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scary teenagers of Woodstock
Thursday, July 23 2009
I've been building some tables out of pressure-treated lumber for the greenhouse, but I'd been uncertain about how to deal with setting these on the irregular floor of faulted shale bedrock. There are several different levels, some offset six inches from their neighbors. One idea was to make legs whose length could be adjusted, but today I decided to modify the floor in two of the places where legs will be. In the southwest corner I poured a level triangular bench of concrete (it was only about the size of a quarter of a large pizza). Eight feet from there along the south wall I built a pier of stacked rocks mortared with concrete. The floor was lower here, so this pier had to be tall. It's not easy to form three-dimensional objects out of concrete without a cast, but I couldn't be bothered to make an actual cast. Instead I used boards here and there to contain the concrete in the places where it tried hardest to escape.
This evening Gretchen and I went to Woodstock to meet up with Deborah at the Garden Café. We went first to the Comeau Property, the large tract of woods and fields adjacent to the village, to walk the dogs. Eleanor doesn't usually get anywhere near as excited about driving places as Sally does, but as we approached Comeau she started whimpering with joy, something I have never heard her do before. She must really like that place.
We ate out in the outdoor part of the café, where we could see the various comings and goings of Woostockians. A scruffy guy who had his head in a cop car talking to the driver. He would have been homeless in any other village but here was just an aging hippie. I think he was talking about the old guy we'd seen standing out near the middle of Route 212. That guy had been propped up by a walker, a thumb extended in the act of hitchhike. But the main form of human presence I noticed was that of Woodstock's teenage population, which kept walking past in small bands, talking and laughing loudly to one another. I guess it's a sign of my age that I'm beginning to find teenagers extremely irritating. I also find them somewhat frightening, these formidable adult-sized creatures operated by brains containing so little information.
Back home, I saw that my new motherboard had arrived from NewEgg.com. I'd become fed up with my Asus P5QL Pro motherboard, which, get this, could not be shut down without automatically booting up again (forcing me to pull the plug), and it could not successfully be made to go into standby. So I'd ordered a Foxconn DigitalLife ELA motherboard (which is not available from TigerDirect.com). The Foxconn is a much better motherboard, with more features, including FireWire and three full-sized 16X PCI Express 2.0 slots. And I'm here to say that swapping it in for my old motherboard was incredibly easy. All the things that could have gone wrong did not go wrong; I put it in, installed the drivers, and now my computer can be shut down and go into standby. I should mention, by the way, that this is the first time that Woodchuck, my main computer, has ever been able to go into standby. The only irritation was that I had to manually put all my desktop icons back in their proper places, which is essential for the way I use a Windows-based computer.
By the way, though the reviews of this motherboard obsess on its capabilities for the trogloditic practitioners of overclocking, I'm not the least bit interested in overclocking. These days it seems like a pointless waste of energy (in more ways than one). But back in the day I was very proud of the overclocking I gave to my old Mac IIsi, whose speed I raised from 20 to 25 MHz.
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