The operation was a success, and now my right eye works much better than it did despite the fact that it is a white hot ball of pain when the Tylonol wears off. The prescription antibiotic eye drops sting, and I hope the International Olympic Committee never finds out about the steroid eye drops, which also sting. The inner portion of my eyelid is a delightful shade of red that complements the bloodshot motif of the rest of the eye.

I really shouldn't complain. thirty years ago, I would be blind. Ray Charles went blind at a young age as a result of lack of treatment for glaucoma. I am not sure when the current method of cataract removal and lens insertion was started, but I am sure it was more recent than that. So, either the glaucoma or the cataracts would have left me blind.

I am grateful, but still pretty uncomfortable

Wednesday I will go very early to the outpatient clinic and have the cataract removed from my right eye, A year and a half ago, I had the same thing done to my left eye. I expect it will be a routine procedure, but if it is not, I will be the hit on Pirate Day.

In about half an hour, it will be nine years since I quit smoking.

I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving. We were invited to my niece's for dinner. It went very well, and we were home in good time to wind down and relax. This holiday weekend was one of the best: I have four days off, it is not my turn to take emergency calls, we got paid two days early, I have a few hours overtime, this is the payday for commissions (I got $186.00 in commissions) and best of all: I got a seven percent raise!

This morning we took the cat to the vet then went out to a lovely breakfast. Once the shopping frenzy was done, I went to the Aple store and bought my new desktop computer. I spent the afternoon cleaning the den and rearranging the cable and router wiring. I set up the Mac and now I am sipping a beer, and installing Leopard (Mac's newest operating system) I have Office for Mac and the printer driver to go, then everything will be done.

So, it has been another boring stretch since my last blog update. I have ordered a laptop from Dell. For my personal computing pleasure, I have made the switch to Macintosh. I have had quite enough of Microsoft, thank you, but the applications I use at work are very specific in their operating system needs. I have an old IBM Thinkpad running Windows 98 for use in the systems requiring a DOS base, and The newer applications will only run in Windows XP. The manufacturers will not be updating this software. When we asked about running them under Vista, they replied: "If you can get them to run in Vista, let us know how you did it." I do not plan to do their R&D for them. So, for the future, i will need a solid machine running Windows XP. Dell has them available for now, but in the future will more than likely phase them out.

I have moved my old Windows XP desktop into the small basement study, where it will mainly be used to back up work applications and sync my PDA. I am using my MacBook now, and once I get the reimbursement from the company for the Dell, I will be heading out to the Apple store to decide which Mac I will use for my new desktop.

See: you thought watching golf on TV and watching paint dry was boring. This little glimpse into the mundane and boring life I lead tops them......

The Incomparable Sunflower and I in the tree house on one of the trails at Arbor Lodge last weekend

Good evening friends,

On HBO FE tonight, I am watching "The Music Man"

I remember a night When My Mom and I took a bus downtown and ate at King Fong's Chinese Restaurant then went to the Orpheum and saw "The Music Man." We took the bus home and got an ice cream cone to eat on the walk home from the bus stop. This was my first Chinese food and my first pistachio ice cream cone.

Mom passed away seven years ago, and I miss her every day. I remember this movie outing like it happened last week. It was forty five years ago. I was nine years old. Tonight, I am up later than I should be, and I have had maybe more wine to drink than I should have, but I am remembering that night so long ago, and watching the movie through eyes oddly blurred........

Well, a couple of strictly routine weeks have gone by since my last attempt at writing the most boring blog in cyberspace. The fall weather here has been creeping in. Last weekend, we caved in to the inevitable and put the hard top back on the jeep for the winter. This weekend we will be making our annual tripp to Arbor Lodge. J. Sterling Morton (of the salt Morton's) lived in Nebraska City. He was the founder of Arbor Day. His property now has a large Hotel/Conference center in the middle of a working apple orchard. We go every fall as the leaves are turning for a calm, quiet weekend of walks through the surrounding forest, great food in the hotel restaurant, and just a general time of relaxation, quality time and renewal.

A month can go by so fast you hardly realize it has been that long since I bored you with my mundane life. Nothing amazing going on here, just normal activity. A couple of weeks ago Sunflower heard a loud crash in the night and woke me. Just as we got to the door, a neighbor from up the street came to get us. He had been walking his dog and saw a guy in a pick up truck hit our daughter's car then drive away. He had ran behind the truck for awhile and was able to get a partial license plate number, and had called the police on his way down. Sure enough, Anne's car was pretty badly damaged. The truck had been driving on the wrong side of the street and hit it pretty much head on, and the whole front end was mangled. Anne wa pretty upset. She had only had this car for a month, and had just pt the first license plates on it. It had less than three undred miles on it.

The next morning, Anne got a call from a detective. They had found the guy who hit her car. He had called the police to try to turn his damage in as a hit and run and when faced with the evidence, admitted that he had hit Anne;s car and left the scene. Anne was contacted by his insurance company and all worked out well.

So, it has been a couple of months since I have updated this blog. You haven't missed anything at all. Mainly, work has been real busy, and the weather has been hot. Sunflower and I spend our weekends going to estate sales. Lately we have been going to the City Botanical Gardens often just to spend an hour or two walking hand in hand along the trails.

The girls are doing well. Our younger daughter is talking about moving out at the first of the year leaving us with an empty nest. She had moved out for a brief period before, but maybe this time she will find a place she is happy. Our older daughter has a thriving practice and is making a nice living.

The weather is starting to cool off some, and the weekend is coming up.

Good evening friends,

It has been a real busy week, but what else is new? The Fourth of July hit in the middle of a crashing heat wave here. the day before, we noticed it was rather warm in teh house, and by Wednesday morning we had to admit that the air conditioner was blowing hot air into the house. My nephew is a technician for a local heating and air conditioning company. He was able to come Thursday evening and look the unit over. It is old, tired and worn out. We found that it was installed in 1974, so we really don't have a complaint. We have lived in this house since 1986, and it has done fine. My nephew charged it with some freon to get us by while he comes up with a new heat pump for us. he should be able to put it in next weekend.

In the meantime, the heat wave broke, and it is a very pleasant night. I am sitting on the patio with my trusty MacBook and a chilled glass of Eye of the Toad, a dry pinot noir rose from the Toad Hollow winery. I hope you are having a lovely evening too.

Henry, the maltese shi-tzu

SO, despite appearances I have not abandoned this blog. I have just been very busy. Work is as usual, lots to do and not near enouhg time to get it done.

Last week we were notified that my cousin's youngest son (23 years old) was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. The funeral is Wednesday. My cousin and his wife were able to arrange to pick the casket up late last evening. They were told the remains were "unviewable."

Decorum prohibits typing my response to this horrendus mess Mr. Bush has created for us.

Good afternoon friends,

So, another week has come and gone. It was amazingly ordinary. Work remains busy as usual. The girls survived yet another barbecue festival and returned safe, if a little hung over. The holiday weekend was one of unhurried relaxation. we went to a morning matinee of the new Pirates of the Carribean Saturday, then an early dinner at Ruby Tuesday. Sunday, the ladies took me out to lunch to celebrate my birthday. Monday we did some yard work. We planted a good sized holly bush and some lilies. After cleaning up, I cooked some steaks on the grill and we enjoyed them with a nice bottle of Bourdeaux.

Today it is back to work.

Just another beautiful evening, Sunflower and I have had the last few days off to celebrate our anniversary. The girls are in Memphis for a long weekend of drunken debauchery. We will pick them up at the airport tomorrow evening, We haven't really done much with our time off except relax. We have slept in, ate at our favorite restaurants, gone to the gym to swim, and caught up on some yard work. Tonight, Sunflower is in the recliner watching a movie, and I am sitting on the patio again with my trusty MacBook and a glass of really nice Zinfandel. Tomorrow we will have the last day of this vacation and then back to work Tuesday, Tonight, we drink wine and relax.

Good morning friends,

Thirty two years ago today, Sunflower and I were married. It has been a great thirty two years. I am sure the next thirty two years will be better

Good afternood friends,

I hope you are having a lovely day.

Sunflower and I slept in a bit, then got out for the day. It is an absolutely stunning day here in flyover country. We started by putting the top down on the jeep. We went to the City Botanical Gardens and walked the trails looking at the last of the early spring flowers and the beginning of the summer stuff.

We Drove to a small town a few miles away to visit Sunflower's favorite quilting store to congratulate the owner for her selection by Quilt Sampler Magazine for the fall 2007 issue's top ten quilt shops.

Back in town, we stopped at the mall and made a payment on our account at the jewelry store, then to Granite City for a delicious lunch.

We shopped around at the various garden stores and picked up a couple of flats of petunias. Sunflower is now distributing them among the various planters. I am doing the heavy lifting, but otherwise sitting at the patio table with my MacBook just enjoying the wonderful Spring evening.

How was your day?

Good evening friends,

Friend Roger, I am doing fine. Things have been pretty busy around here. For the last seven years, my largest client has been the local University. for the last few months, I have been working on a complete remodel of the Administration building fire alarm. During this time, they have gutted the old Engineering Building and done a complete asbestos abatement. I have a couple of spots in this building still reporting, and will start on the new fire alarm soon. Last week, I got a call from the facilities manager to meet him in the library. He wanted a quote to remove all 150 smoke detectors on the ground floor of the Library so they can jack hammer up all of the concrete and rebuild that level from the dirt up. The Radio and Television department need to be redone, and this afternoon they told me that the food court in the Student Center is to be redone starting June first. If no other new projects are started, I may catch all of this stuff up in a year or so. In the meantime, the non-University service calls keep coming in. Manny came back, and it looks like we are going to promote Bobby up from the mechanical dept to the Alarm dept. This means that instead of two weeks of twenty four hour on call and four weeks off, there will be eight weeks in between.

I took this as a temporary job twenty eight years ago.

Godd afternoon friends,

Not much has been going on here. The last couple of days I have been working in a plant that manufactures wheel bearings for cars. They have removed one of the eighty foot long tempering furnaces, and I had to pull out the fire suppression from the quenching oil pit. This was a couple of days standing ankle deep in evil smelling waste oil working with pipe and tools that were too slippery to hang on to. This furnace was the center of three, so I had to move one system to the other side of the plant to provide suppression for the far furnace while thw center one is being replaced. In a couple of months, the new furnace will be in and i will go back there, stand in ankle deep, evil smelling waste oil for a week or so to integrate all three furnaces into the same suppression system.

And who said this job didn't have perks?

Good evening friends,

It is a beautiful evening here in flyover country. I am sitting out on the patio sipping a glass of a lovely Spanish Crianza and watching the college kids start gathering at the house a couple of doors down for their regular Friday night party. in a couple of hours, one of my neighbors will call the police, and the party will be over. In the meantime, I am heading in to get ready for a great night's sleep. I hope the start of your weekend is lovely too.

Just posting a hello for friend spidey! ;o)

It was a lovely weekekend here. We didn't really get much done. We went to a few estate sales saturday and had a lovely dinner at our favorite Italian place. Sunday we went to church and then had breakfast in the park with Sunflower's brother and his family. This evening I cooked burgers on the grill. After supper I had to go to work for a little bit. That could have gone better, but I am home now and off to bed. I hope you all had alovely weekend too.

This morning, the service manager called me aside and told me that he has offered a job to Manuel. Manuel worked for us for about five years and left about the same time Ronnie did. He left due to difficulty with this same service manager. I trained Mannie in his first job, then again for the job to which he was promoted. The service manager kept assigning him stuff from his first job, so Mannie left to go with a competitor as an alarm tech rather than a mechanical systems installer.

The competitor has been bought out by a huge construction conglomerate, and the bean counters are now in charge. They are driving everyone over there crazy with multiple levels of petty managers who do not really understand the work we do.

It will be great to get Mannie back. He is good at his job, very dependable and easy to work with. It will also cut my time on 24 hour call from two weeks out of six to two weeks out of eight.

Everyone wins!

An amazing thing happened yesterday. Three years ago, I sold a car to a co-worker. Ronnie was goint to pay me $150.00 a payday until it was paid off, at which point I would sign the title over to him. Before he was finished paying me, he was fired. (very long and involved story) Ronnie went to work for one of our competitors. In the three years I have only seen him once at a funeral.

I have the pleasure to be probably the only technician in this area who knows how to do the root level programming for one type of system. Our competitors contract with my company whenever this skillset is needed. Yesterday, I was rented to the company Ronnie works for. When I arrived onsite, it was Ronnie there with the information I needed to enter into the system and he was to test this for his customer after I was done. Once the customer was satisfied, we were on our own. Ronnie handed me a check for the remaining balance of the car loan. I was astounded! I assumed that he would try to argue that he had paid me in full and that I had ignored his request for the title. (typical Ronnie style logic)

The check was good, and Ronnie stopped by the house after dinner for the title. Once in a while, people will really surprise you......

I have not been ignoring this blog. There just has not been anything going on worth writing down. I have spent the last week at the University working on the remodel of the Admin building. I got a call early last week from Security. there had been a small fire in the basement of the Engineering building and the people in that area wanted to know why the smoke detectors didn't work. I carefully explained that there are no smoke detectors in that area, they are all heat detectors. (Heat detectors do not react to quick smoky fires) I had a meeting with the guy in charge who cut me a purchase order to change the heats to smokes. The problem is that the space in question was originally unoccupied storage space. as such. the heat detectors are what is required by the codes in force when the building was built in 1964. Now, there are offices and studios for the campus broadcasting department down there. My contact is putting together some funding to pay for a complete remodel of the fire alarm in this section. This will extend the work I have yet do do at the University another month or six weeks. a coulple of years from now, if no more projects are proposed, i will catch up.....

It has been a busy week. Tuesday I drove to a ball bearing plant a hundred miles away and repaired the fire suppression system on the heat treat furnace. Yesterday I finally managed to get the Lincoln guys on the right track to finish the job they have been trying hard to lay off onto me. They have been looking for a programming solution for a wiring problem for a couple of months. I went down there yesterday and found the wire fault in about an hour. If they would have just listened, they could have had this system working back in January. The manager of the Lincon Shop will complain about the bill as usual, but his guys should have been able to find this without me.

Last night we went to a jewelry restyling event and I had the old diamond from Sunflower's wedding ring put into a nice pendant. My older daughter bought a new ring and had the stone from an older ring reset into it.

Today I have been finishing up odds and ends at work to enable me to get back to the university.

More boring junk later......

SNOW DAY!

The snow started about 5:30 this morning. It is now 7:45, and we have had more than three inches of heavy, wet snow on top of a quarter inch or so of ice I left the house ten minutes early to go to to work. I drive a four wheel drive pickup with a utility box. It weighs seven thousand pounds. I rarely have trouble getting around, but today I got hemmed in by traffic. I sat at the same traffic light for about fifteen minutes, then turned back into the neighborhood. I was getting lined up on an alternate route when my phone rang. It was the boss.

He slipped on some ice a couple of weeks ago and broke his ankle. He can't drive and he really shouldn't be even walking with crutches. He asked me where I was, and when I told him I was working my way into the shop, he said he couldn't get out. I told him I would come and get him, but he said to just head back home. The weather is awful, and it just isn't worth the risk. The places I need to go to today probably aren't open anyway, so I have been instructed to take the day off!

Cool!

One of my customers is a state agency that provides for the mentally handicapped. I was called to one of the group homes today to make a repair to the fire alarm system. I have a master key to get into all of these homes, and mostly there is no one there during the day. I stop at each of them and test the fire alarm twice a year.

In the basement, there is an area with a couch, coffee table tv and dvd player. Piled all around this are toy fire trucks, fire fighter's helmets and a surprisingly good copy of a fire fighter's bunker coat with the name Ricky on the back of it. Stacked on the coffee table are all of the movies with fire fighters: Backdraft, Ladder 49 and Towering Inferno. At various times the staff at this home have told me that Ricky spends all of his free time in this little corner of the basement wrapped in his fantasy world where he is a fire fighter, bravely rescuing people and putting out fires.

Today, after ten years or so, I finally met Ricky. He is a slightly built, balding man in his mid to late forties.......

Sometimes we do not appreciate the gifts we have.

The snowstorm seems to be over for the moment. I went out a couple of hours ago and cleared the drive. The news last night had a crawl across the bottom of all of the churches that were cancelling services. We decided to just stay in today. I am making beef noodle soup for my older daughter's birthday dinner, and there is nowhere we really need to go.

Another busy week behind and a quiet, lazy Saturday in progress. The weather has been pretty strange. It was raining softly when we went to bed last night. About three am, there was thunder and lightening. It rained real hard for awhile, then stopped. It has been raining on and off all day, and it will soon turn to snow. We may get up to eight inches by tomorrow afternoon. The winds will whip it into drifts, and travel will be horrible.

We paid attention to the forcast and did our grocery shopping Friday night, and we have no real need to go anywhere. We can just sit here, sipping hot chocolate and watching the snow fall.....

Weekends are way to short.

Our sundays are pretty routine. We attend Church with Sunflower's brother, his wife and their kids and we go out to breakfast at the same restaurant. Tony and his family are in Mexico this weekend on vacation. We went to the restaurant and sat in a small booth rather than a table for seven. This put us in the clutches of the oddest waitress in the place. The last time we had her, she brought us a loaf of warm cinnamon raisin bread and a ramikin of whipped butter. "You will really like this!" she said. It was pretty tasty, but strange to get food we didn't order. Today, I orderd an omlet with chorizo, cheese, tomatos, green onions, sour cream and salsa. Sunflower ordered corned beef hash and eggs. Sunflower was just deciding how she would like her eggs, and the waitress said, "I'll just tell them to give you basted eggs." (Sunflower usually likes them over medium) A few minutes later, she dropped off a pitcher of warm syrup. "For your pancakes," she said. (we hadn't ordered any pancakes) A short time later, our food arrived. It was delicious, as always. Sunflower liked the basted eggs with her corned beef hash, and my omlet was wonderful. The waitress brought us each a side order of pancakes a small orange juice.

Next time, we get this waitress, we will just tell her to surprise us.

Good morning friends,

Here it is, Saturday morning and all is as it should be. I am not responsible for emergency calls, I had some extra on my paycheck from overtime and commissions and Tom is going to do the service call that just had to be done this morning. Sunflower is sleeping peacefully in the next room. For now, I can sit here, sip my coffee and surf the net.

Later, we will dress warm and head out to run some errands. This evening we will go out to dinner to celebrate the nice raise Sunflower received yesterday.

I hope all of you have a lovely day.

This evening I made Beef Stroganof for dinner using my mother's old, battered club aluminum dutch oven for the pasta. This is the pot mom used for everything. I learned to cook using it. My sisters used to argue over who would get this pot when mom died, and mom used to joke that she wanted it to be buried with her. I really tried to do this, but my sister Mary would not let me have it when mom died. A few days ago, I met my nephew over at Mary's house. He will be moving in there after he and his sisters figure out what to do with my sister's things. He was more than happy to let me have mom's pot.

Good morning friends,

It has been a busy week. There was a fire in an apartment in one of our largest client's buildings Wednesday. My fire alarm worked properly and everyone got out safe. As the fire progressed it burned through the wiring to the fire alarm and killed it. I spent Thursday installing temporary wiring through the burned area and replacing the alarm control panel so that it was safe to move back into the building. This was a ten hour day in the cold with wet feet from walking through the water left by the fire hoses. My feet feel cold again as I type this.

Yesterday I was called by the service manager of one of our competitors to work with one of his techs on a particular problem they were having renovating an older system. The service manager and, as it turned out, the tech they sent are former employees of ours. I taught both of these guys through their first few years. I was able to solve the problem for them, and I gracefully turned aside the broad hints that I should really be working for their company.

Sunflower and I are looking forward to a lovely Saturday. I hope your weekend is nice too!

Just one more boring post about my test and the results: I received my license in this afternoon's mail along with my test score: 100%. I guess I didn't overthink the questions.

For those of you who are freezing vicariously through the Omaha temperatures, it is three degrees as I type this. The high is projected to be sixteen. Since it is Friday, I have a fairly easy day planned at the University. I have an ongoing remodel project there that I work on whenever the boss lets me, and today is a good day to get at it. The boss is somewhere warm playing golf. The last couple of weeks have been pretty busy, and this is the first weekend in a month that I don't have to work. I hope wherever you are, you are getting ready for a great weekend too!

A couple of weeks ago, I took my license renewal test. I suffer from test anxiety syndrome. The longer the results take to get here, the more I question all of my answers, and worry that I was reading too much into the questions....

One of our other guys took the test at the same session, and he got his results last Friday. He had failed for the second time, which means he will have to wait six months before he can retest. This morning, I called to find out what was holding my results up. The test proctor told me that I had passed, and that the delay was caused by the wait for the Fire Marshal's signature. I feel much better now.

Sometimes it's good not to be the Sprinkler guy....

It is seven degrees in Omaha. I am not sure how cold it got last night, but this morning my pager sounded. It was the maintenance guy from an apartment complex not far from here. He had a fire sprinkler line in the attic of one of his buildings freeze and split in the night and really needed a referal. I gave him the number of the company we usually use.

we are in out of the cold, and I have a pot of chili simmering on the stove.

It has been a busy week here. Monday morning my truck was dead. I got a ride to work and shifted into another truck while mine was being repaired. I moved some tools into it and I was off to a client site about 90 miles away to do a repair that required a second round trip back to the shop. The guy that usually drives that truck is a smoker and likes those tree shaped air fresheners. the combination of the two smells mae me a little nauseous all week. After an eleven hour day, I had the client's system working again. The next day started real early to let me do a few system checks in the protected rooms of a hospital. Once again, eleven hours. Wednesday, I started at regular time, but had a night appointment for that same hospital for the system in the computer center. Twelve hours for Wednesday. Yesterday I did a few odds and ends. The guy had my truck running, so I moved back into it, then helped another tech on a job he should have done Friday . He is at least two days away from done. Maybe by Monday. I am heading back there today to help him out again.

We had six inches of snow overnight. We also had nothing planned for today, so I put some nice lean beef in the slow cooker for a stew this evening, cleaned off all the cars and shoveled the driveway. It's a good day to just relax, sip some wine and watch some old movies. I hope your day is lovely too!

I just got back from my license renewal test. This takes place every four years. Since my last test, the material from which they draw the questions has been updated. Back in August, I gave the service manager a list of the seven books I needed. I told him I would be more than happy to pay the three hundred bucks, but I wanted them soon so I could start the conversion process. He told me to keep my money, and that he would get right on it. In November, He finally purchased the books as pdf files rather than the hard copies. The pdfd files were the same price. He assumed that he would just run us off copies whenever we needed them. What he did not think about was the size of these works. One of them is 765 pages. He used about a dozen printer cartridges, and a few reams of paper. I got the last of the material yesterday. (lots of study time there....) I have since ordered real books rather than the single sided huge binders I have been using.

Today was the test. I am pretty confident in my answers. The results will be here in about two weeks.

Good morning friends,

It is seven am, and bone chilling cold out there. I should be snuggled up in bed, but I am sitting with a cup of coffee while my truck warms up. One of our larger clients requires that we test their alarms during off hours. All three of us will be there, and we will be billing them for overtime rates, but even at time and a half, I really hate to work weekends. I hope your weekend is going better.

Good evening friends,

On New Years day, I resolved to:

Laugh more
drink more good wine
Take Sunflower out to dinner more often

as a start on accomplishing these tasks, I took Sunflower out to our favorite Italian place tonight, where we laughed, ate delicious Sirloin Marsala and shared a bottle of claret from the Copolla winery.....