morrowlife

I was recently accused of not knowing what my own children look like. Here’s proof that I can tell them in a crowd at least once out of two tries. Pretty good-looking family there.

Loyal Reader Number One once told me I ruin the illusion when I use the Wonders of Blogger to back-date a missed post and then rat myself out, so I’m not ratting myself out this time. Of course I’m writing this post on Friday night. Not Saturday morning. No, sir. Not at all.

Went to the ward Halloween party on Friday night. It was held entirely in the parking lot, which I didn’t expect. The weather was perfect (link warning – noise), the crowd was good-sized, and it was really fun. I think it was the first Halloween party I really enjoyed since I was a teenager. That means Loyal Readers Numbers One and Two probably hated it. I was pressed into service to man the popcorn machine, Loyal Reader Number Four worked the beanbag toss, and LRN1 made cotton candy and worked at the basketball toss. Then LRN4 and I passed out candy during the trunk-or-treat. It was nice to stay busy.

LRN1, LRN2, and LRN4 are at the battle-axe class this morning, making some kind of shroud or something. I found out at the very last moment that I could have gone with them, but I hadn’t had a shower yet, so I stayed home. As soon as this blog post is finished, I’m planning to go out and work on the garage – gotta get things cleared out around the Suburban – and then maybe make an HRVA website update.

After they get back, we’re going to the library to see some Japanese(?) guys beat a bunch of big drums. Should be fun. The advertising flyer says it will be especially good for teens. Why? I have no idea. But we’re all looking forward to it.

Speaking of the HRVA, LRN4 and I took the trailer over to the DMV yesterday to finish up its California registration process. We had to let them look at the VIN and confirm that it actually exists. When we went over to pick it up, I discovered that both battery posts were pretty badly corroded, so I stopped at home with it when the DMV ordeal was over and cleaned up the battery terminals in addition to installing the shiny new California license plate. I had LRN1 take a bunch of pictures of the battery terminal work. If everything works out, I’ll write a battery terminal cleaning article for the HRVA. Weak, I know, but I need content. Don’t mock me before you try making your own RV website. Don’t mock me then either.

Time to get working on the garage. Wish me luck! See you on Monday.

Here’s an old picture of a merry-go-round in the park in Cannes, right in front of the Town Hall, by the waterfront. As my French-speaking Loyal Readers will recall, the French name for Town Hall is Hotel De Ville. When we first started going to Cannes, we couldn’t figure out why nobody seemed to be staying at the Hotel De Ville. We eventually figure it out. Like yesterday’s picture, I found it hanging around on Moe’s Windows disk, which I would dearly like to convert to Linux use.

Went out visiting with the full-time missionaries this evening. We visited a couple of new members and invited them to tomorrow’s Halloween party. We also made tentative arrangements to finish the new-member discussions with one of them. We also filled the gas tanks of the Honda and the Suburban. Spent well over a hundred dollars (big spender!). All in all, a productive evening.

Tomorrow’s my off Friday, so I hope to only have to work three or four hours. There’s a lot to do tomorrow – we have to get the trailer to the DMV so they can look at its VIN, get the Taurus registered, install the replacement blinds that arrived yesterday, check the pool’s chemistry, and who knows what else. I’m hoping to sleep in a little bit tomorrow morning, though. Might as well not get the day started too early.

We’re watching an overly-sentimental WWII-era movie called Once Upon a Honeymoon, starring Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers. I think one of the reviews at Amazon tells the story best: “One of the strangest, most troubling films made in Hollywood.” It’s a bizarre mixture of a romantic comedy and a wartime spy film. I recommend it to my Loyal Readers purely for its strangeness. In spite of the material they had to work with, Grant and Rogers are as good as they ever were.

I hope to have more to write about tomorrow. For now, it’s bedtime.

Here are Loyal Readers Numbers One and Two with some friendly non-readers, sitting at the counter of the world-famous whatshisname’s drugstore in lovely downtown Fredericksburg, Virginia way back in April 2004. Don’t LRN1 and LRN2 look young here? A little bit of time can certainly bring a lot of changes when you’re relatively young.

Went to a meeting at church tonight, so there’s no time to write. Short shrift time: Loyal Reader Number Four picked up some blinds which (finally) arrived at Home Depot. Hopefully, they’ll work better than the ones they’re scheduled to replace. We’ll find out by the weekend when they come out of the boxes.

Otherwise, nothing much new. See you tomorrow.

Here’s my famous picture of Loyal Reader Number Four on the edge of a giant rock field in Hickory Run State Park in Pennsylvania. It was really cool. And we were camping. Happy happy joy joy.

I found that picture on the Windows disk of Moe, my elderly Linux file server. LRN4 needed a copy of our genealogy file, and it was too big of a pain to attach a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to the machine and reboot it into Windows, so I looked up how to read NTFS files on Fedora Core 3 Linux. While I was in there, I found a bunch of other old stuff, including a large number of pictures. That one up there is one of them. I’ll post a few more here over the next several days.

Nothing else exciting today. I listened to a couple of new (to me) podcasts, featuring a couple of well-known conservative bloggers from the Instapundit and Power Line sites. Instapundit didn’t have anything at all to say about politics but was interesting nonetheless. Power Line was a little more political and also interesting. It was nice to have a break from all the tech podcasts.

LRN4 had several women over when I got home tonight for the monthly book club meeting. It appeared that a few of them had actually read the book this month! In any case, I think they all had a good time.

Time for bed already! That adventure with Windows files took a long time. See you tomorrow.

Here’s my mom with some birds (she’s the one wearing two hats) at the lame-o zoo in Nassau, taken during last year’s Disney cruise. It seems like such a long time ago already.

By the way, we got a call from Grandma on Saturday. She wanted to talk to Loyal Reader Number One, who was at the camporee. Grandma, on the other hand, was at Disneyworld. Some of my extended family members are certainly Disney fans. I must admit I enjoy Disneyland myself, but I don’t have the mania – the Disney fire inside – like some of them do. Especially since they PC’d the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. And don’t even get me started on them changing it to the Jack Sparrow P of the C. Yuck-o-rama.

As part of FHE tonight, we played a game LRN1 received at his birthday party on Saturday. It’s called Whoonu, and it’s part of the Cranium Empire. Based on a quick look at the instructions, we all expected it to be subpar. However, we really enjoyed it. Each player gets four cards, each of which has a word or two describing a thing or an activity. You pick the two things you think the Whoozit (the person who’s “it” and doesn’t get any cards that round) will most like. The Whoozit gathers all the cards and orders them from favorite to least favorite. Points are distributed to the guessers according to their ranking. It only took a few minutes to play and we had fun trying to guess what the others would enjoy. Recommended, especially for a quick Home Evening activity.

Drove to work today. It took two hours to get there and just over an hour and a half to get home. Not too bad. As usual, I enjoyed the trip. Work was busy and enjoyable, also as usual.

Nothing else to report tonight. See you tomorrow.