Charleen's Chateau

Insufficient Matts

charleen — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 06:37:55 +0000

This captcha caught my eye today:

December

charleen — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 16:05:12 +0000

Snow has started falling (on my blog), and I realized that December has just appeared out of nowhere! I’m running so late on so many things. Christmas cards, presents, the tree, plans for a graduation trip, hospital openings, the bits of pieces of homework that I have left…It’s enough to make a girl go batty!

On the upside, we had the most wonderful thanksgiving – it was very restful and fun. Most of the usual suspects were there, saving one who was happily traveling, and very much in touch (though much missed!!). I didn’t get to spend as much time with my darling brother as I wanted to, but I’m greedy like that, and the time that I did get to spend with him was full of laughter and fun and lots of turkey sandwiches (my own secret combination of ingredients; if you sweet talk me, I might share).

Plus, we got the tree up on time, thanks to strongmen Matt and Daddy! I wasn’t tall enough to push, so I stood on the other side and pulled. It looks so pretty and tall and finally in its proper place! We forgot to put the star on top before putting it up again, so someone’s going to have to get to the top of a ladder and leeeeeeeaaaaaannnnnn…

OK, I’ve got to get back to schoolwork. Many hugs, everyone!

The weirdest flight ever…

charleen — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 15:54:36 +0000

I just heard of nice visual flight locating website called Hipmunk, and ended up finding the weirdest flight ever. My January vacation plans/graduation gift to myself of a cruise with family bombed quite sadly, so I was halfhearted-ly thinking of places that I could take myself as a consolation prize. I plugged in Dublin, Ireland, as Matt and I had such fun there, and it was a place that I wouldn’t mind visiting again (with a much better camera!). The service spit this out as one of the options. Despite it being the ass-backwards way of going to Ireland, I’m actually half considering it as I have always wanted to go to Seattle, Iceland might be interesting, I love London, and then I end up in Dublin! As much as I love flying, I think it might be fun to spend two days traveling. I wonder what plugging in Cairo would get me?

Update: Most of the Cairo flights offered me layovers in Houston or Chicago/east coast spots and London or Amman. Some offered me a layovers in Rome or Athens. My favorite for exciting layovers on the way to Cairo: Moscow.

Musings on storage

charleen — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:35:37 +0000

I have been pondering online backup for months now, as my brother suggested it might be a good way to prevent data loss in a crash (like the one I had several months ago with my Seagate drive; crash, update, and resolution), and the high cost of data retrieval afterward.

So, I’ve been idly looking at online storage, and I’m not delighted by this. My problem is that it is usually cheap or free for 2 gig, but anything past that starts to get pricey. Is this really realistic? I have an 80 gig iPod full of music, and that, with only a few more gig of other stuff, would cost me, on average $20/month. I have hundreds of thousands of photos (both of my own work, and then historical photos); for that price, I could burn them to disk and stick them in the fireproof safe, or even a safe deposit box for a fraction of the cost. Heck, I could save them on secure digital cards in the fireproof safe, and still save money.

If I traveled constantly, I could see utilizing a service like Dropbox to backup my files in case – this is their example – I drive my car into a lake with hippos and ruin my laptop. But anything past that seems prohibitively priced.

I think I’m just going to have to rent server space somewhere or just backup my everything to one of my network drives. Either way, I obviously need to budget for a non-cloud related storage solution. I have been enormously lucky that I’ve been able to maintain this much data for this long, but I feel like I’m pushing my luck. As it was, I had a lot a help with the Seagate recovery, and the process took months.

Do any of you, dear readers (all three of you ) have any suggestions?

Grrrr….

charleen — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 04:34:19 +0000

I like my iPhone plenty. What I don’t like is having to reload everything on it every two weeks.

Class of 1950

charleen — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 05:16:48 +0000

Class of 1950

I was thinking of my Gram a lot today, then a cousin sent this over. The picture is missing her infectious smile, but I love it all the same. I’d never seen it before, and am glad to have this opportunity.

I hope that you enjoy it as much as I have.

Census commentary

charleen — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:41:41 +0000

This was taken from the August 11, 2010 newsletter, the RootsWeb Review (Vol. 13, No. 8), and it gave me the giggles:

This was written in the margin of the 1803 Census for Oglethorpe County Georgia, Capt Parmenas English District.

“Fishing Creek Academites part morallised the rest get drunk run in debt can’t pay go to jail breakout and run away.”
Thanks to Terry Robertson

obviously, this census taker felt the need to engage in some social commentary, sans punctuation.

Montreal – Quartier des Spectacles 7/17/10

charleen — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 05:48:02 +0000

I went to visit my darling brother in Montreal a few weekends ago, and I’m going to be posting a few pictures from it over the next few weeks. Here’s the first few from the Quartier des Spectacles, and nearby.

Is it really July?

charleen — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:17:14 +0000

Have I really not posted in two months? Boy, am I going to hear about that this weekend! On the up side, I completely changed my look, and added a badge all on my very lonesome, so I should get credit for that!

Let me know what you think of the Chateau’s new look, I’m having fun with the header, that’s for sure!

It’s been a while since I’ve done this

charleen — Sat, 29 May 2010 21:45:56 +0000

So have some patience with me. I figured that I’d try out my new batch photo editing software, so you’ll have to let me know how you like the watermarks. In the meantime, I squeezed in a shoot at Union Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, TX, at the beginning of March when all the wildflowers were just coming up. These are just the flowers and the prettiest parts of the plots. I’ll add the tombstones later. Please let me know what you think!