Kevin's musings

Well, hump day was a bunch of work things, a doctors appointment for my dad and all kinds of other fun. Perhaps next month will be a better one. We can only hope. Barring catastrophe I am probably heading home tomorrow…

I did still manage to take

This was a pretty flowering bush:

Find the bunny:

Find the baaaaaaaaby bunny:

Yet another very hot day here in tucson.

Check out the monster flowers on this cacti:

The bird on the hummingbird feeder is a oreole. Very pretty bird. Pity I don’t have a super zoom lens. This was taken out my dad’s living room window:

With all the rain, the ocotillo are all really leafed out. You can see in the background here some petrified wood that my dad got long ago:

Well, a pretty uneventfull modnay here. Lots of working and helping my dad out as usual.

It was once again hot hot hot.

I did manage to

Some white trumpet like flowers. I have no idea what they are called:

This large kitty came and wandered through the yard in the late morning:

Twyla sitting in a very odd position: (Her legs are causing her lips to lift up)

My sister and I sat down this morning and wrote up a list of all the medications my dad has laying around, who perscribed them, what they were for, etc. There sure are a pile. At least I think we now know what everything is and is for.

In the afternoon jafo and I played with the current SIP software phone packages available on linux. Since I am here in AZ, and now I have high speed net (see the cox cable rant), it would be nice to hook into our voip setup so I could take and send calls from my laptop. Most of the software just didn’t work at all. Finally we found one that was pretty darn good and sounded nice.

It was very hot out today, so I spent pretty much all the time inside except when I had to take dogs for walks.

After all the rain, the mesquite are all blooming:

Here’s the pups on one of our many walks:

Someone unclear on the concept of living in a seething hot place:

Well, today started nice and early with a trip down to the Wildlife refuge again. A few minutes after my sister had asked me if I had my camera and I had told her I did, I checked and had left it in the charger back at the house. So, no pictures this time from there. It was very very green and lush out there.

We saw a masked bobwhite on the road, and then saw a Doe a bit later. It might well have been the same doe I saw last weekend out there. She was far enough away to where she really didn’t care much about us. She kept looking, but didn’t run, so we got a nice look at her.

The great high speed cable access nightmare took up most of the afternoon/evening. One of my sisters, my bother and I had decided it would be good to get some fast net here just in case and for me to use now. We tried to use cox’es on-line sign up, but it couldn’t find the address here. So, we called and got it setup. They then gave us an address for a Cox cable store we could go to get a modem. It was about an hours drive from here through the middle of tucson. So, I decided I would just pick up one closer to here. The only store I could find nearby was a Office Max. They had one cable modem (a d-link), so I just got that one. Then the fun began. I connected it all up and I could get a DHCP address from the network on my laptop. However, it was a 172.x.x.x network, and I couldn’t get out. Looking around I realized they had some silly registration thing you had to go though. After poking around on the net via the slower connection I found that you have to go to http://tucson.cox.net/ (which it will allow you to go to) and sign up. Great. I connected back up and got to a page that expected the cable account number. My dad doesn’t save old bills, so there was nothing here that had that account number on it. I tried signing up for ‘view your bill on-line’, but it also required the account number. So, off to call tech support. The first time I waited about 30minutes and gave up before dinner. The hold setup on the cox tech support is particularly evil. It repeats about 3 “speels” over and over and over. One telling you that you need your computer and modem nearby. One asking you to unplug the modem and power off your computer and try powering them back on. One telling you to go to ‘windowupdate.com’ (how you do this if you can’t get to the net and are calling tech support to help you I have no idea). After dinner I tried again. Only 25minutes and I managed to get a human. I gave her the phone number here. She couldn’t find the account. I gave her my dad’s name. She couldn’t find the account. Finally I gave her the address, and she got to where she could get into the account…except, she needed the last 4 digits of my dad’s SSN. After some digging in files, we gave her that. Didn’t match. Finally after some more digging we gave her the last 4 digits of my mom’s SSN who had been the account name before. That worked. Got her to activate the modem and I was up and surfing. So in the end things worked out, however, whoever designed the on-hold setup there: Die in a fire.

I did manage to take a few pictures today…

twyla relaxing:

Mocking clouds. No rain for us. Or even shade:

Suicide bunny: (Picture the 3 greyhounds who’s leashes I am holding looking intently at the bunny with ears all up)

well, not too much to report again here. I’m still in arizona. Going to miss the annual Colorado Greyhound Adoption picnic, but oh well.

This is an odd little gravel path between two houses near here. Not sure why it’s there. It’s very short (you can see pretty much the entire loop in the picture):

Well, today I got to do a fair bit of waiting around. Took my dad off to a doctors appointment in the morning and got to wait around in a waiting room there. Then my dad wanted to get the oil changed on his jeep, and that took a while waiting in a waiting room too.

On the good side, the doctors office waiting room was quiet, there were magazines, birds to watch outside, a nearby bathroom and it was nice.

On the bad side the waiting room at the oil change place had a blaring tv (“peoples court” and then “ripley’s beleive it or not”), uncomfortable chairs, nothing to see or read, and no beverages.

I’m reminded why I never watch tv. The people’s court consisted of a lady judge yelling at the people before her and deciding the case because she didn’t like one of the guys. She seemed to have no real basis in anything other than being irate. Ripleys beleive it or not had segments about 20-30 seconds long like “This bird defends itself by vomitting. No one wants to tangle with it”. They never say what the bird is, where it’s found or anything else about it. I think “or not” should be the answer to that show.

This was an amusing way to make your gate open smoothy:

Some birds out the doctors office window:

Nice thundercloud, which didn’t produce any rain here:

More thunderclouds, and you can see some of the construction thats taking place near my dad’s house:

Twyla looking cute:

Not much to report here today. Worked along. No rain to be had, so it was hot and nasty outside.

My nephew W came down to visit this afternoon. It was nice to see him and catch up with him again. He’s in college now and working and living in an appartment on his own. He’s really a nice guy.

Here’s todays pictures… some flowers, some mesquite leaves, and a view of the big tailings dump behind my dads house, which for the first time I have ever seen, was green with grass.

Today I was awakened with the lovely sounds of a big thunderstorm hitting. Lots of thunder and lightning and heavy rains. We got about 71/100′s of an inch just in the morning (I didn’t check the rain gauge again in the afternoon). Very rainy and thundery. Kurt the thunderphobe hound did very well all things considered. Mostly just curled up in a corner.

I went out for the midday walk and the sun had come back out. 75degrees and 70% humidity. Pretty amazingly sticky for Arizona.

Lots of work to get done today. Spent a lot of time on the phone.

This was around 45min-1hour after the rain let up. You can still see water flowing…

Monday was pretty uneventfull around here. Most of it spent by me sitting and typing on my laptop and my dad and my dogs all by sleeping.

There were a few things of note however:

• I went to the store and when I got back, Merlin had licked on his wounded leg and got it bleeding, and then walked all over the place. The blood on the tile was pretty easy to clean, but the stuff on the carpet was not as much fun.
• There were some nice thunderstorms that came by, but there was very little rain. Lots of thunder and humidity tho. They did cut the temp from about 102 to 82, so thats good.
• I have the dogs down to 4 trips out a day. Once early in the morning, once around noon (hot hot hot), once before dinner and once before bed. There are sidewalks and such here, but it’s not a very nice place to walk. Lots and lots of cacti and sharp things.