April 22 2012 - Since my last update I have gone down another pants size.  I wear a 34 waist and a 32 inseam, if I can go down one more pants size I will be known as Chuck Dude Square Pants.  I also worked my way through another Birthday, I am now 54 years old, but I am still younger than both my Bride and my SISTER.  After acquiring a new iPad and iPhones I made the offhand remark to my aforementioned bride that when our PCs die, I might like to replace one of them with an Apple Macintosh to do something different.  So on my birthday The wonder of my life took me to the Apple store and bought me a Mac Mini computer.  It was outfitted with a two 500GB hard drives bringing a total storage capacity of one Terabyte on hard drive, 8 GB of on board memory and a quad core i7 processor running at 2.0 Ghz, A true screamer on anyone's measure.  It was also the cheapest Mac option there is as I did not have to buy an Apple monitor.  I did buy a super drive that does CDs and DVDs both writing and reading, an Apple keyboard.  We brought it home and once finished with the setup process I  sat kind of dumbfounded for a little while.  How the hell do you open a program?  How do you quit one after you start it? I had only fiddled with a Mac once back when the very first Apple Macintosh came out in the early Eighties, and that was a very brief encounter.  So we bought some Mac books from Barnes & Noble, I read and tinkered.  When we bought the computer we bought two software packages with it, as I figured I could not live without them.  MS Office and Quicken for MAC.  The MS Office installed fine and I was able to transfer contacts and pst file info over easily, took time, but it was pretty easy.  Then came Quicken.  As soon as I opened the box I read in the manual pages that came with it that it could not PAY BILLS via the Internet. Damn, that was the primary thing we use Quicken for on the PC.  I also learned that if I wanted to run my weather station software I would have to shell out some BIG bucks to Davis Instruments for the MAC version of the weather software.  So here I sit with two SIGNIFICANT pieces of software I MUST run, but can only run on Windows PC.  The solution?  I set up a Virtual Windows PC on the MAC and then transferred my actual Windows PC environment to a virtual image on the MAC.  Again, not a quick process - took two solid days, however it worked. Then I started bringing all of my PC graphics files over from the PC to the MAC.  What a pain, it brought them over as a different user so I had to go in and modify the permissions for the files to let me see and use them as my main log in user.  Along the way I learned that the heart of the MAC is actually a clever GUI front end sitting upon a UNIX build.  Out comes the terminal and I am quickly fixing file permissions with chmod.  The last bit of software I felt I must have to run on the MAC was my Canon Digital SLR camera utilities since I do a bunch of imaging and image handling/processing.  I tried to install from the Canon factory disk that came with the DSLR, but I kept encountering a "You do not have sufficient privileges to install this software" error.  I tried everything, including logging on as another user, logging on as root (the most powerful user in UNIX), changing the permissions on all of the installation files, all to no avail.  So I called Canon and spent forty five minutes on the phone with their technical reps and they could not solve it other than to point the blame at Apple.  So I called Apple and spent almost an hour on the phone with their tech wizards (they call them Geniuses, the jury is still out on that call) and their best solution was for me to take the whole shootin match to the Apple store where their "Geniuses" could help ascertain if the problem was in the computer or the disk I was trying to install from.   I spent four hours at the Apple store at the mercy of the Apple "geniuses".  They appeared to have the problem solved and the Canon software would load.  I went home a tired but happy camper.  Once home I began fiddling around with installing the remaining Canon software utilities and I quickly learned what the "Geniuses" had done.  They simply re-installed a NEW instance of the MAC Operating System and copied the contents of the Application folder over to it.  They installed this bit of trickery on the second Hard Drive in the computer. I already had the virtual PC loaded on that hard drive so between this second installation of the MAC operating system and the actual virtual PC files, the second half of a Terabyte hard drive had less than a gigabyte of storage left!  So here the computer sits with s second working boot-up partition and the ENTIRE virtual machine taking up nearly all of one of the two hard drives and leaving a crippled version of the OS on the other hard drive. I was upset that they did that and called the store.  So after nearly two weeks of transferring and loading software the Apple store erased those hard drives and gave me a brand new computer fresh out of the box.  It only took me two and a half day to rebuild it back to the point it was before the issue with the Canon software, and it loaded the Canon software without a hitch.  So I am now actually trying to use the MAC as a replacement computer for my Windows PC.  I am actually scribing this edition of the Rambling on the MAC.  I have two weeks to decide if I really want to keep this computer or not.  I have until May 2nd to decide.  If on May first I am not happy I can box it all up, including the software and take it back to the Apple store for a full refund.    I should have gone through creating one new newsletter creation for the Norfolk County Rifle range club and a myriad of other "chores" by then.

Karen has been hooked by the Scentsy bug.  Scentsy is a system that delivers various aromas to your abode via aromatic hot wax warmers heated by special low wattage light bulbs.  At least it makes the house smell better than dog. She is into it hook line and sinker.  She started having parties and selling the stuff so much that it was impractical to carry all of the stuff she needed to put on a party in her little Honda two door coupe.  And after instances of her needing my SUV on the same nights I was doing telescope stuff it quickly became apparent that her little red Accord would have to get swapped out. So we traded the little red 2010 Accord in for a 2010 white Honda CRV, yes she had a CRV before the Accord, but we got such a swell deal on the new CV we could not afford to pass it up.  Plus no more leased vehicles, we are buying this one outright.  It might be the one we retire in too Colorado in about eight years.  Karen has been going like gangbusters setting up parties and attending events with her district Scentsy manage.  It has given the old goat a new lease on things!  I am glad that she has found something to pour her discretionary time into, Lord knows she doesn't get into standing out all hours of the night hunting for fuzzy things in telescopes and she doesn't get a "bang" out of shooting, so I welcome her adventure.  As far as Scentsy, she has our house covered.

Cammie is once again in Little League baseball, it would be nice if he and his mother could find one sport and stick to it, that way he could build experience and knowledge in a sport.  But it also takes some commitment on the parent's part, in The Dork's case, her part, to attend the games and make sure he makes it to the games.  Even though I was working for Raytheon and traveling greater than 80% of the time I managed to make it to almost every single game Cheryl or Michael participated in.  I could probably count on one hand the number of games I missed between the both of them for about five+ years.

The dogs are all doing well, too well in fact.  They are all on DIET dog food, the only one who does not need to be on the reduced calorie food is Bronco who is quite svelte at about 105 lbs.  Ninya who is about a hand shorter than Bronco outweighed him by a pound at the last vet visit.  Tinkerbell, well let's just give the mental image of a football with toothpicks as legs, and little miss Ellie is getting quite a stomach as well.  So ALL treats have been stopped, save an occasional scrap of scrambled egg or sparsely provided Milkbones.  The cats are still getting along just fine, Scout is over 16 years old with Tessa not far behind him.  In fact Scout just sneaked up a tree and plucked a nearly full grown baby black bird from its nest and brought it down for Karen, so he is no slouch there.  He howls at Karen all the time for food and attention and now gets his ass locked up in the laundry room at night.