Ho hum, another birthday come and gone.
Pretty low key day. Alice is still recovering strength.
We went up to Lumber Liquidators and ordered wood for the office floor. At the moment I'm planning to do the install myself. We're looking at tile and carpet for the rest of the upstairs.
Dinner for two at Killen's, the local steakhouse. Terrific food there. One of the few places in Pearland, possibly the only place in Pearland, that attracts customers from outside the suburb.
Aryn came through with the number one gadget on my wishlist this year, the Slim Devices Squeezebox.
This is a sweet little gadget that plugs in to the sound system, in my case the A/V receiver in the living room. It communicates via the house Wi-Fi network back to one of the computers up in the office. That computer has all of the 10,000 music tracks I've accumulated over the last few years.
So now, with the touch of a couple of buttons, we can pull up any music we've got. Right now it's working through all the jazz on the system.
As an added bonus, the device can connect out to external sources such as Internet radio stations. One of the servers that Slim Devices run is the SqueezeNetwork. I've marked the Ocean Surf track there as a favorite. Like having a beach house without the sand. :)
Alice is now short a gall bladder. They took it out laproscopically so she has only three small incisions. She came home about 4 or 5 hours after the operation started.
Plan for the party is to have her sit in a comfy chair and be waited on hand and foot. I'm sure she'll be loving that!
House is almost clean, our son-in-law is picking up the food. Daughter or son-in-law picking up booze. I've got one or two errands to deal with.
Well, Alice had her pre-op check today. Tomorrow, Friday, the gall bladder comes out.
The anniversary party on Saturday has grown to between 50 and 60 people.
And I finally came up with a couple of good, but expensive, Christmas gift ideas for Alice.
Oh, and I got the new car yesterday (Wednesday). Love it. The dogs fit much better than in the other vehicles.
This week is kind of nuts.
This Saturday we're having 30 to 40 friends over to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary.
I've been chasing details for buying the new car.
Alice is fighting thru some medical problems. I've been ferrying her to doctor visits. She's been ill in some form since the week before Thanksgiving when I was in Brazil. At first it was just a garden variety cold or sinus infection. But that developed into bronchitis. After whacking that out with a round of antibiotics, steroids, and decongestants, she started having pretty bad stomach trouble. She's had dang little solid food for the last two to three weeks and is surviving on gatoraid and jello.
Today she got 'scoped (both ends). I told her that she promised me all sorts of things while she was still under the effects of the anesthesia (insert goofy grin here). And a CT scan has showed up gall stones.
All in all, not a very happy holiday so far for the love of my life.
Well, the new car is all but a done deal. Went out yesterday and fought the good fight with the salesman. I had the Consumer Reports dealer cost info. Got a price a bit below "invoice", so the dealer made some money but not a lot. They didn't have the color (Barcelona Red) and model (RAV4 Sport V6) that I wanted on the lot but another dealer in the area did. The salesman called me back today to tell me they had the car on the way and I could come do the deal tomorrow.
Finally found some time to go for a quick look at a couple of cars.
Since we want space for the dogs but also decent gas mileage, we looked at the Honda CR-X and the Toyota RAV4. Both are small SUVs. Room for the dogs if the back seats are folded down.
Hated the Honda. Liked the RAV4 quite a lot. The interior of the Honda looked cheap. Just didn't care for it. And the 4-cylinder motor isn't enough for it.
We test drove the RAV4 Sport with the V6. Lots more reasonable. It's not going to win any races but at least I won't feel like merging onto the freeway is taking my life in my hands.
Going to call the credit union for car rates on Monday and go do a bit of negotiating.
After my laptop died, more on that further down, I decided to bring home a Windows computer from work. Which meant that I had more computers than monitors. My monitor at the home office is a 19-inch wide screen combo TV/Monitor.
So I invested in a good KVM switch. The monitor is DVI and the keyboard and trackball I use are USB so that put me into the expensive KVM switches. I got an IO Gear GCS1764 switch. It will handle up to four computers.
It can also independently switch the "console (video and mouse/keyboard USB ports), audio (speakers and mike ports), and USB hub (two more USB ports). Which turns out to be pretty sweet. I can flip the keyboard and monitor over to the work Windows computer to do email etc while leaving the audio on the Linux computer running Amarok and playing music.
The computer I brought home is reasonably powerful but not a killer. Dual core 2.8GHz with 4GB of memory and a 250GB drive. Just right for running a handful of virtual machines.
My laptop did finally get replaced. The company is into serious penny pinching just now so I ended up with a cast-off Dell D-610, slightly more powerful than the antique D-600 that died. But at least I'm prepared if I need to travel. With the fast computer at home now, I'm considering not bothering to haul the laptop back and forth. Might just leave it in the docking station at work except when on the road.
Not a whole lot going on here since I returned from the last trip. No travel planned for the remainder of 2007. Not sure what 2008 will bring but unlikely to be as much travel as this year.
Tucker has settled in to home life very quickly. Since he showed no interest in the cat, we went ahead and taught him to negotiate the stairs. Less difficult with him than it was with Gert. At first Gert wanted to leap down from the landing, he didn't show any signs of that. We crated him at night the first week or so and crated him when we left the house until just a couple of days ago. We're still being more careful to get him enough potty breaks to the back yard than we have to with Gert. We've had a couple of "accidents" but nothing tragic and no repeats in the last 10 days or so.
Not much conflict between the two of them. They sleep at night on beds in our bedroom. There was a bit of a skirmish over that. Gert has been sleeping on a smaller bed for the last year. When I went to get one like it for Tucker they didn't have anything the same size. Since he's a big dog, I ended up getting this huge round bed (5-feet across). Gert immediately glommed onto that as hers. She barked at Tucker once and growled at him if he got too close to it. Tucker, for his part, wouldn't use and didn't really fit in Gert's old bed. So I went ahead and bought a second bed identical to the new one. Good thing we have a huge master bedroom!
I finally got to see Gert really open up and run flat out! She's fast!! There's a new dog park near us so we try to get them over there regularly for some socializing and exercise beyond their daily walks. A couple of days ago I was there with them when a guy with a pair of boxers showed up. Gert and the male boxer had great fun running and chasing. Then Gert decided to really run. She kind of hunkered down and launched herself off into a top speed lap around the park. The boxer just stood and watched, no way he could even come close to keeping up.
All the dogs that show up at the dog park are Gert's friends. Tucker is still a little overwhelmed by it. Since greyhounds spend their whole racing life only around other greyhounds, we're not sure if he has figured out what kind of creatures the other dogs are. He trots about a little bit, sort of tagging after Gert.
Oh, and he's also showing signs of having been mistreated. He is very wary of men and startles away when anything is thrown. There have been a couple of times where other dog owners were throwing frisbees. Gert would happily run after the frisbee or after the other dogs chasing the frisbee. But Tucker would bolt off in a different direction at each throw. One of our previous dogs, Zoe, had a similar fear. It took a couple of years before she got over it. Sigh...
