Letters to you

A ranger came out today to look at the damage. He spent all morning and a cup of coffee with us. By the end of the morning and after much interesting discussion about all kinds of subjects with rialian and his dad, he declared total loss of all three hives and estimated the reimbursement at $650.00. Apparently all the frames had been chewed to pieces (around 80 frames between the three hives). The bees in the top bar were added to the loss since they'd swarmed away. The other two hives had their entire brood destroyed, so they were totaled as well.

Whoa. Things always cost a lot more than I would have ever imagined.

rialian is on TV! with clients at Interplay music program

Idea spawned out of an early morning laughfest with rialian after finding our book on the uses of Kudzu: Carnivorous Invasive Species Permaculture Garden (complete with self-sustaining cycles), which would, among other crawling horrors, contain the product of splicing a giant venus flytrap with kudzu...

I realized after I got my laptop that it didn't have a PS-2 port -- only USB ports. Although I have plenty of USB to PS2 adapters all over the house, I don't have one single PS2 to USB adapter. Therefore, all my PS2 keyboards were unusable on the laptop. I needed a USB keyboard. There was one in the house (Rialian's) but the keys are a bit sticky, so I wanted a new one just like it.

I went to the most convenient place that has keyboards (Best Buy), to find a generic, 20-buck USB keyboard,. That was when I found out that Best Buy didn't carry any USB keyboards - only expensive cordless ones that were $50 and up. For one thing, I am not impressed with cordless keyboards - the one I did try kept losing its connection whenever anything (like a cat) got between it and the box. For another, I wasn't willing to spend over $50 on anything that might fall victim to a spilled drink. I left.

Later that same evening, I decided to clean out the attic. After the last camping trip, I had not really reorganized it, and I had been missing a VCR that I wanted to use to digitize some of my old VHS tapes. We had recently bought a piece of hardware for that purpose, only it wasn't compatible with Ubuntu. Now that I had the laptop, that wouldn't be an issue anymore. Hence the inspiration to find it. Wellp, I didn't find the VCR in the attic, but I did find ... a Logitech USB keyboard.

I don't know if it came from the same place as the Accordion. Probably not. That seems to be from a slightly different dimension than the Keyboard. It was also spawned from a different storage area. So we have one storage area that spawns musical instruments and another that spawns technology that is being phased out.

I can't complain, even though I never did find my VCR... The keyboard was an exact duplicate of Rialian's...

Tonight is a meeting of the Montgomery County Beekeepers Association of Maryland. We can't give rides unless you meet us at the house by 6:45 (no time to collect anyone after work) but if anyone's interested, here's the information:

"Our meetings are on the second Wednesday of the month, 7:30 PM at the Brookside Nature Center, 1400 Glenallan Rd. Wheaton (right next to Brookside Gardens). In addition to socializing, we discuss the latest beekeeping and management appropriate to the season. We always welcome guests. Bring a friend." .

Here's the best part: rialian will be teaching a meadmaking workshop there tonight at 7:30 pm. Anyone can show up.

As an added attraction, they have an indoor observation beehive on the premises, which is most wonderful to watch - they've dotted the queen with a white spot so you can see where she is in the buzzing tummult. It's interesting to see different bees doing different things like building the wax compartments, feeding the babies, polishing the eggs, polishing the queen, dancing, laying eggs (queen only), and flying too and from the hive through an exit in the wall.

To do

Mail package to Secundus
Meet with side job people and start side job
Pay bills
Buy birthday gift for someone whose birthday is 8/19 (located but not yet purchased).

Last Friday we visited my mom and brother Jason, who bestowed his old defunct G4 Mac on rialian in hopes that he could get it running. rialian had been able to use some parts from his fried IBook to upgrade an IMac to do things it was never intended to do, so we had high hopes for the G4. No power was getting to the system, so we'd initially thought that it may be the CMOS battery. We bought a new battery (found the exact one at Radio Shack), but the computer still didn't work after it was installed, so it wasn't that. The other (relatively) cheap thing it could have been was the power supply, so that was the next thing we tried to find. Mac power supplies are apparently not meant to be replaced, because nobody had the one we were looking for. We even found a used G4 and looked inside - and the power supply had a different connector configuration. That G4 was selling for $350.00, so it would not have been worth it to buy that one for parts. The only other place that may have the power supply doesn't open until Tuesday. We shall see if they have one, if it works, and if it's under $50 (not worth it otherwise). We found one on eBay for $65, but that was too expensive plus there was no way of testing it.

We looked online and found out that a new one costs $200, so that was Right Out. We don't even know if the power supply is actually the problem - it could be the motherboard. But even if we were certain, $200 is still way too much for a @#$@$ power supply! Lower end PC power supplies are $30 brand new.

So far the Quest has not been successful. Tuesday maybe we can go to PC Retro Computer Warehouse and they might have one for a reasonable price.

Rialian is back home after having a wonderful time at some friends' wedding! Congratulations go to amberite, heron61, and their significant other. He finally got to meet metaphorge and xanadumalion, both of whom he has wanted to meet for a long time. He also got to meet the designer of the game Nobilis, an RPG based in a skillfully crafted world with superb artwork.

But while he was gone, a bunch of weird stuff happened.

The first thing that happened was that my mom landed in the hospital. She has been having intermittent partial blackouts that she thought were strokes. I didn't even know this until Saturday when she told me. Usually they pass in a few seconds, but this weekend my brother called and said she'd had a partial blackout that seemed somewhat worse than the others. She didn't lose consciousness, and was able to function normally during the entire episode, but had no recollection of what happened during the episode. He said she was having trouble getting re-oriented afterward, and it took about a half an hour for her to be able to think clearly again. We took her to the emergency room where they conducted a CAT, MRI, and other tests - all negative so far. No sign of a stroke, no sign of alzheimer's or any of that. No brain damage, no sign of neurological problems of any kind. They did a cardiac test this morning and we're waiting for the results of that. I'm thinking it could be blood sugar. I hope they find out what it is and that it's something treatable.

Also while he was out, I did a really dumb thing and let Matilda (my ball python) see my hand which was holding the feeding tongs (the tongs were holding her dinner). She got distracted away from the dinner and toward my hand (oops). Already in "feeding" mode, she calculated a precise trajectory through the chink between the lid and tank where the feeding tongs were entering the tank, and struck. Next thing I knew, she had grabbed my middle finger with her needle-sharp teeth and proceeded to wrap my hand and attempt to swallow my finger (my finger tip looks like vampire victim). Hopefully she decided I tasted awful. I used suction on the finger and dowsed it in alcohol and antibiotics. It wasn't at all infected by this morning, so I think it'll be fine. However, it's very bad to allow something like that to happen - snakes aren't the sharpest pencils in the pack, and once they associate something with "food" it's difficult to convince them otherwise.

The next thing that happened (much less serious) was that our Siamese cat went into heat and was waiting to yell at rialian when he got back. We unfortunately can never have her fixed, because we determined that she's very allergic to innoculations which are required for neutering. We're also afraid to risk anasthetic because we're not sure which other chemicals she might be deadly allergic to. She was done with the preliminary presenting and well into "shriek week" by the time he came home. I usually make a special effort to remind him that, well, you know, his cat? She's in heat. (In case he missed it). His usual response to that is "Thank you, thank you very much. That's really ... helpful."

Anyway, I'm glad he's back...