I'm sure this will amuse those of you in real snow country. We had our first snowfall today, which was actually quite substantial for this early. Our house got about 4". Unfortunately, the snow didn't start sticking to the roads until after 6am, and no one expected as much to fall as it did. So none of the schools delayed opening, the trucks ( Read more... )

word_geek and I are looking for a new dining room table, so I've been looking around at lots of various furniture websites in addition to visiting actual furniture stores. And the thing I just don't get is distressed furniture. The store I went to today had the table I was interested in, but it was distressed. To me, it looked like a floor sample that ( Read more... )

There's a week (technically, a week and a half) between the end of summer camp and the beginning of school for Sparky. Last year, word_geek and I took turns taking Sparky out on daytrips. Last year we did Hershey Park, Philadelphia Zoo, Franklin Institute, and some geocaching ( Read more... )

Yesterday I spent some time explaining to Sparky that men and women don't compete together in the events, and that a world record broken by a woman swimmer doesn't mean she just broke the recently broken world record in the same men's event. Today I'm planning on showing him some equestrian, and I was going to tell him that in this case, men and ( Read more... )

When I was young, my family would go canoeing on the Delaware River. We had two inflatable canoes, and we'd take them down the "whitewater" of the Delaware. We used kayak paddles (it was a while before I realized that canoes normally had a single bladed paddle instead of double-bladed like kayaks). That was a lot of fun. When we moved to ( Read more... )

We just don't have fun holidays here. I certainly could endorse taking the day off to go on a picnic.

Last week's saga continues. The new video card arrived, and I installed it in my computer. I just did some web browsing and mail stuff, but the fan spun the entire time, and the machine was fairly hot which didn't seem right. The next day I determined that my power supply might not be sufficient for the current hardware. According to rough ( Read more... )

Last night I was sitting at my computer when the display suddenly froze. After a few seconds, it went black. When it didn't wake up after a minute, I decided to go make dinner in the hopes it would wake up in the interim. Unfortunately, when I came back, the resolution was about 640x480 and there was an ominous message box saying "The display ( Read more... )

Why is that electronic devices always die in the middle of the night and then have to beep to let you know? At the pleasant hour of 3:30am, something in the house started going "be-doop" to call attention to itself. Every 2 minutes. Which finally led to a search for the culprit. Found one phone that was showing a red battery bar, so plugged ( Read more... )

Recently, I've had several conversations about different reading habits. Apparently, my way of selecting and reading books is not normal. Before Amazon, my way of finding new books was to wander along the shelves and look at covers. That's one reason I didn't like going to the library: all they show is the spine. (The other reason being that I ( Read more... )