June 12, 2004
Daniel sick
Daniel - When we woke up yesterday morning, we were all in a decent mood. The weather forecast looked awesome -- clear, dry, 70's -- and indeed it turned out that way. After Timothy's morning nap Michelle took the kids to a local park. On the way back Daniel went from happy and healthy to lethargic and nauseous. Once he got home he threw up and continued to do so for the rest of the day. Nothing stayed down. I felt awful for Michelle because it really made the otherwise awesome day take a turn for the worse. Because he was sick, Michelle had to cancel the CPR re-certification that she planned on taking last night. He seems better today so far (fingers crossed).
Accord - As I suspected, my car is not ready yet. I seem to recall the work being around 33-35 man-hours so it would have taken a concerted effort to finish by Friday. A technician asked if the car had been painted before. I told him "no, I've owned it since mile 1 when it came off the car carrier as a factory order." He found the peeling paint highly unusual.
Down to Earth - On Thursday and Friday Claire and I watched "Down to Earth", a 1947 musical starring Rita Hayworth as the Greek muse Terpsichore coming down to change a musical that she felt mocked Greek mythology. I figured it would be a good followup after watching "Xanadu" last week. Not unlike Olivia Newton John, Rita was definitely easy on the eyes, and the use of "Technicolor" was as advanced in that time as the special effects were in Xanadu, but it was otherwise a ho-hum movie.
Mutually assured "Doh!" - I mentioned earlier this week that the rental car had no air conditioning. It turned out that I just didn't look closely enough. There is no clear "A/C" or "air" button, but the icons on the vent control have a subset of icons that are in blue. If you turn the vent control to the blue icons, you get the same vent control, but with air conditioning. Later in the week as I was leaving for work I was showing Michelle how to charge her phone because its batteries went dead overnight. I told her she could take it off the charger in a few hours and it should be fully charged. Later in the afternoon I got a call from Michelle who had walked across the street to use a neighbor's phone. She said the phone was still dead after it had several hours to charge. I asked her if she turned it on with the power button. She felt the same way I did about the air conditioning earlier in the week. "Doh!"
World News - It's been a busy week with the commemoration of D-Day, the death of Ray Charles, and the death of former President Ronald Reagan. I think that Reagan, like Clinton, must have been a reasonably effective president because he inspired such polarizing feelings toward him. He tended to be either loved or hated. I remember I was still in grade school during the Carter years. America tended to be shaky, lacking confidence, worried about inflation, high gas prices, high unemployment, hostages in Iran, the Soviet Union. When I was in grade school, I tended to think the world would be over populated and out of gasoline by the time I was thirty. Reagan had such optimism in the US, standing firm against Iran and the USSR, belief in people and in smaller government. It shocked the major news outlets when he won in a landslide, winning nearly every state. When the air traffic controllers threatened to walk out, he fired them and the world knew he didn't play games. He bounced back even after being shot by a psycho. Whether the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI aka Star Wars) was technologically possible or not, our research in it raised the stakes for the USSR and was a major contribution for the fall of the USSR and the Berlin Wall. His tax cuts did help increase revenues to the Treasury, as that approach had worked for JFK. Unfortunately, Congressional spending outpaced the revenues. I met Reagan briefly when I was a USAF cadet working at the Pentagon on SDI. He was warm, cordial, and laughing, even when it was just a handful of us lowly cadets coming to see him. Many in NH are drawn to the primary campaigns because they get meet the presidential hopefuls. I was lucky enough to meet one of the great ones in the last months of his eight year service. I'm wondering whether the news media will start re-opening their fire against him once he's buried. It's already started on the internet.