View out the front window at 6:30 AM

Please pardon the crappy photographs.  I took them with my iPhone this morning.  As you can see, it did indeed snow in Atlanta last night.  We got about 6″ of the stuff, which is the most I’ve seen here since about 2000, when we had a major storm that pretty much shut down Atlanta for a week.  As it is, I doubt I’ll be able to get back to the office before Wednesday.

Of course, not being able to go to the office is not a big deal for an intrepid IT guy like me.  I had my laptop at home thanks to the fact that I worked remotely last Thursday and Friday, so I just sat on the couch and did my work thing for most of the day.  Had a conference call with a client in Texas and nailed down some details for a huge dashboard that I’m working on for him, then spent half of the day trading instant messages with another guy who can’t figure out how to use another dashboard.

Also walked around my neighborhood at lunch and took a few pictures with a real camera.

Snowdrifts on the deck

I had a couple of pork chops for lunch, along with the risotto left over from a week or so ago.  No dairy there.  For dinner, I made some noodles in a cup.  Also found some old hot cocoa mix that seemed like a perfect thing to drink on a cold and snowy evening.  Betsy Jones pointed out to me via text message that the cocoa had powdered milk in it.

Dammit.  I didn’t know that.

But hey.  She’s eating eggs.  I consider eggs to be dairy, and I’ve taken them off of my menu for the month.  So pbtbtbtbtbtbt…

I felt bad for the birds and squirrels and raccoons and other critters that live in my yard, so threw a few handfuls of birdseed on the snow.  At last check, none of the ungrateful bastards had bothered to sample it.  I checked on my yard cats, though, and at least one of them was taking advantage of the little dome (actually the top of a litter box) that I put in a corner of the yard as a shelter for them.  That’s nice to know.  I like having the cats in the yard.  Hopefully, they take care of mice and other things that I’d rather not have eating my house.

The front yard

Having not much else to do, I’m already in my bed (it’s 8:00) for the night.  I’ll probably watch a movie on Netflix and maybe catch part of the BCS “National Championship” game, but should still be asleep well before my normal bedtime.

Gotta love being snowbound.

TWD

Well.

I slept until fairly late this morning (after feeding the cats, of course), and then did a bit of internetting to see if I could find some graveyards that I didn’t know about.  I found two in Dunwoody, which is a town about 12 miles from where I live.  I spent several hours wandering around those, resulting in enough pictures to make this post interesting.

At least I hope it’s interesting.

Currently, I’m watching Green Bay play Philadelphia in the NFL playoffs.  Atlanta, winners of the NFC South, has a bye week.  We’ll be playing Seattle next weekend.

Not much else to say today.  Still waiting for snow.

TWD

The pictures embedded in this entry are from a disk I found that was labelled “Desktop/My Documents, June 2004.”  Just so you know.

Bo’s first day at home – August, 2003

That post title refers to a 1983 song by Talking Heads.  It (the title) popped into my head at about 7:00 last night after I put too many duraflame logs in my fireplace.  I wanted to have a nice roaring fire going when Chris got here.  Instead, she arrived to find me standing on my deck staring at the chimney, carrying a pulse rate of about 220.  The roaring fire had been reduced, thanks to a couple of coffee pots of water, to a steaming pile of wet duraflame logs.  The living room, which had until moments earlier smelled like Christmas cookies (no, I wasn’t baking – I had a scented candle), was permeated by the festive odor of burning tires (did you know that wet, semi-burned duraflame logs smell like 18-wheelers in flames?).

After a few much-needed hugs, I calmed down.

All the excitement of the move tuckered Bo out

I must make a special explanatory foray here for any members of my family who are reading this, because our house really did burn down in 1967 – and everyone except for me probably remembers it and would rather not.  The above story is not meant to imply that I actually did set my house on fire last night.  Rather, it illustrates that I’m an incredibly cautious (probably overcautious) guy when it comes to having fires in my fireplace.  The flames got higher than I wanted them to get, so I doused the fire.  That’s it.  No real drama.  In fact, I later got everything burning again, chopped up the logs so that they’d burn faster, and sat and watched everything until I was satisfied that everything was going according to plan.   I’m paranoid about chimney fires, so when my flu starts to get too hot, I tend to freak out a bit.  No crisis, no story, no nothing. Just something to fill space in this here blog.

Bo’s first bed and his first bunkmate.

Dinner, after the smoke cleared out of the kitchen and the stench of liquified rubber lessened somewhat, was quite good, if a bit on the garlicky side.  Chris likes garlic.  I like garlic.  We had so much garlic going on that it was nearly too much for me….and necking on the couch was out of the question.

Instead, we attempted to watch the movie Final Countdown, then gave up on that and instead watched a few episodes of 30 Rock.  Later on, we did indeed make it through Final Countdown, then slept from about 1:30 this morning until 2:00 this afternoon, at which time we finished off the leftover garlic and attempted to watch the first Lord of the Rings movie.  Chris is a big L.O.T.R. fan.  I, frankly, have never really gotten into it.  Not the books, not the movies and not the books on tape.  It is interesting to note, therefore, that Chris slept through most of the movie while I fought off sleep and watched it.  I won’t say that I followed it.  I mean, it ended about 4 hours ago and I couldn’t give you a plot line right now; but I did stay awake for it.

Vermont Christmas, 2003

I’ll try again with it some night this week.  I feel at times like I’m really missing out on some of the “classic” literature that I just don’t enjoy.  Tolkien has never worked for me.  Neither has Faulkner.  I’m just about ready to give up on Emma, the first book by Jane Austen that I’ve ever tried to read.  The book 1984?  Never read it, although I did enjoy Orwell’s Animal Farm.  Other books that I probably should have read, but just never did: Fahrenheit 451.  The Iliad.  Ulysses.  Anything by Hemingway.  Anything by anyone named Bronte.

I blame Cy.  She got me hooked on children’s literature when I was a child, and that’s still my favorite genre.

Took this while camping in TN in January, 2004

Great Expectations, however,  is a major kickass book.  Does that fulfill my “classic” quota?  I’m also rather fond of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, if that means anything.

I am now officially off of the Georgia Brass Band’s board of directors.  It was announced via email yesterday that the sitting board (which I was on) approved the election of the new board (which I am not), by a 5-3 margin.  As should be expected, even this announcement resulted in a virtual shouting match between a few folks.  I wish it to be known that I do feel bad about throwing in the towel with the BOD.  I’ll continue to do what I can for the band – I’ll run the website, I’ll pitch ideas to the director, I’ll push our CD wherever I can and I’ll do whatever I’m asked to do (within reason).  I might even still attend some of the board meetings.  Life is too short, however, for me to get my blood pressure jacked up because one or two people don’t understand that a community band isn’t the place for petty politics and ego.  What type of person thinks that arguments about nothing of substance are enjoyable?

I certainly don’t.

Jenny holds up Bo in September, 2003

Temperatures around the area were close to 60 early this afternoon, but plummeted at around 4:00.  Currently, we’re in the high 20s, and it is expected to remain cool for the next several days.  Maybe that snow actually will come.  That’s okay.  I’ve got a house.

Until I burn it down.

TWD

Wow.

I thought about changing the title for this post, but then I liked the way it looked.  That’s basically what happens when you sit down at a keyboard, don’t get your fingers lined up in the home position, and attempt to type “Productive Day.”

For all you people snickering out there, I’ve been known to type at close to 140 wpm.  So shut up.

I’m typing this at around 3:00 Friday afternoon because, as hoped, Chris is coming over tonight for dinner. I like typing and all; but I think that, given a choice between hanging out with her tonight or trying to keep a streak of blog entries going, I’ll take the former.   On the dinner menu, if you’re asking, is angel hair pasta,  some sort of sauce for it, French bread with garlic, and Fresca.  Or ginger ale.  Or something like that.

No dairy, at any rate.

As noted earlier, the title for this entry was to have been “Productive Day,” because I’ve actually gotten quite a bit done today.  In addition to regular work stuff (I wrapped up the mobility dashboard and have asked my project manager for more work), I did a few loads of laundry, washed some dishes, cleaned my toilet, and went grocery shopping.  Also scooped the litter box, but that’s pretty much a daily thing.

They’re calling for several inches of snow in Atlanta between Sunday and Tuesday.  I’ll believe it when I see it.

The Post A Day suggestion for today’s topic is “How do you stay focused?”

Bottom line:  I concentrate all of my will on the task at hand and never lose sight of my goa – ooh look!  A puppy!

TWD

I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been working at it, but I finally managed to get the MacBook operating system updated to v10.6 this morning. Except for the fact that I can now install some decent applications (I couldn’t previously), there’s not much difference between 10.6 and 10.4.

Rose on the deck.  April, 2004

That doesn’t matter. It’s the principle of the thing. No laptop is going to beat me.

Other than that, I didn’t get much done today that wasn’t actually related to my real job. Didn’t do anything with the android development, didn’t get any laundry done (I’d hoped to, but I guess I’ll take care of that tomorrow)….really didn’t do anything other than sit on the couch, take part in a couple of team meetings, and go through metrics code.

I did get a chance to talk to Chris, and dinner is on for tomorrow. So I guess I’ll be shopping for groceries at some point.

On the No Dairy front, I had red beans and rice and kielbasa for lunch and another boil-in-the package noodle thing for dinner.

It had shrimp in it.

I guess you can see (if you’ve read this blog before) that I’ve tweaked the layout just a tiny bit.  It seemed like it was time.  I’d had the basic black setup for a couple of years.  It’s classic and all, but I wanted something different.  Tonight was the first time in a long time that I’ve actually looked under the hood at blogger.  They’ve made some big strides since I started this thing.  Well done.

TWD

I’d really intended to do an actual post last night, but that football game went on FOREVER. I think it ended at 12:30 this morning or something. Naturally, I wasted time for another hour before actually going to sleep, which caused me to oversleep and get to the office late, but it’s a new year and that’s expected, right?

Doesn’t matter, though. I continued my streak of daily posts. Today’s suggested topic in the Post A Day thing was something incredibly moronic like, “Are you stressed out?” I’m supposed to write a blog entry with that as the topic? Seriously?

Fine. How about this? I’m stressed out by the price of gasoline and other financial issues. Other than that, no. I’m not stressed. I’m mostly bored and apathetic, but am occasionally pleasantly diverted. Fascinating stuff, huh? Screw that topic.

Work this week has been relatively fun, to be honest. After knocking out the errors on Monday, I managed to add a few new bells and whistles to a metrics dashboard that I’ve been writing for mobility, and I added a few more today. I’ve got another huge project looming, but the first meeting for that is next Monday, so in my downtime, I’ve been trying to learn how to write apps for android phones. Betsy Jones gave me one of her old phones as a development tool, and I spent a lot of time yesterday learning how to build forms on the screen (the forms don’t actually do anything at this point – I’m learning, remember?); and today I figured out how to get them out of the emulator on my laptop and actually run them on the phone.

I said I’d be doing more reading this year, and one of the things I’ll be reading over the next few days is a fascinating tome called, “Fundamentals of the Android Application Model.” Once I’ve got a handle on that, I’ll start getting a bit more serious and will attempt to write a notepad application for the phone. Yes, there are a million notepads already available. That has nothing to do with anything. The point is to learn how to accept input, manipulate it, store it, retrieve it and display it on the phone. If I can do that by the middle of next week, I’ll consider it a success.

On the larger computer front, I’ve been trying to update the operating system on the MacBook Pro almost since I first started using it. It’s currently running OS X v10.4, and all of the decent applications that I’d like to use (like the IDE for developing Android apps) won’t run on anything lower than 10.5. I’ve finally located a disk image for the upgrade, but so far have had no luck getting the upgrade to work. As I type this, I’m downloading a different image and will hopefully have better luck with that.

After a few really beautiful winter days in Atlanta, the weather turned pretty gross today. Temps were in the 40s and it rained on and off pretty much all afternoon. I think the rain is supposed to stop tonight, but the chill is supposed to hang around for the next week. Normal Georgia winter, I guess. I was just getting spoiled by the 70-degree days that we’ve been having.

I’m still hanging in there on the No Dairy thing. It’s not like I miss eating cheese or anything, but it’s just so damned hard to find food that doesn’t contain dairy. I had chicken strips, corn, and boiled potatoes for lunch (so there was probably dairy the breading on the chicken – I don’t care), and a couple of chicken breasts made on my George Foreman grill for dinner (with some expired BBQ sauce that I found in the pantry). Last night I had some of those 3-minute boil in styrofoam noodles that promise me about 400% of the USRDA of sodium. Tomorrow, I’ll be working from home and will probably eat some other expired canned food from the pantry. Life was so much easier when I could just make myself a cheese sandwich, but I figure I’ll lose 40 pounds by February at this rate.

Chris may make me some Italian food on Friday. That’d be good. Italians don’t eat cheese, right?

Did not practice my horn tonight (first night in quite a while, actually), but I did sit down at the piano for about thirty minutes. I’m not sure why, but I haven’t done that in a long time. It was relaxing and gave me a chance to practice reading chords.

Fun times in Olde Duluthe.

TWD

Kickoff is happening now, and I’ve gotta watch it. Go, Arkansas!

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

My buddy Bo

Wouldn’t you know it?  I slept all day yesterday, and today – my first day back at work since before Christmas – I overslept. I got to the office at about 9:30 and discovered, along with most of my colleagues, that a large number of our reports were bombing because, when we switched over to 2011, the lack of data in the databases was causing division by zero errors.

This actually made the day go a lot faster. I enjoy fixing problems a lot more than writing the stupid reports in the first place. Before I knew it, it was 5:30 this afternoon.

I had some baked chicken and mashed potatoes for lunch.  I’m pretty sure I was okay with the chicken.  Upon reflection, however, I’m guessing that the mashed potatoes were probably made with milk or butter or both.  Frickin’ No Dairy January.  If I don’t know dairy’s IN something, how am I supposed to avoid it?

Eh, bien.  After I got home, I practiced the horn for a while, then settled in to watch some more episodes of 30 Rock.  I’m just about done with what’s available on Netflix, so I guess I’m going to have to find the show on real television now if I want to see the 4th season.

The suggestion for today’s “Post A Day” topic was to “…write about something that makes you smile.”  I’m sorry, but that’s just incredibly gay (no pun intended), and I’m not going to do it.  Actually, maybe I am.  I’ve decided that my little boy cat, Bo, needs to be properly introduced.  Maybe his sister Boo will get the same treatment at some point (she does have some pretty interesting mannerisms), but today it’s all about Bo.

Betsy Jones is one of Bo’s favorite people

I got Bo in the middle of August, 2003, shortly after Jenny and I officially separated.  He was named after Bo Moore, a college quarterback I knew who liked to scramble around, although the name on his adoption papers was something like “Bennie.”  My name for him is infinitely better.  His birthday, as far as either of us is concerned, is July 4th, 2003.

Bo is a long-haired mutt with a strong streak of Maine Coon in him.  The primary reason that I got the little guy was that, when Jenny moved out, she took our kitten, Bailey, with her; which left my older cat, Maya, without any playmates.   As it turned out, Maya died on the music room floor about a week after Bo came home, so perhaps I shouldn’t have bothered.

No, I didn’t kill her.  She was old.  She died one day while I was at work.

I’m not sure if Maya’s death had anything to do with it, but Bo has been the archetypal scaredy-cat for most of his life.   I can’t help but imagine what went through his tiny little brain when he was ripped from a happy place with lots of other kittens, brought to what was at the time a basically empty house (Jenny got all the furniture, too) to be company for a cat who was old enough to be his 3rd great grandmother (and who hated him every second she lived with him); and then, one day, he probably scampered downstairs and found the old goat lying dead on the floor.

Think about it.  How’d you like it if you found found granny keeled over in the kitchen when you were 2 years old, and you were trapped in the house with a dead body all day?

We are not happy about something.

Anyway, Bo has always been afraid of strangers.  If the doorbell rings or if there’s a knock on the door, he’ll stop whatever he’s doing and tear through the house to get to his safe place – behind the washing machine.  I don’t know how he managed to find that place, but it has always been his refuge.  He’s become incredibly adept at opening the folding louvre doors in front of the washer and dryer in order to make his amazing escapes.

Over the last 5 years or so, I’ve had a series of renters in my house.  Most of them never saw Bo at all until they’d lived in the house for about two weeks.  One of them had been here for more than a month before she ever caught more than a glimpse of him.  Once he’s gotten used to them, however, he generally tolerates them, and apparently even approaches them for comfort or food if I’m away on vacation for any length of time.

With me and a select few, however, Bo is a major cuddle machine.  He doesn’t purr a lot, and when he does it isn’t loud; but his happiness when he’s holding down a lap or stealing half of the bed is so apparent that purring is not necessary.  Once he decides that a person isn’t going to kill him, he’s the sweetest cat I’ve ever known.

Somehow, he never forgets the people he likes.  Even if they don’t come around more than once or twice a year, he remembers them and (after initially running to hide from the front door opening) he’ll allow himself to be picked up, petted, brushed, cuddled and generally spoiled by them when they appear.  Jenny is one of his favorite people.  On the few occasions that she’s come over to feed the cats when I’m out of town, I’m told that he’s all over her.

Betsy Jones is another of his girlfriends.  Over the last couple of years, she’s been at the house maybe 12 times, and I’m convinced that if I were to die when she was here, Bo wouldn’t even notice.  He’d just let her spoil him rotten and only later wonder what happened to the big guy who usually pets him.

Nothing like a few layers of sweatshirt on a cool day

He’s also an accomplished fetch-cat, though VERY few people other than me have seen him at his best.   His best is pretty amazing, too.  I can throw a ball out of my bedroom and across the landing so that it lands somewhere downstairs (and bounces all over the place), and Bo will rocket down the stairs, track it down, hurtle back UP the stairs, and deposit the ball back on my bed within a matter of seconds.  When he was younger, he’d do this continually until he was panting like a dog in August, so I scaled it back a bit.  Now that he’s mellowed with age, he doesn’t play as much, but I still wake up occasionally to find three or four of his favorite toys lying on my bed – he brings them to me in the hope that I’ll throw them.

When I’m not around – or not in the mood to throw things for him – it’s not a problem.  He’s become quite good at throwing his toys by himself.  I’m not making this up.  And I’m not talking about the typical cat “throw” that amounts to pushing a toy around the floor.  Bo will get his claws into a toy mouse and hurl the thing across the room – immediately chasing after it in order to throw it somewhere else.  It’s really an amazing thing to watch (I haven’t managed to get a good video of this yet).

Chillin’ with Dad on the couch.

For whatever reason, he doesn’t like to drink water like a normal critter.  My cats have two water fountains and a bowl of water in various spots around the house.  Bo’s preferred method of drinking is to slap his paw in the water, splashing it all over the place, and then lick the water off of his paw.  He has learned that I don’t like this, however, and will grudgingly hunker down and drink like a normal animal when he hears my yell, “Just Drink It!”  It’s one of two phrases that he does seem actually to understand, the other being “Bedtime!”

When it’s his turn to sleep on the bed (he and Boo do not get along, and they seem to have worked out some sort of schedule for this honor), he’s generally found sleeping as close to my pillow as he can be without actually being on my face, and I learned when he was just a baby that he falls asleep very happily if I hold one of his paws.

If it’s cold, or if he’s just feeling a bit insecure, he will not hesitate to make his way under the blankets and snore contentedly for hours.

And that’s my buddy Bo.

TWD

I was playing around on blog sites during the short time that I was awake today and came upon a “Post A Day” challenge on one of the major blog hosts.  The idea is simple enough, and is based on that age-old bit of advice that says, “If you want to write more, write more.”  It challenges bloggers to write something – anything – at least once a day.  So I signed up for it.  What was I thinking?

One little perk is that I’ll be getting possible topics sent to me every day, so if I can’t think of anything to write about, I can take a stab at whatever is suggested to me.  Today’s topic, for example, is “Your most important achievement of 2010.”

Like I achieved anything last year.   We’ll get back to that later, after I’ve given everybody a quick run-down on what is sure to be the most boring day in my life this year.

In a nutshell, I slept all day.

No, really.  I.  Slept.  All.  Day.   I got to sleep at somewhere around 1:30 this morning.  Yeah, I know that I said that I was in bed at 9:00 last night, and that’s true; but I read a little bit and then talked on the phone with Chris awhile and then traded some text messages with her for a while longer and then I finally went to sleep at 1:30.  The cats woke me up at about 6:30 demanding food (which I dutifully gave them), then I got back in bed, turned on the television, started a new blog (maybe I’ll tell you all where it is at some point); and then I fell asleep and woke up at 4:45 this afternoon.  I got out of bed, ate some red beans and rice with leftover chicken kielbasa (still rolling on that “No Dairy January” thing), watched a few episodes of 30 Rock, and now – at 10:00 – I am back in bed.  I go back to work tomorrow morning.

You have now been brought fully up to date on basically everything that I did today.  I left out some details, like peeing and brushing my teeth.  Other than that, you’re caught up. Fascinating, huh?

A senior sousaphone player takes a breather during her last halftime show in 2010

So about this “Most Important Achievement of 2010.”   Hmmmm.  Let me ponder that for a few moments. I was elected to the board of directors of the North American Brass Band association.  I scored a gig shooting high school football games for a newspaper in middle Georgia.  I got to play the tuba solo in Laudate Dominum when the guy who usually played it didn’t show at a rehearsal.  I rescued 4 handicapped babies from a burning train which had hurtled off of a trestle into 70 feet of alligator-infested water in a Louisiana bayou.  I successfully closed down Camp Ulvik for the winter.  I changed the lock on my back door after some punks tried to kick it down.  I nearly paid off my American Express card…before I had to add $3,000 onto it to get my car fixed.  I wrote a pretty kick-ass ticket scrubbing application for ATT mobility.

To be completely serious, however (something that I endeavor to do very little in these pages), I’d have to say that the most important thing I did last year – perhaps the most important thing that I’ve ever done – was to play three or four songs with my brother and two nephews in a brass quartet at my mother’s memorial service last March.  And I did play most of those three or four songs.  Sure, I completely lost it and couldn’t finish the final one (Lead Me Lord, which has always been one of my favorite hymns), but I tried and I came close and I used the talent that I was born with to honor the woman who raised me.   It turns out that, when you don’t know what you can do, sometimes you just do the best you can.

And that, friends and neighbors, is that.

The handicapped babies thing?  Yeah….I made that up.

TWD

So I turned 45 years old today.

Who could’ve seen THAT coming 10 years ago, huh?

In terms of birthdays, it wasn’t half bad.  Chris and I spent the day together, beginning with watching the entire Tournament of Roses parade – something neither of us had ever done previously.   After that, we went to a diner in Duluth that I’ve been meaning to try, and – while not someplace that I’ll rush back to – it was okay.  I had a meatloaf sandwich, she had a basket of fried shrimp, and then the two of us went to Dave and Busters, which is a sort of upscale arcade.

I’ve been to D&B’s a few times – the last time about 6 years ago.  It’s a relatively expensive playroom for grown-ups, and I was hoping to be able to play some pinball there.  Alas, they had no pinball machines.  Chris, however, is a pretty good pool player and I’ve been trying to find someplace for us to play for a while now; and D&B has pool tables.

Game on!

So….after she beat me in pool (3 games to 1),  I decided that pool is a stupid game.  We decided to up the ante and play skee-ball, which I’ve never done before.  Basically, you roll balls up a ramp and try to make them jump into holes worth x-number of points.  How hard could THAT be, huh?  It’s like bowling for uncoordinated dorky people.

She beat me at that, too.  Something like 4 games to 0.

So we tried an electronic shooting game, wherein one uses a plastic rifle to shoot invisible beams at targets mounted on a wall about 30 feet away.  Now, I’m a good shot with a gun.  I really am.   Ask anybody.   I am what is commonly referred to as “a crack shot.”

Chris, shooting while holding the butt of the gun against her chin, rather than on her shoulder (note – don’t attempt this with a real gun), summarily destroyed me at that game as well.  I don’t even know what the score was, but it wasn’t close.

Any jerk can shoot with a plastic gun.  It means nothing, dammit!  And I AM NOT OLD!

Next up was basketball.

Ha!  I beat her!  Two games to ZERO, baby!  Who da man?

Sure, she was probably letting me win.  Stroking my aged ego, as it were.  Doesn’t matter.  I’ll take what I can get at this point.  That being the case, as soon as I’d actually won at something, I decided that it was pretty late and she needed to go home, which she did.

The birthday was WAY better before that happened, by the way, and I naturally missed her before her car was out of the driveway.  Hopefully we’ll be able to do something together later this week.

At any rate, after saying goodbye to Chris, I sat down and watched the Rose Bowl, in which tiny Texas Christian University knocked off the U. of Wisconsin.

And people still think college football doesn’t need a playoff system at its highest level…

In terms of birthday loot, I got a few presents.  Always a good thing.  Chris gave me a book by Christopher Moore called Lamb.  She’s been talking about it for a couple of years, and I’ve been meaning to get it for myself, so I’m looking forward to starting it later tonight.   Andi and Herb also gave me a book called Brain Droppings by the late George Carlin.

I did resolve to read more this year, right?

Dad came through with a new index for the cookbook that Mom distributed to all of her children several years ago (and which I use quite often).  Hopefully the new index will help me to find some of those recipes that I remember from childhood.

Jenny got me a beer from a brewery in Greenville (which I didn’t know existed).  I polished that off yesterday at lunch, and it was quite good.

I’m currently sitting in my bed (it’s 9 o’clock at night, but I’m 45 now.  I need 12 hours of sleep daily), half watching Oklahoma destroy Connecticut in the Fiesta Bowl.

No pictures in this entry.  I’ll try to either find some or take some before I write again.  Just wanted to let everybody know that I had a really nice birthday and I hope great things happen in 2011.

TWD