Oops!

I've been updating LJ mostly from the machine upstairs, which has been experiencing a long-term "date malfunction," causing most of the posts from this week to be dated one day later than the day the post was written. One strange thing I've noticed is that, having fixed the dates, the calendar hasn't upated. Maybe something just has to propagate through the system.

I arranged for Drew to come by and take me along for his weekly shopping trip. Unfortunately, the county snow scrapers had come by, leaving a 4-ft high berm across my driveway. The only reason I can discern for this kind of service is a need to make sure the road, which dead-ends within 50 feet of my driveway, is wide enough to allow three M1 Abrams battle tanks to advance abreast.

Just in case, y'know.

Anyway, Drew tried to broach the berm and ended up stranding his car on its belly, with the wheels in the air. Fortunately, our neighbor came by and helped us out, but the experience did nothing to enhance Drew's positive outlook on life.

* * *More work came in, and it went back out. I paid school and property taxes on the New York property, which pretty much ate the quarterly rent payment from the tenant (I get to do this again in a few weeks, be-still-my-throbbing-heart), and Galina reports that interest in renting the Houston properties has risen from the completely-dead level to something measurable.

* * *Meanwhile, the grocery store was completely out of "Chelada," a combination of beer and clamato juice, so I decided to perform an experiment. To wit, I bought a 32-oz bottle of Clamato and a couple of 24-oz cans of Modelo especial, which falls far short of being a snobby beer but I find preferable to Budweiser.

I determined the amount of Clamato to add by prorating the cost of the juice, and once I mixed the ingredients, I was pleased to find the taste of the home-made product was a tad stronger than the out-of-the-can drink (and preferable, to boot). There are several factors that might account for the difference, and though they aren't terribly important, I will hopefully keep them in mind should a similar kind of analysis fall into my path in the future.

* * *Among the miscellaneous stuff in the boxes I unearthed I found something I didn't even recall writing, and that was a journal of my 10-day whirlwind tour of Milan, Prague, Stockholm, and Copenhagen back in 1991, when I was part of the Borland "OOP World Tour" (OOP being an acronym for "object-oriented programming" and something that Borland was promoting heavily as part of its Pascal and C++ programming language packages).

I'm taking my time with the document, savoring the little pleasures of having old synaptic paths discharge again.

* * *I did not get invoicing done today. Hence, I will get it done tomorrow.

Cheers...