Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2003 > Late March Edition
For a war that less than a week old, the Allies aren't doing badly: Basra, southern Mesopotamia and two air bases in western Iraq are now in their hands. Saddam keeps saying that he's going to get them, but that's expected of him. CNN got kicked out of Baghdad; I guest Saddam doesn't like Ted Turner after all.
It's one of those lovely spring Sundays (in fact, the first) with the sun shining warmly, the breeze blowing calmly, and you feeling like doing nothing. So, I spent it reading Jean Shephard in between occasional bouts of raking leaves out of the front garden, sweeping out the garage, and scrubbing the bathtub.
My sister (the teacher) came by to pick up her mail and told me mainly about how the house is drained. It turns out it flows not to the town sewer (it isn't hooked up) but to a leach field somewhere. The two access points are in back and front, the latter cleverly hidden under a flower pot. At her suggestion I poured a pound of rock salt down each hole to kill off any roots that penetrate into the sewer line.
My other sister (the editor) will come by next weekend to look over my old computer, which I have reinstalled with Windows 2000. I swear, it works better than with Windows XP: even the DVD player runs as intended. As she is a good amateur plumber, I also need to talk to her about the outside faucet. It leaks along the wall, meaning it's broken somewhere along its half-meter length. That's probably the cause of the kitchen being flooded last fall.
The tree on the corner is dead. Really, really dead: No leaves, and increasingly no bark. It's also leaning toward the electrical, telephone and cable TV lines that supply on just my house but the family across the street. Sooner or later a strong wind will fell it into those lines, and everyone will be very unhappy.
I was on call Saturday morning, so I had to come to work. The carpets on the mezzanine floor were to be cleaned that afternoon, so I had to disconnect any computer on the floor and put it on its desk.
One of the departments there has someone working on Saturday, too. As that department uses a program which requires four computers to run at once, I had to lift not only the computers but their power strips as well, where they shared space with their monitors, a humongous fax machine, and various personal items. That tricky little bit took an hour.
Well, this morning (Monday) I helped put the computers back where they were. I did not notice any difference in the carpets on that floor, and some parts got no scrubbing! What a waste of time!