Winter is Winding Down and Spring is Springing Up...

The daily highs have been around 50 degrees lately, so I guess the cold winter is finally ending. The ice sculpture that was created by the leaking faucet is down to about 1/3 of its original size and going quickly. All the ice on the shaded walkway to the front door is gone - for the first time since before Christmas and all the snow is gone except for the large piles, here and there, where it was piled up from the snow plows.

I went fishing for the first time Monday at my favorite place, DaHole, in Bliss. I didn't catch any fish, but it was a great time to be out and involved in it again. I did see fish jumping, so they are there. I tried out the new reel, and it works much better than expected - which is saying a lot as I expected a lot from it. We will have to see how it deals with a large Sturgeon or three before its officially approved. I plan on going out again tomorrow to try it again.

My pool is not going too well. I am playing better, but a lot of bad luck and general crap seems to be keeping me down overall. Last night was our first night of tournament play and we barely won, having to do a tie playoff. I only won one of my four games. A personal worst for me... Tonight, we have to play a much better team, so we shall see how that goes. I will be glad when these league tournaments are over. I am so done with it all at this point. That being said, I am very excited about starting to play the Tuesday night 9-ball tournaments again. I like them much better and you don't have to deal with all the drama of the team member issues, which have been pervasive all year.

Now that we have the new Media Center Extender installed and the Commercial-skipping software up and running, now it is causing 'issues' with our primary computer in the Living Room. First, the CPU was heating up, making the fan turn on and sound like an airplane taking off and now the sound is cutting out every few minutes for a second or three - which really drives me crazy. I finally resolved the CPU fan issue and am in the process of tracking down the sound 'glitch' problem. A 'glitch' is what sound dropouts are called, I have learned... ... ...

I have to upgrade our network to gigabit speed to handle all the moving of the large recorded TV files around, to and from the home server. Each one of the files is about 2GB in size and if we ever go to HD quality, they grow to 5-10GBs each. The good news about that is that the entire house is wired for it and all we have to do is replace a couple of NIC cards and a switch and we are done.

Pam's Dell Top Performer dinner is coming up in a couple of weeks, as are the two pool league awards dinners, so we will be very busy for a while here in DaHo...