morrowlife

We have a fifth reader. What a shock! I happened to mention in the family newsletter the other day that I had a great blog (this one), and somebody (see above) happened to read it! Welcome, Reader Number Five, and keep coming back!

Not a lot of news today. We jacuzzified after home evening tonight. It’s been a sunny but cool and windy day, and the cold wind was a strong contrast to the hot water. I think we enjoy the spa more in the winter than in the summer. And use it more too.

We have a launch coming up on the eighth – that’s two days away. Watch for it on the Sea Launch website.

Today’s bad news is that it appears that the minivan we were thinking about has been withdrawn from the market. The good news is that we don’t really need another car for about 14 months. Something great will come along.

Speaking of something great coming along, I came really close to buying a Mac G5 with dual 2.0 GHz processors on Saturday. They had one at Comp USA for a great price, but it was still a high price. If only I needed it. It is such a beautiful computer. Someday, someday . . . it will be mine.

I have to drive to seminary tomorrow morning, so must get to bed. ‘Night.

Today’s photo by Mark.

Here’s Reader Number One practicing for a brilliant future in bank robbery. Best of luck with that. He might want to remove the tags before his first job.

Today went from a gray, rainy – but warm – morning to a warm, beautiful sunny afternoon. We’re not expecting the beautiful weather to last any longer. My friends at the Weather Channel are predicting daytime temperatures in the 30’s and 40’s with nighttime lows in the 20’s for the next several days. That’s more normal winter weather around here, but we’ve gotten to like the other stuff. It’s not normal to have spring fever in February!

The Dave Barry book is gradually improving. I’ve actually had more enjoyment than annoyance at the last couple of chapters. He’s just wearing his hatred for Ronald Reagan on his sleeve a little too much (the book was published in 1985). The ironic thing, of course, is that the things that Dave and all the other newspaper people were mocking President Reagan about turned out to have been brilliant ideas that liberated millions of people from Soviet oppression. That doesn’t leave Dave looking too bright, now does it? At least he had a lot of company back then.

I’ve been trying to get Mark’s school computer back on the road after a catastrophic hard disk crash. It’s taking a very long time, but the machine is now running and currently downloading and installing all the Windows patches (27 and counting). It refuses to install Microsoft Office, so we’ll have to call the K-12 help desk and see if they have any ideas, like another copy of the installation CD. It took quite a while to get the wireless card set up, but that’s working now. I first tried installing the driver from its CD, but that installed a bunch of garbage I didn’t want and that kept the Windows wireless manager from working. When I uninstalled the garbage, it also uninstalled the driver. So, I had to restart the machine and wait for it to ask for a driver, at which time I inserted the card’s CD and let Windows find the driver for itself. Voila! It’s working.

Now the biggest problem is unbelievably sluggish performance. Hopefully, we can work on some optimizations and get it back to working like it did before. Very odd, that.

Dessert time – we have some fresh-baked cookies tonight that are crying out to be sampled. Bye.

Here’s something a little bit different – an old tile roof. Talk about your Great Art, huh?

Came home from work early today. I was feeling pretty sick to my stomach, unfortunately. Things are much better this evening. Thanks for asking.

We went over to look at a very old pickup truck (an ’89 Dodge D50 built by Mitsubishi) for sale this afternoon. It looked pretty good for a truck with nearly 200,000 miles on it – no rust to speak of except on the bumpers and exterior mirrors, and it started right up. However, I think I detected a slight smell of anti-freeze in the exhaust, and the automatic transmission is slipping like crazy, making its value about negative $2000. No bid from me. Some friends have a minivan for sale that we’re now thinking about. I could probably use a pickup more than a minivan, but the price is pretty good and the van appears to be in pretty good shape. We’re looking for something cheap and reliable that Reader Number One can drive when he gets to the right age (soon), so its utility to me in the meantime is of lesser importance. Besides, who says you can’t haul a load of manure in a minivan?

Ice cream is waiting. Later.

Doesn’t it look like they were having a great time on last weekend’s Klondike Derby? No? Well, appearances can be deceiving. We actually had a great time! I’ll try and post some pictures of the actual Klondike part over the next few days.

It wasn’t quite as busy a day at work today. I made additional progress on my ICD signoff, had a little conflict with my former coworkers in Colorado and Virginia, and prepared for tomorrow’s telecon with our Japanese customers at 7:30 pm our time. I have a feeling I’ll be doing lots of phone calls from home with these folks – the time zone difference seems to dictate it.

Time to go to Young Men. So long.