Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2001 > Mid-July 2001 Edition
It has been a week since I have taken on the duty as housesitter for my sister. The change has largely been crisis-free.
I have had Baby, the grouchier of my sister's three cats, claw me when I petted it a second too long. Baby is not a happy kitty. It was the original house cat, but my nieces keep taking in creatures that drive it nuts. The most recent offerings are two nutcases named Isis and Thyme. Now Baby comes in only long enough for breakfast, supper and maybe a quick evening snack before fleeing back outdoors.
The two furry fruitcakes are everywhere. You can't sit down without one of them racing for your lap. You can't lie down to sleep without one of them lying beside or on top of you. When you eat, they want to share your food. When fully awake they race throughout the house. They are fun to play with, but when you are done playing, they are not.
Speaking of sleep, my sister has a waterbed, so I sleep on that. (The other available bed is too short.) All the claims of getting a good night's sleep on a waterbed are not true. Or it could be that I am too used to my own hard mattress at home. At any rate, I am not rested on that thing: The mattress is so enveloping that I can't move around on it when I sleep.
I discovered reception for my clock-radio in my sister's room is odd. I cannot receive the Muncie NPR station. I can receive the Fort Wayne NPR station, with its jazz and local band offerings in the evenings and Hearts of Space on Tuesday night.
My other duties as housesitter are to gather mail and record who left messages on the answering machine. The mail part is easy. The answering machine is something else: It's an old model that records messages on tape, and somethings I pick up nothing but static.
The only thing that approached disaster is the large branch that fall on the newly-roofed shed during a morning windstorm. Fortunately the roof was undamaged.
Yesterday I went to Carmel-By-The-Road and took the beta version of CompTIA's Linux+ exam. I'm not allowed to reveal its content, but I can say it told less than the 150 minutes allotted for me to do the test. I got most of the answers right or at least reasonably guessed. I'm sure to have passed it.
What that will mean I cannot know until September, though, because it is a beta exam. It is used to determine the final shape of the test when it is officially offered later this year.
Today I donated a pint (½-liter) of my blood this morning during the summer blood drive. That was probably not a smart move to have raced to the lift sometime afterwards, because I found myself groggy for the next couple of hours.
At work I have gotten my summer project finalized: The distribution of forty-two new computers to eight departments and three branches. I will be doing this while my boss is off on his two-weeks-a-year in the Army Reserve. The new computers have Intel network connectivity, so uploading and downloading images to the workstations will be a breeze. I should be able to finish at least a third of them before his return...assuming nothing bad happens.
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IMHO the offerings of the Muncie NPR station get blander and blander each passing year. I used to go to sleep with A Little Night Music back in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Then, around 1996, ALNM was replaced with Music Through The Night, whose content was a lot less interesting.
Until recently their only good musical offering was Hearts of Space. Then last month HOS was pulled from the station's schedule, replaced with more Muzak Through The Night.
Now the Muncie NPR station broadcasts a lot of bourgeois cruft, like a call-in show about food—not about cooking it, about eating it. Ye gods! I suppose the repeated theft of the station's transmitter north of Marion hit it pretty hard, so that it had to buy boring shows just to fill its schedule.
Not that it's out of the woods yet, unless it invests in some razor wire. The way the FCC handled the distribution of low-power station licenses—you need a lawyer to fill out the forms—means that pirate station broadcasting and transmitter theft will recur.
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