Roblog

I recently relocated floors in the building where I work - from a windowless 7th floor office to a windowed 37th floor office. The office is smaller, and in fact the rooms themselves in the 37th floor are not as nice, but what it does offer is some natural light and a pretty good view.

The window is facing north and the building is on the south side of town, so I can see pretty much all of the buildings in downtown. I can't see much of the ground (except along the streets that are immediately adjacent to the building), but I can see a few highways, Minute Maid park (the roof is open), and the George R Brown convetion center.

One day last week, it was so foggy I could not see anything out my window. It was very strange to see. The fog did not burn off until about 10:00 AM.

This weekend was a perfect storm of nice (un-hot) weather and no commitments, so we spent some of it re-doing a plant bed in the front yard. It has been an unkempt mess of asparagus fern surrounded by decaying landscaping timbers.

Over the past month or so, I'd been ripping out the well-established carpet of asparagus fern. That was a big job in itself, since the plant is a little prickery, and the root system is thick. With that done, we went to a garden store to get some flowers that would do well in that shady area.

We got some purple Verbena, pink Vinca, and two other kinds of flowers whose names I can't recall. The whole family had fun planting them in the bed, which we then covered up with some cedar mulch, which tends to last several years, as well as smelling great while it's fresh.

We kept the landscape timbers to save some money, but I did remove a whole section of the bed. There used to be three trees in the raised bed, but when we bought the house, two of the trees had been cut down and were just stumps. The bed was shaped like a "U" to encompass all three trees. Now, though, the two stumps have decayed enough that they can almost be planted on top of. But regardless, we certainly didn't need all that bedded area, so I removed several timbers and cut some that remained so I could take an arm off of the "U". I like the space much more now, althogh I still have yet to seed or sod the newly-exposed area.

Since then (Saturday), we've been watering it every day, with the hopes that at least half of the plants survive and spread. I'm pleased with the way it looks, and if the plants survive, it should look even better as the plants spread.

I recently got converted to XP (from NT) at work. Included in that was a screenshot program that has a plug-in for use in all of the MS Office applications. So now every time I open a Word, Excel, or Powerpoint document, I get this little dialog box asking if it's OK to install the plug-in. That's a little annoying, but bearable.

But when I open it from Windows Explorer (the analog to the Finder for you Mac people), I get a second dialog box placed on top of the first. Rather than explain it, here is a screenshot:

So then I have to click on the overlapping dialog box that says, essentially, "Hey - there's a dialog box under me!", before I can dispense with the original dialog box.

What gets me is that someone had to put this into the operating system to have it behave this way. Someone thought this would be a good idea. I'm sure there's a good, logical reason why it behaves this way. Probably Excel reported back to Windows that the file didn't finish opening, so Windows wanted to tell me about it. I don't know why I'd need to know that, since I hope I would notice if the file opened or not. Maybe it's in case I forgot I tried to open it.

I have to use Windows XP for my job. I get to use the Mac OS at home. Thank goodness.

We had a really full and fun Easter weekend.

On Saturday, we took advantage of the not-yet-searingly-hot temperatures and went to the Hermann Park for a picnic lunch. It was windy, but very pleasant in the shade.

Long entry follows...

I am excited about a completely free program I recently found online called Lilypond, but when I try to explain it to people, somehow no one seems all that enthusiastic. Lilypond is a musical score creation program that takes text-based input. Looking at their website, you can see their focus is creating very precise scores that are not subject to the small annoyances that most computer-generated scores contain.

The main reason why it's got me excited is that it creates a MIDI file along with the score, so I can listent to the notes I've input. As a non-musician, this is very valuable, since it's the only way I can check myself to see if I've entered the notes correctly.

Since I discovered the program about two weeks ago, I've been entering all the songs we've invented throughout the years. These include "Amanda Jean", "Elena Reid", "I'm the Foxy Dog", "The Trash Song", and "Deery in the Cornfield". I'm right now working on trying to convert Richard's (my brother-in-law) composition "Wedding Waltz" that he created for his wedding. It is hand-written (but clear), so it will take me a while to create.

I got the munchies yesterday at work and went down to the convenience store in the basement of my building with a coworker of mine. As I was mulling over my options from the vast array of candy bars, Whatcamacallits caught my eye. But before I could say so, my co-worker said "When I was young, I used to love Whatchamacallits."

I immediately started looking for something else. The fact that she said something about it motivated me not to get it, for fear of looking like I can't make my own decision. I ended up getting the Whatchmacallit, but I had to say something like "Actually, I am going to get the Whatchmacallit after all" to somehow excuse my selection.

Donna had a meeting she wanted to go to this afternoon, so I left work a little early to meet her there and do a "car swap" so that I could take the girls for the evening. I took them to Chick-Fil-A for dinner.

The dinner experience was OK, but neither Amanda nor Elena ate much. They were both wiggly (Amanda especially). In fact, I vetoed ice cream because they ate so little. Their wiggliness was harder for me to cope with because I had such a lousy day at work today.

But it wasn't until when we went to the play area in Chick-Fil-A that I became really uncomfortable as a parent.