Random Access Memories

My backup plan for where to move the yurt fell through last night.

What is truly hilarious is things would be possible left and right if I had a trailer instead of a yurt.

Silly me let the landowners here push me towards a yurt. “You don’t need to be totally self-sufficient, you can use the community bathroom/kitchen/shower”, too bad I listened, it’s making things almost impossible now.

So, Washington accepted me into the Basic Healthcare system.

The catch? I have a premium, seventeen dollars a month.

Kinda rough, but I guess i’ll manage.

Yesterday was probably the crappiest day since I came to Washington.

I found out that even tho I’ve been hunting for twenty years in AZ and have a dozen licenses to prove it I have to wait until February and pay 50$ to take a 20-hour Hunter Safety Course in WA. Simply because I was born after January 1st, 1972.

Later I was listening to the audiobook of “Speaker for the Dead” and realized it was HEAVILY abridged.

After that one of my good Sterilite tubs fell off a shelf and shattered.

Annoyed about all that I goofed and deleted about 10 gigs of files across my network. Compounding that I undeleted them the wrong way and made them all a total loss.

I’ve really wanted to get back into Airsoft, but that’s 500$ worth of gear I can’t afford right now.

I guess today i’ll try and get a fishing license at least and see if that works. I should have gotten one yesterday but I was so frustrated about the hunting mess that I forgot all about it.

At the Port Townsend Library there is a lovely sculpture.

It is a book, that is mummified and another larger book was used as a sarcophagus.

I messed around with the camera and managed to get a decent shot of what the yurt looks like at night.

Well, i’m running Akismet on this site now to catch the endless spam comments that seem to get posted by bots.

So I’m removing the requirement that people be registered and logged in before they post.? We’ll see how that goes.

Well, tonight Tom broke the news to me.

Tom and Nanci are going to sell their property and take the equity so they can buy a house someplace, or buy into an established community. Tom said they decided they don’t have the time or energy to make their own community come together.

I’ll withhold my personal commentary on the subject and wish them the best.

This leaves me with an issue however. Where to move myself and my stuff.

They want to be out of here before 2008, however even they agree that’s highly improbable.? Hopefully before they sell I can find another community that I can move to, otherwise i’ll pack stuff up well and head for Wisconsin.

Well, it looks like i caught whatever nastiness was making the others here sick. Sore throat, muscle aches, general crappy feeling.

Made for a rough day of getting my propane tanks refilled (for the heater) picking up library books and going to the grocery store. (I had little choice, I was nearly out of propane and the books I had on hold had to be picked up today)

Went ahead and ordered a dehumidifier as well, let’s hope that helps out some.

Sprinkles all day long here.

I woke up late and decided not to head to Seattle. (Partially due to the time, partly the rain)

Split a bunch of wood earlier, now i’m kicking back listening to “Clan of the Cave Bear” by Jean Auel.

Time to get the laundry done and do some cleaning.

Not much interesting to speak of today i’m afraid, tomorrow I have plans to head into Seattle and do some exploring. Hopefully i’ll get to REI and Todai for lunch if i’m lucky. I don’t really have much that needs doing around here, but I have a few things that I need to pickup.

Hrrm, seems the spacebar on this keyboard is acting up, I have to pound on it a bit now, guess i’ll have to fix that.

I have added pictures of the yurt floor construction to the Yurt album. Sorry but I didn’t take any while we were building the yurt itself, it was pouring rain and we wanted it up ASAP. I’ll get some the next time the yurt gets moved.

Back near the end of August the Abit KN8 motherboard in Sarah’s computer failed.

Just failed, kaput, dead, no life.

So we tried to rush to get a replacement before I went to Washington.

Abit sent us a nice lovely KN8 SLI board, an upgrade from the previous board, but it was DOA. I tested all the hardware in both our identical machines, but the SLI board refused to run. I returned it and told them to send me another one to the Washington address. They agreed to send a new board and shipped me another KN8 SLI board. However it too suffered the same exact trouble.

I notified Abit and requested a KN8 non-SLI replacement. They could not see how the SLI version could refuse to work since there was almost nothing different about them but agreed saying that would take awhile since they had none on hand. This was fine with me, and I commenced waiting.

Today the KN8 finally arrived. I threw it in and was greatly elated to see it working without a hitch.

So much for Abits thoughts on why the SLI failed to work. I still do not know the reason for the incompatibility, and frankly I don’t care.

I will say that Abit is absolute hell to reach on the phone, but once I did get a human on the line things were handled in an excellent manner.

I did some more uploading on my substandard connection (V360 phone on T-mobile internet).

The first new album is the trip from AZ to WA. Most of the pictures were taken by pointing the camera out the window while driving, not really much to see the whole way. (I took I5 most of the way up).

The second album is of the trip from Quilcene to Yurtco in Canada and back to pickup my yurt. It looks like i’m being followed by a shark the whole way back. The ferry ride in the morning was glorious, the ferry being only half full. The later trip was horrible. I had not know that only days before it had changed to one ferry every 90 minutes, and I barely managed to get onboard. Both border crossings were similarly horrible, wait times were 2 hours, both ways. This was on a friday, and not during rush hour. I shudder to think what Saturday would have been like.

Well, I slipped with a gouge today and stuck it into my hand between my thumb and forefinger. Left me with a laceration about 3/8″ deep (or more).

So my left hand is exceptionally painful. Thankfully tho I seem to have missed any tendons in my hand since I can still move my thumb around.

But, it puts an end to any carving work until it heals. *frown*

I finally managed to get a few pictures uploaded.

So I woke up around 9am to sunshine. Shocking since all the weather reports said it would rain straight through till this weekend.

I headed down to start a loaf of bread in the bread machine and then realized it was the perfect time to handle the yurt top.

Turns out I had to totally remove the lacing between the top and the walls to lift the top enough to remove the “safety straps” that were screwed to the top of the rafters. Then I got to wrench the tension cable out of the end of each rafter, rotate it, and replace the cable. Since I can’t release the tension in the cable I had to manhandle them all one by one, all 21 of them.

Finally with that done I repositioned the top and laced it back to the walls.

I did not bother replacing the safety straps when I was done, I don’t think they’re much help in a yurt this small.

As I was finishing up with the dome I spotted the first few drops of rain on the lexan. Perfect timing.

I found out it had taken me a total of three hours, and as I type my hands are stinging something fierce.

At least it’s done tho.