07:25 – It was 48.1F (9C) when I took Colin out at about 0615 this morning, damp and foggy again. Colin and I had an early evening, doing last time out and heading back to bed around 2015. I was pretty beat, and needed more than my usual seven hours or so of sleep.
After she finished volunteering at the Friends of the Library bookstore at 1700 yesterday, Barbara drove down to Winston to meet Frances and Al for dinner. She considered driving back yesterday, but I encouraged her to stay down there overnight, so she’ll be heading back up to Sparta later this morning.
Yesterday, the crew from Shaw Brothers ripped out the existing gypsum board ceiling and insulation and tore up the carpet and pad, which was glued to the concrete floor. The whole place is soaked. They left a big fan running downstairs. It’ll probably take several days or longer to dry the place out. Jay Shaw stopped by around lunchtime to drop off his quote for the whole job, including replacing the ceiling with a drop ceiling and installing new fake-wood flooring. It was just over $8,000. It’ll be interesting to see how much of that the insurance covers.
Speaking of the drop ceiling, one of the guys on the crew had helped build this house back in 2006/2007. He told us that they’d tried to convince the original owner to install a drop ceiling then, but he didn’t want to pay the additional cost. I wish he had, because this project would have been a lot less expensive if there’d been a drop ceiling already in place.
I finally decided to give up on LibreOffice. It’s gotten less and less stable over the years, which is ironic considering that the reason I started using OpenOffice back in my pre-Linux days was that MS Office was very unstable on large documents. LO has gotten worse with each release, and I’ve started seeing some really weird bugs. Even completely uninstalling it, nuking it from orbit, and reinstalling it doesn’t solve some of the problems.
A couple of months ago, for example, it started randomly pasting text into arbitrary places in a large document. I’d highlight a sentence or paragraph, cut it, copy it elsewhere, and later on I’d find that there were two or three (or more) instances of that text pasted randomly elsewhere in the document. Then, two or three weeks ago, an open instance of LO would no longer show up on my task bar. That made it almost unusable for me, because I often work with half a dozen or more open documents.
So yesterday I looked to see what else was available. Several of those I’d already looked at and decided not to use for one reason or another. I settled on Calligra Suite, which is the KDE office suite. So far, it looks good. It doesn’t have all of the features of LibreOffice, but so far I haven’t noticed anything missing that I can’t live without.