Some Good News for a Change and a bit of bad news too

I have good news, well and some bad news, to report today.

First the Good news, I was laying in bed last night when it finally dawned on me that even though my docs, my 92 page brief and all the supporting evidence, got deleted, I still have printouts of a lot of things from the previous years. All I have to do is scan them back in, or just make copies.
The other good news is I finally located some web sites, pages and documents, that have the much needed "fair value is not fair market value" phrase within them, I had originally found only one, a court case out of Colorado, today I am happy to announce I found several, and counting, pages using Gahoo/Yoogle, which if you don't know about it has a split screen with yahoo results on one side and Google results on the other, and yes most times there is a difference.
Here is the link WWW.gahooyoogle.com go ahead and try it out.

So things are moving forward.

I got a letter from the State Tax Appeal Board last week, it seems I forgot to include the notice from the county board when I filed for the appeal. They gave me 10 days [from the day they mailed it; May 1, 2006] to return it to them, I'm hoping that weekends don't count. I don't go to the post office everyday, sometimes only once a week or less. So I had only two days, if weekends count, to get it back to them. I sent a note explaining that I didn't get the letter until the 5th, didn't open it until the 6th and mailed it back the next possible day, Monday the 8th, it could get there by the 10th if it goes right through. I'm only maybe 25 miles give or take as the crow flies from Olympia, but 60 miles or more by road, the mail from out here on the other hand goes first to Portland Oregon and then back to Washington. I'm hoping it took the fast route.


The other Bad News, is I am still trying to recover the lost/deleted files. I got one program I could at least understand, plus it was Freeware, it found over 41,000 lost files. The problem is few of them were saved on a different drive, it recommends not trying to save on the same drive the lost files are on, and most of those found either won't open or are blank. I got a couple to open, they appear to be program files, like sample pages and such. I am almost ready to give up and start all over again, but I won't do that yet, there is way to much to get back, too much time involved, like the years it took me to create and collect them all. Not to mention some files that I actually bought.

More Good News

I got busy yesterday and did some dirt plowing and then planting, not to mention filtering out a lot of sticks and roots inbetween. It is going to take me a really long time to create the new garden plus. This old body is in loud rebellion with the digging and stick finding, throwing out, part. But with no one else left around here to share the chores I get to do ALL of them myself. So I now have corn [which is showing] green beans, edible pea pods, tomatoes [ several kinds], dill, cucumbers, pumpkins, radishes, zucchini [I got nuts and planted a whole row of the stuff], onions, and more to come. Plus there are the berries and grapes and the rhubarb here and there. Then the trees, apple, pear, and peach, so far only the three apple trees are producing, the others need a year or three more before fruit will grow. Now I need to prepare and figure out what else to plant in the acre plus of bare dirt still out there; maybe next year.

So keep tuned for updates, and if you read this let me know, if you are interested in my appeal let me know.

Beware what you do in Windows XP

I had the ultimate bad experience the other day. I have been changing hard drives around in this machine, got two inside it and one external hard drive. But I made a real goof, not knowing it could happen and Windows didn't even give me a notice or a chance to not do it or anything.

I had to send one of the drives back because I couldn't get the system to recognize it as being there, more on that later.
So when I got it back I pulled one out and put it in, it was an 80 gig the one I pulled was a 160 gig, my original and still C: drive is only a 40 gig. Anyway, the computer was shut down, asleep hibernating whatever it does on its own, enough so that I have to push the power button to get it to revive. I had a brief thought that I should wake it up and then shut it down, but I didn't thinking it wouldn't matter I just pulled the plug and opened it up and swapped the drive out, put the 160 gig back in.
BUT when I turned it back on Windows deleted all the contents of that drive, which just happened to contain all of my docs, music, videos, programs and way more things. It was my back up in fact.
But due to other problems I had to dump everything I lost from the C: drive in an attempt to defrag it. By the way I couldn't even defrag after removing a lot of things, it said that google earth was the problem, it had files that couldn't be defragged, I don't understand that but that's what it said.
So there I was with the drives all installed, the external hooked up and formatted and all my data gone in the blink of an eye, well a few seconds longer. The Documents folder was only a measly 4.7 gigs
This was not something I had even an inkling of an idea could happen.
So beware of XP, it makes decisions all on its own and won't even ask you for permission.

In the old DOS days I had a program, from either Norton or PC-Tools that did some great things, one of them was to undelete files. Back then a file only got the first letter of its name changed to a symbol, the computer seeing that symbol would ignore the file, not show it as being there and all you had to do was change the first letter back and it would show the file again.
I don't know how XP works but I'm hoping it is still the same way.
I am hoping that it is still possible to recover everything.
I looked at a couple of so called undelete programs for sale these days, but they looked way over my head and due to the amount of data lost I don't want to take a chance on really losing it forever. The greatest loss is the 4 years of data collecting I did on my property tax case. I have a not too good print out of the 92 page brief so I can scan a lot of it, but there was so much more I had that was a part of the findings.
The good news, the hopeful news is my youngest has a friend she tells me who knows how to do things like undelete lost files. I told her to find him that I would buy the software if needed and pay him for his time. I'm still waiting but I have high hopes she will find him.
The notice came today from the State Tax Appeal board, I've not open it yet.
If I need to type everything all over again from scratch I can do it but it's the web pages I had logged in that are the greatest loss. Mostly from legal sites and such, things that supported my position that True and Fair value is not Fair Market Value, things that took years to find.
Well just wanted to give you a little warning to not do what I did.

I said I would add more on the system not seeing the drive as being there. It did see it but not openly, seems if you delve deep into windows there is a place where it will show up, but not as an active drive, it shows a small red X in a circle like icon, how was I supposed to know all you had to do was click on it and follow the directions. It was a Hitachi drive I emailed them and they sent back how to do it instructions, which made me wonder if the one I had sent back wasn't actually good. You see when I installed the 160 gig, it was a Seagate it just showed up as being there and windows asked me if I wanted to format it, simple easy no problems. I expected the same thing, so at least I learned something new about XP. And that is XP I think has far too many hidden areas, areas within areas, within areas, of controls.

May 2006 arrives

Thought I would add a bit here on local events.
A nice big bull dozer arrived last week and spent the next 5 days moving dirt around, burning a stump pile bigger than the house, it raged for at least 5 days and now sits there with only one stump left, that one was dug up as an after the fact find so it arrived too late to burn as the fire was only a pile of coals. But not to worry there is an acre or two of bare dirt now chock full of roots and branches all bone dry as the trees were logged back in 92. So for the whole of this summer and maybe next summer small bon fires are the name of the game, which also means lots of hotdogs and marshmallows on sticks.
It is great to finally look out on that bare dirt because after almost 30 years I can finally start planting fruit trees, flowers, vegetables, grapes, berries and whatever else I can find to create a visual treat to the eyes.
For now I'm going to seed most of it in either red clover or alf-alpha, both are in the green manure category, meaning they enrich the soil as they grow. It will depend on which seeds I can find and of course the cost per acre because after the dozer bill comes in there won't be a lot left this month. I was lucky in that Leon the dozer owner takes payments, plus he only charges $60 and hour with an operator. For those of you that don't know that is far cheaper than I could rent a smaller one for and I would need to run it myself.

The other good news is I finally got the rhododendron bushes off eh truck. They were sitting there for 4 weeks exactly. I picked them up off of freecycle. Each was some 5' tall and about as wide. Took 4 of us just to slide them up the ramp onto the truck, took my back a week plus to recover from it, but well worth the effort. One bloomed on the truck, a brilliant red, the other is just now blooming a bright pink. They certainly add something to all the green of the forest around me.
And while doing all of this we happened to notice one dead tree, there are several dozen of them from an ice storm a few years back, this one stands about 20 feet high or more and about 15" thick, there is a nice round hole in the side about 5 feet from the broken top, inside that hole is a woodpecker, working up a frenzy pecking away clearing out space for a nest.
I've only seen the hen so far but I did notice last year a huge red headed woodpecker working the trees in that area, so I'm having hopes that this will be their nest. I need to look them up and see if they keep a nest for years, I hope they do as it will be fun to watch the young ones grow.


So now I finally have cleared space enough to build my woodshop which is a life long dream since childhood, and plenty of good dirt to plant things in, things to eat that is, and a few flowers for color here and there, stripes and patches of them, what ever I feel like doing, I could even create pictures if I wanted. I've seen that done in magazines and books, you just plant different colors according to a graph plan and when they bloom you see the picture. I've spent the last 20 years drawing plans for this property, all sorts of designs so it will be interesting to see what finally emerges.