The Missing Entry

Ho Lee Crap! I didn't realize how long it had been since I last blogged at y'all. Sorry about that players and playeresses. The truth of it is that I meant to, but things got in the way. Take work for example: I've been mad busy but a good kind of busy (at least some of it). Plus outside of work has been pretty blah, not much to blog about.

So at work I've been troubleshooting what I think has been found to be a couple of broken wires and miswired signals. Please Jebus, let that be the problem. I spent most of yesterday with an ohm meter (a device used to meter ohms) set to beep when there's a short (i.e. you're touching both ends of a wire and it goes where it's supposed to go). The lab sounded a lot like this:

S11-13 to s6_P4-A1, okay.
Esss eleven pin thirteen tooooooo essss six peeee foooouurrr, aaaayyy one
Beeep.
Good.

And so on and so forth for hundreds of wires. The slow talking was me trying to find the pins on the connectors and get the ohm meter probe onto them. If anyone else was in there, I'm sure it was annoying. After hours of doing that it turned out that the only miswired signals I found, I found right away. Oh well, at least now I have some confidence in the wiring.

BOOOORRRRRIIIINGGGG!

Last night I went a-kayaking out on Stockbridge Bowl to get a little more boat time before The Josh. I also wanted to scope out the good parking area; I think I know where I should go, but they had it blocked off so I couldn't get right to it. No biggie. After a few trips around the bowl, I sat floating in the water as the sun set, all the way until the stars came out. I got to watch the bats zip around catching bugs (often very close to mine person). I also learned this neat trick where you sit in the kayak and lean your head waaaaayyyyy back so you can see the water again. It has a neat feel to it, wicked neat.

Sunday morning I went for a run in the woods with The Crazy Running Group. Our fearless leader bailed on us, giving us bad directions and then running back to his house. I could give you the whole story but I already typed it up for my other blog (to which I won't point you) and it's mad, mad long. The short of it is that we got lost; mad, mad lost. Instead of your typical run through the woods on marked trails and solid ground, we ran through corn fields, over barbed wire fences (not a good idea) one lady fell in a disgusting stream (so nasty) and we all got our legs ripped up by the pricker bushes.

Man, let me tell you guys about the woman falling in the stream. We had just gone around the barbed wire fence she attempted to climb, and through the corn field we were promised we would miss, when we came upon a drainage ditch/stream. At its narrowest it was probably 10 feet across, with mushy edges. There would be no jumping over that one.

We spotted a log across the stream to an "island" that looked somewhat promising. It wasn't immediately clear what was on the other side of the island but one woman felt she could get across the log to find out. There were sticks in the ground that you could use for support, but they only made it halfway across, the rest was up to you. She made it halfway across then fell in. The shin-deep water was somewhat of an illusion, since the ground was actually hollow from deserted (zombie) beaver tunnels. She sunk to mid-chest in murky, swampy, scummy water before I could pull her out. It would have been sooner but I was laughing my ass off and couldn't risk falling in myself. Good times.

What made it even better was that when we decided to head back to find another way around, we immediately found that on the downstream side of the dam the water was reduced to a measly trickle; you could just step right over it. Ha ha.

One more thing about that run, besides the fact that we were "lost" for 2.5 hours, was that despite what Hollywood wants you to believe, you really can't run through a cornfield. The only safe way to do it is to put your arms in front of your body to protect your face and just go for it. You catch a lot of corn to the legs and arms, and it's easy to trip over the stalks. You certainly can't run with arms a-flailing like they do in horror movies, even in a panic.

Okay, well that's all I have for you guys today. I'll try to be better about filling you in on the adventures of my daily life.

Over and out,
Old Coot