When Knitting Was a Manly Art

Not much knitting done over the weekend, but I’ve got a ton of excuses.

Yesterday I did get a couple rounds on Eileen’s sock done before we headed east up the Columbia Gorge to a home situated between Bridal Veil and Latourell Falls to look over a collection of maps originally owned by John Labbe who wrote extensively about the logging railroads on the West Coast. Most of the maps were fairly modern, but there were a number that were printed prior to the second world war and a couple that had large blank spaces because large areas hadn’t even been surveyed when the maps had been printed. Some were hand marked with rail lines that John had found and a number had hand written notes down the side margins. More than three hours sorting through about 1/2 of the maps and we ended up with a 3/4 inch stack of maps that we *think* we want to make copies of. We’ll go over the maps later this next week and try to figure out what we really want. Amazing, historical stuff.

Today was a computer geek day. I’ve been trying to find a way to get away from the need to dual-boot my desktop because of the three or four Windows programs that still aren’t available for Linux (mostly mapping and GPS applications). I was recently pointed at a Linux app called Win4Lin that provides a hardware emulation with the ability to install windows on top. It doesn’t yet support XP, but none of my applications require XP and I have a legal copy of Win98SE. Problem is that the stock kernel delivered with Fedora Core 3 doesn’t support Win4Lin and requires a couple of patches and a recompile. It’s been many years since I’ve felt a need to recompile the Linux kernel and the process managed to take most of the morning before I had successfully patched, configured and recompiled the kernel and then rebooted to the new OS and finally installed and tried out Win4Lin. It installed, Win98SE installed successfully and all the Windows apps I’ve tried so far have installed and run. A couple more tests need to be made and I can blow away my Windows partition and say goodbye to dual-boots.

And finally, another good afternoon in the greenhouse potting up bareroot natives. Nearly all done today. In fact everything that can go into 1 gallon pots are done. The remaining plants will need larger and deeper pots due to large root structures.

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7:15am – Clear – Current temp. 32.5F(0.3C)

Max 43.9F(6.6C) – Min 32.5F(0.3C) — 0.08″/2mm precipitation

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8:00pm – Current temp. 33.8F(1.0C)
Another of those *bit of everything* days. A bit of sunshine, a bit of rain, a bit of hail. No snow this time..

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