Flora's House is Finally Done...

We, well mostly Pam and Roberta, have finally gotten Flora's house and stuff all gone through, cleaned, categorized, organized for auction, and prepped for sale. Pam has been staying over there most nights this month, as has Roberta, working on this daunting task all day and sometimes night also. They filled up the dumpster once and had it dumped and returned. The first load was TWO TONS of stuff...

Friday, Roberta was cleaning the stove/oven, which was awful, and ended up killing it, so the family had her get a used one installed. A shinny used white one to match the other appliances. It came with a new hood - since the old one had a built in microwave hood, and I had to wire it up an install it yesterday. I also brought over the power washer and since it's been warm, for here, we were able to power wash the back deck and clean out both of the garage fridge and freezers.

We are going to be bring the large stand up freezer home and give Roberta our small one that will work better for her. It will be great having a large extra freezer. It seems to be in pretty good shape though it is quite old. With my luck, it will last long enough for us to get use to it and fill it up before it dies and required us to buy a new one or loose all the contents on a moments notice.

In Pam's spare time, she has been setting up the newly acquired furniture here at DaHouse - a new display hutch in the dining room, aka The Cake Room, and a very old chest that is suppose to be a couple of hundred years old and first arrived here on the Mayflower, we are just not sure if it was the ship or the moving van... Its a large rectangular beast with lots of leather straps and metal protectors at all possible points of contact, that really looks good with all our other stuff, but needs special placement so it doesn't get destroyed by sunlight. I think we have it all resolved at this point by moving the couch forward and putting it in back of the couch. There, it's away from all direct sunlight and looks real purdy...

She is unpacking many boxes of crystal stuff, washing it all and loading it all into the new display hutch. I installed new lights and automated them so they automatically come on when you enter the Cake Room. It actually looks quite pretty, though is not my 'cup of tea' at all... There is still a lot more stuff to to an little place for it all, so we shall see how that all ends up.

In my 'spare' time, when I am not over there doing something or bringing something or whatever, I have been trying to get my life sorta back to normal. My pool playing has returned to being good again after a couple of weeks of disaster there. My Thursday night league is done, since we dropped out of the playoffs with our dismal performance, which included my dismal performance also, last week. There was a lot of flux in the team for some time - jobs, moves, relationship disasters, etc., that had caused it to be a hassle for the most part anyway. So, it was time to be over... But, the Wednesday night league is still going for another few weeks and it is going great. A couple of weeks ago, we added a new member who replaced the old team captain that stole all the team money an got ran out of town. He is a reasonable player, but besides that, a general nice guy with great family morals. He drives a semi-monster truck, is a hunter/contractor type, had two little boys and a nice wife that comes to the games now and then and shows up every week. Now, if we can get him to play better, he will be a great addition to the team. This last week, our other member, Tim, also a spec house builder/contractor and father of young kids, had to be at a kid thing, so Storm, who has assumed team leadership, brought his father-in-law, Bryce from Alaska, to sub.

I have known Bryce for some time and is a great guy. He grew up and use to live here until he moved to Alaska and started a chain of pizza restaurants and raised a family. Anyway, they are all back down here now and have a new pizza restaurant way out in this little town in the sticks. Jenny, his daughter and Storms fiancee, works for the restaurant and will ultimately take it over. Anyway, Bryce also is an avid fisherman and has lots of friends that are also crazy about Sturgeon fishing and all things outdoors that I plan on getting hooked up with over time. He also has time to fish and said that he would be ready to go almost any time - which is my type of schedule...

While I haven't been recovering from being basically gone from DaHouse for a couple of weeks there, I have been upgrading software and computers. Pam's daughter Jaz and her husband Brad, the ones that did the awesome multi-media tribute to Flora at the funeral, also gave us a brand new full copy of the new version of Windows, Vista. Its the Home Premium version that basically is the replacement for the old Windows XP Media Center Edition.

When I first started getting setup to do it, I didn't have enough disk space in the boot partition and had some software issues that had to be resolved. I happened to have a shinny new 500GB SATA drive sitting here from a really great sale and upgrade started at the Black Friday sale this year. The Black Friday sale is the one that starts at 5am on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I got this 250GB disk then for $49. I didn't need it so I just sit on it and then recently I saw the 250GB disk I had on sale for $159 and this new 500GB SATA one on sale for $179, so returned/purchased the disks ending up with the shinny new 500GB SATA one for a total of $69. Anyway, I regress, so, I installed the new 500GB and rearranged all the disk partitions so now I have plenty of room for the new Vista OS as well as room for 200 hrs of stored TV shows and about 100 hours of saved video space for really good keeper stuff. I also have all the photos/videos from the cameras and all the music database on there and an extra partition for backing up the OS and work space for new, yet to be determined stuff - lots of disk...

So, after downloading and installing all the utility program upgrades, I installed the new Vista and got it all set up. "Getting it all set up" is a term that usually includes all the time that happens from the time you first start the upgrade procedure, until it all finally works right. Which is this case was about 3 days of time... For the most part, it really worked well. I was surprised that it installed so simply. Then, when I started trying to do stuff, nothing much was working and it ended up being a multi-level pissing contest between Vista and Norton Internet Security as to which one was going to do what - with both of them wanting to do it all and not allow the other to do anything. Once I figured this out, I was able to resolve it pretty quickly, though I am sure there will be a lot more tweaking that will be needed before it is all done in that arena. I basically only use the machine for a data server and HTPC (Home Theater Personal Computer) anyway, so that are probably lots of 'issues' that haven't been discovered yet that need to be adjusted.

The largest 'problem' was installing the new version of Media Center with my two TV tuner cards and attached digital cable TV boxes. I must say that the new Vista version of the program is much nicer, and was the reason I did the upgrade in the first place, and is a lot easier to install/configure than the old one, but it just wouldn't switch the channels on one of the cable boxes. It has this little computer controlled remote control, if you will, called an IR (Infrared) emitter that has these wires you stick into the front of the cable TV boxes, where the remote control signals are received at, and the computer sends the correct signals to change the channels just like using a remote would do. And, I just couldn't get one of the two emitters to work at all. I messed with it for a couple of days, going through the whole installation/configuration process numbers of times without success. Then, I remembered the tried and true technique of deinstalling the poorly acting hardware from the computer, via the device manager, and rebooting. When you reboot, all of the 'stuff' attached to the computer is found, identified, and verified installed. If it is not 'installed' the OS will install it again, which it did to the IR Emitter control unit after I uninstalled it and Walla, all was fixed and all is working perfectly. Or at least I don't know of any problems and ignorance is bliss...

I have also gotten the new Office 2007 installed on both Dell machines and it also installed very easily and without issues. I have only used the mail program, Outlook, so far, but it is much nicer than the old version, so I am excited about checkout out all the other stuff in Office I use and see how it has all changed. In the old days, every new upgrade would always require you to convert all your data files and there was never any way to return back to the old version if the new one didn't work, but it seems that they have finally gotten to the point that the file structures are robust enough that they don't have to be enhanced, just the program functions that use them. This is a good milestone in computer development evolution.

Speaking of Bliss, I really must get down there to catch some of those big Sturgeon. So prepare your self for some large Sturgeon fish pictures... Its been raining and warmer, which means that the 'road' is going to be very soft and mushy. I think I will wait for a few days and let it dry out It is amazing how nasty this mud can be here in DaHo...