twenty20 Cricket |
| Sunday, May 4th, 2008 | |
| 8:32 pm | Deer oh Deer This is the first time I've been online since I left Central Point on Saturday morning. The drive to Mehama was mostly without incident, except that just a few minutes from Mehama, a small deer ran out in front of me. I braked hard and the deer and I avoided each other. Fortunately I wasn't driving all that fast anyway. I gingerly made my way the remaining five miles or so to Mehama. Today we had to run out and buy an external mouse on account of having left all of mine in California and not wanting to spend a week or two solely using the touch pad, especially as some of the things I have to are pointer-intensive. Current Mood: tired |
| Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 | |
| 10:37 am | So Much For That My plans for a relatively restful morning, with a leisurely breakfast and a walk along the trail next to the hotel were scuppered when I overslept by almost two hours. Being unfamiliar with the setting on my new phone, I set the alarm for 7:30 p.m. instead of a.m. and woke with a start with just barely enough time to toss on clothes and run downstairs before the included breakfast service ended. Now I'm two hours behind on everything I planned, and some things will suffer because of it. Current Mood: rushed |
| 12:11 am | Making Time I used Microsoft MapPoint to plot out this trip to Oregon, not because I don't know the way -- I've driven it many times -- but because I wanted to see how close its predictions were to actual. I told it the start and end points, adjusted it to force it down a couple of routes I would prefer, and set all of the speeds to the low end of the allowed range. The previous version of MapPoint let you actually set the speeds, but now it just shows a slider with low-average-high. I told it where I was stopping for the night, and that I wanted a 15-minute break ever 1h 30m. (This is an unfortunate requirement due to the diuretics I take for high blood pressure. I've visited every rest area between the Bay Area and Portland, and am very grateful to the Niles Canyon Railway for having open toilets even on a non-operating day today.) Then I told it to plot the route. ( Driving time neepery ) I'd really rather stop about halfway, but there are no Holiday Inn Express hotels in the Dunsmuir-to-Yreka stretch of highway, and I find myself slaving to my frequent-stay program and the Gold incentives I'm earning. (Some of these will probably be cashed in this summer to/from Denvention. Heck, I probably will end up earning enough to keep Gold status for another year, thanks to yet another Worldcon stay in an IC-hotels group property.) I'm now 3/5 of the way to Mehama, and there's no pressure tomorrow -- Lisa does not expect me until late afternoon/early evening -- so I can take it relatively easy. The hotel information says that the Bear Creek Trail is adjacent to the hotel, and that suggests a nice walking opportunity Saturday morning. Current Mood: relaxed |
| Friday, May 2nd, 2008 | |
| 11:55 pm | Train Outbreak I got away from the apartment about five minutes later than originally planned today, but I'm glad that happened, because otherwise while driving up Niles Canyon I would not have noticed that coming up behind me was a steam train operating on the Niles Canyon Railway. The NCRY normally operates weekends only. I'm not sure what exactly was going on, but the procession was being led by SP 2472 -- or was it 2467?, along with a diesel locomotive I now forget, a nondescript boxcar, a Belt Railway of Chicago caboose, and WP 713 bringing up the rear. Fortunately for me, this happened just before the NCRY's Brightside Yard, and there was a place I could pull over and park. I walked across the road to the grade crossing, and watched as the short train crossed through the wig-wag-protected crossing and into the yard. The reason I don't exactly which locomotive was running was because I neglected to bring my camera with me. This is annoying because I remember seeing the camera in its bag and thinking, "I should toss that in the car -- never know when something interesting might pop up." And then I walked off without it. Had I remembered it, I would have been able to include footage of the train in this message. Phooey. Speaking of walking off without things, I realized this evening that I forgot to pack a mouse for my computer. Normally one lives in the computer bag, but it must have fallen out at home. This is going to be very annoying, because for a lot of the modeling work I do, I have to do a lot of pointer work, and it's much easier with a mouse than with a touchpad. I hope that a mouse is sitting around among the bits of computer stuff hanging around Mehama. Current Mood: tiredCurrent Music: Super 14 Rugby on MediaZone |
| 9:50 pm | Sharks Still Swimming I got to my hotel in Central Point (just north of Medford) about 8:45, and after getting moved in, walked over to the nearby KFC and brought some take-out back to the room. After fussing with the computer for ten or fifteen minutes, I finally managed to bring up the audio on the San Jose Sharks game just before the overtime started, so I was listening when the Sharks, having come back from a score of 2-0 to tie the game and send it to overtime, scored the winning goal in overtime. The Dallas Stars still lead the best-of-seven series 3-2, but it's pandemonium at the Shark Tank as the Sharks still have life after having dropped the first three games of the series. Current Mood: optimistic |
| 12:01 pm | On The Road Again Heading off to Oregon now. Tonight's goal: Central Point, Oregon. Almost walked off without my overnight kit, which would have been annoying. Current Mood: busy |