A few Things to Discuss Before the Day Gets Rolling
Yesterday afternoon saw a bunch of stuff happen that were a combo plate of cool and not so cool.

The sad news is that Blinky, our one eyed fish who'd gotten one of his eyeballs sucked out and eaten early last week, he gave up the ghost yesterday. Most likely a combination of the shock of losing an eye, not being able to see food, stress, the continued attacks (before he got moved into the other tank) by the mean old Groms and perhaps even age. His fins were healing up but I don't think a one eyed fish has much chance of any long term survival when half thier viewing capabilities are gone in an instant. Anyway, sad but it happens. Part and parcel of owning fish is the realization that they will die or get killed from time to time.

The bad news is very minor but a hassle nonetheless. Not sure if anyone cares to remember but I spilled water on P's keyboard a few weeks ago and fried the left side of the board. So I jumped on Ebay and order up a replacement. That package was stolen from my front porch and the stupid Post Office won't cover the theft even though it is a federal crime to tamper with the mail. I ended up buying another one on Ebay and had it sent to our PO box instead of to the house. Which meant that I picked it up intact from the post office around the corner from my office. All good, the keyboard is translucent with nice key action (even if a few of the keys are a little smaller than standard) and I liked it. I even nearly left feedback for the auction before testing the unit out. And I'm glad I didn't because the whole top row of letters, from Q to P are dead and there are a few more random letters that just don't work either. So now I'm going to have to deal with the sellers and see if we can work out a deal to get a working unit delivered.

But the good news outweighs the sad and bad. P and I have been going to school next door after work to throw the baseball around, get some hitting in from time to time and just get outside some. My glove has been crap for a long time and I've been meaning to replace it, even more so since P got her new glove. As we're getting ready to leave to go to the sports store, I mentioned to my neighbor (who's son has the most outrageous mop of hair I've seen in years, I will get pics) that we were off to get a new glove. He told me to hold on a moment, ran inside and emerged a minute or two later with a gorgeous glove in just about perfect condition. He'd had it for 9 years and not really used it and gave it to me. Just like that! I was stoked! And its waaaay better than any glove I was going to be buying. And we now have a small but growing collection of outdoor toys to play with. It made my afternoon and P was able to get me to go skirt shopping with her at Macy's for a wedding we've got this weekend.

Which also gave me a chance to finally use up the rest of my Christmas gift card I had. And we invested it into just one nice knife, a Henckels 6" chef's knife that's both esthetically beautiful but also practical beyond my original thoughts. Its balanced and slices through most anything we've got without any hassle whatsoever. We had fun seeing how thinly we could slice up a red pear (that was bad so we couldn't eat it, thanks P for telling me after I'd put a slice in my mouth! hahaha) and then carved up a big Fuji apple which was good fun. And yeah, we could make some of the style cuts to create the fan slices and other cool knife tricks.

And lastly but certainly not leastly, the Airport issues from the other day? Yeah, they're gone again and the Airport system is running and good speed again. And we figured out a few things, like we cannot have the phone upstairs plugged in anymore as it interferes with the DSL signal somehow. But only with P's phone (which has caller ID built into the handset) but my phone doesn't cause trouble, But I've gotta change out the phone system again anyway (thanks to CostCo for their superb return policy) because the phone and the Airport compete in the same frequency range at 2.4 Gigahertz. Now all I really want to do is change out the big old monitor I've got now for a svelte little LCD screen, maybe not so little as an 18" would be ideal for me right now.

I guess that's about it from last night. This morning was fun though, met up for an early breakfast with Esther (yes, my internet goddess of the quality forwards was in town this week) and Brian from work. And there's just about no morning that's too bad when I get to ride my cycle into work.

I'm sure today will bring its fair share of interest news. By the way, I'm selling my 81 VW Scirocco, if anyone's looking for a project car, give me a call. And I've got elbow armor on the way to protect me from my own poor riding abilities (or just stupid interest in doing tricks on a bike totally unsuited for it). Thanks Jay! And my Szaz is getting attention tonight, before cocktails I think, so I can maybe get out and go riding after work tomorrow.

Rock on everyone and hope you all are off to a good start to Hump Day! Bring it on!