Last night, the people NY voted down the proposed replacement fire station #1 (built about 100 yards away from the old one which is literally falling down) and renovation of station #2.

Please note that we are STILL in the running for a stimulus grant, for which we are REQUIRED to be ready to go to bid (which means the vote had to pass).

Because of this vote, if the federal government calls me tomorrow and says “here is $1.5 million for the new station”, I get to say “sorry, the town of Providence doesn’t want it”.

If we hadn’t gotten the grant, the cost to the average homeowner would be an additional $125 a year for 25 years.

I put several hundred hours into this over the past two years. Other folks have put in a lot more. We spent thousands dollars in engineering, environmental studies, lawyers’ fees, etc.

Meanwhile, you can take down the walls of station #1 by just tugging at the bricks.

Hell, forget the fire protection – $125 a year so that firefighters have a nice place to go and train is well worth it.

If the townspeople don’t care about us enough to vote for a $125 per year increase to have a new fire station, I don’t see why I should care about the town.

I’ve updated the blog to WP 3.8.

I also had a bit of an overloaded meltdown a couple of weeks ago. Basically, the working theory was that we weren’t going to work on the house or do anything until after the potatoes went in (which happens about the second week of July). At least, this is what I thought. After the list got stupidly long, and it had to be done sooner, rather than later, I basically just stopped doing everything outside work, working on the house, and being a fire commissioner. This made Liz sad, because she was looking forward to brewing beer, and I had told her not to get me any brewing stuff for my birthday, since I would not have time to use it and it would just take up space. I think that put a bit of a point on it, so she agreed to let me set the pace of things, and not set deadlines, and try to slow down. So, theoretically, we’re actually going to be able to do things like brew beer and sit and read…

At least, once the peas are picked and the potatoes are in. We picked and processed about 4 gallons of peapods today, and we’ll do our first picking of garden peas later this week. The replacement tomato, pepper, squash, etc. plants are all in (next year we’ll wait until the second week of June to plant them).

Fire stuff continues to be stupidly busy, with 3 meetings last week, and while there right now aren’t any this week, I expect there to be 2 by the time the week is out.

As I mentioned, I’m basically not gaming. Essentially, I’m not going to schedule anything recurring until it’s been a year and I’ve actually had at least one night free a week for a year where I can just read and play video games. I’m still buying game books, as I tend to collect them, and like to just read them, etc.

I upgraded everything to Jaunty, fixing the XFCE bad window placement problem by giving new windows focus. While it is not ideal, I spent several days poking different window managers and basically being disappointed by them. KDE4 is too unstable, GNOME is not configurable enough, and FVWM would take too much work to make it not make my eyes bleed. E17 is too unstable (though I may try the official E17.org Jaunty builds)

There’s more, but I think I’m going to break here for tonight. I finished reading Watchmen (there’s a pile of other books I need to review, and will do once I unbury them in the mess which used to be my office), and am now on to V for Vendetta.

Oh, as of right now, I’m planning on hitting Carnage, and will likely be bringing some homebrew. Since it’s not a regularly schedule thing, I likely will be able to find the time. If anyone else is going, let me know – especially if you want me to run something.

• Because of the above, I picked up a copy of Battletech:Total Warfare. It’s a good thing that the pages are kind of glossy because it makes it easy to clean off the drool. I really like what they’ve done with this franchise, as well as with Shadowrun and I’m looking forward to Eclipse Phase. Anyway, specifically about Classic Battletech. See, in addition to the book, there’s lots of supporting stuff on the website, including:
  • PDFs of tables from the books which I can carve up and make my own reference cards
  • PDFs of blank record sheets.
  • CBT Miniatures rules as a free ancillary download.

• As far as the book goes, I was pretty much blown away:
  • It is THE MOST gorgeous CBT book I’ve ever owned.
  • The full color treatment is wonderful.
  • $40? Come on – it’s worth $60. The Master Rules were $35 and were softcover and not nearly so nice.

• I also found (finally) an open source mech generation program. It’s called Solaris Skunk Werks, it’s written in Java, and it produces Total Warfare style record sheets. I like it, and will try to find some time to hack on it. Apparently folks have been complaining about the startup time taking too long, so I suppose I’ll dig into code profiling Java programs to try and optimize it, if possible. There is also apparently MegaMekLab, which I haven’t looked at, but is another approach.

• In an attempt to organize my life, and have the time to play things like Battletech and such, I’m starting to plan out my week for a regular schedule. The sad part is that once I did out how I wanted to spend my week, I realized that I really only have one day a week to devote to fire service stuff (and, to be honest, even that is more time than I want to devote to it, but that is another post, which involves talking about how I’m falling behind in my career, etc.). So, I’m going to end up taking a leave of absence from the department for the duration of me being a commissioner, because I really don’t have time to to both.

• So, last weekend I got the compost pitched into a couple of fields and got them tilled in, transplanted some seedlings into individual containers, did a massive supply run (including $100+ worth of beer… see, I’m collecting bottles for homebrew, and one of the best ways to get bottles is to buy beer and then drink it!!). This weekend I serviced the tractor and got it mostly done, except I can’t seem to break the bolts free for them. So, I’m going to swing by my father in law’s house and borrow his big breaker bar, as well as a larger bore hose for the impact wrench (he thinks that my hose is too narrow so it can’t get the volume it needs to really put much power to it). This year, I’m going to be sure to put never-sieze on it. I also swept and mopped the house, which means that it’s vastly less yeechy. I still need to vacuum, but it’s progress.

Friday night is game night with Lizzy, so we set up terrain for Battletech / microarmor. I took pictures.