Thanksgiving Day 2007

We enjoyed a pleasant Thanksgiving Day with local family members on Thursday. Larry and Katie and their daughter Kaylee joined Kim, Jayson, Zach, and myself for a noon time meal. We were grateful to have Judd also join us; however, he came solo, as Michelle was busy helping her mother prepare their own meal scheduled for later in the day. Clayton and his family are living in Hershey, Pennsylvania while he attends medical school at Penn State. Fortunately, they didn't have to spend the holiday alone and were able to join members of Katie May's family for a couple of days in New Jersey, with a first time side trip visit for Clayton to New York City. With some help from other family members, Kim again prepared a sumptuous feast. Following a reading of the 100th Psalm (the Thanksgiving Psalm) and a prayer of thanksgiving, we enjoyed delicious turkey with stuffing, garlic mashed potatoes, glazed baby carrots, a sweet potato and cranberry dish, a large tossed salad, deviled eggs, sectional rolls, scrumptious orange sweet rolls donated by a thoughtful friend, sparkling cranberry punch, and homemade pumpkin pie with homemade whipped cream for dessert. We're still enjoying the tasty leftovers. I will be thinking about this good food when a week from now I am limited to consuming an IV saline drip and Jello.

Now that I've got your mouths watering, allow me to abruptly change the subject to sewage. :) Each Thanksgiving, it has become a tradition in our family to try harder than the previous year to avoid clogging the drain pipes in whatever place we find ourselves living. Sometimes we are successful; often we are not. Since it has only been a few weeks since I had to rent a drain rooter to clean out a clog under our house, I had hoped that the pipes would be wide open and not give us any problem this year. We have learned the hard way from multiple experiences that garbage disposals are designed to handle a small amount of residual food that cannot easily be scraped from used dishes into the garbage can and that they are definitely not to be used for large amounts of uneaten food left on plates or for disposal of large amounts of unwanted food from pots and pans, especially foods like rice that does such a good job of packing itself tightly into plumbing curves in inconvenient places or stringy foods like celery that do such a fine job of strangling garbage disposals or anything hard like small bones or uncooked rice that loves to jam the garbage disposal. (I'll spare you my oft ignored diatribe on my pet peeve of the simple preventative steps that keep silverware and other small washables out of the garbage disposal) I have had to rent and transport heavy electrically powered sewer rooters so many times that I've been tempted to buy one of my own until I saw the sticker price for even a consumer-grade model at the hardware store. After the kitchen was all cleaned up and the final load of dishes was in the dishwasher (which we didn't have last year and for which Kim has been very thankful all year) and a load of laundry was in the washing machine and family members were settling down to an evening of watching TV watching and eating leftovers, I was thinking to myself that we had successfully avoided the dreaded drain demon this year and the holiday rate$ of the roto-rooter services. Then I heard the phrase that sends a shiver down the spine of every man of the house. "Eewww, there's gross water coming out of the shower drain." Doh! Sure enough, water was also rising from the bathtub drain. Despite our best efforts to practice good drain etiquette all day, that sneaky sewer servant had struck again. Fortunately, an enforced ban on further contributions to the sewer system allowed the once rising flood waters to slowly abate without anything overflowing onto the floor and allowed me to postpone more proactive countermeasures until the following morning. When Zach and I removed the caps to the drain clean out in our front yard early the next morning, I was surprised to feel a whoosh of air and see liquid nearly to the top of the drain clean out. (Good thing I hadn't taken the caps off the clean outs the night before when the water level was high or we would have had a black water geyser!) This was a sure sign that the clog was downstream from the house in the pipe under the front yard rather than upstream under the house as it usually is. We were able to use a recently purchased encased flat metal sewer rod declogging tool (http://tinyurl.com/2ekt6u) to descend down the main drain pipe a dozen or so feet until I felt resistance. After several thrusts into the area of resistance, I was pleasantly surprised that the clog was cleared and the sewage backup resolved with relative ease...unlike most other instances. I'm pretty sure we've got some roots from the tree in our front yard growing into the drain pipe and that I'll have to eventually rent a power drain rooter again in the future. But for the near future, I think that Zach could unclog the drain if it should clog again while I am unable to do so myself. It's a nice feeling to have a Plan B in case you're not available to personally fix something yourself.

GEEK ALERT! The rest of this posting is about computer talk that non-techies may find boring. You are free to discontinue reading, if you like.
I have been working sporadically for months to migrate our home computing services from an aging Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional installation running (walking is more like it) on a 233 MHz Gateway PC I bought surplus from work years ago to an instance of open source (free and modifiable) Ubuntu Linux running on a less ancient no-name brand 1.2 GHz AMD powered PC I also bought surplus from work a year ago or so. While I have been very impressed with the quality, capability, and broad range of open source application software available to run on Linux, I still have a few legacy applications that, to the best of my knowledge, only run on Windows. Therefore, for the time being, I needed to maintain a platform on which to run them, not having had the time to experiment with programs that allow Windows applications or Windows environments to run on top of Linux. I was making slow, but steady progress up until the hard drive on the less old computer began to show signs of dying. In order to shorten an already long explanation, I'll just say that this unexpected event "complicated" things to the point that after adding a new hard drive, I decided to bite the bullet and buy a full copy of Windows XP Professional. My revised short term goal has been to get that environment up and running in stable fashion with the most used applications working well, with data files organized and appropriately accessible to family members, and automatic scheduled backups running prior to my upcoming stay in the hospital. My goal is to have a stable computing platform that family members can reliably use while I am in the hospital and that both they and I can use after my return and during my convalescing period at home. It will also give me peace of mind that at least my computer affairs will be somewhat in order in the unlikely event that I will be unable to do any further maintenance. Until I am feeling well enough to get out of bed and sit in the nice padded swivel chair Katie gave me last Father's Day (or was it my birthday?) for the computer desk, I hope to be able to use a borrowed laptop computer from work while in bed to connect via wireless connection to our home computer network to enable me to do essential work for my employer from home, as well as do some family history work that has been on the back burner for too long. Working towards achieving this goal has, and will continue to, occupy much of my time this weekend.