Return from Chicago - Saturday morning Michelle, the kids, and I flew back to Manchester from Chicago's Midway airport. Michelle and I were really blessed in that all five kids did great on the trip. People saw us board the aircraft and I'm sure they were nervous. The twins behaved, Timothy didn't cry, and the girls kept themselves busy. When we got to Manchester all of our luggage showed up and we rented a cart to haul it to the van. The van was parked in Manchester's parking garage just outside the airport so the parking was close by but a bit expensive: $84. We stopped at McDonalds outside the airport and got everyone some chicken nuggets. It was a good thing because it kept everyone awake on the drive home so that they could still nap later in their beds.
Vacation catchup - It's taken this long to write because there has been a bunch of catchup tasks since then. Saturday afternoon I cut the grass, which I'm happy to say needed a mowing. There are still some brown patches but at least the fertilizer and rain from this past week is helping things grow again. We had a lot of unpacking to do and a lot of bills to pay. The strangest one was EnergyNorth Propane. They were claiming that we were way overdue and weren't going to deliver until we paid up. The strange thing is that they were taking monthly withdrawals direct from our credit card, so what happened? I paid the bill in full but hopefully we'll figure it out this week. Michelle also had to clean out the fridge and restock at the grocery store. Cha-ching!
Madisons everywhere - I don't think I've mentioned before but both Claire and Abby have best friends named Madison. It can be rather confusing at times. When we got back on Saturday Abby's Madison came over to play that afternoon. They still have their usual play and fight behavior which is so funny. Sunday Claire was bored so her friend Madison came over to play for the afternoon.
Highlights of the vacation - The weather in Chicago was beautiful the entire week we were there. Usually Chicago is not the place you think of visiting in the middle of July. I sometimes think they invented the expression "hazy, hot, and humid". This past week the weather was usually sunny, dry, and in the 80's. We saw plenty of family, visited lots of parks and pools, and ate lots of the foods I grew up with: Italian beef, Squab's gyros, Vienna hot dots, Russell's barbeque beef, Italian sausage, the Ale House, etc. We took a bunch of family pictures on the morning that I arrived because everyone was in town. I'll have an album online later this week. The kids got to go to KiddieLand and enjoy the rides, although I was feeling rather sick that afternoon so I tagged along just watching Timothy. Because of that stomach bug I also missed out on movie night when the grownups went to go see "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen".
High school reunion - One of the highlights of my Chicago visit was that my senior year high school friend drove down to visit for a few hours Friday afternoon. It had been over a dozen years since I'd last seen him. He's married now and both he and his wife teach at the University of Wisconsin in Waukesha. Since he was a good friend to both Alyssa and I, Alyssa came over as well with her kids. Alyssa was also watching her niece for the afternoon. It must have been a sight for him to see eleven small kids in his visit. In the end though we did a lot of catching up and had a great time.
The weeks ahead - Now that Timothy is almost six months old, the doctors are ready to move forward with his ear. Today he goes for an MRI. Next Tuesday he goes in for a CAT scan. Friday the girls go in for an annual checkup. Thursday Timothy goes in for a regular visit. Once September rolls around the girls are going to start some programs at Gymnastics Village in Amherst. I looked at a few Yamaha digital pianos during my week of bachelorhood but we first want to see how things go with gymnastics before we consider piano lessons.
Internet Explorer anomaly - While I was at my folks house, I got to see what this website is like for dialup. Most of the work I've done to make things quick seems to be working but his computer had one strange quirk which I wasn't able to resolve. It wouldn't cache the recent photo albums from July. It would refetch the pictures every time which is a slow process. I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't store local copies on his harddrive. If you see the same thing, drop me a line.
I verified the Internet Explorer caching anomaly at my office. I also figured out why the pictures wouldn't cache in Internet Explorer (with a bit of Google searching). It's a Microsoft bug (surprise) but perhaps I can work around it. IE is buggy about caching content on the local hard drive when the web server is serving compressed content. You try to do things to be efficient about download bandwidth and Micro$oft just bites you on the behind! Argh!
Posted by: Scott at July 28, 2003 09:29 AMTimothy's MRI did not happen today. The hospital called this morning to warn Michelle that the doctor's office had neglected to schedule anethesia to precede the MRI scan. They tried but were not able to work something out. There was too little notice to squeeze him in. They will be rescheduling the MRI for a later date.
Posted by: Scott at July 28, 2003 01:50 PMScott, I tried the pictures here at All-Rite and they come up instantly. And they come up instantly in either direction - backward or forward. At home they still take time to load. I guess the problem is unique to my computer at home.
Posted by: Bob Bilik at July 29, 2003 04:34 PMTry Internet Explorer at the house again. It should be fixed now. I've modified the server to work around the Internet Explorer bug. That's probably why things appeared faster at work. They should now be that way at home, too. The prefetching should work and remembering pictures you've already seen should be snappy.
Posted by: Scott at July 29, 2003 05:15 PM