The Weekend that Was. Or so goes this blog post, as the weekend basically fades away into the past. I think we all knew the weekend couldn’t last for two long, and indeed it’s now basically over for weekend.

Save the Pine Bush Hike on Saturday. It was a wild flower hike, and it went well. I was running a bit late for it, because I had trouble finding the house of a person I was picking up to carpool to the event.

Saturday Afternoon I Probably Shouldn’t Have Just Hung Out at Home. But at first, I thought it looked like a nice day on Sunday to go to North-South Lake Campground for some hiking, paddling, and swimming. The weather then crapped out on Sunday, and that idea went down the toilet — but so be it.

One of these weekends when I am in town, I am determined to use my EmpirePass to get into North-South Lake, do a little hiking up North Mountain, then go for a swim at beach, and a paddle on the lake. But so far the weather is not cooperating. i should have done something outdoors on Saturday — I seriously considered going to Schodack Iskland, but it didn’t happen.

Ended Up Screwing around with some maps, while my memory was fresh on the location of the roadside campsites in the Green Mountains. Setting up the mapping data for the Green Mountains, similiar to the New York maps I make, was kind of pain, as it required downloading totally new data and setting all the formatting, but now it’s done and working well. Made a dozen or so maps of the Green Mountains and other locations I explored or of interest in Vermont.

Also got music loaded onto a memory stick so I could listen to it on my truck. It seems I left my memory stick with all my music up at Romance Header Campsite when camping in the Green Mountains, so I ended up buying a new 32 gigabyte memory stick. What’s nice about that, is my entire music collection can fit on the memory stick, so whatever I want to listen to, I can dial it up on the radio. Also, have plenty of room for podcasts — over 9 gigabytes of free space remain, for adding whatever podcasts I want to it, for listening in the woods.

I originally wanted to organize it by genre/first letter artist/artist/ folders, but my truck can only have 700 folders on the memory stick. I ended up coming up with a script hat did genre/first letter/songs or genre/artist/songs or genre/artist – album/songs, depending on how many songs there were on an album. This seems like a relatively simple way or organize it.

Got a New WordPress theme up on the blog. The original theme I had used was kind of messed up internally, as I didn’t fully understand the concept of client themes in WordPress, and ended up hacking, somewhat badly, an existing theme. This weekend, I moved over to the Pinboard theme, with a much more carefully put together client theme, that gives the blog some unique look and feel, while staying constant with a theme that will automatically update as needed, and with clear delineations between my own code, and the code of the theme’s author.

Should instantly improve the way the blog looks and feels, without the heavy lifting and complicated code that was required for even the most minimalistic changes on the old blog.

Did an Oil Change Today. Going to take back the oil filter to Walmart for recycling — I noticed they now offer recycling for the filters. In years past, I would just toss them in the garbage, or burn out the oil in them in a fire and toss them in recycling, but now that there is a proper system for collecting oil filters for recycling, all the better.

One thing I hate about doing an oil change, is the habitual staring at the oil pressure gauge after restarting the engine.

The first time after the change, it literally takes a second or so for the pressure to go fully from 0-40 psi while the pump pressurize the oil. Then the oil pressure always runs a bit high in the 45-55 psi for the first 5 minutes of driving after an oil change, before returning to the normal 40 psi — all while I am holding my breath. Totally normal for this engine with cold oil to run in the low 50s especially under hard acceleration, but still slightly nerve racking.

I actually kind of like the fact that gauges go up and down on my Chevy (like others I have driven). The voltage gauge also goes up and down, a fair bit from 12.5-15.1v, depending on the state of the charge of the batteries. So much different then previous cars that I have driven, where I think the oil pressure gauge and battery gauge actually don’t do anything, or tell you anything as they are a constant level.