Weekend Update

Weekend Update
Well, gentle readers, here it is, the end of the week and the end of the month, a third of the year is gone. And what do I have to show for it?

That’s one of those rhetorical questions that no one is supposed to answer.

Anyway, moving along to some of the odds and ends of the blog site.

We had about 225 visitors to the site during April. This is not a great volume but it is up from a year ago and that, in itself, is rewarding. For any of you that are fascinated with obscure data, you can always click on the site meter button at the bottom of the blog page and see where your fellow visitors are located and other irrelevant information.

Our foreign site visitors this week, in no particular order, came from the Kuwait, the United Kingdom [two from old England], and Saudi Arabia.

I’m guessing the visitor from Saudi Arabia was lost in the ether. He or she wandered in here from Skeet on Mischa so you can make a conclusion that the visitor was seeing what the outside world was like or hopelessly confused or both. Or, possibly that the visitor was an American stationed in the Kingdom of Saud.

Lastly, we had one visitor spend an incredible 24 minutes and 25 seconds on the site, reading the blogs. I wonder what I said that was so fascinating to that person. One would think that after spending that much time here, the visitor could have left a comment or two.

Local Weather Forecast
I live at the beach as most of you know. Technically, I do not live right on the beach sand; that would be too expensive and too crowded in the Summer. I live about a 15 minute walk to the beach from my place. It is a 25 minute walk back because you are going uphill all of the way except when you cross a busy road, then it is level.

We have a local weather phenomenon of low clouds and early morning fog along the coast. Some days, it is so thick that it never burns off and we have over cast all day long. We call this “May – June Gloom,” wonderful name for it.

The seasonal gloom began early on Friday and shows no signs of letting up any time soon. I heard the morning weather forecast on one of our local television stations. It called for gloom all week long in the mornings and some days even into the afternoons.

The gloom sometimes gets into my blogs so if I sound gloomy, you can blame the weather.

Styrofoam Drinking Cups
I have an 18 ounce / 530 milliliter cup of decaffeinated coffee every day at the office. I don’t drink it down in a quick gulp or swallow; it is very hot coffee after all. I tend to take an hour or so to finish it off. This is the only coffee I drink during the day so I want to enjoy it.

Have you ever noticed how sometimes the liquids inside of one of these styrofoam cups seems to leak through, like the cup was sweating the liquid out?

I have noticed this over the last couple of days. This sweating got me to thinking as I was driving home the other day while I waited for the traffic signal to change. Should I be concerned about the sweating? Should I move some of the papers on my desk to higher ground? Should I worry about a massive leak and desk top flood? Should I drink my coffee faster? Should I transfer the coffee to my ceramic coffee cup that I have in my desk?

Am I making more out of this than is truly necessary?

Yes.

EASY RIDER Term Paper
I finished reviewing version 4.0 on Thursday night. It was a much, much better paper than version 3.0. Doug had followed some of my suggestions and the paper reflected a tighter focus and direction. It also flowed better. I made a handful of minor changes to it and sent it back to him.

Doug called me on Friday to talk about changes. I said the only other changes that he might want to consider would be to break up some of his page long paragraphs into shorter ones. He could also break up some of his three line sentences into shorter ones. I felt these changes would enhance the overall readability and strength of the paper.

Doug said that he would take a look at those ideas and see what happens. He said he may add a sentence or three on his section where he talks about the film’s music. This was an idea I had put forth earlier.

Doug said his last term paper was on SOUTH PARK THE MOVIE. This should be an interesting read for me.

Baby Shower
I went to the baby shower at the old office on Friday afternoon.

It was nice to see the people again. The office has a very nice practice of inviting former employees and co-workers back when they have a major celebratory event like a baby shower. I was very happy that they included me in the group.

I found out that I had spoiled the office with my donut Fridays. I used to pick up donut favorites for the women in the office; Lisa a cinnamon roll, LaTonya anything glazed, Evelyn an apple fritter, and Vivian a chocolate covered custard creme filled donut. All of those choices were calorie bombs.

One of the men sent out an email saying that he was bringing in donuts because he had achieved a milestone in one of his projects. Then, everyone sent him a reply saying what type of donut they would like.

He said he felt overwhelmed with the donut requests. He blamed me for this situation. I shrugged and looked for the jelly filled donut.

The baby shower was like most all baby showers.

There was plenty of food, probably too much food. There were some silly games to play and silly name tags to wear; mine was Rattle. I did not win anything. I did try to play the game but I got wrong answers to my questions in the guess whose name is on your back game. The names were all entertainment mothers. I had Julia Roberts.

Lisa wanted me to meet a former co-worker of hers who is a single female and close in age to me. I think she had visions of playing matchmaker. Unfortunately, there was no connection or spark. Maybe we were both too old for this sort of thing.

I think the gifts provided a good boost to what all the soon to be parents will need. Of course, you never have enough tee shirts and things like that because babies tend to be messy at times.

Count Basie Orchestra
I went to the concert last night by myself, Ms Flaky having excused herself on Monday.

I had expected that the concert would last about an hour and a half or so with an intermission around the fifty minute mark. To my surprise, the orchestra only played for seventy minutes and that was it for the night. I was on my way home buy 9:15 PM and back home by 10:00.

For some reason, the orchestra was honoring Duke Ellington last night and featuring a number of his songs in the performance and I am not that big of a fan of Ellington. This was a disappointment to me but when the program is just starting and you are sitting in the middle of the fourth row, it is difficult to get up and leave.

The band members were all very competent, professional musicians. They gave a fine performance. I just would have preferred a slightly more focused musical selection last night.

On balance, I did enjoy myself. I would have preferred a different arrangement but one can’t control too much when you buy your tickets well in advance of the performance and there is no opportunity to read a review since they were here only for the weekend.

Programming Note
I will finish the Weekend Update on Monday with the doctoral mixer at school this afternoon and an early Chuckay Event at Albertacos after the mixer for dinner tonight.

That was my weekend so far gentle readers. I hope you had a wonderful and productive weekend.


Be well and stay happy.