It was a fun, if chilly, Easter weekend. K and the kids spent the end of the week visiting K’s parents and didn’t get back until Saturday afternoon, leaving me time to get a few things done around the house.

Saturday morning I woke up a little later than normal (almost 8!), not taking much advantage of the quiet house. I spent the morning reinstalling Ubuntu on my Thinkpad, with an eye for encrypting my home directory using dm-crypt, the encryption piece built right into the Linux kernel.

After chasing down one or two minor bugs, I succeeded in getting it configured. Now when Ubuntu boots it asks for a passphrase and a key file before mounting my home directory. It was incredibly simple and offers a lot of peace of mind. I hope to do the same on my work laptop so that in the unlikely event I lose my laptop I won’t be losing company secrets.

Once that was done, I went to the garage to see what I could straighten up. I settled on the lumber in the corner, which was meant for an attic project I never began. The project was to build a box over the pull-down attic stairs to better insulate them. For an hour I wrestled the boards into a box-like shape, nailing them together nicely.

Once I put them on top of the stairs, however, I conceded that the obstacles surrounding the stairs could not easily be avoided. The box would add enough height to the stairs (already confined due to their position in the joists) to make it difficult to climb on and off of them. I pulled the boards apart and decided to someday tackle that problem with insulation only.

The 2×6 boards were too useful to retire, though, so I used them for another project I’d been dreaming up: a stand for working on our sailboat’s outboard motor. The engine had been lying horizontally on the garage floor ever since November and I needed an easy way to get it fixed up without putting it on the boat itself. I was reminded of the stands we used in my high school shop classes to work on similar engines, so that’s what I built. After another hour (and one blistered knuckle), I had a 40″ stand, tall enough to put the engine on and still have room for a trash can filled with water: the perfect engine test environment!

The engine tests I subsequently ran showed me for the first time how much electricity the engine’s alternator provides: anywhere between 6 and 30 volts depending on RPMs. This voltage is meant to charge the sailboat’s batteries but the power cable from the engine is tattered and terminates in bare wires. An upcoming project (made possible by the new stand) is to replace the tattered cable with a new, coiled one with some sort of plug on the end. That should make it easy to charge the batteries the next time we’re out.

The family got home about that time, so the rest of the day was spent catching up. K and I retired to our beds and read until late.

We were greeted at 7:30 this morning by the sound of the kids gleefully bellowing at each other from across the hall. After we ate the pancakes K generously cooked for us, we got dressed and headed over to my parents’ house for an Easter lunch (and egg hunt).

The kids had the best time with their cousins, chasing each other around the house. I helped Dad wire a light fixture. We marveled at their newly remodeled kitchen and then put it to use with a tasty lunch of ham, green bean casserole, potato salad and fruit salad, followed by apple pie a la mode and washed down with sweet tea. It was quite good!

It was also good to see my brothers and their families. My brother Allen was the talk of the day with his new job at SAS. It’s only the best company around to work for. He seems quite happy there so far. I think he’ll stay that way, but then again he’s a happy guy.

Once the day had warmed into the mid-50s, my brothers and I hid Easter eggs in the front yard and watched as the kids snapped them up in seconds. This was the third hunt for Hallie and Travis over the Easter holidays, so they’re old pros by now. Try as we might, though, we couldn’t get a decent picture of all the kids. Oh well.

Once home and the kids were down for their naps, I took a short one myself and then did some work on my taxes. I also did a backup of our important files and tuned in NASA TV to check up on the current space tourist (and MS Word author) Charles Simonyi. I didn’t see Charles but the kids and I had fun watching NASA films about Apollo 13, which blasted off 37 years ago this month.

After more tax work I once again went out in the cold to bundle up the plants for what I hope to be the last time this season. For the crepe myrtles it might be too late but it doesn’t hurt to try ’em. I hope we can get the warm weather back for good but next Sunday might be cold again, too.

After this blog entry, I will write some more in my dream journal and then commence to dreaming. Tomorrow promises to be an interesting day, work-wise. I hope it is for you, too.

I’m getting a slow start this morning due to my long day of travel courtesy of U.S. Airways. The plane landed at 11:15 PM, I wasn’t home until 11:45 and didn’t get to bed until 1 AM since I had to cover outside plants against this morning’s freezing temperatures.

Google Maps tells me I could have driven here in less time. Ah, the wonders of the age of jet travel!