Bill Roper's Journal

It was New Year's Day and I went over to a friend's house for a few hours in the afternoon to play some games, which was a good time. Gretchen stayed home because her knees have been bothering her greatly in the last few days. With luck, that will improve tomorrow.

K has to head back to school on Sunday and there are things to do between now and then. Mostly, this involves picking things up and putting them away. We *may* decide to take the tree down on Saturday when there will be more hands to put everything away. Ok, mostly there will be more younger knees to carry things up and down from the basement. :)

I have started work on the Dodeka taxes for 2025. I'd like to get these filed early this year for a variety of reasons. We'll see how it goes.

And the long-range forecast is for high temperatures in the mid-40s in Chicago next Thursday. If that forecast holds, my chances of being able to get off to GAFilk with minimum weather problems are excellent. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

I ran down to Grand Appliance and took a look at the dishwashers in person, because sorting things out on the web is subject to difficulties. I decided to pay for the more expensive dishwasher because it is supposed to be quieter, seems better constructed, and has a rounded handle as opposed to a squared-off one. Our kitchen aisles are small and if you figure that each encounter with the squared-off handle costs $1 in terms of pain, the more expensive dishwasher will pay for itself in almost no time. :)

Unfortunately, the New Year's holiday means that the new dishwasher won't be installed until a week from Monday. But as Gretchen said when I told her this, of all of the appliances in the house that you can work around being broken for a week, the dishwasher is probably the easiest to deal with.

My eye is doing ok. There haven't been any further bleeds since the ones yesterday, so that's good. It's going to take a while for all of the debris field to settle out and clear, if the information on the Internet can be believed, and I'm going to call first thing tomorrow morning to try to get an appointment with the specialist. I could try to go to my usual eye doctor, but I am sure that they are swamped at the end of the year and if there's any remedial action required, I would end up at a similar specialist anyway, so...

The kids are having a good time. Most of them have sallied off to the Goodwill store and will be back bearing some combination of things, mostly clothes.

So progress is being made.

K and I got several errands done today, including lunch at Olive Garden. The junior Midkiffs are arriving tomorrow for a visit, along with the junior Roman. Jen won't join us tomorrow, because her dad could be doing better, so we will continue to play that by ear. In the meantime, I have purchased a blender on a run to Sam's Club, so we are equipped for Kade's broken jaw.

I have misplaced the receipt for my new guitar (which the insurance agent would like to have for our file) and have spent a moderate amount of time trying to turn it up in the bedroom and the office. So far, no luck, but I have gotten rid of a *lot* of dead paper from the file drawer for electronics and appliances that we no longer own.

The one ancient receipt that I haven't gotten rid of is the invoice for my very first IBM PC from 1983. I ended up dropping a bit more than $7000 on that once I had it fully kitted out. It makes me feel better about what I spend on computers nowadays. :)

But this behemoth had a third-party 10 MB hard drive, a whopping 640 KB of RAM, and an 8087 math coprocessor. It *didn't* have a color graphics card, as they could not be found at that time for love or money in Chicago. I ended up buying six of them from an IBM store in Houston when I was visiting my relatives over Christmas that year...

I picked up K down in Oak Brook today after she took the bus home from Ball State.

Julie still has a week of school to go.

Chaos will now begin. :)

I dropped K off to catch her bus back to Ball State today, then ran over to Mission BBQ for lunch since I was in the neighborhood. That's pretty much the sum total of what I managed to get done today.

Tomorrow will be more active. *Much* more active...

So it went like this...

The new baby gate arrived this morning. I dropped the old baby gate off at UPS over lunch and it is on its way back to Amazon. After work, I decided that I would see if I could quickly install the new gate and it turned out that I *could*, having figured out all of the problematic parts with the previous gate. The gate is now installed on the stairs and should, I think, prevent Calvin from coming upstairs. It does not *seem* to prevent Gretchen from coming upstairs, although it doesn't make the whole process any more pleasant. And Julie needs to see how to operate the gate so that she does not tear it down accidentally. I have called Julie and suggested a demonstration, which she has declined. I worry about this.

Meanwhile, the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter card for the Apollo 8 unit that I bought arrived from Sweetwater. It had come via USPS and the notice said that it was in the mailbox. This seemed unlikely and it was, as all of the mail had been left on the porch, because that box had no hope of fitting in the mailbox. I brought everything in and it was now time for dinner.

We have been keeping Calvin on an extra-long leash to keep him in the family room when he is not in his kennel, but after dinner, I decided we should let him roam free on the first floor and determine whether the new baby gate would keep him off the second floor. This cost us one wooden cooking spoon that had been used for dinner and which Calvin found while counter surfing. Ruby took it from Calvin and it died while I tried to take it away from Ruby without breaking it.

And then a little while later, Calvin went and laid an enormous load in the middle of the living room where he has been previously guilty of doing so. Great.

By now, I am *really* unhappy. I head back into the living room to turn on the lights and clean up the mess.

And I trip on Julie's suitcase, which is still sitting in the passage between the hallway and the living room where it has been for over a week since Windycon. I had been thinking that this stupid thing really needed to go upstairs. I had thought correctly.

Trips to the floor: one.

Swearing and shouting ensued, because I was unhappy with pretty much everyone in the house at this point, including myself. Happily, I don't seem have done any major damage to anything, so I was able to pull myself up on the stairs, get up, and clean up the pile of poop. In multiple trips to the toilet, but no more trips to the floor.

I had thought to drag Calvin to the living room and rub his nose in it, but he was having none of this, so I exiled him to his kennel. Then when I was done cleaning things up, I dragged the kennel full of Calvin to the living room, where he will remain until morning in exile there.

And then Gretchen and I finished watching our TV show. After that, I went to the basement to install the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter into the Apollo 8 unit. This is easier when the unit has not already been installed into the rack so that it can only be accessed from the floor.

Trips to the floor: two, but with more planning this time.

Taking the card out requires a lot of playing with a teeny, tiny Allen wrench (which I only dropped once). Then I discovered I couldn't lever it out with my fingernails, but I got Julie to come in and hand me the bit of metal that had once covered a expansion card slot in the back of a computer. That tool did the job nicely. The new card was installed, the screws put back in, the Thunderbolt cable that needed to go to the computer which I had carefully identified and rerouted was plugged into the Apollo 8, and -- as long as I was on the floor already -- I moved the rest of the cables on the assumption that this was all going to work.

I levered myself off the floor, walked through the procedure for registering the used Apollo 8 unit to my account, and all of that worked. Now, the only thing that needed to be done was to use the new, short Thunderbolt cable to connect the Apollo 8 unit to the Apollo Silver unit.

I called Julie to do this, because it has to be done underneath the console. She plugged the cable in and went back to her computer.

The Apollo Silver unit and the Satellite refused to pop up on the list of devices.

Ok, there is no reason this shouldn't be working, unless Julie has somehow plugged the cable in incorrectly. This means that I will need to inspect the cable install.

Trips to the floor: three. Once more with feeling.

Thunderbolt cables are finicky beasts and it turns out that Julie had twisted the Thunderbolt cable so that the lighting bolt was face up on the Apollo 8 and face down on the Apollo Silver. In her defense, I hadn't removed the cable wrap from the new cable and that was the way that it *wanted* to be plugged in. It was just wrong.

I unwrapped the cable, plugged it in correctly, and stuck my head out from under the console. Three devices were now present in the display. Yay!

I crawled back up into my chair, fiddled with things a bit more, discovered that all of my plugins were now recognized, and declared victory. I fired up Cubase, pulled up a recent project, and hit the playback button.

Everything sounded good. Very good. Probably better than before, which is what one should expect from the newer unit with the better converters.

So this project was a success.

I am going to go take some Aleve now.

The week before OVFF is really not the time to have meetings downtown on Tuesday and Wednesday. But that's the way that the schedule worked out, so...

To add to the general entertainment, Julie had a root canal today. Calvin had his last lesson of puppy school and has graduated. More training is likely in order, but it's progress.

And the new CDs are tucked into inventory and the van is packed, save for our luggage.

I should really feel better about this, but it's being a bit of a treadmill. It will be better when we hit the road. :)

Ball State had a short break or a long weekend, depending on how you define it. K had located a bus service that runs directly from the campus to Oak Brook, which meant that coming home was much less of an adventure, so she got home Friday evening and will be heading back at noon tomorrow.

All things considered, this is too short of a visit, but it's been fun.

Well, that was a trip.

We managed to get everything (including the Dodeka cart) to fit into the back of the Edge without blocking any of the windows, so I took that as a major success. We headed out at 6:15 AM, which was close enough to my intended window of departure that we managed to miss all of the congestion on the way out of town. With one stop to grab breakfast at a McDonald's and one to buy gas, we made it to Muncie in 4:15, which was *excellent* time. We got there early enough to be able to stop at a Bob Evans in town and have lunch.

Then it was off to load in. We got there a little bit early. The nice policeman who was directing traffic was explaining to us how there was a waiting list for luggage carts and I interrupted him and told him that we'd brought our own cart. He looked very pleased. Because of some good planning between K and Gretchen, almost everything K brought was packed into four giant rectangular bags that stacked neatly on the cart. I dropped the ottoman, the duffel bag, and the arm pillow onto the top of this and left K to carry the monitor and her backpack separately. I parked the car across the street in the garage, came back, and we rolled directly in and to the kids' room.

The Midkiffs were running a little late, which turned out to combine nicely with our a little early. This gave us time to use my big rubber mallet to knock the bed apart so that we could move it to the height that K wanted. Then we pulled out the bedding and made the bed. We also moved all of the furniture in the room to the "place where it belongs". More unpacking followed. By the time Phil and Max arrived with the Midkiff wagon, we were pretty much done and putting the giant rectangular bags away.

Jen was waiting downstairs for a luggage cart and I suggested that they could expedite the process by borrowing our now empty cart. Off they went and a bit later, we had three Midkiffs and a metric ton of additional stuff. :) More unpacking followed. I practiced staying out of the way and assembling bits for K's desk.

After everything was assembled, we headed over to the food service a couple of buildings over and had some additional lunch (for us; first lunch for Midkiffs). Then I abandoned the party as they headed for the tech store to grab computers, because I had a longer drive home.

Traffic was a bit congested in a few places, but I still made the return trip in 4:30. Yay, me!

Meanwhile, Julie had a successful first day of her senior year in high school.

And Ruby and Calvin continue to try to figure out how to get along. Progress is being made. *Slow* progress...

Anyway, I am very tired and am going to head toward bed.

I am going to miss K coming in to chat every evening. :)

I am getting up at 5:30 in the morning tomorrow in the hope of leaving with K for college in time to get her there by 1 PM. If I do this correctly, there will be slack. If not, well...