On the Fourth

Hope everyone enjoyed their holiday weekend. I even managed about a ½ day off. Unlike Ann and her crew, I did not go to any stinking parades. It was 95 degrees down here, and the idea of standing around watching a group of people too dumb to find some air conditioning (participants and spectators included) wasn’t my idea of a good time. I started off by watching Stage 3 of the Tour de France while eating lunch. After that ended, I read for a little while. Then at 3:00, I watched Germany & Italy in the first World Cup semi-final. That one ended horribly (in my mind) when Germany gave up 2 goals right at the end of the 2nd overtime to lose 2-0. Based on who’s left, I no longer care who wins this thing. I can’t pull for Italy, Portugal, or France (though Zidane and Henry are fun to watch). That’s OK though, as it allows me to focus on the Tour.

During dinner, I watched the first couple innings of the Yankees-Indians game, which almost made dinner come back. Shawn Chacon looked terrible. New York ended up losing 19-1, and I didn’t watch anything after the 4th inning. It was that bad.

The good news here is that this gave me time to continue reorganizing/cleaning the house. You see, after 6+ years in the same place, I felt like I was running out of room to put things. This was only partially true, as some of that space was used for empty boxes. I got rid of a lot of those (along with the Styrofoam packaging inside them) over the last couple weeks, and I can now see all the walls of all my closets. I also discovered that I have 4 boxes full of old Sports Illustrated issues and 2 boxes of old Newsweeks. Those are now gathered and labeled so that I can find them (if needed).

You’ll be happy to know that the parents seem to be coexisting pretty well now that they are both retired. Mom has yet to really feel the motivation to clean her office, but so far Dad is demonstrating some patience about that. We are currently unsure how long that patience will last. My guess is that she’ll need to make some good progress by September or Dad will be getting rather anxious and irritated.

I know I still need to post about the end of my trip when I visited a couple of people. Maybe this weekend. All this cleaning, trashing, and reorganizing has got me behind on a number of things, and eventually I should get caught up, since I’m not too far from done. I still need to get into my closet, but the downstairs closet is done. The office closet is just about done, and I’ve almost emptied all the junk I’d been storing in the dining room. Shortly, I may even breakdown the three empty boxes currently sitting in my living room, waiting to be filled with something.

Other than that, can’t say I have any other exciting news to report. Still working at TNG on a consulting basis, but I still have feelers out on other stuff as well. Nothing really happening there yet, though. If something changes, maybe I’ll put it up here. Or maybe not.