A Queer Mobile

Oof! Back from more business travel

I spent all last week at a customer's site working on requirements for a new system. O'Hare shut down for hours on the way out. I finally slumped into my hotel room at 2 am, vowing never to travel again. Actually not: I hung out with another traveler on the flight: fellow comrades against the airlines. I did wonder out loud, though, when Virgil would appear to escort me out of whatever ring of hell I managed to wander into. Sigh.

The business itself went very well indeed, but I managed to catch another round of the creeping crud. So I've been moping around home while my head drains. I'm better than yesterday: today my ears aren't bugging me. At least I didn't get sick until I got home. Flying with this sort of cold is sheer agony...

A ship's chandler's box

John gave me this most interesting gift: a re-creation of a ship's chandler's writing box. Open the brass latches and crack open the box to find this array of writing tools. There are inks sealed with red wax; a glass pen; two wooden pens and a variety of nibs; three sorts of wax sealing stamps; red sealing wax; and  a small brass bowl and burner for melting sealing wax and pouring it onto a finished envelope for sealing.

I'd never used a glass pen before, so I pulled out some good paper and had at it. The experience is very smooth, surprisingly. The brass nibs, though, aren't so easy to get used to. They're more than a bit scratchy - very different from my modern fountain pens.

Apple pie for my birthday

Birthday pies are the tradition around here, and John put the finishing touches on my birthday apple pie yesterday afternoon. "Pies aren't tarts," he says. "A pie should be thick," holding his fingers at about the inch-and-a-half mark. He pulled apples we'd been hoarding since the last Farmer's Market in October.

He'd asked me about a week ago where I wanted to go for my birthday. We always go out for Valentine's Day, and I'm taking off on business tomorrow morning. So I opted to stay home, cook, and have some of our good friends come over. I made a tomato and saffron risotto topped with grilled shrimp.

Here's hoping your V-Day was as nice as ours

John got me a mountain of chocolate and I got him some Blu-ray discs for our new gear. He always gets me an assortment of every variety of chocolate that our esteemed local chocolatier, Bochner's, produces.

We just got back from Blend, one of our favorite local eateries. They do a prix fixe dinner for V-Day. We were ecstatic. I had filet perfectly prepared on a bed of Roquefort-flavored potatoes; he had a pork tenderloin on hand-made mushroom ravioli. Yum!

So we got into serious trouble with gear...

I promised John I'd get a new HDTV and associated gear once he finished refurbishing the Annex this spring. For some crazy reason a week ago I headed over to Crutchfield's website to see what was new - only to discover that Sony had a sale on HDTVs. John and I had already agreed on the unit we wanted - a 52" XBR4 LCD TV. Lo and behold it was discounted about 12%. So I screwed up my courage and plunked down my credit card for the gear - the TV, a Blu-ray disc player, and a new AV amp. The equipment's been dribbling in over the past week.

John had the great idea to call his brother Jay to see if he might want our old TV. He whisked it away last Saturday just before the latest blizzard hit.

John dug out several times yesterday. This is what it looks like around here, by the way. We're completely covered - with six foot high drifts where we've shoveled the driveway and walkways clear. We don't have places to put any more snow. More  is arriving on Valentine's Day...

Anyway, the truck delivering the TV was delayed yesterday because of weather. The poor driver called to say he'd be by about ninety minutes late - right about when we were eating. John had made a vat of vegetarian chili and he whipped up his mother's cornbread recipe, too. We were chowing down and warming up from the day when the truck arrived. John and the driver wrestled it in while I cleared the driveway to give them access.

Inside it set up like a dream - and it was ice cold. We let it warm up for two hours before we turned it on. Then the fun - if you can call deciphering Sony's manuals fun - began. This new setup uses HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) to connect all components. Sony's also redone all the interfaces to use a menu-based programming setup. It's not bad to use, but it took quite a bit of getting used to.

Once we had it, we pulled out a Blu-ray disc we'd bought and our mouths dropped open. We watched BBC's Planet Earth as our first foray into the new system. The experience was completely eerie: the picture as if we were looking through a window onto a real landscape.

So we're having fun - when we're not freezing in the back room. The back room is the only one we didn't insulate when we remodeled, and it doesn't have very good airflow from the furnace. Things will be much better in the Annex - but nothing can happen on that until we lose all this snow!

The creeping crud creeps out

Partly why I've not written much lately is that we've both had the creeping crud: the long lasting cold and cough that's been making the rounds of late. For once, I'm not the one who infected us. John got feeling lousy about two weeks ago - lousy enough that he actually stayed in bed for a couple of days. I was hoping that maybe I was immune to this one, but I crashed the following weekend.

It's taken a good week or so, but I think the crud has crept on out. Because of my asthma, I'm pretty aggressive about doing everything I can to get rid of upper respiratory tract infections. My old doc's advice came in handy again: I take a big pot with a bit of water in it, start it boiling, and make a big tube out of aluminum foil. I then breathe steam for about fifteen minutes. It actually works much better than cough syrup for me.