MrGrumpy's ICE bucket challenge...

Well it had to happen, MrGrumpy could see from the various social media posting that people closer and closer were doing the #IceBucketChallenge and donating to the ALS charity.
Here is MrGrumpy's one...

Look who just moved in...

MrGrumpy and LittleMissNaughty have some new house guests, MissSmokey and MissBandit... they have their own new blog where you can follow them

Another anniversary

So MrGrumpy and LittleMissNaughty moved into the house one year ago, again the lounge and kitchen are in disarray due to the ongoing kitchen update.

Year 2...

Two years ago today MrGrumpy arrived in the USA, he can't believe that the last year has gone so quickly. In only a couple of weeks LittleMissNaughty will have been here a year...

When it rains it pours, sometimes it rains in California... yes it really does...

Monday morning MrGrumpy had to head back home in the morning as LittleMissNaughty had called him because she heard a loud bang and then the power went out. Turned out it was not just their house, a transformer had blown up and the majority of the complex was off. LittleMissNaughty needed to go out to her voluntary work and with the garage door being electric they had to work out how the manual override worked. "It must be quite simple" MrGrumpy thought, as he dangled from the pull cord attempting to open the door. It turns out the door is actually quite heavy to open, easy to shut but heavy to open.
The power was back on by lunch, but there was continued work ongoing until late into the night.

So to MrGrumpy's surprise the TV weather predicted it would rain yesterday and today, low and behold it rained. MrGrumpy can cope with a little bit of grim weather, after all the past 40+ years of living in the UK he has become accustomed to it.
This morning after his wet drive to work (a little late due to the iPod touch alarm output being redirected to a nonexistent bluetooth device) he got another message from LittleMissNaughty, there was another loud bang and the power had gone again... So much for the fix they did...
Lucky LittleMissNaughty does go volunteering today as MrGrumpy expects she would not easily be able to open the garage door manually.

MrGrumpy's and DIY

We all know how much MrGrumpy likes to complain about DIY, he currently hopes that doing more of it will improve his results and abilities.
One of MrGrumpy's problems (yes he has many, but this is just one of them), is that he wants to minimise his spending on doing DIY, this is normally a false economy, either he has to do it twice or needs to buy something else to complete the job. It is not always him just being "tight", sometimes he is limited by time / storage space and skill (lack of). His background in programming does help him resolve these issues, but quite often is is after something has already gone wrong.
Currently this list of DIY project he has is increasing by the day, two bathrooms, a kitchen, lounge, furniture (bedside tables, headboard, bed frame), renew decking.

As if he needed another hobby...

Well MrGrumpy has taken on a new hobby / project / DIY, even after posting recently that he does not have enough time for his existing ones...
This one is driven in part by wanting to get some furniture to replace the not so stylish "Pickfords cardboard" bedside tables.
If your interested then you can follow his disasters progress on http://minionmade.blogspot.com (there is a link on the side of the blog)

Time wasted thanks to technology and idiots...

Just to really cheer MrGrumpy up, on Sunday LittleMissNaughty and MrGumpy decided to tidy up the garage, so off to the DIY store to buy some shelving. For a change they went to somewhere other than HomeDepot, they went to OSH (orchard supply hardware) as LittleMissNaughty had a $5 voucher and it was a "No Sales Tax" weekend.
It was all fine to start with, they ambled around finding what they needed (and some extras like plants and a solar lit bird feeder), now onto the checkouts. There is always quite a queue, but  it seems worse than normal, once they got to the front they were informed that the "System Was Down" and Credit/Debit cards were not really working... MrGrumpy thought "That information would have been useful before we wasted the last hour in here"... They did try checking out, first till, not a chance, card reader seemed to be stuck in a diagnostic mode. Next till, they just rang up some of the items, as credit card transactions below $50 may work, so why did they try do $55? You can guess the outcome, no link, no authentication... By this time MrGrumpy's patience was wearing pretty thin, so when asked if he wanted to try again or come back tomorrow, he decided to leave...and let them put his goods back.

Too Many things too little time...

MrGrumpy has a bit of a dilemma, he has too many things that he would like to do as hobbies and too little spare time to do them. OK this is not a world ending problem to have, most of his spare time is eaten away just keeping the technology in the house running smoothly.
Now that LittleMissNaughty is doing more of her Cardmaking, that is requiring MrGrumpy to provide additional technical input, so you could almost class that as one of his hobbies.
Next up is Photography, well that has been neglected quite a bit in the last few months, it has not helped that MrGrumpy was feeling under the weather and could not find the motivation to go out and about with the camera.
The list of things he would like to be spending time on goes on, but with limited time and money he will have to juggle both as well as he can, maybe he should write and app to decide for him... (oops that would be another time taking hobby)...

MrGrumpy plans to go square for a while

Firstly as promised, here is the picture of the latest elephant acquired by LittleMissNaughty.

And on the note of images, MrGrumpy has decided that the classic 4x3 landscape and portrait decision is one he no longer wants to make when taking photos. So his plan is to change to square format for a while. OK it's pretty simple on the "iFoam" to change to square but on his Nikon he will have to "guesstimate" when framing the shots.

Chasing the sun(set), the end to a busy weekend

MrGrumpy and LittleMissNaughty had quite a busy weekend, it started off on Friday with an evening visit to the coast, where LittleMissNaughty found a little shop where you acquired another MrElephant for her collection. (Photo to follow)

Saturday morning began with MrGrumpy fighting with his internet / technology to enable him to watch the England vs Ireland rugby, it turned out after disabling IPv6 on the new router and a reboot of everything he was able to get the BBC sport app on the PS3 to work, but only for the Olympics, as soon as he chose the "live" rugby it would just lock up (and even reset the PS3 once)... You can imagine how happy this made MrGrumpy... Anyway with a few moments to go he was able to get the streaming to work and was able to watch the game (except for a couple of min just after half time, where Ireland scored and the stream dropped out)

After the rugby (a close game in which England prevailed), they put the cycles on the truck and went up towards the bay for a bit of exercise and to reacquaint themselves with the pain of cycling again. They had a pleasant 10mile (ish) ride on a nice flat and quiet trail that leads to the edge of the Bay.

In the evening MrGrumpy and LittleMissNaughty were meeting up with a group of ExPats to discuss the rugby (oh and have a pint or two...)

Sunday, well that began quietly, MrGrumpy expected to have a bit of a hangover, but to his surprise that was not the case. He did really fancy a FullEnglishBreakfast, but that turned into MrGrumpy making a curry for lunch (due to watching Saturday kitchen on iPlayer).

After lunch they headed of to the coast again, this time with MrGrumpy's camera, they were attending another meetup, the intention to get a sunset by Pigeon Point lighthouse. At the lighthouse, the fog was rolling in off the sea, the chance of a sunset was remote. The decision was made to head south and try one of the beaches (before the fog caught up).

The did catch a sunset, but the fog bank off shore cut it short.

MrGrumpy does some Ninja Soldering...

MrGrumpy is not generally known for his soldering skills, in fact his soldering has been referred to as more akin to Welding than soldering. Last weekend and early this week he needed to up the level of his soldering just a bit... All he needed to do was solder 6 wires onto a dev board, how difficult could it be? He started by using the "Wrong Wire Grommit", which meant his challenge became like a game of Whack-a-mole as wires popped off at random... Unfortunately during this process he managed to remove one of the tracks and the pad he was trying to solder to. MrClimbEveryMountain suggested he used a much thinner wire, so MrGrumpy started again... Soldering to the side of a tiny chip is a tad challenging, but was necessary due to the missing pad and track, this time after setting the microscope to max and trying not to burn his fingers too badly, he managed to connect all the wires and after an initial ground issue, it sprung into life...

Virus and general update

Well MrGrumpy is still coughing, not as much as he was, it is still quite annoying for his co-workers...

LittleMissNaughty is back to doing some volunteering at the moment, her employment only lasted the one week and with good reason,  you could say that MrLegalEagle was a "BitOfAnAss" so it was time to move on.

There is still no update on the status or whereabouts of MrWhiteRabbit. :-(

LittleMissNaughty's First StooperBowl

Well this was MrGrumpy's 3rd StooperBowl in the US (the first was after the DaftWayDown from Seattle to LasVegas) and LittleMissNaughty's first. They were invited over to gathering with MrBombsAway and Mr7LtrVette, it was all good until the very first play where the Blanko's Quarterback (the names have been changed to protect the guilty) totally missed the snap and ended up losing 2 points in the first few seconds... and it did not improve from there... The SmugHawks did give up a charitable 8 points (just to save the Blanko's from a total whitewash).

Virus Attack

MrGrumpy has been feeling under the weather, over the weekend he was either freezing or boiling, there was not in between. Monday was the first day he has been off work ill for a few years. Now that has passed he is starting to get an annoying cough.

No More MrWhiteRabbit

MrGrumpy and LittleMissNaughty are missing the visits of MrWhiteRabbit.
His last visit was on the day they left for vacation before Christmas.
Since they have been back there has been no sign of him :-( They took a walk around the complex but still no evidence of him.

First week and Technical Bit & Bobs...

Well LittleMissNaughty is getting to the end of her first week at work, she is finding it a little stressful, not surprising really given the last time she started a new job was 17+ years ago. MrGrumpy thinks that it won't take her long to put MrLegalEagle into his place and realise who is boss.

After lugging his old Windoze laptop back to the US, MrGrumpy decided to see if he could make it a usable machine again. It was so slow, you could measure the startup time on a calendar. So what could he do with a 2006 vintage laptop? It originally came with WindozeXP, he had updated it to Windoze7 (which was fun as none of the drivers were available from the suppliers site). With only had 2GB of memory the machine was maxxed out, OK, "it's only a 32bit 1.6Ghz CPU and OS but should be able to squeeze it up to 4GB" MrGrumpy thought. MrFarSide supplied some memory that was destined for the skip, he put in 2 x 2GB modules and to his surprise it showed up as 4GB (well 3GB available) - so that was a win.
Next step, SSD, this would cost a little but after some deliberation he decided the machine would at least get some extra life if it was usable, so he ordered a 120GB Samsung SSD from MrAmazon... which arrived next day. 30 Mins later he swapped over the cloned SSD into the laptop and it booted... Not amazingly quick, but better (and silent, except for the fan), few tweeks here and there and it seems much better.

Word cloud from this Blog...

Back to the Future...

MrGrumpy and LittleMissNaughty had their holiday back in the UK, they very much enjoyed seeing lots of their Family and Friends. MrGrumpy did drink and eat far too much, so much he feels more like MrBlobby at the moment...

The Flight to the UK seemed to take forever, maybe not helped by them being at the airport 6 hours before the flight. Also the jet-lag and not being in there own surroundings extended their non sleeping to almost a week...

In contrast the return flight did not seem as bad, maybe the "extra leg room" seats helped. Within a couple of days they had recovered back to an almost normal sleep pattern.

There was little to annoy MrGrumpy at the airport, except when they tried to check-in and the "system had gone down", which added a 40 min delay where they just stood around waiting... oh and the extra 30 min on the plane while they refueled it with a thimble.

Upon return to the US, they have not seen MrWhiteRabbit at all :-( , it is unlike him to not be in the garden at all for several days.

LittleMissNaughty starts her new role today, she finished off her volunteering before our holiday and now starts a new chapter with MrLegalEagle in downtown SanJose.