So maybe Wednesday should become the new post day, that seems to work out a bit better the way work and everything has been going as of late.  I have morning meetings three out of five mornings anymore, so I'm going to try to get one of those cancelled, the Wednesday one actually, which would give me even more time that day.  Did I post at all last week, I suddenly can't remember.  Things are finally settling down at work so I have time to breathe a bit, and things at home are settling down a bit too.
  I have had a mess of a time trying to get a legal copy of Windows 7 installed on my computer.  My friend David gave me an extra copy he had around, and who can say no to cool free stuff.  Well, after a week of installing and reinstalling trying to get this copy to work I finally gave up and pirated it.  The sad part is that took all of 3 minutes to figure out, get the software for, and complete the installation.  The bad part now is that the HDD I installed it on is failing, so I have to get a new HDD and install it yet again.  I now have another few things to try to get the legal copy working, so I may yet have a legal copy of Windows running soon, the first time in about 10 years I can say that.  As many copies of Windows XP as I have purchased for system builds over it's illustrious life span, I've never owned a copy myself.  That was my revenge against Microsoft for selling me Windows ME, but now with Windows 7 that grudge is settled, and I have a job that pays me money, so it's time to pay up.  As frustrated as I am about having to install windows yet again, I am pretty excited to be going to a SSD.  Good and bad of that is my Mobo only supports SATA II, so I get a slower drive than is available, but that also makes it a much cheaper drive, so good for my budget, which has been stretched right to the point of breaking the last few months, and with West Yellowstone and Christmas coming up probably will continue to get worse before it gets better.
  I also finished up all the major work on my boat project finally, just a few small details left to finish, and none of those actually prevent me from putting the boat in the water, so hopefully I can try it out yet this year before things start to ice up.

  Even if there is no ice about, there has been frost, so I finally totaled out my garden for the year.  I have probably 10 pounds or more of potatoes, and over 5 pounds of tomatoes, so I need to figure out some recipies to use these babies up.  I tried my first one Monday night, fried green tomatoes!  They turned out to be far more tasty than I expected actually, and I used the leftover egg/milk and flour to make a few pancakes when I had all the tomatoes fried, so no ingredients were wasted in the making of this meal.

I've gotten to exercise 3 days in a row now, so that is a big win too.  Running a mere 10k left me pretty sore the next day, so I need to get my act together quick, Yellowstone is not that far away.
  One last fun fact, I am going through my song of the day collection sorting out songs that I like, and I came across a Daredevil Christoper Wright song, the band my friend John Sunde is the lead singer for, so I was super pumped about that.

Heads up 7 up

Yikes, another week has snuck by with almost no blog post, so being a fan of the better late than never mentality, here is a quick rundown.  Last week was pretty crazy, and this week did not disappoint either.  The end of last week slid by somewhat quietly I would assume, since not much of it sticks out in my mind.  It might be that I've just kind of been in a sick/tired coma that is inhibiting the formation of new memories also.

The weekend was not very eventful.  I made some decent progress on my canoe, but now I fear the weather will turn before I get it in the water.  The first gunwale is about 40% installed, but there are some stress lines appearing that I want to work out before I put in any more rivets.  I also got about 1/2 of my yard raked, and can at least see my driveway and front walk again.  I also got dishes and vacuuming done finally, both long overdue projects.

I got a half decent rollerski in Saturday, but wasn't feeling great, so I cut off early of my full weekend route.  I haven't really gotten to work out since, so I'm now starting to get a bit worried about my conditioning, and I'm having trouble shaking this cough so I don't feel motivated to hop right back in to a workout routine just yet either.

Monday I decided to make the switch to Windows 7 and it has been pretty disasteriffic so far.  First I have an upgrade version of W7, so I had to re-install XP with a valid key to start out.  This didn't go bad, just took a while, but then the next step is where trouble started.  Windows 7 refused to boot off the HDD installed it on midway through the installation process, and after several times formatting the HDD and reinstalling XP and 7 I decided it was a master boot record (MBR) issue.  I could boot to a bootable cd and then start my HDD with windows on it fine, but could not boot directly to that HDD.  I finally decided to let that issue be for a while and  just get Windows running the way I wanted, only to find that my key was supposedly not valid.  Additionally the text file where I had all my keys stored was on a HDD that windows recognized but would not connect to.  I finally found drive settings and assigned a drive letter to the drive so I could access it.  After several checks to make sure I didn't have a typo, reinstalles to make sure there wasn't a software problem or some other oddity that was due to it being an upgrade copy I just gave up and cracked the activation.  I now have an activated "genuine" copy of Windows, though not with the valid key that I have for it, and I'm sure not without my fare share of problems in the future.

In addition to the stress of not having a working PC (which is hard to troubleshoot when you can't look up solutions on the internet because your computer doesn't work) things at work have still not been peachy.  We had another major maintenance project on the copper plater and the adjustment to work with 3/4 of our normal staff in my group.  We are running some new cell phone antennas here that have all kinds of issues at gold plate, we have ongoing staining issues on our silver plating, and trouble with some of our new lab equipment.  I also have a couple minor projects that I've neglected too long that I'm getting pressure to get done.  Then yesterday the machine that I have just been put in charge of decided it wanted to start chewing up material, so I have to dig around and try to figure out how to fix it without hardly knowing how it works, or where the spare parts for it are located, or how it typically runs when it isn't broken, so fun times there.

On the plus side my friend Allie sent me an email from her new @cityoflakesloppet.com email address, so that brightened my day.  I'm excited that she got a great job helping make nordic skiing in the twin cites better, and that I now have an in at the city of lakes loppet foundation.

Time ain't on my side

It seems I'm kinda forgetting what my house looks like I'm home so seldom lately.  I did get a good bit of work done on the canoe early last week, but haven't touched it in a week now.  The patches all took and look pretty good, but the gunwales still need to be shaped and riveted on.  I headed down to Chicago to watch my friend Erik run in the Chicago marathon this past weekend.  I took off right from work Friday for the cities to meet with my carpool crew down to Waukesha.  We stayed with Kyle and Kelli, a couple of high school friends.

Saturday was a nice relaxed day, just hanging out, fielding a couple calls from work, and getting in a short run with Erik.  Saturday night a few of us headed into Chicago so we could more easily get to the race the next morning without needing to hop on a train at 2:00 AM.  Elena and I stayed at one of her friends and got to sleep in until 5:30, not bad considering.  We biked the 7 miles to the race start, a really great ride along Lake shore drive.  There was a heavy fog over the lake, and a great view of the skyline.  I tried to take a couple pictures, but they came back very grainy.

Erik was hoping to run in the low 2:20's for the race, which is around 5:20 mile pace.  He started at 5:17's to keep with the women's pacer who was running a 2:18 pace.  This would have gotten him an Olympic trials qualification.  

Biking was a spectacular way to cheer, but Elena and I really had to book it to get back ahead of him, since he was on a closed course and we had to deal with traffic, stop lights, ect.  It was a lot of fun flying around on roads closed to cars and weaving around through roads with slow traffic.  I would not have wanted to be driving a car near the marathon course, but biking afforded a lot of latitude in where we were able to get to.  It was a bit worrisome running red lights and weaving through traffic with police all over the place, but they were too busy controlling traffic around the race course to bother with a couple bikers.  We caught Erik every couple miles or so for the first 8 miles, then headed to the halfway point to catch him there.  He was a bit off the pace by that point, and looked like he had backed way off.  Next we hopped ahead to the 17 mile mark.  We waited there and didn't see him, and didn't see him.  We met a few of the other people who were down there cheering and all kept an eye out for him long past when he should have finished.  We finally got a call that he had gotten bad cramps and ended up dropping out.  Very disappointing news considering all the training he has put in and how great his race start was.  We headed back to the finish area to watch the race leaders come in.  For much of the early race there was a pack of about 10 at the front.  Ryan Hall was dropped by the half and at mile 17 the pack was about 6.  At the finish Moses Mosop had easily left everyone behind and cruised in to take the win in about 2:05.

We grabbed some great Chicago deep dish pizza then split up so the train goers could get back and Elena and I stopped by Millennium park on our way back to her car.  I got some great pictures by the bean.

 We headed Picked up Erik and headed back to Waukesha to celebrate a bit.  It was Elena's birthday so we had something exciting to celebrate, even if Erik's day didn't go as well as he hoped.  We didn't start back for Minnesota until 11:00, so by the time we got back to the cities, got unloaded, and I drove back to Northfield it got pretty late.  I got home at 5:30 and crashed for about an hour before getting up and going in to work.  Normally I would have slept in a bit but there was a major maintenance project going on at work that I had to be there for.
 The rebuild project moved along pretty well actually.  I was awake and mostly cognizant even, until I sat down for a meeting for a bit.  I bet I didn't make it 5 minutes before I was nodding off.  I ducked out early to "go check my machine" so I didn't flat out fall asleep.  I finally got home a little after 6:00 pm, had some supper, and got about 2 hours of sleep before work called me back in.  We replaced a conveyor frequency inverter, and it was not commissioned correctly, so the speeds of the two conveyors did not match.  This leads to very bad material very fast.  I recommissioned the inverter, and it started going in the opposite direction, how does that even happen?  I changed a couple of the wires around and got it going the right way at the right speed, then spent some time searching for a leak from a bad seal.  I finally went home about 5:00, making it 3 days in a row where I was awake at 5:30 AM, and two of them coming from the wrong direction.  I slept until 7:00 and then back in to work.  Things were going well, but I had a lot to catch up on after a couple days of not spending any time at my desk, then had to go to the cities to run a couple errands.  It was 10:30 by the time I got home, just enough time to put away groceries and eat before going to bed.  Finally a full nights sleep.  Still pretty tired today.  Headed up to the cities again today for Erik's going away party.  He leaves for Ethiopia on Saturday for a few months.
 Just to make this busy week more fun I found out yesterday that one of the four engineers in my group is leaving for a different job.  This means 30% more work for those of us who are left, if my math is correct.  This should keep things from getting boring at work, that's for sure.  They should get even more fun yet when our new process equipment starts coming in next year...

Boats, Budgets, and Blacktop

I'm actually starting this a day early, but by the time it makes it out to internet land it will be right on time.  Ok make that late, since I waited to put up some pictures.  Last week was a rough work week, the copper plater was having some teething issues, either not biting material at all or eating it up.  Add that to the fact that we went from having Friday off a week ago and this last Friday scheduled as off to cancelling the Friday vacation, then by Tuesday to adding overtime on the weekend.  This puts a lot more pressure on keeping the machine up and running.  Some random fiddling with settings and careful measurements involving drawing lines on spinning gears got things at least mostly back on track, but maintenance down time on the machine is still crippling right now, so next Monday a major overhaul is on tap, changing anodes, checking cathodes, checking moving parts, and all as quickly as we can to get back to running material.  I did get a field trip in for work last week, going to another shop over in Wisconsin to take a look at some process equipment that is similar to the new equipment we are buying here.
Some pretty interesting stuff this last weekend (if these posts seem to focus mostly on weekends, its because my weeks can be fairly boring and too frequently lately free of training as well).  Saturday morning I dragged myself out of bed early and headed up to Battle Creek to check out a Sisu workout.  We did some pole hiking and a fair amount of bounding.  It was a fun group, and Rob (one of Allie's friends who I met last weekend at the trail run) was close to my speed, so we got a good workout pushing each other a bit.  Then I went to Northwest Canoe in St. Paul (what a mess to get to between road construction and farmers markets) and picked up gunwales and patch equipment for my canoe.  It was a bit more spendy than I expected, so now I'm going to have to watch the budget very closely for a while so I have funds available for West Yellowstone and Christmas.  I did start tearing off the old gunwales when I got home on Saturday, that is a much bigger project than I expected as well, since they are glued on.  I put a couple small tears in the Kevlar tearing them off, but I can just put small patches over them, and the new gunwales should reinforce the area adequately think.  After buying boat parts I headed over to Jeff's to help strip off shingles from his garage.  That project was done by the time I got there, so I caught up with everyone there, ate lunch, and helped put up tar paper in anticipation of the arrival of his roofing (which showed up Sunday just a bit too late).  Then David, Jeff, and I headed out for some biking.  We were going to go do Ohio St. but hit a rough section where there was gravel and sand on the road where they were doing some construction work.  I'm happy we all made it through without incident, since it was a screaming downhill, but David picked up a bit of wire or something and ended up with a flat.  None of us thought to bring a spare or pump, so it was a hike back to Jeff's house to end the ride.  At least it was a short walk.  David is becoming a stronger rider for sure.  Next time Garrison is up I'm going to have to get those two down to Northfield and beat up on them a bit.  I know just the route...
Sunday morning I headed out to try the rollerskis on the new pavement on Hwy 246.  It was a nice warm day out, and since it is now October already I figured I better get on my horse with respect to ski training.  With bible study on Tuesdays I'll have to pick a new interval day soon and get going on those as well.  Since the downhill on 246 would now be manageable on the rollerskis I headed out towards Cannon City first.  There was a decent amount of traffic, but that is just part of rollersking.  The uphills were pretty good, and the downhills all manageable.  The 6 mile stretch from Cannon City to Nerstrand was as boring as usual.  The new pavement made it all the way to Nerstrand, so the run from there to the Valley grove section was rather good.  I took a few pictures along the way.

 





Climbing the hill on Ibson was great; I think in general going this direction gives access to the best climbs.  I'll maybe try it the other way around next time to see how the climbing on the new pavement is for comparison.
I went in for a couple fillings today.  Only three, but all in different places around my mouth, so my whole face is a bit numb right now.  I also found out that silver fillings are actually half mercury.  So I'm not sure what to make of that, but it's a bit creepy considering the stigma against playing with mercury, and for good reason from what medical data I've seen on the topic.  Even so, apparently the release rate is really low, and it's got to be better for me than uranium right?  On that happy note I'm off to study the bible, have a good week.