Monthly Archives: July 2014

New vehicle, eventually

The van is on its last legs. In fact, i couldn’t go to Black Sheep this year because of it. I’d pulled out some money to make sure that we could make the taxes, and wound up with enough to try and get another vehicle. Of course, it’s complicated. If you are looking at anything under $1000, you can be sure it has problems. Lon found this 1997 GMC Sierra stepside pickup. It has a rod knocking, so the engine needs to be rebuilt. He thought he had the perfect truck lined up for that. But it turned out to have a different engine. Then we found a 1997 Silverado with the right engine and a bad transmission. The interior is even the same color. So the engine is out of the Sierra, about to be pulled from the Silverado and then will be transplanted into the Sierra. We’ll keep the old engine for now. And the van is still on its last legs, so hope this all comes together soon.

We have another truck too. It’s a 1954 Ford 3/4 ton flatbed. It needs work but the engine is strong. I just love the thing because I think it would make a great housetruck. And I have always wanted a house truck. The problem is that the guy promised to get a title for us and has sort of flaked out. We’ll need to do a title in doubt to try and get one for it. We have time so might as well go for it. We can’t sell it anyway.

The garden

the garden

I should have taken another picture yesterday, as the tomato plants are even larger. This is from July 6th. We have two zucchini plants so both households have zucchini. We’ve had cukes from the garden, first standard cukes and now lemon cukes. I planted mostly cherry tomatoes, which have a lot of blooms but are just now starting to show small green tomatoes. I would have liked a different variety of plants but went with whatever I could find. We have plans to expand the garden and put in corn next year.

I got a copy of Bird Woman’s Garden and it is interesting. They handle their corn differently than the Pawnees did (and The Lost Universe is an excellent description of the Pawnee lifestyle.) We don’t live in a good area for corn, but I think we can go with some of the Painted Mountain variations. And I still want to grow melons. We will need to get a system in place to pump up river water for irrigation. The folks at the river have been hand watering this and doing a great job, but we can’t expand the garden if we hand water. It’s so nice to grow food again.

“Smart wizards”

Both Linksys and Netgear routers now use “smart wizards”. I can’t tell you how much I despise these. They are guaranteed to add 20 minutes to a support call, looking for a way to bypass them. I had one yesterday with that equally damnable wifi password protected set up. It had the wireless locked down and did not give you the wifi password to use.

I really am to the point where I want to refer these people off to the manufacturer. It’s not really fair to expect the internet service provider to deal with this. If I can walk a customer through logging into the router, it just takes a few minutes to configure it. It’s the same thing that has happened with Windows. They bury the useful programs underneath layers of junk and it takes twice as long to do anything. I really hope that I don’t have to deal with yet another version of Windows. I’ve been doing support work since the Windows 3.1 days and it gets harder every upgrade.