Pull up! Pull up! EJECT EJECT EJECT!!

Major computer crash last Friday morning; black screen of death, checksum errors all over the place, flames racing down the fuselage headed for the fuel, oil squirting on the windscreen! She's going down! And I don't think she's coming back.

And mostly too busy or too tired and/or frazzled to worry about it, to tell the truth. I just for the first time fired up a spare laptop borrowed from M the stakeholder, just to touch base. A quick update on gulchy-type projects: The landlady is here for the week, and so we've designated most of this week to organizing workspaces and getting a lot of potential things actually on-line. The barn's scriptorium has been transformed into an actual working apartment with toilet, hot&cold running everything, refrigerator, washing machine, microwave, sink, and a GENUINE TOWNIE SHOWER complete with roiling clouds of condensation and more hot water than any sane person could possibly think of expending. This was deeply cool: It took M and I (neither of whom knew what we were doing) the best part of three days to get the plumbing sorted out and the shower installed. White-knuckle moment when we finally worked up the nerve to open the valve and let water into the barn and the water heater. I raced back into the barn and found water pouring out of the heater, but it turned out to be only an open drain valve. Opened the hot water spigot where the washing machine was to go and let it vent air until the water flowed. Then lit the pilot, fired up the burner, and to my utter shock everything worked perfectly.

Meanwhile the landlady and W have torn out the random clumps and heaps of dusty tools and building materials that were the "workshop," and transformed that space to a lovely room where you can actually find things logically organized. W did the same thing with the pantry: All the bulk food has been pulled out of that rickety structure and is as I type this being organized into a new, hopefully more rat-resistant, pantry in the barn.

Things keep happening to interrupt the workflow, of course: We're merging two dog packs and while that goes more smoothly than everyone feared there are still moments where hilarity - or at least fangs, foam and occasional blood - ensues. Exactly at the worst possible moment while installing shower walls a long-haul trucker showed up towing the fifth-wheel trailer belonging to another set of stakeholders, and everything had to stop while we sorted that out. There are invariably four or five points during ever project where you're missing the one component or tool absolutely vital to further progress. There has been interpersonal friction here and there as a bunch of prickly hermits find the borders of their - sometimes minuscule - comfort zones. But you know - we all knew the job was dangerous when we took it.

This morning we're waiting for another 2000-gallon cistern to arrive, and M and I will need to drop what we're doing (I'm supposed to be servicing the generator at the moment) and run over to where it needs to get dropped. He's already got all the hardware for pulling water out of his new well, and once the cistern is in place there'll be a place to pump it to. Which is the kind of work project I can get into; one with an immediately useful payoff.

More later: I've got things to do and I've still got to figure out how to configure stuff on this computer. Having fun, but it's a busy time containing exactly four times as many people as I'm used to dealing with. Bear with me: TUAK will resume, for the adventure most definitely continues.