Exceedingly Mundane

Saturday was a good day.

Tim slept late since he was up till 3:15 AM Friday night working on Hambones. After he got up, we went to the clinic and got my ears “fixed”. I was a little disappointed that they didn’t use a machine to clear the ear canal – the nurse came in with a squirt water bottle with a small attachment at the end of a hose, and used that to irrigate my ears! It worked, thank goodness, but I don’t think it got nearly as much out as the machine would have. Next time, I’ll have to go back to the ENT and get it done with the machine. But — the good news is that my ear opened back up, stopped hurting, and I was back to normal! 😀 Tim, for one, was very glad I’m sure, since the ear ache had made me a bit grouchy!

We did something yesterday that I had never done before – we went to two movies back to back! I’ve never splurged on anything like that in my life, and once I mentioned that to Tim, he seemed to think it was time to experience a full day of movies at the theatre, so off we went! We went to see “Mr & Mrs Smith” first (good, not outstanding, but fun). Then we walked across to the mall (Northpark) to get Tim a watch battery as his watch had died. We tried Penney’s first, but after searching for a while, the watch guy said he didn’t have the right battery and sent us to a jewelers in the mall. They did have the right battery, and offered a lifetime guarantee on the battery, and will replace it free as long as he still has this watch. But, they had to keep it a while longer, so we left it with the jeweler and walked back to the theatre for the second part of our double feature – the movie Tim wanted to see – “The Longest Yard”. It was good too, but did have a lot of rough language, especially at the beginning. Once it got to the football part, we liked it a lot better! We rate them about the same, about a 6 or 7 on our 1-10 scale we use at Hambones.

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Ouch, my ear is worse today. I’m going to go to the MEA Clinic near my house in a little while, once Tim is up and I see if I can persuade him to go with me. If not, then I’ll go on up by myself. We tried to put more drops in the left ear last night and that apparently was a big mistake. It’s much worse now, totally clogged up and I can’t hear a thing out of it now.

We went out last night (as previously reported at the end of this post) and got Tim’s dad a gift card and also went to eat at the Mexican place we like out on Lakeland, called El Torero. We ate an entire basket of chips, but only ate half of our entree and brought the rest home for lunch today. I had my favorite there, a shrimp quesadilla, and Tim had the fajita quesadilla (chicken).

After we got in, I was flipping TV channels and found “Four Weddings and a Funeral” on Lifetime.

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I woke up this morning with a bit of an earache. I have been noticing for the past several days (or maybe a week or more) that my ear was starting to feel stopped up. I have had this most all of my life. As gross as it is, here’s the plain truth – I’m a “high wax” producer, as my ENT says. I produce more ear wax than normal people and my body doesn’t “dispose” of it like regular people do. Mine builds up and has to be periodically cleaned out. I try the drops at home from time to time, and they help some, but it usually builds to a point where I have to go to the doctor and have them clean them out.

I called my ENT here in Ridgeland this morning and was promptly informed that my doctor “doesn’t do that irrigation method” any more. Apparently it’s “out of date”. Well. Hmmph. Whatever. Plus, he’s booked up for 3 weeks and I don’t want to wait that long. I guess he’s not my ENT any more! 🙂 Anyway, I called the MEA clinic here and they have the equipment (or so the receptionist said when she came back from hold, she SAID she checked) to flush out my ears and irrigate the ear canal and clean out the built up wax. I am going to give the drops another day or two, but then I think I’m going to have to go to the clinic and get them cleaned out properly. It’s not an earache per se, in that it’s not throbbing or painful. It’s just that it’s stopped up, I can’t hear out of it well, it sort of rings like a vacuum in there, or the sound you hear when you stick a big seashell up to your ear. 🙂 It’s just really annoying and I don’t want to leave on vacation with it like this.

Ok, on to more topics. I’m sure that was gross and boring and tedious. If you want more tedium, click the -More- link to hear about what the Air Conditioning repair guy said and did last night to our AC unit, and also to hear about my day. Consider yourself warned!

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YEAH! Hambones is back up and running, thanks to all of Tim’s hard work. He worked about 14 hours yesterday and last night, off and on, on upgrading the site. Well, not really an upgrade. He wiped the server clean and started over with a newer version of SUSE, the Linux software we use. He got all of the data back, and still has a few things to work on in the background (email and other components), but for the most part, for what regular users see and use — it is all back and all fine. He has a lot of things he still wants to do, but nothing (hopefully!) that will affect users. We’ve been down quite a bit the last week or so, and we apologize for that. Hopefully it will be a bit before we have to take the site down again. When we get a new hard drive, we’ll take it down again, but maybe we can put that off until we get back from vacation.

It was nice having him home yesterday, even though he was mostly locked away in the computer room day and night. 🙂 He went back to work today, and I imagine it was a nice break for him! He will have to leave on time today, as we have an air conditioning service guy coming out this afternoon. Our AC unit is running constantly, and it is taking several hours to drop the temperature by one degree in the house. Tim and I are both worried that we’ll burn up the compressor at that rate! We hope it’s just low on freon or needs cleaning or maintenance. I don’t even want to think what a new heating/cooling unit is going to cost us if it has to be replaced. Everybody keep their fingers crossed! 😀

I’m trying to be really quiet this morning, as Tim didn’t get to sleep till nearly 4AM. We knew he had to work last night, starting about 11 PM on a project, but we thought he would work from home, as normal. But, as luck would have it, our cable modem service was acting up (I couldn’t get web pages to load), which affected what he needed to be able to do, plus now that we have Vonage, it affected his phone call needs. So, poor thing, about 10:30 he had to drive into the office and work from there.

He had wanted to work on Hambones last night, in between waiting on things to run on his project. So, he took the main site down earlier in the evening, and started doing a full backup. He likes to take it down so that no one will post anything new, and so we can get a full backup and not lose a single bit of data. However, about the time the backup finished, and he was ready to start working on upgrading the site, it was time to go into work, so he didn’t get to work on it. So, we’ll have to do this again, either tonight or tomorrow, or soon. Tim really wants and needs to get this software installed, so look for more down time for Hambones.org. Sorry 🙁

Today is going to be a nice day. Tim told me last night that he will be working from home after he wakes up, so it will be nice to have him around later on today. 🙂 I might not get my workout in, but everything else should fit in nicely with him here.

We’ve had a really nice, quiet laid-back kind of day today. The kind that normally drives poor Tim nuts. Poor baby. I love them though. I love quiet restful Sundays, where we can watch tv, play games, play on the computer, read, etc. When I was working, I craved them – a chance to recharge my batteries. Still love them.

We had a tv movie-watching marathon all afternoon (Monte Walsh, Crossfire Trail and Gladiator), and now Tim is checking out “Into the West”, waiting on the NBA game to come on. I think I’ll go read my book while he’s watching basketball. I got my menu all planned out and posted for the week, so I feel like I’m ahead of the game on some things. 🙂

I blogged yesterday about what we planned to do, and for the most part, it was pretty accurate. Well, except for the weathermen, who we all know are never accurate. We didn’t get one drop of rain, nary a sprinkle. Everyone south and east of us did, but we didn’t get a thing from Tropical Storm Arlene. Time to drag back out the hoses and sprinklers and start watering flowers and things! 🙂

Yesterday, as previously reported, Tim went outside to work in the yard, and then came in a bit later to say “I’m going to the parts store, the weedeater isn’t working”. Then a little while later, he says “I don’t think I can fix it, I’m going to go buy a new one, do you want to go with me?”. So, off we go in the truck to Home Depot. After what seemed like a really long time, he finally decided on this one (if the link doesn’t work, it’s a Ryobi string trimmer/brush cutter). Click the -More- link if you want to see a picture of Tim using it later on in the yard! 🙂

After he finished everything outside, he came in and later tried to work on Hambones. He took the main site down for a while, so no one would write anything new to the forums, recipes or reviews systems or their blogs. He got a full backup then started to install his new software on his “development” box. Well, apparently that didn’t work. He emerged a few hours later rubbing his eyes and saying “let’s watch a movie, I’m tired of fiddling with that”. So we watched Oceans Twelve! 🙂

The moral of the story – we got a new weedeater, and Hambones will be down again, more, in the future, as he continues to work on it. Sorry guys!

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We woke up to some wind outside, but the sun is shining and so far we don’t have the slightest hint of rain. I hope that Tropical Storm Arlene doesn’t go completely east of us and we don’t get any rain at all. I love rain this time of year – I consider it free water for the grass and flowers! It keeps me from spending an hour outside in the yard, dragging the hose and my watering wand around, watering everything!

Today is going to be a busy day. Tim is out mowing the grass and doing the yardwork, since we still think (or hope) that it will rain later. He wanted to get that out of the way first. Then, he plans to come inside and work on Hambones, so the server may be down for a while today (and this blog). I just hope all goes well and we don’t lose anything!

I have a long list of chores to do while he’s working inside and out. Among them, cleaning up the house, laundry, making my chocolate-eclair icebox dessert, cooking, working on some things on the laptop, doing research for our upcoming D.C. vacation, working out, and some other things. Going to be a good day, I think! 🙂

Well, it’s pretty late on a Friday night. It hasn’t started to rain here yet (tropical storm Arlene is supposed to hit the Gulf Coast sometime late tomorrow), and I’m starting to have my doubts as to whether we will get much rain at all. These things usually go east of us.

Tim got home at a fairly decent time tonight, about 6:00 PM. They had some of the big bosses in from Dallas today and had meetings all afternoon. More changes coming, or so it appears. Tim, as always, is not worried. I wish I was such an incurable optimist! 😀 He came in the door saying “where can we go out to eat?”. Ummmm, dear, I still have that fish left from last night, that I didn’t cook because you wanted to take me out to eat. Which I thorougly enjoyed and appreciated, don’t get me wrong. But I do so hate to waste anything, especially food. Therefore, after careful consideration, I have very smartly deduced that either a) Tim doesn’t want to eat fish or b) whenever I get in a “we need to stop eating out so much” mood, it only tends to make Tim want to eat out more and more. Sigh. We’ll see.

Ah, I digress, as always. Not only do I write about “exceedingly mundane” things, but I’m incredibly long-winded and verbose. My apologies.

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I did a lot of work today on Hambones. Lots of photos, a news story, some stuff behind the scenes, setup a new forum (exercise), and some other things. I just finished typing up 3 movie reviews from movies we have seen lately. I’ve gotten rather tardy on getting those typed up and online right after we see a movie. I don’t think anyone really reads them, but on the off chance some of you do, I try to keep current with them and offer our (or in most cases my) opinion. Tim doesn’t usually participate in the review writing exercise!

We just got back from eating Chinese. I had my menu all planned out for the week, had fish thawed out today to cook tonight. Tim got in a little before 6 and asked what we were having. After I told him, he said “do you want to go out and eat?” Which usually pretty much means he has no interest in eating what I had planned to cook! He dangled the ultimate carrot in front of my face next when he said “well, we can stay here and eat fish or we can go out and eat Chinese“. DUH. Dufus Head (as Shanna and I are now calling him), you know I never turn down Chinese. Never. Ever. Tim has come in before with supper about to go on the table and offered to take me to eat Chinese. I promptly dish up the food, stick it in the fridge, wash the dishes, and then hustle double-time to go get ready and go out to eat Chinese. That man – you gotta love him – he knows the way to my heart. Flowers work. Chocolate works wonders. Chinese food is right up there with those 😀 What a guy, my Tim!

Tim didn’t have to work too late last night, thank goodness, and got home a little after 6 PM. I had started working yesterday afternoon on some of the photos in the Photos section at Hambones, and got some errors and had some problems. Tim came home last night and worked on the problems for me, and hopefully we now have them all fixed. We lost some photos from early 2004, but those aren’t in high demand, and I have them on my Windows PC, so I will eventually re-load them onto the Hambones site. I want to spend some time today loading all of the new pictures that I have received lately – we have a few from Wendy of their new baby Nathan, some from Trent and Shanna of Ava Clair’s first birthday party, and a bunch from Amanda and Mark of Ethan and Abby’s recent trip to the zoo. I can’t wait to get them all loaded for everyone to see! You know me, I love photos! 😆

After Tim finished fixing Hambones for me, we watched the rest of “I, Robot”. We had watched it this past weekend, and found that our copy had a scratch on it (that we bought from the previously viewed rack at Hollywood Vide0). We had returned that one over the weekend and gotten a different one, and picked up the movie where we left off and finished it. But we wanted to go back on this disc and watch the first parts, to make sure there were no scratches or pops on this disc. I’m happy to report it’s fine. If anyone wants to borrow this one, just let us know. I need to add these new movies we bought to the DVD collection on Hambones. All of the DVD’s we own are listed here, so check them out and if there’s one you’d like to check out from our library, just let us know!

There’s not a lot of exciting stuff going on around here, as per usual. 🙂 I worked quite a bit yesterday on this blog. We lost all of the images and pictures when Hambones went down on Sunday. So I spent several hours, slowly but surely, working on piecing all of them back together. I didn’t have everything in one place on my regular Windows pc (I had them all together on the server, but we lost that entire directory structure). I’m having to find the files and images, resize them, transfer them back over and set the links back up. Slow work, but I want to do it. I want my blog back the way it was! I have several more hours left to go, then hopefully “Humpty Dumpty will be put back together again”. 😀

Tim had to work late last night, and didn’t get home till after 7 PM. We ate supper and made a couple of phone calls, then we settled in to watch King Arthur. Good movie, and I really enjoyed the theatrical version, but the one we bought at the video store is the director’s cut, and it’s a lot more graphic, bloodier and more violent. Lucky for me, it’s one of those movies where you can see the battle scenes and head chopping coming, so I can just throw my hand up and not watch! 😆

We slept late this morning, then got up and went walking. We are having so much trouble getting up early in the mornings to go walk. I think both of us would rather sleep! I did – however- finally get back to a little bit of stretching and exercise. I’ve been wanting to start back on my exercise DVD’s, but I just don’t have the willpower or discipline to do it. (I know, ducking head in shame). Today, I at least made a stab at it. I did one short segment, walking and arm weights, and at least got some good stretches and weights in, as well as a little cardio (it didn’t take long to get my old heart pumping and me sweating!). Shanna really encouraged me yesterday, so thanks Shanna! 😀

I have a long list of household and computer chores to do today, plus I’m still in an MP3 mood, so I’m ripping some old CD’s to my hard drive, and surfing iTunes. iTunes added some new country music artists to their site, including Tim McGraw, and I’m sorely tempted to do some downloading. Resisting so far, but sorely tempted!

Well, we’re still trying to recover from Hambones dying yesterday. Tim was able to get a lot of the data back from the backup system, but we lost a lot of stuff from my blogs, some pictures, and a few various and assorted other things. The GUI interface is not working, and several other components are either barely dragging along or not functioning at all. We ordered a newer version of SUSE today, and Tim is going to completely wipe the server and start over on Hambones once the software is delivered. Not upgrade as I had previously thought (or hoped). He wants to do a clean install. I hope we get all of the data backed up now! We are also going to need to get another hard drive soon. If it ain’t one thing, it’s another. Always something that costs mucho $$$. 😥

I went to the dentist this morning for a scheduled checkup and cleaning. All good on that front. We didn’t get up and go walking because it was raining. We had a nice set of thunderstorms move through last night – had lots of thunder, lightening and rain. We were still getting residual rain this morning, but it stopped by lunch and was mostly sunny and hot all afternoon. I did the grocery shopping this afternoon, and some chores. I didn’t get nearly as much done as I had wanted, but hey – there’s always tomorrow! I bought Tim some happies today while I was out, since he worked so hard on Hambones all weekend and was able to restore most of the data. He’s enjoying them right now (some new football mags and a new handheld game). I think I’ll head back in there and play the game some more with him!

Well, I haven’t really had (or taken) the time to blog about the last couple of days. We’ve been fairly busy, although most of it is pretty mundane and I imagine pretty boring to most people. However, if you like to live dangerously, then read on! WARNING: Extremely long post ahead! 😀

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Well, I haven’t blogged about what we did yesterday, and now I haven’t blogged about what we did today (Saturday). I’d like to say that I will get on Sunday afternoon and catch up, but I’m not so sure about that. Tim has been working some on Hambones and it may not be available tomorrow. We just got back from CompUSA where we purchased the full version of SUSE 9.3, so he can reload Hambones. So, I don’t know when it’s going to be down, or for how long. Might be a long week! I will have to try to remember everything to blog about later on. 😀