Your guide to the perilous waters of the internet

12-14-08

This so called journal has degenerated into a "I'll write when I feel like it" letter to self. Had my first dizzy spell this morning in about 3 weeks. I was sitting eating breakfast when I felt it coming on as a slight unsteadiness. As I sat there, the room started spinning so fast I had trouble focusing. I was looking out the window, but the window was moving from side to side like looking out a train window at a train going the other way on adjacent tracks. It only lasted about 20 seconds. I'm pretty sure I could have driven through it.

I think it was caused by the rough day I had yesterday. I was replaced the starter on our 91 corolla. It took me about half an hour just to find the damn thing. I kept looking around the engine and not seeing the starter. I can usually find major parts on an engine, especially since I had the new starter on the table and knew what to look for. They had hidden it up under the exhaust manifold and I finally spotted it by looking through the wheel well.

It was horribly hard to access. To remove the upper bolt I had to remove the entire air cleaner box assembly, and several wiring harness anchors. They don't tell you how to unsnap wiring harnesses. You have to guess, and every one is different. I like the 'saving money' part of working on cars, but I hate the process of blindly taking things apart that I don't understand, always worried that I will break something so badly I'll have to have it towed to a mechanic 25 miles away.

I had an interesting offer at work, but after one meeting and a flurry of emails and upsetting conversations that could have severely impacted our carefully crafted program, the offer has fizzled out and sunk into the overall chaos of a business in layoff mode. Or maybe I'm just impatient and the wheels of machinery turn slowly. They haven't retracted the offer, but it is complicated because it involves the cooperation of our it department, and they don't want to install php. I like my job anyway, and while I am always up for new challenges, that could have been a first class can of worms. I would have done it, and gladly, but I would have probably ended up working even more unpaid overtime than I work already.

Sue has ordered $3100 worth of engineered wood flooring using a portion of her inheritance from Walt and Ken Bradget. She befriended Walt in the nursing home, and then became a family friend to his wife and son out on the farm where she would drive Walt on afternoon outings from the nursing home where she worked as a COTA. The guy was a true prince to will her all that money. I think they said she got a 2% share of the estate after the lawyers finished milking it.

School has been brutal this last finals week. All the students are suddenly asking questions that should have been asked weeks ago. I have them lots of time to prepare for this, but they screwed around until the last minute and then queued up for my attention. It got so bad I had a "take a number" system going Thursday and Friday, with up to 8 people waiting for my attention. The questions varied from easy to extremely difficult, sometimes taking up to an hour to answer. Some of them had long lists of problems and I'd help them fix one, but that impacted three others and we'd have to start from scratch in Photoshop and pursue the problem all the way through into dreamweaver and debugging in both browsers. It's very challenging work, and makes me (and the students) question the premise of the class. I built it to take none web designers all the way though to a professional looking commercial website in 22 days. As long as they can follow directions it works great, but if they can't easily read directions, and make small leaps in logic, the possibilities for confusion are high.

Christine and I have sort of dissolved our climbing partnership for a while. We had some arguments over my being a sexist pig, and I got tired of having to be so careful of what I could safely say around her. She loves to defend the female species from slights, and all minorities from the slightest hint of racism. I don't give it much thought, and generally coast along saying whatever pops into my head. I think we both had entered into that overly familiar state that brothers and sisters get in to where they know where the soft spots are, and how to wound easily. That happened with my old partner Dave as well. We knew how to wound each other. New friends are polite, but old friends are not...or maybe they were just not good friends?

I've known Ted for 54 years, and we still get along, and all my cousins are cool...it's weird. Anyway, I hope Christine and I climb together in the spring again...she was so reliable, and always up for a trip. Partners like that are hard to find. Clint might be back in action this spring too. That would be awesome to start climbing with my son again. He has so much talent, and now that he has a steady job and is done with college he might get the climbing bug again. Between Fletch, Christine, Sue, Clint, Marty, Nick, James H, Chris D., and Mark I should be able to find a few partners.

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