Chuckay - Part 1

Chuckay – Part 1
The month long celebration of all things Chuck got off to a very good start on Saturday with a lunch with Doug at the Original Tommy’s Hamburgers in Westminster, California and not England.

We had planned to meet for lunch around 1:00 PM. Doug called me because he got to the parking lot and I wasn’t there. I got delayed leaving school after my morning because a couple of students wanted to talk to me about the course and some of their other class work. One student who is not part of the class wanted to talk about her plans for her immediate future after graduation in a couple of months.

Doug had a double chili cheeseburger and fries and a Cherry Coke for his lunch; he was eating on the light side since he was doing something last night. I had a Mega Combo, a meal I have two or three times a year. It is, by any reasonable measure, sheer overindulgence.



My niece the Nutritionist would be horrified if she saw me eating a triple chili cheeseburger with chili cheese fries and a large regular Coke. She might say that the Mega Combo might be appropriate if one was getting ready to run a marathon or other long distance race.

The Original Tommy’s used to pour only Pepsi Cola or at least they have been for as long as I can remember. I guess Coca Cola made the company an offer that it could not refuse.

I had talked to Doug about my thought of stopping at Giuliano’s on the way home and picking up a small salad for my dinner last night. He thought it was a good idea; in the end, I decided to pass on the stop because I properly reasoned that it I went into the delicatessen I would end up buying a rich chocolate dessert. That made no sense to me after the meal I just finished. It was still settling in my stomach.

Excellent decision Chuck.

Visitors
We had a much better month for visitors in April. We had a total of 2,980 visitors for the month; this is the fourth best month for visitor traffic. The page view count was even better. The blog had 4,586 individual page views. This was the third best month for page views. Last week, we had 636 visitors to the blog.

Visitors are coming from around the world to the blog. This is good. The blog had one visitor who logged in from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, home port of the Great Pacific Fleet.

BZ shipmate.

I do appreciate all of you who stop by and spend some time with the blog.

My Friend Sunny
If you recall, I recently spent some time helping my friend Sunny with her term paper for one of her classes. I don’t do very much now to help Sunny. Mostly, I work on American idioms and punctuation. I made some style changes to make the paper reflect modern American English instead of the classic English she learned from a textbook in China. The paper was an interesting one about how income and job status affect happiness for Chinese citizens.

Sunny’s English writing skill has improved tremendously since she came to the United States for graduate school. She writes better than some of my students who are native born English speakers and writers.

Since I was such a big help to Sunny with the paper, she asked me to help her revise her job search cover letter. Since I teach an advanced writing course that features writings used in finding a job, I was able to help her. Sunny had done a good job and only needed a little help with the organization.

I hope Sunny is very successful in finding a job in America and won’t have to return to China.

Lexmark International Call Center – Part 2
I had the occasion to dial up the Lexmark International Call Center on Friday because my printer suddenly stopped working. Naturally, I hoped that I would end up with Darleen. I wasn’t that lucky.

Kath helped me through my trouble.

Kath was excellent.

She found the problem quickly and it was not with the printer or its software either. The problem was with the Norton Internet Security software program. The firewall function decided on its own to stop allowing me to send a file from the laptop to be printed on the Lexmark printer.

This struck me as being really odd and out of place since there had been no known changes to the system between the time I printed out a document and when I wanted to print out another document. I think the elapsed time was no more than fifteen minutes.

Kath had to take control of my laptop in order to fix the problem. It is eerie to see the cursor move about the screen while your hands are in your lap.

I really appreciated her effort and I ended up leaving a voice message for her supervisor that praised Kath’s skill and ability to solve my problem.

I hope Kath gets some recognition from my message.

This and That; These and Those
The Prelude rolled over to 355,000 miles on my way to class on Saturday morning. I didn’t see the odometer actually roll over to 355,000 miles because I was driving fast on the freeway, there was very little traffic on the freeway at the time and the sun was in my eyes as well. I knew it would roll over on my way to class.

I wore one of my Tommy Bahama silk shirts to class on Saturday. On Saturdays and during the Summer, instructors get to dress in business casual. I also wore pants and shoes as well. One of my female students thought I looked cute in the shirt and she suggested that I ought to wear it more often. This is me in the Tommy Bahama shirt.


I am finally joining the social networks. I signed up for LinkedIn after one of my former students sent me and invitation to join. I have a Facebook page but I don’t use it very much; hardly at all if you thought about it.

I am thinking about starting another blog to comment on the financial meltdown and banking. It seems to me that there are a lot of people out in the ether of the Internet who think they know the causes but have never been a banker themselves. That strikes as me as being foolhardy at best.

Anyway.

That was my weekend.


Be well and stay happy.