XMas Season 2010, Final Part

The weather has been exceptionally pleasant at the end of this week. The air was so warm that all the snow from early in the week all melted away. This helps in walking to and from the car to work, and all over town doing my chores. It has not helped with the ant infestation, which still goes on. I have traced another route that the ants are taking — up the water pipes — and will reseal the faucet and put ant baits around the pipes.

The end of the Xmas season comes on New Year's Day, so I will put the Xmas tree away. This will clear the table it is on for Thyme to roost on.

One chore I am done with is the visits to my sister the teacher's house to feed her cats. Wouldn't you know it, there was Baby on the kitchen sink counter! Evidently it was warm enough in the house for her to move around. Their mistress should be home tonight.

I can now divulge what I got my niece for Xmas: A WalMart gift card and a game called Zombie Dice. I prefer not to say where I got that. The game has thirteen dice with three marks on two of each die's six sides: Walk, Eat Brains, or Get Shotgunned. Sounds fun, ĉu ne?

I have been told that my sister the teacher got a Kindle for an Xmas present. I myself see no use for such devices, unless they're for reading best-sellers, romances, and other throwaway pulp. It is a good way to conserve paper. But I happen to like books — real books — and find the Kindle and its kin useless, since I do not read pulp.

Speaking of pulp books, Madre is still working her way through my Xmas present, which is the latest of Tom Clancy's novels. It is a big book — very big — and, avid Tom Clancy fan that she is, she is not even half way through it.

My sister the editor had been wrestling for weeks with a tome about British Idealism translated from the French. She emerged from the struggle just in time for Xmas. Her present from my sister the teacher proved impalatable to her — she hates chow mein — so I got it.

I am doing well at work in the Bracken Library. My volunteer duty in the staff lounge is done. The iMacs in the third floor alcove are reimaged and added to. The iMacs in Ed Res have been upgraded. That work is not yet done, though: The scanners and workstations in the area between the iMac tables need to be moved out, so that the four remaining iMacs (out of ten) can be installed. The iMacs that got replaced return to Ed Res, along a wall under some paintings; but some issues need to be resolved before the iMacs make their way there.

We had a power outage in the library just before Xmas. Our sysadmin has been working to ensure that it did not do permanent damage to our servers. This is not trivial: One of the two experimental servers in my cube is down. Thankfully the downed computer was not the more important. I may have to talk with my boss on getting a uninterruptible power supply for the important computer.