Personal

On Saturday, we tried to get the lawn mower going and had no luck. After draining the gas and replacing the spark plug it still wouldn't start. We ended up using our neighbors' mower and ours will go to the shop tomorrow, hopefully.

We also picked up Heidi who cannot use her two left legs. She seems to have control and sensation of most of her body, but her muscles have all but deteriorated from her two left limbs.

The cable people came sometime Sunday morning while we were out doing a home visit and ran a cable across the driveway which works exactly the same as my solution, though perhaps more attractive. Hopefully they'll find a more permanent solution soon.

Tonight, since we're done with turn off the TV week, we watched Survivor, though Libby already knew who got voted off since we'd heard she was scheduled to appear on talk shows this week. Funny how we could have avoided watching it all together since we knew who was voted off! The plan is to limit our TV consumption in the future since we both agree that we benefited from turning it off.

Thursday, Sidney was dropped off for us to babysit. He's a DRNA dog who doesn't like kids, other dogs, or cats; he's also blind. When we bring him near the other dogs, he tries to bite them. It almost seems like it's not viscous as he just wanted to chomp on them. Unfortunately, it means that he gets to stay in his crate most of the time, just like Chloe.

The weather here is hot during the day, and quite pleasant from dusk until mid-day. Last night we planned on visiting the dog park with the puppies so they could run around and play with all the other dogs. Unfortunately, upon Libby's arrival she discovered that Lillian had a cut under her left eye. We decided it needed examined by the vet, and in a fairly prompt manner, they told us that it was merely a superficial scratch and some drops would help it heal best.

Mina left right after dinner this evening. We hope she'll decide to attend Duke, but know she'll do whatever's in her best interest.

We left our tv off this evening and enjoyed the silence. I suppose it's not that difficult to leave it off, as MythTv frees us from the binds of the broadcasting networks by allowing us to watch what we want when we want and even where we want for free! So, as we sit here in front of our sleeping television, we know that the computer in the other room is working very hard to save CSI:Miami (and other things) to the hard disk for viewing whenever we please.

Either way, the peace and quiet has allowed me to have some engaging chats with friends over the internet and I do truely feel like it's thus far been a beneficial experience.

Today we got up at 6am to drive Ernie to Florence, SC to meet his new family. They had risen at 3:30am to meet us there, so I suppose our end of the stick wasn't the shortest. We dined for breakfast at Cracker Barrel and then drove back and all three of us took naps. My nap lasted around 45 minutes, Libby's 1.5 hours, and Mina napped for over 3 hours. We all felt much better after our siestas and dined at Jason's Deli for dinner. We picked up Oscar at Petsmart who'll be staying in another foster home. So, we're down to three dogs and have been a bit shocked by the peace and quiet it's afforded us this afternoon! Otherwise, we've just lounged around and watched TV in spite of turn off the TV week.

Tomorrow, Mina has her meetings with the faculty at Duke. Best of luck to her!

Today Mina arrived and we enjoyed Dim-Sum, toured Duke campus, and dined at Salsaritas. Tonight we're watching Gothika. During our tour of Duke, we took a wonderful walk through the beautiful Duke Gardens and saw many of the spring flowers.

Also, we've posted the pictures of my parents visit last weekend.

I've also found WiFi access in many places I'd have never expected!

This evening we're tuning into the 2 hour finale of The Apprentice. This is the only reality show I've ever liked (though I haven't watched many). One of the key aspects is that those who triumph in the show do so based on excellence, intelligence, values, and integrity, as opposed to shows like Survivor where the decision is made by lying to ones peers. I also enjoy learning from the show and have read that it's become required watching by business schools across the country.

We sent off our taxes today, but unfortunately we won't be receiving any refund checks. We owed $16 to the state of North Carolina and much more to the federal government.

On another note, my new PDA came last night and I've only gotten to bask in some of the many features. For one, I can now web browse, check and send email from anywhere on the go that has 802.11b access (for example, Borders, Starbucks, and many airports offer T-Mobile hotspot service. This costs around .10/minute)! I hope to get a memory stick for it so I can listen to music and audio books on the go.

We're down to four dogs: Lillian and three fosters (Ernie, Mercedes, and Chloe (who is recovering from a back injury and spends 23/24 hours a day in her kennel)). Ernie and the pair in our foster home should be going home this weekend. We're very much looking forward to relaxing this weekend.

To follow in Libby's father's footsteps I've setup a script to automatically email out new entries in the Personal category to family members. Please contact me if you'd like to be included (or leave a comment). Emails are not HTML, so you'll have to click to see the posting with pictures, etc, but the content will be included.

Back to work today. Generally enjoying myself, but would rather be at home taking in some radiation from our new TV. Tonight I really need to finish our taxes. Hopefully my PDA will arrive today, but probably not until tomorrow. My current PDA (Treo) broke today and its flip-cover snapped off today held on by only a pair of wires. I'm looking at memory sticks for expanding the memory to hold more music/pictures/audio books.

My parents visited this weekened, we dined at our favorite Indian and Thai eateries. In addition we went and picked up our wedding gift from them. We picked up a Toshiba 32" flat-tube HD TV. We can now see our movies in high-quality and at some point we may sign up for digital cable with HD channels. The picture quality is simply amazing!

Anyone trying to access the site might have been unable since our power was off from 9am Friday to 3:13 am today. It's back now. I hope that no more back-hoe's dig through power cables in our subdivision!

I stayed home today with a crick in my neck. I woke up around 7 am this morning with the worst pain I've felt in a while in my neck. I tried to sit up and was confronted with more pain. I felt pretty silly telling my boss that I wasn't coming in to work because my neck was stiff from sleeping wrong, but to be honest I could in that condition. Now, at 5pm, it's to the point where I could probably drive, but it still really hurts. I think I'll take a hot bath tonight to see if that will help and continue to apply Icy Hot and pop Advil. My friend and his wife spent Saturday and Sunday doing back-breaking labor landscaping their front lawn and were sore today. I spent most of the weekend sitting down and stay home from work with a stiff neck.

Time to start making dinner. One of the things we still can't find from our move is our collection of recipes. I haven't yet started to collect them again in hopes that they'll turn up at some point.