I'm sure last Saturday's (March 12, 2005) meteorite is the biggest news.  I was inside at the time and I saw a light out my window but I didn't investigate.  An hour and a half later I heard the report on television.

According to the report, it traveled from East to West with a long tourquoise tail and was seen landing on or off shore just West of Portland, Oregon (about 7:00pm PST).  It was seen and reported along the coast, from Vancouver B.C. to Northern California.

Nothing since I last wrote.  I've been spending all my time on another project (see below).  Maybe I'll get a chance to add the "Story of Humbaba" this weekend.

At work, I finally boxed up the server and sent it to Valdez.  Now I'm loading and configuring three desktops to send to Kenai (today, hopefully).  Another just came in yesterday, our new office "spare".  I expect the Whittier server to be delivered any day now (maybe today) and then I'll have to start working on that.

Last night I spent 3 hours trying to clean enough spyware off a computer in Anchorage so I could put a new account on it.  Being a Sys Admin has become a very different job from what it was two years ago.  I have even less influence over the users in remote offices than I do over the users in my own office and although I've provided them with Firefox browser plus 4 of the best utilities for removing spyware, they don't use them, until they are too infected for the utilities to do any good.

At home, I've been working (and working and working) on Majordomo for seattlelinuxchix.org.  All the stuff on the Web seems to indiciate it is "easy".  Well, no.  I've read many and printed some tutorials.  They've been helpful.  I'm making progress.  But I've also been at it for hundreds of hours.  I'm sure the second time I ever need to set it up, it will take 4 hours or less.

I'm doing a good jog (not a slow jog) for the entire quarter mile on my walk and real running for the last block.  I still haven't lost any weight.  I recently read something that said that half an hour daily is enough exercise (a medical publication).  Whoever wrote that was just stupid.  If that was true everyone would just do it.

One of these days doctors will learn enough about wellness so they can start teaching people how to be well so they can minimize illness and the effects of it.  I wish.  Of course that isn't where the money is.

The truth is that there is a wide range of normal for metabolism (just ask Oprah) and for many people the exercise needs to be more than half an hour daily.  In fact, for SOME people (like me) half an hour daily of exercise is BAD for our weight because we get very hungry, eat, and bulk (our caloric intake increases to match our activity).  Then if we stop exercising, we balloon.

Unfortunately, exercising for half an hour per day is a step towards getting to the point where we are finally exercising enough so that our caloric output exceeds our caloric input.  I'll write it here when I figure out what my exercise needs are.  From previous experience, I would guess I need to be running ten miles per week.  Right now I'm walking 6 miles per week, and running 1 or 2.

For the last couple of days, there has been a different neighborhood cat at the catnip under the birdfeeder each morning.

Then there is the mole (gopher?) that showed up in our backyard the same day as the meteorite (March 12, 2005) .  It hasn't made any new tunnels in our yard in 3 days and we are hoping it has gone back to where he/she came from but there's a good chance we'll need to do something about her later, although we haven't figured out what yet.

The winter birds have left.  The past two days it has been more like a real Seattle March (windy, rainy, chilly) than it has been up till now.