September 07, 2003
Claire the Monkey
Photo album - I took some of the pictures out of my cameras this afternoon to make this album. A few are work related (such as the silly picture of the "USB cake"). There's also a picture of Santos Dumont. I took a shot of what a pellet stove could look like installed in the mantle of a fireplace (courtesy of Stove Keepers).
Saturday - Saturday was pretty ordinary. We went to the YMCA. I mowed the yard. Blah blah. About the only interesting things were that Claire went to her first gymnastics class at Gymnastics Village. She loved it! She won a patch for being able to climb to the top of a 15 foot rope and ring a bell. I was impressed, but we've known that she is a bit of a monkey. Also I took the girls for ice cream at Santos Dumont after dinner.
Sunday - Sunday started with Mass and we registered the girls for homeschooling CCD for the year. I pick up their materials this week. We stopped at Home Depot on the way home. They had the coolest carts for me to push the kids in. The carts had a race car theme and were the kind with three sets of wheels that can turn easily. I piled the four older kids in one and they had a good time. Those carts are so much easier to turn than a stroller! While we were there we bought some throw rugs for the new "play room" (formerly the unused dining room). Madison came over to play some GameCube with the girls while I worked on the photo album. Later in the afternoon we went to the Oak Furniture Store on 101A and bought book case unit to go in the family room. We also went to Target to look for another booster seat since the twins are starting to outgrow their current seats. We held off on the seats but purchased Gameboy Game and Watch Gallery 4 which basically has remakes of six classic Nintendo games. I decided to try Wilton House of Pizza for a carry out dinner, but was not all that impressed. Just before Claire went to bed, she announced she lost another tooth, her eighth.
Near term - Michelle teaches another step class this morning. Abby will take her first gymnastics class this afternoon. Timothy gets his MRI on Wednesday morning. And, of course, this week the nation will remember the second anniversary of September 11th terrorist attacks. There are rumors of what terrorists might do as that anniversary approaches. Time will tell...
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." – Douglas Adams
Oh goodness 9-11 is scaring me! Expecially since Rocky decided to go take a plane to visit our friend Dan in NY on that very day!
Scott or Chris...I have been trying to check out DSL for my apartment. I can either use Verizon or Insight Communications (our cable company). Verizon has DSL for $34 a month and Insight has 'high speed' for $45. Some friends said I should go with Insight, though. Do either of you have any ideas on which is better?
Posted by: Suzy at September 8, 2003 01:59 PMActually it's not air travel I'm all that worried about. I really don't think terrorists would strike that way again. I believe they would go for something else: electrical power, water supply, phone networks, the internet. It's rumored that one of those virus' that hit last month (Sobig or MS Blaster, I can't remember which at the moment) could come back reincarnated and substantially beefed up around September 11th. Heck one of those virus' had an expiration date of September 10th. It's as if they wanted it to die in time for its sequel.
Regarding DSL vs cable, in your situation I'd just get _local_ recommendations on reliability/uptime and weigh that with cost. You aren't going to have it _that_ long. Hopefully you aren't going to be MP3 swapping. About the only time I care whether I have half a megabit (typical ADSL) or 2 megabits (my Adelphia cable link) is when I'm doing a software update or streaming a Quicktime video. Even then it's only a slight quality of service difference. For most web surfing, I find the major advantages of broadband to be :
o always on service (no waiting through the dialup modem initialization)
o not tying up a phone line
o responsive on those annoyingly graphical web pages/flash based pages (Nick Jr, Disney, PBSKids)
For me, things really turned the corner when I got a wireless internet enabled laptop with fast sleep/wakeup time. I can look up something at a moment's notice.