Missive #476

It was almost a decade ago that Least Heat-Moon (Blue Highways ) followed the trail of Lewis and Clark in River Horse ; in the first section of his latest peripatetic writings, he and his wife, Q, trace the lesser-known Dunbar-Hunter Expedition of 1804 through the southern half of the Louisiana Purchase, searching out the head of the Ouachita River in Arkansas.I read Blue Highways and River Horse sometime in the 1990s and had forgotten to look for more of his books. I’ll correct that oversight with this book and hopefully find some of his others published in the 20’teens’. Least Heat-Moon’s fans will find this territory, and that covered in the five other “journeys to places a goodly portion of the American populace would call ‘nowhere,’ ” instantly familiar, as he and various companions take digressive paths from one small opolis (“where anything metro was clearly missing”) to the next in search of “quoz” (an 18th-century word meaning “anything out of the ordinary”). Among his many adventures, Least Heat-Moon rides a bicycle along an abandoned railroad track, discovers a “road to nowhere” built by a Florida county so local drug smugglers would have a landing strip, and comes up with what he believes is the real story behind the murder of his great-grandfather. Or maybe the highlights of these journeys are the people he meets along the way and their stories, like the man who tried to fund a school for disadvantaged children by providing lonely widows with special massages, or the artist who’s turned his cabin into a walk-in kaleidoscope. Either way, few readers will be able to resist tagging along. — Publishers Weekly review

I have been busy doing Linux work these past few days. Learning how to use the HP Stream ‘backup’ with Fedora OS. Also adding and removing Ubuntu to the System 76 laptop as a dual boot with Zorin. Wasted a lot of time trying to get efibootmgr to manage the BIOS on that machine. Finally found  rEFInd, an alternative boot manager, that worked. If six weeks ago I knew what I know now I would have saved myself a lot of aggravation and some money. I could have fixed the boot problem myself. It has been a learning experience. HA 

Have also been doing some domestic stuff; month end house cleaning plus I added refrigerator defrosting. There was not frost to be removed but a thick layer of ice in the refrigerator with a thinner one in the freezer (I may have defrosted the freezer last time and not the refrigerator). Also cleaned up the refrigerator veggie bins and repositioned the shelving to better accommodate what I put in there.

Yesterday I went to town again with breakfast at the Bisbee Breakfast Club then grocery gathering at Safeway. From there I went to the strip mall where the laundromat and Bisbee Computer are and got my laundry done. Stopped by Bisbee Computer and gave the owner an update on how the HP Stream was working and what more I had done with the System 76 laptop.

I can say that it is now Spring. The mesquite are leafing out and they are always right with their predictions that there will be no more freezing mornings. They did push the envelope this time however. It got down to 33°F on 5 April but the low this morning was 48.

Note: This entire post was done using the HP. It is working great (slow to boot up) and Fedora had a shallow learning curve.