Lots happening since last I wrote. We have done several trips; quick overnighters to Charlestown and Spring Mill State Parks, and a longer one to Lawrence Kansas. The State Park trips were for Lise’s work. Not too much to report on them except that I got to do some dragonfly photography.
Blue-fronted dancer.
Black-shouldered spinylegs.
Illinois river cruiser.
The trip to Kansas was to spend some time with Molly. As part of her research she has to measure lizard specimens. The KU Natural History Museum has a large collection of the lizard family she is studying so she had to spend a week there. We jumped on the opportunity for a road trip.
We really liked Lawrence. We visited the chapel on campus where Lise’s parents were married. There were plenty of coffee shops, restaurants and brewpubs. We had a great time visiting with Lise’s cousin Katie.
Kansas is inland. Very inland. One T-shirt store had a shirt that proudly proclaimed “No Coast USA”. Not the East or West Coasts, not the Gulf Coast, not the Third Coast (Great Lakes), but No Coast. Right by the T-Shirt shop was a restaurant advertising oysters. Unless they were of the Rocky Mountain oyster type I would be highly suspicious of their freshness. Oysters need to be right out of the salt water. This boy doesn’t eat any oysters more than a couple hours from the coast or ones labeled Rocky Mountain oysters.
I was totally surprised by the Kansa landscape. I went there expecting miles and miles of open flat wheat fields full of tRump banners. To my surprise there was more topographic relief than in the corn belt of Indiana and Illinois. And it was surprisingly void of tRump posters. We did an excursion to Konza Prairie in the Flint Hills and it was way hillier than here in West Lafayette.
The Flint Hills.
Blue dasher.
Twelve-spotted skimmer.
Smoky shadowdragon (I think).
Collared lizard.
From travels I now move on to a rant about things that don’t work like they should. I’ve been having some technology issues lately. This is tough for me because I like technology. When it works, it’s great. When it doesn’t, it’s a new layer of Hell. Even Dante didn’t think of this one. Every additional feature to supposedly make my life easier is another potential failure point. I really don’t need a washing machine that automatically detects the clothing level and adjusts the water appropriately. I am capable enough to flip a switch between High, Medium, and Low water levels. The list of supposedly timesaving objects in my life that need fixing in some manner seems to be growing, not getting smaller. I’m beginning to wonder if we own our appliances or if they own us.
For instance; Lise does some part time work for Indiana State parks. It’s a good gig and she works from home. Unfortunately this also means that she has to connect our home computers to the State of Indiana computer system. This connection process has led to Microsoft Office 365 being pushed onto both our desktop and laptop computers. Without any input from us, it just kind of showed up. To make things interesting, that install overwrote our old, but perfectly usable, versions of Microsoft Office 2010. No big deal as long as she works for State Parks. Unfortunately, her position requires an occasional hiatus from State Park employment, WHich means she is removed from all State of Michigan accounts. Including their Microsoft enterprise account. Now there is no account on our computers for Office 365. We appear to have a choice of paying for a version of Microsoft Office we do not need. or maybe forking over our first born male child. Otherwise Microsoft Office will be disabled on our computers in a couple days. Since we don’t have a male child to offer up I will have to rummage through boxes yet unpacked from our move, hoping I can find our old Microsoft Office 2010 discs.
While I’m on a computer rant, the DVD drive in Lise’s computer died. An irritant, yes, but not too difficult to physically replace. If you can find one. At one time electronics or office supply stores had stacks of these things. Apparently DVDs are now becoming obsolete. After all, they have been easily available and heavily used for about ten years so it’s time to move on to something new. I could only find one DVD drive available in the greater Lafayette area. It took longer to locate the drive than to replace it.
During our drive back from Kansas my cell phone took it upon itself to completely lock up. Even the power off button didn’t work. I had to hold down multiple buttons simultaneously for some period of time to initiate a complete factory reset. The phone responded and reset, but it was like a blank new phone. No photos, no apps, nothing. A blank slate. Over a period of hours some apps downloaded themselves and things like my contacts magically came back. Unfortunately I did lose a bunch of photos. We were close to St Louis when the phone started reloading. Now my phone seems to think St. Louis is home. I keep getting St. Louis local news posts. Didn’t ask for them, they just appear and I seem to have no option to stop them.
So now I transition from something small like my phone, to something considerably larger and a bit more expensive. The high end dishwasher that came with our house has gone on the fritz. This beast is about the size of a small sedam and has more controls and options than the space shuttle.
The dishwasher has what the internet calls the “dreaded E-15 error code”. It thinks it’s drowning and is in constant flood mode. It is trying to pump itself dry. Even the OFF button doesn’t work. You have to flip the circuit breaker to shut it down. The genius that installed the dishwasher put it in place first, then put a counter above it and a tile floor in front of it. This leaves a paper thin space to lift and drag the beast out into the open. I played around with it some but couldn’t fix the problem. Called the repair folks and a tech managed to get it muscled most of the way out of its hole to work on it. We thought he had the problem fixed but it came back in a couple days. So now our dishwasher is sitting on a pedestal in the shop while they try to find out why it thinks it’s drowning.
On the opposite end of the water failure spectrum, our Keurig coffee maker no longer detects when it is out of water. The function is gone, which means you can try to make coffee when it is bone dry. If you forget to fill it with water it sits there croaking and wheezing like it’s dying of thirst.
Now on a decidedly non-technology subject. The rotting flesh smell is finally gone from under the workshop. In an interesting twist, a groundhog is now apparently living under the shed. This is either an animal reincarnation thing, or the tight real estate market has extended to the animal kingdom. Like most home buyers around here the new resident didn’t wait for the body of the last resident to get cold before moving in.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 