Entries this day: Stuff

Stuff

8:40pm CST Saturday 25 November 2000

Okay. I feel quite behind in my writing. I haven't been keeping notes in my Visor.

9pm-ish Thanksgiving Eve, Wende and I spent the night at Stacy and Roddrick's house. As always, they were great hosts. Rodd made us hot chocolate and said the funniest thing as he presented my cup, as a warning not to burn myself: "Dog, that is on fire!"

It was funny to me.

Slept through tremendous rain (interesting that it rained pretty heavily the last time we were there) and I rode my unicycle a tiny bit in the morning.

10am or so Thanksgiving day, me an' Wen followed Stacy and Rodd 1.5 hours to Wende and Stacy's uncle Gary and aunt Margot's house. Past all the highways to a two lane unpainted road that wound for miles into the wooded hills. There were a significant number of houses nestled into the woods on either side.

Tons of fun with the family. This is Stacy and Wende's mom's side of the family. I had met them all previously at the family reunion. I played with Julie, Erica (sp) and JW (sp) as the adults watched football or talked or cooked. Bouncy ball and horseshoes and various card games and limited exploration of all the *stuff* on their property: mostly old metal things like trucks, an engine, a chain, spring shocks, and some piles of bricks salvaged or left over from landscaping.

That reminds me: the house is fabulous split-level with walls of stone for the first 3 feet and lovely stone steps between the split levels. Up is kitchen and entrance, down is TV and bedroom I think. Hey, where was their bedroom? I must say I didn't recognize one. Hmmm.

Wende and I sat with her dad for dinner and talked some about Julie, who kept hollering, "I can hear you talking about me!" and "stop talking about me!" We mostly weren't talking about her, but it was funny.

Food was fabulous and plentiful.

Stacy and Rodd didn't stay much past dinner. Wende and I didn't stay much past that.

7pm-ish

Hugs and handshakes and "drive safely," which I did all the way to my dad's house. I tried to take a shortcut, but just ended up back on 290. We never did look at the map to see where we had driven. We did get to see a possum and rabbit though!

9pm-ish

Instantly upon arrival at my dad's (after Sadie the tiger-striped solid-build dog barked her brains out at me), Karen (dad's girlfriend) and Marti and Jennifer (friends of my dad's from school) gave healing advice for the injury thing on my chin. Karen made a paste of golden seal and put that on my chin. I wore that under a band-aid all night.

Jennifer asked my birthdate and time, offering possible past life reasons for the recurring injury. Something about a breaching of loyalty while I was in a leadership position of some sort. She imagined Roman Empire kind of stuff. Hmmm.

Talked and played with Sadie, who was quite my friend after all that barking. I became the alpha dog after a particularly hard WHOP!! as she yanked her head to one side and bashed her head into my head, surprising the shit out of both of us. She stopped wrestling and I kept my head above her head as I hugged her to make sure she was okay. My dad said that I effectively made myself the alpha dog by whispering in her ear. Interesting.

Sleep around 11pm after reading several articles in recent issues of Discover magazine.

- -

8am awake and Marti and Jennifer discovered they had a flat tire. I helped my dad change it, and then he went with Marti to get the original tire repaired.

While they were gone, I rode my (borrowed) unicycle all the way down the one lane road on which dad's house lives. After all the rain, the end of the street was covered in water though it was whirlpooling down into the cement tube sewer thing. Very cool to watch the water spiraling down.

As I watched the water, some asshole pickup truck driver sped through the water and splashed me from behind. I yelled a mean name at him (I assume the driver was male), and then analyzed the situation. I was wearing sweatpants and my hoodie pulled over my head. My skin didn't actually get wet at all. I was thankful for my clothing keeping me dry. I rode the unicycle back to my dad's house.

Dad and Marti returned. "They said, 'we pulled out a nail and patched it, and then we found the nail that was actually causing the leak!'," relayed my dad after their adventure.

Once Marti and Jennifer were on their way, dad and I worked again on Wende's computer. We didn't get it fixed, but as Karen drove me home, I believed I had the tools to make it work again.

- -

Home around 4pm and then I brought Taco Bell to Wende at work for lunch. Back at home I worked on her computer and formatted the hard drive then installed Win 95, then installed the 3com driver, then installed the 3com NIC, then let Windows discover the new hardware and set up the driver and it worked. Thank goodness it worked. Visited ati.com and got a driver for the video card so we had 1600 pixels instead of 800. Then visited netscape.com and downloaded Netscape 6.0.

And you know what? During the installation of Netscape, the screen went blank; no signal was being sent to the monitor, but the disk drive was still accessing and installing Netscape.

I let it go for a while until the drive stopped driving, but the screen did not come back. Damn. I performed a stream of Alt-F4, Enter to close all the everythings that may or may not be open, lots of Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X and *finally* got the screen back when it said, "Windows is Shutting Down" and the computer turned off.

I rebooted and just as Windows was cranking up, the signal to the monitor went off again. Great. No, not great. Crappy. I was pissed.

Alt-F4 and Ctrl-Break and got it to shut down again. I barely considered trying to use the keyboard to blindly change the screen resolution, but knew that would be futile since I don't have another Win 95 box to use as a model. I'd be lost without the monitor, plus I didn't know if changing the screen resolution would fix it anyway.

Formatted the drive, installed Win 95, told it to not look for the NIC, then I installed the NIC hardware, told it to look for the NIC, it found it, I set all the IPs, etc, and it didn't work. I got an error when trying to ping. It seemed to not even be finding the NIC.

Formatted the drive, took out the NIC, installed Win 95, installed the 3com driver, installed the NIC, Windows discovered it, set up the driver and it worked. Wende had arrived by then (11:30pm) and I was so tired, yet determined to get it all to work. Visited ati.com, got the driver for the monitor, visited netscape.com and downloaded Netscape 4.7 and it all works perfectly. I am thankful.

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