Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time

So we are all still sick, although Gilli seems to be almost better. I have hit the miserable stage. Karen is on her way to getting better and Bella is to. It’s too bad, because it was like spring here today. It was 63 when I was driving to pick Gilli up after work. There were people playing ball in the street wearing shorts and T-shirts. Very weird for January.

The new semester at the college starts next week, so I imagine that the kids will be moving back into town this weekend. No more good parking until summer. But without them there wouldn’t be much here. It’s really interesting how this area has grown and changed in the time I’ve lived here. I find myself referencing things that no longer exist and have to laugh at myself for doing that.

I have the opportunity to work with both Windows XP and Mac OS X professionaly. Although my comfort zone is still Windows it is becoming evident that more and more things are platform independent. In my daily life there are very few things that require me to choose OSX or WinXP. On the personal side of things, I blog, I IM, I check my email. I use Firefox as my browser and GAIM for IM. Both of which will work equally well in either platform. And for that matter, it doesn’t really matter what program I use as long as I can get the job done. Professionally it is similar. Although there are more cases there for using Windows, particularly for Windows System Administration, although I could remote desktop from my OS X box and for MS Access and OneNote, neither of which have an OS X equivalent. The one killer app I can think of for OS X is iLife, specifically Garageband. But with those few exceptions, it really doesn’t matter to me if I am at a Mac or a PC.

I had to run out to the store to pick up some medicine and tissues this evening. It is an amazing night out. It’s like spring. Clear, in the low 50′s. Stars and Moon out. If I didn’t know it was January I would swear it was spring. If I weren’t sick I’d go sit out on the porch and enjoy it some more. But I’m tired and need to get some sleep. Just wanted to mention this though. Especially since it’s supposed to snow on Saturday.

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Just in case you were wondering what movies/videos Bella likes to watch here’s the list of what we watched today in viewing order:

Veggie Tales: An Easter Carol
The Care Bears Great Race
The Wizard of Oz
You’re Not Elected Charlie Brown
It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown
The Care Bears Great Race
Dora the Explorer: 4 episodes: Super Silly Fiesta, Boots’ Special Day, Stuck Truck, and the Big Potato
Jonah, A Veggitales Movie
The Care Bears Great Race

As you can see she watched the Care Bears 3 times today. Lucky me! It amuses me how all cartoon villans are almost exactly alike. Evidently the bad guy in Care Bear land is called No-Heart. He reminded me a lot of Skeletor or Mum-Ra from He-Man or Thundercats respectively.
Bella seems to be better, so she’ll probably go back to school tomorrow. Gilli may need to stay home one more day. I won’t know that until she wakes up tomorrow.

Everyone is sick today and I am home with the girls. So far this morning we’ve watched A Veggie Tales Easter Carol, The Care Bears Great Race, and are now watching the Wizard of Oz. Gilli still likes to play, even when she’s sick, but Bella doesn’t. She prefers to snuggle up and watch movies all day. Which makes it hard when they are both awake. I get a few moments to myself, such as now, where I can check my email and such. I enjoy these extra days I get to spend with the kids, even if we are all sick.

So, I like to drink coffee. My morning isn’t complete without it. I have figured out the way to get the best pot of coffee I’ve ever had. Prepared this way it is very smooth, not bitter. And it seems to have more of a kick, caffeine-wise. I like to use organic, fair trade coffee, although any type of coffee should be fine. Start with a plain old perculator coffee pot. Fill with the correct amount of coffee grounds, then add another scoop – one for the pot so to speak. Use filtered water if possible. Put on very very LOW flame. I think this is the key. It takes much longer to brew, usually about 30-45 minutes total, but it is worth it.

since the weather has been such a downer lately, I thought I’d throw out some random weather-related quotes. add some more if you will.

“The weather is here, I wish you were beautiful”

“If you want to see the sun shine, you have to weather the storm.”

“Don’t knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn’t start a conversation if it didn’t change once in a while.”

“Every mile is two in winter.”

“One kind word can warm three winter months.”

“Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind,
As man’s ingratitude.”

(nothing like starting withy Jimmy Buffett and ending with Shakespeare…)

I didn’t really finish my thoughts on driving last night. I used to love to drive. big road trips, just driving around town, whatever. In high school a lot of what we did revolved around driving around. We didn’t always have a destination, and you can only drink so much coffee at a diner before the waitress starts trying to push you out of the door, so a lot of times my friends and I would just drive. Then came college, and driving revolved mainly about going home (10 hour drive) and dropping off my friends along the way. That was a lot of fun too. There is something about the freedom of the road that is just wonderful. Of course, these days I don’t look forward to long drives. Something happened a few years back, I don’t know what, and now the thought of travel in general is completely unappealing. I still like to take short drives around the area and stuff, but giant, multi-day road trips are just no fun anymore. Of course with gas prices the way they are I suppose it’s a good thing I don’t drive as much as I used to. That is just ridiculous. The other day gas prices jumped 10 cents in one day. That seems unreasonable. I guess they’ll never really come down anymore, but it sure would be nice if they would.

So I went out for a drive today. Had a few errands to run, but I also just wanted to drive. It’s funny how I forget that everything is either closed or closed early on a Sunday. At least among non-chain stores, which is really where I prefer to shop. I wanted to go down to the local music store (instrument not CD) to check out their bulletin board (the old-school kind where people tack ink-scribblings on processed dead-tree to a wall) to see if anyone my age is looking to get together to form a band or jam. It’s amusing to me that I never even searched online to see if a digital bb exists for my area. With some things I guess I’m still old-school. Maybe I’ll search tomorrow online, I would assume that something like that would exist. Whether it exists for this area is another story. Anyway, my point is that the music store was closed and it never even occurred to me that it would be. It’s kind of funny. I don’t blame them though, I had to go to sprawl-mart and they were pretty empty. So if the largest retailer in the world can’t attract customers on a Sunday, what is a little mom & pop store going to do?

I’ve been playing with a cool little web app called protopage. It lets you create a fully customizable web page. You can also divide it into variuos sections that can be marked public or private. So if you were to go to my protopage you would only see my public page, which is just a bunch of links. When I am logged in I get a different page that contains links as well as a feed reader.
This type of tool allows you such flexibility in how you access information. There are so many possibilities for this. Go try it out, I’ll wait. http://protopage.com

I can put all of my bookmarks and news feeds in one place. If I shared my password, it could be used for limited collaboration using the sticky notes feature. So far this is the best of the ‘start page’ web sites I’ve used. It has everything I need with some extra customization ability for when I get some time to play with it. It is not overy cumbersome to use and loads fast. It has everything I need without bogging me down with lots of extraneous stuff to get in my way. I’d give it a 5 out of 5.