Dale Miller

Today was one of those beautiful Arkansas days that make up for grey, rainy days like yesterday. I went to Bryant for lunch at Cracker Barrel and then found a new way home. This is the first time I’ve dropped the top on the car for more than a mile or two so far this year. I dug out my map and found a way back home that I haven’t tried before. I’m sure I’ve been over parts of it, but I certainly have not been over other parts. I took Salem Road to Congo-Ferndale road, to the Ferndale cutoff to Garrison Road and finally Highway 10. It was a very pleasant drive and just nice to be out enjoying the fresh air. While I was out, I did stop to try and find a benchmark (EJ1879 — Beaver), but was unsuccessful. I found the mount for reference mark 1, and it looks like a bulldozer may have taken the mark off. Reference mark 2 was in perfect condition, I found no sign of reference mark 3, and the station mark appears to have been stolen. There is a witness post right beside a hole. It seems odd that someone would actually dig up a station mark, so maybe I was mistaken, but that certainly seemed to be where the mark should be.

I need to sit down and fill out my income taxes. I don’t want to, but I could use the refunds.

I may not be losing any weight, but I’m almost certainly getting in better shape. Yesterday I went to strength training class over my lunch break, and today after ballet class I headed for water aerobics. Taking that much of a chunk out of the middle of the workday means that I have to work later, but I think it’s well worth it. I need a shower after ballet anyway, so jumping in the pool for a bit just helps me cool down and stretch.

Ballet is fun, but demanding. I’m about twice the age of any of the other students, but I’m keeping up fairly well, considering. The place I’m really lacking is flexibility. She has us do splits each period and I can’t go down particularly far. I need to improve that, but I have trouble making myself stretch regularly.

I went all weekend without updating. I thought about it on a number of occasions, but just didn’t. Bad Dale.

I took a vacation day on Friday so I could stay home and wait for a package to be delivered — my new Canon Digital Rebel XT (350D, if you prefer). I spent way too much money, but it’s a fun toy. I had almost forgotten how much fun it is to have a “real” camera. This one is even more fun thanks to the instant gratification aspect. I expect my Flickr account to shortly have far too many miscellaneous photos.

Yesterday was cold and rainy. So what did I do? I went down to the street and mounted my new mailbox. It’s still not quite as secure as I would like it (I need to go buy some Quickrete and seriously stabilize the base). While I was out working, one of my neighbors drove by, rolled down her window, introduced herself (I’ve already forgotten her name — I’m bad that way), and told me that they police arrested someone for smashing mailboxes in the area. That’s good news.

Today is work and class. I should probably go get ready. I shall share a Haiku that came to me spontaneously on Saturday morning:

My cholesterol
medication works quite well.
Fried eggs for breakfast.

Oh yes. I worked a bit too hard/quickly on the mailbox, and irritated my carpal tunnel syndrome. My wrists hurt. I’ve managed to spend several months without that happening. I don’t like it. :(

I was not pleased to arrive home yesterday evening to find that someone had smashed my mailbox.

It has happened before, and I just pounded the dent back out. Last night’s was worse. I pounded on it until I could get the door to close, and just decided that I would replace the mailbox this weekend.

I was much less happy this evening when I arrived home to discover that someone had pulled my mailbox post completely out of the ground and dropped the whole thing in the ditch. Apparently I have become the target for bored teenagers. I only hope they will stop with bothering the mailbox. However, now I need to figure out what I’m going to do about a mailbox. I have this suspicion that if I simply replace it that it won’t be long before it’s smashed again.

Having now attended each of my classes one time, I think they are both going to be fun. Since half of the class wasn’t appropriately attired for ballet, we didn’t do any dancing, but just went over the proper attire, aim of the course, etc. I think it’s going to be just what I need in terms of fundamentals. We shall see today. In musical theatre we actually sang a bit, but nothing serious. Just a “get acquainted” sort of thing. I ended up going home and dragging out my Camelot soundtrack to listen to last night, and have been thinking about what solos I can work on from the few musicals I know. I need to go to the library and see what I can check out and listen to.

I hate Micro Focus COBOL. In general I have a nice feeling about COBOL. I really like it as a business programming language. I just dislike the licensing model of Micro Focus. I suspect that’s from years of having unlimited COBOL licenses on VMS. The MF licensing model is okay, but the implementation just seems flawed. It’s hard to tell just what is installed and will be used by the system. I will probably spend much of my day fighting this.

On a related note, one of the installation questions while installing the “Application Server” was:

This product can be used to run COBOL CGI programs for use via the Web
Do you wish to install this CGI support now? (y/n)

Even though I like COBOL, using it as a CGI just somehow seems wrong. Of course, I’ve written CGI programs in DCL and in FORTRAN, so I shouldn’t really complain.

The bad news:

My sleep schedule is now quite screwed up. I was sleepy around 5:30 and decided to go lie down for an hour or so. I just woke up. Oops.

The good news:

When I got up to get a drink, Ashley was at her accustomed snoozing place atop the cat condo. All is well with the feline residents of the cathouse.

When people showed up last night, Ashley ran out of the house. I haven’t seen her since. I’m worried about her. She apparently just doesn’t like to have anyone here other than me.

It’s amazing what good a few (and very few at that) hours of sleep can do toward improving my outlook on life.

I had a dinner party this evening. This grew out of an invitation to Sarah and Jamie to come over for spaghetti. This then snowballed into a bigger dinner than I had originally intended. By Friday it had grown to nine people that said they were coming. As it ended up, it was Jamie, Sarah, Guil and Mary. I’ll know if I ever decide to do this again to set a time for people to show up. I just said to be here sometime after five for dinner. They showed up about 8:30. That was okay, but that constitutes a late dinner for me. We enjoyed dinner, went exploring on the junked property next door, and settled down to watch “Dumbo”. Sarah brought a box of wine and I had about four glasses during the evening. For me, that’s a lot of alcohol. I was in a good mood until everyone left, and then the feeling of being alone really hit. I really don’t enjoy going to bed by myself. I’m mostly used to it by this time, but I don’t like it. I’m probably more depressed tonight than I have been in a year or more. Oscar is doing his kitty best to try and cheer me up, but it’s not helping too much. Ironically, when I get into this sort of mood, I just want to avoid people altogether. It’s probably a good thing that I have two days before I have to be back at work. I’ve been looking forward to classes starting, but now I’m not so sure. I just want to hide away for a while. Hopefully a good night’s sleep will help, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, hence my writing a rambling, emo LJ post at three in the morning.