Ipod Shuffle 06/28/07

This week's iPod Shuffle...

1. L'abbé Caillou - Patricia Kaas
2. Tu Me Corresponds - Francis Cabrel
3. Something 2 Dance 2 - NWA
4. South of the Border - Chris Isaak
5. Paranoimia - Art of Noise
6. Then the Morning Comes - Smash Mouth
7. Raindrops - Stunt
8. Listen to your Heart - Roxette
9. Sonate Pour Violoncelle et Piano, Op 19, Andante - Sergei Rachmaninov
10. Nowhere Girl - B-Movies

I thought I'd share one of my favorite Francis Cabrel songs, Encore et Encore. This is a live acoustic version.
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Other neato mosquito stuff I've stumbled upon...
A little add-on for Mozilla Firefox to download (YouTube, etc) videos.

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I received an invite to Ravelry last week (only just noticed it tonight). No clue how I got invited. I never submitted my name. So I can only assume that someone else did this. Had no idea what it was about, so I checked it out. Looks like a neato mosquito knitting project/pattern/stash/anythingyoucanthinkof organizing site. I need to explore the site further when I have more time.

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M's first big bop....

Little M had her first big bop on the head today. She was walking in the living room, lost her balance and hit her head on the coffee table. The nastiest bruise showed up immediately to the right of her left eye. DH was with her in the living room when this happened and he said it looked painful. Thank goodness I didn't actually see this happen. But I heard her wail from the other side of the house. We're surprised that she hasn't bopped her head this hard until now, over a year after she started walking. We were so sure it would have happened much earlier.

Anyhowz, I just realized that I had no ice packs in the freezer. So to improvise, I put some frozen peas and put them into a zip lock bag. That seemed to work a bit after we distracted M with some string cheese, cuz she wanted to eat the peas. And we made a little game of having her hold the peas against the bruise while she counted to 10 or said her ABCs.

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House update...

The two window measurers have stopped by to do their measuring. Yes, for whatever reason, one company (I think it was the Graber shutters) had their own measurers. Our Hunter Douglas blinds are ordered ($2250 for 8 windows). Our Graber shutters are ordered ($2270 for 3 windows). How is it that 3 shutters costs about the same as 8 blinds? Thank goodness we didn't do shutters for the bedroom windows...

We were asked where we wanted the controls for the blinds... which side for the Lifting and which side for Tilting. DH couldn't care less which side they went on. I had no idea which way people choose for these things, but I decided that I would probably use Tilt more often than Lift. Assuming this, I chose the Tilt controls to be closest to me as I walk towards the window/room. It seemed logical to me. However it might be the opposite of what most people choose. I dunno.

We went with a Wand to tilt the vertical blinds. DH prefered the pull strings for the horizontal blinds. I had a slight preference for the Wand, partly due to having little M running loose in the house. We chose the pull strings after the sales person told us that the cords snapped apart easily at the bottom. Anyhowz, if it looks like a problem, I think I'll just find a way to tie up the cord at the top where it is out of reach. I don't really see us lifting the blinds all that much anyways. We have horizontal blinds in our living room right now and I can't remember the last time I ever lifted them; we always tilt them to let in light.

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On the computer front ...

We've been trying to install an OS on an old Toshiba Tecra 8000. One would normally think of this as a basic task. However this particular laptop has no CD ROM drive (don't know what happened to it), but it does have a floppy drive. Most OS installers are no longer available for floppy drives. So we went for Debian 4.0 which could be installed over the network. Well that went OK! Yay! So given than we managed to install Debian over the network, this means that the network card (in this case, a PCMCIA card & dongle) is functional. Fast forward a little bit to the reboot after the Debian install, and we discover that we no longer have network/internet access. Don't know what happened. Tried MANY different things, no luck. It's such an odd problem. Gotta love computers. They should just work!!!

Hmm... maybe a different Linux distribution will solve the problem? I suppose there's RedHat Linux 6.2, which is state of the art (circa 1999, lol). Sigh... if only we had a CDROM drive for this laptop.

Thank goodness this is not my computer. :-) Although I've got most things working on my pre-owned IBM Thinkpad, I just have some straggler applications to install. And some minor data I need to punt over from the old laptop because I forget them the first time around.

I did managed to fish out The Sims plus 2 expansion packs (House Party, Living Large). All the other expansion packs are in another box, the bottom of a 4-high pile. I'll get to those another day...

There's actually a story behind where the computer software boxes are located and why they're not easily accessible. I used to know exactly where they were... in the garage, right in front with no other boxes on top of them. But then we had an unexpected water heater leak back in March so I had to move ALL our boxes PDQ while I distracted M with The Wiggles. Mom was at home so she helped mop while I moved the boxes. Thank goodness nothing got really wet in the process. So now the boxes are in one of two other rooms downstairs, in no particular order. It's a mess. But I'm sure it will get sorted out as we move stuff to the new house. ;-) We shut off the water main, which helped slow down the leakage.

Anyhows, we called a Big Water Heater Company to replace the water heater. BWHC came by to look at the problem. Due to new San Francisco codes, the new water heater needed to be elevated 16" with a bollard installed in front. As a result, a regular height water heater would not fit in the space. They would need to install a "shorty" model. Unfortunately, our WH Guy only carries one in his truck and he already used it earlier in the day. (Our WH leaked after 4PM, we didn't get a guy to come by until 6PM or later) So WH Guy said he would return the next morning. He turned off the hot water valve. In our "panic" mode, we never thought to do that. So we were able to turn on the water to the house and have cold water for the night. Cold water is better than no water.

WH Guy came back the next morning to install the new WH. Yay!!!

Cost for this replacement was around $1500. The WH was actually around $1000. BWHC charges $500 for the installation of the bollard. But WH Guy did not install the bollard. He told us that a city inspector will come to inspect the WH installation, and that they sometimes overlook the bollard. WH Guy said that if the inspector overlooks the need for a bollard, then BWHC will refund us the $500 cost of the bollard installation. Well it's been 3 months now and we still haven't heard from any city inspector. So I'm wondering ... do things move very slowly with the City of San Francisco? Or is this a clever scam for the BWHC to get an extra $500 out of each of their customers? Hmm...

Hmm... if it is the latter, then I'm in the wrong line of work. I should go into the water heaters business and milk an extra $500 from all my customers... imagine all the yarn I could buy with that extra money. Of course I could never do something like this...

It's probably the City of San Francisco moving slowly...

I mean, "slow" is not unheard of. Here's a photo of a bill I received from California Pacific Medical Center for something related to M's birth in March 2005 ... bill received 2 YEARS after she was born. All my medical bills are vague, it's hard to figure out what is what. But this is apparently a bill for the remaining $250 balance after all the dust has settled.

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