At long last, finally back to work today! True, I was only gone a week, but being gone two out of the last three weeks means it feels like I've scarcely accomplished a thing since the middle of last month! Anyway, today was reasonably productive. Plenty of time spent scanning in photos for the web site, catching up on old e-mail, taking full tape backups, etc. Nothing seems to have fallen apart while I was gone, so I could rather quickly work on getting caught up rather than on putting out fires.
When I got home from work today, Mike (my landlord) was here mowing the grass and showing the duplex to some people. He's trying to sell it, so he's been trying to fix things up. I took the opportunity to tell him about the pyrotechnic light socket in the office. This is a rather new phenomenon that appeared just before I left on my second Chicago trip. When you turn on the light switch, there's a loud *pop*, sparks fly out of the light socket, the circuit breaker is tripped, the lights go out, and you are wide awake! The first time it happened I thought a bulb had exploded, but it turned out to be something shorting in the socket itself. As alarming as all that is, it is made even more of a problem by the fact that my computer is on the same circuit -- turn on the light switch, the circuit is tripped, and the computer goes dead. (Item #85 on my "list of things I really should buy" -- a UPS for the computer.) Anyway, Mike said he'll try to replace the light tomorrow. That'll be nice, since that will allow me to take the "do not flip this, you idiot"-tape off of the light switch.
I just saw the most ridiculous thing in the newspaper -- a picture of what is called the St. Louis President Casino on the Admiral. This thing is, supposedly, a riverboat casino. It's on the Mississippi River, so you can gamble on it. And it's a riverboat, right? Ha! I swear the thing looks almost exactly like a building! It really does! Calling that thing a riverboat is ludicrous! I remember back when riverboat gambling was first proposed. It sounded nice back then -- $50 loss limit, a nice way to add some historical color and fun to a little riverboat cruise on the Mississippi River. Now buildings with moats around them are being called "riverboats". I think legalizing gambling (starting with the lottery) was one of the dumbest things we've done in a long time. We let the genie out of the bottle and it doesn't look like there's any chance it will ever get stuffed back inside. As if we didn't already have enough problems!
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