Happy May Day!

I'm back home again, arriving late last night after seeing Nancy enroute in Minneapolis. She's on one of the currently-fashionable low-carb diets (South Beach?) so dinner was at a steakhouse... despite rush-hour there, and a weeks' frustrations, just being with her helped me unwind and feel renewed. It's great when it works!

And other good news... my dad is slowly recuperating from his lung biopsy, and was moved yesterday from the ICU to a regular hospital room. :)

This week, I've worked on a proposal to take our drilling automation to field tests in 2006-08 in Siberia and the Antarctic. Dry-drilling without lubricants is Mars-analog, but is also aseptic if precautions are taken... this is good for coring samples containing several-million-year-old frozen microbes in permafrost layers in those regions.

I've also done something this week that I hadn't in two years... read a novel in just a few days (a Harry Turtledove alt-history novel). I'm just too busy, or too-online, to slow down and find time for pleasure reading. Prior to this week, I'd read a total of 1.5 books in 2004 to date...

This weekend... no plans, other than p3aches's graduation BBQ tomorrow and taking Kevin to his Little League games and invited birthday parties. The kid has a more-active social life at age 7 than I do! Maybe this would be a good weekend for kitchen-renovation, or dropping off the old dishwasher at Dreamland....

Hard to find *anyone* like me, heh.

(meme from mactavish ;)
Currently on okcupid, after answering over 400 of their questions... my top-ten matches are mostly all people I've met... no lovers, but some friends: basmati, karenbynight, vvvexation, xaosia (unknown LJ), questioner, lysana, cortneyofeden, mactavish, eeyore_grrl, and rosefox. I've met seven, and six are already on my LJ list...

The computed match percentages range from 85-81%... so I doubt that I'd show up anywhere near the top of these folks' own lists (most people seem to have more, higher-percentage matches... hey, I'm just weird, OK? ;^). And my "worldwide" list is even lower, starting at 80% downward...