Dave’s Ramblings

Just recording spider hits as Googlebot seems not to be finding as much reason to poke around through CaptiveReefing our Coral Reef Forums nearly as often as a couple weeks ago.

Pretty slick little hack that I added to phpBB to record hits for me and store them in the database. Though the plug-in for WordPress is really sharp for tracking what pages/posts where hit and when. I’ll try to get some links up here shortly to where I found them.

Web Crawlers Visits since Jan. 29, 2005
Google visits: 27074 | MSN visits: 20685 | Yahoo visits: 8990

Today was Gab’s first day at her new school. I don’t think any of us could have wished for it to be any better than it turned out, she’s just in heaven, new town, new kids, the ‘fresh start’ seems to be just what was in order to bring her out of the rut she was in. Honestly after pulling her from her previous school three weeks ago it was more than time for her to get back into school. She’s always been a great student and had a great attitude about school, until the recent events and actions of a number of morons that reside in the county began to make her life miserable. Nothing quite like watching your brightest child go from happy go lucky and straight A’s (a couple of B’s sprinkled in), to failing across the board. The horrible feeling of being completely helpless of not being able to do something about it.

My efforts to help her sort through the Algebra problems alone were just ridiculous, of what I recall and the methods I use for sorting the problems out were either too simple and done in my head before I could explain it, or else far too complicated and I overwhelmed her with stuff she didn’t need to know.

We’re very grateful to the folks who helped us get her transferred to another school district, none of which were part of her former school. They knew three weeks ago of the transfer but wouldn’t bother sending the records over. Called ahead of time yesterday, told them I have the formal request document in my hand and verified that I could fax it to them and that the needs documents would be forwarded to the new school, told yup first thing, they’ll be there by 11am, the gal that handles that will be in at 10:30am. New school calls back at 11am says they have not received them. Wait a little longer….at 3pm call, still nothing, call the old school and get this for an answer “That’s not the way ‘I’ do things, they HAVE to be mailed”, of course the shit hit the fan then. Called new school explained the situation, it’s now 3:30, closing time for the school, their response, first class is at 8am tomorrow, have Gab here and I’ll make sure there is a class schedule waiting for her and we’ll sort everything out later, she needs to be in school. Got here there at 7:50, schedule was waiting as well as a student to show her around, off to work I went.

But alas Gab’s new school is fantastic, the staff is very courteous and actually have ears that work when you have a question. Hell they even communicate between departments! Everyone was aware of just enough of the circumstances and gave nothing short of 100% to ensure a super smooth transition. Gab is still bouncing off the walls, she’s ecstatic, even griped that tomorrow was Friday and the week would be over for school. Now THAT is my Gabbey!

Doc started her on a mid line antidepressant yesterday, it’ll take 3-4 weeks before it really starts working, but I think they will really help her in the long run. Her first real counseling appointment will be in 1.5 weeks, if things stay on their present course, and justice is brought down upon the perpetrators of the heinous acts, I think everything will work out just fine for Gab. I’m just glad to see her getting back to her usual bubbly self.

A quick note so even I can’t forget it, I think we made Aunt and Uncle status for the last time today, Angel’s brother Joe and his wife Renee gave birth to our newest nephew this afternoon. Joseph Charles…. 9+ lbs..
Angel is the youngest sibling on her side of the family, so it’s doubtful there will be any more nephews or nieces there… and on my side I’m the oldest of three, but since we don’t speak they don’t count. Sounds mean, but it’s only true.

At least I hope so, last week we got 5″ of snow dropped on us, and this week it’s touched 60 and almost 70 today… mowed down the Angel’s perennial garden and got it all raked out, lots of green poking up. Odd that two inches down the ground is still frozen solid but yet the plants are green and growing above ground. We got an early start on it this year, now it’s just a matter of luck that there will not be any more deep freezes for the year, that’ll wipe it out again for the year. 3 years ago we lost the engine block in our boat from a solid freeze the last week in April Major Bummer, I was so pissed it took until last year before I built a new engine for her, promising that I’d never again put any water in her until the fist week of May. Although aside from getting the new engine built in put it the boat never got wet, within days of May Angel was scheduled for surgery to have her gall bladder removed. No way I was going to take her bouncing across any lakes with that acting up, surgery got put off until July, and well you do the math… it adds up to never a drop of water touching even the engine let alone the hull.

Guess it all sums up to Winters up in WI get rough, seems like summer arrives and next thing you know there is snow flying around, and of course barely any wood cut for the season. Got caught short this year, I managed to work our daughter and a friend of hers for a few days, with the time I could squeeze in totaled about 12 cords of oak being split and stacked. We use wood to heat the house in both the wood stove and fireplace, so we managed to make it until the end of December before calling for the rip off errr. propane truck to fill us up, $1.80 a gallon! Geez. Needless to say we suffered through until now at 69-70 degrees in the house instead of our normal 85-90 through the winter. We get spoiled with the heat in the winter but of course around June or so we’ll kick the A/C on to cool the house to 70. Nutcases I guess.

Come on spring!

Finally got around to adding a spelling checker to my blog. My spelling has seriously deteriorated over the years mostly out of laziness and being dependent on spell checkers for any real documents. Even though one of my pet peeves is poor spelling when I’m reading someone else’s writings I have been continuously going back through my posts on my blogs, forums, and other websites and find myself correcting myself. If you too fit into this category take a look at the WP Spell Checker plug-in, it’s simple to set up and use. With a little luck now there will not be any blatant spelling errors in my posts.

Now if someone knows of a grammar checker plug-in that would be fantastic, a bigger downfall of mine short of spelling is going back and adding a bit here and there to a post generally breaking all sorts of grammar rules.