Friday

End of a long week here. Although I do have a full schedule tomorrow as well.

2 is on her way to the TC to serve on 1.1's support team for the marathon on Sunday. She was my navigator when we trailed 1 last year. Pasta for them tonight.

Still lots to do for my tax clients. Still looking for Powerball.

Thursday

Back home. Long day yesterday, but as scheduled. 2 earns credits for a midnight run to the airport for my ride home.

Close to 90 here today. Less comfortable than Phoenix.

I'm still not going to be able to add much here until after the 15th.

Wednesday

Travel day for me. Final conference sessions this AM. Client meeting at lunch. And then the long trek against the clock to the QC. At least tonight I get to sleep in my own bed.

Thanks to 2 for her entry.

Hope everyone has a great day.

Tuesday

Not much new here in the desert.

I did encounter another example of "it's a small world". While speaking with a salesman at a random vendor booth, another guy comes up with and I notice his unusual surname on his badge. I comment on it, that I knew a family back in the Midwest with that name. Turns out he is the son of a high school classmate from Ottumwa.

Hope 4 can find the time to give us a little glimpse of her world.

Monday

Kudos to 1 for her entry.

I'm on the blog a little early today. They have several machines here at the conference, but there's like a thousand attendees, so availability later in the day will be iffy. Plus, when I travel to things like this, I tend to stay on Central time, which makes me two hours early in Phoenix.

2 and 4 need to add entries this week. Don't be shy.

Sunday

Phoenix. Scottsdale, actually. The Valley of the Sun. Hot.

The Fairmont Princess. Home of the PGA tournament here. $250 per night. Reeks of money. I'm staying at a Days Inn miles away.

Maybe 1 could give us some observations on her recently completed marathon. Training. Course. Aftermath. Compared to other marathons that she has done.

Have a great rest of the weekend.

Saturday

I think 3 has hit a home run for her first week as our guest blogist. I'm thinking that there ought to be an agreement among the sisters to share the load in the next few days.

I'm off to Phoenix until Wednesday.

See y'all on line.

BCOT

Friday

3 has a gift!

Maybe a few comments on "helicopter parents"?

Thursday

I think Day 2 was a hit. A little Seinfeld-esque. No comment on the homeless asking for some "spare change"?

Go Cubs. Do they actually have to win another game to get in, or can the Brew Crew hand it to them by just losing?

Wednesday

3 is on a roll! Good luck with Day 2.

Tuesday

I've asked 3 to be a guest editor/blog-ist for the next couple of weeks. Others are also welcome to contribute. I'll open an entry most days, but I'll look to others to share their wit and commentary.

BCOT

Monday

It was a busy weekend. Lots of FFF.

1 broke four hours in the marathon on Sunday. You go girl!

1.1 broke two hours in the half, and had enough left in the tank to do another three with 1 in the 20-23 stretch when the heat was really coming out.

2 finished her half in good form and good spirits. Pretty suite for not having had much of a training schedule.

We had a brief period with 3 Friday night, but she had to return on Saturday AM to C-town for a work project.

4, Mom and I were the support team for the runners. We got a good workout in by just hop-scotching ahead to viewing points.

So that was pretty much the focus of the last few days. Nothing else major to report.

Entries here over the next two-three weeks will be a bit sporadic. I'm headed to Phoenix this Saturday for a three-day conference beginning next Monday. And there are at least a couple dozen tax returns due on October 15th that will take a lot of work. So the Blog will suffer. Guest entries will, of course, be welcome.

So congrats to the runners.

Hope everyone has a good week.

BCOT

Thursday

No blog today.

Wednesday

Our contracted computer consultant has been updating our network/system, and the new versions of some of our programs have been tweaked, I'm sure with the purpose to make them better. For the most part, with most things, old guys like things the way they were. Learning to accommodate those little "tweaks" requires new key strokes and sequences. Grrr.

I've also noted that Blogger's spell-check function has been upgraded to include a real-time underscore-alert for a possible misspelled word. The boys is the cubicles keep themselves busy.

In case anyone has not read a sports page in the last week or two, the bandwagon of, "ND Stinks", is a little over-crowded. The most blusterous of the passengers are the media types who criticized ND for the Willingham firing three years ago. As I have said on this blog previously, I supported the change in coaches then, and I still do. Weis is finding out that his recruiting skills need work. But when that weakness is corrected, they should win. The breast-beating over the racial issue repulses me.

Without doubt, ND football sucks right now. I can live with that. It would be nicer if they were winning, but, on the brighter side, tickets are easier to come by in the down years. Let's go to a game!

We moved here from Chicago in 1980. Since then, on every vehicle that I have owned, the set radio stations have always included three Chicago standards, 670 (previously WMAQ), 720 (WGN), and 780 (WBBM). Initially, I just liked keeping up with the old town, but then I figured out that I liked the programming (at least some of the time), so those stations stuck. Until last week.

670 (now WSCR, The Score), has been exclusively a sports station for the last 3-4 years when the parent company elected to give WMAQ's stronger signal to The Score (which had been operating in C-town on a lower wattage station). The Score prided itself on edgy, controversial talk show hosts, and nothing (or no one) was sacred. (They even reached out to flambaque Iowa and Steve Alford when the university didn't take decisive action on the initial Pierre Pierce problem. When they ambushed Alford on a live interview (after having first told him that the Pierce subject would not be questioned on the air) Alford hung up on them. Obviously, Alford was an idiot to think they were calling to just chat about "the team". Whatever. They never missed an opportunity after that to dump on everything Iowa.)

Anyway, on September 11th, last week, one of the afternoon drive time personalities segued from a brief remembrance thing on the 9/11 tragedy to a rant on the White House. Basically doing a Kieth Olbermann imitation. I have no problem with criticism of the politicians, but I can get that on the networks or cable anytime. So I have acted and now 670 The Score is gone from my radios. Take that you pea brains.

This action is somewhat similar to my shunning of the baseball pages in USA Today after the last strike by the players. It took be a year or two before I finally got back to checking out the daily stories and the box scores. But with WSCR, I can assure you that I will never return to it's audience.

Looking forward to some FFF this weekend.

BCOT

Tuesday

On cue, Al Gore made a cameo on Leno last night.

My pal Roy and I drove down to Kewanee, Illinois this AM to check out a below-radar country club that is looking for a White Knight buyer. Roy is a golf enthusiast and sees an opportunity to have a nice little course of his own that needs some work, but that has lots of potential. He's not looking to make it Trump Midwest, and the greens are really nice. Plus, even if the course were to just not work out, he can always sell the land. Compared to the follies (think, horses and jets) pursued by other wealthy clients, the downside here is not that bad. Tough life to have to figure how to use that extra cash just laying around.

The Fed made greater than anticipated cuts today in the applicable interest rates, and the markets took off this afternoon. But even street optimists recognize that the future still has more troubled waters to travel. Greenspan's successor is a hero for the day.

The horticulturalist in my house spent some time Saturday afternoon dividing a couple of the descendants of the Peace Lily from Mother's funeral, and there are now many descendants! For the taking, if anyone is so interested. Splitting the root balls was surprisingly easy. Maybe it was the composition of the dirt from the last replanting. In any event, the dirt broke cleanly away and the roots were untangled by a combing process. (Too much information on a who-cares topic?)

My biking friend who had the ambulance ride last week is in the hospital for a couple of days after they found a blood clot somewhere. Ouch. I'm going to stop in and see him tonight. I might give him a small Peace Lily.

Have a great evening.

BCOT

Monday PM

3's comment on 4's entry gave a peek at why men stay home when ever the term "shopping" is mentioned by a female.

There are two items of major news in the business press today. The first is the frenzied debate (that has been boiling for weeks) as to whether the Federal Reserve Board will raise the Fed Funds rate tomorrow, and if so, by how much. I swear, the commentators on the business channels have been micro-analyzing this thing to the nanoith-degree. I've had to "mute" the TV sound almost the entire day as very smart men (and women) espouse their theories, which, as the media commonly does, are, at any given time, exactly opposite those expressed in the immediately preceding segment of the broadcast.

The second story in the news is the book released today by former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan. Greenspan remains a highly respected financial/economics guru with an impressive curriculum vitae. But this tidal wave of media coverage in the last twenty-four hours (60 Minutes, Today, and all over CNBC) has a movie star's promotional tour taint to it. I suppose that he'll be on Leno or Letterman before the week's out. Release of the book the day before the highly anticipated Fed meeting also smacks of commercialism.

So what is the shelf-life for the importance (or relevance) of a retired government official? Interestingly, retired politicians can go away and never be missed. Until they find a new place to provide utility, a former governor, congressman or President might be a curiosity for a guest list, but their influence is thin. Think Al Gore. But a non-elected official in the government bureaucracy, like Greenspan, can potentially have longer-lasting influence in monetary and fiscal matters since the politicians neither understand nor control many things economic.

One of my favorite economics jokes relates to my first undergraduate econ course. Even back then the books were expensive, and you were always looking for a used alternative. The text for the course in question was written by another highly regarded economist, Milton Friedman. The trail of tears was pretty specific, for my year the text was a new edition and the professor was not going to use the old ones. The explanation as to why the author would need to republish a book on standard guns 'n butter Econ 101 was that while the questions at the end of the chapters had remained the same, the answers had changed. Yuk. Yuk.

Speaking of shelf-life, or lack there of, way to go OJ!

Have a great evening.

BCOT

Monday AM

Great to see 4 back at it.

My Sunday was not overly productive, and I just didn't get back here to make an entry. Actually, I tried to log on from Century Heights when I went over to feed Simba, but I couldn't clear the spam blockers on that computer.

This is a busy day here. I'll try to adds some comments later.

BCOT

Saturday

This looks like it could be the perfect early Fall day. Bright sunshine. Cool , but comfortable temperatures.

I moved my potted annuals and indoor plants (that had spent the Summer outdoors) to the garage for the night based on a frost warning in the weather forecast. It was a good move as the car windows were lightly iced-over this morning. The good news is that the front was a one-night-stand as we're supposed to be back in the 80's most of the next week. But I have some work to do get those indoor plants prepared for the return to the house.

The critics who labeled ND as racist for the firing of Ty Willingham three years ago are thumping their chests with the dismal early results of this year's Charlie Weis-led Irish football team. I said at the time that it was a results, not race, driven action by ND. I do think that the ND administration mistakenly thought at the time that they had their football savior in Urban Meyer within their grasp, and that they needed to have the head coaching position open for him to accept. Their information on that account was obviously in error, and Weis was definitely their second choice. Whatever. Willingham was never going to be the answer in South Bend.

I don't understand why Weis is so under-talented at this point in his tenure. This is his third recruiting class ( although I will give him a pass on the group that would now be juniors since he was late starting for that class). He may need to steal a coach from Iowa. Ferenz consistently constructs an offensive line that can compete with anyone. With ND not having scored an offensive TD in it's first two games, I'm venturing a guess that the O-line is looking for volunteers.

The availability of personal information on-line is getting even more wide-spread. I saw an article the other day where Facebook pages are now (or soon will be) searchable by Google and Yahoo. The theory here is economics. More hits yield more dollars for advertisers. (Apparently, there is a security election that each Facebook user can choose which will disable the general search access for his/her page.) I suppose that these pages have already been available to the accomplished hacker, but this new policy makes those not-for-public-consumption pics and comments there for the world to see. Check your archives.

Similarly, electronic surveillance of everyone's activities just keeps becoming more widespread. All of those fancy gadgets from The Italian Job and Enemy of the State are being used by private investigators, suspicious lovers, and, of course, the divorce attorneys, for leverage in whatever the dispute. A story in today's NYT mentioned a device selling for $49 that can be loaded on another's computer that will automatically send a picture every 15 seconds of what is showing on the screen of the bugged computer. Ouch! Now that's cheatn'.

Before anyone spends the time, effort or dollars on any such investigation of me and my pal Roy, let me save you the trouble. We're guilty. I have no money. And Roy's prenuptial agreement is ironclad.

Get out and enjoy the day. Good luck in Ames. To both sides.

BCOT

Friday

No blog today.

They're talking frost tonight. I need to get some plants to shelter.

Mom and 2 are on the road to Florida for the weekend. 4 to Ames for football.

More tomorrow.

BCOT

Thursday

So we have all stood in front of the gas pump at the Qwik Trip or other filling station trying to respond to the electronic inquiries from the card reader. Insert card. Remove card quickly. Debit or credit? Awaiting approval. Wash? Receipt? Lift handle to start. Push bar to start. Maybe, push button to start.

When I stop for gas at an unfamiliar station, I normally contemplate the pump's system like a new electronic gadget. I know that it requires a credit card to start things in motion, but I am immediately doubtful if I'll be able to get it right the first time through the sequence. Kind of like Gary Sinise in Apollo Thirteen when he's in the simulator late in the show trying to determine the right order for a procedure to save electricity in the re-entry vehicle.

I ran into a new one today. There were the regular queries on the screen. But above the pump on a separate small sign was a set of color-coded instructions. If to pay inside, press the yellow button. If paying by debit card, press the green button. If paying by credit card, press the blue button. Ok, but on the pump's credit card area, the yellow, green, and blue buttons said exactly the same thing. For whom were these separate sign instructions provided?

My first thought was that the color-coding was an effort to address the needs of the illiterate. But if you wanted to help out those folks, wouldn't you add little drawings to explain the colors rather than explain the colors with words?

The new HyVee in Bettendorf has made a trip to the store an adventure exercise. (I think that they hired the same traffic engineer who designed the ingress/egress patterns to the Duck Creek mall area.) It has always been a dangerous parking lot, but for now, there is no discernible main lane, and everybody is still guessing. Maybe when they get fully done with the mess it will be better outlined.

And I'm not so sure that they haven't got the store's dual "In" and "Exit" automatic doors reversed. Although I do think that either will open from either side. Talk about not knowing whether you're coming or going!

I know that somewhere, somebody, is getting paid for designing these traffic flow things. I wonder if their parents paid for their college educations? If you do a task that is so accepted by the general public as what one should expect, does it make any difference if you do it well or poorly? Is there ever any accountability?

Not that I'm complaining. Just observing.

I'm headed home to observe some Tuscan red.

BCOT