We're Back...

...sort of.  This has been a weekend to remember. 

On Friday evening, I started transferring my “stuff” from my old Macbook Pro laptop to my new Macbook Pro laptop.  My laptop is full of all the sorts of tools and daemons a developer needs, and this makes the transfer more complex.  Added to that, my old laptop's operating system was two versions older than that of my new laptop, and that indroduced other difficulties.  Even worse, my user's UID on my old laptop was different than my user's UID on the new laptop, and I didn't realize that until I was half done.  Oh, and did I mention that my old laptop had a half a terabyte of data on it?  Bottom line: while I'm using my new laptop right now, many things are still not working on it.  I've got some work to do today!

But it's not that I spent all weekend working on my computer.  I should be so lucky!  Nope, this was the weekend of the “great burn” – Debbie and I were committed to burning the rest of the giant burn pile that's been sitting in our front yard ever since we trimmed up our pines last year.  And we did it, with just a half hour to spare before the 3 pm deadline (the time at which we had to put out the burn pile, per our burn permit).  We even raked up all the innumerable twigs scattered about the yard, and burned them as well.  The big logs – a couple cubic yards worth – that we thought were going to be a disposal problem turned out to be no problem at all.  Our neighbors Wayne and Marissa were happy to take the pine logs, as they have a big open fireplace in which they'll burn just fine.  It was quite a nice feeling of accomplishment to get that intimidating task done...

Then last night, after finishing the burning, I repaired Debbie's “Easy-Up” – a kind of portable folding canopy.  There's a complex-looking mechanism that forms and expandable framework, involving many hollow metal bars with pivots at each end and the middle.  Two of the end pivots had worked loose and fallen out.  I manufactured replacements by getting one inch long 10-24 stainless steel bolts and jam nuts, then using a Dremel tool to grind a cavity in a molded plastic piece of just the right size and shape to hold the jam nut.  I felt like a dentist with his drill, making this teensy little cavity in my big plastic “tooth”.  In the end, the thing was better than new, as the original design didn't use jam nuts and the bolts could easily come undone.

Now this morning as I sit here typing this post, I'm sore all over – my muscles aren't used to this kind of workout!  I'm almost 60, and this morning I actually feel like I'm that old (most of the time I don't feel that way at all)...