I can't get this song out of my head. I find myself humming it to myself throughout the day.

"1 2 3 4" by Feist



One Two Three Four
Tell me that you love me more
Sleepless long nights
That is what my youth was for

Old teenage hopes are alive at your door
Left you with nothing but they want some more

Oh, you're changing your heart
Oh, You know who you are

Sweetheart bitterheart now I can tell you apart
Cosy and cold, put the horse before the cart

Those teenage hopes who have tears in their eyes
Too scared to own up to one little lie

Oh, you're changing your heart
Oh, you know who you are

One, two, three, four, five, six, nine, or ten
Money can't buy you back the love that you had then
One, two, three, four, five, six, nine, or ten
Money can't buy you back the love that you had then

Oh, you're changing your heart
Oh, you know who you are
Oh, you're changing your heart
Oh, you know who you are
Oh, who you are

For the teenage boys
They're breaking your heart
For the teenage boys
They're breaking your heart

My four favorite day-to-Day coffees are from Starbucks. They are:

Espresso Blend
French Roast
Italian Roast
Gold Coast Blend

Are these the absolutely best beans you can get? No, but the quality you get for the price are hard to beat, plus they are always easily available.

When I want to treat myself my favorites are

Black Cat Espresso Blend from Intelligentsia Coffee

Dead Man's Reach from Ravens Brew

I've found the best brewing method for my tastes is the French press.

I measure 5 tablespoons of unground beans for 0.5 liters of water or 8 tablespoons of beans for just under a liter of water and then grind them in a burr grinder at the coarsest setting.

After the water has come to a boil in my electric kettle I wait until I don't see any more bubble action in the water, put the grounds in the press, pour the water into the press, stir the brew well with a spoon, and then let it brew for 4.5 minutes. Don't let the coffee stay in the press after you have pressed it because it will keep extracting and give you a bitter and too strong coffee.

The most important thing you can get if you want good coffee at home is NOT the brewer, but the grinder. The little grinders with the spinning blades inside are not good for a couple reasons. The most important is because the particle size will not be consistent. Some particles will be smaller than average, others will be larger. The smaller ones will be over-extracted and the larger particles will not release their entire flavor.

What you want to get is a burr grinder. They are designed so all of the particles are uniform in size. I have the Braun KM30. Cuisinart also makes a good grinder. Both are in the $40 to $50 range.

One of these days I want to get the KitchenAid grinder. It is $200 which is why I don't have one right now.

Mitch told me to make this super-cool post.

Watch video

My new theme song.

Kenny Loggins
"I'm Alright"



I'm alright
Nobody worry 'bout me
Why you got to gimme a fight?
Can't you just let it be?

I'm alright
Don't nobody worry 'bout me
You got to gimme a fight
Why don't you just let me be

Do what you like,
Doing it nat'rally
But if it's too easy
They're gonna disagree

It's your life
And isn't it a mystery
If it's nobody's bus'ness
It's everybody's game

Gotta catch you later
No, no, cannonball it right away

Some Cinderella kid
Get it up and get you a job
(Dip dip dip dip dip dip dip dip)

I'm alright
Nobody worry 'bout me
Why you got to gimme a fight?
Can't you just let it be?

I'm alright
Don't nobody worry 'bout me
You got to gimme a fight
Why don't you just let me be

Who do you want?
Who you be today?
And who is it really
Makin' up your mind?

You wanna listen to the man?
Pay attention to the magistrate
And while I got you in the mood
Listen to your

Own heart beatin'
Own heart beatin'
Own heart beatin'
Own heart beatin'

Don't it get you movin'
It make me feel good

Wow, Cinderella kid
Then give it up and give it the job
(dip dip dip dip dip dip dip dip)
(Boom, boom, boom, boom)

I'm alright
Nobody worry 'bout me
Why you got to gimme a fight?
Can't you just let it be?

I'm alright
Don't nobody worry 'bout me
You got to gimme a fight
Why don't you just let me be

I'm alright
Nobody worry 'bout me
Why you got to gimme a fight?
Can't you just let it be?

I'm alright
I'm alright
Just let me be

Immediate Saturday plans: rake leaves, pick up dog poop, cut grass, rip up tomato plants and other annuals, cut off dead parts of perennials.

After that I will shower and run some grocery store errands, and then watch Ohio State play Illinois.

My A1c was 6.2 on Saturday. Three months ago it was 6.5.

I weighed Mitch tonight and he was 71.6 pounds. He is getting about 700 caleries per day plus assorted bits of plastic.

At my brother in law's urging I just purchased the SpaceNavigator 3D mouse I wrote about earlier. I got it at Amazon for $50 and free shipping.

If you felt the Earth move a little bit today it was because my parents bought a laptop computer and a wireless router. I never thought I would see the day.

I had about 50 or 60 trick-or-treaters tonight.

Mitch liked it. He just stood at the door and smelled everyone's bag as I dropped candy into them.

Everyone really liked him except for one mom that grabbed her daughter and pulled her back about 10 feet. When she saw that Mitch just liked greeting everyone and getting his head scratched by the kids she let her daughter come to the door. He never once tried to dart out or even step on the porch. He is such a good boy.

I haven't really felt like posting much the last few months. Part of the reason is the template for my blog "broke" and I didn't feel like taking the time to fix it. The biggest thing that was wrong was the archives disappeared. To fix it I had to select a new template and lose all of my previous customizations. Before I restore those customizations I will live with this template for a bit and see what I think about it. Any comments on it are welcome.

I am sitting on the couch waiting for trick-or-treaters. At 8 PM I am going to turn off the porch and foyer lights and go upstairs and do a few chores.

I have my summer-weight bedspread in the dryer right now.

I am going to try and post more regularly. At first it might just be a sentence or two about something I did until I can get back in the groove.

This is a 3-D mouse called the SpaceNavigator and I think I will probably end up buying it soon.

You can use it in Google Earth, Live Search Maps my favorite on-line mapping site, ArcMap, PhotoShop, CAD programs, etc. Rather than try and explain why it is so cool, just take a look at these videos of someone navigating the applications with the 3-D mouse.

Mitch weighed in tonight at 73.7 pounds. I guess I will drop him to 14 ounces of food per day.

An update on Mitch's weight and food: For the last several weeks I have weighed Mitch on Sundays and if his weight hasn't changed from the previous week I have added an extra ounce to his daily ration.

This morning he weighed-in at 70.8 pounds which is an extra pound since last Sunday's weigh-in. This last week he has been on 15 ounces per day. I am going to keep him at 15 ounces per day until he adds another three or four pounds.

Once he is in the 73 – 74 pound range I will take away an ounce and see how things go. I don't think I want him over 75 pounds.

I have been wondering what to get a four year old for his birthday. Finally had the perfect idea yesterday: the Dremel 400 XPR!

What does a four year old need with a Dremel tool? Pedicures! His doctor said it is a great way to trim their nails. After a little research on-line I was sold. If you nick the quick it actually cauterizes the wound because it spins so fast rather than bleeding all over the place.

When I first heard about doing it this way I thought I would just use my drill. My drill has a pretty fast top speed of 2,100 RPM. No problem. I thought the only advantage the Dremel had was it was smaller and easier to handle. I looked up the Dremel speeds and they have a range of speeds between 5,000 RPM and 35,000 RPM!

I got it home last night and it works great. I get a much better and cleaner cut than with the clippers. With the clippers his nails can splinter sometimes, and I don't cut them as short as I want for fear of hurting him. With the grinding wheel I can just keep taking a little bit off at a time until I can see the distinctive pattern on the cut portion that tells you when to quit.


This is a page that had a lot of useful information on grinding their nails.

I still want to get them shorter, but the quick needs a chance to recede after the nails are shortened. Every four days or so I will take a little more off until they are greyhound active length.

I started Mitch on Iam's dog food a month or so ago. When I started he weighed about 73 pounds. I weighed him yesterday and he was 68 pounds. I would like him between 70 and 75.

The feeding instructions say a 70 pound dog gets 2 2/3 cup of food per day, and an 80 pound dog gets 2 3/4 cup of food per day.

The difference between the two is 8/100 of a cup. That is too small for me to reliably measure each morning, but it apparently makes a difference. The food must be very nutrition-dense.

Because I am me, this morning I measured out four 2 2/3 cup servings, weighed each one and then averaged their weights. I did the same for 2 3/4 cups of food. There is about a one ounce difference.

So, for the last month or so I have been feeding him 11.3 ounces of food. Starting tomorrow I will weigh out his food for him each morning and will start feeding him 11.8 ounces per day.

Feeding him by the ounce will also give me much finer control over his food. After a month if he still needs a little more weight, or he if he has put too much on, it will be a simple matter to add or subtract a tenth of an ounce or two from his daily ration.

I also know exactly how much a bag of dog food will last him too. A 40 pound bag has 640 ounces, so at 11.8 ounces per day it will last 54 days.

I read the Sunday paper at Burger King this morning for a couple hours just to get out of the house.

After than I picked up some of the new Diet Pepsi Max that was advertised in the Target newspaper ad today. It has twice the amount of caffeine as regular Diet Pepsi, as well as ginseng.

From a few quick Internet searches I think that gives it about the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee. I could be wrong, but that's what my 30 seconds of research seems to suggest.

I just got in from planting six tomato plants I bought last night at Menard's for $0.49. I got Better Boys. After I planted them I fertilized them with Miracle-Gro tomato fertilizer.

I also put up some wire fence around the tomato patch to see if it will keep Mitch from stomping through them. Then I cut the stems from the dead peony blooms and watered all the plant beds in the backyard.

Now I am going to take a shower and tackle some paper work that has been waiting for far too long.

Some times I still can't get over what a beautiful beast Mitch is. I think he is truly breathtaking. I am toying with enlarging the first picture to put above the fireplace. I would crop it just slightly so that he is on the right third of the picture. The second picture really shows off his long neck.

Sheri is in Seattle for a two-week business trip. Last weekend I flew our for a four-day weekend in Seattle with her. I have a bunch of pictures and I intend to post about it, but I have just been too busy to get around to it.

This is a picture of the first cappuccino I had in Seattle at Espresso Vivace. Notice the neat little design they make on the top of every drink.


The pastry to the right had spinach and feta cheese. It was also very good. As soon as I finished this cappuccino I went back up for an iced Americano and continued to read the paper. When I left I got a hot small triple Americano to go.

I drank so much coffee while I was there. It is so good and it is every where. I intended to bring back at least three pounds of beans, but I only brought back one pound from Espresso Vivace.

I've been having problems getting motivated to get going in the morning, so I just went downstairs, ground 5 tablespoons of coffee, put it in my French press, and brought that upstairs along with my electric kettle and a coffee cup. Tomorrow morning knowing that a perfectly brewed cup of hot coffee is only seven minutes away once my feet hit the floor should be a good motivator.

We hosted our first Gourmet Club dinner at our house last night. The theme was dishes from famous Irish restaurants. We started out with a bowl of carrot soup. We were responsible for the main course which was a stuffed pork loin with homemade gravy and homemade apple sauce. We had one of the women at dinner that is on the Gourmet Club committee and said that my gravy turned out way better then the test batches they made while preparing the menu. The apple sauce was a big hit too.



Current scones and rustic potatoes were served as sides.

Dessert was kind of like a pineapple upside down cake with hazel nuts.









Everything worked out really well. The first couple came over just a few minutes after 7 PM. Everyone left around 10:45 PM.

When we started cleaning up the kitchen drain stopped up really good. I took the trap off under the sink and opened the access port in the basement and could still not get to the clog. I just kept working at it with the plunger. After a half hour of that I thought maybe I should use hot water in order to loosen things up. I also started dumping dishwasher detergent down the drain on the hypothesis the enzymes would start eating away at whatever was stuck down there.

I took a break to go in the basement and make sure the access port was not leaking from me taking it off and screwing it back on. Everything was dry. As I was walking back upstairs the hot water and enzymes finally had the desired effect it whooshed down the pipes. It almost sounded like a toilet was flushed. Yeah!

By this time I am really tired and my back was hurting from cooking, and then hosting, and then plumbing all night. I took a little break on the couch while Sheri continued to clean.

She had to be dialed into work from about 1:30 AM until 5 AM to make sure all of her servers in all of the time zones handled the new Daylight Saving Time date. I was able to stay with her until about 4 AM and then couldn't keep my eyes open. I think she said two of her servers had problems and needed extra attention.

She was able to get about an hour of sleep before she had to get up and get to the airport for her trip. She also got the entire kitchen cleaned up during the breaks she took from work overnight.

I am feeling pretty beat, but I have already showered, had leftover scones, and done a few chores. I don't know what I am going to do next. I have a list, but it is very possible I might just fall asleep on the couch. It is also possible I might get a second wind and go run some errands. Right now I don't know. I think I am running on about 3 or 4 hours of sleep.

Sheri is on the board of our neighborhood homeowners' association. The person that did the newsletter could not do it anymore, so I stepped up and volunteered. There were some camera-ready ads that needed to be scanned either because they were new last month, or the existing scans looked really bad. We decided to go ahead and buy ourselves a scanner. To my surprise almost nobody makes just a flatbed scanner anymore. Everyone is making the all-in-one machines. Fax-copy-scan-printer. One place we went had two flatbed scanners, but they were clearance and they only had the floor models left.

We walked over to the all-in-one section and started looking at those. We ended up with an HP C3180. After the rebate it will only be $65, so that wasn't so bad. I did not even install the ink cartridges that came with it because I like our current printer and I am just going to use it as a scanner.

I have had some fun scanning some old pictures around the house, and will probably continue to do that as I come across them.

In this 1942 picture my mother is the baby in lap of her grandmother. The writing on the back of the picture says (I left off all the last names):

Left to Right (Standing) Mary, Glen, Katherine mother – (Martha), Jacob, Michael (Grandma B's brother)
Sitting: Great Grandma and Grandpa Nick and Fannie, Beverly

click for larger picture


If anyone is interested in a larger picture for getting prints let me know. The original scan is very high resolution; 5,058 x 3,850 pixels.

The bean soup I made last week turned out really good and we ate every last drop. I had celery and carrots on hand because of the soup so I thought that was a good enough excuse to make a pot of chicken noodle soup this weekend.

I got a six pound chicken for only $4, and a bunch of parsley at the grocery store and came home yesterday and got that cooking. After a couple hours of that cooking on the stove I stained out all of the chicken, vegetables, parsley, bay leaves, etc. put the pot on the patio to quickly chill, and then brought it inside before we went to bed.

This morning I scraped the fat layer off of the top and put the pot back on the heat. I finely diced up a couple carrots, a stalk of celery and a medium onion and have that cooking right now. The broth tastes amazingly rich.

We are going to get cleaned up and dressed, boil the noodles, have a bowl of soup, and then run some Sunday afternoon errands.

Mitch gets hoppy before every meal. Here is a quick clip of him doing it this evening. He does the most hops at the beginning of the clip.

Friday evening Sheri picked me up at work and we took the train into the city to see a friend of hers, Carolyn Turgeon, do a book reading from her first published novel, Rain Village.



There was also a guy that played a didgeridoo before and after her reading. Very cool. I liked it a lot and now I want to learn how to play it.



After the reading a bunch of us walked down Clark Street to a place called T's for snacks and drinks.



This is a short little video I took just to give you an idea for the feel of the place.

On the way to the book reading we stopped to take a picture on the Jackson Avenue Bridge of the ice jam in the Chicago River. On the way back later that evening ALL of the ice was gone.



We got home about 1 AM and had to make a big deal over Mitch for be such a good boy and staying home all evening by himself.

I few weeks ago I bought a ham, and after I was done eating it for a few days I froze the ham bone. This afternoon I took the ham bone out and made a great batch of navy bean soup. It must have been good because even Sheri liked it. I also made some corn bread. We had both of them for dinner while watching the Oscars.

My grandfather was a civil engineering student at the University of Michigan. In 1928 he was inducted into an honorary engineering fraternity called Triangle. It is still active today.

This is what he received when it was time to be inducted. You can click on the picture to view a larger version.



I assume this picture was taken after all of the inducting happened. You can also click on the picture for a larger version.



I have even larger versions in case you wanted to print them out or send them to a photofinisher. Just let me know if you are interested.

Walking through Target today I saw this espresso machine on the clearance shelf for only $34! It has a 15 bar pump. My old espresso maker (which I haven't used in quite a while) did not have a pump, but got its pressure just from the force of the steam expanding in the heating chamber. An espresso machine with a pump heats up the water ahead of time and does not start being forced through the coffee grinds until you push a button to start the pump.

A Middle Eastern halal grocery store and kitchen opened up just down the street from us. We went there tonight to check it out and get some take-out food for dinner. It was pretty good and we are excited to finally have a Middle Eastern place nearby. We tried a falafel sandwich, a shawarma sandwich, and a large side of Jerusalem salad. While we were wandering around the store I picked up a bar of soap made with olive oil and laurel oil.

Their meats looked really good. I guess you would expect that from a halal store. They had an entire aisle of hookah pipes and tobacco. Interesting.

When we were walking down the frozen food aisle one of the guys from behind the prepared food counter approached us with a tray of little glass cups with hot sweet tea. What a nice touch!

Walking through Target today I saw this espresso machine on the clearance shelf for only $34! It has a 15 bar pump. My old espresso maker (which I haven't used in quite a while) did not have a pump, but got its pressure just from the force of the steam expanding in the heating chamber. An espresso machine with a pump heats up the water ahead of time and does not start being forced through the coffee grinds until you push a button to start the pump.

A Middle Eastern halal grocery store and kitchen opened up just down the street from us. We went there tonight to check it out and get some take-out food for dinner. It was pretty good and we are excited to finally have a Middle Eastern place nearby. We tried a falafel sandwich, a shawarma sandwich, and a large side of Jerusalem salad. While we were wandering around the store I picked up a bar of soap made with olive oil and laurel oil.

Their meats looked really good. I guess you would expect that from a halal store. They had an entire aisle of hookah pipes and tobacco. Interesting.

When we were walking down the frozen food aisle one of the guys from behind the prepared food counter approached us with a tray of little glass cups with hot sweet tea. What a nice touch!

This morning (Saturday) we left the house mid-morning to go to Cosi for breakfast. I had a bacon-egg-cheese bagel sandwich and a coffee and Sheri had grilled cheese from the children's menu and a hot green tea.

Next on our itinerary was the John B. Sanfilippo & Son, Inc. thrift store in Elk Grove Village. They are the company that makes Fisher Nuts.

I had the GPS synched with the camera today so you can click any of the pictures in this post and then click on a map link under that picture to go to a map of the exact place I snapped the picture. I didn't have great GPS reception in the grocery store so some of those locations incorrectly show up as outside the store.





The main thing I go there for is the grind-it-yourself peanut butter. They have a machine with just peanuts for regular creamy peanut butter, and another machine with chocolate chips mixed in with the peanuts! This gives you a slightly sweeter peanut butter with a nice chocolate taste. I got one regular and two chocolate.



You can also buy all of their nut products for a big discount in large bulk packages. I was in the mood for some salted blanched nuts and asked for a price. For the bulk pricing the smallest (only?) size was 40 pounds. That is too much for me. I could have handled 20 pounds. Maybe the next time Dad visits we will go there and we can split a box.

The next stop was the Mitsuwa Marketplace. It is a huge Japanese grocery store/food court/book store/video store.







We got a few bags of frozen baos, a couple of sweet treats, and Sheri bought a few skin care and bath things. When we were done shopping I took the things to the car while Sheri went to the food court and got us a little snack of sushi and egg rolls. Both were really good.







We had planned to go to Target and a shoe store but Sheri's cold started to take its toll and she didn't have any energy left, so we decided to go home and do those errands tomorrow.

We just steamed a few of the baos for dinner and are getting ready to watch a movie. I think we are going to watch The Science of Sleep.

I took my new GPS along on our vacation to Wisconsin. Whenever I took a picture I also had the GPS on. When I got back home I processed the pictures to automatically attach the latitude and longitude to them.

Click on this link to see where I took the picture, and then click the red push pin to see the picture.

Veterinarians always tell us at our dog's annual exams to brush their teeth every day. We have tried several types of brushes designed for dogs with special flavored toothpaste, but it just seems to be more trouble that it is worth.

We have discovered a great product that makes brushing their teeth every day easy. They are pre-moistened wipes, kind of like baby wipes, soaked with antiseptic, mint flavor, and baking soda. I can wipe all of Mitch's gums and teeth in about 20 seconds. We think he actually kind of likes it too. He struggles just a little bit when I am doing it, but when he sees me grabbing the container and pulling one out he still comes over and waits for me to start working. His breath is really good too. We keep them on the coffee table and I do it in the evening while we are watching TV.

These are the ones we are using now and got them at PetSmart.

Go Bears!

Pringles has a new product line called Pringles Select. We tried one today that is particularly good: cinnamon sweet potato. Lightly sweet taste with a nice dusting of cinnamon. A one ounce serving has 40% RDA of vitamin A. We will probably get them again.

Oranges have been bad this year. They have been juicy but not very sweet or flavorful.

Luckily Fuji apples have more than made up for them. Every Fuji we have had this season has been fabulous. Mitch has even turned into an apple whore. When I first gave him a little piece a few weeks ago he didn't know if he liked it or not. Now he follows us around if we are eating an apple hoping for a bite.

Meijer had a 3 pound bag for $1.50 a few days ago.

After having Mitch for 1.5 months now I am convinced that greyhounds make the best pets for most people.

1. Very gentle. Have not seen any aggression towards anyone yet. Has been OK with kids touching him. Has been OK with clipping his nails, touching his feet, putting clothes, muzzle, boots, etc. on him.

2. Very quiet. Not a barker. In the morning when he is ready for breakfast and to go outside he has this cute little yip he makes, but that is about it, and then he only yips a few times and then stops. No whining. No barking when someone comes to the door or sees another dog walking in front of the house. If you want a guard dog then a greyhound is not for you. I don't think he would be very good protection while walking down the street at night, but I think just his size would be enough to deter someone from bothering you. He is a big dog, and someone that didn't know he was a greyhound or what a greyhound is like would just see a big dog and leave you alone. But if they decided to mug you anyways I don't know if he would do anything. Goliath was good protection. If he sensed that one of us didn't like someone walking on the sidewalk towards us, or thought there was someone in the house, backyard, etc. he let them know he was there and was pretty scary about it.

3. Very affectionate. He needs lots of petting and attention, and that is the way we like our dogs. When Sheri is at home working all day he needs to be in the same room with her and every couple of hours he gets up to check-in with her and get some petting. Just about every time I get up to use the rest room he has to get up and follow me in to make sure he doesn't miss anything. This might not be good for some people, but we like it that way. I think cat-people generally like their pets a little more standoffish.

4. Clean. Greyhounds do not have undercoats, do not shed very much, and have very short hair. If Goliath rubbed up against you after putting on a suit you would have to get the tape to get the hair off. Little balls of his hair would accumulate in corners and under the bed. We called them tumble weeds. Mitch can rub up against you and you will not find one hair on your clothes! Some people that are allergic to dogs can actually tolerate greyhounds.

5. Attention getting. I like the attention he attracts while walking him. I can't wait until the summer months and all the new girlfriends he is going to attract! The few times we have taken him downtown it seems every head turns as we walk past. Some stops us at least every 15 minutes to ask about him and to pet him.

6. Low exercise requirements. It seems like the world's fastest dog would need a lot of exercise, but they don't. They are huge couch potatoes. Of course regular exercise is good for them, and us, but they are not demanding about it. Some dogs start acting up and chewing inappropriate things as an outlet if they don't get enough exercise, but greyhounds are content just to sleep and cuddle most of the time. Sometimes while watching a movie we will notice that he seems a little restless. He will get up, come see us. Pick through his toys, walk around. We will pause the movie and take him outside. A lot of times he will do a few high-speed laps around the yard, take a pee, and then come in the house and go to sleep. When we do take him for walks he needs at least a couple hour nap afterwards to recover. The excitement of a car ride is enough to wear him out for a while too. I have no doubt he could keep up with an active runner that ran several miles a day, but he is totally fine with just hanging out too.

We had a really fun morning outside despite it being cold and wet. There is a "sport" called geocaching. It starts by someone hiding something someplace. It is usually something like a Tupperware container with some small trinkets inside. They record the coordinates with their GPS and then go to a site like www.geocaching.com and post where the cache is.

When someone goes and finds it they can take a little trinket and leave a trinket of their own. There is often time a little paper log where you can leave your name, date, notes, etc. Sometimes they are easy to find and sometimes they are tricky. There are lots of different variations on what kinds of caches are left and how they are described and found.

Anyway, I have known about geocaching for years but never tried it. Early this morning after I let Mitch outside and I was just checking the Internet before I went back to bed something made me register at geocaching.com and pick out a nearby one.

I went back to bed and asked the now-awake Sheri if she wanted to go on an adventure, and she did!

We bundled up and got on our rubber boots and set out to find our first geocache.

It was at a nearby forest preserve.



Sheri was holding the GPS and led the way. I think she liked it because I was having a tough time keeping up with her as she dodged in and out of the thick brush and thickets. It was not on a trail. We were going right through the underbrush.

Sheri found it after just a few minutes of being in the general area. My current handheld GPS does not have WAAS and will therefore only get us within about 30 feet of the point I entered. Here she is retrieving the cache from its hiding place. Take note of her new boots she got yesterday.



Ta dah!



This is what was inside.



This is what we took.



And this is what we left.



We also left four Wetnaps. A lot of families do this with their kids so I thought they might be handy if a kid gets into something messy he shouldn't have.

We saw a buck and three does during our adventure too!







Afterwards we went to McDonalds for breakfast and to read the Sunday paper. I would say we spent over an hour outside hiking through the forest. It felt good to get up and get going like that. We think we are definitely going to do it again. It is a fun way to get some exercise in. We both had a nice tired feeling afterwards and our cheeks were flushed from the cold wind blowing on us.

After breakfast we went to Walgreen's to get a few things that were advertised in the Sunday paper and then to PetSmart to get a couple algae eaters for the aquarium.

Now Sheri is at a neighborhood food party that is kind of like a Tupperware party. All of the food is either ready-to-eat or only needs one or two ingredients to prepare. We aren't really too excited about the food, but it is a good way to meet more people in the neighborhood.

After I wrap this up I am going to go downstairs and watch the rest of the Bears football game and probably end up taking a nap and wait for Sheri to get back home. I don't have to work tomorrow because of the MLK Day holiday so we will stay up late and watch a movie, burn some wood and wait for the snow to start falling. The last I saw we are only supposed to get between 3 and 5 inches. Earlier in the week they were saying Chicago might get over 10 inches.

Very funny. I laughed out loud a few times.

Thomas S. Ruff


Loving Husband, Father, Brother, Grandfather and Friend. Tom passed away suddenly on January 6, 2007. Tom always lived life to its fullest and "seized the moment".

We hope that donations to his memorial fund will help save young lives, find cures for childhood diseases and enable children to live their lives the way Tom lived his.

We had a really nice Christmas and New Years holiday. Even though Sheri was on call up until New Year's Eve day we still both felt really refreshed from not feeling pressure to do anything and just enjoy cooking, eating, watching movies, burning wood, and playing with Mitch.

For New Years I made pepperoni bread. We were gone too long while the dough was rising and it blew the bowl right off of the counter.



It turned out excellent.



pepperoni
provolone cheese
parmesan cheese
garlic powder
oregano
basil
onion flakes

We had a little incident tonight with Mitch. I thought I would see how he responded to having his nails clipped. I did one of the nails on his back leg while he was lying down. He didn't even look up. Cool. I took just a little off of the first one to get a feel for how far down his quick grows.

On the second nail I found out how far down his quick grows. He let out a little yip and sat up. His first response was to kiss my face, like he was letting me know he was OK, and then he looked at his foot.

It started bleeding like crazy. After inspecting it for about 10 seconds he laid his head back down and let us figure out how to stop the bleeding. It just wouldn't quit.







Direct pressure didn't work because I think when we removed the tissue any blood that had clotted was disturbed and it started bleeding again. After doing that a few times I just let it bleed. It started to slow down after a minute and pretty much stopped after about three minutes. I guess the air helped to dry it out and create a cap.

I had a really unusual pizza tonight. It was a very thin crispy crust topped with artichoke hearts, prosciutto, ricotta cheese, and a couple other things I can't remember.

As soon as they take it hot out of the oven they crack in egg right in the middle of it and let it cook for a little bit just from the heat of the pizza. By the time they bring it to the table the egg is coddled. The server takes a spoon and mixes the egg up right in front of me on the pizza and then spoons the egg around the entire pizza. Surprisingly delicious. If I go back I would order the exact same thing which is extremely unusual for me.