Saturday

Another cold front moved in yesterday. -5 here this AM.

2 is very excited to report that the U of Iowa is storing its 12,000 piece art collection at the Figge for something like five years. The Museum of Art in IC was flooded last summer, and I guess that they were able to save all of their collection, but the rebuilding of the facility will take time. There are numerous valuable pieces in the collection, and the Figge may be able to parlay the loan into better attendance numbers. For anyone with an interest in art, this is a big deal.

My latest foible is fumbling my keys down between the driver's seat and the center console in the Buick. They're still there. I tried digging them out via the same down route that they fell with no success, and was similarly confounded from the under the backseat route. I'm going to need to do some fishing with a hangar or something. Talk about frustrating.

One of my goals at the office this year is to upgrade our telephone system. The existing hardware is now 20 years old, and the technology is such that none of the new gadgets work on our equipment because the manufacturers assume that no one is still using systems that old. We need to integrate our office phones with our cell phones and our computer/Internet connections. I'm not sure that it will improve our profitability, but it will definitely improve our processes.

The ESPN college basketball Game Day crew is at ND today. The Irish have a 45 game home court winning streak on the line tonight against UConn. Interesting how ESPN has taken its football Saturday game-site concept and applied it to basketball. They usually set up for a mid-morning broadcast on the selected court and then come back on live late in the afternoon as a pre-game show for a 6 or 7 Eastern time tip-off for the featured game. From a fan's perspective, I think it works. Erin is in the house.

One of the more absurd new nuances I first noticed last week over in Wheaton was a few of Wheaton's players doing their pre-warm-up shoot-around listening to Ipods. But the jumping around was such that the Ipods wouldn't stay in place, and one tool in particular spent most of the session re-adjusting the thing after every shot. The price of being cool.

I'm headed over to Augie tonight for their game with Illinois Wesleyan, their biggest rival. 2 has dumped me for a movie. As I noted last year, I'm sure, Illinois Wesleyan is the alma mater of Jack Sikma, a several-time All-Pro player in the 1970's and '80's.

More later.

BCOT