Good morning. Clear drives and sanded on-ramps.

The signs of Saturday's snowfall are still everywhere: grass and bush and barkdust groundcover are coated with snow. Cars moved since Saturday are clean, but the rest of us lumps are not so lucky. I had an inch of snow on top of my car (it's scattered on the road from here to home) and an inch on my windshield. The latter was easy to get off, which I hadn't been sure of: it had melted and refrozen to itself just enough that all you had to do was break it apart with an ordinary squeegee, then shove the chunk off the edge of the windshield. Quick work.

Nothing icy or slippery in my path, though the radio has announced a number of closures in areas more prone to have trouble. Here, the roads were purely wet. On the highways, Saturday's sand had already been shoved off to the side of the road, forming a dark blotchy border beyond the white lines. On the on-ramp to the freeway, however, there was still the familiar light coating of grit, protecting us from melted water.

Others are not so lucky. Some bridges are apparently a sheet of ice. (And what idiots decided to go up the hill to Bald Peak, in weather like this? Everywhere those people can get doing that, they can get going around. It might take longer, but you wouldn't be stuck in the multi-car pileup....

Ah, well.

*sighs* Microsoft. Pains, posteriors, as usual.

Anyone know how to hamstring or otherwise disable this stupid pile of garbage "office clipboard"?

The help says that it runs whenever an office program is open, which includes tons of stuff I use. But I'm trying to do basic, normal, ORDINARY cut'n'pastes in other programs and it comes up and says I can't do what I want to do because of "office" clipboard is full (and it hooks into regular cuts). But I don't want the office clipboard and its stupid tracking of all the stuff I do. I just want to move stuff around in my other programs, and it comes in and screws it up.

Anyone know a way to get RID of the little monster, for good? Can't find it in their "help" (which is anything but helpful).

Yay! Things get done. Nimda gets given the big ol' finger.

As I suspected, several zip files I salvaged off of the (unprotected) machine had Nimda-infected eml files in them. I just got antivirus for the laptop tonight. (Yes, I know. Careless. It didn't have email till very recently, and had no shared drives, so it was pretty safe. Still, sooner would have been better.) Five infected files in all the zips, presumably from having had the drive shared. Yay. Cleaned them out. And now I have good virus protection in place, even more yay.

Of course, since I stayed late at work and then had to go buy said antivirus software, I got home after seven. I shouldn't complain. It took me less than an hour and a half to drive down to Fry's, get the software, and drive home. I know people whose commutes - the regular ones! - are not that kind.

Spent the rest of my evening eating dinner (I won't buy that particular microwave dinner again, but it was at least edible), and then reading more of That Book. Very good book. Excellent book. Reread NOW quality book.

I'm not done. I'm not quite halfway through. Part I ends on page 351. Starting part II at this hour seems ill-advised, if I want to be alive tomorrow. Instead, I think that I should take out my contacts and go to bed shortly.

Don't want to. Want to read the rest of the book. This woman is good. Very good. If the sequel to this is out, and is in hardcover, and costs $30, I will buy it to read it.

Unless she somehow ruins it in the next 350+ pages, of course. But I don't think she will. Not one story element has been misplaced. She did have a few descriptive paragraphs, very early on, which caused me to skim, but seldom for more than half a page, and I haven't seen any of those in 300 pages or so. The pacing is excellent.

And I really, really want to keep reading. But I'm being good. More book tomorrow.

I haven't read, especially not new things, nearly enough lately. Starting back up with a random selection from the Bag Of Ignored Books and having it turn out to be one of the ones you cannot put down, that had Better Have A Sequel, is just wonderful.