Let's see; where to start?

PROM

We took my daughter up to CT to go to her boyfriend's senior prom.  They made a lovely couple, she in a beautiful dress handed down from her aunt-by-marriage, a professional (opera) singer/performer, he in an elegant tux.  They make much nicer tuxes/formal-wear now than they did back in the '70s when I was of age to go to proms. 

We took her up there, went to a hotel to get her ready, took her over to his house where she changed into the dress, and made them stand out on the front lawn for pictures.  J, my daughter, looked beautiful in her bright-eyed, alert way; her boyfriend looked very handsome and managed to maintain reserve and look happy at the same time.  I  teased her enough that we have two shots of her with an outraged look on her face, with him cracking a smile and watching her from the corners of his eyes.

PLAY DATE

While some of this was going on, I., my son, went back to the old neighborhood and had a play-date with his best CT friend and had a wonderful time.  He was a really good kid all weekend, being patient beyond his years on a weekend that was really all about his sister.  We all laid too much expectation on him and he did very well.  I've got to think up a way to thank him and show him how much we love and appreciate him.

XBOX

An opportunity came up over the weekend, and we've taken advantage of it.  J.'s boyfriend has several of the gaming systems so popular these days.  One of them, his XBox, he never plays any more -- he had three games for it and had mastered them all.  Since XBox just announced its successor system, the market value of the system has just taken a drop, but of course the _games_ haven't gotten simpler... Since he never plays it, he mentioned that he was thinking of getting rid of it.

Now comes the good part.  I.'s NJ friend has an XBox at home, and I. and friend frequently play on it.  So I asked J.'s Boyfriend if he'd be interested in selling it to me at current retail value, established by an average of several closed EBay sales.  He was so eager to get rid of it/get money for it that he handed it over to me then and there, telling me to pay later. 

So now we own an XBox, and three games (Halo, Halo II, and a terrorism shooter whose name I forget).  'Course I. is too young to be playing bloody shooters, so we're going to get a copy of the game that he plays with his NJ buddy.  But he's now got another toy, a gaming system, at a price that looks likely to be reasonable (It's shaping up to be between $100-$150 at the moment).

Hi, it's me again.  Hotjobs (a Yahoo service) was offering a $25K prize drawing entry to anyone who entered and put up a resumé, so I did.  I'm not actually looking for a new job -- the one I have now fits my needs and interests pretty well.

GERBILS

Huh -- has it really been three months?  Let's see; changes.  We're now a family that keeps a dog, five cats (down from six; the sixth one, Becky, is very happy at friend E.'s apartment), a bunch of fish, a frog (at least until the spring when we can put him near a freshwater source without him getting frozen at night), and... TEN GERBILS, with more probably on the way.  We only bought three of them; but one was pregnant.  Seven is an unusually large litter, but not unheard of.  The little ones are cute.  In fact, they're all cute.  The cats think so, too, which is why we don't let the cats in the room where the gerbils live.

Deb's written a journal of their keeping, for their technical owner, I. (our son) -- it started out as his birthday present, but the investment has continued to grow, and ownership is kind of a fuzzy concept to gerbils -- Deb's spending more time with them than I. is, and is doing all the maintenance (cage cleaning, feeding, etc.) so they respond more to her than to him.  J. (our daughter) is getting a pair out of the new litter, so the critters will be in two rooms in the house instead of one; J. is also directly owned by two of the cats, so this could get interesting.

DEB'S BACK

...has been giving her a lot more trouble in the past two months, and so we saw a specialist about it; he recommended us to another specialist, the Rothman Institute down in Philadelphia.  They specialize in spinal problems and scoliosis, so it's a good match with her history.  We have an appointment for the end of March.

It's baaack...

My Netscape account has reappeared as eerily as it disappeared.  There were 84 new pieces of mail in the inbox; about half-a-dozen which I had seen already on my yahoo.com account, and the rest, of course, was spam.  (Did you know there's actually a Spam Truck which goes around the country, doing cooking demonstrations using Hormel "SPAM," in front of grocery stores?  No kidding.  And they give out little magnets -- I've got one at my desk.  Unfortunately, I didn't get there in time for a free sample.)

So, I'm going to one-by-one point my various accounts away from Netscape and toward Yahoo, and stop mentioning the Netscape account in my letterhead/cards/etc.  They had me convinced that I wasn't going to get my account back, and were going to charge me $40.00 for the phone call to confirm it.  One shouldn't expect too much from a "free" email account... but one might reasonably expect such an account not to lose your mail and your login, since such things make "free" quite expensive.

The Old Home Town

We went up to Hartford last week to see a friend's Tang Soo Do test.  Dawn W., our friend (distinct from our friend Dawn B. who reads this Blog!), and Mike her buddy were awarded Apprentice Black Belt rank by our dojang's owner/lead instructor.  We saw several other old friends during the weekend, and had a good time (we know we were having a good time, 'cause we didn't want to leave).

Driving home was long -- it's a four-hour drive, which I'd forgotten.  I'm used to thinking of Hartford/New Jersey as three hours, because I used to drive directly from home in the Hartford area to work in metro, New Jersey, which is 2:40 (okay, so I bent a few speed laws).  But it's a fair hike farther to go out to our home in western New Jersey.

I WILL

 

OvercomePursueFinishThriveResolveLaughBreatheBelieve

 

                        --found on web page: http://www.franklincovey.com/

This time, it's Insulation (Or, why J.'s room is always cold)

Welcome Back to our current edition of The Money Pit... In this weekend's surprise episode, we discover (while winterizing the attic) that all the plywood in the attic, over the original section of the house, was placed so as to conceal the fact that there is no insulation over much of that area... and, for extra points, discover that much of the insulation which is placed is unfaced, and therefore not much good for first-layer insulation.

Watch as we go to Home Depot and pony up for about $250 worth of Kraft-faced (means it has a vapor barrier on one side) R-19 attic insulation, bring it home, and accept the help of J., my daughter and her (male) friend C. in moving goods around, picking up plywood, laying insulation batting, relaying the plywood, and replacing the goods, trying to get the whole place insulated for the winter.  A winter which, mind you, is expected to feature record-high fuel prices.  Much dust enters our noses, despite the breathing masks which you're supposed to wear when working with fiberglass.

Anyone who has figured out how to breathe through those masks without steaming up your glasses, please call me.  I need your advice.

Also this weekend, we accomplished a few other things.  Deb built from scratch (with plywood cut by Phil, two kinds of padding, velour fabric, and a lot of big staples) a simple headboard for our bed, in order to reroute an air duct to provide more heat for the room.  We'd had to leave the duct turned off because it was right behind the bed, but with the headboard we were able to duct the air out into the open.  She built the headboard high enough that it mostly blocks the draft from the window (Don't get me started on the quality of the windows in this place, I can't _believe_ how drafty it is), so our sleep last night was noticeably warmer.

In addition to supporting Deb in that and working on the insulation, Phil found time to rewire the bathroom fan so that the exhaust and the heat run off of different switches, so we'll have a warmer bathroom this winter.

Deb managed all this while recovering from a stomach bug which had sidelined her and both kids on Thursday and Friday.  I've known her twenty years and she still amazes me with stuff like that.  She says that living with the Scoliosis problem all this time has made her used to working while hurting.

Bet 'cha can't wait to see what's up next...  You'll know as we live through it.


--Phil

If you don't want to deal with a whine, don't read any further.  If you read further, don't complain that I'm whining.  Are we okay so far here?

Arrgh.  New clothes for work, because the old ones are starting to look noticeably shabby.  A new coat, because my good old leather one has disappeared, probably taken when my car was broken in to last spring, and the two I have, well, one has a twelve-inch rip down  the right front as a souvenir of the last time my hand slipped while trying to start the snowblower; the other was comfortable in subzero temperatures in Y2K on the New Hampshire/Canada border, and is _definitely_ too much insulation for commuting in a car in New Jersey's mild winters..  (Fortunately, the new coat isn't leather, and I got it on sale with additional discounts, etc., for under $40).  And as if the clothes thing wasn't bad enough...
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