
Blizzarding in Abbotsford
News ·Thursday November 30, 2006 @ 02:53 EST (link)
As promised, we drove up to Abbotsford, BC this Saturday; we left around 1500, fairly uneventful trip—border was good, just asked where we were from and where we were going and if we were leaving anything—but shortly after we got into Canada it started snowing. Hard. Looking forward through the windscreen was like looking out of Ten-Forward on the Enterprise at high warp (how's that for a geeky metaphor?) I took over driving and although we missed one turn (badly signed highway), we got to Grandma Martin's at about 1815, came in and talked for a while, and then headed over to Swiss Chalet (Canadian family restaurant) for three of their festive specials.
We were there for about three hours; we watched the snow come down by the glare of the outside street lamps as darkness settled in. On the way back to my Grandma's place we stopped at the her bank, then stopped in again for a few minutes; she was a little worried about us getting back and offered to let us stay overnight, but we decided to drive home. I drove back, since I've a fair amount of experience driving in snow in Ontario... seems most Americans (and, according to AT, British Columbians too) have trouble driving in snow. There was one skid but I grabbed the wheel and steered into it and all was well. It took about the same time going back as getting there, but there was no wait at the border, so the driving time was probably a little more. When we arrived home there was no snow in the east side.
On Sunday and Monday, the snow came to Seattle; I went in Monday and left around 1800. It took me an hour to get out of the parking garage—cars were backed up to the first-second floor ramp, and not moving much at all as people were creeping out of every building on 36th Way and wedging themselves into the creeping line. We snaked our way to the WA-520, but after that traffic was only about as bad as it would have been on a normal day but an hour earlier (i.e. 1800 traffic at 1900) and the rest of the drive was slow but uneventful; even Novelty Hill and Stephens Road weren't bad. Tuesday was a snow day, much of the campus was closed, I worked from home.
Update on Douglas Hedrick (Honey's dad): he went to the hospital to get his heart trouble checked out on Wednesday, and the doctors determined that he'd have to have open heart surgery; stents would not suffice (they tried putting one in but it gave him pain and they realized there was a second 99% blockage behind the first). I left work early to be with Honey and VPN'd in later on. The surgery is scheduled for Monday, but will be done sooner if required; he's in the critical care unit at the Richmond, VA (Virginia) VA (Veterans' Association) hospital.
Speaking of VPNing: VPNing into MS is like using a 28.8k modem right now. I hit shift and it gets relayed 3 seconds later which means I get 0 instead of ) or [ instead of { and redraw is so slow you can critique the gnomes' brush strokes. Argh. And the connection process is pretty random, too; sometimes you get through, sometimes it attempts to count to infinity, sometimes it bluescreens, and sometimes it needs a reboot because, as I believe I've mentioned a few times already, the Windows OS has many a pile of fetid horse dung hiding in its nooks and crannies.
We're watching House, Stargate SG-1 season 1, and various items on the MythTV machine which is now pretty full so is starting to auto-expire some shows, which is fine; if they're important we can tag them not to expire. I have another 120 Gb HD I can put in (since I elected to use Linux's Logical Volume Manager, I can add it to the logical partition and it will grow seamlessly), but I need some longer screws to put it into the silent-mount chassis.
Fixed a bug in the pH internal parser for these pages (actually not the parser itself, which is a rock solid C++ XS module, really, but in the pH::Journal module), where it ignored element content of "0", since it was checking an iterator value for truth (and "0" is false in perl, either as a string or a number) rather than definedness.