Life is good when everything goes right. Cheese omelets with Okeechobee tomatoes, toast, coffee, the works. I deserve to do nothing today and that is mostly what occurred. I finished the potato famine book and played around with a C++ compiler called DJGPP which I do not have much good to say about. I’ve downloaded it and installed it many times and it never does what it says, although I did accidentally hit a series of keys that got it to work at least once.Wallace has the theory that if you keep your mind active, you will never get all the brain-dead conditions and diseases when you grow old. I’ve met dumb old people and there is definitely a correlation in what he says. On the other hand, my experience is that dumb old people were also dumb all their lives, so go figure. I decided to go over my Mandarin (Chinese) numbers and I can still write them up to one million, which is actually “one hundred ten thousands”.
Then I practiced cracking a rather difficult code and this is what I came up with: “All-of-Magellans-spacecraft-systems-are-performing-nominally-as-Magellan-starts-orbit-229-the-7-star-calibrations-and-the-2-desaturations-of-the-reaction-wheels-of-the-past-24-hours-were-fully-successful-with-nominal-attitude-updates”. Kudos to anyone who can figure out where that came from. Your hint is that is “number 498”.
The shop was dead, with one or two customers all day. Mike is watching for a laptop that can just hold XP. That is one of the requirements Arnel has stated to teach me the MIDI operations. I note that XP Pro, which MS does not any longer support, is still for sale at $199. Fred mentioned that the man from the school board wanted to contact me. Of course, I hope that they are interested in having me teach a course. This is the chap I was teaching guitar with his teenage daughter last April and May. Until she decided she wanted to be an actress or cheerleader. Hey, the joys of being parents include the whims of tween years.
Now Wallace wanted to go out but my routine does not involve doing anything of the kind on a Saturday. I’ll go to a bookstore or stay home in peace and quiet. So we set to Googling all the usual calendars in this town. Arts, Science, Theater, Music, Festivals, Fairs, Dancing, Science, Trade Shows, you name it. Our conclusion is that there is absolutely nothing happening in this town. I know that it is easy to go out and have a goo time for a few dollars, but there was not even a Bingo game going on.
Wallace went shopping, I made us spaghetti. He dropped by Flannigan’s and returned to say there were no friendly ladies there. That’s fine, we are both convinced within a short time a couple of rich widows are going to find us. So I made hot cocoa and played two crib games. Both games were, for the record, won by the same person. I won’t say who but that is a first around here. There was a Johnny Cash documentary on the big screen showing some films that had suspiciously great sound for that era.
Nothing happened all day and I like it that way. I tried to watch TV, being that there were two Predator movies in a row and then some version of Lord of the Rings. The plot of dragon movies and acting don’t impress me, however those battle scenes are classics to any historian. The defenders are modeled on the Roman legions, while the attackers have tactics favored in the Middle and Far East. The computer enhancements are incredible although the entire movie was filmed in an ancient kingdom that outlawed all bright colors.
Nobody called Peggy. I though Wallace called and vice versa. That rules out this week but I think before month’s end we’ll show some progress toward the cookbook. In all I’d say it was representative of what I call a relaxing day with not much to do, kind of a model for how I plan to retire some day.
