Home Again
I was in no particular hurry this morning, so after a fairly leisurely breakfast and packing, it was back on the road to head back to Fremont. Traffic was a breeze. Even with a rest stop at Vacaville, it took less than three hours to get back home. There was heavy traffic going the other way while traversing Fairfield, though. Even with five lanes, that stretch of road didn't have enough capacity.I was wearing a shirt that is covered with diesel locomotives of various sorts in a bunch of fallen-flag railroad paint schemes. As I was coming out of the restroom, one of the people who operates the miniature railroad on the Nut Tree grounds, wearing traditional steam-railroad eng

Surplus Small Hard Drives
Lisa informs me that she's had a couple more of the small (40GB and smaller) hard drives on her laptop computers have gone bad on her. She doesn't need a big drive, but it's difficult to buy small IDE laptop hard drives at all, save refurbished drives online, and even those are annoyingly expensive. Anyone have any small IDE laptop hard drives sitting on a shelf that you want to get rid of?

Thanksgiving Presents
I will be away from home for nearly the entire month of December and will thus have no time for Christmas shopping or sending presents to my family. Therefore, instead, as I explained to my mother, she and my sister are getting Thanksgiving baskets instead of Christmas baskets.We took several photos of me, my mother, and my grandfather. I hope to be able print at least one of them at high quality a

Treed
travelswithkuma reports that a tree has fallen on the roof of the old house in Mehama. Lisa sent me pictures.Here's the tree that snapped. It's one of the smaller trees that surround the house.It

Tubular
Because of the nature of my travels from early December onward, I'm very concerned about my luggage. Being able to carry everything I need for SMOFCon, a week of work in Columbus, and three weeks in Oregon in one bag <50 pounds (plus my backpack and briefcase) isn't looking very good. I'm probably going to mail a box of stuff up to Oregon next week, which will take care of some of that. But there are things I need in Austin only, including the tripod for the camera so I can record the Fannish Inquisition. Lisa sent it down from Oregon and it arrived yesterday. I also need to print a banner -- SFSFC is sponsoring a couple of hours of SMOFCon's Hospitality Suite -- and that should be a