An Exercise In Futility

This is Nanaimo in November. There is not supposed to be snow. Yet, we are due for flurries tonight, plus, by sunday we might see the temp drop to a high of -3 C. WTF! The bathroom has fallen behind schedule: the rhino board ended up being a whole extra step (it had to be adhered using thinset, which i had not known before). Tile cutting took 5 hours or so (all of sunday basically), so the tile is not even ready for grouting yet. Grr. I have determined that tiling a small room can possibly take longer than a big room, since the ration of cut to non-cut tiles is higher; since it is more likely that someone will be looking at cut tile, the cuts have to be more precise. This is my excuse anyway. My goal is to have nitpickers walk into the bathroom and say “hey, nice tile job!”, or even not notice at all.

We owned a DVD burner for about 3 days — but in the end had to return it due to its crappiness. It was an HP DVD640 external, with “lightscribe”. The first disc we burned worked fine, but every disk after that was basically unusable. 50% of the time the drive would report ‘no media’. the rest of the time it might or might not erase, and then most of the time it would not write at all, or would fail part way through. I managed to get one disk to write eventually (many many tries), and it would play in my computer’s DVD drive (which took several tries), but would cause our living-room DVD player to “hang”. We figured it could not possibly be the drive — it must be the media (we were using TDK DVD-RW), so we got some Memorex -RW and they exhibited the exact same problems.

a command i never knew about — will show you windows uptime, and other possible useful information.

…but i certainly look forward to it! Tonight i re-climbed the 5.11 that i did last week. It requires an odd sequence of moves and i was stumped for a while as i had been in the past. But it’s all about having things *just* in the right position: a slight turn of a hand on a specific hold can produce an extra couple of inches of reach which can make all the difference. After a rest (belaying for R.) i then was able to on-site a 5.11-. Very happy about that. It was tough, and i had to battle off some sewing machine leg, but patience and a good rest spot about 2.3 of the way up made it a success. I was also made very aware, from chatting with other people at the gym, that my height puts me at a definite advantage, and i quite often feel like i am cheating with my enormous reach… so i’m thinking that i’d like to see a 5.11+ under my belt before i consider myself to be truly at the 5.11 level.