Entry 02/23/2011 10:46:10 AM – Mentat 602

Oh the joys of waking up first thing in the morning and as I’m making my routine decision of restarting my system after it being online for a week, see that the restart button is actually set to shut down. Any time I’ve seen this sort of thing, I know that Windows has pushed some sort of update and that it’s requiring a full start fro a down state in order to work. Forcing the restart anyway, when it gets back to the Windows Login, I see that no updates had been applied, check the history to see why it was there. It turns out that Windows attempted to push KB2488113 as a required update and then downgraded it to optional.

Shrugging to myself, I go into Windows Update to see that there were a couple of required patches that need to be installed not to mention Windows 7’s Service Pack 1 in the queue for download and installation.

Grand.

One thing that I’ve rarely been enthusiastic about Windows Update has been the way that Microsoft’s been attempting to push SP updates through its interface, and for years of working on upgrades for my home computer along with production computers at work, I’ve generally avoided doing the SP upgrade path through Windows Update because of the two times that have gone tragically. The first time, the service pack didn’t even install and the second time the OS had been completely hosed. So as a general rule I stuck to downloading (or purchasing) ISO and running it from disc instead.

Not this time. Call me a masochist, but this time I made the decision to give it a try just to see if the update engine had been improved.

First time I tried running it, it said that it had failed and demanded a restart while the update window was covered in red-as-blood failure messages.

“No biggie,” I muttered to myself. It was probably because of the three other patches that it had downloaded and installed and experience has shown that certain patches have higher priority for being installed than other patches and even service packs.

A restart later and I was off to try again. Stopped the Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware modules as a precaution as it’s simply common sense when applying serious OS/Kernel updates.

Then came the anticipation of sitting there watching the download move along at its own pace; halting at 15%, then 45% and then 75%. When it downloaded and began the hooks for installation was when the real sitting on pins and needles feeling began.

Unlike Windows XP (and even 2000) where you can sit in the OS and happily watch as the service pack was being installed from the desktop, Windows Vista and above actually forces the user out of the OS to apply the service pack. And with Vista and 7, it will occasionally force the system to restart at certain points of the service pack configuration. In this case it happened at 30% which sort of caught me unaware as I was on the laptop and here the familiar clicks of my desktop fans being cycled while I was chatting with Glenn on MSN.

Thirty minutes and about 4 GB of disc space taken by this update later, the Service Pack was successfully installed and from what I can tell everything’s up and running according to plan. And for those of you that are sort of policing your free disc space (like I do), you can follow the instruction on cleaning up the backup files once the service pack is installed from here. They’re not kidding about it taking a few minutes to run the completed service either. While it stated that it had completed the remove, it took almost 7 minutes for it to reach the “The operation completed successfully” message. From what I’ve been seeing of the comments on the page, 32-bit and 64-bit users will see ~540 MB to ~1.3 GB disc space recovered. So far I seem to be the exception with Windows 7 Ultimate and reclaiming ~4 GB of disc space; and at least one person noticed they had less free space after than before (though it was reported afterward that he was tired and reported it backward)… but it’s still early on with the article, and I’m sure there will be others that reclaim more.

As a precaution, I had also downloaded the DVD ISO Service Pack from Microsoft in case I ever had to reinstall from scratch and don’t want to sit through single updates, which after a bit of finagling through Firefox was able to burn to DVD. Seems that when trying to download it through IE, I kept getting a “connection reset by server” message just as it downloaded the last bits of the ISO, but in Firefox, it downloaded like a charm and a couple of minutes after that, I had a DVD happily burned just in case I ever decide to reinstall Windows from scratch on this system.

So after about 2 hours of installing, restarts, almost biting my nails a couple of times, with finally performing the routine clean-ups and a bit of stress-testing. I’m back to where I should have been when I had originally restarted my system. Woo-hoo!

[Last Edited: 02/23/2011 03:57:18 PM]

Other than the usual upgrade nonsense, things are for the most part quite and rather normal. Of course by normal I mean that the temperature are colder than a witch’s tit in a brass bra face down in an ice puddle. While we’ve had some moderate to better temperatures (on and off) for the better part of the last week and we’ve seen/experienced some melt for the glaciers many of us seem to have in our yards as well as along the sidewalks in the city; whatever melt we’ve had as stopped leaving us with harder blocks of ice where packed snow used to be. Even had a bit of snow as well; though fortunately for us it didn’t last long even on top of the existing snow and ice we have here. Jeez, can’t it start to warm up soon? I’m tired of having a chill and having one hand that feels as though it’s colder than the rest of me.

Please?

Well that’s about it for the time being. Off to warm up a bit and finish reading Bram Stoker. Until the next time.

Entry 02/19/2011 09:23:31 AM – Mentat 601

As I’m sitting here at the moment with the coffee brewing behind me, softer music playing, the whining needy Hellbeast happily sitting on the bed cleaning herself from a thorough gorging of this morning’s food, and wondering why I’m sitting here in my T-shirt and sweats; I’m feeling rather accomplished at the moment after almost 9+ hours of fixing a relative’s PC woes. I am also feeling a bit daunted as to why one of the problems is still going on, small as it is. I received a call from my uncle earlier this week with the usual, “what are you doing?” which is often the pre-amble of the New England-polite for “you’re expertise in computer’s is needed”. Turns out my Aunt Norma’s nephew’s home PC was acting incredibly slow and he was at a loss as to what the problem could be. So with the usual interchange of “any day good for you is okay with me”; I set the daunting task for the end of the week so that it would give me the usual false sense of accomplishment I get for the weekend.

What kind of environment the PC is in and who uses it the biggest telling of the probable cause for the current computer woes. Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 3, ~2.6 GHz Pentium 4 Processor, 512 MB RAM… Family of four(-ish). Two adults and teenagers… Teenagers have limited accounts. As the dad tells me a bit about some of the work that he had done prior my arrival, I peruse the system to see what I’m looking at for damage. The son’s account is password protected and it’s pretty apparent to me why it would be password protected: he’s 18 and the computer in the basement and out of the way of most traffic. The daughter’s a big-time music fan and social group addict. Two Adult Accounts and a Main Admin Account with Full Access and no password protection. Wireless router in place, with default SSID and passwords in place with no WEP/WPA passwords/keys in place.

Smiling a bit to myself, I get a strong feeling of what I’m in for, for repairs.

Asked the father while looking about the layout, if he had run Spybot Search & Destroy as I found the icon and a full load up of an older version of the program in its appropriate directory.

Father doesn’t know what it is, and only ran the standard Anti-Virus/Anti-Spam program provided by Cox: McAfee.

I thought to myself that one of the kids knew that either the system was slowing down or tried to clean up the potential for downloading something that they shouldn’t. The logs indicated it had been run a couple of times, but hadn’t been in some months.

I pulled out my thumb drive with the tools of the trade and installed the newest version of Spybot, and hankered down for the long wait as it ran a complete system check.

Forty-Five minutes later and enough warnings on the values of putting passwords on the admin accounts making comparisons that children (and especially young teenagers when the computer had originally be bought) are like the worst employees when it comes to a piece of IT-like hardware; Spybot reported about 22 different forms of malware, from XPAntiVirus to various flavors of Virtumonde and all sorts of variants of CoolWebSearch types; Spybot happily cleaned them all up after a couple of restarts and running in Safe-Modes. Still though the system was running a bit slower than I’d expect for an XP machine with less than adequate memory for Service Pack 3.

So the next order of business was to load up two of my favorite tools from Sysinternals and get them running to see what I could see: Auto Runs and Process Explorer. The run registry entries in HKLM and HKCU were a mess of unnecessary programs and call procedures to bloat and malware of which I happily hacked away the unnecessary, while cleaning out the DLLs and executables that were attached to the malware. Watching the processes in Process Explorer, I could see some pretty interesting pieces of innocuous software completely misbehaving in ways I’ve never seen before. The older version of MSN Toolbar loaded up three different executables to run, one of this ended up slogging the system down to a crawl for reasons that left me stymied. So off it went along with the three other toolbars that I didn’t recognize loading up in Internet Explorer… Heh, while it wasn’t as bad as this Toolbar Fail, given that I don’t run toolbars on any of my browser, three are entirely too much for my liking. Off went a lot of other things that seemed to be load

With the system still running a bit slow for my liking, I ended loading up Hijack This! to see what BHOs and unknown programs were causing IE to slog down. Not to mention for some unknown reason, during boot up, IE has a habit of starting up and running resident when it shouldn’t be. It’s easy enough to kill out from Processes Tab in Task Manager, but the thing it IE is supposed to be an on-demand only program. On the whole my aunt’s nephew was more than happy with the end results (in spite of the rogue IE and the current work around), and I made a promise I would look further into this problem while I had suggested that he purchase more memory to bring the system up to at least 1 GB RAM.

Getting home last night (and again this morning after my morning coffee), I honestly couldn’t find what could be causing IE to silently launch in the background and suspect there’s either a BHO I’m not aware of being a problem, or a piece of malware that none of the programs that I used to clean up the system recognized it as a problem. I’m still promised to head there to work on the laptop that my aunt’s nephew’s son bought, along with cleaning up that minor annoyance and even perhaps put some more memory into the desktop (to bring it up to at least 1 GB of RAM).

From this happy trip, I feel like reminding folk of what I know from such trips to family houses and family computers:

1. When you have teenagers, always password protect your admin accounts. Make sure the password is a word or phrase that only the adults will remember (I usually suggest something from their past that they haven’t told their children about).
2. Strong passwords should always be used. No dictionary words, at least 1 capital letter and 1 numeric in place of a letter.
3. Always password protect the SSID. The last thing you need are neighborhood kids mooching their connection for P2P piracy. I can’t tell you how many take-downs of business-classed accounts I’ve dealt with over the years from the next door neighbor’s kids were caught by the MPAA sharing movies through various torrent software.
4. Even if your children are 18, monitor their activities for installing programs until you’re sure they’re reading and thinking wisely. This will ensure that they’re not clicking through install screens and adding unnecessary and even potentially dangerous malware. The rule of thumb is, “if you can’t read what the screen said, they didn’t either when they clicked NEXT.” (Something I have to watch my aunt as she has a habit of clicking next, next, next without realizing she’s changed her homepage and added yet another toolbar).
5. An ounce of prevention is always worth more than a pound of cure. When in doubt about a piece of software being requested to be installed, say no first and do research. It’s always easy to say okay afterward when something is cleared than cleaning up a mess when it’s a bad piece of work.

After that, it’s just a matter of common sense.

As for the rest… On an impulse buy, I decided to finally upgrade my Logitech webcam from a Communicate STX to a C910 and definitely not for the suggested retail price on the Logitech site either. While the quality of the video is significantly better than the older one that did it’s job marvelously, I am not too keen on the fact that the software has changed drastically between the two. Seems that the controls for the camera itself and the capturing software are now two separate components instead of integrated in a single ribbon. Then again, I admit that I’m not really good with radical change in software; but I’ll adapt like I always do.

Admittedly the impulse buy wasn’t exclusively my own idea. I was influenced when a person that I’ve been talking with paged me to want to talk about getting some advice about purchasing a new webcam. Given the man’s penchant for privacy, I had suggested the C510 as it’s small and compact and gives the necessary privacy by folding up and away. Part of the reason was that while he aid that he knew about computers, in less than a ½ hour of speaking to him about the pros and cons of using a webcam, he wasn’t exactly as “expert” as he boasted he was and I suspect that he could easily fall prey to trojan software that can be used to hijack a webcam. Of course, he completely disregarded my advice (as I knew he would), the instant he found out I was going with near top-of-the-line with mine. But this isn’t why I’m bringing him up.

I’m bringing him up because I find myself in conflict with wanting to continue to interact with him. While he’s extremely smart on many subjects, and I really do like talking with him about the myriad of subjects that come and go over the course of hours, I find myself put-off by the fact that the 4 times we’ve talked on the phone and the one time I was admiring the fine picture of the webcam I would be expecting in my mailbox within a day — he has always had a cocktail in his hand. In a couple of instances, he’s been more than drunk during the course of the night… Add on to the fact that he’s admitted to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and couple this with his admission of having a heart-attack in his earlier 40s, and well… This seems like self-destructive behavior I personally have no need for in my life.

Glenn has in his almost-sagely sort of way asked me whether it was something I would be willing to face to help this man face and without any doubt in my mind, answered to the negative. Of course it didn’t help matters that in my pondering his question I was having images of Rick and his drinking ’til he got drunk and smoking like a California Summer Brushfire and all the control issues he had toward the end of our relationship. Still though, while it makes me cringe when I say things that contain the words, “…at my age”, I still can’t help but point out, “these aren’t the sort of issues I want to be facing at my age.” It is of my firmest believe that when one gets to middle-age, one should have some modicum of sensibility and common sense to know better.

So at the moment, I’m doing what I feel is necessary to do until I can make up my mind as to how I want to approach/encroach the subject: avoiding it for some “me” time that I can think about whether it’s something I want to deal with in my life even in a casual manner. Really, I need a day, especially given that every time it’s been my turn to contact him, he’s been beating me to the punch and contacting me first. That also doesn’t help my conflicted state as I feel like I’m dealing with a bit of “clinging Kudzu” while I try to sort things out. More on this in the near future no doubt.

Finally as I wrap things up… The world had a scary moment about midweek when my old Coffeemaker decided on breaking the feed tube to the grounds bucket from the heater. Ugh! Yes, I once again was faced with the Water tank volcano as I had described in a previous entry and no matter what I did wouldn’t stay fixed. Fortunately for me, I only had go pull out the 12-cup maker for my happy addiction and when out during my normal shopping run to pick up a new one. So the Coffeemaker is dead! Long live the Coffeemaker! Life as we know it is safe from my pre-caffeine rampaging.

Well that’s about it for the time being. Uncle’s out of the house for most of the day which mean my aunt and I are fending for ourselves. As it’s been a while since I’ve had a grinder, I think as I’m buying that’s what we’re going to do. Until the next time.

Entry 01/22/2011 03:17:09 PM – Mentat 596

As it turns out, my run of luck against illness has finally run out and as I’m sitting here with covers up to my waist and doubled up with a T-shirt, Thermal undershirt and a heavy sweatshirt, I’m sitting here going through the alternate chills and feeling as though I’m about to start sweating from the weird-assed fever that I seem to be running. That and my throat being pretty scratchy at the moment (even after the expectorant that I just downed), I have all the makings of tonsillitis going on right now. Can’t say that it’s shabby really given that in the last two and a half months, my aunt’s had two different sort of viral flus and seems to currently be through another head cold. Not to mention that my uncle’s had the same flu and looks like he’s working through his second at the moment as well. I knew it was only a matter of time before whatever mutation was going on was going to strike me given I’ve had to be in the house troubleshooting a NIC issue with their PC (more on that and the drama of it in a couple). At least I know my tonsils are still working properly… even if this time through they decided on acting up from all the germs and viruses flying about my aunt & uncle’s house. This of course means I’m going to be a bear for about a week while I go through all sorts of the usual fun that I go through when I’m sick.

Heh and before the lot of you snark me like Glenn did — no it’s not man flu. I generally do pretty well when I’m sick, the only rough spot during this is that for a couple of days I’m going to completely lose my voice because of it. Fun that is because that’s the height of it when I’m sounding like a squeaky mouse more than a man. After that though, I’m pretty mobile and self-sufficient as long as I don’t start running a high fever. But all that is still about 2 – 3 days away. *knocking on wood*

So in the last month — most of my computer woes have sorted themselves out. PC boots up without issue for weeks at a time, and then has a singular moment when during boot-up decides on wetting the bed and giving me a BSOD. Couldn’t find any solutions for it through the usual search sources; so I’ve allowed Windows to send the reports along to the Solution Center and see if it comes up with anything. Looking through the View Reliability History, since installing the new video card, it’s been 1 every 3 or so weeks and I’ve noticed it might be something to do with the PATA/SATA combo controller that I have on my Motherboard and how quick the PATA drives come up from a cold boot. Seems that when the PATA initialization takes 5 seconds is when I experience the BSOD which corrects itself and runs fine for the next three weeks. And yet, when the PATA initialization takes 30 seconds (as it usually does), it runs fine.

We’ll see what the solutions center reports back on the issue, but seriously I’m not too concerned about it. Once it’s back to the Windows Login Screen, it doesn’t give me a problem at all. I suspect more and more it might actually have something to do with the BIOS needing to be flashed and updated. Something I’m not too keen on doing given my experience with bricking Motherboards after a ROM-BIOS upgrade.

My aunt on the other hand has seemed to have developed problems with her Vista Desktop. Seems that when her computer comes back from hibernation, her network card doesn’t come fully back on as she’s been getting a Limited/No Connectivity Warning sign in her Network setup. First off, it looked like the wire she had been using between her computer and the first router was all twisted up with all sorts of other wiring (which might be suffering from insulation problems) not to mention a bit of fraying around one of the connectors. So I replaced the wire with the spare that I used to use between my old Dell and second router (the wireless). The issue seemed to have corrected itself for a bit, but then returned after a quick re-plug on the CAT-5. A couple of hours later, it happened again and I checked the power settings, disabling the hibernation/sleep settings as either her or my uncle tend to play games on it through the day. Suspected that it might simply be a common problem she used to experience with her COMPAQ (which was running XP Home at the time), and the NIC wasn’t coming back online like it should; but a quick reboot seems to fix the problem

I came across a solution of uninstalling the NIC drivers and then allowing Vista to reinstall them to see if that will fix the problem (as it’s not a problem with the Cable Modem or router, as I swapped out her plug in the router for the second router (which is where my computer goes through), and it’s running fine and without any sort of interruptions. Not to mention my uncle’s Sorenson has been operating just fine and my aunt was able to confirm that my uncle has been receiving calls when he has without interruption, issue or problem.

Heh, and just for giggles I decided on running a ping test while writing this section of today’s journal from my computer and it reported just fine as you can see:

Ping statistics for 69.147.125.65:
Packets: Sent = 200, Received = 200, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 19ms, Maximum = 41ms, Average = 21ms

So when I get a bit better and my throat doesn’t quite feel like it’s on fire, I’ll stop by my aunt’s and try to uninstall and reinstall the NIC drivers to see if that’ll fix the problem. Right now though, she’s mostly satisfied with the solution of rebooting her computer if she hasn’t been using it for a long period of time. More on that when I get a chance to test this out.

[Last Edited: 01/24/2011 09:19:47 AM]

Heh, oops.

What started as a fairly easy enough journal entry got diverted and side-tracked a couple of times. First I was giving Glenn a tutorial on the ins and outs of Apophysis — particularly in marble making — which he’s done a few that are most impressive for a beginner. Then I got myself involved in a bit of the drama that’s been going on in one of the usual places that needs to be curbed in some manner, though I’m not in any position to do so at the present time. Then I got sidetracked with finally checking out a profile that I should have (now I need to write a note back after reading what I read). Yeah, just the usual things that I do when I’m distracting myself from thinking a bit on this and that. Though at least at the moment as things are quiet this morning (including the cough that’s definitely becoming more than a nuisance), so perhaps I’ll get this entry done finally.

Things at the homestead have been relatively quiet all things considered. In spite of a couple of rather smallish snowstorms that dumped a couple of inches of snow, and a storm that included some freezing rain and sleet — it’s definitely looking like winter here in the Tundras of New England. On the mad dash out of the house this morning for cough medicine and cough drops, my aunt made a comment to me that this is the coldest winter she’s seen ever. Of which I’m all too keenly reminded that her memory is entirely too subjective for the likes of me.

I reminded her of that there was the time when Boston Bay (and Cape Cod Bay) had been frozen over back in the 70s (though for the life of me I can’t seem to find the article online though do remember it was the Boston Globe that had reported it). I reminded her of the time in the early 80s when it was so cold in the Biggest Little that Narragansett Bay had frozen over as well. I reminded her of the late 80s when temperatures had been reported at -15 F (-26 C) with wind chills at -45 to -50 F (-42 to 45.5 C)

She muttered to me that it’s the coldest that she remembered, of which I left it at that and changed the subject.

Seriously, it’s pretty damned cold at the moment. Looking at the thermometer in the car when we got in to make the emergency drive to CVS and getting comfortable once again, I see that the weather reports set the temperature currently at 0 F (-17.7 C) with wind chills at -16 F (-26.6 C). Yeah, that’s pretty damned cold, as it seems the Hellbeast is currently sitting at my feet and once again I can feel her purring up against them.

At least for the moment we’re not expecting anything more than another snow squall tomorrow. After that it’s sunny and cold, cold, cold!

Well that’s about it for the time being. Off to work on a couple of discussions, e-mails and notes. And of course clear out the collection of deviations that have been collecting in my Deviant Art inbox. Until the next time.

Entry 01/03/2011 11:17:16 AM – Mentat 593

First off, I would like to take the opportunity to deeply and gratefully thank my anonymous patron for extending my Deviant Art subscription for another year. I have my suspicions as to who that patron is given my rather heavy handed approach to bestowing one some time back; although unlike that certain who, I will simply leave well enough alone with the appreciation that someone really likes me enough to extend my subscription another year. Though I digress and say:

Thank you. *bowing* It is most appreciated.

And now back to our usual programming… Already in progress.

2011.

Hard to imagine sitting here that I’m into another decade in the 21st century. Well, technically I have been since last years (as calendars and decades go from 00 to 09 and then repeat), the brain such as it is tends to put the numbers 01 – 00 instead. I usually joke about it because my brain doesn’t like nil (or imaginary numbers for that matter) and will organize accordingly. Seems that I’m not the only one in this as too many other people do the same. Good thing too, I’m typically token enough in my eccentricities. I don’t need to be completely off the beaten path all the time, eh?

Not surprisingly in this time I was also able to get my resolutions for the year written out as well. Sure they’re nothing too strenuous or difficult (for me) to fulfill though I will admit that they’re going to take quite a bit more discipline than I have demonstrated through the 2010 year. One of them though is a carry-over from the year before — one that I have got to delve into more than I did last year. Suffice it to say that while I won’t be posting them publicly, I will say they are going to be adhered to, to the best of my ability — if only because I need the diversions and the discipline which I haven’t been practicing all that much in the last year or two.

Hard to imagine as I’m sitting here that it’s been more than 3 weeks since the last time I’ve sat down to write. There have been numerous times that I’ve thought about writing an entry prior to the Christmas Holiday Dysfunction, and then again as a quick “hello, I’m still alive” between Christmas and New Year’s. But the fact of the matter is that I was entirely enjoying my slacktastic time playing games, watching shows in my Hulu queue, generally being a pain in the butt with my family, and chatting with friends when I could. People that have known me for some years know that the easiest way to get in contact with me is usually through the various messengers if they really need to get hold of me, and those that are only moderately acquainted; well… I did warn that I was going to be away (mostly) during the last months stretch. It’s not as though I’m going to die or end up in a hospital somewhere in that time. Heh, my family’s stressful yes, but not that stressful.

Since the last time I’ve written the computer continues to run well. I’m still seeing an odd BSOD in regards to something that doesn’t seem to be running properly during the boot up process. And the information that I’ve been able to dig up has been sketchy; but given that in the last three weeks it’s only happened twice during a reboot, I’m not going to worry too much about it and keep it on the radar for just a little bit longer. I still suspect it’s because of the old PS/2 keyboard being swapped out for a USB keyboard instead — for even though I was able to clean up the problem in Check for Performance Issues looking through the System Event Viewer I’m seeing a System Error that the ATI-Tool had failed to load. There’s a couple of Microsoft and Google Entries that explain how to remove it; though admittedly I haven’t had much want to continue tinkering with something that’s only moderately annoying. That and if I knacker something up, I really am not in the mood at the moment to play reinstall the Operating System. That can take some hours that I don’t want to spend time on, as I rather have a list of other niggling things that I need to do at the moment. Until then though I think I’ll stick by the old saying of, “don’t fix what isn’t really broken.”

And in the last three days I took the opportunity to update many of the programs that I haven’t checked for updates in a while. Many of the programs that I have loaded seem to have had a couple of minor bug tweaks and fixes, with a couple that have shown some major improvements. One of those updates is actually an open source game that I’ve been having a bit of fun with is UFO: Alien Invasion. As a long-time fan of UFO: Enemy Unknown (otherwise known as X-Com: UFO Defense here in the USA) fan, this game seems to be a pretty good improvement to the original. Significant graphics, with the right sort of turn-based that I appreciate in this sort of isometric game play. Now granted I haven’t gotten quite that far into it (as it’s not a game one can cheat at like the old UFO: Enemy Unknown) though it’s the right sort of annoying for me to want to play for a bit, take a break and come back and play some more. Either or, for me — it’s entertaining without being too frustrating.

On the homestead, things are just going. As I’m sure some folk have caught in pictures at the various places, last week we had our first nor’easter of the season. The media blew it completely out of proportion by calling it “The Blizzard of 2010”. Pfft, 6 inches (15 cm) and the Governor/State not even declaring a state of emergency for the snowstorm is hardly a blizzard. Hell, by the time I was up and helping my uncle and neighbor with shoveling out the driveway and walks, the city had pretty much did a fine job clearing out the roads in the neighborhood. Which was quite the shock given that in the past, our neck of Fairmount is usually the last section of the city that’s done as we’ve had snow mounds in the roads lasting until 5 PM the next day after the blizzard. In fact, according to my neighbor, they had actually been up and down the street at about 2 in the morning plowing the street clean. Good thing too, given that it can be a bit annoying come the morning when Uncle and I are clearing out the driveway and the huge plows come through pushing the mounds back at the end of the drive. A week later, with a bit of balmy 40s F (~4 C) the snows and ice that had accumulated in the drive and on the steps have cleared up enough leaving just the sand and what’s left of the salt in the driveway.

The Hellbeast continues to surprise me with her wacky appetite. While she was completely in heaven having leftover turkey that headed in her direction, she’s shown interest in foods that she’s never shown interest in before. Spinach & Cheese from the occasional Calzone lunch, granola, peanuts and raisins (probably because of the sea salt on them from the trail mix that I’ve been chomping on), Pizza Crust (though I noticed she’s a bit picky as to which Pizza place I order from and will only settle for Olly’s), this morning it was parts of my Cinnamon Buns, and for lunch she seems to have taken a liking to Deviled Ham (with the bread I might add). On the other hand, she’s also become completely allergic to most canned seafood with the exclusion of Tuna, and even then she only eats that once a week. Heh, old age and that mass in her stomach is what I suspect is the problem. At least she continues to do well for the most part.

As for the family, Christmas Holidays and me… All I’m going to say is that I survived it. Good thing too, I wasn’t up for the crazy amounts of drama and dysfunction that can come up during the holidays.

I think this is going to be it for the time being. Sure it was a hodgepodge but given I’ve been away for more than three weeks, I believe it’s a good start for the moment. Will probably be back through the week as I try to get more of the other thoughts in my head out. Until the next time.