Story Archive - February 2006

Just a Little Distracted (02/28/2006)

Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained. - Arthur Somers Roche

I've been a tad discracted by personal issues.

On Friday, my company went up on a ski trip to Tahoe and I went along. Until I get the green light from the medics, I'm boycotted from high impact sports and that means I can't ski. Rather than be "that guy who didn't go on the trip," I went up and just hung out with the people who were there. While I enjoyed being "that guy who came on the trip only to drink at the bar" I kept looking towards the snow thinking I could just be careful and do the beginner slopes on skis and it wouldn't be very dangerous. On Monday, I bounded up the stairs at home taking three steps at a time in giant leaps when my right knee gave out and I face-planted on the staircase. It's been five months since that has happened and I take it as the universe's way of reminding me not to do stupid physical feats.

I saw my father's mother who has recently moved into assisted living. While one grandparent was gone before I was born, I have been lucky that the other three have been present for all of my childhood and adulthood so far. For a long while, my father's mother was in better shape than I am and could have out hiked me. It's got to be hard to go from being self-sufficient for thirty years to being assisted by strangers. My mother's mother, who has been frail for decade has the benefit of a fully ambulatory husband to provide the assistance.

And finally, a long time friend of the family is on her final legs from lung cancer. It's a reminder for any smokers out there, that now is the time to stop. It was a few years ago when the prognosis was that she had "years" left. I recall when it droped to "months." Recently it dropped to "weeks." Her husband, the doctor who delivered me, passed away some years ago to a heart attack. Growing up, I was at there home nearly every Sunday morning. There are two children that are the same age as my brother and myself. It can't be easy to have both parents gone before you're thirty. I'll keep counting my blessings.

That's what has been occupying my mind recently. Doctor, give me 20cc of joy, stat.

A Rant on the Fuzzies (02/23/2006)

You can get far in North America with laconic grunts. "Huh," "hun," and "hi!" in their various modulations, together with "sure," "guess so," "that so?" and "nuts!" will meet almost any contingency. - Ian Fleming

In tenth grade, my theology teacher asked the class to write an essay. He gave the class an overview of how to write essays well, a subject rbest left to english teachers. I recall vividly how he started the explanation: "Your first paragraph should contain your thesis. The best way to do this is to have your first sentence be: 'The thesis of this paper is...' and then put your thesis clearly. That is how I wrote every paper in college." All I could think was, "you must have been a C-level student" for surely every english teacher I had since the dawn of time had told me that is the worst possible way to state a thesis in a paper. Of course, when I wrote my paper for his class, I did exactly what he suggested, got back the A and felt dirty.

I'm taking GRE prep, as I might have mentioned, and the verbal sections annoy me. A sentence completion question that I had was "Unlike his neighbor, who told stories that ran for hours, John was very ____." With two of the answers being (a) terse and (d) laconic. I looked up terse in the OED, "Freed from verbal redundancy; neatly concise; compact and pithy in style or language." and I looked up laconic, "Following the Laconian manner, esp. in speech and writing; brief, concise, sententious. Of persons: Affecting a brief style of speech." So which of those two is more correct? Try looking up "terse" in your thesaurus and you will find "laconic" listed. Try looking up "laconic", and sure enough there is "terse."

Could you imagine a similar question in the quantative section of the test? I would be something similar to, "Given that N does not equal zero, which is more correct? (a) N = -2 (b) N = 2" ! You would fire that writer of that question with good cause.

The teacher of the class also made two wonderful comments. The first was during the discussion on not being garrulous when essay writing, "At the end of the day, you should remove unnecessary clauses from your sentences." The other came when a student asked how to rewrite "The war was fought by the soldiers" without passive tense and he said, "the soldiers were fighting the war." I punched him. He deserved it.

A Walk on the Beach (02/22/2006)

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. - Mustapha Mond (Brave New World)

Some three-day weekends are filled with non-stop action. Some are filled with rest. Mine was somewhere in the middle.

My recent weeks have been full of work, friends and school, the major food groups of life. Since the grass is always greener, I'm pining back to the days that were empty even though I know back then I was pining for full days.

I haven't had a lazy weekend in a while. A lazy Saturday begins with making breakfast, followed by a walk to the library to catch up on the magazines and find a new SciFi book using the Jordan(SM) method. I hit a few geocaches on my way home and settle in for a night of words. It's also harder living with two other people since a lazy Saturday can quickly be subsumed with trips to the autoparts store.

On Monday Gumdrop and I took a surprisingly fast drive to Half Moon Bay to stroll around the beach. If we were smart we would have packed a picnic lunch, but instead found a quiant preppy cafe in town. Our second date, way back in May, was a trip to Santa Cruz to walk on the beach and our infrequent trips to the beach always remind of it. It was beautiful and warm then. Monday was beautiful and cold.

I took a lot of trips to the wetlands in the east bay when I was living there. I would often spend hours just wandering and talking to myself. It's nice to have someone with me for both the talking and the quiet moments.

Army Training, Sir! (02/17/2006)

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber. - Plato

I've taken two mock GRE's now. It's been fun. Really. I like taking standardized tests when I can do fairly well on them. It makes me feel smart.

The math section of the GRE only tests up through Algebra II. Since I have four years of very expensive college-level education in the field, with numerous courses in number theory under my belt, there is nothing on it that really confuses me. The only way I miss problems on the math section is due to careless error.

I still recall taking the Putnam Challenge in college. It is the hardest undergraduate math exam in existence. The score is from 0 - 10, and the median is 0! The mean is something like 0.01. The test takes four and half hours for three problems. It sounds like they must be long and tedius, but the solution should be able to fit onto a single page. The scoring for each problem is something like: 1 = you solved the problem, 2 = you solved the problem elegantly, 3 = you solved the problem in the most elegant way. So a student spends 80 minutes per problem struggling on scratch paper, attacking the problem with whatever techniques come to mind. With ten minutes left, you scribe the most elegant version you can put together onto the answer sheet. What did I get? I got a 1, which is well above the average. I rule.

The first faux GRE I got a 690 on the math. Bleck! The second one I get a 750. There's a score I can be proud of and I only have 50 more points to get for perfection.

The GRE verbal gives me a good ass-kicking. I like to think I'm smart, but the sheer number of analogy or antonym problems where I just have no clue what anything means is pretty high. I was shocked when I took the first one how much it schooled me. My score on those, if you care, was 520 and then 550.

Lucky for me, improving on the verbal is merely a matter of memorizing words, and I have a good knack for memorizing pointless things that no real person needs to use. It all comes from my job selling encyclodia's in high school. So I have a goal to start using at least one GRE word per post, and though it might cause more circumlocution usually, I hope to be an erudite pedant at the end of it.

If it ain't Broke (02/15/2006)

The law an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. - Mohandas Gandhi

Remember how I destroyed my glasses about a week and a half ago? I certainly do. This morning I went to a new optometrist. Since my life is a complex medical tapestry, I dislike going to new doctors. I get to spend a lot of time checking boxes. Yes I had an orbital blowout of my right eye. Yes I have retinal scarring. Yes I have had iritis in my right eye. List the medications I take? There's never enough space.

My old glasses are pretty mangled, but I had them held together well enough when I walked in. They offered to reduce the mangling of the frames, and I was hesitant to mess with something that works. So after she messed with my old frames for ten minutes with the pliers and the wrenches she had mangled them to a point where one of the lenses no longer fit in. Her suggestion? "Why don't you just buy a similar set of frames that we can pop your lenses into." Are you kidding? So I took the pliers and contorted them so my lenses fit in again. Silly girl.

They did the new cool retina photo machine on my eye and we could pretty clearly see the retinal scaring left over. I thought that was neat. He also said I have ocular allergies. I didn't think I did, but he asked "are you eyes itching right now? Kind of like you're tired?" Why yes, yes they did.

Seven to ten days from now, I will have new lovely glasses. I decided to go crazy and got the flexible frames and transition lenses. I'll see how I like them.

Valentines Day (02/14/2006)

But it's St. Valentines Day! God wants us to do it. - Homer (The Simpsons)

So, obviously, it's Valentines Day. Those with dates rejoice and those without dates commiserate. That's the way the game is played. I have been commiserating the past few years on this day, so this year I had one of the best V-days ever.

I had this sinister plot over the weekend to have Gumdrop's parents plant a little bag of candy hearts for her to find when she woke up on Tuesday. I saw the parents on Saturday, but forgot to bring the candy. So I surprised her with it Sunday. This early gift provided the false sense of, "Well this is what Jordan is giving me for Valentine's day."

The next part of my scheming plot was to surprise her at work with flowers on Tuesday morning. So while talking on the phone with her Monday evening I did my best to try and suss out her plans the next day.

"You showing up early to work?" I asked.

"Well, I have an 8am call, but I think I'm going to take it from home."

"Good." Thinking. "So you'll be at work around 9:30 then? Do you have any other meetings?"

"Nope, I should be able to get stuff done in the morning."

At 9:45am I showed up at her office with a bouquet of flowers and peaked around the parking lot to find no sign of her car. I went in and reception called her desk to learn she wasn't in yet. Oh well, I did need to get the office myself. So I put a note on the flowers and a second on her whiteboard and went off to work.

At 3pm, after coming back from a meeting I discovered a ginger bread bouquet on my chair from Gumdrop. Gingerbread cookies are an obvious choice, because the best compliment to a Gumdrop Girl is a Cookie Boy.

We went to downtown Palo Alto for a nice romantic dinner, but the poor restaurant was not well prepared. "Ohh, we ran out of champagne glasses, so here are wine glasses." "Actually, we've run out of our second course, so here is a substitute." "We ran out of the third entree on the list." "We ran out of second dessert option, so you'll gelato." I was waiting for, "We've run out of food, so we got burritos from next door." Silly place. It didn't even offer a couple bucks of the price. They cleaned house.

Flowers, candy, cookies and dinner. Happy Valentines Day.

Justifiable Crimes (02/13/2006)

There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy. - Ambrose Bierce

Patroclus: I know we missed Battlestar, but we can just download it.

Mr. Squirrel: That's not quite legal.

Patroclus: It's time shifting. It's legal.

Mr. Squirrel: Well, you can make an argument for it being legal, but it's definately illegal.

Patroclus: You can mark an argument for anything being legal.

Mr. Squirrel: False. There is no valid argument for unwarranted on-going domestic spying on Americans by the government being legal.

Patroclus: Still, you can make the case of the vice president shooting someone not being illegal.

Mr. Squirrel: Clearly.

I misplaced my iPod at some point on Friday, and I realized this weekend how much of an iPod junky I have become. I listen to podcasts all day long, on my commute, while I work out, all the time. This weekend as I was doing random chores around the house, I kept thinking "I wish I had my iPod." On my way to work this morning, as I listened to standard morning show crap that all music stations seem to play, I was thinking "I wish I had my iPod." I finally found it. Exactly where it should be in my backpack.

You know, I even played with the idea of doing a podcast myself. I was recording my own ramblings on my mobile phone during a 5-minute stretch of road on the way home and assembling it on Saturday. I have a little alpha-audience that has been listening, but I don't think I am inspired enough to keep it up. So I don't think it will ever leave the alpha.

Enchanting, alluring, enthralling (02/12/2006)

They may turn out to be a great disappointment, or perhaps they may be full of enchanting surprises. - Mary Wesley

Friday night I went out to celebrate a long time friend's birthday. We went bowling at a place that had music videos from the 80's projected and security guards in the parking lot! I saw a second-degree friend I haven't seen in around ten years.

We met back when I was sixteen. I went over to visit a friend I had met on a BBS. Over at her house was another friend of the family, her younger brother's good friend, who was around twelve. This friend was an adorable little ginger girl that I dub Ginnie. I had never really known a real-life ginger before, so I was quite taken aback by her very red hair and very pale skin.

When next talking to my friend, she asked what I thought of Ginnie. I tried to come up with a good adjective that aptly defined her looks, and I choose the word "enchanting." So what does my friend do back then? She tells her brother my description. Of course, her brother tells Ginnie my description. This becomes a joke at my expense for quite some time. "Jordan, the enchanting Ginnie is coming over."

So of course, when I saw her last week, I told her that I hadn't seen her since she was "young and enchanting." Then I quickly jumped in that she is "still young and enchanting." Good save.

Long-haired Freaky People Need Not Apply (02/07/2006)

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign. Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind. Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign - Five Man Electrical Band (Signs)

A friend sent me a cool Flickr photo set called "Sacramento Signs" that shows pictures from daytime and night time of various signs throughout Sacramento. I spent two summers working in a sign shop in Sacramento, before my summer doing day care, before refusing to have any more summer jobs. There are actually quite a few signs scattered throughout Sacramento that I had a brief hand in making.

There was a Palomino Room sign on El Camino that I helped to cut. Normally, when I produced signs, a font machine cut through vinyl and I would just peel and apply. The Palomino room had a horse on it, and we had a sketch from the artist that needed to be tediously cut out of the vinyl by hand. I was proud of that sign and it wasn't in the photo set. The last time I was in Sacramento I drove by with my camera to discover The Palomino Room has been replaced by an Asian buffet and my sign is gone.

There was another sign for Giselle's Travel on Ethan Way that I have fond memories of. I didn't actually do the sawing of the plastic to make the gazelle, but I did the photo polymer to raise the letters of the sign. Additionally I broke the antlers off first plastic gazelle we fabricated causing stern looks and the requirement to create a second. I couldn't find that sign on the photo set either.

Finally, there are a ton of signs throughout the Sacramento Airport that I built. The painting department would paint the board and stencil on the words, but then I would glue on the big white square and the arrow on the left that shows which way to "Gates 1-77" and other similar arrow signs. Those signs are boring, so I don't mind not finding any of them.

Where Did You Expect to Be? (02/06/2006)

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is." - Kurt Vonnegut

When I was out in Long Island a couple weeks back I got to visit with a friend I don't see enough of. I have known him since high school where he was a year behind the rest of my friends. The most poignant thing Chris said to me was, "I feel too comfortable in the life I have. I thought I would be a struggling artist using the conflict to produce amazing works of literature. I'm a programmer on a proprietary database language. Do you ever think that none of us are living the life we planned to? We're all doing something different."

I wrote poetry and fiction in school, but never dreamed of making a career of them. I still write as a hobby. I have always expected that I would have a career as a software developer or as a teacher. I'm currently living life as the software developer and I may return to higher education and become a professor. I'm not sure yet, but certainly my career is following one of the paths that I thought it would.

My love life has certainly been more dicey over the last decade than envisioned. My relationships lean toward short and/or turbulent. Well, they were that way at least. Recently things have been going better than I could hope and I am in the ninth month of something great. I think I have even set off commitmentphobe alarms in her head a couple times over the past few weeks and I have never been on the giving end of those before. It's fun.

I spent years living by myself in the east bay and no one wanted to make the trek to visit me. It was a change from all the socializing of my high school and college years, though surprising similar to my grade school and junior high school years. That hermit life, where most weekends were spent reading books instead of having friends over, was not something I expected, but I can't say it was bad. My seclusion has melted away over the past year with my new move onto the Peninsula. Now there are friends visiting all the time and we have the party place. At my grandparent's sixtieth wedding anniversary this past weekend, the room was full of people who have been friends for an incredibly long time. My good friends, Chris among them, have been with me for a decade and I think we will easily all be friends for many decades to come.

I guess, the summary overall, is that my life is mostly how I expected it to be. I'm happy.

Sixtieth is the Diamond Anniversary (02/04/2006)

Con permiso mi capitán, the hall is rented, the orchestra engaged. It's now time to see if you can dance. - Q (Star Trek: TNG)

It's the calm before the storm. My grandparent's sixtieth wedding anniversary passed by this week and there is a large gathering for them at my mother's house. I can't image many couple make this feat. It's a powerful combination of love and longevity. As an unmarried twenty-eight year old, only the healthcare singularity could grant me this kind of fortune in my life.

In my mother's home, the carpets are clean, the chairs are out, the grandparent's are en-route, the cake is being picked up and the caterers are on there way. I sit on the floor of my very clean room taking that moment to center myself for the two hours of panic that is about to ensue.

My mother has a the daunting task of making sure that the entire orchestra, from the valet to the caterers, is playing in tune. My equally daunting task is to make sure that my mother and grandparents don't have panic attacks for each tiny insignificant issue that is bound to come up throughout the day. People aren't coming for the appetizers or the ambiance, they are coming to see my grandparents.

I've reminded her, though it will not sink in, that the flaws of a party are what make it unique and memorable. You don't remember parties where everything went off without a hitch. You remember parties where the caterer didn't show up and someone ran out to grab to $100 worth of fast food. You don't remember all the times the national anthem played at the start of the basketball game, you remember the time the speaker system broke and the audience sung it themselves. Those flaws, those issues, are what make a good well-planned party into a fantastic well executed party.

I Fracked My Glasses (02/03/2006)

Sometimes that's what happens in life. You're going about your business and someone throws away your Lembas bread. - Billy Boyd

During Battlestar a mosquito flies in front of my face. I clap my hands to take it out and miss. It lands on my leg. My mother says, "kill it." I smack at my leg and miss and it flies up in between my glasses and my face. I instinctively freak out and clap smack into my glasses which proceed to go flying from my face in a beautiful projectile arch landing across the room. The mosquito flies triumphantly away to spread West Nile to others.

I walk across the room to find my glasses twisted into a shape that Frank Gehry might wish to use in his next building design. First, grip your glasses where the ear piece meets the lens and pull outwards until both lenses pop out and ovals are elongated. Next grip them firmly by the two lenses and twist one side about ninety degrees so that the lenses are on perpendicular planes. You're almost there. Finally, bend them into an L-shape. You have just replicated the state of my glasses.

I bent them mostly back to shape and the lenses stay put, so I can drive somewhat safer now. This particular pair is circa 2003. I bought them after going for over one year without even wearing glasses. I hate my glasses, but less than I hate the idea of trying to put a flappy thing onto my eyeball.

Game Over Man, Game Over (02/02/2006)

All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men. - Isaac Asimov

It's a child's responsibility to embarass his father as often as possible. You know, it was right after I wrote the entry on my father's computer woes that I turned my work laptop into a brick. I ran all the latest driver updates and then, poof. I just get a blank black screen when I turn it on without any bootup. I finally gave up trying to restore it, and took it to my IT group who said "don't ever run update on a working system." Come on. Seriously? You can just see the scenario where I get hacked by Back Orrifice and they said, "Why wheren't you running the important system updates?!?" "Well, my system was working."

So I just backed up my Mac again. You should do the same. It's all safe until my home burns down destroying my laptop, my backup flash drive, my backup computer and my backup CDs. Brilliant.

The first call came in during the work day and I hear the Top Gun Anthem playing on my phone signaling my father. As friends and family will attest, the chance of me answering the phone during the work day is within epsilon of zero. I let the voicemail answer and then I checked a few minutes afterwards. "I was trying to install Outlook and now when I boot I get a blue screen that says the Windows boot process has stopped for my protection." I shudder and clear my schedule for the evening.

That night, I was just sitting down to work at 9pm when I hear the sounds of Top Gun emanating from my pocket, sigh briefly, and pick up the phone.

J: "A blue screen on start-up is not going to be an easy problem to fix."

D: "Well, I took the computer into a service store and they told me the hard drive is damaged. They are going to pull things off and asked if I wanted them to just rebuild the hard drive or put in a new one."

J: "Well, if the hard drive just has bad sectors, pull off the data and have them reformat it. If it's physical damage, then you need a new hard drive."

D: "They said it was physical damage, but it would be fine just to wipe it and re-install."

Something is obviously not right. Either the store is giving him bad advice, the store is lying or he's gotten something wrong. Still, the drive is getting old and getting small, so it's a good time to replace it.

J: "Drives are cheaper and faster these days. Get a new one."

D: "One other question. I'm trying to use the other desktop since my laptop is out of commission and I was getting a warning about the firewall. Can you help?"

These questions get trickier every year. Since my glorious switch to the Macintosh, these are all the types of issues that I haven't needed to care about that I am slowly losing my expertise in. Firewall must be the XP firewall, right? Must be.

D: "So I left the computer running when I went to eat and now that I'm back to it, the screen is just completely blue."

J: "Are there words on it? Is there some kind of text?"

D: "Nope. Just an arrow. A blank screen and an arrow."

J: "An arrow? What does it look like?"

D: "Well, the arrow moves when I wiggle the mouse."

J: "Oh. You mean the pointer. I got it. Okay. Try Ctrl-Alt-Del and see if anything comes up."

D: "Nope. Nothing comes up. The green light is on, but the yellow light isn't on."

J: "Ok, try..."

D: "No wait! The yellow light is flashing."

J: "Ok, so..."

D: "No, it stopped flashing."

J: "Well..."

D: "It's flashing again."

J: "Okay, we'll wait for a few seconds."

Ten seconds go by. I take a shot of Fernet.

D: "Nothing has happened."

J: "Okay, press the big off button on the front."

D: "I pressed it and the yellow light is flashing again."

J: "Let's just wait."

Thirty seconds go by.

D: "Okay, the screen is black. It's dead. Nothing is on at all."

J: "Great, press it again and lets power it back on."

D: "Okay, I'm on the Windows XP login screen. I have an account here for '[his account]' and I click it and it asks for a password. What password should I use?"

I take a shot of Bacardi.

J: "Umm... Why did you set a password and not remember it? Is my account on there? Use that one."

D: "Okay, I'm logging into your account. Great, and now I see a popup saying my virus definitions are more than 30 days old."

J: "Okay, well, we can update them."

D: "I'm not connected to the Internet so I'll close it."

J: "Wait... umm, whatever. Okay."

D: "Now I see a bubble that says the firewall isn't installed."

J: "Okay, so..."

D: "I just clicked it. Now I see an error with run.dll and it wants me to send something to Microsoft, but I'm going to say NO because I don't want them tracking me."

J: "Okay, well..."

D: "And nothing is happening. Why is not firewall coming up?"

I take a shot of Jack Daniels.

J: "Okay, click on Start -> Control Panel and find Security Settings."

D: "Okay, I'm in the control panel, but there is no Security Settings. There's a Symantec. There's a System. Ohh, there is Security Settings, let me click it. Now I see an error with run.dll and I click don't send. And nothing is happening."

J: "Okay..."

D: "New updates are ready for download."

J: "What?"

D: "I clicked the balloon. 36 critical updates are ready for download, do you want to install."

I take a shot of Grey Goose.

J: "Okay, we need to connect to the internet."

D: "I see an earthlink on the desktop, I'm going to click that. There was an error with EarthlinkDialer.exe and I won't send to Microsoft."

I've started drinking heaving at this point, if you hadn't guessed.

J: "Okay, go back through your start menu into your connections."

D: "Great. Do I want to use 'Connect to Earthlink' or 'Copy of Connect to Earthlink' or 'Copy of Connect to Earthlink (1)?'"

J: "Um, whichever one is the furthest down on the list."

D: "It's dialing. It's connect and my Fox news page has come up."

J: "Okay, Lets do that update bubble. Choose express update."

D: "All right it's starting. How long will this take?"

J: "All night. Leave it running all night."

D: "Update 1 of 36 has failed."

J: "Hmm, that's means that..."

D: "Update 2 of 36 has failed."

J: "Yes, they're probably all going to fail."

D: "Update 3 of 36 has failed."

J: "Yeah, there's something wrong enough that I can't diagnose this over the phone."

D: "I get an timeout when I try and connect anywhere over the internet except my Fox news page."

J: "Try Google."

D: "Nope, only Fox news page works."

J: "What is the date on the page? Does it show a date?"

D: "No, there is no date on the page, but the stories look like today."

J: "Okay, I just pulled it up and I see a date on the left next to the search box."

D: "Well, I don't see that. Only about half that page has loaded and the rest is just filled with red X's"

I pass out drunk.

As the World Turns (02/01/2006)

Everything's Coming Up Millhouse! - Millhouse (The Simpsons)

I played around with iWeb a lot trying to think if I can make any kind of use of it for this website. I've decided I cannot. I think if you're building an entire site from scratch, and are not such a web snob as I am, it could be really cool and simple. Maybe my dad would use it, but certainly I wouldn't.

The month of January is over. It's crazy talk, I know. Everything is just too short. My resolutions are going along well. I start a GRE preperation course in about a week. I went to the gym last night, but I would say I'm still not hitting the numbers I'd like to there. I went to Disneyland with the girl last month. I would same I'm well on my way. This past week the garage finally became clean enough that I was able to park in it.