Friday

Good afternoon!

This was a quick week, what  with the start of it busied with the travel back from Boston, and a full day on the road yesterday for a meeting in Des Moines.  I'll be glad to relax this weekend.  We still need to do a little celebration for 2's birthday.

The report on the not-so-new replacement NSSP is positive so far.  I still have some programming to tweak, but it definitely doesn't have the bugs that came with the initial replacement.  When email gets properly routed to the phone, the need for the laptop on a day-trip like yesterday's is negated.  Which is good.

On another recurring situation, the Buick is back at the shop after I woke up early Thursday and was faced with two flat tires!  I had known that the new tires didn't solve the "check air pressure" problem in the dashboard display a couple of days after their installation.  But it had been inconvenient to take the car back to the dealership, and I had just put up with airing-up the tires as necessary for the last month (including for the trip to Muskie on Wednesday night).

The flats caught me by complete surprise yesterday morning, and my less-than-preferable Plan B was to take the Taurus to Des Moines.  Ouch!  But I was committed to the DM meeting so the Taurus got it's first taste of non-QC roads in the last several years.  And it proved to be uneventful. Thank goodness!  (I did have to replace a fuse in the electrical system to get the power outlet for my phone hook-up to work for the way back.  I won't bore you with the details of that exercise, but it was not an insignificant effort.)

Most of the world is aware that Lance fell (literally) victim to Rule #1 of cycling yesterday.  After reports of doping by him and others were reported in the morning news.  I'm not a huge Lance fan, but the guys pointing the fingers (now and previously) have always had grudges against Lance and his associates.  With his record of duplicity over the last few years, it's hard to believe Landis.

3 has had some up-ticks to the job search in The Big Apple.  Keep pitching, Kiddo!

After getting home from DM last night, I did 15+ in the rain on the bike path.  And something happened that has never occurred in all my years of cycling on the path: I encountered not a single other human from entrance to exit over those miles.  I saw one deer.  And two cars in the Duck Creek Park interior roads.  So the lesson is that, the crappier the weather, the better for LtPC's workout!

No big plans for the weekend.  It's supposed to get near 90 here on Sunday.  That's a little warm for me.

I'm thinking about a little Writer's Challenge to myself to get some of the creative juices going again.  Something of a serial, like Eleven Days in May.  Kind of a play on the old political thriller from Fletcher Knebel in the '60's.  (No worries, peanut gallery.  It won't be a series of interviews.)  Stay tuned.

Maybe more here a little later.

BCOT