Spring Cleanup

Well, there were dumpsters galore in the neighborhood; I just had to drive around a bit until I could pull the van in behind a fresh one. (The first one I tried was full, and the crew waved me off.) The teenagers were still asleep and hadn't sounded very happy about their mom "volunteering" them for trash duty (and chaoswolf had her door locked in any case), so I did it myself. Not really hard, about 20 minutes at each end. You can't get all that much into a minivan without taking the seats out, but I managed to get almost all of the chipboard, dead plastic baskets, and assorted other items. Ended by throwing the dead weedwhacker like a javelin onto the pile, earning an appreciative grunt from the guy on stacking duty.

I don't think I'll do a second run; most of what's left is jungle vine, and I don't have a way to transport it even if it were chopped up into clippings, which it mostly isn't yet. We were planning a dump run anyway.

Still to go this weekend are:

• figure out my Baycon setlist (since it looks like I'll have one)
• figure out what needs to be re-recorded for my demo album
• work out the Makefile scripting for making music + CD-ROM (CD-Extra) disks.
• continue restructuring my "collected works" pages
• see how much bandwidth the Debian mirror eats up
• do some more system administration
• Mother's Day brunch with the flower_cat
• call my Mom.

Saturday update -- not your cute little tiggy

Did a little shopping earlier this afternoon, and bought a B&D Hedge Hog for dealing with the jungle vines in the back 40 (that's 40 feet, of course). This isn't a cute little tiggy-wiggie we're talking about here; it's a 22" electric hedge trimmer, pulling about a third of a horsepower. Watch your fingers.

Yes, as a matter of fact having a local Debian mirror does make upgrades faster. By a lot. Took over four-and-a-half hours to rsync, but since I pulled the copy at work on Wednesday or Thursday, that's not doing too badly. The cron job is set for 4am, so it shouldn't be a problem in any case unless there's a major update, and now that Sarge is frozen that's a lot less likely than it was a week ago.

Did a little guitar/vocal practicing; having ciarhwyfar over made for a good excuse.