Notes From Zone 4

We are. They got us up yesterday afternoon, Most of the trouble I had getting back online was getting bunter’s gateways straightened out. I’m sure I changed them three or four times, but I still kept seeing the old router IP not the new one. Well, it seems to be working finally.

I’ve given RHN quite the workout, bringing three systems up to date. I just can’t see compiling your own anymore, unless being sysadmin is your day job. If I was downloading source and compiling it, I’d still be at it tomorrow, and that without putting in any billable hours.

Anyway, I now have all the user workstations behind a firewall. I got ICQ and the VPN I need for my contract, both working. We should be good to go now until Jeremy gets home for spring break and wants to start gaming.

So now it’s on to the server. I’m not ready to deal with anything hard. www.therichards.org will be fine for tonight.

Every time we get more snow, or I hear more snow is coming, I have a hard time remembering that it’s good for my garden. I keep hearing it really is, though. That underneath all that snow, the ground will hardly freeze very deep, because snow is such a good insulator. But I grew up in the desert, and it’s still all very strange for me to think of snow as keeping things warm, you know?

We’ve hit some pretty interesting milestones in snow cover. I’ve heard this isn’t a record breaking winter, though it feels like it is. It probably won’t even be in the top ten snowiest or coldest winters in NH. But it definitely is both the snowiest and coldest since I moved here in 1990. The well by the pergola is completely buried. I’d say the snow is half way up the pergola. The frame from the kids’ trampoline doesn’t show anymore.

The temps at night have been dropping to -25 and -30 pretty routinely in the last few weeks. That’s when I remember to think of all that snow as a blanket, keeping all my perennials nice and toasty warm.

Now if only we could keep the basement nice and toasty warm for the little seedlings.