No good deed goes unpunished.

Friday night was a mixed bag of enjoyment for me. On one hand, I made it up north in less than 6 hours, about 5 1/2, had seen my buddy Mark and had dinner with my folks. Then I tried to get on the computer, the very same computer on which I'm writing this entry. Unfortunately, I couldn't access hotmail or facebook or seemingly anything that I wanted to see. My folks were still using Internet Explorer 6.0, so I decided that part of the problem might be the old version of the browser. They needed to upgrade anyway, so I downloaded IE 8.0. Very reasonable right?

Well, after downloading it, I couldn't access the internet at all! Arrrrrghhhh! After calling the cable company's automated attendant and then live techie, I was referred to Microsoft's support group in India (southern India where it's very warm this time of year I understand). The techie there was VERY helpful and we determined the problem was the firewall from Computer Associates. We disabled it and everything was ok. My folks will have to reload it later. The whole ordeal took about 90 minutes though and was pretty frustrating, at least until I got to the Microsoft guy.

Saturday was spent working in the yard. Lots of pine cones, leaves, needles and sticks to be raked up and hauled to be burned. My mom raked, I shoveled the piles into the cart hauled by my dad on his tractor. It worked pretty well. After we filled a load, dad would drive it down by the firepit and I would unload the cart. Then back up the yard to do it again. It took abour four trips I believe. LOTS of stuff.




Here's some of the piles of needles and such. Some of it was already burning as you can see.














Close up in the fireplace. We filled it twice on Saturday as we decided to see how much more we could burn after letting it sit for a few hours while we got dinner.
















Putting up the bat house was also on the agenda for me. It needs to be between 10-15' off the ground, away from too many branches and facing south. We found the perfect tree. Let's hope we attract some of nature's flying pesticides!!

Full length view of the yard. You can see the fireplace at the end and the bat house up in the tree.