Cody’s blog

When I woke up this morning, the air smelled wet, and later heard thunder rumbling in the distance. It’s not raining now, but it must have done last night, because the ground is wet. There are thick, light gray clouds covering the sky. Looks like the thunderstorms that were forecast for Monday have arrived today. At least it’s cooling things down a bit, but if the clouds clear and the sun comes out later, the heat and humidity are going to be a killer combination. It’s supposed to be in the 90s every day this week—maybe the low 100s. With added thunder and lightning. I just hope the lightning doesn’t start any fires. I wouldn’t mind a nice, soaking rain, but so far it seems to have been fairly light.

I’m also wondering how my 16-mile run is going to be affected this weekend. If it’s 100F and clear, it’s going to be hard to do a run that long. I should try to start really early—it would be nice if I could be out on the road by 6 am, rather than getting up at 6. But that would mean getting up at 4 am… not sure I can manage that.  I was thinking of running from the Old West Ranch gate to Meadowbrook Park and back—eight miles each way—but that only gives me one chance in the middle to stop for bathroom/water. If it’s going to be that hot, I might be better off staying near the middle school track, closer to water. I might need to soak my head more often. 🙂

I didn’t write yesterday because I didn’t have time after doing my midweek run. I see I skipped writing on Wednesday last week as well.

I’ve read three of the accumulated Shonen Jumps so far and am on the fourth. I like this way of reading them—I can follow the stories better when I don’t have to stop for a month after every couple of chapters. Maybe I should continue to save them up for six months or so at a time and read them all in a bunch! The Yu Yu Hakusho demon tournament arc has finally ended, and Naruto‘s chunin contest storyline is building to a close. Yu-Gi-Oh! is near its end. I am enjoying most of the stories—even One Piece, which is generally too silly for me, is keeping me interested. (Note to self: make sure you renew your subscription. I was considering letting it lapse, since I wasn’t reading it any more, but now that I’m catching up, I’m really enjoying it again.)

Also reading: a collection of short stories by Annie Proulx, including “Brokeback Mountain.” I decided that, since I was probably never going to see the movie, I’d read the story instead. It’s the last one in the book, and I’m trying to read the whole thing from the beginning, but it’s not really my thing so far. I read the first story at lunch on Tuesday, and most of the second yesterday. I’ll keep at it, it’s okay lunchtime reading material.

Here’s another photo from the rodeo. This is the team roping event. One cowboy ropes the steer by the head, and the other ropes the steer by its hind feet. If the second rope only catches one hind foot, there’s a penalty, but they still get their score.

Or possibly squirrels… I have quite a zoo living “upstairs” this year—every morning, I hear little critters of some kind scurrying around overhead. Not sure what, if anything can be done about them. There’s no way to block them from getting up there without major remodeling—the attic is open to the garage all the way along its length, so it’s easy for critters to get up there (including me—the one time I locked myself out of the house, I got back in by climbing up into the attic crawlspace from inside the garage, over to the attic door, and dropping down onto the couch in the sunroom). Putting poison up there would only result in lots of stinky dead animals in my ceiling. Maybe build a ramp so a cat can get up there? I dunno, I think I’m kind of stuck with critters living up there.

Yesterday was In Town day. Mom and I headed in around 10:30 am, and started out by getting gas (it’s down to $2.79! Hope it continues to drop, although there’ll probably be a spike up around Labor Day), going to the post office, and washing my truck. We tried out the new “Sail Thru” car wash on Tucker—one of those automatic ones where you set your truck on a rail that pulls you through all sorts of brushes and streams of water. It did a pretty good job, although it’s still a lot cheaper to do it myself at the self-service car wash next door.

Then we went to the flooring place on Tehachapi Blvd. (There are actually two flooring places on Tehachapi Blvd. We went to the newest one. I don’t remember the name, but it’s by the tire store.) Quickly picked out some heavy-duty on-sale vinyl, and arranged for the woman to come out in the afternoon and measure my floors. That all took so little time that we went ahead and went grocery shopping before lunch at Que Pasa. It was good, but we both agreed that Gracian’s is still our favorite Mexican food place in town.

After lunch, all that was left was to go to Home Depot to pick up some edging stones for Mom, then home to unload everything. Not long after, the woman from the flooring place came out to measure the kitties’ room and utility room. She called later with a proposal of $360 to do both rooms, installation included. Seems like a good deal to me, so I’m going to stop by there this morning to pay and arrange for a time for them to come and do the installation. I’ll have to pull out the carpet myself (they would have done it for additional cost, but I think it will be easy enough to do myself, so I’d rather save the money), but they’ll install the vinyl over the tile in the utility room. So, I’ll have to get everything out of both rooms (and figure out what I’m going to do with the kitties while their room is being torn apart—probably stick Socks outside in her enclosure and put Jerry in the bathroom) and pull up the carpet in the morning before the installers come. I can empty the utility room the night before (put everything out on the back porch or in the sun room), but I don’t want to disrupt the kitties too much in advance. Maybe take out the little chest of drawers the night before, but save the file boxes and other stuff for the morning. I hope the carpet doesn’t take too long to pull up. Mom will come and help me, I’m sure.

That was it for yesterday. Still no housecleaning! Argh. The kitchen floor is getting so dirty.

I also finished cleaning up my JournalFen backup, doing an ljmigrate and then going back and deleting all the duplicates. I finally decided to put the blog thing entries on my lj. It seems like better continuity to put it there. I made an icon to use just for those entries— it’s a tiny version of the old blog thing layout: . The dates are when I was using the blog. It’s pretty, I think. I always liked that layout, so I’m glad to have some tiny form of it preserved on the net. And they’ll all be tagged “blog thing” so they’ll be easy to find, if someone should actually want to find them. I’ve already posted all of February and most of March. I would have finished March last night, but my ftp went flooey and I couldn’t upload the pictures I wanted to use.

Some day, I must start producing new content again, instead of laboriously cleaning up and reposting old content. I’ve redone my fic site, consolidated all my marathon journals into one, cleaned up and backed up my LJ, and now I’m doing the clean up and repost thing for my oldest blog. After that… well, I’ve still got LibraryThing to finish. Maybe then I’ll have to start working on my Yu-Gi-Oh! site again! It’s been over a year since I updated that, sigh. I never wanted to stop working on it, I just lost my energy for it.

(Yeah, I suppose this blog could be considered “new content,” but, except for the photos, I don’t think I’m really producing anything of interest here, I’m just rambling on.)

The second event at the rodeo was calf roping and tying. This picture shows the calf un-tyers—they came out and turned the calf loose after the roper was finished with him.

I got the latest issue of Shonen Jump in the mail yesterday, and decided it was time I started reading the pile of them that’s been accumulating on the floor by the couch. Turns out I had issues all the way back to March 2007 sitting here waiting to be read. Eep! The latest issue is October, so I’m eight issues behind. I read March last night, and am starting April today. You know what I think the problem is? When they started putting a chapter from one of their graphic novels in the front of each issue, it was always having to start something new instead of jumping right in to continuing the stories from the month before. Most of them, I wasn’t interested in, and I’d end up putting the issue aside for “later.” Then I’d forget about it, and when the next issue would come, I’d put it aside until I got the chance to catch up on the previous one, and the whole thing just spiraled out of control!

Yesterday was a good day. My seven-mile run went well—I finished a few minutes faster than my previous 2:2 seven-mile run, even using the 2:3 run/walk ratio—mainly by virtue of pushing the speed of my walk intervals. It also helped that it was overcast and relatively cool for most of the morning.

When I got home, Mom called to say that John and Jill were at her place. They’d come to pick up that old flat-bed trailer that was up there, and were staying for lunch. So I showered and joined them for lunch. John joked that if he and Jill couldn’t afford their place, they were going to come and live there at Mom’s. Heh. Mom said I’d probably charge them a little rent. I guess John and Jill both have jobs now with the Mojave newspaper to help make some extra money. We are all heirs and heiresses, but a little extra money from a part-time job still helps out! (Especially when you’ve had one large-ish unexpected expense after another, as I have this year: generator repair $400, truck tires $600, truck repair $300, Spot’s vet bill $400…. If not for my library money, I’d have been dipping heavily into savings.)

Anyway, it was nice hanging out with the family for lunch. We don’t see enough of each other, even though we live so close by.

The afternoon was spent doing chores. I did two loads of laundry, which should have been everything, except that I forgot a pile of dirty clothes I’d gathered in the bedroom, so I still have half a load to do, sigh. I could easily have done them in the second load, it was only half full, but I forgot them. And I couldn’t do a third load, even if I’d wanted to—I don’t have enough hot water for three loads of laundry in one day. Oh well, I’ll do them next time.

I had kind of a headache in the afternoon, which it finally occurred to me to take some Tylenol for, and I felt much better afterwards, even getting back enough energy to take apart and clean the aquarium hoses while I cleaned the fish tank. The hoses get filled with gunk that slows the flow of the water, so every couple of months or so I pull the filter system apart and clean the hoses. It’s a tedious, messy job and I hate doing it, but it’s necessary. The tank is so much cleaner this morning, and the fishies are swimming around all happy and energetic. If I did it often enough to remember all the little tricks of getting things taken apart and put back together, it would be easier, but I always forget something. But this time, at least, I didn’t spill huge quantities of water all over the place.

Then I pumped water and finished going through my old LJ and JF entries. Yay! I still have to run ljmigrate and go through JF one more time to eliminate any duplicate entries, but (if I’m right that it re-migrates entries that have been edited) this should be the last time I have that problem.

I also dug up my old blog from one of my archive disks and copied it back to my hard drive. I’m still pondering whether I’ll repost the entries, or most of them anyway—I looked through it last night, and was a bit surprised how many quizzes there were. Heh. Most of the quizzes are dead links anyway, so I won’t repost them.  I’ll probably post the rest of them here, backdated to their original dates, with “blog thing” as the tag. Hm. I hope I don’t end up spamming the few people who are reading this blog on RSS. I hadn’t thought of that…. Hmm. Maybe I should back-post it to my LJ after all.

Today, Mom and I are going into town to pick up some paving stones for her to use on the side of the drive to the shed. I’m also going to check the flooring store for something to use for the kitties’ room, and get some groceries. I should also do a bit of housecleaning. Maybe I’ll do that before we head into town, since it’s still early.

First event of the rodeo was the bareback bronc riding. They have to stay on the horse for eight seconds to receive a score. This fellow is still hanging on!