Doc’s Blog

Haven’t posted lately cause I’ve been busy looking at houses. ??? You Ask? Me too!

Got a call from Cindy at Timberland Bank that we might possibly NOT get the loan to build our ICF House. Oh, they can loan us some money, but it would be about $25K short of what we need to completely finish out the project.

That really bummed us out. SWMBO e-mailed our Contractor, Jeff, and told him what is going on. He e-mailed her with an offer to carry the $25K. So they’ve all been calling and e-mailing and hashing all that out these past couple of days.

I’ve been looking for a (new) house. And I gotta tell ya it ain’t easy given SWMBO’s criteria for any house we move into or build. It’s gotta be on one floor as much as possible, and, it’s gotta have something that can be turned into a Mother-In-Law apartment. Other than that she doesn’t really care. My requirements is that it not be near a major road and I’d really like to NOT be able to see my neighbors. (Having a MIL Apartment is a Whole Other Argument and we really don’t want to go there.)

Found two, believe it or not. Houses. With built in MIL Apts. The first, down by the water (sort of) here in Olalla sits WAY back on a lot on the side of a hill and is really kind of nice but would have a butt-ton of external maintenance. The MILA is fairly small also. But the house is fairly huge and has a built in 2 car garage with room for a small wood shop. It has a house length master bedroom with a huge bath and walk through closets where the attic would be on a regular house. But all the carpets and flooring need to be replaced and there are many "dings" where the people that were living there made moving out.

It’s Frakkin’ Huge!

The other, out Tahuya way, is Frakkin’ HUGE! Two levels but each level has it’s own ground level entrance. Has a HUGE daylight basement that would have enough room for a woodshop and room for my father-in-law to set up a couple of his train boards with room left over for SWMBO’s quilting stuff. LARGE 2-bedroom MILA. Two car garage for the upper level with a room at the back for storage/whatever. And did I mention: This Thing Is Frakkin’ Huge! SWMBO and I wouldn’t have to see each other for a week in this thing!

SWMBO liked it when I took her out to see it today (the house that is). I can tell by that look in her eyes that IF it turns out that we can’t build our house, we’ll be putting in an offer for this one. Which would be okay as long as I get the Hell out of this house before another winter swings in on us.

So, we’ll see.

And they had new menus printed up and out. New Menu items too!

Tried to get mine with Crab instead…

I got up and downloaded it first thing this morning. Watched it and was captivated. Gotta pee? It can wait. Hungry? It can wait. What a fantastic series ender! I haven’t seen many series enders (M*A*S*H which sucked; Star Trek TNG & DS9 which were okay. Still haven’t seen the end of Voyager) but this one was fantastic! I laughed. I cried. I cried some more. Brought SWMBO out of the bedroom cause I was sitting the living room saying fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK! It was the perfect ending for this series. The special effects were movie caliber. The story was right on. I even liked the way Starbuck disappeared while talking with Apollo without “glowing” out or them explaining what the hell she’d become; leaving it to our imagination. (I think she was a Poltergeist. Poltergeists tend to bring mayhem where ever they go.) And showing us the “Advances In Robotics” 150k years later was genius. Really. I am going to miss the Galactica & the crew & the story. Thanks to all the folks that participated in the torrent. I can’t imagine watching this with commercials. And thanks to the Sci-Fi channel for not having those mini-commercial thingies that take up the bottom third of the screen.

See ya on the other side.

But what’s strange about that? I have to do it once every year or so anyway. THIS time it was because of a viri/trojan I got from a torrent site. I clicked on the link for a torrent and, next thing I know, Spybot is asking me if I want to approve a registry change. Damn! Did a scan with several utilities I have and found several trojans. System was booting slow, shutting down slow and just running crappy anyway so I figured I’d just reinstall. Tada! This install is running great (so far) and I made a backup with an old copy of Ghost and saved it to a dvd. Cool!

Guess what: I woke up at 0600 Sunday morning to see it snowing outside. Frakkin’ Snow! Middle of March. Can you believe that? We had about 2.5 inches by 1000 and it was all gone by 1500. Damn! They (TPTB) canceled church and everything. So I stayed home and rebuilt Windows.

Not much else going on. Raining since yesterday evening. Had some high winds come through and knock out the power just long enough to kill my phone conversation with a friend back East. According to the news it did some damage around the area; but not particularly in our area. Good! (I mean good that it didn’t do much damage in MY area.)

This reinstalling Windows is something. I didn’t realize how much junk I had installed. There is stuff on the old drive that I haven’t used in, oh, probably two years. So I’m not reinstalling anything I don’t use on a regular basis. Doing Office XP now (I like the toolbar!) and will get to my “sims” momentarily. Can’t go too long without jumping into a plane and buzzing someplace (The White House) or shooting something out of the sky in Lock-On. Think I’ll install either Rail Sim or Trainz; whichever it is that lets you design your own layout.

Later!

Coldest I’ve seen it around here in some time. I mean get-your-fingers-numb cold. Keeping me indoors. Using more wood in the wood stove. That kind of cold. Tried making a time-lapse of some pebbles melting through the ice that formed on the top of the bucket I use to collect rain water; but it never did melt completely. Oh well.

Speaking of which: Phillip (my 70 year old neighbor) showed up around 2030 last night and asked me if I would please show him Venus on my telescope. Wasn’t doing much so I did. He was suitably awed. We saw Venus in Crescent pretty good. Had him come back at 2200 to look at the moon and even though it was really the wrong time to look at the moon, you don’t see as much detail during a full moon, it was still pretty impressive. I’m getting the hang of aiming the damned thing better! It was fun and I was grateful to Phillip for "dragging" me out in the cold. Even if my fingers did sting for awhile after coming back in.

Other than that, not much happening around here. We had a LOT more snow on the 9th; but it didn’t stick. Was coming down pretty thick too! (I’ll upload some video later.) Guess it was a good thing it didn’t stick. Went up to the property expecting to see at least 4 inches; but it was mostly bare.

Good thing too! I got the crawl space hole done except for straightening up the sides and digging that bit of dirt out along the edges. I have got some serious piles of dirt around the outside of the hole though! I need my bulldozer back to move it someplace. And where am I going to move it? I have absolutely no idea.

SWMBO’s off to the office tonight; as usual for Wednesday. I "wasted" a couple of hours upgrading or updating my ICF House Blog to the latest version of Wordpress and trying to get the widgets I want to use to work. Couldn’t get all of them to work but will try again when I’m not feeling so frustrated about it. I think they ought to be called "Widgits" for all us "Idjits" trying to make them work!

Took my telescope out again for a bit this evening. I just cannot find the Andromeda Galaxy! Even with the help of Stellarium. I need to find a local Astronomy Club!

Me aboard the USS Dixie (AD-14) 1973?

Semper Fi!