Been busy

Since my last entry on July 28 I have been busy. I am still trying to work in house painting between rainy spells, without much luck. I'm still only about half done with the house. I had Brad and Scott scheduled to be here on August 8th to help me replace the big deck on the front of the house. Before they got here I had to demolish the old deck that wasn't built any where near building standards and was rotting badly. I got the old deck down by myself and with Scott's help got the basic structure ready for Brad. With Brad's knowledge of deck building we got the basic structure up on Friday. On Saturday we woke up to a drenching rain. We waited till midmorning to see if the rain would let up but when it didn't we finished the deck in the rain. It was a steady soaking rain that just didn't let up. We got most of it done with the exception of some trimming that required the saw up on top of the deck so it couldn't be done in the rain. I got the trim work done Sunday before it started raining again and then Monday I had to get the lawn mowed since there was a break in the rain.
While all this was going on I had downloaded service pack 1 for Windows Vista around August 5 and tried installing it then. It didn't work so on the 9th when Vista prompted me to install the service pack I decided to go ahead with it. I only keep Vista on my laptop so I can use Windows when needed, which isn't very often since Linux has become much more Windows friendly. After a few hours of installing and rebooting I noticed my wireless connection was screwy in Windows. So I booted into Linux and my wireless was completely gone. So back to Vista to check the internet for solutions and the wireless was dead in Vista also. I went to one of my other computers and found that HP recommended not installing service pack 1 but if you had they had some bug fixes and one was for the wireless. So I hooked up a network cable to my laptop and found the networking completely dead for both wired and wireless in Windows and Linux. I finally got wired networking working on my laptop but still no wireless. I ended up ordering an adapter for my laptop so I can use my wireless plugin cards to get some wireless back. I can't believe computer manufacturers don't take Microsoft to court for ruining their products.
The latest thing to happen around here is that Mary went to the store the other day for groceries and came home with a kitten. It's a light gray cat with white around it's mouth and a couple of it's paws. We named it Earl Gray like the tea. The little guy holds his own with the dogs who either ignore its presence or want to mother it.
One last thing. For those that visit Bleatinghearts.homelinux.com the goats webcam has been offline for a while because of connectivity problems. Once I get some free time I plan on getting the link back up.