It has been a long time since the last post! Probably far too long. If I don’t do this regularly, the habit goes away and there’s no reason for anyone to ever look at the blog. I promise to do better in the future… (grin). I’ve received a new toy — a film scanner. I have some slides and pictures from when we lived in Japan from 1966 to 1968 and some of these pictures have really deteriorated. I’ve scanned a bunch of them into the computer and am getting them onto CD’s so that we can preserve them better than the film is being preserved. One of them is a picture of James and Heather along with Momo, our dog of that era. Heather was born in the fall of 1966 and she’s probably around six months old, so this picture would have been taken in the spring of 1967. We were living near a housing area called "Hyde Park Annex" just off base at Johnson AFB. At that time, Johnson was a shared base with the Japanese Self Defense Forces. The USAF used it as a housing area and as an emergency airfield. A few years later the base was turned over to the JSDF completely and the Hyde Park Annex is now a city park. A couple of the base housing buildings remain as offices. Just on base the Base Exchange and Commissary buildings are visible, but almost falling down. That part of the base isn’t being used by the Japanese at the current time. The base is open for visitors on the first Saturday of each month, but we’ve never been in the area at that time. I’d like to do that some day….

The house we lived in when this photo was taken still exists. During Heather’s visit to Japan a few years ago we went looking for the house and found it. A Japanese family lives there (of course). The roads have been rerouted and not much of the neighborhood looks the same, but the house was still there. The picture shows a patio area just outside a sliding door that lead into the living room. There were two bedrooms at the back of the house and a small bathroom. The kitchen and living room were essentially one large room with a small divider.

Momo means "peach" in Japanese. It’s also the main character in a famous Japanese fairytale. When we got the dog, a Japanese Spitz, it was just the tiniest fur ball and earned the name Momo. We gave the dog to another Air Force family with a number of kids when we left Japan in 1968.

The deck is finished once again for another year. I’ve also mounted some flower boxes along the deck railing and we now have flowers planted there. It looks quite nice. As part of this project I bought a new table saw and had fun building the mountings. I’m now ready to tackle a larger project. I think the next project will be a gate for the deck to keep Bradica on the deck and the deer off the deck. I just need to decide how best to build the gate. A swinging gate is easier, but a sliding gate, kind of like a pocket door, would be much more practical. After that I need to build a set of nice-looking shelves to go alongside the desk in the computer room so I can get this tangle of cords and computers out from under the desk.

In about ten days we’re headed east on vacation. We always manage to make life busy and complicated for us! We’d like for our granddaughter Kendra to go with us so she can be with some of her cousins. So Heather will be driving up to Boise and Wendy (Kendra’s mother) will meet her there with Kendra. A couple of days later, Nina will meet Heather halfway between here and Orem, Utah and get Kendra from Heather. Then Kendra will go with us out east. On the way back, we’ll go north into Montana, meet Wendy, and give Kendra back. Quite a shuttle! Hopefully Kendra won’t get too homesick while all of this is going on.

We had a major catastrophe in the corporate data center last Saturday evening. It was one of our maintenance weekends and a lot of work was going on in the data center. Part of that work included the semi-annual preventative maintenance on the battery-backed universal power supply. This device provides a couple of minutes of battery power should we loose city power to keep things running while the generator comes online. When the preventative maintenance was finished, the maintenance man switched the UPS from maintenance mode to normal mode and the device completely failed. We lost all power to the front half of the data center, where about two-thirds of the servers and disk arrays are located. Of course, they all went down immediately. Realizing that there was a problem, without thinking, the maintenance man switched the UPS back to maintenance mode, which put power back into the room from the standby generator. Everything started trying to power up again, all 180 computer systems. Doing that did a fair amount of damage to a number of systems. When power went down, he needed to have left the system in that state so that we could go turn off all the power switches. Then we could figure out what was wrong with the UPS, get that fixed, and then start bringing systems back up again. However, that wasn’t the case. All of my folks supporting the data center in Colorado Springs were called in to work and most of the production systems were back to normal around 6:30 Sunday morning. One of the large disk arrays failed entirely, so we still have some systems (primarily supporting the development and software testing functions) that have yet to come back into service. The disk array was finally repaired late this afternoon and hopefully sometime tomorrow afternoon we’ll have the data restored and those systems will start coming back online. This was as bad a disaster as I ever want to see!