It's been nearly a week since my last entry. In many ways things have been pretty routine. We did have a series of days with some minor note. Thursday the 21st was, of course, the first official day of summer. Friday the 22nd was the twins' five month birthday. Saturday the 23rd was my dad's 60th birthday and was originally planned to be retirement. He recently decided to wait until the end of July to stop working. He wanted to make sure his other retirement checks were full checks before he stopped drawing All-Rite Industries checks.
Today (the 24th) is the feast of St. John the Baptist and was our day to spend at Ken Moge's summer home at the coast. Once a year we have our parish RCIA planning session there. His summer home is right along the ocean in Seabrook, New Hampshire. I tried to take a few pictures of the gorgeous view from inside his house, but I don't think they'll turn out. Anyway, the whole family went this time, including Michelle and the twins. Unlike last week when we went to Wallis Sands beach with the Tarpeys, this time I convinced Michelle to come if we could schedule the driving times near the boys' naps. It worked out well for the most part. Abby slept on both legs of the trip as well. Even Claire, my "I don't need a nap" girl, slept on the ride home. There were times during the drive home where the rain came down heavily. However by the time we got all the way back to Nashua, I was wondering whether our house saw any rain at all!
Saturday my father celebrated his big six-oh at Barnaby's restaurant with family and friends. I would have loved to have been there. They basically do pizza, soda, and beer. I haven't been there in several years and almost forgot about it. Also, his co-workers at All-Rite pitched in and got him a digital camera and a near photo quality color printer. I predict that once he retires, you'll be seeing him "roaming the chat rooms". I can only wonder what his online nickname will be. 'Shish-ka-Robert'? 'GreenThumb'? ;-)
It's hard to believe the weekend is almost over... again. In the geek news: ATT Broadband will be installing cable modem service this week. Claire and I went to CircuitCity this weekend to buy the cable modem and an ethernet card. Pushing large digital pictures up to the online print services with a dialup phone modem was driving me crazy. In other geek news, Michelle was complaining that the home PC was acting strange: hanging and locking up. I wasn't sure whether it was faulty hardware, software, or ??? So that night I spent several hours on the linux partition, building the latest stable version of the GIMP image program that I use to massage the camera pictures. It's a huge program and probably took over an hour to compile. So the computer ran overnight without a hitch. I figured Linux is usually rock solid in terms of stability. If I had bad hardware it would show, but it just kept on chugging along. So I think I'm going to blame Windows98. What else, eh? News Flash: Microsoft Windows can lock up your computer! But seriously, perhaps I should just redo that part of the hard drive with Windows 2000. We use that at work and it's much more stable than Windows98. Enough of the geek speak already!
The end of the quarter is quickly approaching. One week left! My immediate boss is spending this week in England with the other customer support managers for some training. My customer support associate and I have to hustle our butts and make some training slides. At least the end of the quarter, which happens to be my birthday, ends this year on a Saturday. For once I should feel no pressure to work on my birthday... but don't hold me to it! We'll just hope. Until next time...