Year: 2009

97,000 Calories

This morning we took a little trip downtown to St. Mary’s School’s Annual Chocolate Festival. We didn’t consume anywhere near the 97,000 calories that were on display at the bake sale tables. It was probably somewhere between 97 and 970 because all we spent on cookies and brownies was a buck and a quarter.

We spent $11 dollars on used books. Donna bought 16 kids books for nephew James at a quarter a piece and I bought 3 hardcover books. The one book that cost the most, nearly 50% of our book expenditures was Lee Child’s 2007 Jack Reacher tale, Bad Luck and Trouble.

I’m 150 pages into the 370 page book, it’ll probably be finished before tomorrow night. Chapter 13 starts like this:

At six the next morning Reacher went up to Neagley’s suite. He found her awake and showered and guessed she had been working out for an hour. Maybe in her room, maybe in the hotel gym. Maybe she had been out jogging. She looked sleek and pumped up and vital in a way that suggested there was a whole lot of oxygenated blood doing the rounds inside her.

After the festival we took the long way home via the bypass so we could drive by and look at, quite literally, the biggest thing to ever happen to Aiken. It has been the talk of the town since last weekend when the 300 foot long 1.89 million pound transport carrying a giant generator parked along the side of the road east of town. There is a photo in this article from the local paper, but you cannot get any idea how big this thing is from it. Plus in addition to the transport rig there is about a 1/4 miles worth of support trucks parked along with it.

Somewhere during our excursion the Emperor passed the 97,000 mile mark.

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I'm Glowing Again

Give Me A JayA confluence of events last week led me to purchase something that I’ve wanted for a while and had given up on after my last attempt.

I was catching up on reading some long neglected linkage on my sidebar when I ran into a post from August 26th on Darth Mojo. Wow this is what I was hoping for back in November of 2006, but that unit disappointed and didn’t get used too long before being exiled to a closet.

Then a day or so later I saw that very same keyboard listed in a Gadget & Gear Deals of the Day post on Lifehacker for a killer price, $55 with a twenty dollar rebate.

It arrived Wednesday.

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Book Excerpt

I just finished reading Too Close To Home by Linwood Barclay, the cover shouted at me in the used bookstore, “IF YOU LIKE HARLAN COBEN (I do,) YOU’LL LOVE LINWOOD BARCLAY.” So I picked it up. In the beginning it had that HC feeling, the plot was almost worthy of the statement, but in the end Linwood Barclay is no Harlan Coben. Not that I won’t read any more of his books, it was a mostly entertaining ride that is probably worth repeating.

As I went to color in the zero on page 101 (my way of ensuring I don’t pick up the same book more than once at our favorite used bookstore) I noticed that there was a page corner turned down. Ah, that’s right, I loved a little passage on page 182 that I wanted to share. Here you go.

In the years since she’d moved here from Hollywood, Ileana had gotten the small town college president’s-wife thing down pretty well. Expensive, but tasteful clothes, heels that were high but not towering and no longer made of clear plastic, a blouse unbuttoned far enough to draw your eye in, but not enough to give any real kind of show. But under all that upstate New York respectability there was still something of the tart about her. Like she was chewing invisible gum, making high-frequency snapping noises detectable only by the true hound dogs of my gender.

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Just How Many Variations Are Enough?

First there was the regular sized grocery cart. Well not actually the first, that was really a folding basket carrier patented in 1948, let’s say original modern shopping cart. Next probably came those small plastic hand baskets, perfect for those 10 items or less shoppers.

The next variation was the ones that have a slightly smaller basket which sacrifice grocery space for a plastic toy car in front to place the kiddies.

When our newest Kroger opened up 5 years ago or so there was another choice added, a 25% larger basket (mostly in width) for those big family bi-weekly shopping trips. The new store was more brightly lit to enhance the shopping experience and had slightly wider aisles, coincidentally about 25% wider.

A couple years later these small carts appeared that had a shelf for those small plastic baskets, which in a strange way almost returned the cart to it’s humble roots and allowed those to lazy to actually have to carry those ten items.

On a quick trip to the store this evening I noticed a 6th different kind of cart sharing the abandoned in the parking lot experience with its brethren, sort of a hybrid between the small cart with shelf and a regular cart. It looked like a plastic basket cart with a wire basket about a third of the size of a regular cart permanently attached.

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Like Kissing Your Sister

Pop the champagne, we're a pretty good team!Last night, after their 5th loss in a row, the FRS backed into the Wild Card spot in the American League playoffs because the Texas Rangers lost as well. This means that even if the Red Sox lose their last 5 games they will still have a better record than the Rangers if they win all of their last games. Which is a good thing too because the FRS are about to lose the the Blue Jays again tonight (in a double digit shut out no less.)

This morning the Sox web site was proudly directing folks to the store where you could buy your 2009 Wild Card paraphernalia. No thanks. Admittedly the 2003 World Series winning Red Sox were the Wild Card team, but trust me, this is not the 2003 team. They’ll be lucky to get past the first round the way they are playing.

Sniff, Sniff

Finished the last of West Wing tonight. To use one of President Bartlett’s favorite expressions and the nearly last line spoken on the show, by the newly inaugurated President Santos, “What’s next?”

Gall Bladder Ectomy

At 7:30 this morning they dragged my groggy wife away on a wheeled bed and three hours later a nurse was pushing her out to the car in a wheelchair. She had three incisions in her mid-section, was short one minor …wait let me check Wikipedia … organ and crumpled in her fist was a script for Dr. House’s favorite pills.

Isn’t modern medicine so amazing? I can’t help but think of that scene from Star Trek IV when the crew of the Enterprise travel back to the then current time (1986) and they have to rescue Chekov from a hospital because Bones is worried for his safety in the hands of practitioners of barbaric 20th century treatments. Imagine how we would react to what constituted the practice of medicine in the 18th century if we somehow found ourselves there.

She is still a bit sore and the vicoden is keeping the edge off, but she helped me cook dinner, washed the dishes and we walked around the small block in our neighborhood afterward. Current plan is to return to work next Monday.

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 412