Memorial Day 2011

Memorial Day 2011
As we enjoy the Memorial Day during the 150th anniversary of the start of the greatest American war, the Civil War, we should be mindful that liberty and freedom are never free. They were provided and always will be provided by veterans.


Be well and stay happy.

Memorial Day Weekend

Feeling bummed out
I was sort of feeling bummed out.

I was working on the laptop this morning when the Word program froze on me. It wasn’t the first time this has happened. Most of the Microsoft programs and Firefox seem to stop responding from time to time. I shut the program down and restarted.

When I restarted Word, I discovered that I had lost about fifteen pages that I had written over the last two or three days for my attempt at writing a novel. I felt that I had written some nice work in those pages. It shouldn’t have happened, I have the auto save function enabled in Word and I manually save the document whenever I leave it for an extended period.

Later, I found that I had created two copies of the document, the last chapter in the second novel, I had been working on. I clicked on the regular file where the lost pages were. After searching the hard drive, I found the other file with the missing pages.

All was not lost; just misplaced.

Perfect.

Chuckay Dinner
I celebrated my birthday with Doug and his mother. As usual, we went to Morton’s the Steakhouse because I love their beef. Morton’s also serves my favorite single malt Scot’s whisky, Lagavulin.







The meal was very predictable. It was excellent.

I had a small steak. Small is a relative term, eight ounces is small at Morton’s.

Doug had a whole lobster. He had the kitchen take all of the meat out of the shell for him. I think takes away part of the enjoyment of cracking the lobster open and digging the meat out yourself. I did that when I went to Seattle for the Princess’ birthday.

Doug’s mother was caught in a quandary; she loves prime rib and she loves lobster. She was having trouble making up her mind. I suggested that she order both and take home something leftovers for Sunday dinner.

She said it wasn’t on the menu.

I said that if she asked our server to have her dinner that way it could be done.

Our server said excellent and asked how she wanted the prime rib cooked. No problems at all.

She had a lobster tail and a giant slab of superb prime rib. It was close to two inches thick. It was her dinner for Saturday, Sunday, and the following Monday.

We shared a Morton’s Chocolate Cake for dessert. We managed to finish less than half; Doug finished the balance off.

13 Assassins
Doug and I went to see the Takashi Miike samurai film 13 ASSASSINS as part of the month long Chuckay Festival. We both loved the film.

The cinematography was excellent. Some of the images and long shots were simply stunning and breathtaking. The best part of the film was the ending; a twenty five minute long sword fight. I particularly like the use of English subtitles in the film instead of dubbing English.

I can highly recommend the film to those who enjoy this genre. It is on my list of films to acquire.

Shameless Joyriding
I went out for a shameless joyride in the MINI today. The weather was not the best but the freeways weren’t very crowded. That was a good trade off. I started out with the top down and drove for about an hour until the weather changed.



The temperature was falling and I started having raindrops fall on the windshield. Fortunately, I was traveling on a freeway with light traffic so I could pull over and put the top up.

It’s Memorial Day Weekend. It shouldn’t be even misting in Southern California.

Anyway.

The top up and the heater on, I finished off my drive. It was a fun way to spend almost two hours.


Be well and stay happy.

Happy Birthday to Me

Happy Birthday to Me
Yesterday was the 66th anniversary of my birth. I didn’t celebrate very much; I had two classes to teach at school. That was the day after I taught two classes at school on Friday.

I bought donuts for my morning class. I also bought a donut for one of my fellow instructors. She has developed a taste for chocolate so it was a chocolate covered chocolate donut. My friend thought it was perfect.

Excellent.

The afternoon class got a birthday cake. I would have loved to have purchased a double layer chocolate cake with chocolate icing but that would have been way too much for me. I exercised what passed for restraint and picked out a chocolate mousse cake instead

There were no candles for several reasons. First, the candles might have set off the fire sprinklers. Second, there wouldn’t have been any room; it was smallish cake. Third, the first candle that I lit would have burned out by the time I lit the last candle, leaving puddles of wax on the chocolate mousse.

Since I had two long days at school, I went to bed early and indulged myself further by staying in bed until 7:30 this morning.

Doug and I will celebrate next weekend with our traditional dinner at Morton’s the Steakhouse.


Molly the Stylist and Me
I went to see Molly on Thursday for my regular hair cutting – hair styling. I was in a good mood because I had been driving around with the top down on the MINI. I let Molly talk me into changing my hairstyle. I have parted my hair on my right side for probably fifty years or more.

Molly convinced me to comb my hair straight back and to hold it in place with some jell or goop in my words.

I thought I looked pretty good when I left her salon as I drove off with the top down to meet Doug to go see a film. I had my hat on so my hair stayed in place as the MINI and I raced along the 405 Freeway.

Doug said, “Noooooo, this is not a good look Dad. Put your hat back now,” when he saw my new hairstyle.

After the film, I drove back to the beach. I stopped at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf for a large ice blended. Tihana the barista said, “Grossie. What did you do with your hair?”

Her large ice blended drink was excellent.

My last stop was at Giuliano’s Deli for a sandwich for my dinner. I had skipped lunch except for a box of low food value candy at the film. Luci was one of the counter girls working when I walked in. I have been seeing Luci at the deli since she was junior in high school and now she is getting ready for graduate school.

Luci was on the blunt side. She said, “Oh my god Chuck, your hair looks terrible.”

I changed my style back to the original look after I had my sandwich for dinner.

Change is not always a good idea.


On Posting to the Blog
Doug and I talked about my time away from the blog.

Doug said it was fine to take a break from posting. It’s not a big deal and that resting is a good thing. After we finished that subject, I decided he was right and that I shouldn’t feel guilty about not writing.

Perfectomundo.


eHarmony and Me
When I joined eHarmony at the end of January, I thought I might get a few matches and that I might me someone who was interesting and was interested in me.

In a little over three and a half months, I have had over two hundred matches and no matches. None have gone beyond a first meeting. Of course, some of the women cancelled me out without even exchanging any information.

I had one woman yesterday cancel out on me before I even knew I was matched with her.

Oh well.

One of my students works for eHarmony. He gave me some suggestions about how to improve my match selection results by tweaking the search parameters slightly. Maybe it will work for me.

I have learned several things from my time with the program.

Matches with no photos are not a good sign.

Undated photos can be used to hide the truth.

Nice photo shopped head shots are misleading.

Women who say they love dogs but have a photo of cat in their gallery are untrustworthy.


The Month of April by the Numbers
The MINI now has just over 15, 650 miles and 43.25 hours of driving so far this year with the top down.

The blog had 151 visitors for the month who viewed 240 pages and 59,193 visitors since inception.

eHarmony closed matches stood at 200.


Be well and stay happy.