Someone just forwarded one of those funny emails that proves that the number of people who enjoy Jazz is actually less than the number of people who want to play Jazz.
It occurrs to me that similar arguments can be used to show that the actual number of people who enjoy pure science fiction (no zombies, demons, vampires or elves) in reality is less than the number of people who aspire to be science fiction writers.
There is lots of evidence to support this. For instance the combined subscriptions of the top science fiction magazines is well under 100,000 and the number of short story submissions to these magazines is pushing 50,000. It might be easy to come up with the math to show that the number of pure science fictions fans who subscribe to science fiction magazines is less than the number of people submitting stories to science fiction magazines. What remains is to factor in the submission rates at all the SF magazines on Ralan’s website and compare that to the number of page views they get for their stories as compared to their submission guidelines pages.
I have no doubt that at least 3/4 of all of the readers of SF magazines and websites are wannabe writers, and only 1/4 of them actually read SF for pleasure.
One of my best revenue sources lately has been eBay Partner Networks. The way it works is that eBay will give you money if you send them buyers. It used to work that you got a chunk of the auction fees when someone was a high bidder on an auction. My HarpAmps.com site used to clean up because amplifiers typically go for over $500. I devised some fancy eBay searches that made finding a good amp easy, and they worked because my surfers are buying thousands of dollars worth of amps every month.
The problem is that eBay has fiddled with a good thing. They decided that they would use “quality clicks” to filter out the people who would have bought an amp anyway, even if they did not use my links. As a result of this “quality”, my revenue was significantly cut. I still get enough money that I won’t throw out the eBay clicks, but the days of big checks are now gone.
Starting tomorrow my eBay partner network income will be about 1/3 of what it was. I was having fun making up new searches for my surfers to find stuff on eBay, but it is a waste of time now.
We had a load of wood delivered. Erica sent me some pictures.
The first picture is the wood dropped off in the driveway. About a third of a cord. We’ll stack this for easy access along the hedge. Those ladder-like things you can see are a frame for stacking wood that I made out of salvaged boards from when I fixed up the deck.
This is a picture of an area inside the fence where we can stack about 4 cords. This looks like about a cord and a half. In all Erica ordered 4 cords, which is about what we would use in a cold winter.
I wrote a plugin for the Wordpress Blogging software. It fixes issues where the page name has changed. I needed this after I migrated from Blogger.com to Wordpress. Many of the posts had different names and Google was not sending surfers to the right page.
It has been up about a half an hour and I have already had 12 downloads.
This is exciting – well maybe not for you. If I publish a short story, maybe 50 people will read it, but if I write a program that is useful thousands or tens of thousands will use it. Cherchez Le Trafic – I guess I am a much more successful programmer than story writer.
Jim just sent me a note reminding me that Thursday is not only Poker night in Upper Nyack, but “Watch Stella on CSI” night.
Stella plays a stripper on Thursday night’s CSI.
A porn producer and a drug dealer are murdered in an upscale Las Vegas area, and the investigation centers on the members of the affluent neighborhood.
Stripper? Polly and Jim must be so proud.
Stella Maeve has been on Law and Order several times. She has a recurring role on Gossip Girl. She is a costar in the Film Runaways, and she is currently filming a new movie on location in upstate NY.
I put a few of my programming projects on my domain BlogsEye.com. I decided to use it to keep my programming projects separate from the rest of my work.
The stuff that I wrote for this blog in order to correct the migration problems that I had with going from blogger to Wordpress is working well. I cleaned it up and formalized it. The next step is to get it listed in Wordpress’ repository.
I bought my 2009 Ford Ranger under the Cash for Clunkers program. It was a great deal, but I had to take what the dealers had and that was a bare bones model with just a radio. I wanted to play my old Cassette tapes. I have a few thousand dollars worth of cassettes. I have bypassed CDs completely and the few I have I’ve already ripped to MP3 format and uploaded to my iPod. The cassettes are mostly books on tape and I want to listen to them for the next ten years.
I looked for a good replacement for my radio-only audio system, but was surprised to find a Radio/Cassette player that was pulled from a 2003 Ranger at a garage sale last Saturday. This model sells for $10 to $20 on eBay, but I was lucky enough to get it for $5.
I needed to pull the existing radio and drop in the new one. As a far as I could tell Ford Radios from 1993 up will fit in a Ford Ranger as long as they are the same “double din” format. There are four holes in the radio and Ford will sell you a tool for pulling the radio using these holes.
I decided to try making my own tool from a coat hanger. I cut the corners off a metal coat hanger and bent it so that is will fit into the holes.
You can see how I made it. The important part is that the two ends be the same depth so that they go in straight and the same distance on both sides.
Push the two tools into the holes as far as they go. As you push in, angle the tool towards the center. This moves the tool over the tabs so they can be depressed.
When the tools are pushed in as far as they will go, press then outward from the center and this will pull in the tabs holding the radio . If you do it right, the radio will pull out by gently pulling on the tools (still pressing them outward).
The radio should fall out practically into your lap.
You can see the back of the radio, and the antenna and cable connector should pull out easily. There is a tab on the cable connector that you have to push in and it will let you pull the connector out easily.
My truck had just one connector, but yours might have the super duper multiple speaker system that requires another connector.
The replacement radio had another place for a second connector, but my connector fit in the smaller one.
I plugged things in and it all fit. I was concerned that the new radio had a place for two plugs, but it turns out I had nothing to worry about.
I pushed it into the dash until it snapped in place.
I turned it on and, Voila, it worked perfectly.
The whole thing took under three minutes. It took longer than that to find my diagonal cutters to clip the coat hanger into the right size.
It rained the whole day on Sunday, so I did not get any pictures. It was a great trip, though. Erica and I went up to the Rose Hill Farm in Red Hook, NY. They have Pick-Your-Own deals, but the rain was too much. We bought 1/2 peck (a small shopping bag) of macoun apples and a wonderful apple pie. The apple pies are the old fashioned kind with a thick crispy crust and tart firm apples. It is very different from supermarket apple mush pies with soft crusts.
We then plugged in Millertom, NY into the GPS. Erica had a recollection of the place from an article she read a few years ago. It is a cute little town in Columbia County, NY right on the Connecticut border.
Millerton was a cute little town, but when we wanted lunch only the town diner had empty seats – for good reason. Erica and I sat down and then left because of the unsanitary look of the place. There was a “Tea Bar”, but it only had a few tables and none were empty. There was a Coffee Bar, but the prices were very high and the place had a line waiting for tables.
We stopped at an Organic Farm stand and I bought an apple cider doughnut to keep my blood sugar up. We also bought organic baby beets for dinner when we got home, which were wonderful.
We went through some of the most beautiful country in the area. It was alternately horse farms and rugged hills. There were no flat places and the ride was wonderful. If I go again I will bring the big Nikon camera and take pictures.
The foliage was just starting to change. On the hilltops there was lots of color starting to appear, mostly yellows from the sugar maples. This will darken up to reds as the month goes on and the oaks start to change.
I used about half a tank of gas in the new truck. Good mileage was one of the reasons that I bought it. I had a great time, even though I had about 4 hours behind the wheel. I am looking forward to the next road trip. I hope we can go gallivanting again.
The consultants where I work are forced to take a certain number of days off each quarter. I have to take a few days off before Oct 1.
I am also not allowed to take off days towards the end of the year. This was because one of us saved up and took off the whole month of December and all of his projects either failed or caused political problems because he left them unfinished.
I will not be able to take many days off for Christmas Shopping so if you were expecting a present…
Frederik Pohl has a nice article about The Science Fiction League. I found an original SF League membership card on eBay and I made copies of it. I put a high resolution copy of the card into a standard printer business card template so you can print your own cards.
WARNING: this is nigh onto 30 megs of download and may take a while.
I added a theme switcher and a couple of extra themes. If you look at the sidebar on the right you can see where you can switch to a Very Simple Text theme and a Mobile theme.
I figure Justine reads this blog using her iPhone so she can use the Mobile theme. With this theme everything should fit on the screen and there are no big graphics or javascript that would screw up a simple mobile phone.
The Very Simple Text Theme lets you see the blog as a no frills black on white “fluid” style blog for all of you who hate the ugly colors and graphics.
I am looking for a better mobile theme. The Carrington Mobile theme was way too complicated and I found it difficult to find the right place to add the theme switcher PHP code. For a while I could not get out of the mobile theme. I put it down in the footer, but it doesn’t look like it belongs.
I would like to add more themes, including my new Wandering theme. I am looking for a very simple Mobile phone or iPhone theme and a theme for the hearing impaired who like my friend Art who uses a screen reader. A large font theme might be good, too.
The theme switcher requires a little PHP coding to make it work, but other than that it is a good thing.
Silicon Graphics has released a desktop workstation that qualifies as a super computer. My guess that it can be configured at about 50 teraflops. (A teraflop is a trillion floating point arithmetic operations per second.)
Hans Moravec estimated the computing power of the human brain at 100 teraflops, although some other researches have placed it out at 1,000 times higher. Regardless, we are in the right neighborhood if a desktop computer can even approach the speed of a human brain.
The human brain, in addition to the computing power of billions of neurons, has some fancy programming going on that will not be accurately simulated for a while. The fact that we are creating computers now which are nearly as powerful as a human brain does not mean that anyone has been able to make a computer that thinks like a human. That is ways off (not too far, though).
If trends hold then the computers should continue to increase in capacity and power exponentially, doubling every 18 months. There are some physical limits to the current technologies, but that doesn’t mean that new technologies will not appear to keep the growth on track.
In 2015, then, desktop computers should be at least 16 times more powerful than they are now. Super computers which are a few orders of magnitude more powerful than this desktop, will have the capacity a dozen human brains. Within our lifetimes there will be cheap computers that are smarter than ourselves living in our cell phones.
What will happen, and I am sure of this, some clever programming will result in a human equivalent intelligence program that will be several thousand times smarter than the smartest human who ever lived. There will be lots of these computers working on the difficult unanswered questions of our time. They will solve health issues for us resulting in very long lives. We will get free energy and perhaps even the ability to travel to the stars.
It all starts around 2015, but may be as late as 2025.
I wrote up all the details of what I’ve done to get this blog running on Wordpress. If you have a Wordpress blog, you might read it. It is quite a bit of reading, though.
The main key to success on the internet is keywords. 99% of all of your readers find their way to your site by doing searches on Google (and now Bing) looking for keywords. If you want to have readers that will stick with you, you have to have the right keywords in order to lure and trap them.
The Crotchey Old Fan has a post about this. His is in reference to text ads and their keywords, but such talk can get you in trouble, so I will mention no mentions.
I have borrowed his keyword list (in exchange I offer a very valuable link back to his site).
Here is what Steve wrote:
Please bear with me: Science Fiction. Sci Fi. SciFi. Speculative Fiction. Spec Fic. SpecFic. Genre Fiction. Steampunk. Cyberpunk. Greenpunk. Space Opera. Science Fantasy. Urban Fantasy. High Fantasy. Sword and Sorcery. Military SF. Hard SF. New Wave SF. Paranormal Fantasy. Donkey Kong.
Neil Gaiman. Charlie Stross. John Scalzi. Cory Doctorow. Robert Sawyer. Nick Mamatas. Robert Heinlein. Arthur C Clarke. Isaac Asimov. A. Bertram Chandler. David Drake. Mike Resnick. Edward Lerner. Larry Niven. Eric Flint. John Ringo. Baxter. Weber. Ellison. Delany. Silverberg. Piper. Russell. Brown. Ooops! Cherryh. Bradford. Butler. Russ. Wilhelm. Norton. Bradley. Ursula LeGuin.
COBOL or Common Business-Oriented Language was invented in an attempt to standardize a language for the Department of Defense. One of the inventors of the Language was Grace Murray Hopper (the woman who invented the term “bug” to describe programming defect.)
COBOL code survives to this day, although there are many fewer COBOL jobs. It is estimated that as much as 75% of all computer programs running today are written in COBOL. COBOL runs incredibly fast compared to all modern languages. It is used in large applications like banking and airline reservations systems.
The first program that I wrote as a professional programmer was written in COBOL. I learned how to code it from reading books and looking at the code of other programmers. A programmer named Charlie Hannes had taken classes where he learned Structured Programming and I was greatly influenced then and even to this day by his clean style. I learned the tricks from another programmer, Vinnie DeLuca, who wrote “old style” spaghetti code. He learned to program as a CIA analyst on computers that had less than 10,000 bytes of RAM. He did things like write initialization routines using the input/output buffers where it would be erased when files were read, but after they had done their work. I used such trick extensively in my career as an assembly language coder.
I taught COBOL for 20 years at several colleges, until the last college dropped COBOL from its curriculum.
I wrote my final COBOL program at Lockheed about 1988. COBOL is probably the great Mother Tongue of computer languages and has influenced modern programming even more than other ancient languages such as ALGOL or FORTRAN.
COBOL has been good to me. It kept me in beer and cat food for half of my life and since then, the lessons that I learned from COBOL programming have kept me fat and padded my 401K.
Today, if you find a moment, and there is a bar within walking distance, stop and raise a pint to the COBOL programmers. Most of the original ones have retired or died at their green screen terminals. COBOL programmers are becoming a legend of the Iron Age of computers when bits were stored on magnetic rings and program lines were written by punching holes in paper cards.
It went down into the 50s last night. When I woke up Erica had turned on the oven to warm the kitchen. I like the cold nights. Last night was perfect for getting under a light blanket and feeling all warm, except for your nose.
I cleaned the chimney today in preparation for burning wood. We have a little left over from the 4 cords we bought last year, but Erica has to order a bunch more. I always feel good with a pile of cord-wood in the the yard. It is a kind of wealth.
I turned on the furnace and it started right up. I have a new condensate pump to help. This furnace produces lots of moisture and there is a place where it drips so I have a tub to catch it and now I have a condensate pump to move it to the drain.
It is early to worry about heat, but this last week has been chilly. I expect now that the heat is on that it will be in the 90s for a couple of weeks. They had their first frost already upstate so the frost might come early down here. Usually the first frost is late in October, we’ll see.
The apples are ready upstate so I want to take a Sunday ride up the thruway and buy a pie and a bushel of apples. I need some fall pictures for the blog. Fall is the best time to take pictures.
I never got comment spam using blogger. Since I switched to Wordpress I get a dozen spam messages a day. Luckily the wordpress built in spam catches all of it.
I’ve finally gotten more books than I have room for. I have decided that I will start selling some on eBay again.
In the mean time I have these books I can’t sell, because they still have a lingering scent of mildew. These I will give away as promos. It is up to the winners to figure a way to get rid of the mildew scent.
Just make three comments on my blog on three different posts. When done, use the contact form to send me your snail mail address. Media mail in the US is about a buck a book. If shipping costs too much for crossing a border, I may decide I can’t afford to mail it out. If the book is less than 3/4 inch I can ship it to Canada or Europe quite cheaply, though.
I am starting with three books. The first is a hardcover version from the 70s of Slan by A. E. Van Vogt. The second is a hardcover version of John Varley’s collection Persistence of Vision. I already mentioned Ursula K. LeGuin’s Three Hainish Novels: Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions.
Just make the comments and tell me which book you’d like. First come first serve. One book per week per reader.
The Slan book has the least smell of mildew and the LeGuin the most.
I have about 100 of these books, most of which I’ve read. I will give away as many as I can. If this works out, I’ll start getting rid of my books that don’t smell bad.
(I wrote this post a while ago, and Wordpress noticed that I hadn’t actually published it. I am beginning to like Wordpress.)
There is a strange obsession with vampires and zombies in the spec-fic community lately. I feel that since there is no such thing as a real zombie or vampire, that these are just fantasy elements out of some other writer’s creation. It would be stupid to write vampire stories the same as it would be stupid to write about hobbits, dark elves, schools for magicians, or unicorns. All the good vampire stories (if there ever were any) are written already. Yet, every free zine and almost all of the horror zines have mostly all vampire and zombie stories.
Here is my dilema. I am writing a story with a killer in it. The killer is not the center of the plot, but the main character is very sick wants to die and she thinks that getting this killer to target her is a good way to get the job done.
I have an opportunity here to have the killer be a vampire. Not a real vampire, but an insane person who thinks that they are a vampire. (I can’t bring myself to make him a real vampire) I would do this for one reason. If editors are buying and publishing vampire stories it means that they like vampire stories and the readers want vampire stories. I have the chance to make my story, in a sidewas kind of twist to the plot, a vampire story, even though it isn’t a real vampire and the story would not be about the vampire.
I hate vampires.
What do you think? Vampire or just a boring strangler or throat slasher?
The story, by the way, is based on a vingette from Durrel’s The Alexandrian Quartet. In the book there is a vampire living in Italy that kills one night a year. The police know the night and are ready for him, but he always manages to kill his victim and escape. The vingette has hardly anything to do with the rest of the novels. I think Durrell was bored one day and just wrote the chapter for fun and left it in the book.
I started reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s Three Hainish Novels: Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions (complete in one volume). I grabbed the book the other morning from the garage sale books that my brother found, and it really smells of mildew. It found it difficult to read and I could not keep any interest in it. I gave up after the first 30 pages. It might have been the smell or this damn headache, but it has to do with my inability to connect with the characters. The book is full of scene switches and action that I have trouble following. What is more, I did not care enough to go back and see what was going on. By the time I was through a few dozen pages the story had gotten away from me and I did not want to continue.
I realize that there are many LeGuin fans out there and many people who would like to read this book. I did not like the Earthsea books, and I did not like Left Hand of Darkness, so I don’t expect that I will try this book again.
If you want the book, make three comments on this blog on three different posts. Once you have made the three posts, email me your snail mail address and I’ll ship the book out book rate to you.
I’ve had a headache for a week or more. I wake up with it and then it gets a little better and then at night it starts to get worse. It is mostly a dull pain and not very extreme, just always there and annoying.
Arthritis Headaches: Pain at the back of head or neck. Intensifies on movement. Caused by inflammation of the blood vessels of the head or bony changes in the structures of the neck.
or:
Tension-Type Headaches: Dull, non-throbbing pain, frequently bilateral, associated with tightness of scalp or neck. Degree of severity remains constant. Causes: Emotional stress. Hidden depression.
I don’t have much emotional stress or hidden depression, but I could use some time off – I am very sick of working all the time.
I am going to the doctor today to get another Lyme test, and whine about my headache. I think it might be strain from reading on the bus or trying to use the laptop computer while Ollie sleeps on my chest, but there may be a medical reason for it. If the Lyme disease is still with me, then this could be a symptom.
Disney animation of bizarre life on Mars. It is reminiscent of Greg Bear’s novel Moving Mars. There is much food for stories here even if it is from the 1957.
I transferred all data to Wordpress. The blog is now free of Blogger.com and its restrictions.
There are numerous small differences that I have to work on. There are a handful of pages that have different names now. The archives looks different and the individual posts don’t have all of the formatting that appears on the front page.
All in all, it was painless. I just hacked the hell out of the default template and you see the results. I will continue to tweak things as I find issues. Please report anything odd.
Warning: technical gobbledygook follows – do not read if you are not a programmer or blogger.
Blogger export does not export anything that is usable by any other program. There are programs that convert the exported xml file to a Wordpress export file, but they don’t work with my file. Either my file is too big or there are bugs in the programs. Wordpress will not import from my blogger account directly.
I have one or two more things to try, but unless I can find the Wordpress format and figure out what is in the blogger format so I can make a conversion program I am out of luck on this one.
AHA! Success
Here’s what I had to do. First, you need a hosting company that will let you run long scripts. 1and1.com failed me here and I had to use a domain at HostGator. You get what you pay for in this case.
Log into your blogger account and turn off archiving (this is a magic step. I don’t know what difference it makes.) You do this by going into the archiving tab and setting the frequency to none.
I had to switch blogger from FTP publishing to a BlogSpot domain. This is only temporary. Save your settings on BlogSpot .
Open the WP admin page and click on import/blogger. You will have to refresh your credentials because Wordpress remembers the results of the last time that you tried this.
You should see your posts and comments.
Click import and after 5 or ten minutes you have a newly imported blog.
Go back into blogger and set archiving back to monthly (or whatever) and reset the publish method back to FTP. All of my settings were there and I did not need to retype anything.
My next step will be to export the mySQL tables from HostGator and import them into the 1&1 database so I can continue to host the blog at 1&1.
I will spend a few hours next week converting the blogger template to a WP template. I will also install all of the SEO tools.
The only bad thing is that I will have a big issue with the names of the blog pages. They will be different in WP than in Blogger. It will require lots of redirects so as not to lose the inbound links to various posts. I may make a program to do this.
I have made quite a few changed to my blog look and feel recently. I needed to do this make sure that the pages were being scanned by the search engines correctly. In the course of this Idiscovered that Blogger will not publish more than 500 posts. I have over 1700 posts. Any post older than a year or so has not been republished, the older ones have a template from 2006.
Now I have to figure out how to get these into wordpress or into a static page format.
You may have noticed that there is a pause before the header appears on the blog. You also may have noticed that on very small screens (800×600 or less) there is some wrapping of the menus and overlay of data. This is because I moved the header along with all the links to the bottom of the blog and then reposition it at the top.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
I did this because my Google page rank dropped from rank 4 (good) to rank 1 (bad) one day a couple of weeks ago. I have been reading up and I am making lots of changes to the way the data appears on the blog. Strangely the page rank has not affected the traffic flow.
I have been getting intimate with the blogger tags and as a result I am adding meaningful headers and descriptions to all of the blog entries. I have changed the archives so that they only have the name of the post and link to view the post page. I tried to make the whole blog a little smaller so that Google would spider the whole thing. I am using the new Blogger post editor for new posts to clean up the HTML a bit.
I have gone to the Google webmaster tools and started fixing the 404 – page not found, and one by one changing the static page headers, and the other problems that the spider discovered. Google Analytics shows different data than webmaster tools, though.
My next step is to find out from Google just why the page rank collapsed.
One thing that I noticed is that the original owner of the Cliche list (or someone claiming to be him) has put up his own cliche page again, but it is on Geocities and that will go away October 15. My version has his old page and tons of new content. I will be deleting the original list and leaving my own content and not calling it the “Grand List” anymore since it will be all original content after I reformat things. I don’t like getting traffic on the Cliche list because they seldom click on any links.
I deleted the posts and images of the H.S. Thompson stuff. That was a waste of bandwidth, and frustrating to see people load my page and immediately click to the original page.
I am getting zero hits from Stumbleupon or BoingBoing, but I picked up about 100 new surfers who are visiting more or less regularly – Who Are You People?
There is a reoccurring debate in the SF community as to what is Science Fiction and what exactly SF or SciFi or Syfy, etc mean. Much of the debate is trying to designate what is not Science Fiction. Heinlein proposed Speculative Fiction, a term that would cover classic Science Fiction, but include fantasy, horror, and weird tales. In the Days of Jules Vern, it was called Science Romance, a term that I like quite a bit. Bradbury said “Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.” Often, definitions of SF are either too restrictive or too inclusive.
There are writers who produce novels which appear to be SF in many ways, but who work hard to deny the SF label. (I think that this might be an economic issue). Michael Crichton wrote SF, but was not considered a Science Fiction writer, even though I once read that he wanted to be thought of that way. Dan Brown writes Science Fiction and is not considered an SF author. Robert J. Sawyer writes novels that are similar to Crichton’s and Brown’s, but he is considered a Science Fiction writer.
Bloggers like to quote Damon Knight’s definition: “Science Fiction is what we point to when we say it”. This is useless as a practical guide.
My own definition is that Science Fiction is what you find in the Science Fiction aisle in the bookstore, but bookstores are rapidly getting scarcer and the Science Fiction aisles are getting smaller. This really means that we are delegating the definition of SF to publishing houses.
I was reading a John Varley short story collection on the bus this morning that had an introduction by Algis Budrys, the great SF writer and editor. Budrys proposed that SF stands for “Somehow if Fits”, which is an interesting way to say that Science Fiction is defined by what could be included and not what should be included.
I tried the first method mentioned on the internet. This was to put the books in a sealed box with cat litter.
There were three boxes – this is one of them. You can see the mold growing on it.
I filled the bottom of a plastic clothes storage box with litter. This box had a broken corner so I taped it up. It is the only box that Erica would let me experiment with.
I put down a layer of brown paper and then laid in the books.
I left them in for three days. I went out this morning. Compared to the books that were not placed in the box, the smell was somewhat abated. There was still a slight smell of mildew, especially when the pages were opened.
I will leave them in. It is hard to tell just how bad the smell still is. I will read the Cordwainer Smith book this week. The book Slan by A.E. Van Vogt (review tomorrow), that did not go through this process, was difficult to read because the smell was so bad. If the cat litter makes much of a difference I will try the method with six or so books each week.
If the cat litter approach does not work well enough for me to read the books, I will try another method next week.
I never really blogged the new truck. I got this on the Cash For Clunkers deal and it is pretty cheap. It is a tiny truck, though, and has not luxury items – not even a CD or tape player.
I took a picture of when the odometer passed 100 miles the weekend after I got it. I know you don’t care, but I can come back to this post 20 years from now when I sell it and think about the good times.
I paid big bucks for a new cap. Here are some pics from the installation:
Here she is in the yard. and the view in the back:
Next I should have a Name the Truck contest. My blue truck was Maude, and I can’t remember the name of the Red truck before that.
