A Teaching Schedule Finally

A Teaching Schedule Finally
I do have a teaching schedule for the next term. I guess the school still likes me as an instructor. I thanked the Associate Dean for the schedule. He gave me four classes. He was surprised when I mentioned to him that I must be his Super Utility Instructor since I have taught 22 different subjects at the school over the last three years.

My schedule includes a night class, Composition II, one that I had asked for this term; and three days classes, Group Dynamics, a new course for me, and two sections of Professional Procedures. I did not ask for the Professional Procedures course.

I am glad because I only have one new course to prepare for this term. That will make my Spring a bit easier.

Perfectomundo.

One of the instructors was putting on a bitter and angry act on Monday night. He had only been given one class to teach. He was complaining about the unfair deal he received. He probably picked up the minimal assignment because he doesn’t follow the school’s standard curriculum.

I know enough about office or school politics to know that you have to be a team player and follow the game plan when you work in a regulated industry like education. Education, in addition to the state and federal governments, is also regulated by the accreditation agencies which is almost the same as a government agency.

I don’t complain or grouse and moan. I accept my assignments without complaint. I will help out at the last moment when another instructor cancels out.

Excellent for me.

My Students
As most of you know, I do not write very much about my students. I do this because they are with me for only a few months and then I get a new set of students.
Anyway.

On Tuesday, one of my students who I have been helping a great deal with her self esteem, life planning, and writing told me that her family was going to have a large graduation party with all of the relatives for her.

Good family.

Then, she said that she wanted me to talk to the family about her for twenty minutes or so.

I was obviously very surprised and honored by her request. I said I would, all other things being equal, be glad to talk for about maybe for about five or ten minutes. She was disappointed but agreed that ten minutes was a ice time length for me to talk about her to her family.

I think this is more about her self esteem than anything else. Having a college professor, that’s how I will be introduced; talk about how good of a student she is will act to validate her self worth in her eyes and those of her family and help raise her self esteem.

Haircut or Styling
I went to see Molly the Stylist today. Today was my regular appointment.

Molly was quiet beside herself at how good my hair looked when I arrived at the salon. She was very pleased with the job she had done about a month ago. I was fairly shaggy and had rather unruly hair that grew out from the December cutting. I was pleased with the appearance of my hair.

I asked Molly what she thought of my moustache. I told her that I was surveying the women in my life about whether I should keep it or cut it off. Molly was surprised at my choice of words but understood my meaning when I said that I have been seeing her regularly for going on a year. That qualified her as being a woman in my life.

I told Molly that I will ask Dr. Karen and the Princess as well.

Molly said the moustache should go.

I decided to give Molly an avatar since she doesn’t like to have her photo taken. As some of you may notice, this is from the set of avatars that Dr. Karen selected hers from. Molly has some incredibly attractive blue eyes and so this one seems to be the most appropriate.

Tihana the Barista
I finally caught up with Tihana the Barista today on my way home from seeing Molly.

I hadn’t seen her or had one of her most excellent ice blended drinks in probably a month or longer. I thought that I had either just missed her on Wednesdays, the day I used to stop by the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf for my drink, or that she was no longer working at the Bean.

It turns out that I was wrong on both counts.

Tihana has a new schedule at school and has classes on Wednesdays now. That explained a great deal because she greeted me with a big smile and a very friendly, “where have you been hiding?” greeting.

Now, I will be going to the Bean on Thursday afternoons since Tihana thought she would be there for the middle of the day.

The large ice blended was perfect this afternoon. I almost finished in my drive home; a distance of a little over a mile. I did miss some lights so I had time to sip while I was stopped for a traffic signal.

Perfectomundo.

Visitors
The blog’s visitor count grew last week to 525.

Excellent.

It was difficult to tell if the traffic was coming from the United States or from Europe because the Sitemeter counter only tracks the most recent 100 visitors. With sometimes 70 visitors a day, I lost my ability to measure where the visitors are coming from.

In our constantly changing world, it is always wonderful to discover that some constants still exist. The most popular page by far is January 1, 2007. The last time I checked the page traffic; this page had about 82% of the traffic.

I do appreciate all of you who stop by the blog from time to time.


Be well and stay happy.

Fooling Around withTechnology

Fooling Around with Technology
I was fooling around with technology over the weekend. I hadn’t planned to spend part of my weekend fooling around with technology.

I did anyway.

I went to Best Buy to cash in some frequent spender points, mostly for the purchase of the flat screen television last year. I picked up some relatively inexpensive speakers and hooked them up to the laptop’s docking station.

Now, I can hear what is going on.

Whether that is a good idea remains to be proven. Currently, I am listening to Amazing Grace CD by the Pipes and Drums of the 48th Highlanders. Interestingly or not as the case may be, the 48th Highlanders are a Canadian regiment, having been formed in 1891.

If I really wanted to get moody, I would be sipping some single malt Scots whiskey.

Not being or feeling moody, I will just drink my Arizona Tea Company’s Arnold Palmer drink instead. I like the taste and it is healthy for me since it made with green tea. I suppose that a nutritionist might argue that the corn syrup in the drink was not all that healthy for me.

I also picked up my copy of Turbo Tax 2008 so I could complete my state and federal income tax returns. Something for me to do during the week long break between terms.

Paulina Garces
Paulina Garces is my favorite used car television infomercial host. I have written about how much I enjoy watching the program even though I can only pick up a word or two since the hostesses tend to speak Spanish much faster than I can comprehend it.

I never knew her name until today when I was channel surfing this afternoon as I am prone to do since there is no American football on television until the Fall. I figuratively stumbled across Pauline Garces doing an infomercial for a Direct TV reseller; but, I could be wrong.




What caught my attention was the first image of her was a full length shot. I think it is called a full length shot; Doug would tell me if he or his friend Robin were here. Pauline was wearing a pencil skirt that ended up below her knees and a long sleeved blouse that was buttoned up.

Wowie kazowie.

The infomercial went on and flashed her name with her image.

Excellent.

I went to her web site, http://www.paulinagarces.com and downloaded a few images of her. If you feel you need more, you can go there on your own. You can also check out some videos clips if you have the time.

I didn’t have the time because I had a corporate balance sheet to analyze so I could help one of my former students who is in another finance course.

More Technology Dinking
I have been running IE8 RC1 for a couple of weeks now and frankly, I really like it. It loads pages much faster than IE7 and seems to be more stable even if this version is the RC1.

So far, I have only found one flaw and it borders on insignificant. The icons in my Favorite’s List page are continually being mixed up. For example, the Area Code website that I use from time to time now is sporting the logo of Western Digital, the manufacturer of my external disk drive.

I find this to be slightly annoying. I have gotten into the habit of searching my Favorite’s page by the icon, assuming the site has an icon that IE will recognize. I hope this will get fixed when the final version comes out.

Visitors
Traffic at the blog improved last week.

We had 323 visitors which was a dramatic surge from the recent prior weeks. Yesterday, we had 127 visitors to the blog. I have noticed a significant uptick in visitors from Europe as well.

One of the most significant factoids is that the visitors are falling back into their old patterns of going to the pages that feature the models. This is hardly earth shattering news to anyone who has followed the log over the years.

I do appreciate all of you who stop by the blog.

Teaching
Well, it is now Week 11[end of term week] and I still do not have a teaching schedule for the next term. I would like to be able to plan ahead a bit. I have a weekend trip to Salt Lake City in April to plan for example.

I have been told by some of my current and former students that I have been listed on their student schedules as their instructor for one of their classes. So far, I have been told that I will be teaching Composition II and Consumer Behavior, two classes that I have taught before and one new class, Group Dynamics.

Three classes are nice since this coming term is usually the lowest in terms of student enrollment. Having typed that, I would really prefer to teach four or five courses.

Last night, I counted up how many courses that I have taught at school since I started in 2006. I was surprised to see that I have taught 22 different courses at the school. I did not realize that I was that versatile.


That was my weekend gentle readers.


Be well and stay happy.

Yawning

Yawning
I seem to have suddenly become very tired this afternoon.

Granted, I did not a great night’s sleep last night. I think I only slept for six hours and that was the most I could have slept. My actual sleep time was probably closer to five hours. Obviously, I will be going to bed early tonight. Thankfully, I can sleep in tomorrow morning so I will be fine on Thursday.

I still don’t have my teaching schedule for the next quarter yet. I had spoken to my department chair yesterday evening about the schedules. He said that an email was supposed to be sent out today. So far, I haven’t seen it. There is always tomorrow and I have to be at school for my evening class.

The Disney Channel is shooting a made for television film in the park next to my building. The film is called ZEKE AND LUTHER and is about two teenage skateboarders. As I told Doug, I don’t think I will be watching this film when it is broadcast. He agreed with my assessment. We did get a minor laugh at how the park has been re-titled for the film. It is now known as “Ape Mountain Resort.”

“Ape Mountain Resort” is hardly a logical or fitting title since the park is maybe 200 feet above sea level and it is in the middle of the city. But, this is all about make believe so I guess the Disney Company call the park what it wants to call it for the filming.

I must be tired. I feel asleep or dozed during a Lakers basketball game tonight. I definitely need to go to bed.


Be well and stay happy and, in my present case, sleep well and dream better.

Footnotes from the Weekend

Not Everyone Was Dry
I managed to stay dry for most of the weekend. I did get a little wet when I was out and about. Fortunately for me, the storm that had the weather news readers peeing in their pants seems to have been a bust as far as I could tell.

I did wake up in the middle of the night when the wind was blowing rather strongly through the trees that are next to my building. All I could see in the morning was a few more branches were blown to the ground. I certainly wasn’t going to get up out of a very nice warm bed to look outside in the darkness

Visitors
We did a little, make that a very little, better with the blog’s visitor traffic last week. The traffic count got up to 49 which is a modest improvement.

Now would be an excellent time for a “band of brothers” speech to encourage greater viewership. Regrettably, I am not that good of a writer and I know I could not come anywhere near to close to Shakespeare’s writing.

I do appreciate you, you happy few, you band of readers that come to the blog and take time from your days.

Footnotes from the Weekend
I finally got a chance to see the Spanish language car commercials on the big screen television over the weekend. There is nothing interesting about the new or used cars in the commercials. The only reason I like to watch the commercials is because they feature young women in short skirts and low cut blouses. Some wear boots and some wear four or six inch high heeled shoes.

The two women I saw doing the commercial were representing a Nissan dealer. It is more like an infomercial since it runs for thirty minutes. I think it was an older commercial since it was sunny when it was filmed.

The sun has been a rare commodity here in Southern California lately.

I did enjoy their demonstration, if you will, of the cars’ features. I also enjoyed their ability to balance and walk on their high heeled shoes. I will probably tune in next weekend if I am at home.

I was not very active over the weekend. I did enjoy sleeping late, even after taking a nap in the afternoon. I did manage to do some marketing and two loads of laundry.


That was about all there was for my weekend. I hope your weekend was better.


Be well and stay happy.

Me and the Cancer

Me and the Cancer
I went to see Dr. Karen today. It was overcast and gloomy and rainy but that did not dampen my spirits. I was in a good mood today.


We had what has become our routine visit. I write down a bunch of questions that I think or sometimes Doug thinks of between visits. This way, I am certain to get all of my questions answered. Dr. Karen is used to seeing me open my composition book. Some of my questions have become standard ones by now.

My tests from last week were all normal for example. Dr. Karen did say that my potassium was on the low end of the desirable scale. I had run out of bananas the day before the test. Dr. Karen wasn’t as concerned then.

I wanted to know how the CT scan went. I also wanted to know if she had ever tried some of the contrast or dye liquid. Karen said that she had not. I encouraged her to give it a try and take a sip. She will probably hate me for suggesting the taste testing if she ever does go through with the testing.

Anyway and more to the point, I wanted to know about the two lesions on my liver. They were the focus of the scan. Karen said that my lungs were clear. This is obviously good news especially for me since I lived with heavy second hand cigarette smoke for about twenty years or so until my mother stopped smoking.

Karen said the lesions were still the same size as they were a year ago. This is good news for me because it means they are probably not cancerous since they haven’t grown.

I asked Karen about the idea of a lesion biopsy to once and for determine if they are cancerous or not. The biopsy was suggested by another doctor who filled in for Karen on my last visit. Karen liked the idea of the biopsy as well. She wanted to check first with a radiologist about conducting a biopsy. Later, Karen came back and said the lesions were too small for a biopsy.

Curious, I asked just how big the lesions were. Karen said one was four millimeters in diameter and the other was six millimeters in diameter. Together, they were both a little less than one centimeter in diameter. The sounded nice and small to me. I converted the lesion size from millimeters to inches and found out they were less than four tenths of an inch in diameter combined.

Nice.

I had been thinking one night on my way home from school about the tumor remnant that was left inside in October 2007 when Dr. Takahashi removed the bulk of the tumor and part of my colon. I was stuck in traffic because of an injury accident and I knew that I wasn’t going to be going anywhere fast. I asked Dr. Karen what happened to the remnant.

Karen said that the tumor remnant had been behind my left ureter when the operation was completed. Now, she said that the doctors could not see it on the CT scan or the MRI. She thought it might have been dissolved by the Oxaliplatin – Xeloda chemotherapy procedure.

That works just fine for me.

Dr. Karen said she wanted to schedule another CT scan in a couple of months just to make sure everything was fine. Since I am not scheduled for any biopsy or other surgical procedures in the near future, Karen put me back on the Xeloda regimen. I don’t really like the regimen since I have to take seven pills a day. But, I will take the pills because they are helping me and Karen asked me to do that.

I had my vital sign taken as usual at the clinic visit including my blood pressure. It was on the high side 141/83; probably because I hadn’t taken my daily medicine for blood pressure yet. I usually take the medicine at breakfast but I overslept and had to skip breakfast.

One of the nurses said my blood pressure was up because I was in a room full of nurses.

I went along with the thought line. I said that I referred to this appointment as my date with Dr. Karen and the Nurses.

The same nurse corrected me and said that it should only The Nurses.

Fascinating thought.

I’m fairly certain she was joking with me although there is one nurse who is very interesting to me. I will have time to explore that idea since I will be back at the clinic in three weeks.

I wonder if the comment was only coincidental or intentional because St. Valentine’s Day is tomorrow.

More fascinating thought.


Be well and stay happy.

Middle of the Week Break

Middle of the Week Break
Here it is Wednesday and the week is almost half gone.

Perfectomundo.

I do have a class tomorrow night to teach. It is a small class of only four students, most of who have been in my classes before. That plus there are only two weeks left in the term and Week 11, the last class session, is only for a final exam and course project presentations.

Speaking or rather typing about school, one department chair mentioned to me that I may be scheduled to teach a class on group dynamics for a section of her students. It would be a medium sized course of thirteen students. If this comes to pass, it should be interesting because it is unlikely that I have had any of the potential students in one of my classes before and it will be the first time that I have taught the class before.

Teaching classes for the first time is nothing new for me. Three of my five courses this term were new to me.

One of the other instructors and I were talking yesterday about teaching assignments for the next term. The other instructor said he thought I would be teaching a lot of courses because there is a lack of instructors who can cover a wide range of subjects. He also speculated that I would get the call to teach because the academic administration doesn’t have any problems with me.

I come to school regularly and start and end classes on time. I get good evaluations from my students and from the department chairs. I don’t whine or complain or argue about the class assignments. I am flexible and cooperative.

Using a baseball analogy, my friend compared me to a long reliever. I come in and put out the fire. The administration knows that I will deliver a quality product on time, every time.

I have already had about a dozen current and former students asking me what classes I will be teaching next term. I guess they want to be in one of my classes if they have the chance.

On Monday night, I had three former students come into my classroom because they missed being in my class and wanted to talk to me. They also said they hated their current instructor.

That made all of the dull and boring hours spent on preparation and research and reading and grading their papers all seems very worthwhile for me.


I had my CT scan on Monday morning.

I survived the experience. For the most part, it was not as bad as the first time. The hospital had a new flavoring in the dye liquid that I had to swallow. It still tasted unpleasant but I did not gag on it like I did the first time.

I do like the scan because it is quicker than an MRI scan. The CT scan was over in about three minutes while the last MRI took close to twenty minutes. Best of all, you get to stay much warmer because the CT scan doesn’t require heavy duty air conditioning to operate the equipment and freeze the patients.

I will get the results of the CT scan on Friday when I see Dr. Karen


I stopped by Gloria’s ice cream and frozen yogurt store on my way home from school this afternoon. Gloria wasn’t working so I only had a single scoop of chocolate ice cream. I did add some chocolate and caramel sauces to the ice cream. I ate in silence and that was fine with me.


The holiday weekend is shaping up to be one where I will stay inside. The tentative forecast is projecting rain, starting tomorrow night and that will make the drive home from school less than fun, and continuing on into Monday.

I can get caught on all of my teaching administrative work. I can also do some laundry and a little cleaning around the flat. I am go see the movie CORALINE over the weekend.


Be well and stay happy.

Rainy Weekend

Rainy Weekend
It looks like I will have a rainy weekend. Rain is much better than snow for driving.

I don’t have any plans for the weekend that will require me to wear anything more than a clean but unironed casual shirt and jeans. Sunday is my day to go to the market and no one dresses to go to the market.

Excellent.

I went out and picked up some address pages to go inside of my old address book. The address book is fairly pathetic looking. Calling it a disaster is being charitable; I have taped its spine several times. I think I have enough blank address pages to last me for several years; maybe even longer. I have even received some replies with information. Now, all that I have to do is enter all of the addresses.

Last Sunday, I tuned into a Japanese language television show called The Rookies. It ought to last another forty to fifty weeks or longer. I will probably become a regular viewer. The plot line looks simplistic and linear. The show is about a high school teacher who has to overcome a personal challenge while facing a professional one at his new school. The title makes sense since the program revolves around a disgraced high school baseball team’s redemption.

The show has some good points. Since it is set in a Japanese high school, there are lots of scenes with females in school uniforms with short skirts. Two of the teachers are young females; one of whom knew the central character at their prior school. The other female teacher dresses as if she was on her way out to a late night party and appears to have a somewhat trashy reputation. This teacher has shown some interest in the central character in the first episode so I expect that one of the subplot lines will revolve around whom the central character will want to be with and the competition for his attention.

While I was watching the high school show, the station broadcast previews of a samurai drama that will start this Saturday. The samurai drama looks promising and I will tune if only out of curiosity. This drama will probably last a long time as well.

One of the benefits of these dramas is their long broadcast life. If I happen to miss one episode like I will in February for the limited Douguary dinner and the one in March when I visit the Princess in Seattle, I can always catch up quickly.

Perfectomundo.

I had one of of those annoying warning lights go off in the Prelude on Thursday night.
I took the Prelude into the Honda dealership on Saturday morning to find out what the light meant. The service advisor said one of the brake lights was out. It was a USD$2.00 light bulb but I didn’t want to run all over town looking for one and then trying to figure out how to put it in.

Since I was at the dealership, I had them put it in along with changing the oil in the car. It did need an oil change. I killed the waiting time by reading the paper and reading one of my new course textbooks.

I watched the samurai drama last night. It is set in the Warring States period in the 16th century. I recognized some of the lesser but historical characters’ names in the episode. This comes from watching several of these historical dramas over time. I feel confident that Tokugawa Hideyoshi, I think I have his name right, will appear towards the end of the series.

They series is called The Helmet of Love. I’m not certain how that will fit into the overall scheme of things. I just don’t see a match up with the period and the concept.

I left my self control and discipline home when I went to the market this morning.

While I avoided buying some brie cheese and a sourdough bread loaf, a healthy combination when the brie cheese is melted over the sourdough bread with a dab of Dijon mustard, I lost all control when I was in the frozen food aisle. The store was having a sale for their private label ice cream with a buy one cartoon, get one cartoon free promotion. I picked up a cartoon of chocolate truffle ice cream and a cartoon of coffee chocolate chunk ice cream.


That was what passed for my weekend. I hope you all had a good weekend.


Be well and stay happy.

Researching the Lost Ones

Researching the Lost Ones
Today was visitor traffic reports from Sitemeter.com day.

The month of January was worse than it seemed to be. We had 1,909 visitors to the blog. That was a nice number but not in comparison to December when we had over 3,500 visitors. This last week was one of the lowest in blog history at 36.

The Asian visitor traffic has held up fairly well. It is steady with a good geographic dispersion. I have never had much of a following in South America and I still do not. Europe was where the big falloff in traffic has been. I think I only had two or three visitors from Europe.

At one time, in January in fact, I had wondered which I would reach first; 1,000 blog postings or 50,000 visitors. Based on how the volume was tracking, I was thinking that I could hit both by the middle of the year.

Obviously, that is not going to happen.

I am at blog posting 902 [this one]. I have a chance of reaching 1,000 posts by mid-year. 50,000 visitors is a dream for me.

Other Stuff
It looks like I will have a quiet weekend. I have no tutoring or mentoring sessions scheduled.

Oh holy irony Batman!

I just received a promotional email from Palm with offers to purchase a new Palm PDA. After my last experience with their Z22 model, I don’t think so. I have adopted a simple pocket calendar that only requires me to turn the page to the proper date and a pencil to record the activity. No batteries to replace or recharge and it is Y3K compliant already.

Perfectomundo.

Doug called today to check in on me. He hadn’t spoken with me in a couple of days and wanted to know how I was doing. I told him that things with me were pretty steady and quiet; not too much happening in my life at the moment.

Of course, my life could get very complicated if I find a female companion. After all, I did get a comment on my Friendster page from a young lady in the Philippines who looked young enough to be too young for Doug to date this morning.

Please do not ask me why I have a Friendster page; it is a very long, long story.

I found out that my photo on the Friendster page had been viewed at almost 40 women.

I also found out that people want to add me as a Friend and I have never even had an Instant Message chat exchange with them. Maybe there is some status with or among Friendster members by having lots and lots of Friends.

Fascinating.

We are having a light rain today. It will rain enough to make the roads really slippery and mess up the finish on the Prelude. It will be cooler, 60F or 15C.

It’s Southern California. This is Winter for us.


Be well and stay happy.

Minor Catastrophes and Other Events in My Life

Minor Catastrophes and Other Events in My Life
I had a minor catastrophe happen to me over the weekend.

My Palm PDA, a Z22 model, failed. It just plain and simple died on me for no apparent reason. Thanks to the brilliant design work by Palm, I cannot open the case to see if it is a simple repair or not. The Z22 was a little over a year old.

I lost all of my address information except for some old backups that are paper based. Those will not be much help for me. I will have to collect the addresses again and place them in Outlook. Outlook can be backed up and exported to offline disks and drives.

I just do not want to go through that effort again. I would rather sleep in the sun instead.

The Z22 was made in China; not a surprise by any measure.

But, I am developing a feeling that Chinese quality control is something of a joke or a suggestion.

Failure after a little over a year of use that consisted of sitting on my desk is really poor. The Z22 replaced my fourteen year old Handspring Visor that survived much harder use including being tossed about in suitcases by airline baggage handlers. I had to replace it because the Visor was not compatible with Windows Vista and Palm had no intention of writing a software upgrade.

After transferring my address data, the Visor went off the old electronics recycling center and its final reward.

Then, I purchased a scale at Walmart after the surgery in 2007 that was made in China to “an American company’s exacting standards.” It consistently registers me as being four pounds lighter than the scale at Dr. Karen’s clinic.

I guess that I can kiss “exacting American standards” apparently good bye.

So much for quality control and this doesn’t even begin to take into consideration what happened to the baby formula and the shoddy school construction in southern China that lead to the deaths of thousands of children.

This is now the eighth week of the school term; only three more weeks to go. Week eleven is for final exams and project presentations so I don’t have to prepare any lecture notes for those classes.

Next week, I ought to get a hint at my schedule for the coming term. I hope to be teaching four or five classes. I should be teaching at least one writing class and that will make me happy. I think I am developing a reputation at school of being a very good instructor and one who will work with his students to help them succeed.

This was not a bad start of the week for me; all things considered.


Be well and stay happy.

Time to Get My Act Together

Time to Get My Act Together
I really need to get organized. I need some order and discipline in my life. Oh, I am organized in some respects; I’m just not as completely organized as I should be.

Anyway; tomorrow is only a day away.

I had another tutoring session today. This was much, much better than the first session. My student is more confident of her work and how she is progressing towards completing. She has about fifteen or sixteen pages completed so far; I offered some suggestions on how she could compress what she has written into a fewer pages. This would be good.

We meet at a local Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf because it is convenient and I like the coffee there. Today’s decaffeinated coffee was from Columbia; it was very smooth and rich. It was also perfect with the Dunkers cookies that I brought along. My student loved them and decided to not share any with her boy friend. She said they were too good to waste on him.

Mostly, all we do at these sessions is talk about writing and her project. I felt very good because I was able to bring some insight into the thesis this morning.

Visitor traffic to the blog has fallen off of the cliff. This week, the blog had 46 visitors. Life happens and there is not too much that I can do about the traffic decline. Doug said at lunch today that I shouldn’t worry about the traffic. It is what it is which is true.

I guess that I am bothered more by the sudden drop of visitors who I believe are young men and wonder why they would, all of a sudden, stop want to see young women in bikinis. There has to be a rational explanation.

Doug had a good explanation. He suggested that my images had been posted a long time ago and that Google was picking up more recently posted images of the same models and actresses. Since the newer images are displayed first, mine might be missed.

Oh well.

This is certainly not the end of the world for me.

Doug and I had lunch at Albertacos on Saturday. I think this was the first time that I have been there I at least six months and probably longer. It was good to be there again.

We both had a Number 8 Combination with a medium drink.

I had expected Albertacos to be crowded on Saturday. It usually has been when we have gone there in the past. For a change, we were able to walk right in around 1:00 PM and place our order. There were plenty of empty tables and that was nice.

The big discussion item for us was where to hold the traditional Douguary Dinner. It looks like we will be going to a new venue. Doug wanted to try Wolfgang’s Steakhouse in Beverly Hills; this means traffic and parking will be ugly on a Saturday night.

We also agreed to try a new hamburger restaurant, The Counter, that one of my friends had recommended to me. Doug had already been there and liked it. The big draw for The Counter is that you can choose your own ingredients for your hamburger, down to the sauces that go on it. I think we will be there for lunch after my next tutoring session.

My big Sunday adventure was downloading the new Internet Explorer 8, Release Candidate 1. This is the next version of Microsoft’s web browser. I have been so feed up with IE 7 that I was willing to try the RC1 version.

I do like the RC1 version. It loads much faster than IE7 and that was reason enough for me to keep. It does have a feature that requires you to re-enable most of your downloaded plug-ins from IE7 instead of overwriting the older version and keeping all of the plug-ins. Once I figured this out, everything ran very smoothly.

The new version seems to have dropped the open web site tab system. I thought the tab system was annoying and bothersome. This new version is a substantial improvement in my mind. IE8 seems to be more stable with Widows Vista; maybe I haven’t used it enough to know any better.

Oh yes, I did watch the big American football game today. I was not a fan of either team so I just enjoyed the game and some of the commercials.


That was my weekend.


Be well and stay happy.