July 2nd's Joke

I went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day but I couldn’t find any.

March 2024 - Family Trip to San Diego

(Just a quick note:  If you are landed here because of a comment I left on your book blog, you might be more interested in my review blog, Carstairs Considers.  But you are very welcome to stick around here, too.)

The middle of March, I met up with my family in San Diego.  We'd done it a couple of years ago, really enjoyed it, and decided to do it again.

Mom and Dad rented up a place to stay right on the beach.  It was a different place from two years ago, but still very nice.  In fact, we might have liked it a bit more in some ways.  The plan was to enjoy the beach, plays games, and be a bit of a tourist.

We did still play tourist a bit, spending one day at Sea World and another at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

However, we got sick while we were there.  My nephew had gotten sick a couple of days before, and Dad started to get sick our first night.  I was just getting over being sick, but I got sick again.  And my brother got sick.  The ladies stayed healthy, until we left.  Then they got sick at home.  What's the weirdest is we all seemed to have slightly different symptoms.  I was the quickest to recover, and it took some longer than others to get over it.  But eventually we all did.

So it was a bummer of a trip in some ways.  But we did still have fun, and we are glad we went.

February 2024 - Catching Up

Well, I managed to get behind again, didn't I?  Let's work on catching up.

Honestly, not that much happened in February.  We started out with weather in the 70's, but wound up getting lots of rain.  Fortunately, no flooding in my garage, which was nice.  Did miss some running because of the rain, which is a Southern California problem.  But before that started I got a nice afternoon of ultimate Frisbee.

I did my taxes on my President's Day holiday and wound up owing this year, which was a bummer.

The bigger bummer is that I got sick at the end of the month.  Sick enough I would have taken time off work if I weren't working from home.  I might have if nothing else had been going on, but I got sick at the end of the month, which was quarter end, so I plowed through.  I did see a doctor, and it just seemed to be a cold.  I was negative for other things.  Of course, I'd managed to give myself pink eye as well.  Got drops for that, which cleared it up.  The rest slowly ran it's course.

May 27th's Joke

What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?

A Day at the Beach in January

(Just a quick note:  If you are landed here because of a comment I left on your book blog, you might be more interested in my review blog, Carstairs Considers.  But you are very welcome to stick around here, too.)

At the end of January, we had some very nice weather.  We're talking mid-70's.  Yes, we can get that in Southern California in the winter, usually at least once, but it isn't the kind of thing we always have.  It's been mostly cool and raining the last couple of weeks, for example.

So I had to take advantage of that.  So I went down to the beach in Santa Monica.  I parked where I also do these days, and then walked along the beach.  I'd just set out to walk, but I wound up walking down to the Santa Monica pier.  It's been years since I was there, so I had some fun playing tourist and wandering around to see what I could see.

It was a quiet, relaxing day.  And the weather really was so wonderful.

Lunch with College Friends

About a month ago, I met up with a couple of friends from college for lunch.

It started because Brian is getting married this summer, and he asked John and I to be in the wedding.  He was about to move to be closer to his fiancee, so this was the only chance to hang out and see him before we go back for the wedding.

To my surprise, they both came up here.  In fact, we wound up not that far from my place.  I feel a little guilty about that, but neither one of them seem to mind.

We sat around and talked for several hours, sharing memories and catching up.  Yes, we talked a little about the wedding as well.  It was just a nice, pleasant afternoon.

February 19th's Pun

A three-legged dog walks into a frontier saloon, sidles up to the bar, and announces, “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw.”

Jury Duty 2024

(Just a quick note:  If you are landed here because of a comment I left on your book blog, you might be more interested in my review blog, Carstairs Considers.  But you are very welcome to stick around here, too.)

I had jury duty again the third week of January.

I'd had Federal jury duty in October of 2022, and I had to actually show up.  And it was in downtown LA, which wasn't fun.  This was back to LA County.  Fortunately, that meant I was going to be going to a more local courthouse.  Still not the one in down, but closer than downtown.

They'd originally called me for the week of Christmas.  Since I was out of town with my family for Christmas, I postponed.  I couldn't have showed up if called to show up.  But I wanted to get it over with, so I just postponed by a couple of weeks.

What I didn't like?  I couldn't call in until after 7 PM.

But I did pick the week of Martin Luther King weekend, so I only had to call in for four days instead of a full week.

And I never had to report.  It was so great every night hearing "You don't have to report tomorrow."

My boss was on call that week, too.  At the same court house.  She never had to show up either, but we were checking in with each other first thing in the morning each morning.

Hopefully, it will be several years before I have to go through that again in either location.

Master's University Winter Classic 5K - 2024

(Just a quick note:  If you are landed here because of a comment I left on your book blog, you might be more interested in my review blog, Carstairs Considers.  But you are very welcome to stick around here, too.)

Well, you can see how good a job I've been doing at keeping up with this blog this year.  So much for my once a week life updates, right?

Almost a month ago now, I took part in the Master's University Winter Classic 5K.  Last year, it was cold and threatening rain, with a little bit of sprinkles on us.  This year?  It was cold, but not nearly as cold.  But the sun was out.  Once we started running, I warmed up pretty quickly.  I finished in a little over 36 minutes (like 36:10 or something), which I was happy about.  I took a couple of weeks off from running in December because of my cough, so the last couple of weeks before the run were a struggle.  I took a couple of walk breaks, but did better than expect overall.  (And I generally walk at some point during my runs, even before I took the break in December.)

As always, I saw a couple of friends there, which isn't a surprise after attending school there and then my time working there.  However, it wasn't the friends I normally see.  Still, it was nice to say hi really fast to them.

February 4th's Pun

A rancher counted 196 head of cattle when they were out on the range, but when he rounded them up he had 200.