The Sun Sets on Sun Valley’s Garage Sale Day

I’ve been attending Sun Valley Garage Sale weekends since the late 70s/early 80s, and writing about them on this blog for more than fifteen years. I’m afraid both of those things may have come to an end. Pat Deckard was the red-headed dervish behind Sun Valley’s annual garage sales. Pat was a realtor who happened to live in Sun Valley, and whom my family personally had the pleasure of living next door to. I don’t know what all went in to organizing the annual event or how much work it took. All I know is that over the past 40+… (read more)

RobOHara

The Answer: “King Kong Grew”

The best thing about pitting characters against one another in a film’s title (like Godzilla vs. Kong) is that long before people actually see the movie they can imagine the conflict and try to predict the outcome. When I was a kid I owned a book full of articles about horror films and movie monsters, and one of the movies featured in the book was Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971). Even though I had never seen the movie, I spent a lot of time wondering how a battle between Dracula and Frankenstein would turn out. Dracula, especially in bat-form, could flutter… (read more)

RobOHara1 Comment

Visiting Friends and Barcades

Earlier this week my buddy Robb and his wife Mel flew in from Colorado to celebrate his birthday. The two flew into Arkansas, drove over to Oklahoma to visit me, and eventually returned to Arkansas to visit the Arkadia Retrocade in Fayetteville before returning home. While they were here we ate onion burgers, had Mexican food at Ted’s, and had breakfast at Hatch. We also did some shopping, sight-seeing, and even stopped by Bob Funk’s stable to check out the Clydesdales. I had a great time visiting with Robb and his wife, and I hope they had a good time… (read more)

RobOHara

Easter 2021

On March 19, Susan and I returned to Enid, Oklahoma to receive our second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. We could have waited a week or two and received our second shots at work, but time was of the essence. According to the CDC’s website, people are considered to be fully vaccinated two weeks after receiving their second shot. That date for us was April 2, two days before Easter. The weather Sunday afternoon was just about perfect. It was warm, but not too warm. It was windy, but not too windy. For the first time in over a year,… (read more)

RobOHara

Buying Time

Saturday morning, the power supply in my home file server died. According to Amazon, the power supply was three-and-a-half years old and already out of warranty. The 486 computer I bought in 1996 still has its original power supply. It seems to me they don’t build things like they used to. Or maybe I’m just old. My server has all my movies, all my music, and all of my data. I have backups (my backups have backups), but accessing them involves physically moving drives around and isn’t as easy as one might imagine. Because my server also handles services like… (read more)

RobOHara2 Comments

A Light at the End of the COVID Tunnel

Facebook has a feature called Memories that shows you previous pictures and posts from your own timeline. Every morning when I log on, Facebook shows me posts from a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, and in some cases, ten years ago. I’m constantly reminded of parties and friends and holidays, but the posts from one year ago this month are most curious. The first few posts are trivial. Innocent. There are pictures of food and thoughts about video games. In the second half of the month, the posts begin to change. Mostly they’re reactions to the arrival… (read more)

RobOHara

A Hail Mary Upgrade

Tuesday morning, one of my friends informed me that my web forum was offline. I didn’t think too much about it (servers reboot occasionally) until I noticed another one of my sites was also offline. Both sites were built on an older version of PHP, and a few minutes of troubleshooting revealed that my webhost (HostGator) had unceremoniously (read: “without notification”) removed PHP5, instantly breaking two of my websites. One of the sites, one I used to track my bookmarks, was salvageable. The other, my forum, was completely broken. The technical issues were complicated by the fact that my forum… (read more)

RobOHara3 Comments

That Last Visit to Fry’s Never Happened

In the fall of 2013, work sent me to Tempe, Arizona for a week of training. After arriving in town, one of my first stops was at the local Fry’s. Although we didn’t have a Fry’s here in Oklahoma, I had visited a few of their other locations. Fry’s was multiple stores in one — like Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA and Radio Shack all under the same roof. They had a huge selection of movies, music, and A/V equipment. The computer department contained everything from completely assembled computers to parts like hard drives, memory, motherboards and cases. They had… (read more)

RobOHara4 Comments

What a Difference 24 Hours Makes

Wednesday morning we didn’t have water, I was worried about losing power again, and I couldn’t get out of my driveway due to all the snow. Thursday, just after breakfast, our water returned. I checked the kitchen faucet around 8am and was getting a trickle, which was more than we’d had since Tuesday. Excitedly, I filled an empty gallon water jug with water (it took about 7 minutes to fill) and set it aside. When I checked the faucet again around 9:30am, our water pressure was back to about 75% normal. A couple of hours later, it was back to… (read more)

RobOHara2 Comments

On Snow and Surgeries

Sunday morning my wife boarded a plane to California, where she is having a medical procedure performed on Wednesday. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Everything will be fine here at home.” Over the past 48 hours we’ve had record amounts of snow and low temperatures, a water pipe burst inside our house, experienced a power outage, and now we have no water. My wife was diagnosed with Lipedema, a non-life threatening condition that causes nodules to grow inside your legs. The surgery to remove the nodules is categorized as cosmetic; there are roughly 60 surgeons in the country who are trained… (read more)

RobOHara1 Comment