Altivo

Once again I've taken too long a break from posting here. The winter has been made busy by several events, not the least of which is my planned retirement from full time library work. After June, I will be a greymuzzle pensioner, with more time for writing, music, gardening, and my pets. Of course that means helping to find and train my replacement. After twelve years in one job, there is a lot of stuff to organize and document and I've been kept very busy getting that done while keeping up with my regular responsibilities.

Meanwhile, my husband is getting near the end of his five year quest for the Ph.D. degree, which has also kept us pretty busy. Next week he will be presenting a paper at a conference, while I cover the animal care tasks he normally handles here at home.

Also some announcements on the writing front. First, I have two poems recently published. One gives a tortoise's view of history, and can be found at QuarterReads. The title is "Thoughts Chelonian." The second appears in a curated selection of furry poems at Adjective Species. The title is "Procyon Prowling" and the subject is a raccoon. I recommend the poems in that collection. They represent a wide variety of styles and formats, and an equally diverse viewpoints on furry subjects. Lunostophiles did a fine job of selecting them from the submitted works.

My story "Coyote's Voice" will appear in ROAR volume 6, to be released in July at Anthrocon if all goes according to plan. The publisher is Bad Dog Books, and the very competent editor for this issue is Mary E. Lowd, also known as Ryffnah.

I'm also currently engaged in writing the completing chapters of Oh, Ricky, the parody on Richard the Lion(heart) that some of you may remember from NanoWrimo 2011. I'm doing that in connection with this month's Camp NanoWrimo where I'm one of a dozen folks working together to prompt and encourage each other.

More as events develop. Thanks for reading.

Three years ago we presented Marni McGee's book Winston the Book Wolf with a fursuit appearance by Argos in the role of Winston. This evening we repeated that event, with a few enhancements.


Here Argos greets a young fan after the story presentation.


And he expresses dismay at the smaller children who were apparently afraid of him as he waits for them to make paper wolf puppets in the next room.

For a full sequence of 10 photos of the event, start here and proceed by using the "next" button at the top right corner of each photo.

Of course the weather has been pleasantly moderate all week until today, when the temperatures again climbed into the 90°F range. My fault I'm sure, for scheduling a fursuiting event.

I hope someone got the license number of that bus that ran over me. Monday, you say it's called?

Seriously, I feel as if it's Friday after a full week.

Heat continues unabated. Guess the liberals running that particular plot device have pulled out all the stops. Hope they keep it under control until the election. Otherwise we may be all burned up and unable to vote at all.

It's Wednesday, and Midsummer's Eve, and (ugh) Summer Reading Club. Today's door count: 1420. Average for when it isn't Summer Reading? About 500. Screaming hyperactive kids, mothers shouting into their cell phones, compounded by hot, humid weather. Yay, lovely. Not.

Sonic screwdriver search ended early when I found a hand drink mixer/cappuccino frother on eBay for $5 and change, with free shipping. Runs on 2 AA batteries, looks to me very much like Tom Baker's version of the screwdriver. Comes with several different mixing attachments too. Hope it makes a suitable buzzing noise.

And that's the news for today. Oh, the new lamb appears to be doing well. I'll try to get some photos soon, perhaps tomorrow if the weather is decent so there's light.

And then some. Not that this weekend will be any more relaxing, but still.

Printers are a pain in the a**. People who make a fuss about printers are even worse.

Yeah, a good chunk of my time today was wasted on printer bullshit. Not the fault of the print hardware, though. That functions as designed. It's the print queue management, and the lack of formatting capabilities in typical software, and worst of all the horrendous sloppy inefficiency of PDF files. It seems that library users invariably want to print huge Acrobat files that make print queues gag and stall or that overrun the available memory in the printers. Worse, after you make voodoo sacrifices and stand on your head while reciting spells in dead languages to force these awful documents onto paper, then they say "Oh, I only needed this page here. Do I really have to pay for the other sixty?"

Software vendors are no better. Exact same software installed on two machines with the same parameter definition files (copied, so identical) but on one machine the print jobs have a banner sheet while on the other they do not. I want the banner on both, can't make it come out on the second machine no matter what I try. Same printer, so it's not that. Same queue definitions, identical server software and hardware on both machines. Vendor has now been trying to resolve this for TWO days without success.

Ducks: three eggs a day looks like the new normal production rate.

Me: I think it's bed time.

And a long weekend, thank goodness.

Formal word today, no raises again. Soon they'll be asking us to pay them to work for the city. Unionized employees get raises. No union, no raise.

Tess is OK, thank goodness. I went out early, before breakfast, to let her out of her stall and put her in her pen. She was fine, and remains normal this afternoon. The grass in the pasture is dry from lack of rain and therefore slow growing and not so rich in carbs, I guess.

Gary survived his root canal too, and so far has some ache but no terrible consequences. Good thing, going into a three day weekend, though I think the only added resolution they have might be to extract the entire tooth. He's gone to a Toastmasters meeting (ewww, but he likes them) at the moment.

Gusty high winds and red flag warning are unusual for us, especially at this time of year. If the predicted thunderstorms materialize tonight and tomorrow, though, that will take care of the problem.

Replacement Literati e-reader has arrived and is working normally but I haven't connected it to wireless and allowed it to try to update its firmware either. Will do that at work tomorrow, where the speed and bandwidth is greater.

Good grief, I think the last time I missed posting for two solid days was probably several years ago. And the worst part of it is that there's nothing interesting to say about all that time, much beyond that it was too busy and the days were too short. Work stuff, failed geekery, shopping nonsense.

Hopefully the bump is past for now. Yesterday and today were beautiful days that made me want to go out in some park and hike in the woods. We have some nice places not far away where that would work. At least three of them, four in fact, are within less than 30 minutes' driving distance. And some really excellent ones, like Glacial Park, are under an hour. But managing to actually get away from work during daylight hours has been too difficult. I hope the weather holds through the weekend but that seems unlikely.

Indigo buntings, hummingbirds, and orioles are making frequent appearances near the house now. We've still seen only one grosbeak, which is disappointing, but all our usual species are accounted for. The red-headed woodpeckers haven't been spotted for a week, so I suspect they have moved on as usual. White-crowned sparrows, of which we saw many last May, have not been here this year. But I hadn't seen any of them in the previous ten years either, so that's not too surprising. Coworker reports seeing a pileated woodpecker in Marengo Ridge a week ago today, and I've wanted to get up there (literally ten minutes from home) to check it out myself but haven't yet managed. At least the odds are good that if it was there last week it still is around now.

Cat and dog are taking up the entire sofa next to me. The Literati ereader arrived on Tuesday, but committed suicide while trying to download its own update from the net. Not my doing, it automatically did that as soon as it connected to wi-fi. EBay seller supplied prepaid return label and says he'll send another one (which may do the same thing, I don't know, though colleague's Literati is working fine with the newest firmware, so I expect it's not inevitably fatal.)

I have successfully downloaded 65 ebooks that I had purchased for the eBookwise reader device over the past seven years. All of them were converted to epub format and await a new epub compatible reader so they can be transplanted. Adobe Digital Reader seems quite happy with them, so I'm confident that they will take root as soon as new soil is avalable.

It's 9:30 pm, which means finally dark here. There has just been a lot of dog barking and distant shouts audible through the open window, and now a strong scent that is either a fox (nearby) or a skunk (at a distance.)

There may have been the sound of a fox earlier. No idea what's going on out there, really.

No one else in at work this morning, so I actually got some useful things done. Damaged printer replaced with a backup, which ought to be easy but since the backup is a different model it required reconfiguration on several workstations that use it. Pulled a spare old computer from storage and replaced the Linux installation on it with XP so I still have a backup PC that can be dropped in should something fail unexpectedly. This is a nuisance, but it saves substantial time and money in the end.

Beautiful weather today. Tess got to go out, which makes her happy. Grass is getting away from us and needs mowing all over. Blackberry blossoms are starting to open, and the catalpas and hickories are finally showing leaves. Hard to believe it's already mid-May.

So to bed, to see whether I can catch up on the sleep I lost last night. I have doubts.

Getting lax here. Or too busy.

Not that much happened yesterday other than the usual for a Saturday, shopping, animal care, laundry stuff.

This morning we went up to the library so I could activate and test the new firewall while no one was there to be interrupted, and Gary could use the wireless (which doesn't depend on this particular firewall) to work on his final project for the term. The firewall worked first time, though it still took about 90 minutes to test all the possible functionality that I could. My big concern was a point to point VPN tunnel required by our library software system, but that worked right off. I still had to try various subnets and parameters, but that seems to be done. Hooray. I just might be retired before this particular process needs to happen again. (I should be so lucky.)

Then we drove out to Richmond to pick up two ducks. Gary has become hooked on Freecycle and Craigslist, and yesterday he saw someone giving away ducks. Happily, they divided up what they had between several requesters, so we ended up with two females, perfect for our interest in eggs. The hens were reluctant to leave their home pen, but finally Gary crawled in there and caught them gently. They seem to have made themselves at home with our two established ducks within 30 minutes or so. These are "domestic mallards" according to the giver, and they apparently lay eggs with blue-green shells so it won't confuse our count for the Campbell hen. Now to see if she stops laying due to the disruption of her daily routine.

The red-headed woodpeckers are still hanging about, for the fourth day running.

Plans to grill something for dinner have probably been aborted by rain showers, but that's OK. We have plenty of stuff in the freezer to choose from.

Well, library books anyway. All day in-service training completed and went reasonably well.

Got home just in time to see a red-headed woodpecker in the back yard. Gary has already spotted it a couple of times earlier, and it came back yet once more before dark. These are very striking birds with areas of snowy white, solid black, and deep crimson. The edges between the colors are sharp and clear. When I was outside later I think I heard it as well, though it's not easy to distinguish from a bluejay and we have lots of those around.

Heard a great crested flycatcher in the woodlot behind the barns, and since the oak and hickory trees are only just starting to leaf out, I was able to spot it when it flew from one crown to another about 50 feet up.

On another birdish topic, our champion egg-laying duck laid egg number 199 today. One per day is her rule and she has only missed one day since she started laying last fall. Tomorrow will be number 200 and I have no reason to suspect she'll fail to deliver it.