morrowlife

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.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Four taking a picture of Loyal Reader Number One at the oft-photographed overlook in the Pennsylvania mountains.

Decent day today. My Loyal Readers will no doubt be surprised to hear that the weather was perfect. Again. And I’m not complaining. I read that it’s snowing today in Detroit and is going to freeze in Pennsylvania over the weekend. Heh heh heh. I guess we need to call our real estate agent and make sure the heat is on in the house, huh? It was in the mid-70s in Lardville today and the mid-to-upper-60s in Sunnyvale. Aaah.

Loyal Reader Number One will be sixteen years old tomorrow! He’s away camping with the scouts tonight and most of the day tomorrow (sounds like a lot of fun, by the way) and has requested to invite some friends over tomorrow night for a Pool Party. Permission granted. I hope enough people show up and that it’s warm enough to swim. We’ll heat the pool up some during the day and have the spa temperature nice and warm, so hopefully it will be nice.

There are plenty of things to accomplish tomorrow. Loyal Reader Number Four and I are going to the church to clean it sometime in the morning. We need to do something with the back yard, I think. There are a few panels of the back fence that still need to be coated as well. I need to clean the grease off of the floor mats in the Honda and Mercury – the oil change joint was kind enough to leave use those little gifts recently. The floor mats on the Suburban are disgustingly filthy as well. There’s a bunch of Ward Mission Leader stuff to get done too. I suspect the day will be fairly full (link warning: the ugliest, jarringest pink web page ever).

It’s Friday the Thirteenth today! Nothing unlucky happened to me. Yet. I’m not worried, though. I don’t believe in it. I’ve always believed it’s bad luck to believe in superstition.

The train seems to be moving a little slowly today. I left the office at 4:00 this afternoon, rather than my usual 5:00, and experience says the earlier train is late a lot more often. It’s usually because of slow freight or Amtrak trains. Oh, the speed is picking back up now. Good. I’d really like to get home on schedule tonight.

My brother (unfortunately, not a Loyal Reader, so we’ll call him Loyal Reader Number Zero for now) called me this afternoon just to say hello. He was on the way to the boat dealer. He just bought a boat – a sixteen-footer – and needed to pick up a few things. I’m not sure why he bought it, but I hope he enjoys it. A boat is just about the last thing in this world I want. I don’t have any fun riding around in them (except sailboats, of course) with all the noise, and it’s absolutely no fun owning them. In fact, they say the second-happiest day in your life is when you buy a boat, and the first-happiest day is when you sell it. Let’s all hope LRN0’s experience is different.

On the other hand, I sometimes enjoy riding on someone else’s boat. Maybe he’ll give me a ride.

We haven’t had any new Loyal Readers in a while. Anyone have any friends you would like to invite? Anyone have any friends at all? Hello? Well, then.

As mentioned yesterday, watch the HRVA website for something new over the weekend, and I’ll see you on Monday.