A neighbor/friend/co-worker turned Carol and I on to an exceptionally good wine at a reasonable price — $6. He found it at Trader Joe’s (not all TJ stores sell beer and wine). It’s Black Mountain Vineyard, 2005, a California Merlot.
It’s smooth and, for a Merlot, strong. The 2005 is ready to drink now, but the 2006 needs a year to mellow, and who knows if it’ll turn out to be as good?
This will give my son a shock. Here I am when I was exactly the age he is now, about to turn seventeen.
I used rabbit ears for FM reception and, yes, I was seated to give the impression I had antennae coming out of my head. Ah, my first stereo — Pioneer SX-440 receiver, Radio Shack MC-1000 speakers, Garrard 40B turntable, Shure M91ED cartridge, and Pioneer SE-20 headphones.
When I was in high school I listened to the classics — The Who, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath. Today, with the departure of Bush and Cheney, I’m reminded of this song.
https://youtu.be/bYgpv5clf3Y
Ding, dong, the Bush gone… well, almost. Not been posting much. Sorry! We went out to eat two nights in a row, but not tonight, because it snowed today. Still working on Eric’s computer.
To gain control over the failed drive I put it in an external PATA-to-USB case I saved after the 80 GB drive in it failed, not too long after I copied everything on it to a 160 GB USB drive, that has already been replaced with a 500 GB drive. I ran CHKDSK on the drive and it fixed a bunch of index errors. Then booting into safe mode I took ownership of all the folders of interest and I got everything worth getting off it, but I’ll still probably junk the drive, because it’s five years old. I’ll make the 2-year-old 200 GB D: drive the primary and install XP on that.
This is what I’m looking at right now for Eric’s PC:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545
Not fun. It was fine yesterday, and now it’s anything but. AAUGH!
Looks like I’m going to have to resort to putting the primary drive into a USB case, attach it to my computer, and see if there’s still a file system on it. Agg-oh-knee.
This is the 40th anniversary of my parents moving us to Massachusetts. Christmas of ’68 is indelibly associated in my mind with $1 Peanuts books and the Beatles record called “The Beatles”.
I don’t listen to the White Album every Christmas, but I’m glad that Fantagraphics made it possible to revive the Charlie Brown tradition by publishing The Complete Peanuts. I posted a picture of last year’s books, and I’ll start a new tradition by showing you this year’s books. One of them has a serious printing defect, but all of the pages are there so I don’t mind.
We enjoy getting a few new ornaments every year, and Carol bought this one with Snoopy and Woodstock.
Here it is, the first snow of the winter, and we’re promised about a foot of it, so I’m glad the snow thrower started right up and is ready to go. This will be its tenth season.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/DEC/SnowThrower.flv 480 360]
