Bogieblog

Racing Blind

47 mushers and their teams have completed the Iditarod. This year's big story was about Rachel Scdoris, a legally blind woman, who entered the race for the first time. She made it 700 miles before scratching at Eagle Island because of the health of her dogs. Her visual interpreter, Paul Ellering, scratched at that point also, "I’m just the kind of guy who likes to leave the dance with the girl he came with".

Apparently, she is already thinking about improvements that she can make for next year's race. You go girl!

Keppin Busy

It was a very busy week at work. I have been working on additions to databases (pre-exixting and those that I have recently developed for the company), lots of new procedures, many MRB and internal corrective actions (I am the distributor and tracker), keeping up the MSDS books (every chemical company seems to have updated those lately), along with other routine stuff.

Additionally, I have been given the task of catching up on making First Article Inspection (FAI) templates. One of our customers alone has revised about 20 drawings. Our company also is more of a job-shop, where most orders are for something new, so new FAIs have to be made for each of those.

2005 Ididarod Winner

Congratulations to Robert Sorlie, who won the 2005 Iditarod. This year's race was especially close with less than an hour separating the top the finishers. At this time, 17 teams have finished the race. Congrats to all of them, and good mushing to those who are still on the trail.

Town Meeting 2005

Yesterday was town meeting day. After going down to Caron's diner for breakfast, we made our way to the still-being-renovated town hall. The renovation bond passed at last year's town meeting. The downstairs, where we hold town meetings, looks really good. I didn't take a look at the upstairs, where the town offices are (once it is done anyway, right now they are in trailers).

The meeting lasted from 9AM until 2:30 PM to go thru 21 warrant articles. The basic town budget took about 2 hours as we went thru and approved or amended each line item. We actually added money to the town budget because one of the town plow/sand trucks had just died (actually 2 died; one is salvageable, one is not).

Moving

Drumwaster is moving. Yes, the old page works for now, but not everything is posted to both pages. So, do yourself a favor and update your blogroll and Favorites links to the new page.

Update: Drum says that the new page will go up at the old address tonight, so there's no need to change your bookmarks.

Slow Thinking Day

I just about made a colossal idiot of myself. Fortunately, know one will ever know except for me and my blog.

As I was writing the last post, the mouse started acting strange. I clicked on a higher row than I was currently on, in order to correct a spelling error, and everything between the two points highlighted. After trying several times, I finally just hit "Save" and do some troubleshooting.

I figured that I had hit a key combination by mistake, so I rebooted the computer in order to clear the key strokes. I clicked on "Restart" and nothing happened. I tried it again - still notta. But when I clicked on "Shut Down", everything worked okay. So after waiting a minute or so, i pressed th "On" button and everything looked okay until I clicked on my mail program. All the icons above that one hightlighted also. "Uh-oh", I thought, "somehow I got a virus."

Yesterday while I was on the computer, I had updated the virus checker, so what had slipped by? I ran the virus checker(after unplugging the modem from the Internet), but it said I was clean. I plugged back into the internet and using the Taskbar shortcut, ran the update - which said I had all the latest updates. Okay, no virus, I think.

ESP

Remember my prediction last week, the one about it being almost guarenteed to snow this weekend (town meeting weekend)? I was right! After a large snowfall on Tuesday (the snow blew around so much that it couldn't be measured - some places were bare, other places had 3-4' drifts), we are supposed to get 3-6" of snow this afternoon, and then a second storm tomorrow is supposed to drop 6-12".

Big Disappointmet In the Iditarod

Rick Swenson, who is a 5 time winner of the Iditarod, has scratched (PDF file) at the McGrath checkpoint because of concern for his dogs. He joins 5 other mushers/teams in this disappointment.

One of Melanie Gould's dogs got loose at the airport, where it had been transported after being dropped from the race. It appears she (the dog) wasn't ready to stop running and led everyone on a merry chase.

For some photos of the race, go here.

Pictures R Us

Everyone at once - - - -AAAWWW!

Missy is the hairbag on the right, and Prince is the skinny one on the left. Oh yeah, the little one on the coffee table is Indy.

I picked up some developed film today, and haven't shared pictures lately, so here they are:

What if there Were no Global Warming?

I don't have much time as the weather is horrid; snowy, temps in the single digits with wind chills almost as cold as they have been this year. I am hoping it doesn't take me  2 hours and 15 minutes to get to work this morning, which is how long it took me to get home last night. Actually, I am figureing on taking 1 1/2 hrs to drive in. I'm sure the plows have been out all night, but with blizzard-like conditions, they can't possibly keep the road clear.

We will be keeping the dogs in today - but we don't have that luxury.

Speaking of dogs, just go look at the top 20 names of placement at this point in the Iditarod. If you looked up the last couple of years of my posting on it, it would probably look pretty familiar.