so much to say
Today was a flurry of activity.
One of our beloved neighbors has decided that its a good idea to set their alarm clock for 4:30AM, and let the damn thing beep for 2.5 hours. They did it on Thursday morning, and again this morning. WTF kind of idiot does something like that????
I've managed to mess up my right shoulder & neck somehow. I was drying off after a shower this morning, and while bending over all of a sudden this sharp pain shot through my shoulder. It has gradually worsened over the course of the day to the extent that its excrutiatingly painful. Taking two aspirin helps a little, but unfortunately, the pain & muscle stiffness is so bad that its literally zap the energy out of me. I'm so exhausted, and I ordinarily shouldn't/wouldn't be.
We drove up to Emeryville this morning. We stopped at Ranch 99 to get some well priced produce, and then went to IKEA to look for a bed for David. Unfortunately, we didn't find one. So we went to a bed store on the way home afterwards, and purchased david a twin size bed, which actually got delivered this afternoon. David is sleeping on it tonight.
I went ahead and upgraded the border router/firewall today. Shamefully, I hadn't really performed any maintanence on it since it was first setup when we got DSL back in July 2002. I had been using an ancient (although it was current when I first set it up) release of FreeSCO. To its credit, it has worked flawlessly. Not a single problem in over 3 years of operation. So today, I upgraded (or more accurately, installed the newest version) to version 0.34. The process went surprisingly smoothly. I was somewhat clever, and actually configured the floppy on a separate box, so that there wasn't any significant downtime, beyond booting into the new version (about 4 minutes worth). This new version is pretty spiffy. They now have built in ssh support, instead of crusty old, insecure telnet. So I've got a nice little Celeron 400 system with 64MB RAM running FreeSCO with a 2.0.39 kernel. Ah, the beauty of Linux.
Yesterday, we decided to halt our house search for at least a few months. We were actually on the cusp of submitting an offer to a house that cropped up very suddenly on Thursday afternoon, but thankfully sanity kicked in, and Denise & agreed that we were too great of a financial risk (we'd be essentially broke for months if not years). Our hope is that the housing market softens up over the next 6-12 months to the extent that we'll be able to:
0) afford more (since we'll have more saved up)
1) have less head to head competition on a per-property basis
2) house list prices will level off or even possibly drop a little