I had a good day at work yesterday because I got to work on some stuff that was slightly different than normal. After work I applied lawn fertilizer as soon as I got home. I wanted to just apply a normal feeding, but when I went to buy the fertilizer at Home Depot on Thursday all they had was winterizer with weed control. I didn't want to put that on until the middle of December, but I also didn't want to go driving around yesterday for fertilizer because I was already running late. I guess I will just try to find a straight fertilizer by December.

I washed up and then put together a cookie tray of loaded nachos for our dinner. Onto an aluminum foil lined tray I layered:
· Low carb/high fiber/high protein tortilla chips from Trader Joe's
· Shredded extra sharp cheddar

I put that into a 350° oven for about seven minutes until the cheese was bubbly.

From a small sauce pan that was heating on the stove I spooned over the chips:
· Almost fat free Hormel turkey chili with beans (very good)

Then I sprinkled over all of that:
· One bunch of sliced green onions
· One diced tomato
· One diced avocado (from Chile and very sweet and flavorful)

· I scooped a few tablespoons of fat free sour cream into a sandwich baggy, poked a hole in one of the corners and piped sour cream over the whole tray.

We sat on the couch together and ate that while we watched the movie Batman Begins. Great movie. It is slightly confusing about what is going on in the beginning, but it all works itself out. Just stick with it. Good action. Good story. Good special effects. Really cool car.

After the movie Sheri felt like a donut. I didn't because I was still full from the nachos, but I have been meaning to go to Meijer to see if they have the B-29 airplane model I want to build. Sheri said a cookie from Meijer would also do the trick so at 9:30 PM we saddled up and went to the store.

They didn't have the model I wanted. I was tempted to get a fighter jet they had in the same 1:48 scale as the B-29, but the modern jets just are not as much fun to build because they are too streamlined and not enough little detail things to clue on. I might go to a couple stores today and see if I can find it. I am going to tape old maps from work to the table we bought for the front room and use that to build my model. That will be perfect. The maps will protect the table from paint and glue spills, and it will be better than taking up the kitchen table for a week or two. (I don't think Sheri would go for that anyway.)

When we were checking out I realized I was thirsty, and Meijer has a fountain drink dispenser near the checkout. I knew it was going to keep me awake, but it was Friday night and I could sleep in the next day, and I really wanted it, so I got a large Diet Coke. It really hit the spot.

We got home and got ready for bed. We watched TV in bed for a bit and I surfed the web from the laptop. After a while Sheri got tired and turned the TV off, but I was wide awake from my large soda. At 2 AM I was still awake and thinking of taking the laptop downstairs to the couch and watching TV, but decided to just turn the light out and listen to the radio with my earplug and try to go to sleep.

The friend we visited in San Francisco in early May is flying out here this afternoon (just Addy, not Jeff) for a girls weekend with Sheri, so we thought we would go out for breakfast this morning before she got here. I am typing this in Einstein Bros. Bagels while Sheri works a sudoku puzzle. She had a toasted raisin bagel with cream cheese and I had their Santa Fe breakfast sandwich. That is a little omelet, a piece of sausage, pepper jack cheese, and salsa on a bagel (I picked their everything bagel). All of the ingredients were good, but sandwiches on bagels, especially ones with that much stuff, are difficult to eat. I had to get a fork and eat it piecemeal because the insides kept slipping out. I won't get that again. Maybe with just the egg and cheese might be easier to eat, but the egg could still get squeezed out when I bite into the very firm bagel.

Which brings me to my report on OpenOffice.org. I installed it while I was grilling the London broil Thursday night. It installed flawlessly. No weird stuff. The download file is only 77 Mb. Someone with dial-up could download that without too much pain. So far I love it! The spreadsheet feels almost exactly like the Excel that I have gotten used to over the last 16 years (I had Excel on my Macintosh SE in 1989!) and it is hands-down better than the crummy spreadsheet program that comes bundled with MS Works.

The word processor is serviceable so far. I am not using it for anything more than a text editor and spelling checker so I can't really say if it is any better or worse than Word. For what I am using it for right now it feels exactly the same as the word processor that comes with MS Works. I have also been using MS Word for 16 years and I can get it to do some pretty amazing things. Looking over all of the menus it seems to have everything, but I don't know if I will be able to make it sing like Word until I actually get into a complicated document. That might not happen because my need for that kind of stuff happens more at work where I have Word installed.

I also have not tried opening documents created in Word and Excel so I can't comment yet on the compatibility.

So bottom line, if you already have MS Office installed on your PC you will probably just want to keep using that, but if you are using the bundled programs that came with your PC, you definitely want to download OpenOffice.org. If you are about to buy a new PC and are trying to decide whether to click the option to include MS Office I would also say save your money and just use OpenOffice.org.

There is a database included but I have not played with that yet. I have some pretty involved MS Access databases I have developed for work, and because of the Visual Basic components I wrote for them I don't know how compatible it would be, but if you just needed some basic database utility on the desktop I think it would be perfect. I will write more about this in the future as well as the drawing program, the math equation editor, and the MS PowerPoint replacement.

Sheri will be heading to the airport in a few hours to pick up Addy. My plans roughly are:

Watch the Ohio State vs. Indiana football game
Watch the first game of the World Series that starts at 6:30 PM CDT.
Cut down some of the perennial plants in the yard to get ready for winter.
Look for a B-29 model
Sweep out the garage
Check the air pressure in my tires