Highlights from the Week

1) Being 100 calls and Emails behind for four days due to last week's craziness. Everywhere I went, I was late. Everything I did, I was behind. Everyone I was trying to help was mad at me for taking so long to get to them. Still not caught up.

2) Working with another guy in very tight quarters yesterday for a couple of hours. After a period of listening to him sniffling, etc. I asked him "Are your allergies bothering you?" He answered "Nope. I'm sick as a dog. I'm sorry, but you're going to get it, too. Look on the bright side, you would have gotten it from your kids if you didn't get it from me!" Nice.

3) I plugged in my new cell phone to synch it to my computer--turns out it actually went and got all of my contact information. This was quite unfortunate. Now, my phone has 3,000 numbers stored in it including people who are dead and mis-entered stuff that I could never delete from my database. Now I can't delete them from my phone...

4) Two nights ago I was putting the kids to bed, and, while we were saying our prayers, we heard and felt a big "BAM!" against the side of our house. I finished putting them to bed and then headed downstairs, where I saw Fran headed around the corner outside carrying a baseball bat. Part of me wanted to see her use that if she caught someone...

Well, other neighbors were coming out of their house because they heard and felt something slam against their house, too. We finally determined that someone, somewhere, hit something big. Funniest explanation: One of our neighbors said "I just figured that my air conditioning has been running so much this summer that it finally just exploded."

Yesterday morning I could see that someone nailed a retaining wall about 1/4 mile away--there was a huge pile of stones. I guess that was it.

5) I was getting help from an online chat support line from a certain large, Austin-based computer company which will remain unnamed. The support guy was from India. During the support session, during a time while something was downloading, he asked "Do you mind if I look at the photos on your computer?" Creepy, huh?

I did fix Fran's computer, finally, and had to reload a bunch of software. I'm using it right now. The funny thing is that her keyboard is laid out differently, and there must be a key whose function is "highlight one or two lines you've just typed and delete it irretrievably". The problem is that I'm going too fast and can't figure out what I'm doing to cause that--but it's happened five different times during this post.

6) Frequent readers might have caught a brief, mean-spirited rant against the novel "A Room with a View", which I posted in a moment of weakness and took off less than 24 hours later because I felt guilty. Well, I finished it this week and it ended up being great. The first 100 pages, like so many books I've liked, were so slow I could hardly stand it. but it ended up being great. Next stop? Not sure...