Monday Meanderings - 11.23.2015

Just in time for Thanksgiving - a cold front rolled through and dropped overnight temperatures into the low 30's - in this area. Much colder elsewhere, I recognize, but this is Central Texas, after all. However, there is talk of colder weather here before the week is over. Be safe out there.

Barb brought all the plants inside a couple of weeks ago and I put the covers on the faucets, so I guess we have winterized. We did have to return a bright green grasshopper-like creature to the great outdoors yesterday. Mr. Green-hopper came in with the plants and decided he liked it inside, I guess. Sorry.

During a Sunday afternoon football game, I saw a referee throw a flag, then because there was a 2nd infraction, he had to throw down his cap. It set me to wondering; in the unlikely event there was a third foul, what else could he use to indicate it? TV commentators sometimes refer to "laundry" on the field when there are multiple flags - could that literally be the case. Flag, hat, shirt, pants? IMWTK

Saw an obituary for one recently deceased Richard Buckman, of Evansville, Indiana. It said, "In lieu of flowers, please do not vote for Hillary Clinton."

This has been a traumatic weekend. Not to be too technical about it, I set out to "partition" an external hard drive that I use for various tasks so that it would appear to the computer it was attached to as 2 smaller drives, rather than 1 large one. I followed the manufacture's instructions closely in this endeavor and all went well until the very last minute, when the host computer tossed up a simple, but fatal message that said, "Sorry, Dave, but I can't do that."

From that point forward, it has been total frustration trying to revive this little drive. According to the drive maker, the last option is "a low-level reformatting of the drive." Okay, there are multiple ways to do this, and I chose the one that seemed best, but 2 days have passed, and it has not finished reformatting.

True, a low-level format has to look at each and every "sector" on the drive and decide if it has been naughty or nice, and then keep a list of naughty ones and there are 1,953,525,168 sectors on this particular drive, but if by the time you read this it has not completed, come by and see me playing street hockey with my new little hockey puck.

But that was not the most frustrating event of the weekend - not by far. Saturday evening my coffee maker went on strike. Probably one of these union sympathy things. "If the hard-drive is on strike, so am I. Not crossing that line while my brother machine is in dire straits."

Hah! I will have the last laugh. Both of these problems are solved with 1 trip to WalMart!

Stay warm and well-fed this week.