There were 3 power outages in January on Finn Hill per the noteworthy Northshore Utility District.  They were January 1st, January 7th, and January 14th.  The one on the 14th may have been planned.  It was at 3:00am and lasted for over an hour and a half.

After record rainfall losening the soil we are now expecting gale force gusts and the news reports are all warning us that power outages are expected from falling trees this weekend.

Seattle has gone a little nuts in anticipation of Seahawks superbowl Sunday.  I'm busy plotting the shopping I can do while the stores are relatively empty.

I purchased 3 expensive products in the last several months that did not turn out as promised and I'm waiting on replacements.  One of them is the hot tub spa we purchased last August that wasn't delivered until the end of October.  The hot tub itself is fine, but it was delivered with a used cover.  We've been waiting for a new cover to be provided since.  We are supposed to be scheduled for a delivery this Monday.  The other product was an expensive bed that I purchased from Futon Factory.  I purchased a bed from them 2 years ago that is absolutely wonderful.  We have it in the guest bedroom and we are thinking of moving it to our bedroom.  They no longer make that model, so we purchased the nearest current model and it has been very bad for my back.  It is lumpy and was not made right.  The edges slope down 1.25 inches.  The middle is strong with in a vertical line from toe to head, with practically no over-padding.  The edges are mushy with lots of overpadding that doesn't compensate for the lacking understructure.  The final item was the server I purchased for work that was supposed to work with RedHat9.0 and doesn't.  Fortunately all items were purchased from reputable companies and they are in the process of fixing the situations, but waiting is difficult.  I'm sure after the wait is over, if the product is as it should be I'll forget all about the wait.

I hate having to get things fixed or replaced once they have been purchased.  Mostly, I hate having to communicate my dissatisfaction and demanding what I paid for.  So here I am, waiting on three corrections for things that should not have gone wrong in the first place.  Of course, I can't expect things to go smoothly all the time, but I do have to take note when I have 3 battles to fight all at once.

I'm recovering from a back injury.  My back no longer hurts (so long as I don't go into the hot tub and then sleep on the lumpy bed) but it isn't back to its full strength yet, so I had to cut down on the exercise.

The February colors are new and this page.  I also did some minor refactoring on my Perl script that serves up the visitor statistics page.  It now sorts by count instead of date, sorts the cookies in descending order, and no longer prints leading nor trailing commas in the cookie column.  The code itself is a little cleaner, too.

I'm waiting for the replacement server from Gateway.  It should arrive within a week or so.  Then I'll start installing RedHat9.0 again.

The Ops meeting in Vancouver was a bust and I've been reprimanded for my minor reactions to their series of inconsiderate and insulting presentations.  First, I was told that I had to drive there a day in advance because I was the only tech person attending.  The other Sys Admin plus the woman who usually takes care of the projector both opted out.  I was to meet with one other person from our company and the tech person at the hotel.  When I got there, they knew 3 names from our company and none of them were mine.  This is normal for the Mill Valley office.  Their HR person doesn't know how to spell my name.  The head of the over-corporaytion thinks of me as a glorified "office girl" (my guess is that he bearly graduated High School and has always gotten by on luck and "the seat of his pants" so he doesn't recognize that there are certain skills - like IT and Accounting - that one really does need an education to be able to do properly).  So no one bothered to tell me that the other person was bringing not one but three presentations, and that the big boss wanted to show an image that she had on her laptop but that I was never given.  Had I known in advance, I would have given her all of mine

I STILL haven't gotten Majordomo working properly on my server for SeattleLinuxChix.  I phoned my ISP and they are supposedly sending my messages through, but it isn't working the way it should and I'll need to look deeper into it.

My left heel is starting to twinge first thing in the morning and I'm a little worried that I could be recreating my old injury.  I'm running during lunch and at the gym on a tread mill.  I exercise:  walking and running, between 1 and 3 miles per day.

Turns out, I'm not alone in needing MUCH more exercise than I'm able to get.  According to a report from the Surgeon General, we should be walking about the equivalent of 5 miles per day.  If I don't get out and run or walk specifically for the purpose of exercise, I probably walk around one mile per day.

We are still experiencing unseasonably warm weather, but lots of rain. 

A hairy woodpecker is visiting our shade garden feeder regularly.  I haven't seen a hummingbird in a while.  I've heard the Bewick's wren, so she is not far.

The winter-blooming yellow "honeysuckle" bush is blooming up front.  I cannot perceive any fragrance from it.  The pink camellia in the center of the shade garden has a few blooms.  The yuletide camellia did not bloom this year.  It has not bloomed yet in our shade garden, which means that from the middle of November (when the tigerlillies die) till now, there are no flowers for the hummingbirds.