Kevin's musings

I went down from Denver to Las Cruces today. Left around 11:15am and got into Las Cruces at about 9:45pm. It’s a long haul, but I have done it sooo many times, and it’s very easy: You get on I25 and drive south.

As is typical, traffic though denver was nasty:

Sunday started very eary here… around 6:30am AZ time. Had a quick shower and breakfast and walk for the dogs, and then we were off to the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge

Man was the desert ever green. Very lush and bright. There was green grass everywhere. I would say about 90% of the cars we saw on the road to the refuge were border patrol. There was one going by about every 10min and one parked along the road every 15. Must be a pretty popular place to pick up people trying to cross the border.

The refuge was nice, we saw a deer (she was laying under a tree, but had her ears sticking out) and a little buck (ram?) antelope…

On the way back we stopped at a sourdough bakery. Very nice place. The rest of the day was spent inside away from the heat relaxing.

You can see how lush it was out there:

Today I was awakened with the lovely sounds of a big thunderstorm hitting. Lots of thunder and lightning and heavy rains. We got about 71/100’s of an inch just in the morning (I didn’t check the rain gauge again in the afternoon). Very rainy and thundery. Kurt the thunderphobe hound did very well all things considered. Mostly just curled up in a corner.

I went out for the midday walk and the sun had come back out. 75degrees and 70% humidity. Pretty amazingly sticky for Arizona.

Lots of work to get done today. Spent a lot of time on the phone.

This was around 45min-1hour after the rain let up. You can still see water flowing…

Well, today I got to do a fair bit of waiting around. Took my dad off to a doctors appointment in the morning and got to wait around in a waiting room there. Then my dad wanted to get the oil changed on his jeep, and that took a while waiting in a waiting room too.

On the good side, the doctors office waiting room was quiet, there were magazines, birds to watch outside, a nearby bathroom and it was nice.

On the bad side the waiting room at the oil change place had a blaring tv (“peoples court” and then “ripley’s beleive it or not”), uncomfortable chairs, nothing to see or read, and no beverages.

I’m reminded why I never watch tv. The people’s court consisted of a lady judge yelling at the people before her and deciding the case because she didn’t like one of the guys. She seemed to have no real basis in anything other than being irate. Ripleys beleive it or not had segments about 20-30 seconds long like “This bird defends itself by vomitting. No one wants to tangle with it”. They never say what the bird is, where it’s found or anything else about it. I think “or not” should be the answer to that show.

This was an amusing way to make your gate open smoothy:

Some birds out the doctors office window:

Nice thundercloud, which didn’t produce any rain here:

More thunderclouds, and you can see some of the construction thats taking place near my dad’s house:

Twyla looking cute:

Well, today started nice and early with a trip down to the Wildlife refuge again. A few minutes after my sister had asked me if I had my camera and I had told her I did, I checked and had left it in the charger back at the house. So, no pictures this time from there. It was very very green and lush out there.

We saw a masked bobwhite on the road, and then saw a Doe a bit later. It might well have been the same doe I saw last weekend out there. She was far enough away to where she really didn’t care much about us. She kept looking, but didn’t run, so we got a nice look at her.

The great high speed cable access nightmare took up most of the afternoon/evening. One of my sisters, my bother and I had decided it would be good to get some fast net here just in case and for me to use now. We tried to use cox’es on-line sign up, but it couldn’t find the address here. So, we called and got it setup. They then gave us an address for a Cox cable store we could go to get a modem. It was about an hours drive from here through the middle of tucson. So, I decided I would just pick up one closer to here. The only store I could find nearby was a Office Max. They had one cable modem (a d-link), so I just got that one. Then the fun began. I connected it all up and I could get a DHCP address from the network on my laptop. However, it was a 172.x.x.x network, and I couldn’t get out. Looking around I realized they had some silly registration thing you had to go though. After poking around on the net via the slower connection I found that you have to go to http://tucson.cox.net/ (which it will allow you to go to) and sign up. Great. I connected back up and got to a page that expected the cable account number. My dad doesn’t save old bills, so there was nothing here that had that account number on it. I tried signing up for ‘view your bill on-line’, but it also required the account number. So, off to call tech support. The first time I waited about 30minutes and gave up before dinner. The hold setup on the cox tech support is particularly evil. It repeats about 3 “speels” over and over and over. One telling you that you need your computer and modem nearby. One asking you to unplug the modem and power off your computer and try powering them back on. One telling you to go to ‘windowupdate.com’ (how you do this if you can’t get to the net and are calling tech support to help you I have no idea). After dinner I tried again. Only 25minutes and I managed to get a human. I gave her the phone number here. She couldn’t find the account. I gave her my dad’s name. She couldn’t find the account. Finally I gave her the address, and she got to where she could get into the account…except, she needed the last 4 digits of my dad’s SSN. After some digging in files, we gave her that. Didn’t match. Finally after some more digging we gave her the last 4 digits of my mom’s SSN who had been the account name before. That worked. Got her to activate the modem and I was up and surfing. So in the end things worked out, however, whoever designed the on-hold setup there: Die in a fire.

I did manage to take a few pictures today…

twyla relaxing:

Mocking clouds. No rain for us. Or even shade:

Suicide bunny: (Picture the 3 greyhounds who’s leashes I am holding looking intently at the bunny with ears all up)