The Time Sink

...and it's Back to School time here! Daniel's school day now starts at 0730 (hoo boy!) and Brad's is still at 0840. The obvious corollary that: Daniel's day is done at 1430 while Brad goes until 1530. This will require a little more coordination than in the past, but Shelley isn't even talking about subbing until she gets a handle on things...

One bit I see that may work out well: Daniel should have time to get his homework well along before dinner; that way we can concentrate on the stuff he doesn't understand after dinner. In the past we've had to deal with the bulk of it way too late at night.

I took the night off last night... Yep, there was just a little too much happening at work and I ended up blading early. ...and then not going inside for the longest time.

Yep, it was still hot (right at 100 and then 81 at midnight), but there was a breeze and some fantastic cloud patterns from a storm that was spilling over the mountains from Arizona. So I stayed out and watched the pseudosunset (hard to have one with cloud cover <g>) and ended up playing with the Zaurus a bit...

...ejection of the CF card from the mp3 player <g> and I was good to go with the wireless card. I took a look at a few general sites, but with that small a window, it wasn't long before I was on Daynotes sites: the simple table stuff you see here shows up real well, even on a narrow screen. Way cool though...

I forgot to mention I played with email on the Zaurus too... I just worked off web-based, which wasn't as easy as I'd like from pair's place; the tables were too wide for me to easily see what I was doing. The next time out I'm going to try the .org's server and see how Horde works.

There's some background changes going on with some of the pages on the domain (yes, again); my design partner went a little whacked and came up with some new stuff you may run across as you wander around. This place will stay plain vanilla, but the blog will have another shift maybe as early as this weekend. The archives over there are already swung. ...and at least one other domain and one subdomain are changing. I'll show it all off when we're done with it...

Man, that's two nights in a row out blading with the temp at 90F or below. Compared to last week, this almost feels coastal. Yeah, it's still hitting 100F during the day; but just before sunset it's been down a good ten degrees. ...and that's just fine!

...and joy of joys: Big 5, one of the sporting goods places here, has the same set of wheels and bearings I've been testing for the last month on sale again. Way cool! 'Cause with me going through a set of wheels in a month or less, $29.99 sounds a lot better than $49.99

I'm sitting here typing with the headphones plugged into the Zaurus and the volume cranked up to the point of hearing loss. ...and at that, it's barely covering the sounds of five tweeners (okay, four tweeners and a nine-year old) blasting the heck out of each other in a Star Wars game on the Game Cube.

Update: evidently, you can somehow get louder sound effects from Mario Brothers (I don't know which one): when you blast people in the Star Wars game, they just explode; in Marios Brothers, they splat...

Stardate 03-08-29:2500 (extended reference system)...

• 2500: The noise level is below the sound of a 747 taking off from ten feet away; I attempt the impossible...
• 2530: Sleep overtakes me (finally)
• 2830: Daniel wakes me up to advise his glasses are bent; Brad sat on them (update: Daniel was wearing them at the time...)
• 3100: Brad advises the waste disposal system has undergone a catastrophic failure ("...and there's water on the floor")
• 3130: There was more than water on that floor...
• 3400: Coffee, then blading. The only hopes to survive the day...
• 3630: The local team is in Tennessee. 'Nuf said. They beat the line...
• 3800: Brunch? Breakfast? Lunch? Supper? Whatever... Two naps begin, sequentially, not concurrently (although attempted).
• 3700: By order of the Captain and seconded by the Navigator, Executive order 0829 is now in effect: no birthday sleepovers past age 12. Note: the Captain and Navigator are specifically exempted from this rule...
• 4730: The rest of the household is comatose in bed.
• 4800: Dinner.

Well, I managed to get some sleep last night... No, not enough, but I'm very glad tomorrow is a day off. The boys' godmother, her mother and Shelley's father and "Grandma Jean" will be here shortly for the second half of "The Birthday Show". ...and then? Blessed peace. ...and a nap.

I did manage to get out and blade this morning in between cleaning adventures. The air quality kept me in Friday (there are fires burning in counties north/upwind of us); the entire valley is covered by drift smoke. ...but the early morning today had almost a misty look from the humidity and light winds off the hills; things were much nicer than even yesterday.

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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