I don't know what I am going to do with myself today. It is supposed to be hot and humid with three rain events: noon to 2 PM, 5 PM, and 9 PM. I guess I will try to cut the grass in an hour or so once the neighborhood is awake but before the rain. (It is a pet peeve of mine when people do loud outdoor stuff on Sunday mornings before 10 AM or so. It's not like I am Mr. Devout, but I still like the old tradition of quiet Sunday mornings.)

Some other things I might do:

• Empty dishwasher.
• Go through mail and pay bills.
• Do some more cleaning/organizing/straightening in the bedroom, kitchen, family room, and front room. I threw out about 40 pounds of old magazines Friday night that had accumulated next to my side of the bed.
• Go hang out someplace with air conditioning to read and people-watch. Starbucks? The mall? Bookstore?
• Check inventory and see if I need any food stuff from Meijer. Check-out their Sunday ad for healthy frozen meals for work.
• Kill time walking around Best Buy, Target, Fry's, etc.
• Go to Farm and Fleet? Sheri hates going there, but I can usually find a couple cool things to buy.

The flower bed right in front of our house has a lot of gravel mixed in which makes it almost impossible to get a shovel through. Last summer Mom and I sat down after I turned over what I could and picked individual stones out by hand. A couple weeks ago I noticed that there was an even and dense layer of stones covering the entire bed. They were there the entire time but each stone was covered in a then layer of mud so we couldn’t see them until after the mud weathered off. I sat down again for 20 minutes last week and picked out all of the stones I could see, and then turned everything over again. It looked very dark an well groomed. Not a stone in sight. After the few rains we had last week all of the mud has washed off the stones that were exposed and it looks like we never sat there picking out stones. I guess I will pick out all of the stones I can see again today, and then turn the bed over again. Maybe if I keep doing that one day it will be a nice workable bed. If I remember I will take a before and after pic. It really is amazing all of the stones that you can see on top of the dirt right now.

I am thinking about a bike ride, but I am not sure. I am interested to see how it feels to bike in hot sticky weather. Unlike other sports and exercise routines, when you are riding a bike you always have a nice strong wind in your face, so I am wondering if that wind will mitigate hot uncomfortable weather, or will it still be just as uncomfortable as if I was standing still. If I go for a ride it will probably be later in the day after I am done doing other chores so I don't tire myself out too much to actually do chores.

On a related note, when I am riding, about the slowest I will go is 6 mph. This is when I am going up a pretty good sized hill and I am on the tired side. Any slower than that means I am killing myself and I will get off and walk it up the hill. When I am walking it I have noticed that I am going about 3 mph.

On fairly level terrain with small ups and downs my average speed has been right around 10 mph with bursts up to about 13 mph. Anything faster than that means I am going down a long straight hill and gravity is doing most of the work.

I would like to try a cycling jersey but I think I would be self-conscious wearing one for a couple of reasons:

One, I think they are supposed to be worn fairly snug and form fitting. This is because, besides reduced wind resistance, the main purpose of the shirts is to quickly wick sweat from your skin to the surface of the jersey. It is then evaporated my the quickly moving wind which keeps you both dry and cool. The shirts are made with special man-made fibers to do this. If the shirts are loose they can't make contact with your sweaty torso to absorb the sweat and wick it away.

Second, I would be afraid that it would look like I was trying too hard to have that Lance Armstrong Tour de France look. They sure look cool though. I guess it also would be kind of useless until I start taking rides longer than an hour or two. These shirts are all in the $70 range.

Last Nokia 770 post for tonight!

This links to a page with nine screenshots from the Nokia 770 Intenet Tablet similar to this one:

Here are a couple more pictures. The more I read about it the more I gotta have it.

I found a better picture of the $350 (list) Nokia 770 Internet Tablet to be released this summer:

I was about to take a quick rinse-off shower before I started watching the movie because I could smell smoke from the grill on me from cooking my sausage. I was about ready to hop in when I thought I am going to take a shower anyway, I should go for a bike ride!

Last year we were walking through Blain's Farm and Fleet and I was intrigued with a rack of ANSI high visibility safety green t-shirts they had on sale. I tossed one in our cart not really having an idea of what I was going to use it for, but just thought it was cool. Well it is the perfect thing to wear for nighttime riding.

I put the safety green t-shirt on, tossed my cell phone, wallet, garage door opener, and keys in the trunk, turned on my LED headlight (thanks Sunny) and my red LED taillight, and started riding.

So far every bike ride we have taken we have headed to the east. The city has been working on a nice bike trail that leads into our downtown. Our closest point to the trail is about a mile west, so I thought I would go check it out.

After about a mile, and just about to the trail, I heard my cell phone ringing. I quickly stopped and unzipped the trunk and answered it. It was Sheri. So I dismounted, turned off my lights and took off my helmet and talked to her for a few minutes.

I was stopped in front of a 7-Eleven with a lot of traffic and across the street from some apartments. A group of four or five punks in black t-shirts was crossing the street towards the 7-Eleven. They were being jerks and just walked in front of on-coming cars and would yell and look tough when a car honked their horn. I thought great, here I am in a nice safety green t-shirt with my nice safe helmet on my nice brand new bike talking on my nice cell phone. I was directly in the path between them and 7-Eleven. They cut a wide path around me and didn't even make eye contact. I forgot that I look like a mean m*&%$# ^%@#!r with my shaved head! How fun is that?

After the call ended I mounted back up and continued on to the trail. When I got to the trail there were several rows of city signs saying the trail was closed. I rode past the signs about 50 feet and everything looked OK, but I figured with my luck a police cruiser would see me and give me a ticket or something, so I turned around and headed home.

Going back is mostly uphill, but it is very slight so it wasn't too bad. A headwind kicked up as I started back and I thought I was going to have a painful ride back, but it only lasted for a minute.

I rode 2.6 miles at an average speed of 8.7 mph, and my top speed was 20.5 mph. We had a little rain again before I left so the roads were wet, and a little spray kicked up and got my brakes wet. The first time I applied them I was a little startled because they made a loud squeaking sound and grabbed a bit. After that I just lightly applied my brakes to dry them off when I knew I had a stop to make.

Now I am going to take a shower, pour myself a tall cool glass of fresh iced tea, and settle in to watch Kinsey.

I did not expect the reaction I got from my sister and mother from my shaved head.

My sister said it "looks good".

Mom said it made me look "cute".

Go figure. I thought they both would absolutely hate it.

The reaction at work has been mostly positive, and Sheri thinks it is sexy.

After I putzed around the house for a bit I took a shower and then took a nice nap on the couch with CNN on in the background. I really do feel good after exercising, and one of the great side effects of exercising is great naps.

I woke up after an hour or so and tried a frozen chili and cheese tamale we got from Trader Joes. It looked great in the package. It was even wrapped in a real corn husk, but the taste was just average. I have definitely had worse tamales, I just had higher expectations for this one. The cheese didn't have much taste and I could barely taste any of the green chilies. The corn taste from the masa was good. Not great, but better than average. I also had a serving of plain yogurt with some Equal sweetener.

I decided I needed to get out of the house for a bit, and the other night I saw a circular in our mail from Tuesday Morning. I normally toss those in the garbage, but this time something caught my eye; they received a big batch of die cast Corgi toys at cheap prices. When I was a kid and we would go to the mall I would always go to the toy store while Mom and Dad shopped elsewhere. One of my favorite things to look at was the big Corgi display case they had with all of the cool cars, trucks, planes, construction equipment, etc.



I never had one as a kid, so I thought it might be kind of fun to pick one up now. So that's what I set out to do. That and get some gas in the car. I did not see one Corgi product in the entire store. Oh well.

After I got gas I was trying to decide if I just wanted to go home or stop somewhere for dinner. I thought about a hamburger and some chili at Burger King, but that just didn’t get me excited.

Sheri suggested earlier this afternoon that I should go to Bobak's. I think she meant for the buffet and that just sounded like too much food so I dismissed the idea. It started me thinking though that something on the grill might be nice, so I went to Bobak's after all.



I have always got their precooked sausages in the past, but this time I wanted fresh sausage. I went to that part of the store and got one pound of their Polish grillers.



Bobak's is a Polish store. They make good Polish sausage. They do not make good German bratwurst or Italian sausage. They both taste like Polish sausage with something wrong with it. If you go there get their Polish sausage. That's what they do best.

I put them on the upper grate so I could cook them slowly and not burn them or over-cook them.



They turned out perfect! Good fresh garlic taste with just a very slight hint of hot spice. Lean and juicy too.



I wanted to have a nice picture of a sausage plated with a little mustard and a little horseradish with beet juice. I put the two condiments on the plate while the sausages were still cooking. By the time I brought the sausages in the horseradish juice had spread all over the plate and just looked gross, but I took a picture anyway. It tasted much better than it looks. I ate two of them, and I will save the other two for lunch tomorrow.



The movie Kinsey arrived in the mail today from Blockbuster. I think rather than wait to watch it in two weeks with Sheri when she returns, I will watch it tonight, and then she can watch it when she gets back during the day when I am at work. I hope that is OK Sheri.

It sucks not having her around. I think I have been making a lot of posts because she is not around to keep me occupied. It keeps my mind going and gives me something to do. If you want me to write about something in particular just let me know.

As you may have noticed we have finally found a way of posting pictures on the web that is fast and easy, and as a result we are including more pictures in our posts.

We have only been using Sheri's Canon PowerShot S200. We have not touched our Olympus Camedia D-360L in probably three years. Her Canon has many more features; is smaller and easier to carry; and has slightly more megapixels, 1.3 vs 2.0. Her Canon also has an optical zoom. The Olympus has no zoom.

Anyway, with Sheri gone for a week or two, and she took the camera, I thought I might get a little anxious not being able to take and post pictures. I dug out the old camera last night, put the batteries in the charger, and took a test picture. It still works great! (Dad, you can see the two bags of perlite in the background from last summer!)

This is a picture of the sensor and the magnet for my bike computer. The magnet is the little round thing attached to the spoke almost in the center of the frame. The sensor is just to the left of it. The little grove on the barrel of the sensor is what you have to line up the magnet with. You can click on the picture if you want to see the original size of the picture as it was downloaded from the camera.

We have talked about in the past, and much more seriously recently, about getting a laptop PC. The main purpose would be casual browsing while downstairs watching TV or a movie, and in bed.

At least once or twice during any movie we watch a question will arise such as:

What other movies was that actor in?
What is that actor's name?
Where is the city/country/etc?

You get the idea.

Sometimes we also like to go to places like Panera Bread or a local coffee shop that has free Wi-Fi to kill a few hours on the weekend.

Now that neither one of us has a work-laptop to bring home on the weekends we have been thinking about it a little more seriously.

You can get a model good enough for internet surfing for $800 - $900. Still a lot of money, but we are heavy enough users of the internet that it would be worth it.

Well, just this week an announcement was made, by of all companies Nokia, that they are going to release the $350 wireless 770 Internet Tablet this summer. That is all it does. You can use the internet and check your e-mail. You cannot install any other software like games, spreadsheets, Quicken, etc. You will be able to load MP3 files and listen to internet radio stations and watch movie files.

It is only 5.5" wide by 3.1 inches tall. It is 0.75 inches thin! It could slip into your back pocket. The screen is 800 pixels by 480 pixels.



I am thinking this might be all we need for what we want to do. The one thing I hope it will accept is a USB keyboard so I if I want to type a lengthy e-mail or a blog post I can use a keyboard rather than scratching it out with a stylus. If the average web page is legible and the text is not too small and smushed up when I look at a floor model this summer we will most likely get one.

I will probably write about this again as I find out more details and as I consider purchasing one.





(Sorry about the lousy pictures. They were all I could find on the Internet right now.)

The weather radio just sounded an alarm for a severe thunderstorm warning. The sun disappeared. And I just hear the first drops of rain hitting the window now. I guess I won't be cutting the grass today. At least I got a bike ride in.

I had another good ride. I rode 12.1 miles and my average speed was 9 mph and I was in motion for 1 hour and 20 minutes. My top speed was 23 mph coming down a hill on a residential street. One of these days I want to break the speed limit on my bike! Just three more mph's.

I love my bike computer. It is a good way of pacing myself, like spacing out water stops every two miles. I also love the trunk. I don't have to carry anything in my pockets. I highly recommend both.

There are very strong winds here today and that made it more difficult than usual. The headwinds made the nice flat straight-aways, were you can normally do some nice comfortable peddling, feel like I was going up a fairly steep hill!

At one point near the dog park I saw a little sparrow-sized bird sitting in the middle of the trail. It didn't move when I whizzed by it just a few feet away. I turned around and the bird was still sitting there. It was a baby robin that was really lost and confused. When I started going towards it to scoop it up to safety, it went to hide in the shadow of my bike. Poor thing. I scooped it up and walked it about 30 feet away from the trail's edge. I didn't want a playful dog to turn him into a chew toy. It started chirping like crazy as I set him down. I don't know what that was about because he hardly made a fuss when I picked him up and was carrying him. Good deed for the day. It also reminded me that I didn't pack some hand sanitizer in my trunk like I said I was going to after the last trip.

After 8.5 miles I found a picnic table under a shady tree. I made a couple of phone calls, flipped through the paper, had a Luna Bar for brunch, and zoned out a bit watching an Indian family getting ready for a big party under a park shelter.

I heard one of the kids tell someone else that he thought all of his uncles would play cricket so he was going to get the cricket stuff set up. I wanted to stick around and watch them play because I have never seen that, but I didn't know how long it would be before everyone showed up.

After 20 minutes of sitting at the picnic table I walked my bike over to a restroom, walked my bike inside, and used the toilet. The restroom was wheelchair accessible so it made wheeling my bike inside easy.

I then walked over to another larger shade tree far away from the party shelter, laid down in the grass and used the newspaper as a pillow. Heaven! My back was bothering me a bit so this felt really good. I took a rest for maybe 10 or 15 minutes.

I had to walk the bike up two hills on the way home. I think I could feel an improvement in my thighs from last week's trip. I guess every trip my biking muscles will get more developed.

*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!
[Possibly TMI (pronounced "Timmy") after this point.]

The first few times I rode my bike, even though it was for just a mile or two each time, when I got back my man-business felt funny. Numb and tingly. I noticed that Sheri's saddle had a cutout down the center. Did they put a men's saddle on hers? I switched saddles and my junk felt totally fine after this week's ride and last week's ride.

So if you are a guy I highly recommend one of the new seats with a cutout. I am still researching them, but I think a good name that keeps popping up is Terry. I am looking at the Liberator Y Gel or the Liberator Y Saddle.

Liberator Y Gel
$70 List
Performance Bicycle has it on sale for $55.


Liberator Y Saddle
$60 list
Bike Nashbar has it on sale for $45.

I am going to saddle up and go explore some trails.

I am going to start where 79th Street intersects the west side of the Main Trail and go counter-clockwise.

At the connector trail on the north-east side of the loop I will cross Greene Road to the Valley Trail and head clockwise.

At the bottom of the Valley Trail I will cross over to the Oak Spur trail.

After I explore that I bit I will back-track and head home.

I am thinking about strapping the newspaper onto the trunk and if I find a nice bench maybe sit for a bit and enjoy the paper.

If any of the mentioned trails turn out to be grass rather than crushed limestone screenings I will not ride them. To much rolling resistance.

A couple of "action" shots that Sheri snuck while we were at the zoo on Monday.

In spite of tonight's flood of posts I am not procrastinating doing anything, I was just feeling "posty".

Since Sheri does not have a work cell phone any more I ordered one for her this week. I currently have a phone from T-Mobile that costs me $30** a month; includes 350 anytime-minutes, and unlimited weekends.

For an additional $20 per month we got a free Motorola V188; we share 500 anytime-minutes, and we get unlimited weekends and now unlimited nights. We also get unlimited minutes if we call other T-Mobile subscribers. So when we talk to each other and we are both on our cell it won't count against our minutes.

**All prices quoted do NOT include fees and taxes.

I am giving up coffee and Diet Coke/Pepsi cold turkey. I will still drink iced tea for now though. I expect the caffeine withdraw headaches to start in earnest on Saturday and probably last until Monday.

I knew I have been drinking way too much caffeine lately, but yesterday I could feel my heart fluttering for a couple of hours. I have had that happen before, but it usually only lasts for a minute or so. Last night about every third beat it would flutter. After a while it decreased to a flutter maybe every five or six beats, and then went back to normal.

I am continually on a caffeine roller coaster. The pattern is that I get to a point where I am drinking way too much caffeine and decide to stop. I go cold turkey and stay away from it for a couple of months or so.

Then one day, usually at work, as a reward for a job well done, I will have a delicious Diet Coke, and really enjoy it.

The next day I will remember how good that Diet Coke was and usually near the end of the day decide that just one can won't be bad and I will really savor it. But no more than one can.

The one-can-per-day routine usually lasts about two or three weeks. Then I move to two cans per day, and stay at that level for another couple of weeks.

After that I rationalize if I am already drinking two cans a day, there's not much difference between that and three cans per day.

Then one rough Monday morning I will think that a nice hot cup of coffee would really do the trick, and I will just give up my three Diet Cokes for that day and I will call it even.

This slow increase of consumption continues for several months until I am getting acidy stomach, too hot, or in yesterday's case, heart flutters. Then the whole cycle begins again.

On Sunday Sheri and I got out the clippers and shaved my head clean to show our support for Linda.

I didn't tell anyone about it until now because it was done for Linda, so I felt she should be the first one to see.

I just got an e-mail that she received the print in the mail and it brought a smile to her face.

My bike computer arrived in the mail at work today! The first thing that struck me is that it is much much smaller than I thought it would be from the pictures I looked at. This is a picture from their website:



Because there is nothing to compare it too I expected it to be about the size of a digital kitchen timer.

For comparison, this is what it looks like in my hand:



Big difference.

I have already installed it on my bike and it works great. It is really clever how it works. There is a sensor that gets attached to the fork. There is also a small magnet that gets attached to one of the spokes on the front wheel. You have to position everything so that the magnet passes five millimeters from the sensor.

A wire attached to the sensor gets snaked up the fork and then along one of the brake cables to the handle bar. At that end of the cable is a bracket that gets attached to the handlebar. The computer can slip in and out of the bracket easily so in case you are going to leave your bike locked up in a public place you can just slip it into your pocket.

Before you can use it you have to enter the outside circumference of your tire. In my case it is 205 centimeters (80.7 inches or 6.73 feet).

Every time the sensor detects the magnet passing by it knows that it has just traveled 6.73 feet. Remember the elementary school equation rate x time = distance. The computer knows the distance of one revolution is 6.73 feet, and because it has an internal clock it knows how long it was since the last time it detected the magnet. Therefore, to calculate your speed it just divides the distance by the time of the revolution.

So the 9.73 feet circumference of the tire is equal to 0.00127381094696970 miles.

If it takes the tire 0.5 seconds to make one complete revolution that is the same as 0.000138889 hours.

Finally 0.00127381094696970 miles / 0.000138889 hours = 9.2 mph!

It doesn't matter where along the spoke you attach the magnet even though it will travel faster the farther away from the axle it is placed. This is because it will still take the same amount of time to make one revolution no matter where along the radius of the wheel it is placed. Pretty clever, huh?

I get about $0.75 of enjoyment everytime I see a bright yellow finch on our thistle sock. The five pounds of thistle, plus the included sock, cost about $10. Therefore, after seeing just 14 gold finches the thistle paid for itself!

Wow! SBC just announced a great offer today on DSL internet service.

If you order from the web it is only $14.95 per month for thier 384 Kbps - 1.5 Mbps (1,536 Kbps) service.

For comparason a good dial-up connection is usually about 50 Kbps, so the DSL is at least 7.5 times faster than dial-up.

We just finished up watching The Aviator about Howard Hughes. Good movie. Lots of stuff I didn't know. Rent it, but make sure you have the time to watch it. It is three hours long. We watched two hours of it last night (Monday), and the remaining hour tonight.

We saw this piece of work at the zoo on Memorial Day.

An excerpt from an e-mail from my sister regarding my nephew Shawn:

He talks about you often - sometimes just out of the blue like when he said "Can we go to Chicago & ride the trains with Uncle Brad?".

Awwww……

Sheri claims she does not like ham.

Every time we eat a HoneyBaked ham, though, she says "I don't like ham, but I like this."

Today when she said it I asked her if maybe she likes ham, but she just doesn't like bad ham. When she thinks of ham she thinks of an overly salty dried out grisly piece of meat that has been left in a buffet chafing dish too long. She thought about it for a minute and then, I think, somewhat agreed.

She has had two whole (unusual for her) ham sandwiches since yesterday evening, and while we were out this afternoon she kept talking about getting home so she could make another sandwich. I guess she likes ham now.

Something I forgot to mention. The trunk that I picked up at the bike shop on Friday is expandable. There is a zipper that unzips and the main storage compartment almost doubles in size.

I was going back and forth on if I should get that one or just the normal one. I was thinking that I really only needed it for a few small things: wallet, cell phone, garage door opener, etc. But in the end I decide it was better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

Anyway, when we left the house Sheri was a little cool so she wore a jersey jacket. By the time we got to the dog park the sun was out, we had exercised a little bit, and Sheri was too warm for her jacket. We unzipped the expansion zipper and her coat fit in perfectly! It still had room for a few more things. I love it. I highly recommend a trunk. It makes it very convenient.

This is the expandable one I got for $39.99:



And this is the regular non-expandable one I was also considering for $27.99:

I didn't take my GPS on our bike trip, and I don't have the bike computer yet, but the best I can figure is that we rode about 9 miles today, and it was a lot of fun!

I topped off the air pressure in our tires before we left to about 60 psi. Sheri filled up both of our water bottles with water and ice and put them in their cages.

Sheri has only rode about a mile or so before this morning and has never had a bike with more than one gear before, so the first mile or so we rode through some residential streets just getting her used to shifting and when to up-shift and down-shift.

The trails in the forest preserve are mostly crushed limestone screenings. It feels different riding on this compared to paved roads, so we spent a little time going slow to get her used to that feeling and finding out how fast she can take sharp turns without the tires skidding out from under her.

We stopped for a drink and a few pictures after about 2.5 miles.





We kept riding north until we got to the dog park. We sat on the bench right in front of the gate where the dogs enter and leave the dog area so we could say hi to all of them. We also had our breakfast here: we split a Toasted Nuts and Cranberry Luna Bar and drank some more water. The sun felt good and we enjoyed watching the dogs so we sat there for about 20 minutes.



The dog park is on the northish side of the forest preserve and there was just a little bit more bike trail to the north of us so we thought we would continue north to see what was there. When we got to the end of the forest preserve the trail kept continuing along a busy road. About two miles down the road is a Dominick's grocery store with a Starbucks inside. We thought we would ride there, have a coffee break, and then backtrack home.

At one point Sheri shifted funny and threw her chain. Fortunately I was able to put it back on without any tools. It only took a minute.



The two miles there are mostly uphill. It was tiring, and we could have made it, but the sky started looking threatening, so we decided to turn around about halfway there and go home. The air started to feel different and cooler.

We stopped a few more times on the way home to because our thighs we getting sore, especially after climbing hills. You can't really see it in this picture but Sheri has a lot of color in her face:





We got home without getting rained on. We sat down for a bit and each had a HoneyBaked ham sandwich and a couple glasses of iced tea. I am going to take a shower now and then we are going to run some errands.

My back has been giving me problems for about the last two months. The last few bike rides I took my back would be hurting pretty good, which seemed weird since it doesn't seem like an activity that would be especially stressful on your back, even if it has been sensitive.

I had my handle bars in their highest position. Before this ride I lowered them, which also shifts them forward a little bit too, and my back did fine. It started hurting just near the very end of our ride, when we were just a few minutes from home.

We are getting ready to take an early-morning bike ride through the nearby forest preserve to the dog park!

You can tell when I am trying to put off doing something, like cut the grass, when I make post after post after post after…

I am going to cut the grass before the rain is supposed to get here at noon.

Then after I shower up I think I am going to pick up a HoneyBaked ham for the holiday weekend.

Last fall Tim and Lisa dropped Shawn and Dauber off with us, and then went into Chicago to get a hotel room and spend the weekend seeing the Christmas lights. As thanks they gave us a HoneyBaked gift certificate. I have been saving it for a special occasion, but that just meant that it was hanging under a magnet on the fridge. I thought a nice three-day weekend would give us plenty of ham-eating opportunities.

I actually planned on getting it last night, but I ended up going out to a buffet for lunch with my boss, and I knew I wasn't going to eat much for dinner, so I decided just to wait until today to pick it up. My reasoning: there is a small chance that the retail store would have received a fresh shipment of hams between yesterday after work and today when I go to pick it up, and therefore might get a fresher ham. Probably not, but oh well, that's the way my mind works.

Thanks for being so thoughtful Tim and Lisa!

(The Blogger.com spelling checker suggested "henpecked" as a replacement for "HoneyBaked". Hmmm, HenPecked Ham?)

Important!

There is an updated version of the excellant free Ad-Aware anti-spyware program now available on-line. We run it daily both at home and work.

1. Click this link.

2. Click the "Download Now" link on the page that opens.

3. Click the "Run" button on the dialog box that appears, and then follow any on-screen questions that appear.

If you have an earlier version of Ad-Aware it will ask you if you want to uninstall it. Answer yes.

Mom and Lisa both liked the picture of Sheri and I at the Cubs' game and asked for a copy.

So first I sent them a link to the original 1,600 x 1,200 high-resolution copy of the image so they could print it out any way they liked.

After I did that I had the better idea of sending the image via the Internet to our local Wal-Mart store's photo department. I did that, it just takes a couple of minutes, and then I was going to pick them up this weekend and mail them to Toledo.

Then I had an even better idea: I sent the image via the Internet to their local Wal-Mart's photo department! It worked great. I just called Mom and told her that she could pick up the prints at their store after 10 AM yesterday. She showed up and they were waiting for her. No hassle.

We bought a cheapy frame at Wal-Mart last night and I am going to take one of the prints to work. I don't have any pictures or personal stuff at work, so I need at least a picture of the two of us on my desk.

By the way, in case you were wondering, I took the picture of the two of us, not someone else. You can see my arm extending out of the left side of the photo.

I stopped after work to buy the bike computer I wanted, but I guess it is a newer model and they don't have it in stock yet. I told myself I wasn't going to settle for a different model if they didn't have the one I wanted, so instead I got a trunk for my bike rack. It attaches with four Velcro straps to the cargo rack over my rear wheel. This is what it looks like:



I wanted it because there are several things I like to take with me when ever I go for a ride, and it is too much to shove in my pockets. With the trunk I can just dump it all in there. I like to take:

Garage door opener remote
House keys
Wallet (for my ID in case I am found unconscious)
Cell phone
Bike tool

When I got home I ordered the bike computer online from Amazon.com.

For my little ride today I strapped my GPS to the trunk so I could see how far I rode. I went 4.74 miles and my top speed was 21.9 mph. My average speed was 9 mph.

When I got home I found Sheri in bed and she told me she lost her job today. What kind of boss gives someone the axe on a Friday, and especially the Friday before a holiday weekend? I always thought the classy thing to do was wait until Monday to do that. Oh well. We will be OK.

I am going to pick up a Cat Eye Enduro 8 bike computer this weekend.

This was the usher for our section today. He didn't take guff from nobody. I think it was the combination of his slick shades and his cool pencil-thin moustache. When he took breaks he would remove his sunglasses, but when he returned to his post the shades went back on. His name is Warner.