It's been a mostly boring week, but here are the highlights: Some guy is coming eventually to pick up the 7-foot enclosed rack that is currently taking up space in my home. I know it's of use to someone, and I wish it could have gone to TBLC, but there just wasn't enough headroom in the closet we call a network room. I could have gone to Jodi's this weekend, but I expected this guy to come pick up the damn rack. Now it turns out he'll be coming by on Monday, so I could have spent an enjoyable weekend out of town. Oh well, I'll see her next weekend. I saw Lonesome Dove and tried watching another DVD which I ended up ejecting in much the same way as Steve Martin howling in pain as he pays another 50 cents to put the newspaper back into the rack. I bought my first pair of Birkenstocks and boy do they ever hurt. Well, it'll get better eventually or they'd never have been in business for so long. My computer is dead; long live my computer. I'm blogging from my spare machine, an AMD 333MHz machine running RHL 7.1. My usual computer is having serious problems, possibly power-related. I do NOT want to lose any data, so I'm just going to let it rest until I can assemble my new machine. Fong Kai mid-tower, black, with an AMD 1.4GHz/266FSB, 512MB PC2100. Should be fun assembling it. And I'll be cannibalizing most of the parts: drives of various descriptions, video and sound cards, the monitor and keyboard and mouse, the USB hardware, etc. When marketing surveys ask me when's the last time I bought a PC and what brand it was, I don't know what to tell them.

I've spent much of my free time this week cleaning up the place in anticipation of Jodi's visit. Friday afternoon I went downtown to pick her up at the bus station. Greyhound seems like a shadow airline, with arrivals and departures listed on a board (though it's the type with plastic letters that you push into a corduroy sort of back) and a facility for checking in and checking your baggage. I've never taken a private, non-charter bus before. Friday night I cooked white beans provençal: saute in olive oil two cloves of garlic, minced, and about 1/4 teaspoon each of dried thyme and fennel seeds. Add one can stewed tomatoes and two cans (rinsed, drained) great northern beans, and let this simmer for about 15-20 minutes. I also had had the foresight to get my bread machine working on a loaf of garlic bread. We didn't go anywhere that night. Yesterday we woke up and headed to USF for a tour of the campus. When I toured it some five years ago, it was a driving tour. It is now a walking tour of about 3 hours. This was a test of Jodi's endurance, as she uses crutches. We made it, with somewhat more frequent rest breaks than the rest of the group, and then had lunch at CDB's Pizza. Even when two people are very hungry, they don't make much of a dent in an 18" A-T-FM (artichokes, tomatoes, and fresh mushrooms -- at first I thought it was named for All Those Freaking Mushrooms), so we would have leftovers for breakfast this morning. We came home and watched Edward Scissorhands, which she'd never seen before. Several hours after the movie, having discussed a few important questions, we were hungry enough to venture outside; we played NTN Trivia at the local Tchotchkie's. This morning, after the aforementioned breakfast, we took a driving tour of the bay area: south to the 275 junction, then across the Sunshine Skyway and Howard Frankland bridges, to end in How-do-you-pronounce-that-word? City where we had a light lunch and a beer sampler at my favorite brewpub. Then it was back downtown to wait for her bus. She just got back to Ft. Pierce about ten minutes ago. Dang, I hope she decides to move to Tampa -- possibly even earlier than December. If she does that, she'll have to move out of my place in December anyway to be within one bus ride of USF. It's a sick world, but I'm not complaining. Side note: I realized to my utter amazement that two of the funniest men in show business, Steve Martin and Bill Murray, have worked together on the silver screen only once.