jimsjournal
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jimsjournal |
Sweet Sixteen -- 09/26/12 |
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This -- my little online corner of the world -- is now sixteen years old. If it were a person, it would be able to go down to the DMV and apply for a driver's license. (Okay, actually for a Limited Instruction Permit allowing practicing of driving during daylight hours after completion of a certified 33 1/2 hour driver education class.) They no longer let you do things like my brother did -- He showed up at the DMV on his 16th birthday, got his Learner's Permit, and scheduled a road test for a week or two later. Of course he had been practicing and practicing off road for a long time before he was 16. Our parents had bought some land out in the country (where they eventually retired) and Charlie bought an old car -- paid $25 for it -- and the guy who sold it to him put a dollar's worth of gas into it for him (which means about four gallons at the prices in those days). There was an old drive way leading to an old abandoned house on the property (which we tore down) and Charlie cleared that driveway and then cleared a long winding pathway through the woods -- just barely wide enough to get the car through. He would drive his car slowly through the woods, just squeezing past the trees until he go to the end of his little cleared pathway -- a couple hundred twisting and turning yards -- and then he would put it in reverse and drive backwards along his winding road. And then he would go forwards again. Back and forth for an hour at a time, every weekend. I have heard it said that the Lawrence boys are stubborn. And speaking of stubborn -- Charlie continues to be determined to keep on raising funds to pay for medical research to find a cure for diabetes. It has been difficult for him this year because his training was interrupted by foot surgery during the summer -- and then disrupted again by eye surgery (which left him under doctor's orders to have no physical activity for at least two weeks). However, he figures he is close enough to his mileage goal that he will be able to make the ride. Just before the eye surgery he got in an 80 mile training ride and made a short video of his ride through rural areas of Ulster County (mid-Hudson Valley, New York) which he posted on Facebook. (Clicking here should bring you to it.) The ride is 105 miles across Death Valley. You can click here to make a pledge for Charlie's ride -- his son and daughter have hit their targets and Charlie is at 78% -- pretty close but with just three weeks left, I figured I would give you the address that points to his efforts. Jill ran a half marathon on Sunday morning. She signed up for it about two or three weeks ago, almost a spur of the moment thing, probably because of having run a half marathon two years ago (at the beginning of October). She did quite well for not having been training specifically for that. She could handle the distance -- her long run each week has been in the eight to ten mile range -- so finishing in just under two hours is a pretty good accomplishment. I suppose that in honor of this 16th blogaversary of this site I should provide some suitable statistics. Hey, 16 years, what more can I say? Oh, okay, 1389 of these individual essays -- commentaries -- babblings -- mutterings -- blog entries -- whatever. Hey, that is a fair number of entries. It takes 10.6 MB (that is, 11,120,128 bytes) to store the HTML files. (Given the way files are stored, with clustering and unused space, etc. that would be 13.2 MB on disk.) Of course my HTML editor keeps a backup copy of each file. And I have no idea how many bytes are taken up by the photographs and other graphics.
Yes -- I still think I am going to stay with HTML Comment Box unless I suddenly find a few hours to fight with some DISQUS stuff I can't figure out -- and the odds of me finding a few spare hours before the end of the month are somewhere between slim and none. |
