Posts in the General Category

Not much new to say this week.  We had an out-of-town friend visit us over the weekend, which was really nice, and Kat and I have been discussing plans for home improvements this spring and summer.  It isn’t so much what we want to do as what we want to do this year, and what we want to put off for following years.  I’m also starting to assemble my thoughts on the subject of renegotiating my home finanacing, what with interest rates as low as they’re about to be.  Hey, if we’re going to be forced into a downturn by (insert your preferred scapegoat here), we may as well benefit from it in some fashion.

• Monday, 19 March 2001 was published on Monday, March 19th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

Jeez, have I ever fallen behind.  Things are flying every which way, metaphorically speaking, and trying to duck the swooping events while also being productive has consumed a lot of time and energy.  All of which is my lame way of saying, “Sorry I’ve been so silent.”  I’m not going to really do penance right now, either, because I don’t have time to make up for it.  Maybe tomorrow, we’ll see.  So why am I writing?  I have two recommendations to make.  The first one is for Clevelanders who want some great Japanese food: go straight to Matsu and don’t come back until you have.  If you’d like to meet Kat and I there, then let me know and we’ll schedule something.  Second is for anyone buying technical books: Bookpool.  They have great prices on stuff like O’Reilly books, so if you aren’t going to use a local merchant to get your tech references, go to Bookpool instead.  I get absolutely no money from them for saying this, nor have I ever ordered from them; I just noticed that their prices are outstandingly low, and wanted to give everyone else a heads-up.

• Tuesday, 13 February 2001 was published on Tuesday, February 13th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

Wow.  We all made it.  Now where’s my Pam Am shuttle flight, two-week holiday at the HoJo’s in low Earth orbit, and neurotic AI?

I don’t really have that much to write about, but of course I had to make sure that I wrote an entry for today.  The date alone made it worth it for me.  Kat and I did have a really great time at last night’s party (at someone else’s place for once!) and are looking forward to the New Year with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation—the same mix as usual, I admit, but this year it runs a bit more deeply.  If nothing else, we should have a very interesting year… and if you’ll recall, the Chinese had a curse along those lines.

May your year-to-come be healthy, happy, and wholly wonderful!

• Monday, 1 January 2001 was published on Monday, January 1st, 2001.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

Ever tried to count your blessings and then realized you didn’t have the energy to bother?  Just wondering.

Christmas at the folks’ house was nice as always, and this year we had the super-special added bonus of clear skies over north central Ohio.  That meant that we could enjoy the sunlight glinting off of (and refracting through) the hoarfrost and the snow, both of which dazzled throughout the morning.  It also meant that we could observe the partial solar eclipse around noontime, using a pinhole camera I constructed out of some gift boxes that happened to be lying around.  Pretty nifty.

• Tuesday, 26 December 2000 was published on Tuesday, December 26th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

I hope your Thanksgiving was as convivial as ours.  We had over both sets of parents and siblings and their partners, a cousin, and some friends.  We may have missed our first Halloween in the new house, but I think we more than made up for it with our first Turkey Day.  And major thanks to Alton Brown for giving us the secret to crowd-pleasing turkey.  Even Dad was impressed.

The extended weekend was useful in some other ways as well: I got more work done on my next book, and wrote (or started to write) some new articles.  It turned out that I’d been away from writing too long, and pounding the keyboard for a few hours (okay, it was probably close to 20 of them) did me a world of good.  Does this mean I’m becoming a Writer?  I hope not—it would break my poor mother’s heart to know I’d gone so wrong.

• Monday, 27 November 2000 was published on Monday, November 27th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

Another month, another lack of updates.  Our house is coming along quite nicely, although it’s nowhere near where we want it to be.  I’m told that’s how it goes.  As my friend Bruce D. told me, “Now you have a kit which is never finished and to which you’ll never have all the parts you need at any one time.”  The big challenge now is trying to find bedroom furniture to match the ceiling fan we bought.  Salespeople give us really odd looks when we tell them this.  Kat’s recovered completely from her surgery, which is great.  I got back from Vancouver a week ago; nice city, but lots of rain.

• Friday, 27 October 2000 was published on Friday, October 27th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

It is often amazing how fast time flies past.  No news posts for the last month definitely doesn’t mean no news—it’s just that we’ve been too busy to do updates.  In brief: we moved into the house and had some work done, Kat had outpatient surgery, and Eric signed more contracts to speak and write on the topic of CSS.  That’s about it, but it’s certainly enough.

• Friday, 29 September 2000 was published on Friday, September 29th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

Of course, work on the house and the attendant move continue to dominate our lives.  While we were away for a week, the nearly 2,000 square feet of hardwood floors were refinished, and they look great.  The yard’s been ripped apart until it’s something like what we want—not finished, by any stretch of the imagination, but much better than it was.  We still have some distance to go, but things are pulling together.  The actual move is looming ever closer now, and hopefully we’ll get everything lined up for departure on schedule.  In fact, we’ve been so fixated on the house and moving that I completely neglected to post the fact that Kat passed her certifying exams a week or two back.  I never doubted that she would, but of course the waiting for test results is always quite stressful for the person doing the waiting…

• Friday, 25 August 2000 was published on Friday, August 25th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.