The Tucker Stories

Yesterday, Kelly got the keys to her library at Owen Elementary School and I got my Final DD-214!  So, Kelly can now be the bread winner whilst I putz around the house.  Naw, not really but it sounded good.  To me at least!  After the last of the Unaccompanied Baggage arrives today, we’re into the house re-arranging today and the house remodeling/repairs continue.

Cheers!!

So we’re back in town, dealing with Bragg to get our stuff and cleaning up the house from the renters.  Friday night, Kelly tells me there’s leak from the back bathroom toilet.  OK, no problem.  I look and confirm there’s water coming from the base after the flush.  Saturday morning, Matt has his first driving lesson by taking us to our local Ace Hardware to pick up the bits and bobs of toilet repair.  Job’s a good ‘un before noon.

Today, Kelly had a plan of action to get us further along with all of these boxes and immediately steps into a puddle of water in the bathroom.  We’re thinking its the toilet leaking again, but, nope.  Matt and I did a good job there.  Naw, there’s water coming from underneath the cabinet and the bottom of which is completely rotten through.  So I tore the whole cabinet out to get into the wall to find a leak in the hot water line to the sink.  It looks like that has been going for quite some time as the water has soaked up the gypsum behind the wall about 6 inches.  As for the sink from that cabinet, I had Matt use it to replace the front bathroom sink which had rusted out!!?!!  How does that JUST happen??!!  I’m not happy with our rental manager as I was expecting them to keep this sorta crap from happening.

Now I’m looking for a plumber to come in and fix this little leak as I don’t know how to weld/solder/seal copper pipes.  But I must admit that I’m still digging the joys of home ownership as this is MY HOUSE!!

Cheers!!

No, I’m not talking about this hokey movie or this old classic.  Naw, I’m talking about the remaining 188 days until the Clan Tucker moves back to the United States of America, finally and permanently.  This afternoon, I picked up my Retirement Orders which officially puts me on the Retired List of the United States Army as of 1 November 2010 with 25 years, 2 months and 22 days of total Federal Service.  The next step is to get the Travel Orders which authorizes me to move my kit and kaboodle outta here!  Yes, Kelly is counting EACH and EVEY day as they creep on by.  BTW, there’s a countdown timer on the bottom right of the blarg for those who are tracking this, too.

Cheers!!

Thanks to my buddy Art, I found this clip of Mike Rowe (details here and here) to be rather intriguing.  I’ve got to say that I really can appreciate what he’s saying about work.  As I’m wrapping up a 23+ year career of serving the dictatorship, the US Army, that guards the Republic and looking at what I’m gonna do afterwards, I’m thinking that I want to do something with my hands.  The last 10 years I’ve spent working IT, which has limited physical effort, and I want to do something that, at the end of the day, I can see the fruits of my labors.  And I like how Mike Rowe just puts it out there.  This is what he has to say, like it or not, but not in a confrontational, “in your face” manner.  Just like in this letter he was asked to write to an aspiring Eagle Scout.  “But I can tell you for certain, that NOT getting your Eagle, will be one of the easiest things you’ve ever done.”  There ya go.  And his website, MikeRoweWorks.com, is pretty clever, too.  Nothing wrong or dishonorable with honest, manual labor.  Just not cool or glamorous in today’s techno age.  Sorta sounds like a Star Trek or Twilight Zone episode, huh?

Cheers!!

My wife was reading the book The Political Mind and came across an interesting tidbit.  Seems that Bush II had been adding signing statements to bills that he’s signed into Federal Law.  In my wanderings of the Intarwebz, I’d read about this before on one of the news sites and when I was telling Kelly about it, I couldn’t find the story again.  It was just gone.  When she came across this tidbit in the book, she remembered my telling her about it and got us to thinking:  WTF, eh?!?  Why isn’t the Congress, ACLU, ABA, et al, up in arms about this practice?  Or are we the only ones who thinks that this is as wrong as the summer day is long?

When I was growing up, the scary movies of the day were The Omen, Amityville Horror, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, just to name a few.  Back then, scary movies required the audience to think, to perceive the danger, to anticipate the terror.  As the years went by, these thriller-type movies devolved into the gash and gore, slasher movies and I just stopped watching them.

Until now.

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Somewhere, sometime last week I read about the Picasa photo management tool and was hooked.  I’m thinking that Google is gonna give Microsoft a run for it’s money with these cool new programs they’re building.  I say this because Picasa does a fantastic job of sorting through all of the snaps and then will attempt to do facial recognition on them.  Talk about helping with the sorting.  Even better, Picasa doesn’t do >anything< to the photos themselves.  Doesn’t move them around, like iTunes does(!!!), nor does it change anything about the file itself.  It only creates a small index file of the photos found in each directory.  With that in mind, I installed the program yesterday and let it run over the next 12-13 hours last night.  Lotsa snaps to plough through.  I’ve spent the last 8-9 hours doing the final sort on the ones that Picasa couldn’t figure out itself.  So, of the 44,592 files in the Happy Snaps directory, Picasa wasn’t able to get through just over 8k by itself and in the past 9 hours, I’ve crunched through about 2k worth of photos, as well as massaging the snaps it through it’d recognized properly.  Now, I’ll gunge along with this over the next couple of weeks but I’m real happy with this prog enough to recommend to the rest of ya’ll.  Take a look at it and give it a whirl.  I’ll let ya’ll know how I progress.

Cheers!!

So, back in the day, Kelly got her new car, the 1977 Triumph Spitfire 1500 with an Opel Kadet E 1200S engine.  This car was to be a “hobby” car where I would work on this car, over long periods of time.  Think weeks to do a single job.  And that all changed when Maggie got stole.  Now, when the Triumph has a mechanical failure, there is a lot of pressure to get that fixed before someone’s job get effected.  So far, that has not been too much of  a problem.  Until the headlights went out.

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Wow.  My youngest boy, Matthew, is now 17 years old.  Sheesh.  I don’t mind being an old guy, I don’t really care for being reminded of it is all.  Today, we were doing some of the prep-work for his upcoming Eagle project and I can remember when he used to play with his (imaginary) Panthers football team in the back yard.  Ya know, I remember folks saying that time will fly.  I just didn’t know that they weren’t kidding.  Happy Snaps are posted.

Cheers!!