More musings

The squaw bread came out ok. Not quite what i wanted, but edible at least. I'll post the recipe(s) i used & how i made it later.

It is a gorgeous day again. The sky is unbelievably blue. It is 74F with 11% humidity. I hear it is hot & sticky down the hill. But not here at near 7,000 Ft! This is considered "unseasonably warm."

My house is a mess. The "I hope no one stops by unexpectedly" type mess. Not all of it. I worked on our bedroom last weekend & it is 90% ok. But the living room & the dining table (which is in the living room, we don't have a dining room) are a mess. The kitchen is better than it was. Part of the problem in there is i have a total of about 5 ft of counter space broken by the sink & the stove. It almost always looks cluttered, even when clean. If i have any dishes waiting to be done it looks a disaster.

BTW, i have come to love the dishwasher! Does that sound strange? I'd not had a dishwasher since the first year i was in college. So i'm totally unused to using it. And, i have to admit, i didn't see much point in it . . . the only dishwasher i've used recently is my MIL's. She washes every dish before putting it in, so again, what is the point? She even has a very fancy, very expensive, very quiet one, but she still washes the dishes. (And if i wash & dry a dish or glass by hand & put it in the drainer, she puts it in the dishwasher.)

Duane & i did an experiment a couple of weeks ago. We put in the dishes just as they are, including a really dirty glass pan. Didn't rinse them. Several had dried on stuff. I ran it on "heavy wash" but no extra heat, no extra rinse, & no heat dry. (It is so very dry here that they are dry within a few minutes of me opening the door to let them air dry.) They came out perfectly clean! In my month of doing this, i've only had one dish not get clean. Hooray! Now Duane will "do" dishes because he will put them in the dishwasher.

There are still some things i don't put in the dishwasher. Big pots, & plastics. I haven't many plastics, i got rid of most of them 2 or 3 years ago. But i do have a couple of plastic scrapers & a few other odds & ends. I wash my knives by hand. Still, it has cut my work a lot & i sure appreciate it.

I'm not being too hard on myself about the housework. The chronic fatigue has been very bad the past couple of months, & Duane does not help beyond putting an occasional dish in the dishwasher, & carrying out the trash. Oh, he does do basic vacuuming & i so appreciate that. He will water our trees if i ask. It just means that i get things done very slowly. Maybe later today i can focus more on the living room.

Part of the problem is that he & i are so alike. That is really good for most things. Minimal conflict in the house. But we tend to get "hung up" on the same issues. We are both very challenged with paper. Eighty percent of my home is very organized, but i have the 20% hang ups, & paper is a big part of that.

On the other hand, i just came from the neighbor's this AM. She has at least twice the counter space i have, maybe more. I can see that having more counter space can result in twice as much area TO clutter!

Our apple tree is now blooming & looks simply amazing. I was pleased last year (tho we got no apples due to a late freeze) but i see now that it was effected by lack of water the year before. It is just loaded with blooms this year. We still are trying not to get our hopes up because we could get a freeze even into June, but it is possible we'll get a good crop of apples this year.

We live in a resort town. People pay a lot of money to come & stay here, sometimes in little houses or cabins. We have been trying to find someone to stay here while we are gone in June. And play with the cats. And water the plants & trees. They won't even have to feed the cats or scoop poop because all that is automatic. And we can't find anyone to come. They don't even have to stay the whole time. If we could just find different ones to come each of the two weekends we are gone. No soap, so far. Probably going to end up having to pay some young teen girls (sisters) from our church who live walking distance from us to come play with the cats & water plants & trees. How screwed up is that?

Two years ago the company Duane works for wasn't doing so well. Long, long story, but the result was Duane had hours cut, lots of people were laid off, & Duane became the sole computer guy. (Yes, we bought our house in the middle of that, what were we thinking? But it has worked out ok.) Duane's company is doing much better now, & he has gotten the back pay that the company didn't have for him before. In the meantime, he took on some consulting jobs & did other work for people privately. He is still working with a company in FL. That company has grown a lot, & they now have several computer guys working for them. Duane is kind of the "head guy."

A couple of days ago he re-wrote some script one of the other programmers had put on the site (they wanted a logo in a different position or something). It was a very minor change. And the entire site went down! This programmer had written in a "bomb" so to speak. If ANYTHING was changed after he had written his program, it destroyed the site. They lost everything.

Fortunately this is the test site for another product, or something, & not up & running yet. But Duane was blown away by it. He said he could understand that if the guy had written program that he considered unique & "proprietary" that they guy shut down all the items that were his own. But this guy took a page that Duane had written, made a couple of minor changes, & added this bomb (basically claiming it "his" design). When Duane took the same page he himself had created & tried to make a couple of more design changes, the whole site self destructed. Duane was flabbergasted. But he is glad it happened now, so that he can go in & check all the code that this guy has worked on. It is basically the same as having a hacker inside the company. We have been walking around, shaking our heads for the past couple of days. Some people do things that are just inexplicable.

This guy said that it was in his contract that people can't change the things he has worked on. He said he has dozens of other clients & no one has ever complained before. Makes me wonder how many websites there are out there just waiting to explode. If something happened to this guy, & his clients hired another programmer to replace them, their entire site will disappear & all the data will be lost. I wonder if they understood the meaning of this clause in their contracts.

Two loads of laundry down. I've about six more to go. Should have worked on it before, but i was focused on other things.

Hope you're having a good weekend wherever you are. :)

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