First off, Typhoon is back on-line, but I may have to take it down for maintenance every now and then. I think the problem was related to the external IDE controller I recently put in, but that is neither here nor there and only Tim would really care. Oh, and that also means that I'm back in AZ, if that wasn't immediately obvious.

Last week I spent hanging out at home, doing things like mowing the yard and helping install new door handles, and I also spent some time at Hope putting Gigabit Ethernet cards in and cleaning up the mess associated with that. What happened is after installing the cards the servers used DHCP to obtain an address, which it got from the other server (they both run DHCP) and upon doing that it polluted the DNS and WINS among other tables, making it such that upon re-assigning the server with a proper IP nobody could get to it. After 3 days I finally found all the spots and got everything talking the way it is supposed to.

Late Friday morning we (being my parents & I) drove down to my Aunt & Uncle's place to celebrate the 4th. To be more precise, it was this club he belongs to just outside of the town they live in. The buildings were in need of repairs and some paint, but unlike many times where our families get together we didn't have a work project lined up. We spent most of the time sitting around and talking. However, this club also had a shooting range complete with a trap house with motorized clay pigeon machine. My uncle had brought a selection of shot guns and ear plugs. So I learned how to operate and shoot a shotgun, and I even managed to hit a few of those clay birds.

Dinner was some very tasty bbq chicken with all sorts of sides to accompany it. After dinner was the fire works show. We had quite a crowd by this time. I ran the spot light while two of my younger cousins Mike & Matthew did a bit of a relay between the spot setup for shooting the fireworks and my older cousin Josh who was readying the next firework and giving any necessary instruction on setting it up - the spotlight was needed so Mike & Matthew could find the fuse to light it. We had a good assortment of fireworks going off, and only set one small fire when we were trying to make a smally sparkly bomb-shaped firework more exciting by throwing it in the air. We had a bucket of water standing by for just the occasion.

That night I slept out on top of the trap house - which has a nice soft comfy concrete slab of a roof - with my cousin Anna and her cousin Amanda. It was good for star gazing, and I felt like I slept well when I woke up. However, I did wake up several times... like when the sun was about to rise, various animals like roosters and cows and some dog was awake and making some noise, luckily they were very far away and barely audible. I fell back to sleep after listening to them for a bit.

The next morning we cleaned up our mess, did a bit more clay pigeon shooting, collected any un-broken birds, and packed up. I followed Josh back to Tulsa for the night. One of his friends had a birthday party, so we went over there and had some burgers and good times hanging out with some of them. We came back at a decent hour and jumped into the pool which is right outside his apartment. The water felt great, and provided some good time to chat and catch up and stuff. After coming back in and watching some SNL, I conked out on the sofa.

I woke up before my alarm, which is always a good thing and even better when you have a long long day of driving ahead of you. 7:22 was the time my phone read. After getting around and getting some breakfast, saying my goodbye's to Josh I was headed out from Tulsa slightly before 8:00 CDT. I made it to Albuquerque shortly before 4:00 MDT, and decided that it was early enough to be adventerous so I headed south from there on I-25. I had no maps that showed me where I was going, except the map in my head. I knew I could go straight south and eventually pickup US60 and take that straight in to Phoenix. I exited the Interstate to get onto the 60, but missed the small little sign telling me that I needed to turn at a stoplight to stay on the 60. I ended up back on 25 going North, about 3 miles south of where I first exited so I tried it again and found the sign the 2nd time around. The new route provided some much needed scenary given the boring Interstate driving done so far. I passed by the New Mexico site for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. I think I counted around 25 sattelite dishes, and I'm sure I missed a bunch. They were setup right along side some railway up on top a plateau in the mountains. There were signs for an aptly named subdivision "On Top of the World" which is exactly how I felt, however I don't know why anyone would move there... not much for towns along that road, and a good 2 hours from Albuquerque by that point. In all, the detour only took me an extra 20-30 minutes, even with my missing the turn.

This entry is getting really long, and I've run out of things to say, so I'll stop here.