Category: Life with Pratts

Wacky Wallowheen!

Halloween 2009

Well, another Halloween has come and gone. We had a good crowd show up, yet we have more leftover candy than ever, because one of our neighbors dropped some off so we could cover for them while they went to a party. There’s plenty for me to leave in the break room at work on Monday!

Here is what I posted last Halloween ,and the year before that, and three years ago. This year I added the video projector to the decorations, in rear projection mode with an old sheet hung from the garage door for a screen. I played the 1953 movie “War of the Worlds,” and the original “King Kong .” It was very windy tonight! On the video you can hear the wind, and some kids up the street.

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I was pleased that ABC -TV ran “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” twice this week. Being the fan that I am — Great Pumpkin is my favorite “Peanuts” cartoon — I watched it both times, and the commercials too. There was a loud hum in the soundtrack towards the end that I don’t recall ever hearing before. And I had to think of the promo in an ironic way, because I refuse to accept it as a sincere attempt at updating Charlie Brown!

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Status: hiatus

After a great deal of thought, I have decided to put the blog on hold. At the moment I can’t go into why this is necessary.

I don’t know when I’ll start posting again, but if I can get some photos from Prue Bury’s Beatles Weekend appearance in France, being held one month from now, I might be able to return at that time. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to moderate comments and reply to mail.

Sorry about this being such an abrupt announcement. Thank you for being there.

Jury rigged

Tomorrow, I have jury duty.

I’ve been called for jury duty four times before, and I’ve served on two juries. First, a drunk driving case (guilty), and a few years later an assault and battery charge (not guilty).

At the second trial, when I was led into the courtroom to impanel the jury I was surprised to see that one of the prospective jurors was a neighbor of mine. We served on the same trial, which ran into a second day. We didn’t discuss the case with our spouses, but when we drove in together the next morning we talked about it, and nothing we heard during the remaining testimony changed our minds that the charge was bogus.

Not my week

Work has been totally clobbered this week by a major outbreak of the Conficker-A worm. It got hold of some valid Windows Domain credentials and wreaked havoc. I was at the office until nine tonight, and we’re nowhere near the end of dealing with this mess. The XP desktops were relatively easy to take care of — get rid of server service, run the removal tool, then enable Automatic Updates. The Windows 2003 servers were much tougher to clean up, because DHCP client and RPC were clobbered. I’m sure you’re fascinated by this. But I had to leave the fun tonight because I promised Bismo I’d meet him at a bar, where a couple of other guys from work were playing in a band with a buddy of theirs.

Speaking of getting clobbered, Bismo and I found ourselves as reluctant participants in a bar brawl! By the time the pile of lunkhead steroid users plowed into us, the two guys who were actually throwing punches were being held down by others, so for me it was only a matter of pushing back, which was surprisingly easy to do. But there was no avoiding becoming involved. The fight broke up, but only temporarily, when the two antagonists started going at it again, apparently at the urging of some woman who either looks older than she is, or is trying to look younger than she is. Once things heated up again, the cops were called, and before they arrived the troublemakers cleared out.