Sweet Baby James

stinks on ice

friday, february 19th, 2010

i can't remember 56"+ of snow on the ground, all at one time, since I built the GC&N Complex back in 1990. And we have another supposed 2-4" on the way, starting Monday and lasting through Tuesday morning. Just what I don't need right now. The Complex has been closed since last Tuesday; we'd cleared it out on Sunday & Monday, but abandoned it when the new snow arrived Tuesday afternoon. All the snow plow companies are swamped with contract work, so Arthur & I — mostly Arthur due to my bad back — have been chipping away at it. I'll sure be glad to see Spring and warmer weather come, with a return to normalcy. He's been a lifesaver this Winter.

"I've had enough snow for 2010. Have you? Somehow, I just don't think Mother Nature's finished with us, just yet. As I've said since 1996: "Mother Nature's in charge; we're just along for the ride."

With my back problems, and my Foreman Alan's vision problems, I can't rely upon him anymore to do what he used to do to help me keep the place functioning, so Arthur has gratefully stepped-in and filled the gap. I have a very special "certificate" for him, which I'm working on this week. From what I'm reading in "The Old Farmer's Almanac", we've got a lot more snowstorms coming before Spring arrives; hence why I moved the "20th Open House" back to April 17th, to give us some breathing room.

After 5 days of plowing and shoveling, the Complex is navigable again, and if some warmer weather arrives and melts some of the massive piles of snow, I'll be a happy camper. I just don't have anymore places to put it all. And there's nowhere to truck it, as the nearby boroughs and towns are doing. I'm truly sick of the snow and Winter now.

Around The Garden Center.™

After 3 days of being snowed-in by 2010 Blizzard II, it was nice to get out of the condo. I caught-up on my sleep, washing etc, but the outside world was nice to see, again.

The GC&N Complex is another matter. I drove down on Friday with Arthur, and the roads are so drifted-over, Rt 24 is closed below Duke St. So is Plank Rd on the west side approach. So is Rt 216; impassible. So we'll try again tomorrow. I don't know how we'll ever get it plowed-out, without some heavy-duty machinery; my two John Deere 675B & 317 just won't hack it. I've slipped and fallen on the machine/ ice so many times, that I can't count that high. My backside is bruised-beyond-belief from numerous falls on the ice, but heating pads/ ice-paks/ aspirin/ Gabapentin helped. Best to wait for some heavier machinery to come thru and clean the roads & parking lot out, before we try to get in and do the lighter-lifting.

I'm still waiting to hear from several plowing services, as to whether they can get in and open the heavily-drifted roads and parking lot. If not, I'll just let it sit, and get to it when I can. There's no hurry to get the Complex opened-up, right now. I can do business over the phone, by email and in-person, for a while. I'd taken 200mg of Gabapentin, for back pain, on Saturday, and couldn't "safely drive" to the Complex, so I checked-in with Arthur, who'd planned on going back down to finish plowing, before the Mon-Tues snow arrived, and made it a worse mess. I'd try to get down on Sunday to help out.

On 2/12/2010, there was snow on the ground in all 50 of the United States. No, shit-for-brains Obama-Lama-Ding-Dong; we have 50 states, while your murderous muslim filth have the 57 states, you moron! New record.

I slept-in until 10am Sunday, fed & watered the cats, and put a heating pad on my sore back. I shaved, took a nice, hot shower and laid back down on the LR king-sized couch, in front of the roaring gas fire, with the two condo cats. Arthur was at the Complex for most of the day, plowing the roads and opening-up the Center. He didn't get to the front steps, as he was too cold and had to break-off and go home and warm-up.

Mom's vocal cord surgery is scheduled for Wednesday; otherwise she came through the l/s carotid surgery 100%. This is a quickie "come-and-go" procedure, according to Becky, and she should do just fine and get instant relief. Quite a lot to go through for an 86-year old woman. My Mom's a fighter.

I got into the Complex around 9:30am on Monday, and fell 3x trying to get up the un-shoveled front steps. Arthur had it all cleared-off and ice melt applied by 1pm, since he had other business to attend to for the morning. So did I; that's why I took the chance of getting into the Main Bldg, as it was. Life and business must go on regardless and I have a lot on my desk these Winter days. We both left around 2:15pm, in anticipation of the coming snow making the roads "difficult"; we'll deal with that mess in the morning.

JoAnn from J&M Systems, our IT tech company and good friends, called to re-set husband Mark's visit to this Friday. He'll be bringing Dad's refurbished, 5-year old HP laptop back, and setting-up my new desktop HP mini-tower screamer, with Win-7. I know Dad's anxious to get that unit back, so he has something to do in the evenings. At 85, I never thought I'd see him adapt so quickly to computers, email and the like. Jeff emailed and he'd be here to convert WIN-XP to Win-7 on Thursday, at 6pm. We're going ahead with it.

I approved the 2 ads, 4/c flyer, banner ad and postcard date changes on Monday, and emailed NeFra, our new graphics, mailing and production company, to go ahead and ship 'em out.

By 3:30pm Monday, light snow was already coming down, and was starting to "stick on the hard surfaces. We got maybe a 1" of snow, by 11pm. Looks like the snowstorm mercificily missed us with only a ¼" of snow; we can handle that on Tuesday, no sweat. Arthur continued plowing and shoveling the Complex out, while I attended to 19 messages in the answering machine. I'd had enough by 2:30pm, and we called it a day, to come back Wednesday and finish-up.

I watched the "The Departed" and "The "Aviator" on Tuesday evening. Great flicks!

Up early at 6am on Wednesday, and in for a haircut by 8am, at Walt's, in Red Lion; it'd been a couple of months and I was looking pretty "shaggy". Arthur was coming in to finish-up shoveling-out the GHs and Main Bldg's side doors, plus the rest of the main parking lot, so I wanted to get an early start. I still had some new data etc to copy to an external HD before Mark arrived Friday and replaced my old computer.

Dad took Mom to York Hospital for her vocal cord procedure at 7am, Wednesday, and it went well, as planned. She's home and resting comfortably, but tired from the anesthesia, so I'll give her a day to rest-up, and go visit her after work on Saturday. I called her on Thursday afternoon, and she sounded great! Back to her "old self", talking fine and swallowing liquids and solids easily.

My friend Jeff, is stopped by Thursday after work, to delete the dual-boot manager from the partitioned C: drive, image my existing Win-XP Pro installation, remove the partition on the C: drive, enlarging the volume to the whole drive, and then restored the XP image to the whole drive. Next was to install Windows 7 Pro to a separate drive. I have 2 internal 250Gb drives and an external 1-Tb HD, so space is not a problem. All data and apps have been moved to the external HD, for storage, until this is completed. Then, I have to re-install the few apps on Win-7 Pro, and I'm good to go. My office unit is another matter. That happens Friday when Mark, my corporate IT guy, comes by. It's going to be 3-5 days until I get that machine useable again, to where all necessary apps are functioning as I need them to be.

I left the office around 2pm, as I had a few more settings to retrieve from the Thunderbird Email (POP & SMTP) and Ipswich WS-FTP-Pro apps, as well. I did a final "go through" of all the apps in the Trial Copy/ Build 7100 of Windows 7 Ultimate, just to make sure that nothing important got erased. I made a list for Jeff of some items which I couldn't find; he'll take care of those and move them to the safety of the external HD, prior to installing Win-7 Pro.

Why did I buy 3 copies of Win-7 Pro instead of Win-7 Ultimate? After reading comparisons and viewing the many demos and screenshots, I decided that Ultimate just wasn't worth the extra $200/ copy. I'd pre-bought Win-7 Pro in July for $99/ each, and back then, Ultimate was still $200 more pricey. Just not worth it, IMO.

Fonts For You™.

Many Journal entries are best viewed in the Charrington Roughened and the Orlando typefaces. You may already have Century Gothic on your Windows-XP machine, and that's almost always used for the body copy or subheads, so grab it, if you don't already have it; you're reading it now. They're free from my website. Grab 'em! Save them to your HD, and install to C:/Windows/Fonts (folder), thru your WIN XP Control Panel > Fonts > File > Install New Font. Simple stuff; just takes a few minutes.

Here are a few others, which have been used in my Journal: Papyrus and Acoustic Bass, and Caesar Regular and Carleton and Charrington Strewn and Catherine. If you get and install them, you'll see how much nicer these pages are to view and read. Plus, they add to your repertoire of available fonts in MS-Word, as WIN-XP System Fonts, so you can use them for your daily documents.

Here's a new one, for your Windows/Fonts folder: Sketchy.

Some People Just Need Killing.™

It's not my intention to be the judge here — that's God's "job" — but rather to "hasten the meeting" so that He can send the following subhuman filth to the "Fires of Hell", "River or Lake of Sulphur", or whatever He deems appropriate. I'd gladly/happily volunteer, at no cost to any of my Hard-Working, Fellow US Taxpayers, to gladly/gleefully/happily headshoot these murderous, lowlife dirtbags of all stripes — their skin-color doesn't matter to me, at all — and rid American Society's innocents (especially our precious children and the frail, defenseless elderly) of them, once-and-for-all. And yes, I'd rather see one innocent man convicted and executed, than 10 murderers/robbers/child rapists-murderers freed, to rob, rape and murder again. Hey; call me an "Old Fashioned Conservative"! Too harsh? Nah. Just RIGHT!

Subhuman, piece-of-radical-shit-lowlife-bitch, Amy Bishop, needs killing in the worst way; read her "story" and decide for yourself how many innocent lives were sniffed-out, and the skank got no punishment, since the 1986 murder of her brother. KILL HER!

The End Of An Era.

All good things must come to an end, eventually. This short website review column is being discontinued, and will be replaced with "something else" at a later date. I hope you've enjoyed reading the reviews of various sites I've found on the Net, over the past 14 years.

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