Mortaine’s Blog

I sent the following to my mother via email earlier today:

You may or may not have heard about the Morgan Hill fire, which is currently at 3,000 acres and will not be contained until Saturday. People are being evacuated, and 11 homes have already been destroyed.

Morgan Hill is on the other side of the Santa Cruz Mountains, basically north of Soquel. The fire is in the hills, which is why it has been so hard to contain. We are in no danger in Scotts Valley, but my friends Chris and Ann live in Morgan Hill (away from the fire); if they are required to evacuate, they will pile into the RV and possibly park in front of our house.

Of more concern is John’s mother. Karen’s house is less than 10 miles away from the fire, on the Santa Cruz side of the hill. Right now, the fire is being stopped at Summit Road, which runs along the summit of the hill. Because it’s easier to break a fire at that point, I doubt they will have difficulty keeping it from entering Santa Cruz County, but it is a possibility. If Karen is evacuated, she will be staying with us until she can return to her home.

I just wanted to give you an update and let you know what was going on. San Jose is filled with the smell of smoke today, and the wind conditions are starting to blow it into Santa Cruz and especially Watsonville. Most of the fire fighting has been via air, as the fire is in a hilly area with few roads.

Working on my karma today, I helped our office receptionist install AdAware on her system, which was infected with TopText. And, by the way, if you’ve ever installed Kazaa and didn’t do everything in the world to remove TopText, your computer is probably infected, too.

How this program stays off of the McAffee virus list, I have no idea. They must own stock in the virus software companies or something. See http://www.scumware.com for more information on these insidious programs. And then see this site to find out how to get rid of those– and almost every virus currently in existance– forever.

Anyway, this article almost makes me want to uninstall Linux on the iMac and upgrade to OS X. Almost. It’s the price tag that gets me, though– it’s hard to justify when I already own the Linux disks.

I am so blinkin’ tired today. It’s mostly just my eyes– they’re sore from yesterday’s contact lens fiasco, and from having to wear glasses today. Eh.

Yes, the nasty smell pervades the office. . . . again.

Barf.

I skipped out on the LiveJournal Meetup yesterday because my contacts were bothering me. Still bugging me today, so I have to wear glasses all day long. Which means I can’t see as well, which makes it kind of hard to drive. Arg.

It’s after 11 PM. I am still up. I am trying to get my webbified photo album posted. Unfortunately, I have some movies in there, including a rather long one from the Eiffel Tower, that seems to cause everything to “hang” a bit while it uploads.

When it is all done, the photo album will be available here. Please wait until tomorrow morning, though, as there are 430 MB of data to move from my desktop computer to the garage, via FTP. Yes, FTP. It’s more secure than NFS )even in our house, behind the firewall), but it’s not nearly as fast. Even so, the fastest way to move this data would be to burn a CD-ROM and walk into the other room. However, the CD burner is on the other computer, so, oh well.

BTW: Almost every digital photo I possess is on that photo album, including several that I didn’t take myself, some that may seem weird, or sideways, and none that have captions, really. Deal with it. I used a free little perl program called “album” and just auto-generated everything. I haven’t even organized these things yet. If you see a dirty picture, please just let me know discretely, so I can take it down, ok? I think I got them all off of there, but ya never know. . . . And no, I won’t tell you if it’s actually me, or just my head pasted onto someone else’s body.

We took Hammer to the dog park today. Again. Carl stopped by to pick up his cell phone, which he left here Sunday night. Mind you, Carl does not, to my knowledge, have a land phone, so his cell is his phone. I’m glad he got it back, and glad he was still here when I got home. I was able to convince him to go to the dog park with us, which was fun. Carl is the kind of person who seems to have an affinity with animals– he claims that every animal except pot-bellied pigs likes him. The best he can hope for from the pigs, however, is cool neutrality. Oh, well, we can’t be perfect.

To give you some idea of this man’s charming effect on animals, my dear sweet Harry actually made the effort to get into bed with him– something he was never quite energetic enough to do with us (couch, yes– bed– even the futon– no).

Tomorrow is Wednesday. Hump Day (because it’s the middle of the week, you perv!) I keep thinking there’s something I am supposed to do tomorrow, and of course, the thing I’m supposed to do is call Sienna tonight to ask her to the dog park tomorrow. But I remembered at about 10:30, and I do not call anyone after 9:30, unless their house is on fire, or I know they’re awake and there’s something urgent I have to tell them, or it’s a booty call (which I haven’t done since my dating days…).

I think the UFies have cracked, by the way. Just a public service announcement. They’re telling shaggy-dog stories now, or whatever those stupid jokes are. No, I take it back. They’re just telling punch-lines to stupid jokes.

I can’t tell which is worse. A really bad bad bad joke. Or just the punch-line of one.

“They” are out to destroy my olfactory happiness.

This morning, a co-worker (the same one, I suspect, who eats gross-smelling food at work) did a hit-and-run with some sort of Chinese snack. It was so gross. It tastes something like the Broccoli with Cashew nut I had last night for dinner– not something I wanted to face at 10:00 in the morning.

Then, of course, at 11:30 was the obligatory fill-the-software-department with nasty smelling food smells.

Now, it smells like someone just dumped a half bottle of cheap perfume or cologne on him/herself.

Will these people never learn? I wish I worked in a scent-free office! Ack!

Oh, and of course my contact lens is bugging me again today. I don’t see any tears on it, but who knows? These Acuvue 2’s really suck when it comes to not ripping while they’re in my eyes!