2006, February
Happy Valentines Day!Looks like we have survived the worst of the winter. I could almost believe in global warming at this point.
Feb. 3 was Rich's birthday. Daughter Kriss and her husband Jon surprised us by flying into Chicago. Jon's mother's birthday was Feb. 1, so they took us all out to dinner at Berghoff's. Well, we waited for nearly an hour in line outside and then a little while inside and when we finally got dinner it was worth the wait.
Next day, Saturday, we went downtown again and had a genuine Chicago deep-dish pizza. That was a real treat. I'd say it's about as good as Kathy's, which is a real compliment to their chef. Pizza Hut doesn't come close, not even in the same league. And frozen pizza? Forget it!
Oh, but one time Jon, in Boston, ordered a frozen pizza from this place and it arrived FedEx on dry ice. Pop it in the oven and oh, my!
All this celebrating wore us old folks out, so we left about 4:00 and got home about 7:00. (Well, that's Indiana time. The numbers are different Chicago time but I think it was still nearly 3 hours. It's slow getting through Chicago Heights and from there to Merrilville, IN.) Kriss and Jon flew back to Boston and I don't think anyone ate supper. We brought some leftover pizza home and that sat in the fridge until Monday.
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Almost cost more to park than to eat!
Actually, for one person it would but we crammed 5 of us into one car.
It was a lovely dinner, especially because Jon paid, and everyone had
dishes that ended in -schnitzel and -braten. I think
everyone got some spätzel and a creamed spinach of some kind. Oddly,
the waiters seemed to be Italian. It was most delicious anyway!
Parking starts at $20.00 for the first 20 minutes in parking garages downtown, and goes up by 20-minute increments, about $5.00 per. You pay by credit card. |  |
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Jon's mother, Laura, lives about 2 miles from Highway 30, the same one that goes by us about half a mile to the north. It's kind of boring being pretty straight and flat, but it's probably just as quick as finding an Interstate in the final analysis. Only two non-obvious turns, and we got to Laura's house and back with no trouble.
the birthday "kids".
...So what else happened, significant or not?
Well, the weather warmed up after Christmas and we have had several days in the 40s. They said that last winter "wasn't so bad" but there was for about a month the temperature never got above freezing. It was high teens and low 20s for the high nearly every day a year ago. I can tell it's a warmer winter because on Feb. 1 I still had over two of cords of wood in the shed and over half a cord in the garage. During December we really went through wood in a hurry, down around zero a lot of the time. As I recall, about the first of last March, we were out in the woods with the chainsaw and the snow not entirely melted, mostly because we were nearly out of firewood.
As I write this, it reminds me of winter in Seattle: occasional light snow, mostly 35, damp and rainy. We hope there is enough moisture to keep the water table up for the farmers.
One student, David, is married, and one evening his wife came home to find him in the middle of the living room surrounded by computer parts. I saw them later at church and she said she had him restricted to one corner of the living room with his "junk -- I mean, project". I told her that when they graduate and get into a house, that David needs a "den" or "cave" where he can play with his stuff.
In other health news, Kathy has been hobbling around with a mysterious pain in her foot. Doctors blamed it on flat feet, prescribed some kind of super painkiller so she can sleep. Didn't work. Finally diagnosed as either gout or rheumatoid arthritis. We'll find out soon. She had one of those Nuclear Medicine bone scans ($$$) but didn't glow in the dark afterward. (I thought maybe she could unplug the night lights.) Scan showed that her left ankle has a problem. Duh! She's been suffering since October, getting progressively worse. At least if we know what it is there might be a treatment for it. Too much high living, that's what it is.... May have to cut out those chocolate-caramel lattés we have each month when we play at coffee houses.
Had another one of those sudden drops in temperature like we reported a couple of months ago. 59 degrees at sundown, 22 at midnight, down to 7 by the next night. Buds were already out on a lot of trees. Might get a lot of firewood this winter.
But friends Tom and Candace had us over for dinner and the fellowship was warm. Also the food. His folks are from Mexico and his "specialty", Spanish rice, was nice and "warm". Not insufferably hot, but more like "real" Mexicans eat. Their son played the piano for us. He's about 10. It was his own composition, as good as anything in those piano books for his age. They're great folks, blue collar types where I feel so much at home. (Not that I have anything against our middle-class friends at church, but how many times do we get invited to their houses for dinner?) We ate fajitas from paper plates and had a great time. For some reason, though, we didn't sit out on the patio like we did last summer; it was about 75 degrees colder.Proverbs 17:1 Better is a dry morsel with quietness, than a house full of feasting with strife.
Friend Tom is working long hours. His company ships out 450 FEMA trailers every day, has been since Katrina. One trainload is 300 trailers; we have to stop for one occasionally if we're downtown Warsaw during the week. The remaining 150 trailers get towed one at a time behind pickup trucks. Guess which is the cheaper way to ship? (Had you bought railroad stock two years ago, you would have doubled or tripled your money by now. Seriously! With fuel costs going up, train traffic is way up. BNSF was $28.00 a share, now 80; Norfolk Southern was $19.00, now 50.) Anyway, these little trailers arejust barely shelter from the weather. Door in one side, one window in the other, probably 20 feet long total. Room for one couple to live if they really love each other. FEMA has their specs and these trailers meet them. Wonder how much the government is paying for each one. I have it on good authority (Tom) that it's costing FEMA $20,000.00 each to set them up. Bet I could do it for half that even if I had to dig sewer lines and put up utility poles by hand. The contract for $520 million works out to (Back Of The Envelope Calculation) way less than $10,000.00 each, and setting up costs twice that much. Go figure. But even then, it's cheaper than the $275.00 a day average for housing families in hotels. Payback in what, 3 months max?
Photo courtesy FEMA.gov
Your taxes at work. Not to mention the 40,000 trailers that are still sitting around down there waiting to be set up already (local zoning laws, politics, you get the idea, and the poor people are the ones who suffer). And it seems that the family that owns Tom's employer contributes to the Republican Party. No, not millions, maybe $8,000.00 a year. Is that why they got the contract for umpty-ump thousand FEMA trailers? Hmm. Wonder what they'd do for me if I contributed five bucks...? But with his overtime pay, Tom bought his daughter a (inexpensive) guitar so she could take lessons. And while she was at her lesson the other night, they dropped in and we had a nice visit for an hour or so. At least the money goes into our local economy. I read somewhere that FEMA awarded a contract for 1000 trailers to a motorcycle dealer, which has a much worse odor than a contract to an established RV manufacturer. More worrisome is whether Tom will even have a job when the contract runs out. Sales of "ordinary" RVs are way down.This is not a reflection on the people at FEMA who are putting in 12-16 hour days trying to get housing in place!
Much more effective, and not publicized at all, are the large crews from Indiana churches who go down to Mississippi and clean up yards, refinish floors, install new wiring, drywall and plumbing, and get families back into their homes. Gulfport was a real mess. Still is, for that matter, but getting better. Philosophically speaking, the money from the RV contracts goes back into our local economy, which increases church donations, which enables the people to send workers down to do the real work. It's an OK deal, but could be done more efficiently. (Washington, D.C.: the city of Northern hospitality and Southern efficiency. According to Mark Twain, the only inherently criminal class in our country is Congress....)
Logic demonstrator board. Wires look like a lot of spider webs, but there really is some order in the chaos.
At the end of February, Rich and colleague Rick Koontz drove to Houston to present a "poster session" at a national conference (SIGCSE, if that means anything to you). Drove? Yes, they have this "logic demonstrator" with blinkenlights that they took along. It's about 2 feet by 4 feet and stands on legs so it comes up to about 5 1/2 feet. Anyhow, it's a smidgen too large to go in a suitcase. Rick thought it up at last year's SIGCSE conference in St. Louis. At midnight as I recall, and we both stayed up too late planning it. But inspirations like this are why we go to conferences. I was already in bed half asleep when he starts talking across the room and, well, here we are....
There is a certain type of computer person that is attracted to blinking lights of any kind. The demonstrator attracts people we like to talk to, like moths to a flame. We took it to Brethren National Youth Conference last summer and it attracted lots of teenage geeks, including some girls.