Halloween 2010

I Don't Care For Halloween

I drove to Sam's Club for some DMD. When I got back the town has groups of costumed people walking about, and the downtown was fenced off. Halloween (the official version, as the day itself fell on a Sunday) was in progress.

It is a nice gesture of Madre, who no longer gives out candy, to set aside a bag of candy for my sisters and myself. I do not participate. My town does not have that many families with kids, so most of the people out on the streets come from elsewhere. And why should I give treats to non-locals? Or even to the locals, who act such that they deserve a poke in the eye? As evidence I give the three pumpkins of my neighbors across 4th Street, smashed in the middle of the street.

Wallyball!

After work last Friday I went down to the racquetball courts behind the new student wellness building, joining Budi (our sysadmin) and two student assistants out of Kirk's area for a game of wallyball.

Wallyball is like volleyball, played inside the confined space of a racquetball court. The rules are the same, with the addenda that the ball must never touch the ceiling, must not hit a back wall during a serve, and must alternate between the two players on the same side for a total of three contacts.

It has been years since I had played volleyball or anything like it. But I managed to get in three games before I became too exhausted to continue. That brought into me the need to shed my weight and start eating more fiber.

Mid-autumn

The weekend was spent either raking my yard of the last leaves from the big maple tree, or raking the leaves off of Madre's yard and next to the house.

Saturday was troublesome, as we are talking gale-force winds that sent the leaves flying to where we did not want them to go. Sweeping them onto the side of the street was out of the question, and I had to bag my leaves just to get them off my lawn.

Sunday was better, and I did haul all the leaves from Madre's back yard onto the street side, and dumped my leaf-bags onto the side of Fourth Street. The yards look nicely bare, but mine still have not gotten the leaves from the maple in the neighboring yard.

Apart from that, the leaf-raking season is pretty much over for this year. I may mow my lawn one more time, as it looks like there has been enough moisture to make it worth doing so. Then I will oil down my mowers and put them away for the year.

Nabiki

I have not done anything with the Nabiki pages this week. I have been too busy watching Daria when I was not raking leaves or visiting the Kokomo Sam's Club for some DMD. However, I have brought Glucopage, my blood-sugar database, back online and its data up-to-date.

phpMyAdmin is a decent enough utility that I have weaned myself off MySQL Administrator (which MySQL no longer supports) or that abomination that succeeded it.

I also got the settings on the Web and storage folders done, so that they are visible on the main box Madoka via Samba. But there is so much junk on the storage folder that I will have to reorganize it.