07-23-05 Journal

July 23, 2005

Nevin lines one up...	Up at 6:00 again Sunday morning to finish studying to teach Sunday School. Ina Sue also got up in good time and cut up a big bowl of fresh peaches. Uncle Enos preached on "The Example of the Apostle Paul". We tried to leave immediately after the sermon because we had a dinner appointment over at Nevins. Luckily they didn't eat without us. Carolyn Kurtz, sister Laura, and Kimberly Eshleman were also there. Kay K. fixed us a wonderful dinner of roast beef, potatoes, green beans, peach jello, pound cake & icecream. After dinner the ladyfolks visited while Nevin and I tried our hand on his new pool table. From Nevins we dropped in at Dad's for a short visit. Nevins called and said we had left Carolina's banky at their house. So we drove there only to find out that Dad's had called to say we had left something else back there.... Oh well, we still make it back in time for church in the evening. Benita Hege had a reading, Daryl Brubaker had a book review & Hendrick had a character study on Moses.
Grandmother & granddaughter...	Monday was just a regular day. I was at the shop all day. Ina Sue did wash. Is was extremely muggy and in the afternoon a pretty fierce thunderstorm blew up. I got home from work a bit late and Ina Sue had fried lebanon baloney sandwiches waiting. Delicious! We had a relaxing evening but my monitoring software paged me that our wireless internet was down, I'm guessing from the thunderstorm. There's not much I can do tonight so I guess I get to look forward to that tomorrow.
An evening with Carls	Tuesday, Oh what a day! Extremely hot and extremely muggy. I started working early on to figure out what was wrong with our wireless internet. After some checking I realized that I couldn't talk to the radios on the tower from either end. NOT GOOD! I climbed 280' up that tower in the hot humidity in hopes of finding just a blown power supply. No such luck! It seems the router got blasted.... I carried the router back down and did some diagnostics back at the shop. Nothing worked so I ordered in another router overnighted. Luckily my customers all seemed understanding. Ina Sue spent most of the day sewing. After supper we went over to Carl's for a visit and snack of chips and floats. A really nice time but after 10:30 before we got left.
My daughter, the goober...	Wednesday morning I left early in order to get a service call in to Augusta Fiberglass before the new router got in. The router got in around 11:30 so after quickly configuring and testingit at the shop, I headed back up the tower. (I have just about gotten over enjoying the climb...) I got up to the top and connected everything up. The lights didn't seem to be blinking quite right so I called back to the shop to check on the connection. Still not good... Tried everything I could think of but not able to connect from the shop to the tower. So, I stuck the router in the front of my pants and headed back down. I was getting frustrated. Took the router back to the shop to check the configuration but as soon as I hooked it up there it worked fine???? After going over everything I could think of I replaced the radio card and headed back out to the tower. It was starting to get a bit cloudy looking and by the time I got to about 150' it started to lightning. I headed back down quickly and knocked off for the day.
The view from 280 feet	Ina Sue finished sewing Carolina Sue's dress. For supper we had corn-on-the-cob. After supper we went to prayer meeting. This evening we had our congregational sunday school elections. Since I was not on for any positions they asked me and Gordon to serve as tellers. Daryl Brubaker will be the new superintendent and Lloyd Oberholtzer will serve another term as trustee (He does such a great job I think he should get tenure...) Bro. Wendell made an announcement that came as a bit of a surprise to us. The ministry would like the church's blessing to ordain another minister. I thought we had enough clergy but with Uncle Howard & Uncle Enos both retiring I can see the wisdom in getting another minister in training. We'll see.... James Groff had a good talk on "Saying No". After I dropped the ladies off at home I went over to Ivan's to fix his shop computer. The power supply was bad so it was an easy fix.
Looking back toward our store...	Thursday morning I got up and and left around 7:00 to go in and get the tower climb out of the way while it was still cool. I won't go into details but by dinner time and after yet another climb I finally had everybody connecting again. What a week! I finished up the day with calls in Allendale & Walterboro. Ina Sue spent the morning making a dinner for Ivan Skrivseths (to help out with new baby) She did some sewing and had a delicious supper of sausage-potato quiche & squash casserole waiting for me when I got home. After supper I went to work on the book shelves at the school. Ina & Carolina dropped in for a while and spent some time watching the youth play volleyball. Ralph helped me quite a bit. I kept working after the rest left. Got quite a bit done but didn't get home until about 1:30am.... Sleepy.....
The wife gets tough with vines!	I awoke to my pager going off Friday morning. When I saw whose number it was I nearly questioned my religion... (Not really, but it did seem God was putting me through some real testing) It was one of our wireless customers from the SCAT park and when I checked I saw that the wireless was down once again. One small consolation was that I couldn't even ping the router in our shop. That meant that the problem might not lie at the top of a tower.... After I hurried into the shop that is exactly what I found. The lightning had burnt up the router in our shop. I normally have a spare router but I had left it out at the Kronotex construction site 25' up on a telephone pole. I called out there and begged the use of a lift to get to it. Since it was still only about 7:30 I didn't have much luck, but the president of the company tried to help and ended up giving me an extremely interesting tour of the plant to take my mind off of the long wait. We finally got the lift and I got the router. From there I soon had things flowing again. Ina Sue did the normal friday cleaning. She also did a little sewing. After I got home we ate a light supper then worked on getting as much of the yard mowed as possible. The grass had been growing so fast that even when you mow every week it still feels like you are making hay. Sometimes I wish our mower had a leaf collector on it. After it got dark we relaxed on the couch together and just listened to music... Then to bed.
Ralph helping finish the shelves.	Saturday was another one of those busy days. I wanted to work some more at the school so I really scurried around getting my work done in the morning. I was able to start mowing soon after 7:30. Ina Sue sprayed Round-up, picked up sticks and helped me pull the weed vines down out of the tops of our camellias. I don't know what kind of vine it is but it grows quickly up through the inner part of the camelia then spreads out all over the top. They are a pain to remove because they are so entwined with the camellia limbs.... About the time I got the lawn all finished up I got a page from Vaughn Electronics (the RadioShack in Bamberg) Here lightning had hit the network card in their main computer and he needed me to do a Saturday call to fix it so that they could keep the store running.
Evening with friends.	I left around 11:30 and took care of that then went on to the school and worked there with Ralph Dickerson until about 4:30. Then I came home and helped Ina Sue get things ready for our company. She fixed pizza, cucumber salad, chips, ice tea and blueberry delight. We had over James & Brenda Groff, Hendrick and Richard. (Kind of a Computer Solutions/Radioshack party) After supper we played a game of Password, then a couple rounds of Balderdash. We had fun and it seemed that they did too. It was around 11:30 before everyone left. We hit the sack!