The Magic Is Strong Down There, Close To The Ground

We had a little parade yesterday, a dinky thing by anyone's standards. But the city folks who showed up had a great time. They're the same people every year, many of them urban or suburban families who own property in our little vacation spot. And their kids absolutely loved the tossed candy. When you're little and people are throwing sugary things at you, all is well.

Many parades have ceased throwing candy for liability reasons; tampered treats, people falling down or getting run over by parade vehicles, etc. ad nauseaum. I hope we can keep doing what we do for many years.

The Fountain of Youth

This ninety-six year old local fellow and I struck up a conversation the other day. He credits his longevity to hard work, lots of loving people in his life, and one Mountain Dew every day.

What can I possibly say?

Crash

Regular blog passers-by may have noticed that over the last couple of months my blog photos (here, at the "You Are What I Eat" blog with Steph, at MySpace, etc.) have sometimes shown up, sometimes not. The short version of this tale of woe is that I have run my own webserver since early '06 and have hosted several years worth of my own blog photos - far more than Photobucket or Picturetrail would allow - as well as video and audio files, and other stuff for friends including a couple of websites for causes I support. And my server, over the recent months, was dying a slow death.

Today it finally gave up the ghost.

I was able to rescue the websites and 99% of my images from backups and get another, hopefully more reliable box running Linux and the venerable Apache webserver software. The remains of my old server are against the far wall in the tan box. The newer, faster machine is the black box at the far right in the foreground. It's even hosting this photo below. Sort of funny when you think about it. It's hosting a picture of itself. Ha ha. Ha. Hee.

It's been a long day.