It is "Superbowl" weekend and we are in the midst of a Gale force windstorm.  We've already had two power outages today.  One was short, around 7:00am.  The other was around 1:00pm and lasted two hours.  Considering how hard the wind is blowing and that we are located on "Finn Hill" (a frequent outage spot) I wouldn't be surprised if we have more this weekend.  I'm actually pleasantly surprised that the last one was only two hours!

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 (early Saturday morning) and lasted for over an hour and a half.

All our local weather reports have warned us to expect power outages after our record rainfall losening the soil plus the gale force gusts.

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 (and slightly torn) 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 RedHat 9.0 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 RedHat 9.0 again.

The Ops meeting in Vancouver was a bust and I've been reprimanded for my reactions to their series of insults and inconsiderations.

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 of this biyearly meeting.  I was to meet with one other person from our company and the tech person at the hotel.  When I got there, the Hotel personnel knew they were meeting with 3 names from our company and none of them were mine.

I should mention that the Mill Valley side of our company still (after 3 years) cannot spell my first name correctly, even when they remember that I'm one of the people they sent somewhere.

The head of the over-corporation thinks of me as a glorified "office girl".  My guess is that he barely 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.  I'm not sure how much formal education my immediate boss has either, but he's a much smarter (certainly self-educated) and more considerate person, and a decent boss.  Still, it was he who delivered the reprimand and I know I didn't handle the situation as gracefully as I could have - had I realized the position I was going to be in.

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 (during times when no visual presentation was being made) that the Secretary had on her laptop but that I was never given.  Had I known in advance, I would have given her all of the presentations to her and let her be in charge and I would have only been there in case something needed troubleshooting.

As it was, I wound up having to do a lot of switching (the projector cable) from one laptop to the other and STILL people came up to me at the last minute with presentations (one of them in a .mov file so I had to download Quicktime on the spot).  There was actually one I could not run because his flash drive didn't work in my laptop and the projector didn't work on his.  If I had been given even twenty minutes advance notice, it would have been possible for him to email the presentation to me (we had an internet connection) and for me to display it on my laptop.

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 doesn't hurt because I haven't been running because I hurt my back.

I'm feeling well enough that I'll probably start running again tomorrow.

I saw mute swans on my trip up to Vancouver.  I brought in a branch with thorns that I found in the parking lot at work and some red flowers bloomed.

I've seen a few crocuses (or is it crocii?) popping out of the ground.  I expect to see the ducks doing their head-bobbing soon.

The daphne and andromeda are in bud.  The sarcococca is in full bloom.  The fragrant clematis (Armandii) has put out some new growth but I don't know if any of it has buds yet.

With all this rain, we now have a "water feature" in our backyard:  somewhat between a puddle and a pond, near the north end of our backyard from the Greenhouse (east end) to under the canoes (west end). 

During a lull in today's wind I saw a Bewick's wren in the suet in the shade garden.