Intuition

Our sculpture "Intuition" by Destiny Allison was delivered yesterday evening. We spent this evening installing it.

We first had to drill two holes through the garage wall. The bracket uses ½" bolts and my largest drill bit was ⅜". So I had to make the holes larger by grinding away at the sides of the holes with my ⅜" bit until they could take a half inch bolt.

One of the holes came through the edge of a board that held the paper and wires the stucco was applied to. Since the bolt was right on the edge of this board the washer and nut wouldn't have had enough board to hang onto so I had to chisel a notch in the board so that the washer would be able to reach the stucco. (No project like this ever goes without a hitch.)

Here's the mounting bracket and outlet that powered the drill.

Once the mounting bracket was in place it was easy to hang the sculpture. Here it is sharing the garage wall with a piece by Jason Mernick that Jerry gave me for Christmas several years ago.
(As always, click on a picture to get its full size version.) The sun was setting when I took this picture. I'll post more in a few days when I get some with the sun on it. I'll give you a close-up. I just had to show it off right away.

Isn't it great?

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Carved stone, 13 inches long, 25 pounds.

Heaven on Earth

We watch the HGTV program "Divine Design." In it, Candice Olson remodels a room in a client's house after getting a feel for what the client needs. The client doesn't get to say what the finished product is supposed to look like and can't see the work in progress. At the end of the program we get to see "the reveal" where the client squeals with delight over all the perfect elements in the room. Candice signs off telling us "How Divine!" the result is.

I find that a bit beyond arrogant for her to declare her own work to be divine. She could at least get the client to make that declaration. (The results are usually nice but a bit too cluttered.)

Today, I made bread. I modified a recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum's "The Bread Bible." This is a "bible" the author herself tells us. The Word of God. Was it written by God herself or did Ms. Beranbaum simply channel it? That is a pompous title for the book. But I bought it anyway.

The book takes itself way too seriously (even if it had had the title "Bread Recipes"). She expresses the ingredients based on The Dough Percentage. That might be useful if I were loading my mixer with a hundred pound bag of flour but I'm not. Nor are any of her readers. As a result, her lists of ingredients have 2.4 grams of yeast. (Well, she does give us the measurement in teaspoons but we're supposed to measure by weight to get the best results.) My scale's accuracy is to two grams. One that is accurate to tenths of a gram would cost a fortune.

In the list of ingredients measured by volume she tells me to use "2 1/4 cups plus 2 1/2 tablespoons" of flour. Then, even though she uses this hyperprecision, she told me to use a very imprecise "scant 1 3/4 liquid cups" of water. My snit level rises there.

The book is filled with other overly precise statements. The recipe I followed tells me that the "dough will weigh about 44.25 ounces/1258 grams." "About"? I could swallow "about 44 oz./1250 grams" but to go to the quarter ounce or to the gram is ludicrous. Especially after we're told that the amount of flour that is needed is influenced by the humidity we're experiencing while mixing the dough.

Then the book is filled with instructions that I find badly written. It gives us lists of ingredients for a step, tells us to assemble the ingredients and do a step, do another step then add an ingredient that was in the list for the first step. "Your bread will be ruined if you add the salt too early! IT WILL KILL THE YEAST!!!" she tells us but she kind of lets us goof because the salt is included with the list of things for step one. She doesn't tell us to add it in that step but she could as least not include it in the ingredients for that step.

(Adding salt then isn't a problem. Just ask AB. Some of his advice in his bread making episode were to let us know that some bread cookbooks are too fussy. I think this is one he was telling us about.)

But this is the Word of God. I need to go to confession to ask forgiveness for using the Lord's name in vain.

Anyway, after I get over my snits about all these things, the bread she has me make is pretty good. I just hate her instructions.

I made her "Basic Soft White Sandwich Loaf" and added Asiago cheese to it. It turned out nummy. Especially toasted and buttered!

Here's the finished product.

Heavenly (if I may say so myself)!

Art's been coming

A couple of days ago UPS delivered a long, well-padded box that held the glass piece by Melissa Haid that we got in our big shopping day in Santa Fe. We hung it over the living room window.
Hanging next to it is another piece of hers that we got years ago in Madrid. The big, open space you see on the garage wall above the flamingos is where the Destiny Allison piece will go. It's due Tuesday.

Here's a close-up of one of the panes of glass. It's layers of glass, glass beads, wire, and mica fused together and strung on (we're told) livestock fencing.

And here's a close-up of the fringe hanging in front of the window (the blind has been lowered behind it).
It's pretty.

Stirring controversy

The videos I post to my blog through YouTube are available for the world to see. People all over the world have seen my little films and some of them take the time to make comments.

My Black and Tan movie has gotten three comments from the world. Two of them came about 20 minutes apart this afternoon. The comments I've gotten for it are (one is slightly edited for sensitive eyes):

• F**king awesome
• HERETIC! You can only make a real B&T with Guinness. You're hereby banished from me pub, blackheart!
• Murphys Is way better then guinness!! Nice pours. whats the bottom beer?

(The last two came in rapid succession.) This movie is getting about five views each day. It's going viral!

I've gotten comments on my How to See "Dial" from Inside the Bar of Soap contribution to WikiHow. Some people just aren't impressed. The comments on that how to are:

• Cool.
• ummm. interesting. kinda pointless tho...
• Who the h-e- double hockey sticks would do this? for entertainment? That is so sad, i'm going to cry!

I made somebody cry! That makes me sad.

But the how to has been improved by others. Somebody added links to related wikiHows and another added to the list of Things You'll Need. I had listed only two or more bars of Dial soap. Somebody added "water to wash in." Somebody else shortened that to simply "water."

It appears that the instructions for seeing the backside of "Dial" are important enough to improve. I'm feeling better now.

Though not controversial, one of my Blendtec Blender movies got a comment just hours after I posted it. I'm told "that is an amazing blender." It seems Blendtec Blender videos are popular. Mine have had many views and will be catching up with the Black and Tan movie soon.

By the way, I added annotations to my Blendtec movies. I added bubbles that tell my viewers what ingredients are going into the blender and tips on what I did that I shouldn't have. You can watch them again if you want to know what goes into the smoothie, tomato cheese soup, and blueberry ice cream.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

---

Colleen wants the back story so here it is.
I suppose we bought it at Indian Market in 1993 or later. I don't know any more details. It's signed by W(anda) Aragon. It's a nice piece.

And now the moment you've been waiting for!

Here it is! Decades in the making! Silliness in reverse!

The rush redo of my film-to-DVD transfer was done in only two and a half weeks. That's a week and a half quicker than the original botched job.

Now you can actually see much of the action. You can see Colleen, Don, and Karen leap onto the picnic table! You can see Don rolling around our front yard! You can see me sucking crackers!

And, best of all, you can see Poss and her banana!

I had stretched the music to go as long as the movie but YouTube's processing seems to process the audio and video separately so the music went back to its original length. It ends before the movie does. Sorry.

And my titles ended up being much shorter than I thought I had made them. Be prepared to engage your Evln Wd Spd Rdng skills.

And now with no further ado, here are Don, Karen, Colleen, Poss, and yours truly undoing things.



Adieu.

Trees a crowd

This time we're only trimming trees. Well, we're not doing it, we've hired Artistic Tree Care to make them pretty. They came today. I came home this evening and my jaw dropped.

Here are some before and after pictures of some of their work.

The big, backyard ash from the front yard before it got trimmed:
Here's the backyard ash after the trimming. The lighting is way different but you'll get the idea:
There were a lot of branches in this tree that had finished their jobs and had died. I guess that's what ash trees do. (A lot of dead stuff blows out of them when we have heavy winds.)

This is the ash tree in the front yard before the trimming:
And after:

And another ash tree on the side of the garage before its trimming:
I don't think you can see it but there was a huge branch that broke in the winds that drove October's fires. Good thing it stayed in the tree otherwise it probably would have taken down the power and telephone lines.

And after:

Then we had the oleanders under that last ash severely shortened. Here they are before:
And here they are with what was cut down on the ground in front of them:

What I first saw when I got home were the piles of ash branches that were in the front front yard and across the street. They ran out of room in our yard to store the debris. There are more heaps of ash on the other side of the oleanders below and along the fence by the neighbor's garage. I guess they're coming back tomorrow to shred all the piles.

They also ground the pine and juniper stumps you've seen earlier. And they ground out the palm stump that was left in the backyard after the hideous palms were removed years ago. The person who did that work decided that we'd like a big, ugly planter made out of a palm stump. We never used it as an ugly planter and ivy grew over it. It's gone now.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Bonus day. Two turtles for the price of one! These two live in the garden room.

I left my art in Santa Fe

We got a call from Karla at the Winterowd Fine Art gallery yesterday. She said that Destiny Allison, the artist who made the sculpture we're going to put on our garage, wanted to spruce it up before it leaves town. But she was out of town and couldn't do the touchup yet. So it wouldn't make this week's truck to Southern California.

They make deliveries to California every other week so we'll be getting it around July 29. I'm sort of glad since I didn't want to get back to work one day and say that I'll be working from home the next while waiting for a delivery.

Will it blend?

While I was in Los Alamos a couple of years ago we were showing one another our favorite online videos. I contributed Marilyn Horne singing "C is for Cookie." Peggy and Bobbie enjoyed the alien singing "I Will Survive."

Then Peggy pointed me to Will it blend? We get to see Tom Dickson blend fun things like:

• Light Sticks
• Bic Lighters
• Easy Cheese
• Light bulbs
  
• iPhone 3G
  

The real demonstrations of the Blendtec blender's abilities made it sound like a nice appliance to have. I sort of wanted one ever since but not so much that I'd get one without seeing it in action.

We went shopping at Costco today. They had a Blendtec Blender roadshow going on. It was much like the hawkers at the county fair. But I was pretty much sold before listening to his spiel. But seeing it actually make several parts of a meal without much to clean up between courses made it seem more attractive.

We came home with our new gadget!

We used it for four treats already. And for your time-wasting pleasure, here are videos of our four uses. Prepare to be bored to tears!

Fresh Fruit Smoothie
Our first try was smoothies. This one was made of grapes, strawberries (with the nutritious hulls included!), watermelon, cantaloupe, pineapple (with the core), banana, and ice.

We need to learn to measure better. Overfilling the blender doesn't help.

Watermelon Lemonade
Jerry made us lemonade to drink with supper using a recipe from Martha Stewart's "Everyday Food." It was made of lemons, mint leaves, brown sugar, watermelon juice, and vodka. It was good. Here's Jerry making the juice.

Oops! Overfilled again!

Tomato Cheese Soup
For supper we made some soup. It was made of a tomato, some onion, grated cheddar cheese, tomato paste, vegetable bouillon and hot water. It ended up being 145°. It heats things up with friction.

I forgot that the hole in the lid needs to be opened and covered.

Blueberry Ice Cream
For dessert we had ice cream. It was made of soy milk, frozen blueberries, sugar, vanilla, and ice. The same machine that makes soup hot makes ice cream. Go figure!

Overfilled once again but a bit of shaking loosened it up! (Update: Oops! RTFM! Don't shake the blender! Stop it and loosen the material and restart it. We'll learn.)

It will take some time to get the hang of this machine. I hope we use it a lot. It fits under the cabinets so it can stay out and beg to be used.

New poll!

---

Poll Results
Light Sticks: 2
Bic Lighters: 1
Easy Cheese: 2
Light Bulbs: 0
iPhone 3G: 0

It's a tie!

It was a dark and stormy night

We had a mostly uneventful trip home. We packed up the car and stopped at the Coffee Booth on our way out of town for our morning fix. We saw a white car in Otowi Station's parking lot but it wasn't Sophie so we didn't stop. We drank our coffee and, as a result, had to stop at the McDonald's in Bernalillo. We filled up with gas in Albuquerque, ate lunch at Taco Bell in Grants, stopped at various rest areas, filled up with gas in Flagstaff and continued west.

The monsoon season apparently officially started June 15. It had been quiet so far according to this story (that you might have to register to read...besides you who live in monsoon region probably already knew that). I'd say it came roaring to life yesterday. We drove through some rain after we left Flagstaff and it was clearing up as we approached Kingman. There was some interesting looking weather to the north of town when we arrived. I thought it might be foggieness coming from rain evaporating from the desert. It turned out to be dust.

We had to get our afternoon coffee so we drove through town and found a Starbucks. While we were waiting for our coffees, the wind started blowing. Hard. The mat inside the door was flapping in the wind even though the door was closed. The door sang a mournful tune.

Then the rain came. They got an inch and a quarter in this storm and most of that probably fell (rather blew by...it was horizontal) while we drank our coffee. When it let up a bit we drove a few blocks and had sandwiches at a Subway.

The rain had ended by the time we finished eating. So we got back in the car and kept going.

The rain came back. It was extremely heavy for hours. We had to stop at a rest area because we needed to rest and get fresh air. We got quite wet running for the shelter. We waited for the rain to let up again then continued our journey.

We stopped at another rest area because the rain was so heavy we could hardly see. But that time we didn't take advantage of the services. We would have been completely drenched in about three seconds.

The rain continued, very heavy much of the time and sometimes it was a normal pitter-patter, almost all the way to Barstow.

The most amazing part of this storm wasn't the rain. It was the lightning. We had never seen so much lightning. It was constant, close, and was everywhere from horizon to horizon. We could see the scenery even though the sun had set long before. Who needs headlights when you have so much lightning?

We made it to Barstow and trusty Motel 6 had left a light on. They were down to smoking rooms. And it turned out that their air conditioning wasn't working. I slept fine but poor Jerry didn't.

We hit the road at 6:00 and got home by 10:00 after a stop at Tom's Farms and the post office. I got a jury summons!

What a long, strange trip it's been

Monday, July 10, 1978
30 years ago today I started my first post-college job at NCR (formerly National Cash Register). It's kind of been the only place I've worked but it's had a few little wrinkles.

Over the years my job was bounced from location to location. To see where I've been for the last 30 years, here is a file that lets you navigate through the waypoints of my career using Google Earth. For those of you without Google Earth, here's an image from it that shows the spots. The yellow is where I've lived and the red is where I've worked.
I started my job in the Engineering and Manufacturing-San Diego (E&M-SD) division of NCR at in Rancho Bernardo, a community of San Diego (double-click on Waypoint 1 in my Google Earth file). I started in the (Programming) Languages (I forget whether it was I or II) group. We had two people in each office. I was put with Ray, who you might remember is is the one who lent me the projector and screen for the backwards movie and the chainsaw for the Escondido Chainsaw Massacre. Ray and I were working on maintaining a COBOL compiler.

Rancho Bernardo is a planned community. When I started it seemed to be planned for retirees. It was scary to drive to the shopping and restaurant area with all those old people driving their large cars. The drugstores stocked a lot more hemorrhoid treatments than acne products. Over the years it has attracted younger people but it still has its strict rules. You can't have your garage door open unless you are in the process of driving a car through it. I don't plan to live there.

Where I ended up living was in a one-bedroom apartment Escondido (at point A in the Google Earth file). It was much larger than I needed. It had a large living room and the bedroom was large. I didn't have much furniture so I had a lot of open floor space. The closet in the bedroom was probably large enough for me to live in. I didn't shop around much in my search for a place to live.

Some time later Ray (remember Ray?) bought a bigger house for his growing family and stayed at his old house until it sold. I moved out of my apartment and lived in his new house so it wouldn't look abandoned. After his house sold I moved to an apartment that was a quarter of a Victorian house (see point B in Google Earth). This was a much more sensible apartment than my first. But it had no laundry room. I had to lug my laundry across town.

April 1980
The first major reorganization of my career happened around this time. It was decided that the compiler development we did didn't belong to the E&M division. It belonged to a "Systems Engineering" (SE) division. So we were given to the SE-Torrey Pines division. That division was new and didn't yet have a building. So we were moved to a temporary location (Waypoint 2). There was a lot of undeveloped land to hike in at lunchtime. The phone book for the division had an entry for "Snake Removal." I never had to call it. There was (probably still is) a pet cemetery down the street. I explored that a lot. Cemeteries fascinate me and I don't think I had encountered one for animals before that.

I don't remember how long we were in the Sorrento Valley buildings. We eventually moved to our permanent location (at Waypoint 3). It was just a short walk to the Torrey Pines Golf Course. They just had the U. S. Open Championship there. It would have been a major headache to work there through all that.

Another benefit of working there was we could walk to the beach through the Torrey Pines Reserve in a long lunch hour. The scenery and exercise were great.

May 1981
I bought a condominium. It was a two-bedroom apartment conversion. Jack cosigned the loan. The unit was at the end of the building next to the laundry room. The living room window looked at the laundry room (and vice versa). Oh, well, it made washing clothes convenient. Besides, I had a cute neighbor I could peek at through the curtains while he did his laundry. *sigh* I'd get to know him in about five years. My condo is Point C in the Google Earth file, the cute neighbor's is Point D.

Things settled down for a while. No big upheavals at work (for me...we did go through layoffs at the end of each year for several years. Ah, the good old days!) or at home. My job evolved at a nice pace.

The pace picked up.

June 1986
The cute neighbor and I finally summoned the courage to talk to each other. Soon we consolidated our homes. Jerry moved into my unit. His mother sold his. And there was much rejoicing!

Later that year?
There was a Systems Engineering-San Diego division in addition to the SE-TP that I was in. They decided that was one too many SE division in the area so they were combined. The Torrey Pines people were moved to Scripps Ranch (see Waypoint 4). (Before I made it to Scripps Ranch I was waylaid in Sorrento Valley (somewhere in the region of Waypoint 2) at a company NCR was buying some technology from. I was on the project that was going to support that. It was shelved.)

November 1988
Jerry and I bought our house (Point E in the Google Earth file) in a frenzy during a sellers' market. The sellers got what they were asking. Other than two major remodels things have been pretty stable in our housing since then.

At work things got weird and I don't remember the dates for some of the events.

Back to Rancho Bernardo
I can't remember when or why we moved back to the plant where I started my NCR career. But we moved. See Waypoint 5.

Somewhere along the line my group was transferred to a division that was based in Dayton. I never understood how our group fit in with the Dayton organization. Somebody thought it was an important thing to do. The Dayton division had one more holiday than the San Diego division! We got Good Friday off. We got to say "Nyah, nyah, nyah!" to our San Diego colleagues on Holy Thursday as we left. Apparently our San Diego colleagues didn't like something about the Dayton organization so they kicked us out.

Back to Scripps Ranch
We set up shop in Scripps Ranch. See Waypoint 6.

AT&T
AT&T bought NCR in 1991. (I'm really not sure whether this happened before or after we moved back to Scripps Ranch.) We became "NCR, An AT&T Company" for a while. Then they came up with the catchy name "AT&T Global Information Solutions," or the shorter, sassier "AT&T GIS"!

Back to Rancho Bernardo
AT&T GIS gathered all of its San Diego operations into a new campus (see Waypoint 7). No more moving! And there is much rejoicing! But I did change companies several more times.

TOP END
The Dayton-based division I had been in was dissolved and we all had to find new jobs. I think this was around 1994. For the first time in my more-than-15-year career, I changed departments. I didn't have to look for a position, I was told that the TOP END group wanted me. So off to TOP END I went. For more about the TOP END group and its aftermath, see an earlier posting where Colleen suggested it would have been easier to follow with a chart and time line. (Well, Colleen, no chart but here's basically the time line but I'm not convinced that this is easy to follow. Sorry.)

Back to NCR
AT&T decided that NCR didn't really fit in with them so in 1996 they spun it back off to be an independent company with the name "NCR."

BEA Systems
In June 1998 the TOP END group was sold to BEA Systems (which is now part of Oracle). They had a product that was a competitor of TOP END's. NCR wanted to unload products that weren't really part of its core efforts and TOP END was one of those.

Chuckbert has left the building
BEA bought TOP END, a product competing with one of theirs, apparently to take the good bits for its product and to kill it. In February 1999 they laid off half of the group. I was in that half. BEA had rented space from NCR until they got everybody laid off. So I never left the plant until BEA sent me on my way.

I spent the next month and a half unemployed. I watched "Teletubbies" (that Tinky Winky!) and Clinton's impeachment on TV.

Back to NCR, take 2
I got a job with the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) department back at NCR. After a year with that department, NCR decided that they needed a CRM solution faster than a home-grown product could be brought into production so they bought a company with a somewhat mature CRM product. The management of that company was given control of all things CRM and they decided that what was being done in San Diego didn't fit in with their vision so they shut us down. We had to find new jobs. Many of us found positions in NCR, many were laid off.

I found a position with a group that was making tools for the Professional Services (PS) people. I wasn't terribly thrilled with that position but at least I was still employed. After a short time there, one of the managers from the old CRM group recruited me to work on giving a tool in his new department a graphical user interface. I did that for about three years and was then recruited to work again for the manager I had when I was doing stuff for the PS people (but for a different product).

Not long after that my manager's manager decided that my manager was overworked and that his people needed to be managed by two different people. My project ended up working for a someone who came to NCR by way of another acquisition. NCR had bought a small company in Toronto, Canada. The manager we got had a management style of a small, startup company. That is, get the job done quickly and that's all that matters. Quality doesn't matter. Just get what was promised delivered and fix errors later. Old timers didn't like that. We like to deliver quality. The manager alienated everybody in San Diego and everybody left the group. I was one of the last two to go. We were "involuntarily" transferred to the group I am now in. We were very happy to be transferred. There was much rejoicing!

The manager in Toronto was fired a year or so later. His manager was given a new job with very few responsibilities. (The manager's manager screwed up other big products. I can't figure out why he didn't get fired, too.)

Teradata
Way back before AT&T bought NCR, NCR here in San Diego was doing some sort of development with a database company called Teradata. I had heard that the contract between NCR and Teradata said that if either company was acquired that the other company could bail out of whatever contract they had. After AT&T acquired NCR I heard that they figured that Teradata was going to get out of whatever was being done with NCR. So NCR/AT&T bought Teradata to keep from losing whatever investment they had with the operation.

Over the years the work that was being done in San Diego was more and more focused on this database business. We were told that investors didn't like the mix of the old NCR and the new Teradata. So last October they split the company into two companies to make them more attractive to investors interested in one or the other of the businesses. I ended up in Teradata.

So, after 30 years without ever really changing companies, I have worked for NCR, AT&T, NCR, BEA, NCR, and now Teradata.

I wonder what the future will bring.

(I told you up front that this was long. Sorry.)

Back to Santa Fe

We didn't find good stuff in Taos so back to Santa Fe we went.

But we stopped at Shidoni on the way because there was a miniature by Daniel P. Kronberg that kept calling to me. (I hope that link keeps working but it might go away once the web site is told that it's been sold. I'll have to get my own picture of it but it's already packed.) It's so adorable! We have another piece by him, an orca.

Then we headed into Santa Fe. We fed a meter with about two hours time and looked around the plaza. We didn't find anything there that we had to have so we went back to Canyon Road.

We bought a sculpture for the side of our garage that we see from our living room window. It's a bronze piece by Destiny Allison from the Winterowd Fine Art gallery. We went into the gallery and told the woman working there that we had seen the pieces on their outside wall a few days ago and had come back for a second look. She introduced herself as Karla Winterowd, the director of the gallery. She couldn't contain her enthusiam for Ms. Allison's work. We like it, too, so we bought it. It's called "Intuition." It will be delivered next week.

Intuition

It will dress up the house nicely.

If that weren't enough, we went back to La Mesa of Santa Fe. They have accessories for your house. And they have glass pieces by Melissa Haid. We got a piece of hers in Madrid many years ago. We need to dress up the living room window some more (the Destiny Allison piece isn't enough, you ask?). We're thinking that this piece will do the job (it's the one near the ceiling).
I didn't realize that I had the camera in the car. So I used my phone's camera for these pictures. Better this than nothing, huh?

It's been a very productive trip.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

It's not as much fun without Colleen. It's not!

Today we went to Tesuque and Santa Fe on an art quest.

We started at Shidoni where we enjoyed the art but didn't get anything for ourselves. Jerry got Peggy a bronze pea pod. On our way to Shidoni we thought of Colleen.

We browsed a bit at Tesuque Glass Works but, again, left empty handed.

Then we headed to Canyon Road.

I'm glad I wore my sneakers instead of my worn out flip-flops. We went up and down the road browsing in gallery after gallery for nearly six hours (with stops for lunch and tea). My feet got tired. Jerry bought a glass piece that has a pretty matte finish and some wonderful colors that come from some metals that the artist includes in his secret formula glass.

Other than that we got only ideas in case we return from Taos without any new acquisitions. If we don't find good stuff in Taos, we'll go back to Santa Fe on Wednesday. Maybe we'll even find time to go to the plaza.

It was a day without sunshine

In the days just before a vacation I want to use up perishables. I finished off a batch of orange juice yesterday. I certainly didn't want to mix up another can of Costco OJ for one day's drinking so today I had no juice with breakfast nor did I have any with tonight's pancakes. Jerry makes the best pancakes! Every Thursday! Tonight's were especially good. Maybe it was the extra egg. We didn't want to leave just one egg in the refrigerator so it went into the batter. You never know what a lonely egg will do.

Jerry had better beverage timing. His jug of milk ran out just as his glass got full tonight.

We're almost ready to set off. We'll see a lot of you in just a few days!

Sigh!

Yesterday, after four weeks of antici......pation, we got a call from Costco telling me that my film-to-DVD transfer was ready to be picked up. We raced over to Costco to get it. We didn't need to do any shopping so we just went out to their food court for supper. I got a slice of cheese pizza. Jerry got two hot dogs and two drinks. (You get a drink with each hot dog.) While Jerry was loading his dogs up with condiments I opened the package with the movies.

I got a disappointment.

The label told me that the movie's length is 1:03. Minute and seconds, not hour and minutes. The cases for the DVDs have images for each of the chapters. There were images from the frolicking in the creek and a few from the jumps onto the picnic table. There were 54 of these images.

Apparently these movies are limited to six banks of nine chapters. The movie had 54 chapters of about one second each. So the discs ran out of chapters long before the movie ran out. It didn't even make it to the picnic table!

I took it back tonight. They're going to do it over. They're putting a rush on it.

The images were clearer than my digital camera captured from the projected image. But at least I captured nearly five minutes.

You'll have to be patient for a while longer. Then I'll have to figure out how to get it to YouTube. They'd better not make the discs copy protected. They're my images after all.

In the meantime, you can relive the banana here.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Let's see a real tchotchke turtle (rather than the art we've seen up to now).