The regular softball season for Katie's team, that is. They won today, beating the Skokie Schwarbies by a score of 8-2. Elia hit a big three-run home run (the team's first of the season) to give the team a 3-2 lead and they scored five runs in the fourth to win going away.

The Lightning finished in second with a record of 9-2-1, going 9-1 after an initial loss and tie. They are an impressive bunch of girls.

Playoffs start on Tuesday, but finishing second in the ten team league will mean a first round bye, so the next game is Thursday. Fingers crossed!

That's about all.

Happily, our A/C guys were able to come by this morning. The air conditioning unit had blown a large capacitor. Once that was replaced (and the cleaning that we should have scheduled completed), we had a functional air conditioner.

I have buttoned up the windows and we are waiting for the cooling to catch up. :)

The good news is that Katie's team won their next-to-last game of the regular softball season today by a final of 2-0. It was mightily hot when the game started; not a whole lot cooler when we finished, but the sun was down and there was a breeze.

The bad news is that the air conditioning at home failed today while I was at the softball game. We have a call in to our A/C guy; I hope we hear from him in the morning. I am sure that he has a million other calls right now.

*sigh*

In any case, I have managed to log into Gretchen's email and extract, print, and fill out (the last by hand) the forms that we need to have for Katie and Julie's dance camp that starts tomorrow morning. There are still a couple of items that need to be added, because for one reason or another, I don't have things like the phone number for the girls' pediatrician.

Because that is not a computer thing. That is apparently a Mom thing. :)

In other news, I think that I have figured out how to solve my computation problem at work. Now, I just need to spend a day or so coding it and testing it out to see if the algorithm that I have in my head actually produces the right results when reduced to electronic impulses.

But I think I have an impulse to wait until later -- like tomorrow -- to sort this out...

One of the problems of having a program that is complex enough to have what I refer to as "behaviors" is when you're trying to figure out why a particular behavior has changed from one version to the next. This problem is worse when you've had major changes between the two releases.

You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

Katie scored tonight, although not in the way you might expect.

I took her to tonight's Cubs/Rockies game down at Wrigley Field. Having seen me running the scorebook at her softball games from time to time (which I would refuse to give her :) ), she asked if she could help me score tonight's game. And on the way down to the ballpark, I explained how the fielders are numbered from one to nine, and what a "K" meant, and other bits of scoring esoterica.

And then I gave her the scorebook at the game.

She scored about a third of the game with my help, which was pretty good.

Maybe we can keep scoring from becoming a lost art after all! :)

The Cardinals bullpen has cacked up another lead in the late innings.

I'm thinking this is not their year...

Someone elsewhere in the larger group ran a lint-like tool against our Java code today and sent us the list of complaints. Most of them were actually real problems. I fixed the ones in my area and sent the others off to the developers working in the other areas, because I could fix the bugs, but why deny them the valuable learning experience? :)

About the time I was almost finished bug hunting, it was time to take Katie off to her softball game. Her team won 3-1 over another of the local teams, scoring two runs in the bottom of the last inning before the game was called for time.

If I'm counting correctly, her team is now an impressive 7-2-1. This is not good enough for first place, but it is definitely good for second. :)

Take a week off and get up to go back to work in the morning. Slowly. Very slowly.

But I fixed at least one bug today. I think I fixed another massively complex bug, but I discovered that something that someone has checked in prevents me from building the software. I have now sent a message out looking for help, as it looks like there are missing files that weren't added to the VOB somehow.

Maybe by morning, they'll sort it out.

Today was the last day of my short vacation. I had intended to go down to Wrigley Field to see the Cubs / Cardinals game tonight, but my intestine informed me that I had other plans. (It quieted down nicely later in the day, but you really don't want to be at Wrigley Field with an iffy digestive track.)

So not a lot got accomplished. I took Katie to the library to register for their summer reading program. I installed a big SD card into my new phone to hold my music library and I think I've got most of it copied to the new location.

And we grilled some Polish sausage and hot dogs for dinner.

It'll do. :)

Katie's team got to play on the big fields over at Rand Park today. They had a good hitting day, scoring 2 in the first, followed by the maximum allowed of 5 runs in each of the next two innings on their way to a 12-3 victory in 3.5 innings.

When they hit, they hit.

Well, actually, upgrading Gretchen's laptop.

Nearly two years ago, I bought Gretchen an HP Stream. Never again. It is now in the process of failing in all sorts of interesting ways. I may open it up and see if a cable is badly seated or something like that, but since the stupid machine will reboot itself when you have booted into the BIOS settings, I'm fairly sure that this is not a Windows problem.

And being an HP Stream, unless the problem is a badly seated cable, the machine is nigh unto unrepairable. For example, if this is a RAM error, you are out of luck, because the RAM is soldered to the motherboard.

But I will take a look at it. Eventually. (I have a litany of complaints about the machine, not the least of which is having to plug in an external hard drive in order to update Windows 10, because the Microsoft-size-mandated built-in flash drive is too small to allow for it.)

In the meantime, I have bought a nice little lightweight Acer laptop for Gretchen on heavy sale. It's only a dual core, but I've now upgraded the not-soldered-in RAM to 8 GB, which should give Windows 10 plenty of room to operate. I have also purged Firefox and McAfee and installed Chrome, Avira, and Alpine.

All of this only took about two hours, the largest single item being installing Avira.

I am sure that the machine will shortly busy itself downloading Windows 10 updates. But it can do that without me.

Sam and Bonnie came by today to finish the fence. With some help from Katie as we hammered in pickets, the fence was finally finished and Ruby the Dog could be released from her tether. This made the poor dog very happy.

Afterwards, I took Katie off to her softball game against the Skokie Indians. Her team won 6-0. Katie did well, getting two hits, driving in two runs, pitching well, and snagging a humpback liner at shortstop for the first out of the last inning. (The rest of the team did well too, but I only need to tell you how well Katie did. :) )

So I'm taking the week off from work. I knew we had a rotted out post on the cedar fence and figured that with a little bit of help from Sam, this would be a piece of cake. We would need to replace one post, rebuild one section of fence, and probably replace some of the pickets that couldn't be salvaged.

We started working on the fence on Monday. The score thus far:

One trip to Home Depot for a new post, a dozen pickets, and nails. Oh, and two new hammers to replace the ones that I had already broken on this project.

The Memorial Day festivities, where we discovered that three posts were rotted out and three sections of fence would need to be rebuilt.

A trip to Home Depot on Memorial Day where we acquired two more posts and another dozen pickets, plus assorted odds and ends, including a drill bit to try to ream out the rotten post ends.

The sad discovery that the ends of the rotten posts were not rotten and were damned if they were coming out of at least two of the three existing concrete sleeves.

The Tuesday lunchtime trip to Home Depot, where a new chuck key was acquired for the drill, the previous chuck key being nowhere to be found. (I trust it is in the basement somewhere.)

The Tuesday afternoon trip to Home Depot after Sam arrived and I suggested using a demolition hammer on the existing concrete footings. Quikrete was also acquired on this trip.

The demolition of 2.5 of the footings and the digging out of the holes. (One of the footings appeared usable once the top section had been cleared, so we left the rest of it in place.)

Sam returned the demolition hammer to Home Depot within the four hour window while I took Katie to her softball game.

On Wednesday around noon, Bonnie rejoined our crew. Sam and I put the posts into the holes and dropped the Quikrete around them. We adjourned for lunch and concrete setting.

Returning from lunch, we tried to nail the loose section of fence to the new post and discovered that section of fence would need to be rebuilt too. We carried it up to the patio for Bonnie and Gretchen to disassemble. Sam and I set out to mount the crossbars. Concluding that nails were not going to do the job after nailing the first set into place, Sam went back to Home Depot for deck screws. I started nailing up pickets to the first set of crossbars on the fourth section of fence.

Sam returns. Nailing continues. I pick up Katie and Julie from school. Ruby the Dog is released from her kennel without being attached to her tether and promptly escapes through the giant hole in the fence. Hilarity ensues, but Ruby is recaptured by Sam, wielding her toy ball, before Gretchen can recapture her, wielding her minivan.

By about 7 PM, we are running out of nails. We have run out of original pickets. A quick count indicates that we will need about a dozen more than I already have. We are done for the day.

So tomorrow will start with another trip to Home Depot. (Lucky number seven!) We will acquire more nails and pickets. With any luck, we will finish reassembling the fence so that Ruby the Dog can have the run of the back yard again.

This has proven to be a rather larger project than I had in mind...

Today was Katie and Julie's last day of school for the year. I have not had a chance to look at their report cards yet (because of important reasons appearing on next rock), but Gretchen tells me that they are very good. I am appropriately proud. :)

Katie's team met the team from Norwood Park today at Chippewa, which is our home field.

It was an unusually close and low-scoring game which Katie's team won by the final score of 2-1, with Katie driving in both runs with a first inning double. And she got the game ball, which made her very happy!

And I'll just say that the Norwood Park manager was everything that I like to see in a manager at this level.

It has been extraordinarily busy here for the last few months. It was thus that we found ourselves coming up on the end of the school year and having not yet written a song for Katie's teacher, Mrs. Sharko. We knew what we wanted to write, but actually putting pen to paper was being challenging. We had had discussion on the subject with Katie and Julie. We had nothing actually written down.

And then on Thursday night, I started my vacation.

And at 3 AM I woke up Gretchen and rapped out a verse to her.

"Can I go back to sleep now?"

"Yes. Yes, you can."

Not much later, but much more awake, we managed to finish pulling everything together. While performing the song as a rap was a possibility, setting a tune to it was going to be a better choice. :)

And today, Katie was able to take the recording of the song to Mrs. Sharko, who likes it.

It is only deadline that would get me to record something with this case of bronchitis... :)

Anyway, here are the lyrics:
( Lyrics inside...Collapse )

It is amazing how the fence repair project can go awry when you discover that rather than replacing one post and two sections of fence, you actually need to replace three posts and three sections of fence.

We are still working on clearing out the ruins of the rotted out posts, all three of which were emphatically dead at the ground line. Getting the posts out was enough to put paid to one more section of fence as well.

All of the sections of fence have been demolished, nails removed, and the still-useful pickets separated from the ones that are rather the worse for the wear.

Sam will be coming back tomorrow to help me figure out how to sink the posts. If we can just get the posts in the ground and the cross beams up, nailing the pickets is going to be easy by comparison.

Sam has wondered if it would be easier to dig out the old concrete sleeves. I suspect that this is not the case. I hope that I am right...

If the weather holds, Sam and Bonnie are coming out tomorrow and Sam and I will make an assault on repairing our fence. (Sam and Bonnie are coming out regardless of the weather, barring something apocalyptic arriving.
The fence repairs are subject to being called on account of rain.) In the interest of minimizing the number of trips to the hardware store, I headed out there today and picked up materials.

I'm going to try to get by with the 2x4s that are sitting on the patio for reconstructing the cross bars. But I now have a new Douglas fir post and a dozen cedar pickets, carefully selected by removing the crap that was sitting on the top of the pile outside and finding the ones that were intact. They were a bit damp, so I set them up to dry out in the garage, which caused Gretchen to comment, "The garage smells like pencils!"

Yes, I suppose it does. :)

I also bought two new hammers, having broken two hammers on this project so far. And nails, because you can't have too many nails.

We'll see how this goes.

The weather today was good, so the softball practice that had been called for Katie's team worked out well. Only about half the girls were there, but it was a holiday weekend and relatively short notice, so that was just fine.

I wasn't sure what we were going to be doing later in the afternoon until someone at the practice mentioned that our neighborhood pool had opened this weekend. So off to the pool we went, where we splashed around for a couple of hours.

After dinner, I hit both grocery stores and came back with deli meat which was rearranged into a variety of sandwiches and sandwich-like foods, including the Reuben that Gretchen made for me. I greatly appreciated this, because eating a Reuben in a restaurant is a crap shoot, given the chance of sulfites in the sauerkraut.

And now, we are hoping to get everyone to bed soon. We'll see how that goes.

Katie has now embarked upon reading the first of the Harry Potter books herself. She got the book from the library yesterday and is already up to chapter six.

Gretchen has suggested that I not tell her that we have all of the books in the library downstairs. (And two copies of book six, because I decided that neither of us needed to wait for the other to finish it that way. :) )

The product is shipping.

I am now going on the vacation that I didn't start at the beginning of this week. :)

It looks like we're shipping the product, which is good.

After work, I took Katie over for an impromptu session of team batting practice over at the batting cages at the nearby park. This went pretty well, but my voice is now completely shot.

Maybe it will be better tomorrow. :)

Thanks for all the lovely birthday wishes!

Julie was home from school sick today with a tummy bug, which made things more complex. She's feeling better now and we're hoping she'll be able to go on the school's field trip to the Lincoln Park Zoo tomorrow.

I have the head cold Katie had over the weekend, which is not a plus. :)

The roofers probably will not return until Thursday, when the rain is supposed to stop.

But happily, Katie's softball game was canceled, which is much better than playing in rain and slop. (Especially when I have a head cold...) The next game is Thursday by which time things should have dried out a bit.

My new VM almost works. My old VM goes away in an hour or so. It would be good if we could move past almost soon...

And now it is time for bed.