Boring Life

I sometimes think that maybe I have a boring life. Just to drive the point home, I'm going to describe my Saturday morning. Of course, I'll throw in the usual historical perspective to set the mood.

It was pretty dry around here from July through August, so the grass in the yard pretty much quit growing and in many places, especially the shady spots, it just died and turned to dirt. At lease it looks like it turned to dirt, since there's no grass there. However, starting in September, with the arrival of the pretty wimpy hurricane, Ernesto, we've gotten a fair amount of rain. Maybe 6 or 7 inches already this month. Consequently, the grass that had barely survived sprung back into action. I mowed the front lawn last Saturday and it needed it pretty bad again this week. Here's what it looked like before I started:



That's a lot of grass for just one week. So I got out my trusty mower. This lawn mower is pretty amazing. When I needed a new lawn mower about 16 years ago, I looked in Consumer Reports and they rated a cheap no-frills Sears mower as a "Best Buy". I think it cost about $110 dollars. So I bought it. I was intent on taking care of my new mower so I looked in the manual to see how to do it right. They said you should drain the oil every winter and replace it in the spring when you start using it again. I did that for the first year. Since then it's gotten zero maintenance. I mean none, nadda, zip. Oh I would occasionally put some oil in it when it got low, but I haven't even done that for a couple of years. I'm scared to look at the oil level. I don't think it would be detectable. For the last few years, I think the only form of lubrication that it gets is the heavy parts of the gasoline that squeak past the piston rings. Given its age and the wear on the rings, that may be substantial. But it just keeps running. I pull it out of the garage, pump the gas thingy a few times, pull the cord a couple of times and off we go. I guess it's about 123 years old in mower years. Here she is:


It takes about 35 minutes to mow the entire lawn. I did the front first and then moved to the back. While I was working on the back, my lovely wife came out and started a job she's wanted to do for years, edging the sidewalk and driveway. That means cutting the grass cleanly away from the concrete with a little trench looking thing between the two. She saw how my sister had done it when we were at their house a few weeks ago. My sister's yard looks real nice. I think they work on it a lot. I mentioned that we would have a nice yard too but that our children take up so much of our time. My much ignored high school age daughter thought that was funny. My son, who is off at college, would have laughed too if he had been there. The thing is, yards are a competitive sport in North Raleigh and Cary. In Chapel Hill the tendency is more to let things "go natural." My wife would have none of such nonsense. Respectable people have little trenches between their grass and concrete and we are respectable people and so, for the next few hours, we were involved in putting little trenches between our grass and concrete. We eventually got the job done and although it looks a little ragged, I think it will heal with a bit of wind and rain and look real nice. Here's the finished product:



So job done, I went into the house, took an ibuprofen, and chilled with some ice water while surfing the web.

Till next time.

Same as Usual

On the way home from picking up my daughter at the annual youth choir kickoff pizza party, I noticed an interesting sign posted by one of those mini-storage places in Carrboro. You know, those places where serial killers hide bodies.

Anyhow, it was getting dark but I stopped and got a snapshot. Good sense of humor for a somewhat dry business. I guess there's no reason to drop by again tommorrow after all,

New Blogger

Today I just switched over to the new version of Google's blogging thingy. I'll do a few Blogs and let you know how it works. So far it looks about the same.

Bye!

The Blue Chairs

A long time ago, maybe 14 years or so, my wife bought a couple of very Blue Plastic Beach Chairs. Every time we went to the beach, I packed up those lovely Blue Chairs. Here's a picture of my lovely wife sitting in one of the two Blue Beach Chairs. This was taken in the summer of 1994.



Anyhow, starting sometime in the nineties, we began staying in the same beach house each year. And each year I would pack up the Blue Chairs and take them to the beach. Problem was, my wife hated the Blue Beach Chairs. They were too low, they didn't have arms, they got hot out in the sun and they were a little heavy. They were made of a lot of very fine Blue Plastic. About eight years ago we decided to get rid of the Blue Chairs, so we just left them down at the beach house. For the next few years they were always there when we came back. Their devotion to us didn't endear them to my wife. She still hated them. About four years ago, when we returned again in the summer, the Blue Chairs were gone. For me, that vacation just wasn't the same. We didn't actually take them down to the beach with us, but knowing that they were there always provided a sense of continuity for me.

This year we went back to the beach again as usual. The pain of losing the Blue Chairs was ebbing but I still felt it some extent. One day, as we were sitting out on the beach, building sand castles, catching some rays and waves and downing some brewskies, my cousin shouted out, "It's the Blue Chairs". We all turned around and looked and, I'll be damned, there were the Blue Chairs out sitting under an umbrella, enjoying the sun, just like the good old days. Turns out they had only moved over one house. I spoke with the renters who had brought them down to the beach, explained my special attachment to the Blue Chairs and asked if I could take a picture. They clearly thought I was crazy but indulged me anyhow. And here they are, twelve years later. They're aging much better than any of us.



And that's the end of my story of the Blue Chairs.

Bye for now.

NC Boys Choir's Chamber Choir Reunion

A few years ago, when my son was still in high school, we sang in the Chamber Choir associated with the NC Boys Choir. The Chamber Choir was composed of some high school kids who had sung in the main choir as kids, some dads, and a few friends who liked to sing. At our Christmas 2004 concert in Henderson NC, I was able to persuade the high school kids in the choir to pose while showing off one of the neat features of our new choir robes. I posted that picture on this blog some time ago.



Last night, thanks to organizing by Adrian Randall, the high school guys, most of whom are now in college, got together at BoJangles. I was invited along as the honorary "Old Man". We all ate a "Chicken Supreme Meal" which has 3 week's worth of the RDA for grease and calories and drank Sweet Tea which is 57.3% sugar.

Afterwards, I took a picture of the group.



Bye!

Pictures from Sunset Beach

Hi Blog readers. Not much to say right now. We went to Sunset Beach last week and had a great time. For now I'll just post the pictures that I took. Sorry, but they're a little heavy on the sand castles and I didn't bother to rotate a couple of them.

Enjoy. See you later.

Pictures from the Beach 2006

Fire Hydrant Update

On the way to work this morning I noticed that the fire hydrant has been removed. I wonder if city workers did this or maybe it's sitting in some Duke dormroom. The orange barrels are still there and the flange is still sticking up out of the asphalt.

Bye for now.

A Misplaced Fire Hydrant

I recently took a new job in downtown Durham, NC. Durham, once the Bull City and now the City of Medicine, is one of those once important North Carolina cities that has fallen on hard times but is always on the verge of a comeback.

Recently, something minor happened that gave me some insight into the bureaucracy of the city of Durham and suggested that maybe that comeback might not be just around the corner.

On my way to work one morning, as I was turning onto Foster street, I was greeted by an absolutely absurd site. Someone, I guess a city employee or two, had installed a fire hydrant right in the middle of the street. Well, it wasn't in the middle of the street, but it was in the path that a car would take. It was about 3 feet away from the curb. It was sticking up out of the asphalt just waiting to get slammed by a car. The more bizarre thing is that there was already a perfectly fine fire hydrant up on the sidwalk where they belong. To someone's credit, there was a traffic barrel in front of the hydrant to sugggests that you might not want to run over it.

Well, it lasted about a week before someone actually did run over the thing. The hydrant is just lying there in the street, next to the exposed flange, it's twisted bolts glistening in the midday sun. I think of it as a monument to the incompetance of city hall.

You might think that such a scenario would be an embarrassment to some town officials and the whole mess would get cleaned up. Not in Downtown Durham. It's still just sitting there. Has been for about three weeks now.

Last Friday, a coworker and I walked down to inspect it during lunch and I took the opportunity to take a few photos which I am happy to share with you today. I hope you enjoy them. Please notice how nicely the awning, in the photograph above, matches the traffic cones. You might also notice a building with Oprah in the window. I'll save that for a later post (as soon as I figure out what that's all about).

Bye for now!

Good afternoon Blogging fans, all two or three of you. This morning I did some weeding. Our house sits off of a little island (the concrete kind) along a dead end street. Heere's an arial view of the island:



Every once in a while the island starts to look a bit ragged so one of many neighbors will be moved to do something about it. This was my morning. The weather was a bit cooler and I felt like doing something mildly useful.

So I got out the wheel barrow and an assortment of tools and went down to the island to do a bit of weeding. It was about 10:00 AM. I had already had a few cups of coffee and had done the daily Jumble and crossword puzzle before I went out. I took a picture of the weeds before I got started. It was mostly some kind of grassy crap.



This turned out to be a bit of work. I couldn't just pull the crap out. I had to go into the ground with the dandelion tool and break off the roots about an inch below the surface. After about an hour, I took another picture.



Looks much better doesn't it? I worked for about one hour more, then I came in and ate lunch. I've done enough yard work for one day.

Bye!

It's blogging time again. Tonight I'm going to talk about my new computer.

Recently, I needed to use a computer to get on the web and do something useful. Well, actually, it probably wasn't something useful that I needed to do. Maybe I just needed to surf the web to feel like I was connected to the world. They say it's like an addiction, where if you don't get on the internet at regular intervals, you go into withdraw and start twitching and feeling helpless and lost.

So I went upstairs to connect. My wife was working away on my Dell laptop on something important, maybe video poker or a Sudoku puzzle. My daughter was also doing something equally important on the old mac. She might even have been writing a paper for homework, otherwise, I'd have tossed her off. I was twitching pretty bad by this time. There was no way I was going to get on my son's computer. He was locked in a battle to the death with some pretty evil looking beasts in one of those online multiplayer games.

That's when I summoned up the courage and announced that I was getting a new computer so I could get on when I wanted to. And guess what? Much to my surprise, my accountant, I mean wife, said "Sure, what kind are you gonna get? A Mac or a PC?" What a silly question. Of course, I was getting a Mac. I've got one of those white Apple decals in my car window and I'm a major Apple stockholder. OK, I'm a minor stockholder. Anyhow, It's been 8 years since we got our last computer, which was our third Mac. I don't count the Dell since that was purchased by my business strictly for business purposes.

To make a long story less boring, I bought a Mac Mini, one of those new Duo Core, Intel Macs. I also bought a wirelss keyboard and a wireless mouse. Cool!! But I'm not crazy about the wireless mouse. It's heavier than a regular mouse and the response isn't as crisp. I also needed a monitor. I could have bought a nice Apple monitor. They look real good and go for something between 2 and 7 million dollars. I ended up buying a Dell monitor from Costco. It was rated high by Consumer Reports but not recommended because it listed for almost $400 when they tested it. I could get it from Dell for $309 but Costco had it for only $259. I went for it.

Of course, I have no software for my new computer besides all the stuff that comes with it (which, by the way is fairly substantial). But these days, who needs software? All you need is a browser and a Google account and you can still figure out how to waste endless hours on the computer and never spend any more money. Except, of course, for that monthly bill from Time-Warner for high speed internet access.

OK, time for some pictures. I'll get a little help from a couple of my business partners, who will stand next to each computer so you can judge the sizes better.

Here's the old Mac with the ViewSonic monitor perched on top.

And here's a close up so you can see my business partners better.

And here's the new computer. Notice that there ain't no wires connecting the computer to the keyboard or the mouse. That gives you the freedon to have incredibly poor posture as you surf the web.

And of course, a close up with my business partners standing on top of the computer. As you can see, it's much smaller but it's much more powerful.

OK, that's all for now. I'd write more and put in some more pictures but it takes so long to upload the pictures. You have to watch this silly spinning forever.

Goodnight.

Boiled Peanuts

Recently, my wife moved the portable computer down to the living room so she could play poker on line while she watched TV. She would generally play two tables at once and surf the TV channels. Talk about the need for mental stimulation. Recently, she's been slacking off the 'puter a bit so, since the computer is sitting in the living room already, I can blog while I'm vegging on the TV.

Today I want to talk about boiled peanuts, or more specifically, how to use science to cook them. If you look in a thousand books and on the internet, you can get lots of history and a bunch of recipes. After perusing them for a bit, I discovered the secret. A lot of recipes tell you to boil them for a couple of hours in salt water and serve. Well, I can tell you that don't work. The peanuts aren't even close to being done. The secret is to get the juice into the nut so that they taste right. "Right" being salty and juicy.

OK, here's the science. It's mostly physics or maybe chemistry if you believe that the behavior of liquids and gasses is the domain of chemistry rather than physics. But because there is little or no bond breaking, I, being an organic chemist, tend to think of this as physics. So, the problem is to get the juice into the peanut.

You start out with a peanut that is filled with air inside sitting in a pot that has water outside the peanut. As you heat the liquid, the air (gas) inside the peanut expands and builds up pressure which does a great job of keeping any water out. As you boil away, some of the gas escapes through the shell into the water, but for the most part, a positive pressure remains inside keeping the water out. This is not what you want.

So what you do is heat the peanuts in water for a while, say about an hour. During this time, some gas escapes from the inside of the peanut. Then you let the peanuts cool. Because much of the gas escaped through the shell, when the peanuts cool back down, the gas contracts to occupy less space than originally needed. When this happens, an actual vacuum is created inside the peanut which sucks in that succulent salt water infused with all the flavoring of the peanut shells. Then you heat the suckers back up again and this time the peanuts inside the shell are bathed in a salty solution. As they heat up, they cook inside the little pressure cooker of the shell. Of course, the shells are somewhat permeable so the peanuts leak out a bit of the air and juice to avoid exploding.

So here's my recipe.

Get a bunch of fresh peanuts and wash off any dirt that's on them. A quick rinse will do. Don't get anal about this step.

Get a big pot and pour in a bunch of water and a bunch of salt and a dash or two of winegar. Then toss in the goobers and heat for 1 and 1/2 hours. Turn off the heat and remove from the burner and let the brew cool off for one hour. Then return to the burner and boil for another 1.5 hours.

You can eat the peanuts now.

Peanuts are best eaten with your hands. Squeeze the shell and the secret opening reveals itself. Pry the shell apart with your fingers and place the peanuts up next to your lips. With a loud slurping sound and a great sucking motion, the peanuts will fly out of their shell into your mouth. Munch them down quickly so that you can get another one up next to your lips before the flavor fades. You should repeat the process as fast as you can till you reach a state of life altering euphoria. If you're fast, you'll also eat more than the other fool slurping away across the table.

Hope this helps. I know it still takes 4 hours, but if you leave out the cool down step, the peanuts will still be hard as a rock after 4 hours and you will be abondoning science when you need it most.

So till next time.

It's been a while since I've posted so I thought I'd give it a go. I'm sitting here watching the Canes (short for Hurricanes) play the Oilers for the Stanley Cup. Normally I don't give a flying phooey about ice hockey, but every once in a couple of years a local team makes it to the latter stages of the play-offs and all of a sudden the whole Triangle is into hockey like a bunch of canucks.

It's just before the start of the third period of the second game. The Canes are up 3-0. They won the first game 5-4. Both of these games have been in the RBC center over in Raleigh. I'm a bit curious about this 3 period thing that they have in hockey. All the other sports seem to go in halves or quarters, there's a definitive half-time so you can sell some kick-ass advertising time. But not hockey. I guess I forgot about baseball. It's got nine innings. That's pretty odd too, I guess.

Well the third third has started and I have to go back to watching. Hockey is a low scoring game so you have to watch it intently to have any chance of seeing something happen in real time. Most of the time you just watch a lot of guys do a whole lot of random stuff. I think there are some rules but there doesn't seem to be any good reason have any. You can't watch and see any rules having any effect.

Crap. I missed it. The Canes just scored again. Oh no! They disallowed it. The guy kicked it in. Oh yes! They just allowed it again. You can't kick the puck into the goal but you can use your foot to deflect the puck into the goal. The consensus was that it was a deflection and the goal counts.

The Oilers are pissed and beginning to act nasty. Being down 4-0, they don't have much of a chance of pulling this out. So all they can get out of here with is a bit of flesh. One of the Oilers whacked a Cane up side the head and got put in the penalty box so the Canes get to play with an extra player for a couple of minutes. It's called a power play. Whoops! Carolina just scored again on the power play.

5-0

Back to full strength. Looking bad for the Oilers. I'm gonna quit writing and go back to watching. Oops. Those nasty oilers just whacked another Cane with a stick. On the replay it didn't look intentional. Back to another power play.

Gotta run. Go Canes.

Hi there,

For those that occasionally read my blog, I started a new job on Monday, April 10. I think I will like it but it will take a few weeks to work out the kinks. The name of the company is not very different from the name of the compan that I left. I believe there will be more difference than there is in the names.

Here's a new post for those that care. I'm trying to put in a clock. How boring is that?

Hi There Choir Music Singing Fans,

Let's say you're in a choir and you like to sing and you prefer to sing well or at least you prefer to hit the right notes and you don't know music like that smarty pants that always gets the right answer when you don't even understand the question. Well, you can learn music theory and learn to play a piano and punch out your part and try to sing along.

Or you can cheat. For myself, I prefer to cheat.

Thanks to the internet, there are lots of ways to cheat these days. You really don't have to know anything any more. You just type it into Google and there it is, all the answers you ever needed for all of life's questions.

For learning choral music, I found a neat little crutch that's almost as useful as letting Dale Bailey learn it first and just copying what he does. It's called the

"Silvis Woodshed"

It's a site with lots of midi files of lots of the music that we sing from time to time. Midi files are just files of notes and not the sound files like ".mp3's". and the good thing is that they only have the vocal parts so you don't have to listen to a bunch of strings while you try to figure out what part belongs to you. It's got Durufle's Ubi Carritas, Brukner's Christus factus est, even Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and, of course, Handel's Messiah among many others.

If you click on a file, most computers will go ahead and play it for you. If you want to get a little fancier, you can download the file and play it in one of the many players that are available. A few are suggested on the Silvis Woodshed website. You have to download and install them.

I like Melody Assistant. It's written by some French people and has way too many features which confuse me, but it does allow one to read in a midi file and easily adjust the volume of the various parts. The program can do lots of things and if you send them $20.00, they'll send you a secret code that let's you do even more.

Have fun.

As an added note, one of my fellow choir members had asked me just how to adjust the volumes of the various parts in Melody Assistant. I can never remember how but I can usually figure it out. What you do is click and drag on the little volume control icon running down the left side near the bottom. When you click down, the panel shows up. If you then drag across the page, it won't disappear when you release the mouse button. Here's a picture of this in action.

There are a lot of other sites where you can find choral music stiff. You can try

The Classical Music Archives

Or I like:

the Choral Public Domain Library

I found a .pdf file of the score of Bruckner's Christus factus est along with an different midi file.

So enough for now. Hope this helps.

OK, time for another post.

I recently found this bit of video on Google video. If you want to watch it you may have to download the video viewer. But it's worth it. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time.

Whale of a Story

Enjoy,

Later....

Hi There Sports Fans,

Like always, it's been a while since I've blogged. Today I thought I might spend a few minutes describing something I did last night that was, at best, a pretty useless waste of time.

Over the last umpteen years, we've had this big plastic coke bottle that, I guess, is supposed to be some kind of bank. I hate to carry change and never do. So anytime I have change in my pocket I put it on the bedside table at night and then drop it in the big plastic coke bottle in the morning on the way downstairs.

I've been wondering lately how much was now in the bottle. A few years ago, my wife actually counted it and found that it contained about $400.00 and it was only about a third full. Lately it been getting closer to the top and I've been wondering what's in it now. So I decided to count it. I told my wife and she understood cause she had been wondering herself. I asked her for an estimate. She said $1,200. I guessed it was a little bit lower, maybe $1,100.

So here's the numbers.

First of all, it weighed about 88 pounds. If you knew something about the statistics of change, like how often you got quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies in an average financial transaction, you could probably calculate how much was there. But I can count better than I can do statistics.

So I set about separating out the coins. I worked on it about an hour and then had to go fix supper. I do supper on Saturday night. Burgers on the grill. After supper I went back to work with help from my daughter. She'd just had an argument with her mother and found separating coins to be therapeutic. As we separated the coins into piles of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and a few Sacagawea dollar coins, I stacked the quarters into a box in 20 dollar (40 coin) stacks. Basically, I count one stack and make the rest match the height After about 3 hours we were finished. I then stacked up the dimes in 5 dollar stacks and the nickels in 2 dollar stacks. I didn't feel like stacking the pennies so we weighed them and divided their weight (22 pounds) by the weight of a penny (2.5 g) to get a count.


Final count:


coin_______________total val_______number_______weight g
Sacagawea dollars_____8.00___________8____________64.8 Quarters____________790.00_________3160________17917.2
Dimes_______________230.00_________2300_________5216.4
Nickels______________70.00_________1400_________7000.0
Pennies______________41.00_________4100________10250.0

Total_____________$1139.00_____________________40448.4 g = 89 lbs.

The total value comes from adding up the values of the stacks, except for the pennies. The number comes from dividing the total value by the value of the coin. The weight comes from multiplying the number by the weight of each coin (which I got from wikipedia). The total calculated weight is close to the experimental weight of 88 pounds so I guess the count is fairly accurate (1-2%).

So then I tossed them back in the bottle till the day when we fill it up. And now it goes back in the closet. It looks like this:

Hi there,

It's blog time again. Actually, what I really want to do is put in a link for anyone who wants to look at the pictures that I took at the Thanksgiving. There's also a few other pictures from backstage at Whitney's play at school.

We had a great time. The weather was very good though it has been warmer on Thanksgivings before. We did the traditional turkey on Thursday and on Friday we had some old and new friends by for some oysters and other stuff. There's a few pics from the Bird Island walk and the last pics show houses falling into the sea over on Ocean Isle. It was good to see everybody again and we're looking forward to going back this summer though that will be a while.

So here's the link:

Pictures from Thanksgiving 2005

Enjoy!!

Last night I fixed supper and decided to photo-document the event. However, I haven't gotten around to doing it yet. Just to remind myself how all this works in the Blogosphere, I'll show a shot or two of the meal's creation.

Here's a bit of the meal's ingredients.











Well, I gotta go now. It's time for Desparate Housewives. I'd hate to have to buy it from Steve Jobs if I missed the episode.

Hi there fans of Philip's Blog. I haven't written in my blog in a couple of months so I'm going to try to start back up. I don't think the world can stand to go so long without bits of wisdom from yours truly.

So today I'll start slowly. My wife is taking me furniture shopping today. I tried to arrange some major surgery and a root canal but I didn't have enough advanced warning so I guess it's shopping for me instead.

Well shucks!

So long for now.

Good Morning! It's been about 2 weeks since school started back. As I mentioned earlier, my wife has started teaching seventh grade math, a new career at the half century point. Well, we're still into it 24/7 but I think she likes it OK. I'm dealing with it right now. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, we'll get some of wife and mom back into our lives as the new becomes more routine.

I can tell you one thing for sure, teachers aren't paid much for the work they do.

Good Morning!

School has started back and life takes on a new sort of pace. I'm trying to adapt. This year things are going to be a bit different. First and foremost, my lovely wife has gone back to work. When we moved here from New Jersey, she was pregnant and decided to take a year or so off with our new baby. Well a year stretched into 14.

With my son off to college and my daughter getting a bit more independant, my wife was getting antsy to do something. The fact that I was out of work and not making much money with my little business venture may have also have influenced her thinking. Anyhow, she decided that she didn't want to be a scientist anymore, which was what she used to be, and that she preferred to return to her roots in math. So she decided to get a teaching degree and teach math to hormone addled middle school students. She entered a program called NC-Teach, a state program designed to allow people, primarily in the math and science fields, to quickly get teacher certification. Good math teachers are hard to come by apparently. It's a total immersion teacher training thing where you go to school at all kinds of irregular hours and do lots of homework.

Anyhow, she did the whole banana and got a job. I may talk about that at another time. I sure the travails of teaching will make for some interesting stories. The reason I started writing this blog entry was to explain why I have time to write this today. The job she took requires her to get up at about 5:30 in the morning. She tries to be quiet when she gets up but I started slamming the Snooze every 10 minutes to try to get a bit more sleep and eventually, I decided it wasn't working. So now I get up. But I have to take my daughter to school at 8:00 so that gives me two and a half hours to kill. So first, I go for a fast walk in the dark. My walk takes about 2o minutes. Then I have some coffee and a poptart. Then I wake up my daughter and then I log onto the computer and check email and the web for news and other things and then I shower and shave and then I take my daughter to school and I go to work. Today I tried to insert a blog session and if I write a bit less than today it might just work. But Today, I'm out of time and need to jump in the shower.

So bye for now!

We just got back from taking my oldest son off to college. For reasons that I don't fully understand but will learn to accept, he decided to attend a small Quaker school about 10 hours from home. Let me just say that saying goodbye was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I'll get used to it eventually, I guess. But it won't be easy.

I think he'll do well and I believe that the school will be good for him and also, that he'll be good for the school. It's small enough that he'll make an impact and I think it will be a positive one.

And he'll also get good grades or he's coming home.

Hi there,

It's blog time again. Actually, what I really want to do is put in a link for anyone who wants to look at the pictures that I took at the beach. I used Picassa to export them into a bunch of web pages and I uploaded the whole thing into my web site. The pictures don't have anything to do with my web site but it's a good place to post them so that anyone can get to them quickly.

So here's the link:

Pictures from the Beach 2005

Hey, that was pretty easy. Enjoy!!

Hi there. It's Monday. We went to Sunset Beach last week and had a really good time. Sunset Beach is a really nice beach in NC. Some say it's the best. One of the reasons is that for some cause or another, sand is piling up on Sunset while it's washing away from all the other beaches. This leads to a very wide flat beach with very fine sand (at least by east coast standards). So it's good for building sandcastles, spreading out without being on top of other people and letting your kids run loose. That allows you to relax and drink beer all day while you talk with old friends about other people who aren't there.

This year we had a bigger crowd than usual. We had some friends down from Pennsylvania for a few days who stayed with us. My cousin from Chicago stayed next door. Her brother-in-law and family had another house. My sisters and another cousin had another house and an old friend from my home town got another house. I was particularly glad that my buddy from Tabor stayed for the week. When he visited in past years, I was always worried about him driving home at night after too many beers. Also, his wife, an avid NC State fan in a sea of Carolina fans, always adds spice to any discussions of ACC athletics.

I may say more later but for now, I'll post a couple of sandcastle pictures. The timing of the tides made this a good year to build sandcastles. Low tide occurred about 11:00 AM on Monday and moved up about 52 minutes each day. The result is that after you build a sandcastle, you get to watch the tide destroy it rather than going in for supper, knowing that some unappreciative pre-teen jerk kid was going to kick it in. I build my castles for God to destroy, not some some unappreciative pre-teen jerk kid. Plus, I like to watch the destruction myself.

Bye for now.

Before
After