Recycled Electrons - Blog of Keith Horowitz

I went to the balloon festival again this year. I got up early Saturday - it was too wet to even set up the balloons - much less launch them. I got up early Sunday - it wasn't as wet - but the cloud cover was too low to launch. I did get a bunch of pictures of the balloons set up on the ground. Then I had to run off to meet up with another geocacher to do an group hunt. It was nice, as he had a 4x4, so we got to do some mountain ones that I wouldn't normally try. Monday I wasn't sure if I would get up early. I was tired. Yet, I managed to get up pretty early anyhow - but not quite as early as the 2 previous days. I headed down to the balloon festival. I was still a couple of miles away when I could see about a dozen balloons already in the sky! They were launching! I got down there and managed to take a whole lot of pictures. A whole lot! I'm going to post one now. I'll see about posting more later.

Well, I'm all moved in. a little more than 2 weeks ago, I got the keys. The first weekend I started moving in. It was also my first official weekend with the boys. And it was my birthday weekend. And it was hot - Sunday broke a record. Well I decided to not work the whole weekend. I did work most of the weekend. But I took the boys out to eat most of the meals - as a birthday/moving treat. We also went to the movies. And there were a couple of shopping trips - I got a futon (bed/couch) at WalMart. And we went in the pool at my new apartment complex. The good news is that the pool is really close to my apartment. The bad news is that the people on the first floor like to smoke outside :( The boys slept over Saturday night, and pretty much seemed to enjoy it. I have a 2 bedroom, 2 bath apartment. I got the 3rd floor so I have a vaulted ceiling from the dining room, going up in the living room. It even had a wood-burning fireplace! It is at the bottom of a hill, along a st...

I have not done much blogging lately - and I've really let this one go for a long time. Part of that is that I've been spending a lot of free time and energy on geocaching. And to that end, I've done some blogging on a sub-blog about geocaching. But the other issue that was most worth talking about, I did not feel it was appropriate to air on this forum. That issue was that my marriage was going through some difficult times. The conclusion was finally reached a number of weeks back, but the official things are starting to happen now. I have filed for divorce. I am going to be moving into my own apartment about 2 miles away, probably this week. It is in the same zip-code and school district. Being a child of divorce, the decision was extremely difficult for me to make. But my wife and I have grown apart, and just can't seem to find enough common ground on some important issues. Yes, there are a lot of issues. I am sure we both could point out how everything is the...

I ran my second geocaching event yesterday. The last one was just a general get-together. This one was a special clean-up event. The main geocache site, geocaching.com, promotes both regular clean-up whenever caching and a special day once a year for a major international clean-up on Earth day. They call the clean-up a CITO, for Cache-In, Trash-Out. During my first event, a number of people in the area indicated they would prefer a clean-up event that did not occur on the Earth-day on Saturday. Many people can't make Saturday events. Also by having it on a different day, it would allow Geocachers to do the Earth-day/Saturday event up in Denver on Saturday and then do another one on Sunday. It took me a few tries - but I got in touch with the parks department. They asked where I would like to clean up. I figured with all the different places that I knew people would be coming from, that somewhere around downtown Colorado Springs heading West towards Manatou Springs would be p...

I've been living without sound on my Toshiba laptop since last summer. When I opened it up, I found the sound card was this tiny board, maybe 2 inches by a half inch. And it has this plug-in to the motherboard. The connector on the motherboard had come loose. Considering that plugging in earphones would cause mechanical stress on this top board, it almost seems inevitable that this connector would break on the motherboard or sound card. This should have been right on the motherboard or connected with a ribbon connector. There are a number of other ribbon connectors in the laptop, so it is already a workable solution. At first it just worked oddly - sometimes the sound would work, sometimes it would make odd noises - sometimes it didn't work. And of course this happened after the unit was out of warranty. I can only imagine that if I took it in to be fixed, the answer would be to replace the motherboard. A motherboard and labor - I can only imagine this would cost nearly...

For a change we got our taxes done early. Early being 2 weeks before the deadline. The last 2 years, things were crazy enough that we wound up filing extensions. But this year we did our taxes on the most appropriate day of the year: April Fools Day - April 1st. Somehow it seems appropriate to me. I'm just not sure who is being made a bigger fool. Trying to read tax code, I think it is me! I'm not big on April Fools. It seems way too easy for people to be unnecessarily mean - and it seems like meanness can only escalate until someone gets upset. The one little joke I played was I told my son he didn't have to clear the table. When he asked 'really', I replied 'April Fools'. That is about as far as I like to go. No long suspense. No elaborate lies. No major emotional plays. Just a tiny bit of quick teasing once.

I was musing about 'The Who' Music used on CSI and on the reference to the guy on the show who was collection famous dead people's picture, saying that he was going to put it next to his Entwistle. I laughed at the connection between the musician from the group that does their theme music. And it reminded me of the morbid joke about getting the Beatles back together, when there were still 3 of them. The joke went it would take 3 more bullets. Ouch :) Then I realize both The Beatles and The Who are down 2 members. So between the 2 groups they have just the right number to make a new fab-four group. :) Then the topic became what would the new group be called? I think the best that came up was The Weavels. A little hard - a little soft - introducing those new old guys from the UK: The Weavels! :)