Its been a while and we’ve been busy – sorry about the extended interval since my last post.
We made a flying trip to Saskatoon, Prince Albert & Nipawin last week. Marilyn had some meetings – I went out to Shellbrook to visit Ken and we both had a good visit with Al & Grace. We had been really pissed at the fridge that came with this house for a really long time. We never could figure out why it insisted on dumping about a cup of condensation out on the floor every day. So when we were going to Saskatoon anyway we took the truck and brought a fridge home with us. Marilyn put the old one on the local Facebook buy & sell page as a free fridge and within an hour had four candidates willing to come pick it up. We could never have sold or even given it to anyone we know but when we were giving it to someone we will never see again it seemed OK. Of course we told the new owner how annoying the fridge was but it looked really good and its hard to believe it could be as annoying as it was.
We also brought home 40 little raspberry sticks from Boughen Nurseries in Nipawin. I fired up the Kubota excavator, scratched out some shallow trenches by the little house and planted our new raspberry patch. Then Marilyn called Richard to come turn the water on at the little house and we discovered that the main shutoff valve had exploded over the winter. Actually “we” didn’t discover that – Marilyn discovered that when she got soaked by a fountain coming out of the incoming line from the street. So today I went to Preeceville and got a few plumbing bits so that we could get the water turned on without getting soaked.
This was also the week when the mayor organized a work party to build our neighbours a ramp into their front door. Irvin has something wrong with his back which is taking away his use of his legs. I’m not sure that anyone knows exactly what the problem is but the symptoms are that he is increasingly wheelchair bound and that wasn’t workable without ramp access to the house. So about 10 of us got together over the course of the last 3 days to build a ramp, put railings on the sides of it and lay carpet on it. It looks pretty good despite the qualifications of the crew.
Today I fired up the little Scat Trak and started excavating for another neighbour’s drainage project. Keith has had a lot of trouble with water in his basement. At one point the water pressure under his house built up to the point where it raised the middle of his basement floor by 6 inches. Last year he had that all dug out and rebuilt. Now he wants to change the surface drainage around the house so it doesn’t happen again. The starting point for that project was skimming off some topsoil and sod around his house which is what we did this afternoon.
My biggest news for the last week is that I have finally resolved all my computer “issues”. After we got home I got my prime laptop and my backup working so that I could use either of them but there was still something wrong with my prime machine. It wasn’t throwing any error codes and there wasn’t anything showing up in any of the various Windoze performance monitors but it also wasn’t completely right. Fairly regularly it would just go off somewhere on its own. By “Fairly regularly” I mean at least a couple of times every hour of use and more often at least one incident every five minutes. The activity light for the hard drive would light up solid and the keyboard/mouse would become completely unresponsive. It would stay that was for anywhere from 5 seconds to a couple of minutes. I did a few software tweaks which didn’t do much more than stop the “not responding” message that Windoze likes to display. The machine just clearly had a mind of its own and it was extremely annoying, bordering on impossible to use. The only remaining possibility that I could think of was a failing hard drive but none of the hard drive utilities that I have showed anything wrong with the one I was using. Finally I bought a new drive off eBay and restored the system onto that drive. Its been like I have a new machine ever since. This computer hasn’t worked this well for literally years. So I’m very happy.
No comments:
Post a Comment