June 2008 Archives

I could blame it on the heat but it has been pretty cool lately. Yesterday was the start of summer and the weather has been very mild. We had a couple of thunderstorms but they did not deliver much rain. So why did I decide to cut off all my hair? I have not had a haircut since I retired April 3rd so I was long overdue. The barber has not been able to do much with my hair for years now as I have less of it each year. So today I just decided to get rid of it all. I asked Teresa to break out our electric shears and she went at me like a sheep in Australia. When she was done I was actually quite pleased with the results. The last time I had hair this short was boot camp in the U.S. Army in 1968. But this is going to be my look from now on, there is no going back. I expect to get a few comments when I go to church tomorrow but that is OK. There are several benefits from having hair this short. It requires very little combing or brushing and I will no longer have that just got out of bed hair look. And what with being retired and on a reduced income I will save a couple hundred dollars a year. Maybe I will grow a mustache back to compensate, just kidding.

I have been busy the last few days moving my Wordpress blog, my photo galleries and my MovableType blogs to a new hosting service. The last straw with my old hosting service, Bluedomino, came when they again failed to fix a problem that they had caused on their servers. As usual their support staff was completely useless. All they know how to do is tell you that it is your problem when in fact every service call I ever placed with them was something wrong with their servers. So I bought a new domain with GoDaddy.com. The new domain name is 'TheMindofTefft' and I will be using it from now on. It is also a .com domain instead of the .org of my old domain. I have been able to successfully move everything to my new hosting service with far less problems than I had anticipated. There are still a few details left before I can call Bluedomino and tell them to cancel my service. I just hope GoDaddy will be a better hosting service than Bluedomino was. So far things look pretty good for GoDaddy and to make it a sweeter deal GoDaddy is three times cheaper than Bluedomino. I should have dumped them a long time ago.

Today the high was 97 degrees with a heat index of 114 degrees. I managed to plant grass seed in the far back of the yard that we just had graded. I will have to water the seed for the next 21 days and pray that it grows. Right now it is a dust bowl back there. I managed to mow part of the back yard before the heat and humidity became too much. The rest of the weekend and first part of next week are going to be much the same. Isn't Summer still a couple of weeks away? Since I have been forced inside I have been doing a lot of reading and listening to podcasts. I finished 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' and have started started a collection of short stories titled 'Beyond Armageddon.' I am still looking for a gym or health center to join so that I can start losing some weight and get back into shape. I want to be in good condition when we go hiking in Yellowstone later this year. I also have decided that I am going to travel to Florida in October and see the next Shuttle take off from Cape Canaveral. The space program has been a part of my life since childhood and I really want to see a launch before I die. So come hell or high water I will be in Florida this October to watch STS-125 take off. It will undoubtedly be one of the highlights of my life.