Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

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  • Life is what happens when you’re making other plans

    Yeah, that headline there? Totally saccharine and goofy and pointless. Yes, I know it’s cribbed from John Lennon, so what?

    Anyway.

    The “life that happened” was a sudden and unexpected gall bladder removal for my wife last week. Yeah, I know—Wha?!? She went to the doctor on Wednesday, confirmed that she had gallstones, and they wanted to take the gall bladder out either that night or Thursday. We opted for Thursday, so I spent most of that day at the hospital and the rest of the weekend taking care of, er, everything. So I’ve been busy.

    You know what’s crazy? They treat gall bladder surgery (formally known as cholecystectomy, in this case laparoscopic) as basically outpatient; my wife was able to come home Thursday night.

    Okay, this is even crazier, and creepy (from that Wikipedia article):

    Gallstones are, oddly, a valuable by-product of meat processing, fetching up to $900 US an ounce in their use as a purported aphrodisiac in the herbal medicine of some cultures. The finest gallstones tend to be sourced from old dairy cows. Much as in the manner of diamond mines, slaughterhouses carefully scrutinise offal department workers for gallstone theft.

    Wow. And “ew.”

    On the other hand… no, I won’t even go there.

  • Now this is how you do viral…

    This is absolutely great: Send a free personalized message from Samuel L. Jackson for “Snakes on a Plane.” I swear, the thing is brilliant… the audio editing is really good… and it makes phone calls anywhere for free. Even better? You put in the phone number you want it to appear from… and it uses that number for caller ID.

    As my brother said, you think you’re getting a call from a friend, and Samuel Jackson is commanding you!

    Oh, uh, the movie itself? Well, if it’s successful, it’s because they’ve been taking the viral approach all along…

  • It’s been awhile for Scooby…

    I figured it’s been just long enough for everyone to forget…

    Scooby's at the front door! ticket

  • Post eye surgery

    The eye surgery went very well, our daughter has been recuperating marvelously all weekend (it wasn’t a very eventful weekend because of this), and things are more-or-less back on track.

    Saturday morning we did make a Costco run, largely because I had an eye exam of my own at the optometrist there. It’s been probably 15 years since I last had my eyes checked, and the kids having the surgery—not to mention having had eye floaters for years—put me in mind to getting it done. As it happens, I have nearly perfect vision; I see 20/20 in each eye, and have a very mild astigmatism that may necessitate getting glasses in a few years. The floaters are normal.

    And yeah, go ahead and get the “floater” jokes out of your system; I can hear a bunch of you snickering in the back.

  • In Lake Oswego, eye surgery tomorrow

    Like the trip we had almost two years ago, tonight we’re in the Phoenix Inn hotel in Lake Oswego in preparation for our daughter’s corrective eye surgery tomorrow. Pretty much anything I would say is covered in that previous post; the only details being different really are that my daughter is six and it’s her third (and hopefully last) such surgery. And I’ve taken today, Wednesday and Thursday off from work for it (back on Friday).

    On the positive side, we had a really excellent dinner at Piazza Italia in Portland’s Pearl District; we got to try some cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory at Washington Square; and we’ll be doing a Trader Joe’s run sometime before coming back on Thursday. Anyone need anything from TJs?

  • Oregon Brewers Festival and Portand Friday

    I’m taking the day off from work this Friday and going to Portland for the Oregon Brewers Festival! Woo hoo! My original plan was to stay in Portland the entire weekend, but as it turns out I’d already obligated myself to a friend’s wedding Saturday evening, so I’ll be spending Friday night with my friend Justin (who’s also going with me to the Brewfest) and leaving Saturday late morning sometime.

    It’s going to be an eventful day. Aside from the Brewfest, there’s a beer blogger meetup that evening (starting at five) over at the Rogue Ales Public House, so I’ll get to meet yet more bloggers from Portland and other far-flung places (Arizona, for one, I think).

    Are any other bloggers in the area going to the Brewfest? Let me know.

    At any rate, I’ll have the camera and notebook and plan on writing a bunch about it. And, Friday right now is looking at an 80-degree forecast for Portland, so that’s just about perfect. Three days and counting!

  • the show

    Okay, I’ve pretty much become addicted to the show with zefrank. I can’t help it. It’s compelling. And funny. And smart. And for embedded online video, it just works. Go watch. And then go watch a bunch of the archives.

  • Cowboy Dinner Tree review

    The Cowboy Dinner Tree was fabulous. A real experience, one I would absolutely do again! So this review will mostly consist of gushing over the meal (I can’t think of anything bad to say), followed by a few pictures. Read on… (more…)

  • Cowboy Dinner Tree

    Tonight my wife and I are driving down to Silver Lake to eat at the Cowboy Dinner Tree. This is actually something we’ve wanted to try out for years, but it was this article in the Bend Bulletin which finally prompted us to make reservations.

    Probably the best description I could give is one I’ll lift from the Bulletin article:

    The Cowboy Dinner Tree, about 85 miles from Bend, is about as rustic as a restaurant can get. Made of rough poles and barn planks, the building itself has the look of a hermit’s cabin. A sign on the wall proclaims “No electricity – No credit cards – No kidding,” and it’s not. A 12-volt solar-powered battery provides the juice for a couple of bare light bulbs in the dining room, but when the sun sets, the lights dim. All the food is cooked from scratch with propane.

    When you make your reservations, you get the choice of either the steak or the chicken for dinner. And their serious about they’re food; when they say chicken, they mean a whole chicken. And the steaks are 26 to 30 ounces. That’s almost two pounds of steak!

    Should be an experience, one I’ll write about sometime in the near future, if I’m not comatose from that much red meat.

  • Dell computer fun

    Simone noted the humor/frustration level I was having with Dell this week at work. Of course, anytime I mention “Dell” around her she shakes her head in disgust, so perhaps she’s not exactly the most objective observer. :)

    What happened was, at work this week one of the newish Dell PCs started making a high-pitched spinning/whining noise. At first I thought it was a fan, so I opened up the box, eliminated the fans as a source of noise, and quickly concluded it was the hard drive. Sounds emanating from the hard drive are, generally, a Bad Thing. And sure enough, when I tried to boot the machine up again in order to copy the data to the network (most of the user data is already on the network, except for a few things like email and some accounting data), I got the Windows blue screen and problems booting.

    So I got the person set up with a temporary PC (an older one), pulled the hard drive, and called Dell.

    (Let me disclaim in advance that in fact all the people I talked to at Dell were very professional and helpful, and the overall service they performed was very good. It just turned into a minor comedy of errors.)

    First of all, the machine’s out of warranty; it was purchased one year and one month ago. Of course! Even assuming I’d bought the one-year service plan warranty with it, it still wouldn’t matter.

    Nearly 45 minutes later, after talking to three different people (a woman from India; some fellow with an unidentifiable accent in Tech Support; and a woman from Roseburg, Oregon in Sales), I was finally able to get the order placed for a new hard drive that matched the specs of the machine and drive in question: 80GB Ultra ATA, IDE interface. Pay attention, that’s an important detail.

    They tell me that yes, even though I ordered the drive with Next Day delivery, it still may not even ship out until Friday the 14th. That’s fine, I say, just get it here ASAP. And guess what? They surprise me by delivering the hard drive the very next day! Woo-hoo!

    Open the package, mount the drive into the PC chassis, go to plug everything in… and it’s the wrong type of drive. They sent me an 80GB Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive, which is incompatible with the IDE interface in this computer.

    So there’s not much else to do but get on the phone with Dell again, spending exactly 31 minutes on the phone this time (our office telephones have a call timer). I spoke with the Customer Service department (again a woman from India, as near as I can figure), got the return processed (UPS would pick it up in the next three days), then transferred to Sales, where I made sure to order exactly the right type of hard drive. I hope. This was Thursday.

    The new drive hasn’t arrived yet, so the speedy Next Day delivery that accompanied the first hard drive hasn’t recurred. Hopefully Monday? But, the UPS guy did pick up the return Friday morning, so that’s something.

    Simone did warn me.