I am writing in my journal and talking to Earl on the telephone at the same time. He wasn’t very pleased with that, so I finished the phone call before continuing.

What a week this has been. Last night my sister called, my mother was on her way to the hospital. Seems she had a slight heart attack, and they have to do an angioplasty (or however it’s spelled) tomorrow morning. Ken was kind of enough to give me the day off from work (which I knew wouldn’t be a problem, because he’s one of the nicest boss-type guys I ever met) so I can be with Mom for her surgery. She’s doing very well. She’s such a worry wart (which I inherited by stroke of luck), I think all the stress of life has brought this upon her. I need to teach her to meditate. Maybe I’ll give her some incense sticks to calm her a bit. Get her to relax her mind.

Earl, by the way, is in Indianapolis, Ind. (I like to use the old state abbreviations) on business through Thursday night. True to our agreement, he drove all 12 hours rather than flying out there. He said he enjoyed the drive. I should have given him the digital camera so he could take road geek pictures for my road web site, but I didn’t think of it until now. I miss him so much while he’s gone. I become the consumate bachelor, eating microwave popcorn and Pepsi Twist for supper, having dirty clothes on the kitchen table and the cat and I eating out of the same bowl. He’d have a fit if he knew what the house looked like while he was gone.

By the way, being the odd duck that I am, I still call the microwave the “radarange”. Remember the Radarange by Amana? My grandmother had one since the late 1960s (you had to lock it and wear lead gloves to use it – just kidding about the gloves), and then my father won one in a raffle in 1978 so we had a radarange too. People make fun of me when I call it the radarange, but it’s fun to be different. Those machines were HEAVY and cost a hefty bundle, not like the $70 throwaway ones you find in Ames these days.

The geek in me recently became intrigued with the new Macintosh operating system OS X. Now, I have never been a Mac fan, as I’ve always found them to be too elementary and pretty for my tastes, but this OS X looks interesting as it’s built upon Unix. And if you’ve been a faithful reader of my life on here, you’ll know that I’m a fan of Linux, which is a Unix-like operating system. For those not geekily oriented, its like having a GE washing machine instead of a Whirlpool. It does things in a similar way, but it’s a whole different machine underneath.

I’m really groovin’ on the TiVo too. I’m watching more television than ever, what with all the Bewitched episodes I tape, Golden Girls, then our weekly favorites like Dharma and Greg, Judging Amy and of course The West Wing. If you don’t have TiVo, get it!

I changed the colors around on the site to something a little more masculine. I’m liking the look. 🙂