Happy Birthday, Lisa!

Happy birthday, Lisa!! And many happy returns, too!! :-)

On a less joyful note, Cathy had an anaphylactic reaction to a peach the other night. She fears that she's becoming more food-allergic as she gets older. She's had reactions to grapes, watermelon and even celery, and has become lactose-intolerant which is a little ironic as she's about themost tolerant person I know.

Steve had his knee surgery this week and is doing better than I did at the same stage. No crutches, no cane and maybe no physical therapy. Waddaguy!

I'm leaning toward getting an implant when they extract my tooth. My theory is that a bridge would require work on the adjacent teeth and why bother?

Cathy's Uncle Bill was laid to rest in the same military cemetery as his wife. And Uncle Alfred made it back to Long Island. The nice thing about funerals is the "luncheon" afterwards. Bill's daughrer Maureen Kanka (mother of the child that Megan's Law was written about) had it at her house, and it gave Cathy a chance to reconnect with her cousins and make plans to see them later in the year.

I'm worried about the Red Sox. Their pitching has all but disappeared. They scored 16 runs in their last two games and won only ONE!! Another week of this and they won't even be in the race for the wild card slot!!

Heh-heh-heh

As I mentioned yesterday, Cathy's Uncle Bill passed away last Saturday and Uncle Alfred ("I'll be 87 in October") who lives way-the-hell-out-in-Long-Island is going to stay with us. Well, at about 8:45 last night, after I had just finished reinstalling the electronic and mechanical filters for my HVAC unit and was dripping sweat, the phone rang. "Hi! I'm at the Trenton train station. Can you come and pick me up?"

Drat! He wasn't supposed to be here until Wednesday! "Sure, Alfred. Which Trenton station are you?". There's a new one, well-lit and well-policed in Hamilton, and another, very close to downtown and scary. "I'll ask the cop......I'm at the downtown one." Hmmm. "OK -- I'll pick you up in about 25 minutes." "Thanks. The cop says he'll stay with me until you get here." I breathed a sigh of relief on hearing that; the Trenton train station is no place for a frail 86-year-old to be alone.

So I jump in my TSX and head up Rt 68. "Hmmm", I say to myself. "Where is the station?" I've driven there from our old home in Ewing (north of Trenton) but never from Columbus (south of Trenton). My NJ state map had an inset of Trenton and showed where the station was so I pull back on 68, went north on 206, cut over to 130 and get on I295. Take the exit toward Trenton and get on 29. Will wonders never cease?? Signs to the train station! OK, I follow them and turned on Clinton Ave. First thing I see -- a group of young men loitering on a corner! Aiaiaiai!! I said a silent prayer to Click and Clack that I would not have car trouble or have to stop at a light and continued. Go just a couple of blocks and see, on my left, the station for the NJ Riverline!! Is this what the signs were pointing to??? The signs are new; Riverline is new. S**T!!

So I go another block and realize that the "real" Trenton train station is right there on my right! :-)

Pull in and there is Albert and the cop who was very nice and seemed happy to have kept Albert safe. Phew!

Of course, I did not know exactly how to get home, and back-tracking was foiled by some one-way streets, but eventually I found S. Broad St and got going in the correct direction. 20 minutes later, the adventure was over.

Cool, man!

Well, well...our A/C picked exactly the right day to develop a problem. Truly! It was only 83 today with humidity less than 50%. :-) Serviceman says it needs a new blower motor and it may even be a warranty repair. Fancy that! So I washed the filters and the electronic filters and replaced the paper filter -- no telling how overdue that was!

Screwed up my courage and made an appointment to have #19 extracted. Mentioned that their website was really scary about surgeries and she said that extraction is not considered surgery (so why am I going to an oral surgeon???) and I didn't need someone to come with me, etc. Whew!

Realized that I'm only using about 60GB on my C: drive so I can easily copy everything to H: (it has 133GB free) and sort things out after I reformat C:. However, that will get pushed to the weekend because my schedule has been adjusted due to the death of Cathy's Uncle Bill...viewing Wednesday 6-9PM, funeral at 11AM on Thursday followed by a service at the local military cemetery where he will be interred and then lunch. Uncle Alfred will be staying with us again. He takes trains and buses from the middle of Long Island to Trenton -- and he's 85 or more!

No plans for the weekend. We were scheduled to go on a map rally but Cathy doesn't read well in a moving car and I don't think I'll do well with small print and tiny roads. Next rally is a "conventional" one in September.

The summer has gone by very quickly. Perhaps that feeling occurs with age, but I'm always surprised to find out it's Thursday already when I thought it was Tuesday.

Cathy remarked that just when she was thinking that my sister has such an enjoyable and varied life then said sister sent her an email saying, "You have such an interesting life" implying "compared to mine", we thought. Ah, perspective!

Time to watch the BoSox on MLB.COM!!

Grumble, grumble...

Well, whaddaya expect – it’s Monday morning!

Just got off the phone with Verizon. I need a new wall-mounted DSL filter and it took me 45 minutes to reach someone who could help me. What a system! I got a “better” 800 number from her: 1-800-483-3000. Feel free….

Also, I must have hosed something on my XP Pro computer because I had to remove Office 2003 and reinstall Office 2000 (XP). And when I start an Office application, I get a pop-up “Preparing to install Office 2000…” and “Configuring Office 2000…” before the appl actually starts. What’s going on there???

And Outlook 2000 doesn’t sync with my Key Suite PDA application. Yuck. I think I’ll remove KeySuite and reinstall.

On the brighter side, the weather is nice enough for a bike ride that I desperately need so as soon as I finish this, I’m off.

My windshield replacement went well. Amazing that one guy can come to your house and do it in 30-40 minutes. I remember when it took two guys and a big suction-cup thing to move a windshield.

Blogger for WORD

Just heard about this on the MAKE site and had to try it. BUT...."Images and document tables are not supported"!! And color is not supported in Word!

Gas-tronomic Delights

--) Yikes! Went out last night and found that gas prices had jumped another 6 cents all around!!!

++) Rats was great! The Delmonico steak was tender enough to cut with a spoon and the potage puree ("mashed potato" to you!) was served in its own copper "tea pot". The appetizer was a white gazpacho and was very interesting. Cathy and Steve had lamb Porterhouses and I heard no complaints from either. Phyllis had sole and enjoyed it too. But is Rats ever expensive!!! Whew!! A neighbor emailed that if I can afford Rats, I have no right to grouse about $2.71 gasoline prices!

We never did walk around the Sculpture Garden as it was too steamy for everyone. Steve said it was just like Vietnam -- he returned from an 18-day trip there on Tuesday.

++) Shalom Club Bagel Breakfast was very nice. They had a conveyer belt bagel toaster that no one was able to set right so most people had burned bagels with their cream cheese, lox, whitefish salad, tuna salad, onions, tomatoes, olives, etc.

++) Found some cheaper gas! We had to run to the soup kitchen so Cathy could pick up some papers and later work on the 05-06 budget. On both Broad St and Chambers Ave, we found at least one name brand gas station with $2.45/$2.55/$2.65 and quite a few no-namers with significantly cheaper gas. So I filled up at a Getty for $40. Now that may not seem like much to you SUVers but as the driver of small cars with small tanks, it was a shock. I'm going to drive the speed limit and keep a fictitious egg between my right foot and the accelerator (for a while), and see just how much of a savings I can effect.

More Hot Weather

I hate to keep carping about weather, but when it's hot and humid..well, as Mark Twain said, "Everyone talks about it but no one does anything!" And the air quality is poor, to boot! We have plans to meet Steve and Phyllis at a fabulous restaurant with an off-putting name (Rats) at 7PM and walk around their sculpture garden for a hour before dinner, but I don't think I'll be able to handle that--walking, I mean, not eating.

I didn't mention it before, but on the trip last weekend, I picked up a rock that cracked my windshield. There's an auto glass service that will do the replacement in my driveway for $350 (well under my deductible) and they will be here Tuesday.

The 20 cent jump in gasoline prices is still shocking to me, although we're considerably less expensive than many parts of the US. On my way to the super market, I surveyed the gas prices and EVERY ONE OF THEM has the same prices! Brand names and no-names alike. $2.45 for regular, $2.55 for "plus" and $2.65 for super. Since the 10 cent difference in price is only 4 percent of the cost, I guess I'll forgo my usual "money-saving" thing of alternating tanks of "plus" and super and just pay the freight for super. Let's see....average fill up is about 14 gallons and that's (mumbling "4 times 9 is 36, write the 6, carry the 3...") about $37 per fill. Whew! My first tank of gas in this car, back in March, cost me $2.12 per gallon!

Other than the above, it was a very quiet week.

Look at the picture of Sara below (top left). Some have said she looks like Shirley Temple. What do you think?

Pictures of Sara

Another Monday

The drive home from New England today was the antithesis of the drive there on Friday. Today it was 70MPH door-to-door (for all intents and purposes) for four and a half hours. Very little traffic, only a couple of rain drops and no accidents. Friday's drive saw traffic on the NJ Turnpike and Garden State Parkway, and an accident on I84 near Hartford that had traffic at a standstill (or at least, we moved at less than 10 MPH when we moved) for an hour. There was rain on the Mass Pike with flooding in the left lane where the road had been resurfaced. The trip took about 6.5 hours!

However, seeing Sara made it all worthwhile. I'll unload the camera later and upload a bunch of pictures.

Got a phone call from the ShopRite division of American Express (or perhaps the AmEx division of SR!). Seems that someone had made two charges with my card using Cathy's name. We think it came from inside SR because even though she doesn't have a SR-AmEx card, we do have the same "PricePlus" account. Hmmmm....

TGIT!

TGIT because tomorrow we go to visit our granddaughter up in Massachusetts! :-)

So far, DSL has been fine. Only one strangeness: when I set up Cathy's Thunderbird to use the DSL mail servers, it would download her email OK but it wouldn't let her send. I decided to create an account for her and even that didn't help until I configured the SMTP portion to use username authentication. Funny that it didn't need authentication on my machine. Latest speed test shows 2774 down and 682 up.

I've been a little low because I found out Monday that I need to have a molar extracted (number 19 for the dental-aware!) and a bridge built. I hate dental work. I hate paying for dental work even more. After all, how many more years am I going to use these teeth! :-)