Kevin's musings

Pretty easy and uneventfull trip down last night. I did almost run out
of gas near Santa Fe, but luckily managed to make it. I usually
these days just fuel up in Santa Fe once to avoid stopping all
the time. I forgot this time that I hadn’t topped off the tank
before leaving though. Made it into Las Cruces about 8:30pm last
night.

Today I have been working from here and also helping with some
cleaning. Soon we are going to do a pile of baking. The big
party doesn’t happen until friday/saturday night, but there will
be a few people over tonight. Should be a nice fun mellow
gathering tonight.

Well, this morning I head down to New Mexico. It’s our annual
Halloween party going on this weekend. I wanted to get down and
have time to relax and visit with folks before the big party on
friday and saturday nights. Should be a nice time. I’m taking
the dogs with me, which should be fun. I have traveled with Kurt
and Twyla before and they do great. This will be the first long
trip with Merlin. I suspect he will do just fine.

Bottled cider tonight. It turned out pretty nicely I think. It quite
dry, but very yummy. It tastes a bit like the hornsby’s dark and
dry cider. Should be nice at the halloween party next weekend.

Got a ton of anoying around the house things done this weeked,
including:

• laundry
• washing AND waxing the truck
• cleaning out the insides of the truck
• giving all the dogs baths
• cleaning up apples in front
• mowing
• draining the sprinkler system
• loading music for the trip next week
• bottling cider

I meant to wander down and see
elusis
DJ and play good music, but didn’t finish dinner until pretty late
and didn’t manage to overcome hermithood.

Finally, I had run some sleeping bags through the wash tonight to have
them nice and clean for the trip next weekend, and I made the
mistake of leaving them out where twyla could find them. She
promptly made a nice nest in them and went to sleep:

Last night I came home from
hacking society
to the great clock disaster.

I had this nice wall clock that my parents gave me a few years
ago. It’s large and wooden and winding. It was nice and
comforting to see it ticking away. Sometime last night while I
was gone the hook holding it up decided to give up. The clock
fell down, ripped my thermostat off the wall and fell on the
floor. Luckily the mercury from the thermostat stayed up on a
shelf with the broken glass and so the dogs didn’t get into
it. The clock is pretty much a loss. It’s cracked all around the
top of the case and the hinges on the glass part are ripped
out. I guess it could have been worse.

A nice low key saturday and sunday. Saturday I just relaxed and watched some
netflix
and cleaned up the house. Sunday I met up with
sgailean
and went for a bike ride. We did a pretty short one because it was
looking like rain. I got my GPS mount setup on my bike, so I had
the GPS along. Unfortunately, my data cable is dead, so I can’t
post a route. We only did 8.4 miles. Max speed was 14.8mph. We
were talking while we were riding, so we were going kinda slow
to keep up the conversation. It was a very pleasent ride tho.

Went out for a lovely dinner with friends at
the Walnut.
They had a so-so altbeer and a very nice red. The food was excellent
as usual. Then we wandered over to
trilogy
for a show. We got over there around 9:30, and the opening act had
“just started”. They played until a bit after 10. They were
pretty good. It was one guy with a gitar, and later he asked
some friends from
shanti groove
to join him. The banjo player was amazingly good. The other guy was
mixed down so far I couldn’t hear him.

After the opening act we waited for the headliners to go on. They
played a really weird mix of music between bands: punk, ac/dc,
and old bluegrass. Which wouldn’t have been too bad, but it was
REALLY REALLY REALLY LOUD. Painfully loud.

The headliners,
Split Lip Rayfield
went on around 10:45. They were pretty cool. Kinda like speed
bluegrass. However, they were also REALLY REALLY REALLY LOUD. In
addition the venue was packed. It was so packed the guy next to
me kept elbowing me. I’m not sure what the capacity of that
place is, but it was very much at it. Around 11:30 we had had
enough and fled. The band was good, pity they weren’t in a nicer
place, or one with less people/better sound people. When we left
there was a pile of people waiting in the alley to come into the
bar.

Hurray! I finally got the brightness buttons working on my
laptop. Ever since I got the laptop the brightness buttons would
work fine until I started X, then they wouldn’t work again. Was
poking around and looking at the laptop market tonight and found
a page that mentioned that they had the same problem and they
fixed it by adding:


Option "AGPMode" "4"


To their X Device section. I’m not sure this card is even a 4x agp
card, but adding that in there seems to fix the birightness
button pretty handily.

Got to sleep in today some. Missed V and C leaving (they had a super
early flight out). Breakfast was followed by a trip to target to
get new shoes, then a movie. We saw
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
It was basically
Escape from New York
but not as good. Oh well, it was a way to kill some time. After that
we had lunch and then I headed to the airport. No problems at
all today, and everything on schedule.

Saturday was a good faire day. Got up and had breakfast and caught the
shuttle bus out to the faire. We took the 10am shuttle, and it
was abandoned except for us. Nice new comfy bus.

We had our usuall fun wandering from pub to pub. We caught a few shows
(the birds of prey and the commedia). A number of goods were
looked over and examined. A pickle selling bar wench was
visted several times. Arogant Bastard ale was consumed.

Here are some
pictures of the day at TRF.

The evil friday kept going. I managed to get on the next flight, which
was packed, which was good. Got into Houston around 11pm, and
quickly headed down to the bagage claim. Waited while all the
bags came out, and mine didn’t appear. So, I started walking to
the counter to ask about it and noticed my bag sitting in a pile
of other bags. I thought they weren’t supposed to send a bag on
a plain that the passenger wasn’t on, but it sure looked like my
bag caught the flight I missed.

Getting the rental car was pretty painless, and finding the hotel
wasn’t too bad either. As a final farewell to friday, my sandal
fell apart in the parking lot of the hotel and I had to limp
into the hotel.