Aerie Report, December 15, 2009

I spent the better part of this morning running virus software on my laptop trying to discover why it kept locking up on me. Locking up to the point where even pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del would not bring up the Windows Task Manager window so I could shut down my AOL browser and/or my Firefox browser. Finally had to go out the hard way and shut the computer off and restart in Safe Mode to run the scans. Nothing but tracking cookies showed up. Ditched them and rebooted in normal and the damn thing has been running fine ever since. Go figure.

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While the virus scanners did their thing, I went to the workshop and put the final touches on the wooden quilt square. There are still some gaps I'm not happy with but this one went together pretty well compared to the one that provided four four-inch square coasters instead of a 20-inch square quilt. It all comes down to making precision cuts on a contractor's table saw. Ones that are within 1/32 of an inch of the desired width. And that, my friends, is damn near impossible with the rip fence I've got now. Maybe with the table saw I've got now. I can afford a new fence, but the saw is another story.

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Another cloudy, dreary day at the Aerie. The high temperature of 42 degrees happened just after midnight while the winds were still out of the south. They switched to the west-northwest around daybreak and the temperature began slowly sinking soon afterward. We above 2000 feet are the only ones that still have snow on the ground from last week's storm. The valley yards and fields are all bare again.

Looking at the long range forecast on AccuHunch wasn't to encouraging either. yesterday the fifteen day forecast had many days with a mostly sunny/partly cloudy icon, today they were replaced with mostly cloudy with snow showers or just plain snow.

There's a saying about if you wish to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans. Terry plans to go into New Jersey on this weekend to stay at her Mom's for a while. Mom is going to California for Christmas and Terry figured to stay with our daughter, Jessica, for the duration. She also has plans to party with her old stitching mates and even go into the city for a party with her old office mates. I would travel to NJ on Christmas Eve day for a party at my sister's house and return to PA on Christmas Day. Well, those mostly sunny/partly cloudy days that disappeared? Those were from the 19th to the 26th of December. Well, there's a good probability the folks at AccuHunch will revise their forecast--again. Last year I didn't make it to NJ because of an ice storm through the mountains of PA I'd hate to miss out again.

Oh, crap! There are little pellets of frozen stuff hitting our northwest facing windows and piling up on he deck.

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Actually, I shouldn't be so down about the weather. I see they're forecast to get 5-6 inches of snow in Copenhagen in the next few days and then it will get even colder. The Good Lord does like to show who is boss sometimes. And He's got one heck of a sense of humor, too.

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I've been troubled lately with some spam comments. Two types in particular have been showing up. One is in all Chinese characters with the exception of a word or two (notably "sex") and the other is about some investment opportunity. These have been showing up in posts four years old as well as some recent posts. I've gone back and deleted them (permanently) each time they show up. I don't want to do it, but if they become more troublesome, I may have to turn on word verification to prevent these bots from taking too much time.

Have any of you experienced a similar problem? Is there anyway to block them without using word verification?