Peppers, peppers, everywhere

Nor any piece to eat*

Not for me, anyhow.

A rare double post day! And a break from the tech stuff that weighs on my brain.

This is why red bell peppers are a) grown in greenhouses, primarily, and b) are more expensive (they take longer to mature to red from green; anywhere from 20-30 days). Outside, in Florida, in summer, the peppers are prone to rot, wilt, and scald, and it’s damned hard to get a bell pepper from green to red here growing them outside.

The chiles, on the other hand, generally have no issues with the heat and humidity, and usually when I lose a few of those fruits, it’s because I didn’t pick them in a timely manner. So far, they all look quite good.

The cayennes: very dependable variety here, called Cheyenne. I dry these and then grind them to make my own bottles of cayenne pepper powder for various things – bbq rub and sauce, my honey-soy shrimp, a dash into my roasted red pepper and sweet potato soup, beef stew, etc. It’s very handy to have on hand.

The jalapenos this year are a “gigante” version. I chose the larger ones since one of my sisters likes to make jalapeno poppers, and larger equals easier to stuff with whatever needs to go in them.

Poblanos: these are also good stuffed (chile rellenos, anyone?) as is, but most of these I’ll wind up drying, at which point they will become anchos. One of the weirder transmorgrifications, I think.

Finally: tabascos. I still have a bunch in the freezer from last year to make my own tabasco-based sauce. The last batch I made two years ago is almost gone, as everyone uses it for everything. Between last year’s harvest and this year’s, it’s going to be a huge batch of sauce. When I make it, I have to open all the windows, turn the fans up to high, and wear a mask. It’s why I don’t process them into sauce until fall, but last fall, I was sick throughout and the sauce making just wasn’t happening. This year, it will happen – and primarily because my mother keeps reminding me she’s down to her last bottle. Yes, mom.

It’s been an excellent pepper season so far. The tomatoes, though. Heavy sigh. Far too much rain in June here, and they are a sad lot indeed.

*What, you never read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? For shame!

More later, peeps. Be well.

Good morning campers

Our recovery of nameless guy’s server continues today, but I did implement part one of my overall plan to get some writing time.

See, the thing about owning a small business in the field I’m in is that not only is it very unpredictable, but sometimes it takes more than one day. It can take dayS, plural. We are in day three of this specific issue, and still going.

Fortunately, right now does not involve a ton of hands on for me while we wait, so I’ve been able to knock out a few other things that also need to be attended – payroll, for instance, since my employees don’t work for free, the bastards, and payroll taxes, because neither does the IRS or the country. Other “real” work things has filled the nooks and crannies, and I believe I am caught up in the routine, day to day things. Yay!

So maybe it’s time to type a few sentences into Scrivener and move that few footsteps closer to (one) goal. Progress is progress, after all.

More later, peeps. Be well.

The plan was

To write. Because it’s time to, as Neil Gaiman says, make good art.

I’d been moving sites around as we retire older servers, and finally got to bed this morning somewhere between 4 and 4:30. A few hours later, I get a notice to my phone about a customer server. Nothing is responding. I try to log in, get a login incorrect error. Huh, that’s weird, the client is unlikely to have changed the password without telling us. I try it again, same deal. Well, hell.

So by 7:30, I’m up and around and chatting to the client, and something very bad has happened – I won’t go into details except to say it is something so bad it makes your heart stop. The plans to write this morning and perhaps a second, smaller session this afternoon? Gone.

Off to the NOC to do some recovery on this client’s server. Spend a large number of hours reviewing the damage. Build a new machine because all his sites have to be transferred off the existing one. Deal with other client stuff throughout.

Finally, I’m shot at about 2-3 AM or somewhere in there. Crash out, wake up again at 7:30 (I am now typing this on Monday, the next day here), realize I have to go get blood drawn to check various things, drive out to the hospital (again) where I was in the ER back in February to get my records for that visit, as two previous requests to relay those records to Mayo resulted in the records not being sent because they didn’t have my fax although the transmission was good, then the records not being sent because the form I hand delivered to them, in person, wasn’t done (and a bonus: they lost my form and couldn’t find it when we called asking them where the records were), and then to Publix to pick up my meds.

Off I go right out the door, because the bloodwork has to be fasting. Do all of these things today, and I am back, in my chair, at my desk, at 10:50. That is not bad at all, and shows that focused work can be truly productive – and those tasks involved other people, as well. I wonder how much writing I could get done in three hours without people (real people, anyway) being involved in things I need to get done.

Sine we’re still dealing with this server, and some defacements of pages, and because I had to mow beeyard #1 as it hasn’t been mowed in three weeks, and because I needed to feed the bees and add a second brood box to one hive, and because work has been a steady drip, drip drip of things going wrong for people, no writing today. In fact, right now I am very sleepy, and if I didn’t have to transfer this guy’s sites off his server to the new box, I’d probably go hit the sack for a bit. I actually may not do that immediately, but run something that I won’t go into detail about, and then transfer the sites after that.

Now, I wait for something else to finish on that server, and I have titles popping in to my head, so I’m writing those down. Something productive in the writing arena after all! And the day has been productive otherwise, even if it seems like treading water.

Treading is better than sinking, though.

More later, peeps. Be well.

Moving day

No, not me. Late Saturday evenings are for the heavy lifting of maintenance, including server moves, which is what I’ve been doing for hours now. People who don’t work in tech don’t realize that probably a third of your time is spent waiting for something: waiting for a copy to finish, waiting for a compile to complete, waiting for a server to reboot after a new kernel is built, waiting for someone to reply to the question you’ve asked them.

A funny: a “webmaster of x years” (x = more than two decades) spent “two hours” trying to configure FTP, couldn’t connect after figuring out what to use like on ALL other systems he uses, which of course were MUCH easier to use, finally managed to get connected to find NO files listed when he KNEW there were files under the account, and WTF don’t we have the configuration information on the page for the FTP accounts, huh? I got to point out that clicking on the handily named “FTP configuration” link RIGHT NEXT TO the FTP account he created had the configuration information listed, that he had been unable to connect because he was using “user@domain.com@domain.com” according to the logs, and that he configured the FTP user incorrectly, assigning it to its own, restricted, directory, and not the directory with all the files in it. I didn’t bother to ask WTF he spent “two hours” trying to figure it out when he could have just opened a ticket and had a reply literally within minutes, as he did with his whiny list of trial and tribulations he was going through. As of right now, almost two days later, he has not responded to our last reply, nor has he corrected the incorrectly configured FTP user as per the instructions I laid out. And what’s absurdly remarkable about all this: he has the actual user’s master username and password. I wanted to ask him WTF he was bothering screwing around with a secondary FTP user when he could just log right in with the master username and password. Problem solved, in two minutes, not two hours of dumbassery.

This is why we use lots of quotes when someone claims to be a “webmaster” of x years, or a “developer”, or an “IT person”, or a “network engineer” – the latter are amusing when they insist there’s an issue with the network (because of course, they are a network engineer, far more skilled then we are even though they know nothing about us) because look at this trace and this ping from my computer and my cell phone can’t even pull up my site, so your whole network must be down, you suck! It’s fun to tell them they triggered the firewall because they tried to access the control panel on the wrong port, having transposed the last two numbers, and perhaps untethering their phone from their home wifi network would yield a different result if they in fact triggered the firewall in the future at some point, because then they would be able to check their site from a network unrelated to their home system.

Thus ends my mini rant about clueless people who proclaim themselves to be experts on something. I find that the louder those people speak about how many years they’ve been in x, or how they hold a high position of y in some random company, the less likely it is that they know what they’re talking about, and they will probably be among the rudest people we have to deal with in any given day.

Until next time, peeps. Be well.

What’s that smell?

“Your upper lip.”

That was a joke in my family that, as kids, we found vastly amusing. Another one that was equally giggle-worthy to our pre-teen brains was when someone said “excuse me”, and someone else would say “There’s no excuse for you!”

Kids are silly.

The smell was not, as it happens, my upper lip. Today was round one of mowing. It’s rare that I will do all the mowing on the property in one go, because it takes about three hours plus change to do that on a regular-size growth of the areas that need to be mowed. Because I’d been in the hospital, I missed my mowing date earlier this week, and things were a bit higher than usual. In addition, all the areas that had flooded with the daily rains we received in June are now dry – because we haven’t received any rain of significance since July 1. Such is Florida. Those areas could not be mowed while they were under water, and the grass in those areas today was almost up to my hip. Today’s session of three parts of the first group of areas I usually do in a batch took almost three hours by itself.

One of those areas is outside the gates of our tiny development here. We don’t have a HOA (how I hate them!), which is terrific, but that also means when something needs to be done, like a fix for the gate, someone has to organize it, then divvy up and collect everyone’s share of the cost to fix it. No problem for me on that; there’s a guy down the road who handles those sorts of things.

It also means we don’t have a HOA to hire a lawn service to deal with the hedges at the gates or the grass that we are responsible for, from the gates to the main road. For awhile, the guy across the street from us – the guy who has a garage mahal that’s almost as large as his house – had a lawn service, and they would mow out there. He dumped them at some point, and a couple of times he did the mowing outside the gates, then for some reason, he stopped. Since it needed to be done then, and needs to be done now, I’m doing it.

Today was one of the few days that the county doing their mowing jobs of the strips on the sides of the roads and in the ditches/swales coincided with my mowing, something that doesn’t happen often. They, of course, are in air conditioned cabs. Yours truly is on a lawn tractor, without a shade. As I started my run out there by the road, I noticed they’d missed a spot at the end of their responsible area. No big deal, I figured, I’ll just run over it and it will be done, too.

As I neared that spot, mowing around the telephone/electric pole in that side of the of the outer gate area, the breeze kicked up and I got a snootful of the most horrid smell, but one I know: death. For awhile now, I’ve been wearing a mask as I mow, as it isn’t good for my lungs to be inhaling all the things that get kicked up during that mowing time, but some of the odor managed to get through then and a few times as I went back and forth on that side of the areas outside the gates.

I thought, ugh, something has died, fairly recently, and the wind is bringing it to us. I got up on the spot the mowers had “missed” and found that the wind was bringing that smell from much closer than I imagined: there was a dead raccoon at the edge of the road there, baking in the Florida sun (it was 96F when I went out to mow). How did I know its death was fairly recent? I’ll tell you:

First, the body was pretty intact. A lot of times around here, when something dies near the road, they’re usually run over a few times. This poor creature wasn’t.

Second, it wasn’t bloated (yet). If something sits long enough in our heat, it starts to bloat as the insides get hotter and hotter. It didn’t look too much bigger than a regular sized raccoon to me.

Third, and finally: nature’s clean up crew had not yet arrived to start dealing with it. We have tons, and I mean TONS, of turkey vultures around here. Last weekend when I went to the store, I saw not one but two individual examples of those birds at work. Today, as I was mowing, I’d not seen any on that raccoon, hopping around as they jockeyed for the power of having the first go, and there were none circling above in the sky. That tells me the raccoon’s death was recent: they had not gotten to it at that point.

I had to stop after just those three sections for a few reasons: almost three hours bouncing around was eating into time I was supposed to be on the helpdesk, I’d used almost a full tank of gas on the tractor (that one tankful usually allows me to finish four or five sections in this particular area group), I was getting hungry, and I was sweating so much that my hands were slipping on the wheel, no matter how often I was wiping them on my equally sweaty and wet shirt.

It was a bit windy, as I mentioned, everything is quite dry from no rain, and I was filthy, covered in dirt from head to toe. After getting the tractor cleaned and back in the shed, I got a shower, had some lunch, and worked.

And now, I’m eating again, a bit sleepy, planning my day tomorrow, but planning to write this evening despite the fatigue as my “real” work slows down for the weekend, since that’s the time I have for it. Between Wednesday evening and this morning, I had four more ideas for stories involving the main character in the book I’m working on. Clearly, I don’t lack for ideas, as one of the previous posts showed. Some are more fleshed out than others, and I thought of a title for one of the new ones last night when I was trying to get to sleep, and just as clearly as being overflowing with ideas, I need to write faster. Much faster, and much more regularly. Getting the writing in each day can be a struggle, as of course the “real” work is often unpredictable, given the nature of it, but it’s time to take what I can get, when I can get it, and, as Neil Gaiman says, make good art.

That’s it for this one, peeps. More later, as always. Be well.

The lost weekend

OK, so it was not a weekend, and not as Oscar-worthy as the movie of that name (which is brilliant, by the way – you should watch it if you’ve never seen it). It was a few days during the week, and yours truly was back in the hospital with pneumonia. Again.

The  first sign of an issue: I slept for almost 11 hours straight, without waking up. Not normal for someone who regularly wakes up every 2 to 2.5 hours.  When I got up, I couldn’t really see – everything was sparkly, and not in the sparkly vampire sense, but in the sense of standing up too quickly, or getting heat stroke. So, we took my blood pressure, which was a rather alarming 64/48, then twice more because hey, you have to confirm these things, and the other two were not much different. I also stuck a finger in my handy pulse ox (O2) thing and it came back as 76%. Stuck it on another finger and got 80%. None of this is good. We called 911 and yours truly took a delightful ride in the ambulance to the ER. They gave me oxygen and fluids and finally I was back into normal ranges. But, I also got admitted because the chest xray showed lower lobe pneumonia, and they wanted to nuke me with some IV antibiotics.

And here’s where those sensitive to descriptions of bodily functions should stop reading. Seriously, if, say, reading about people puking gives you the heebie jeebies, stop here. I mean it.

Still here? Good. let’s have a little chat about heavy doses of antibiotics via IV, shall we?

The point of it all is to kill all the bad stuff, knocking it down quickly to a level where you can go home and take more antibiotics the way any normal person would take them, for x days. The problem is that those large doses of antibiotics kill everything – including the good little bacterial guys humming around in your guts, happily keeping things stabilized down there. You know what happens then?

Explosive diarrhea. And I don’t mean that in the joking, ha-ha sense, I mean that in the “OMG, am I going to make it to the bathroom before I shit my pants and the bed and everything between me and the bathroom” sense.

Fortunately, it’s kind of easy to tell from the gut rumbles when the time is close, so the astute patient hauls their ass out of bed and into the bathroom. This was made easier for me this time because they didn’t have me continuously hooked up to the IVs, so I was free to get up without having to take the IV stand with me.

And then, I got my independence from the hospital on Independence Day, July 4! I made my escape back to the ranch, and have two antibiotics to take, along with something they quaintly describe as being “for loose stool”. Thankfully, the doses are not high enough to cause me to have to race to the bathroom, so things are not quite as explosive as they were in the hospital. We should be thankful for some small favor every day, and right now, that one’s mine.

More later, peeps. Be well.

Crawling out of timesinks

As I said yesterday, I made a massive shift that gave me time I could assign to something else.  What was that?

I shut down pretty much all social media.

Now, to be fair, I was most active on facebook and twitter, with a small dabbling in instagram from time to time, and those three are the biggies, name recognition-wise. But I got sick and tired of facebook, and deactivated my account there. As a result, I have quite a lot more time to pursue other things, because those “I’ll just spend ten minutes checking out facebook” is never really ten minutes. You look up, and suddenly you’e been checking it for an hour or longer, wasting time that could be better spent on other pursuits.

I still have a page on facebook, since publishers expect writers to have a “platform” (and let me tell  you how I want to launch that phrase into the heart of the sun). Before I deactivated my primary account used to create that page, I created a new account for myself that follows nothing and friends no one. I then passed administrative duties for the page from the account I used to this new account that I do not use except to manage that page: an object lesson in how to both have a presence and not have a presence on facebook.

That was followed next by twitter getting the heave-ho for the most part. I created another twitter account to use as my author account (for branding purposes, of course).   Under that umbrella, I can do the author update thing now and again without spending hours at a time on social media throughout the day.

So, while I know that it’s necessary for me (the artist) to have a presence on these outlets, it really is not necessary for me (the person) to have one, and now I basically don’t. And I’m ok with that.