I spend a couple hours this afternoon cleaning my side of our bedroom. Filled two grocery bags with paper recycling, and another two with trash. Cleared the top of two dressers and two bookcases. Also moved 20+ books to our library and got them (sort of) shelved–I need to do some more organization there. As you must have guessed, this was long overdue.

I also closed up the cases of our three dead computers (all long obsolete) so they take up less space and we can more conveniently recycle them. I then worked some more on mia_mcdavid‘s workstation, recabling it to remove a now unnecessary KVM switch (the other computer that had been on it is now among the dead). I ended up replacing both her mouse and her keyboard to deal with various glitches. That is why I keep spare parts around.

We are having lots of trouble getting Norton Antivirus to work on the laptop we got for James. I am currently thinking of nuking the whole system and rebuilding it in Linux, probably Slackware or Debian. He should be OK running KDE.

Mia made a nice green bean/potato/chicken salad for lunch. Not at all the July 4 BBQ cliché, but quite satisfying.

Unusual July 4th observances: The Discovery Channel was doing a Mythbusters marathon, while the Sci-Fi channel was running the original Twilight Zone. Mia saw more than I did, but I did catch about 1 1/2 episodes of the latter. I had forgotten how really good it was.