Techie girl, garden pictures and a little garden friend

Our little tech girl using the trackball and listening on her headphones as she plays the Sims game. She is reading a few more of the commands correctly to me off the screen - she has known 'what they do' for a while, but now is reading the actual words for 'call' and 'taxi' and a few others. She is understanding more how not to make her people 'all red unhappy', how to get them around 'downtown' and why it isn't such a good idea to use all your money to buy balloons and teddy bears and paint your person into a corner so they can't get out. She puts the headphones in and guides herself into the game, pauses, saves and shuts down when she is done... it's pretty cool!

We have also been playing 'soccer' in the mornings the past few days - but it was interrupted by red shirts, blue shirts, referees and dragons and octopi this morning. She surprised me by turning our kicking practice into a 'run down the court and score a goal' practice.


Strawberry blonde sunflowers


tomatoes, black krim and lemon boy
they went into spaghetti!


Bees pollinating in our corn early this morning



I was pulling up grass and weeds in the garden and this little guy popped up! I ran inside to get the camera and took some pics of him before setting him off into our corn so he wouldn't be stepped on until I was finished weeding.

A four year old and Minecraft

In Minecraft -
We are just sitting here often in awe of how quickly and accurately she works out the mechanics of the game - just by observation and experimentation. She knows her way around in an uncanny manner - knows exactly where she is going and what she is going to do when she gets there. She has picked up the use and purpose of most of the tools, the inventory system and even some of the more complicated things like redstone, fishing, feeding animals and cooking (fish) in the furnace. She knows what makes the fishing rod, and a few other things - and will go and get those things out of chests and ask us to help her craft the item.

Daddy had to put all of his 'hard to find stuff' in a new set of chests in a locked room - to keep Esme out of it on the multiplayer server. She asked Daddy to open the door a few times, and he said no, it was locked. He locked the door with a set of six switches, only one of them worked to open the door, which was located around the corner in another hallway. He thought that would be enough. NO - within minutes she had her character over there examining the switches, because they were new. She was playing with them, randomly, checking what they did. Just one of them made the 'open door' sound - and she paid attention to that, and looked for a door after she heard the noise. She went away and came back a few times - watching to see if we were looking at her. It was less than three hours and she had the door open and was inside the room. He is now wondering just what he has to do to make something she can't get into.

Also - she has been watching him harvest a garden with a switch mechanism that pours water down to force the harvest (so you do not have to do it piece by piece) and collects the wheat at a trough at the bottom of the hill. It is quite elaborate - and clever, I think. She knows where the seeds are kept in a chest - and knows the steps of making a garden - water, hoe the ground, plant the seeds, wait until it turns brown etc.... Wheat makes sheep have babies - and she likes that. I saw her watch Daddy harvest the garden and then she ran 'across the world' (a good distance) to a sheep field. She took out the hoe and started making a garden and put seeds in it.

Also - she is happy that my character (whom she plays at my permission) has a 'helmet' now. She was scared of him going out in the rain before - he would get wet. Now he has a hat, and he does not need to be scared of the rain. I was mining clay in a river today and it started to rain. She came up to me and said 'wait, I click the i'. She hit the inventory button (i) and said 'OK, man - you have helmet, you be ok with rain, no hurt.' Too funny.

bits

This is Esme on her new laptop computer.
"No, I am NOT cute", she says

Well, it's not a NEW laptop.. it's an old laptop, but it is new to her. Daddy has put several games on it for her that are appropriate and blocked other things. And, because she can't spell well (she spelled cat as 'cvd' today) she can't get anywhere in the URL box yet, only click on icons in the toolbar and click on things from there.


In our super geeky computer office,
all of the rest of the keyboards and monitors in
the background belong to Daddy's ONE computer!

Mark canned up six pints of thick homegrown tomato sauce last night. He was up half the night. We plan to use it on a pizza soon. We had to go to town to get some plumbing things, the pie plate I wanted and a few other things. I replaced our kitchen faucet, which was difficult as the connections had corroded on hard enough to require some serious elbow grease to get them off. It all seems to be solid and not dripping etc.

I have some fabric washing and drying to make another pair of drawstring pants for myself, and trim out the green dress I was wearing again yesterday. The sleeves are still unfinished, and Esme kept trying to put tomatoes in the pockets which were non-existant. So, it needs pockets in the skirt!

Esme is looking very cute in her braids, playing Sushi Cat and eating multigrain Pringles chips she chose for a treat at the store. She was quite unhappy earlier as she wanted to help me with all of the faucet things and I tend to get a little 'go away until I'm done with this' when a hands-on project isn't coming easily. But, as soon as I got it finished it was all good. We have Jell-O in the fridge and another pumpkin to harvest from the garden, soon!

More: As I was up under the sink earlier tonight I was feeling more respect for the huge plumber types who squeeze into tiny spaces and reach far up over their heads at awkward angles. I had not realized just how wide my shoulders are until I tried to get in and out of the cabinet doors over and over again. I had also not thought about how difficult it is to lay on your back and reach up with a pair of heavy pliers again and again to try to loosen supply lines. I was using muscles I didn't know I had, and wishing they were more developed ones! Between that and shaking a tupperware container to mix the strawberry pudding (Esme thought it was yogurt!) up consistently, all sorts of tiny unexpected muscles were overused today. Esme has been introduced to MSPaint on the computer, and is creating quite impressive color block and line drawings. The third pumpkin, about a six pounder, was brought in and put in storage. The 'lasagna' type pie we made for dinner was not quite what we wanted it to be - but it wasn't a whole loss, either. I need to experiment with different kinds of pie crust recipes, as the boxed version I used tonight was brittle and oily. The drawstring pants have a slight pull to one side - needed to trim the reversed pieces to match each other perfectly after they were cut out of the main pattern - and I did not do that step. The resulting pants are wearable but just very slightly strange in both look and feel. They are a modern size twelve which means there is not as much room for error as there had been when I was making size sixteen and just using the drawstring to keep them tight.

It has been a long day!

Getting Ready for Mark's trip and backstory on the move

Mark has been getting things ready for his trip - and we're getting to where he will probably take off sometime this next week. He now has a mobile internet connection, as well as new tires on the vehicle, updated driver's license (his birthday is in the first week of December) and will be looking into getting his glasses updated before he travels as well.

The mobile internet connection was quite a big deal. That should let us do our Ebay auctions from anywhere in the country.

That leads into this:

For several months, (nearly a year by some measures) we have been telling Mark's father he does need to get a new tech to manage the network system for his company. Up until recently, we also ran our Ebay pictures and some email off that same system. That system has been breaking, systematically, over the past several years. Usually Mark creatively 'tapes' the sytem back together or buys parts out of his own pocket to fix it if he can't get money for parts from the company.

Our computer network is a complicated beast - it has lots of different parts that all run together to make the whole. A few months ago a major hardware part of the system broke, and right on the tail of that, another machine began to fail as well. They didn't affect immediate productivity (everyone still had email, internet, and most of their files), but they have affected things more and more as time goes on. We can't fix them, without a lot of scrambling and restructuring. We just don't have the time or energy to do it anymore.

Mark's father has looked some for that new techie, but hasn't found anyone yet who can and will take on the job. Two weeks ago Mark stopped monitoring the things that are breaking. He had been watching system messages since September 1997. He can translate the messages from the system (attempts to connect, files not found, errors, memory allocations) into potential risks and alerts... This is no small task - as it requires constant diligence. He said it is terribly depressing to know what was breaking when he couldn't fix it. He will also be gone for several weeks and not here to fix it even if he wanted to. He shut down the messaging terminal with all that in mind. So, we are no longer fixing things OR monitoring the broken pieces.

Mark's father called last night with another problem on the system and we really couldn't tell him anything. I felt bad, but he really needs a new tech to be able to call. Mark is going to be gone for several weeks - and I wouldn't know how to fix problems that deep in the system anyway -- I'm a software and internet geek, not a hardware geek. This system needs both. Most of this equipment is over 10 years old and running custom code and open source software. Some of it uses more electricity and puts out more heat than you could imagine. But, for the most part it works - and like a car held together with Bondo - it has done what it needs to do long enough to get us here.

*sigh* but basically, this is the time we ALL (us and them) have to learn how new systems work, and how to get the same jobs done with whatever is out 'on the market' nowadays.

We're doing that with our cellular modem and laptop. Mark's father will have to do that with whatever new tech he finds. Hopefully, this won't affect our family relations. If we continue to try to scrabble up fixes for the dying network with as little resource and time for other things -- that will surely break us down. And it won't help them in the long run either - as eventually we won't be here to call up and ask for repairs.

If we don't stop doing things around here sometime, when will it ever become someone else's job? That sounds harsh... but there isn't any nicer way to say it.

For years Mark lived what he describes as a 'monkish' existence. He thought he was building equity in a family business that had an honorable and attainable goal. He was helping provide technology services (internet publishing, email etc) to people in the property rights movement, to help them get their message out to the public. This was back in the very early 90s, when lots of people still didn't know about the Internet or how big it would become. Their family's website and magazine gave a voice and a forum to people who wouldn't have had it otherwise. He worked 24/7 on maintaining and monitoring the website and office network. It was a job that required constant upkeep and quick response time, and he gave it his all for ten years.

Up until a year or so ago, he didn't even take salary above his household bills, assuming he was paying into the mortgage on the property he lived on in lieu of other compensation. That made for some interesting and frustrating financial problems for him, then and now.

Now, he is disillusioned about the equity and partnership he was originally told he was participating in. He can't get a straight answer about things that were once said, and doesn't want to wait any longer for others to decide what they want to agree was the actual case. He is also upset that his father always wanted him to make his projects happen smoothly, but Mark's ideas and projects never got support. Or, even worse, the support was pulled from them after Mark had done a large amount of the work. It made him bitter and frustrated. This house we currently live in is one of those projects, although the building itself was successful. Mark built it on his own design, as the place he would live and work. He also put his own handwork into its construction. Now, he is told it isn't 'actually' his. He cannot get a deed to it because it 'belongs to the company', and was paid for partially by a grant given to the company.

It has come down to the point Mark just wants something he knows is his, that he can put his hard work, heart and soul into and know that someone else can't take it away arbitrarily. He has 'burned out' on this dream, and I want to help him in finding one we can both share. With Esme, we feel we have to take that action now, and start building a solid future.