Seen today in the Athlete's Guide for the Lake Placid Ironman Event (2.4 mile swim && 112 mile bike && 26.2 mile run in ONE day):

RUN COURSE & RULES
* COURSE LENGTH - 26.2 MILES/42 KM
* CUT OFF TIME - 12:00am (Midnight)

1. NO FORM OF LOCOMOTION OTHER THAN RUNNING, WALKING OR CRAWLING IS ALLOWED.

Crawling. Did you see that???? Crawling. My God.

Hurray! I performed in my teacher's piano recital last evening. I performed:

"Prelude in E Minor" by Chopin (slow and emotive)
"Phantasietanz" by Schumann (fast and exciting)

I was much calmer than my last performance 2 years ago. I was actually able to relax enough to enjoy hearing the other students perform. They are phenomenal. When I sat down at the piano, I became nervous suddenly. My hands started shaking a little. I had not practiced in heels, so was not used to playing in heels and my calf shook a bit. But it all worked out well. It was fun and I learned a lot.

This past Saturday, I did a 22 mile skate with the Belmar & NYC Rollarblade clubs. I work-out every day and thought I was in pretty good shape, but this skate convinced me otherwise. The NYC rollarbladers are hot skaters. They can skate dance and do ice skating moves. It was so fun.

Here are the pictures. I am in a couple:

Jersey Shore Skate
Mocha Superman's pictures

Mocha, who owns the "www.mocahspuerman.com" domain name which contains some of the pictures, is from the NYC skate group. He was a little disturbed when his real name was revealed by one of his friends. (Peter)

I have been eating good for the past couple weeks. I have been harvesting my snow peas for the past couple weeks. They are sweet, crispy and delicious. This morning I tried my green garden All-America Winner, "Mr. Big Peas".

oh. my. god.
oh. my. god.

Wow. Wow. Wow. What a winner. And I thought the snow peas were delicious. The snow peas are good. But the "Mr. Big"s... I am in heaven. A totally different taste than peas from the gorcers freezer. Oh. My. God. Oh. My. God. Sweet. Sweet. Sweet. I wish blogs had replicators (not just image links and audio files) so you could not only see what I am talking about, but taste it too.

The following is a picture of my "Sweet Garden Peas". They will probably be ready to harvest in a week or two. In this picture, you can see:

1. The flower that the pea will grow from (if it is pollinated)
2. A small pea just starting to grow from the flower.
3. A little more mature pea on its way to becoming Dinner!



You can see the peas growing in the pod in this picture:

As seen on today's cuteoverload:

The Hills are Alive with the Sounds of YIPPING. Yip, Yip, Yippee!!! I just love this doggy's pure happy !!Joy!!

This is 10% luck
20% Skill
15% concentrated power of will
5% pleasure
50% pain
And 100% reason to remember the name

Fort Minor, Remember the Name from The Rising Tied Album

Oh yes!!!

So is anyone else totally rapping out to Fort Minor's new Album, Rising Tied?!? How about twanging out to Tim McGraw's Album, Live Like You were dying?? I cry every time I hear it.

The song that made me buy Fort Minor's Album is Where'd You Go. It has two themes: One done in Rap, One done in a fluid, melodic, echoey, lyrical, hauntingly beautiful sonds of singer/songwriter, Holly Brook. The Rap portion helps you to understand how the female character being quoted feels: Angry, Frustrated, Alone, He is always on the Road, leaving the family for God knows how long. Angry, so Pissed.

Then Holly Brook's portion enters and helps you to understand the female character loves him, misses him, wishes he were with her. It is tender and sweet.

I love the way this song shows all these complicated emotions all at once.

Tim McGraw's song Live Like you were dying is Wow. Wow. Wow. A man in his early 40s was unexpectedly diagnosed with terminal illness and quick death. Tim McGraw asked, "What'd you do??"

He said

I went sky diving I went rocky
mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a
bull named Fumanchu
And I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter
And I gave forgiveness I’d been denying
And he said one day I hope you get a
chance
To live like you were dying

I love both these albums.

Being a volunteer on my town's first aid squad, I am supposed to try to sell Raffles to raise money for the squad. I hate selling stuff, but it is for a good cause and I have to try.

Each one costs $20.00 and is fully tax deductible.

Please email me at my regular email if you want one.

I had my first garden harvest today: Spinach!! It was less than 5 minutes from the spinach plant to my lips and down the pipes. Yum, yum, yuuuuummmm.

Family, take note!: Today I planted a ~20 foot row of grandma's field peas (aka cow peas).
Also directly sowed in the ground were my delicious Kentucky Blue Green Bean Seeds and the Florida Speckled Butter Beans.

I saw a spider that had a big egg sack attached to its butt. It was cool. Unfortunately, I did not bring my camera out today because my hands were filled with seeds and a shovel. Oh well. The soil is rich and black and filled with earth worms. My present to myself last year of 5 cubic yards (and paying guys to move it into the garden) of top soil is really paying off. I buried pounds and pounds of organic matter during last years season. That is paying off nicely too. Other insects I saw today include many sweet-loving ant colonies that are getting ready to drink the nectar (helping pollination) from my super-sweet peas.

New SGI CEO, Dennis McKenna, was interviewed for an article in "Computer Article":

Q&A: SGI CEO Dennis McKenna discussed the company's decision to file for Chapter 11


And "The HPC Wire" has an article:

CEO Dennis McKenna Plans for SGI's Comeback


Also, I have another 2 engineering article ideas too that I am hoping to have a chance to write and publish. They are engineering articles about cool stuff we do in SGI Engineering that nobody else does. I know, I know, I drank the Kool-Aid. SGI really does cool stuff. The engineering group is tight and smart. So we will see how it all turns out for them and for me...

SGI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this morning.

Beleive it or not, management is claiming I still have a job. Management is claiming that this a legal process which will be transparent to the employees. Blah, blah, blah...

My Green Garden Peas are out of the ground!



And the Apple Blossoms are out too:

I planted over 50 feet of peas March 31. I have not planted the early spring crops in years. I hope it all works out and I did not plant too early. Note to family: by "peas" I mean "Green Garden Spring Peas", not "Field Peas".

My Tomatoes(Cherry, Heirloom & Beefsteak) and Peppers(Sweet and Mildly Hot) are growing nicely indoors. I will transplant them May 15. Note to Family: The Field pea seeds will go in the ground May 15 as well.

Yum, yum. I can not wait to eat.

PLEASE SEND RECIPES WITH HEAVY USAGE IN PEAS.

I am already planning to cook "Mutter Paneer" and "Aloo Paneer" as well as sauteed peas, boiled peas, peas in butter sauce.

Dad recently spent a couple days at the Mayo Clinic. He said it is an amazing place that goes on for blocks and blocks with underground passageways between the building so you do not ever need to go outside.

He arrived early. A Minnesota Chorus performed for an hour while he was there. He got to see the performance and said it was wonderful. He said that there are grand pianos EVERY WHERE in the Mayo Clinic. The pianos have signs on them that say anyone (clinic staff, patients, loved ones) is invited to play and to please not accept any money for performing. The signs further say if someone insists on giving the performer money to please donate it.

Guess what! I did NOT mess up anything or delete something I should not have deleted. I called Dell support. They gave me all kinds of non-obvious tasks to do (hold down this key while tapping that key while booting up).

My computer is new. The software I am attempting to load is old. So the software is having bad installs all by itself. I can not believe the installs and un-installs do not fail in a more graceful way. I do not think the software is that old too. Weird.

Thank you folks for your advice.

Apparently, I messed something up or deleted something I should not have deleted because I can not install or uninstall any software on my Dell PC. Does anybody know where I can get help on the following message?

C:\DOCUME~1\Debra\LOCALS~1\Temp. A temporary file needed for initialization could not be created or written to. Make sure that the directory exists... blah, blah...

Where is that directory? I do not see any sort of "Local*" directory. All I see is:
C:\Documents and Settings\Debra\
Cookies,Desktop,Start Menu,UserData,My Documents

I am using: OS is MicroSoft Windows XP Professional 5.1.26

I probably deleted something, but for the life of me I do not know what it is. I tried System Restore. I tried defragging and disk clean-up, but no luck. Does anyone know where can I go for help?

First let me say, "Happy Saint Patrick's Day"! I have already eaten a green clover-shaped cookie to start off my day.

Work news: My friends have been warning me about the company's viability. And I must say, they are right. But for some reason, I got particularly concerned this Monday and called our Tech Lead and asked him if he has any plans to leave. If he leaves, I _must_ leave because I will not have any work. He assured me that he had absolutely no plans to leave and neither did another key engineer on the project.

Then Wednesday, two other people quit.

Thursday there have been a flurry of emails to "all" from key engineers and one manager saying things like:
"I am definitely staying"
"I intend to stay fully invested in my piece of the valuable work we are doing."
"I personally feel we are better off NOW then we were six months ago."
"I'm personally committed to seeing it through."
"With the folks that have decided to move on I do not wish them ill but with one's departure creates an opportunity." (That quote is from the manager.)

Last Friday out new CEO laid off 250 or so employees: mostly IT people and some top brass. No one I know was laid off. Believe it or not, we are hiring in the groups I work in.

I know, I know, I should look for a job. But these people are nice to me and the work is fun and publishable.

Poor Brittany has been sometimes slipping and falling down my un-carpeted stairs. The little pads kept coming un-stapled. Also, her back legs would often land on the uncovered wood and slip out from under her body. She would look down the stairs and cry while she put one paw on the first step, then lifted it back, then put it down, then lifted it back. So sad.



So I got the stairs re-carpeted today! Brittany is much happier. The stairs are carpeted from end-to-end. The padding below the carpet is plush and thick and helps with my dog's grip. I think the workers did a well-crafted job around the rounded parts on the bottom step. The carpet has a substantial texture which also helps with grip.

BIGGEST SNOW STORM IN NORTHEAST THIS SEASON:
The North East had just had the biggest snow fall (~2 feet) of the season on Sunday while I was out of town. By monday night the fallen snow had changed from "heavy, but movable" to "big icy sheets".

FRETTING, WORRYING, PLANNING:
As we arrived to my home from the airport at 1am Tuesday morning. I was thinking about my driveway and car. The driveway is about 50 feet long. It would be a pain to crunch over the top by foot with the luggage and myself into the house. But that would be the least of my problems. How would I get my car out? I was planning to work from home on Tuesday, so I figured that I would need to use good portion of the day to clear the driveway. That was tough because I really needed to work as well. But I could shovel in the "warmth" and daylight and make up the work in the evening. "How could I loosen the icy sheets to make the shovel-able?"; I planned to walk to the hardware store and pick up some salt on Tuesday. That seemed like a good idea until I saw that the sidewalks from my house to the store were not shoveled. I could not walk on the main road (cars fly by at over 55mph) to get the hardware store because it would be too dangerous.

ARRIVING HOME:
We turned onto my road and came closer to the house. I could not believe my eyes. My driveway was clear. Big piles of snow lined the edges of the driveway. The walkway from the driveway to my door was clear. The car was even cleared of snow. As I got out, I said, "Oh my god. Somebody helped me. I am going to cry." and then promptly did. Whoever helped me had a huge job. There was lots of snow. The driveway is long. The snow drifts on the walkway and is even deeper than the snow closer to the road. Sometimes I feel quite alone as I am dealt painful, hard challenges to handle. I regroup, figure a plan of action and proceed despite the difficulties. Shoveling out a couple days after a major snow storm when things have iced up is not that hard when compared to real life challenges, but it was so generous and thoughtful and helpful that someone would do this for me. I feel loved.