Too Cold and Wet for Outside Chores

This morning we have freezing rain in Mehama, so it seems unlikely that we'll get any more "outside" chores like cutting more of the old telephone pole done today. Brr!

Last night and today, we're working on trying to bring back to life some of the hard drives on Lisa's computers. Here's an odd thing: she has one IBM T30 she can't use because it doesn't have a touch-pad, but it will boot. We cloned its hard drive. The clone wouldn't boot, but if I booted from the Windows CD and ran FIXBOOT, the clone worked just fine. A couple of other drives seemed to only need to have FIXBOOT run on them, but one of them began throwing STOP 7A and other my-drive-is-dying errors, so I suggested to Lisa that she get any files off of it that she can -- the drive is more or less readable as a non-booting device -- and discard it.

We'd install from scratch on a larger drive, except that for some reason any installation from scratch comes with the default setting of maximizing all windows, and Lisa very much does not want this. It's a tremendous pain in the neck to keep having to reset computers, and it's also frustrating that -- if our online searches are telling us anything -- that nobody else considers this a problem. We've found lots of ways of forcing all new windows to maximize, but hardly anyone seems to think it's worthwhile for new windows to not be maximized.

Logged Out

We have finally vanquished the log -- actually an old telephone pole -- that has cluttered up Lisa's father's field for many years. As the first drops of rain started to fall this afternoon and the light began to fade, Lisa completed the last cut needed to finish reducing that stupid pole into 30 cm-long segments barely light enough for us to pick up and cart over to the "coal seam" debris dump. We can't burn the creosote-coated pole, but we can apparently dump it in the disposal ditch to slowly rot. And there was rot in the pole, through the center, actually.

After putting away the electric chainsaw and extension cord -- rather a priority as light rain was falling -- Lisa used the cart to bring over a load of firewood to her father's house while I used a heavy rake to try and rake the loose soil, molehills, and sawdust into the rut that the pole has left in the field from having lain their for years. With any luck, in a year or so, it will have grown over and flattened out sufficiently to no longer be a hazard to navigation while mowing the field.