Asymptomatic

My Kindle arrived today while I was watching Riley drive his electric Jeep around the cul-de-sac island. Since he refused to park his Jeep to go inside, I tore open the box right there in the driveway, and carried its contents up to the circle to get acquainted.

The Kindle is an electronic book. It has a paperback-sized screen with a small keyboard below, and large buttons on the sides. When the device is on, it reads just like any paperback book except that when you want to turn the page, you just press the button.

Several special features of the Kindle make it a pretty unique product. I admit that this device is going to be a problem for me because it's just too good....

Excuse me if this doesn't make any sense, I'm a bit endorphin high. I just got finished mowing the front lawn -- with an electric push-mower.

The lawn has been a battle. We discontinued last year's lawn service because they were doing things that we asked them not to do, resulting in large dirt patches in our lawn. So this year, with no service, our lawn has been growing uncontrolled, much to the chagrin of our mower-loving neighbors.

The riding mower that came with our house has a dead battery from the kids leaving the headlights on (why does the mower have these?) so I tried for a good bit this afternoon to get that working again, to no avail. And in the end, I bought a new corded electric push-mower from Home Depot. It's corded, because the battery on the last one went kaput. Speaking of going crazy while mowing the lawn, Bill Clinton called me today. Don't believe me?Bill! more

This week has already gone atypical. Yesterday, Abby was off school for President's Day. Her being home while I'm "at work" left me with one of those feelings of a void day. It felt like Tuesday when it was happening, and I stressed out over how much I had to get done to complete the week. And then today, it's like yesterday never happened since it's Tuesday again, with the exception that a lot of the stuff I had needed to accomplish today is mysteriously already done.

This week is Abby's Top Dog week at kindergarten. Every week, her class has a "Top Dog" who they profile. They get to bring in a show-and-tell item and talk about photos on their Top Dog poster.

Berta and Abby have een assembling her Top Dog poster for a couple of weeks. It's supposed to be special, covered with things that illustrate Abby's personality and hobbies. Berta got a bunch of scrapbooking stickers to apply to the poster, and glued some other things to it too. She's got little cutout dominoes and ballet attire, the program from her camp play last summer, and photos of Abby and Riley, and rollercoasters....

You may ask "Why?" so I'm going to tell you straight out.

When I first started working at Kruse, I mentioned in my interview that I had used more than one monitor hooked to a computer. And I had.

I used my main monitor for the computer, and I hooked a Wyse terminal to my serial port. The serial port, used with vt100 output, would output debug information while I used the computer to write programs. A pretty sweet setup for the time....

Well, it seems we're done. Suckered into throwing at the buyers another $4500 plus $500 that our realtor is kicking in from her comission, we are finally parting with our house. Whether the additional $1500 was worth our piece of mind, I can't say. What I can tell you is that anything not nailed down in the house that was not mentioned in the sales agreement is not remaining in the house, I don't care if I have to give it away to the neighbors, these buyers aren't getting another red cent from me. This means when they beg for the bedroom's window air conditioner because the 2nd floor is so hot they need a new central air system, they can just bugger off. Nevermind that we don't need it in the new house, I'll sooner give it to Goodwill than leave it for these greedy buyers. Bah, so angry!

And now on to more pleasant talk, since it's been on my mind...

We went shopping for a few items for the new house. Since the new house will not have a washer and dryer, and our buyers are keeping ours, we bought a new set. The new washer and dryer are a matching pair of GE appliances. The washer is a front-loader, something I have no in-home experience with. The lady at Home Depot (who was infinitely more educated than the guy at Sears, who expected that just because Consumer Reports gives his appliances the top rating, we would fall over ourselves in quetionless stupidity to buy them) assured us that this was the brand to buy if we were mounting the washer on a wood floor, as opposed to on concrete block. ...