Thrilled!

Gainesville

Glad to hear there is encouraging news about Mom's prognosis. Apparently all this experience pays off-- but what a ghastly price to pay for experience! Do keep us informed, Sandy. We'll all look forward to reading Mom's first post-op post.

Planned to Scooba the kitchen floor yesterday, but he suddenly decided it was time to have a 16-hour long slow charge. That put it off until today. The two-part system for doing the kitchen is working well, and it's getting faster as I get practice. The cat hates it, but I'm very pleased to have clean kitchen floors for once in my life. There's effort involved-- moving the furniture and stuff on the floors, sweeping then swiffering pre-Scooba-- but then he does his thing. Fairly minor clean-up after. The floors look better each week.

We are getting some rain, but not nearly enough. We were just getting to sleep last night when we had a 10 minute power outage. Just enough to set all the various UPS's a-peeping, and the digital clocks a-blinking once power returned. The UPS that holds up my computer failed-- not sure why yet. A test on it afterwards showed no problems. Usually the UPS allows plenty of time for an orderly shut-down of the various systems.

Got some bills written tonight. Also a good start on next week's menus. It's a 3-day weekend for Bill, and he needs it. He's working much too hard. I asked him what he'd like for meals over the holiday, and the first thing he asked for was another "pizza" with the cheese-egg crust that I made earlier in the week. I'd say that one was wildly successful! He polished off the last two leftover pieces as we sat down to a smorgasboard of leftovers-- not our usual Friday pattern, but maybe it should be: it served as the hardest part of the weekly fridge purge. He also requested "shellfish," and when pressed for his preference, scallops. Can do.

Looking forward to diving into Everything is Miscellaneous, the hot new book for those of us in the Info field. Bill has been reading it very slowly and carefully, as it is dense with important ideas. The copy I'll read is already well marked up, important points highlighted. The author is on Twitter, which is fun-- he's my "friend," I'm his "follower." Contrast this with: I'm Barack Obama's and John Edwards' friend, and they are MY followers. (The terminology of this interaction is vastly amusing to me.) They don't have much to say, though... Hillary has an account, but no posts. It will be revealing to watch who knows about it, who actually gets it, and how they use it.*

I've been learning lots of interesting things through this supposedly trivial net-thingy. Among them: I probably need a Wordpress blog account. They're pricey, but would allow me to have a web presence unrelated to UF, with a very friendly input interface.

Also: I learned about "WordCrowd," an intensely cool site that creates a word cloud-- a visual representation of word frequency in a document. If I had the above-mentioned Wordpress account, I could demonstrate the cloud it made for the "Learning History From Comics" paper I wrote for the San Diego conference two years ago. Some people use them on resumes to give an instant image of their strengths and interests. Print them up on badges for a conference! Maybe a t-shirt! (This last my own idea, although it is surely not original.)

Think maybe the 140 character limit is making me more verbose here, as a reaction. So I should stop.
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* Hee hee -- this just in from John Edwards: " Thrilled to be in Iowa with Elizabeth and the kids…working with Iowans to support our troops and bring them home." THRILLED to be in Iowa! As who wouldn't be!