Daybook

This morning, I walked to McKinley & John - a little over three miles - before catching the 4E bus to work. This afternoon, I had the whimsical notion to walk back to McKinley & John, and catch the 4W bus home (with a transfer at Country Fair to the 9A, my usual bus home). Alas, there were problems.

For one, I seriously underestimated how long it would take to walk from Wolfram Research to McKinley & John, and missed the 4:36pm bus. (I'm not even sure there is a 4:36pm bus. I neglected to check the schedule before embarking on this adventure.)

The bus schedule said there'd be another bus at 5:15pm, so I elected to walk down John Street a bit, and catch the bus at whatever corner I happened to be at when 5:15pm rolled around.

Crossing Prospect Avenue at John Street is always tricky: there's no signal, and Prospect is a pretty busy street. Crossing it at 5:00pm - in deep twilight and rush-hour traffic - was even worse. As I waited to cross, there were three different vehicles packed into the intersection, all trying to make a left turn somewhere, with traffic zooming around them.

And I thought: This is the intersection where Jerry Keiper died. So I waited.

Eventually the lunatics cleared out, and I crossed Prospect without incident. I ended up catching the 4W at Russel & John, transferring to the 9A at Crescent & John, and getting home just before 6:00pm.

Perhaps I should aim for less adventurous commutes from now on....

From the City of Champaign News:

Frauenhoffer and Associates, P.C. provided the report on the integrity of the building at 215 North Neil St. at the request of fire officials concerned with the safety of personnel conducting fire investigation of the Metropolitan Building fire on November 7.

The Frauenhoffer report states, "In my professional opinion, the north and east third-floor walls of the Law Office are susceptible to collapse at any time. Collapse is most likely during high winds, heavy snows, or snow accumulation followed by drizzle soaking the snow."

I imagine the lawyers are a bit upset at this news....

I looked out the office window just now, and saw...snow, the first of the season.

It's coming down pretty hard, but the ground is warm enough yet that it's not sticking.

I think Jennifer is out driving in it, too. Poor Jennifer.

I have a new skin-care regimen, that's proving quite effective at preventing cracked & bleeding hands.

Every night at bedtime, I slather on about a half-cup of hand lotion (on each hand!), then put on a pair of white cloth gloves (that Jennifer picked up for me at Walgreens the other day).

Sleeping with gloves on is a little weird, and I certainly look ridiculous wearing them: I'm just a tin of shoe polish away from an Al Jolson impersonation. But it gets me through the day with unshredded hands, so it's a fair trade.

We're having a quiet afternoon here at Stately Rice Manor.

(For certain definitions of "quiet", that is: Jake's computer game and Sam's Teletubbies video are making some noise. But one of the many unexpected consequences of parenthood is a new-found ability to tune out offspring-induced racket & mayhem. So in my own mind, at least, it's quiet.)

Jake, Sam & I drove to Le Roy this morning, to meet the grandparents for lunch. We also unloaded some no-longer-needed baby gear, for delivery to Matt & Trina.

Sam didn't eat very much of his lunch. He drank some of the juice, ate most of the caramel sauce (but none of the apple slices that came with it), and none of the chicken nuggets. Silly boy.

Jake ate all his lunch, and would have eaten Sam's, too, if I hadn't stopped him.

(Me? I had a salad that probably wasn't nearly as healthy as it could have been. I'm sure to regret it when I get on the scale tomorrow morning.)

Jennifer's off on a well-deserved sewing day with her friends.

Dinner is cooking: some kind of turkey recipe in the crock pot, and a loaf of oatmeal bread in the bread machine. It won't be finished until 5:30pm, but it smells pretty good already.

(We've been having uneven results with the bread machine lately. About one-third of our efforts end badly: small, dense, raw-centered disaster loaf. Another third is frothy, over-risen yeast-gone-wild bread. Only one in three loaves comes out normal.)

I probably should have tried to get Sam down for a nap. But he slept late this morning, and he doesn't seem all that tired this afternoon. The no-nap Sam can be a fearsome beast, but it makes bedtime go much more smoothly.

Choose your battles, as the saying goes.

Noticed the Parkland College course catalog this morning, lying more or less where I'd left it the night before, and had a look at the rest of their offerings for Spring 2009.

It's always a bit awkward - if not annoying - to read course catalogs. I'm not a teenager, fresh out of high school, trying to accumulate a few semesters' worth of credits on the cheap before transferring to the University in pursuit of a degree that future employers will take seriously. I just want to take a few courses, learn a few new things, stretch my aging brain a little.

I briefly entertained the notion of taking a composition class, or a digital-photography class, or - veering way out of character, here - studying classical guitar and/or music composition.

Alas, the scheduling conflicts (not to mention the tuition, course fees, etc., etc.) proved insurmountable.

Every semester, Parkland College sends us a course catalog, even though it's been ten years since I took the Ken Urban's C++ class. Maybe they just send them to everyone in the county?

Unlike most of them, this one didn't go straight into the recycling. Instead, I leafed through it a bit - with frequent interruptions from Sam, who had his own book he wanted Papa to read instead - looking for a course that met the rather stringent criteria of being interesting, being affordable, and not taking too much time away from work and/or family.

Alas, I didn't find anything - but then, I had only reached the Art section when it was time to put the kids to bed, and I had to suspend my search. Perhaps somewhere in the remaining 96% of the alphabet there lurks the perfect course for me.

Must remember to take another look, sometime tomorrow.

iTunes is running some kind of movie-of-the-week promotion: a different set every week, only $4.99 each. This week: Terminator 2.

I resisted for a day or two, then caved & clicked Buy.

In the in-box this evening: a letter from Green Sherpa:

We are closely approaching the release of our beta software! We have been working diligently on our software and are thrilled to get it into the hands of the many people like you who have signed up, requested and often lightly stalked us for the product.

In order to serve you in the best way we can we would like to get to know you a little bit better. Please take two minutes to complete the following short survey.

So I filled out their survey, ending with the comment:

Microsoft Money is unusable. Quicken for the Mac has been abandoned by Intuit. Mint lacks forecasting, and is generally unsatisfying. Help me, Obi-wan Sherpa, you're my only hope.

Perhaps my shameless keister-smooching will get me a beta invite....

Today I signed up for an account on http://www.soocial.com/, because they said:

Soocial provides a one address book solution to contact management. No matter where you add or change a contact, it will be changed in your other connected devices or web applications.

I like my new phone (the Sidekick 2008 I bought last August), with one glaring exception: there's no way to synchronize the phone's address book and to-do list with any other machine or service.

So I hoped that Soocial had found a way around this. Alas, no: the Sidekick is not on their list of supported phones. So that's a big Never mind on Soocial.

(And their name is silly, too.)