Odds and Ends of a Winter Kind

Losing Hard Disk Space

Saturday I was doing work around the house: taking out the garbage, doing laundry, paying some bills. I was also getting ready to make a post to the blog when I got this odd message from my computer. It said my start up disk was running out of space and I needed to delete some files.

At first I thought this had to be a mistake. But I looked and sure enough I had less than a gig of hard disk space left. So I began deleting files. I have this bad habit of putting files in the trash but never emptying the trash. So I did that. Got the hard disk space up to like 8 gigs or so.

I went one and did a few things more around the house. I came back to the computer and again had less than a gig of disk space. In fact I watched the disk space disappear before my eyes. I had some movie clips that I’d download that took up a lot of space so I got rid of those. Still the amount of disk space went down.

I closes all of my programs and still was loosing hard disk space.

I restarted the computer to see what would happen. Once I restarted I had over 29 gigs of disk space. It’s stayed at that. I still have no idea what happened.

Hawk around the Circle

I was walking up 19th Street just north of DuPont Circle on Sunday. There a bunch of birds in the trees. They got startled by something. There all took flight and made a great deal of noise when they did. There were a bunch of crows cawing away at something.

Then off to my right was a blur and suddenly a pigeon hit the street. There were feathers everywhere. Then I noticed that there was a hawk. It had obviously gone after the pigeon. It was why the crows were raising such a fuss.

The hawk (it might have even been a falcon) did not get the pigeon. It flew high and then landed at the top of one of the trees. It looked magnificent. It stayed in the tree a short time and then shot up into the air and was lost from sight.

The Bar Code and the Post Office

A couple weeks back I got a bill in the mail. It was not for me. It had the right house number on it but the wrong street number. This happens from time to time. It doesn’t make sense to me why this would happen.

It took me a couple of days but I finally put the bill back in the mail. A couple of days later it showed up again in my mail.

This time around I looked more closely at the envelope. There was a bar code on it. Then after the bar code what looked like to me a street number. It so happened to be my street number. And that explained why the bill had been delivered again to my house. I took out a marker and blotted out the bar code.

The next day I put it back in the mail. I haven’t seen it since.

Not Watching the Olympics

Usually I watch the Olympics from start to finish. For some reason this time around I’m not all that interested. In part because the coverage runs until 11pm and the real good stuff will be on between 10-11pm. It’s just really hard for me to stay up that late and get up the next morning and make it into the gym. The other reason is all the controversy of it being in Russia.

I think as the games progress I will be watching it a little more.

When I got home tonight, I did watch the games. But I did so from my Xfinity account. I watched some speed skating and luge. I liked it.