maple syrup time again!

Problem: Most of the dry wood that is located near to the fire pit where I’m making the maple syrup is suspended twenty feet in the air horizontally.
Solution: Tow rope+Jeep+luck
This has all the makings of my next fiasco story.

zzzt!

After several flickers, shudders, flashes, and beatings, the screen on my Apple PowerBook finally bit the big one. Fortunately, the external monitor connector still works, so I can still use the computer (which was an absolute necessity, for wedding invites and such). After some fingernail biting and hair pulling (very little of the latter, since there is less and less there to pull), I found Carbon Copy Cloner for OS X that makes a disk image out of the entire hard drive, which I saved to my indespensible firewire drive. Then I was able to use the same program to write the image from there onto my Powerbook loaner from the U. What I ended up with was a perfect duplicate of my laptop on the loaner. Shazaam! And thanks, Apple, for building an OS that Just Works. (ie. I started up the loaner afterwards with not so much as a “New Hardware Detected” or reboot. Try that on Windows!)

sleeping on the floor again

Since I wrote this post later than I intended, I should say, “I was sleeping on the floor again.” Marie and I unleashed the powers of renovation on the main bedroom, which involved pulling up the old carpet and pad, scraping and repainting the ceiling, and installing new pad and carpet. So for the last couple days, I spent the nights on the only remaining floor space in the living room.
Yesterday was a long day that involved more painting, much carpet wrangling, and furniture moving. But I got to sleep on a real bed! It was weird. (Since I’ve been sleeping on the futon that I’ve had since my senior year of college… circa 1998.) Below are some action shots, though I didn’t get a pic of the old, cat-infused carpet and pad being taken out.