Hey, you! Wake up! Yes, shocking though it may be, I am actually writing a new entry. My last entry was way back on November 24, but I really haven't written very consistently since June of last year! Yeesh! A lot of that has to do with the fact that, in July, I launched The Skeptic News, which I update almost daily. Well, I finally decided to start posting again, so earlier this month I sat down and "cleaned house," as it were, moving old entries to the archive and getting things ready. I also began reading the journals of others again for the first time in quite a while. (What happened to Squirrel Bait's journal? It seems to be gone. Wah!) Today I read that The Mighty Kymm has begun working her way through the Open Pages webring in search of dead journals to remove. Looks like I've begun reviving this thing just in the nick of time!
So, what has happened since November?
December: Visited Dad and my brother Ross down in Texas over Christmas. When I did this two years ago, it was cold and rainy the entire time I was there. This time was better -- it wasn't rainy. Actually it did warm up a bit the last day that I was there, but nothing like the 85 degrees it had been before I arrived.
January: Nothing memorable.
February: In the November 17, I mentioned putting together a plan to completely change what I do at work. We held meetings, we modified the plan, etc., and finally submitted it to the Agency Information Management Steering (AIMS) committee. They examined it, held meetings, modified it, etc., and finally submitted it to the senior managers. They examined it, etc., and in February they approved it. Bravo! Success! Or so I thought. In actuality, they sent it back to the AIMS committee, saying, in effect, "sounds good, but give us more details." My section's manager, the chairman of the AIMS committee, then went on vacation, which takes us to....
March: The section manager returns and announces that he's taken a position elsewhere and will be gone in a week. All work in the AIMS committee grinds to a halt, due the the lack of a chairman. As for today, June 26, that's where things still are.
April: Nothing particularly memorable. I did attend the Illinois Geographic Information Systems Association (ILGISA) "GIS in Illinois" conference on April 20-22, but there's not much of interest to say about it. Oh, and Dain had a 5th birthday party on the 26th. I abandoned my traditional strategy of "buy a toy that's noisy" in favor of "buy a toy that will scare Mary out of her wits." Specifically, I got him a nature kit (for collecting bugs and stuff) and a bunch of plastic bugs.
May: REALL held its annual elections. I had been the secretary-treasurer for the last year, but the newsletter editor was getting too busy, so we swapped jobs this year. I had resigned as newsletter editor of the local SCA group earlier, luckily! Also, on May 15 I went to Springfield Highland Games and Celtic Festival. It was fun, but I left early because it began to rain. There was also a little movie called Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. I went to see it about a week after it opened, with the idea that I could avoid the massive crush of people and still see it before I learned the entire story. The movie was about what I expected -- not as good as the first two, but not a total bomb. The special effects were fabulous, of course, but there was virtually no character development and I had some problems with several plot points. I'd probably give it 3 stars.
Somewhere in there, Dad came up and visited for a couple of days. He finally bought a modern computer! He had an old Commodore Amiga 500 for years and years -- 1 meg of memory, no hard drive. One of the things he had to take into account when buying a new system is that he travels a lot, spending months at a time in a trailer Texas and Colorado. That means not a lot of room, and the system needs to be able to handle getting bumped around a bit. I recommended getting a laptop, and showed him some stuff from Gateway's web site. He finally got very nice one, which I think is probably about perfect for what he wants. Of course, there's a huge learning curve to get over! Plus, finding an Internet Service Provider that would have a local access number in Texas, Colorado, and a tiny town in southern Illinois was another challenge! After some false starts, however, it turned out that the solution was simple -- AOL! That has the added bonus of being about as "user friendly" as you can get. He's already been in contact with former neighbors, relatives, etc. As best as I can tell he likes it.
I also talked to Dawn this month, in our typical "once every 6 months" manner. We're still planning on taking a trip to Canada this summer, and I still haven't made any firm plans! Actually, we did settle on one thing -- the dates August 21-29. Now we just need to pick an itinerary and a mode of travel, preferably sometime before August 20.
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