Lila Perry Steinhoff Archives

November 14, 2012November 25, 2013

Fall at Kentucky Lake

Mother and I went over to Kentucky Lake Monday to winterize her trailer. For you Florida folk, that means that we drained all of the water out of the drains and water lines and put antifreeze in any place that water might pool. If you don’t keep the pipes heated, the water in them will freeze and the pipes will burst. That happened to her a couple of winters ago. It’s not pretty and it’s not cheap to fix.

While she was inside the trailer doing inside-the-trailer stuff, I was blowing away the leaves that had fallen so far. Leaves, again for you Florida folks, are a big deal up here. And, I am far from being a proficient leaf herder. I’m not convinced that I couldn’t do a better job with a leaf rake.

Anyway, once I got the ground cleared off, it was covered with a gazillion hickory nuts that were like walking on ball bearings.

More hickory nuts to fall

They’re not done falling, either. Hearing those things bounce off your trailer top must make you feel like you’re under machine gun attack all night long.

Ducks on the lake

We took a swing down to the campgrounds to see what was going on. These guys don’t seem to notice that the water’s growing colder in the late afternoon.

Naked tree

We couldn’t help but notice this dead, naked tree with all its bark missing as we passed the entrance to Camp John Currie. It was worth a u-turn.

Peeling paint to peeling bark

I know I’ve been posting a lot of what we journalistic photographer disdainfully call “peeling paint” photos, but I couldn’t resist this shot of a trunk with its bark peeled off.

Something got under its skin

At some point in its life, something crawled around between the tree’s bark and its trunk.

Pining away for Wife Lila

I had to put that bad pun in to keep Wife Lila from dispatching me as a stranger breaking into the house when I get back to Florida this weekend.

October 17, 2012

91st Birthday Season Kicks Off

After my preview presentation of Ordinary People in Altenburg Tuesday night, the staff of the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum surprised Mother with a cake, flowers and balloon, kicking off the start of her 91st Birthday Season. Several of Wife Lila’s Class of ’66 showed up, including Terry Hopkins, who came all the way from Florida.

Friend Shari and her mother attended. It’s not often that someone can say that his first high school girlfriend and his last high school girlfriend are attending an event. Brother Mark came down from St. Louis.

A very receptive group of 37 (if I heard correctly) watched my photos and videos and listened to my war stories. They were actually TOO receptive. My goal was to figure out how to cut about 30 minutes from a presentation I did this summer. Riding Partner Anne warned me that if I played off my audience’s reaction, I was going to go long, not short. That’s exactly what happened. Now I have 46 minutes to cut. I needed someone to yawn or check their watch to clue me in that the listeners were getting restless.

Thanks to Carla Jordan and her staff for doing a great job hanging my photos, offering hat-stretching compliments and recognizing Mother’s Birthday Season. I would go into more detail, but my brain is fried. I don’t see how teachers do this kind of thing every day.

September 30, 2012September 30, 2012

Cleaning Up the House

Wife Lila and two of her friends are coming back home Saturday night after taking a cruise in Alaska. That means I’m scurrying around like a teenager who threw a keg party while his parents were gone. The place pretty much passes the sniff test (or my sense of smell has gone dead).

This trip left me in unusual circumstances. Normally she takes my level of domestic skills into consideration before she leaves town and makes sure that the laundry is in a U+4 status. (That means four pairs of underwear more than the anticipated days she’ll be on the road).

Abandoned in U-3 status

She had a lot of last-minute tasks to take care of, so she left me in a U-3 status. Faced with either turning the articles of clothing inside out to bridge the gap or going out and buying more, I tackled the washing machine. It didn’t belch suds, my white underwear is the same color as when it went in (I remembered to add the fabric softener, too) and the smoke alarm didn’t go off. An even number of socks came out. That must mean that I either didn’t lose a sock or the sock monster coughed up a spare.

The fridge was pretty barren of leftovers, too. I thawed out a bag of frozen homemade chili for a couple of meals and there was enough cheese and lunch meat around to carry me for a few more. In the end, though, I had to reach for my cookbook: a stack of takeout menus under the kitchen telephone.

Dishes are overrated

Dishes are highly overrated. Food tastes just as good off a paper plate and you don’t have to wash it. OJ tastes a lot better straight from the bottle.

In the end, though, I had to fire up the dishwasher for coffee cups, eating utensils and the like. The experience went much better than the first time I did it when the kids were little. I got everything loaded, put in the detergent and went into the living room where we had the computer set up.

All of a sudden, I heard the kids screaming “Daddy! Daddy!” and turned to see them running from a wall of suds only slightly ahead of a thoroughly traumatized cat. Who KNEW that all soaps weren’t made alike? Well, at least the kitchen cabinets were clean up to about waist level.

It’ll be good to have her back home. I’m just waiting to hear what I did wrong.

[The Missouri Utilities ad came from the 1956 Sesquicentennial book.]

September 26, 2012

Backup, Backup, Backup

I’ve had a very frustrating (and expensive) last two days. I’m a pessimist who believes that Murphy wasn’t an only child. I usually have not only a Plan B, but Plans C through E. In fact, a pessimist is someone who is actually DISAPPOINTED when Plan A works.

Optimists, on the other hand, don’t have Plan Bs because they are SURE than Plan A is going to be successful beyond anyone’s dreams.

How do you fight Murphy?

I have about 50% of my data on a pair of external 2-terabyte drives. The drives are mirrored, so the information is duplicated on both drives at the same time. If one fails, then you slap in a replacement and the mirror rebuilds itself. We used this technology on equipment in our telephone switchroom, and it saved our voicemail system and what we called the “cash register,” the equipment that supported our circulation and classified advertising call centers. There’s no more sinking feeling than seeing the alarm, “Drive Fail>’

On the other hand, there’s a great feeling of satisfaction when you slide in the spare and watch your world – and your job prospects – become infinitely brighter.

Backblaze puts out the fire in your tummy

To be even safer, I back up the mirrored drives to a second external drive, and I also use on offsite, “cloud” backup system called Backblaze. You can’t beat the deal. It costs five bucks a month and you can back up unlimited amounts of data. (It was an even better deal for me: Son Adam prepaid a year of the service as a Father’s Day gift.) The advantage to a cloud backup is that it’s not in your house where it can get stolen, flooded or burn up.

I wasn’t their normal customer. I have so much data that it took about four months to upload it all. One it’s there, though, it constantly monitors the files on my computer and sends changes to the cloud almost immediately.

I just signed up to become an affiliate, so if you click on the Backblaze logo above, or this link, I’ll get credit if you sign up for the service.

If you are an optimist, this is a good Plan B. If you are a pessimist, this will probably slot in at about Plan C or D. Five bucks a month is less than some folks spend in Starbucks a day and it’ll let you sleep a lot better.

So, what happened?

Last month, my RAID drives gave me an alarm that one of them had taken a dirt nap. These drives have names. The bad guy was the primary, the good guy was the secondary.

I ordered a replacement drive under warranty. It arrived in a couple of days. I popped it into the slot and watched with satisfaction as the primary synched up to the secondary in about six hours. All was good for about a month. Then, two days ago, the drive in that slot failed again. The vendor had sent me two drives by mistake, so I pulled out the replacement and replaced it with the second drive.

Just before I turned the drive back on, I decided to do a backup on my external drive G. I kicked it off just before going to bed and it finished just about breakfast time. That means the data exists on the secondary, on Drive G and in the cloud with Backblaze.

Life just got uglier

I pushed the new drive in, powered up the enclosure and got an error message that the drive had to be formatted. Format is a scary command. If you screw it up, you’ll wipe out all the data on the drive. To be on the safe side, I removed the good secondary drive, then formatted the primary. I’d never had to do that before, but…

I put everything back together, turned on the power, then watched, first with satisfaction, then with horror, that the mirror was being rebuilt. The little arrows were going the wrong way. The little arrows SHOULD have been pointing FROM the secondary to the primary. Instead, they were going the other way, meaning that the blank primary drive was overwriting all my data.

The pessimist in me was satisfied

This was a bad thing, but, at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had two other sources of the data, both fresh. I logged into my Backblaze account and started a download of the data. It’s a lot faster to restore from a local drive than from the cloud. (If I had REALLY been in a hurry, Backblaze would have sold me an external drive with my data on it.) Downloading everything on that drive was going to take about 50 hours, even with a fast Internet connection.

Here’s where I made a minor error. Backblaze has everything that was on the drive. When I did my backup to local Drive G, I elected not to copy over a couple of directories of nice-to-have-but-not-essential files. I would have been better off to have requested a Backblaze download of only those files instead of EVERYTHING. It would have saved a lot of download bandwidth and time. Still, this is a nice practice run and will give me a good idea of how good the service is.

THEN what happened?

I decided that the problem was probably in the piece of equipment that holds the drives, not the drives. I pulled out the primary drive, booted up on only the secondary, and copied all my data from the local external drive to the secondary. It worked fine. I decided NOT to try to rebuild the mirror.

I called Son Matt, who has been trying to convince me that I should buy a magic Drobo S Beyond Raid 5-Bay USB 3.0/FireWire 800/eSATA/SATA 6GB/S Storage Array with Drobo PC Backup by Drobo because he had good luck with them both at home and at work. The magic part is that you can put a mixture of drive sizes in it to use old drives or you can upgrade them if you need more storage. Wife Lila is out of town on a cruise ship in Alaska, safely out of cellular range, so I felt safe in ordering the Drobo.

The bad news is that it cost $553.14 (without the drives). (That’s one of the reasons you should click on my Amazon link at the top left of the page. It helps pay for these kind of glitches.)

The worse news is that I clicked on the item to create the links on this page, and saw that the price had DROPPED in the few hours since I had placed my order. A very nice woman said they don’t normally do price matching, but they’d make a one-time exception for me and refund the difference between $553.14 and the new price of $518.49.