(annoyed look)

When a long-time friend (best man at my wedding) sends me an unsolicited link to yet another website demeaning Southerners... this time portraying an ostensible trailer-park beauty contest in Mississippi. Along with the fake buck-teeth sales. Grr. Just because I live in California nowadays doesn't mean that I've somehow become other than who and what I was when he met me... and he ought to know that that stuff annoys me, after this long. Shucks, that's probably *why* he sends me that stuff, just to get a rise...

Heh. If he keeps dissing Mississippi and making bad-teeth jokes, I ought to unleash a certain sweetie on Rob to wreak her fury... that'd make his hair curl even more.

avoiding termites

I feel like my teenaged son, in one sense... it is raining outside and there's not much to do. "I'm borrred!" (golden stapler) "Watch out for termites, then!" Boredom... I wonder myself why I took vacation time this week. Yesterday I spent the afternoon working at home... on a long-overdue impact crater journal article, while patgreene took the kids out. At least Pat and I joined a group for a birthday dinner for p3aches last night -- then went home and fell asleep watching PBS documentaries.

No plans for this week, at least not until NYE. I'd hoped to be more social, or seeing friends, or taking the kids skating... and working on home improvement, but I can't sand and stain outside when it is raining. I'm having less contact with friends and partners this past week than I normally would -- let alone having more time. People seem busy, off doing their own holiday activities... at home my kids keep playing their new video games, so the noise and visual distraction there flushes me out of the main living/dining area. My refuge is my tiny bedroom in the garage, which is unheated but at least no one's loudly zapping ogres or dodging banana peels.

Retail therapy... browsing stuff on eBay... I lost an auction for a pair of Raiders tickets for next weekend (I'd have given them to Pat, to invite someone else, anyway) but won auctions for a half-dozen salvia (ornamental sage) plants. The ones we already have along the front walk are practically the only landscaping there that hasn't withered. Not that I can plant anything in this weather...

look, Mom, no hands!

Well it isn't perfect, but this speech recognition system, isn't horrible either.
I'm going to try to use this system to assist me with my over due geophysics paper.
There will probably be lots of typographical errors, or word this matches, but it will be easier to capture the meaning now and go back and edit the words later.

And it seems to work better than expected in instant messaging, which opens new possibilities....