Roblog

The hottest day of the year hit Houston on Tuesday. The official high reached 100°. That also happened to be the day I needed my car for an offsite meeting just after lunch. The problem is that my car has no air conditioning. If it's 100° outside, then the coolest I can get in my car is when 100° air blows onto my face from my open window.

I came up with what I thought was a clever solution. We have a casserole dish that has pads that can be heated up in the microwave and placed in the carrier with the casserole to help keep it hot. We also have one you put in the freezer that will keep the dish cool. So I took the cool pad to work with me, keeping it in the freezer in the lunch area. When I left for my meeting (right after lunch), I took the cool pad to the car and put it between my back and the car seat.

It actually worked quite well! I could feel the heat in the car, but that square foot of my back stayed cool enough that my whole body never got sweaty and gross. It started losing some effectiveness after 20 minutes or so, but I wasn't in the car too much more than that. The only other problem was remembering to take it with me (from freezer to freezer) as I traveled from office to office. I'll definitely use that technique again if I have to stay cool in my car.

I finally got around to entering all of the data collected from every gas fillup our Honda Accord has ever had. Here are the gas mileage results:

Click on the chart to see a detailed graph of our gas mileage history.

The graph shows a few interesting things:

• The mileage decreases during the hot months
• Our mileage is not going down yet
• The mileage started off very low

Being the data junkie I am, I look forward to seeing what this graph looks like in a few years.

Donna injured her back this weekend. Actually, it was Friday when she hurt it lifting Amanda out of the stroller, but she reinjured it on Sunday getting Elena out of the car seat. She was pretty much incapacitated yesterday. I hope she is able to both keep her back and the girls cared for today until I can get home.

One upside of this is that I got to take the fancy car into work today. OK, it's not really that fancy, but it has air conditioning! I was going to have to take my hot car into work until Donna became incapable of driving yesterday.

But this small change in routine had some adverse side effects. Firstly, I keep my bag-o-change in the hot car, so when I arrived downtown ready to pay cash for my parking space, I didn't have the change. I drove around until I found a parking lot for $3 (which is how much in dollar bills I had on me). Secondly, the key to my desk is on my other keychain. Thankfully, I keep a spare in my wallet; otherwise, I would have been computerless for a while since I keep my laptop locked up in my desk.

We have a gas fireplace that we have never used. Being in Houston is part of the reason why, and now that we have toddlers that's another good argument against it, but mostly it's because it seems like too much work for it being so messy.

But we've smelled a small gas leak coming from the valve next to the fireplace from time to time. Somedays the smell is stronger than others, but Donna smells it much more often than I do. We even had the gas company come out a few months back to check it. They didn't find any leaks.

Well, last night, it was quite pronounced. We called the gas company and, at 10:00 PM, they came by. Their little gas detector wand started clicking. The technician said it was a small leak.

He also said we have two options:

1. He reports the leak, at which point we'd have to schedule a city inspection after repairs were made to confirm the leak has been fixed.
2. He shuts off the gas and pretends we weren't there, while we get a plumber to shut the gas off to the fireplace. Then we can call the gas company back to say we missed the technician and to come turn our gas back on.

As promised, there are now some new pictures of the twins from the previous two months. Some of them I've posted before as part of other collections.

By the way, our gas is back on. I had an extra hot shower this morning just because I could.

The Heat
The Humidity
The Hurricanes
The Flying Cockroaches
The Mosquitoes
The Traffic
The Constructions
The Sprawl
The Refineries
The Ridicule
The Pollen
The Air
The Billboards
The Flooding
The Image
The Property Taxes
The Short Springs
The Long Summers
The Potholes
The No Mountains

http://www.houstonitsworthit.com/

The girls have been saying something that sounds like "little father Daddy" but it was hard to say what, exactly. We could never tell from context what might make sense. But I just realized that they have been saying "little flower Daddy" since they were recently flower girls at my sister's wedding. I guess they figure since they are flower girls, I must be a flower Daddy. I haven't corrected them.

It's sometimes annoying how poorly I type. I took typing in high school, but I didn't practice enough to realize the benefits. So I still only use five fingers to type. Funny thing is, people are sometimes impressed when they see me type. My fingers fly around the keyboard (they have to, since I only use 5 of them), and sometimes I can get on a roll that does look rather impressive. But that's only until you check my accuracy.

My most common errors are transposing two characters. I type "coudl" far more than "could" on the first try. "Woudl" and "shoudl" are also very frequent typos. Sometimes, I'll get out of synch and type a word with two or three consecutive transposition errors. That probably tells me something about either the mechanics of how I press the keys, or how my brain tells my fingers to press them. When I'm independently wealthy, I'll commission a study on myself.

At least these errors almost always produce non-words, so as long as I spell-check my text, they are caught and corrected. This blog, however, does not have a spell-check built-in, so unless I catch my mistake, you might see an occasional error slip by.

My lack of blog entries belies my eagerness to get our new, as yet unannounced, iMac. The product announcement is expected to be made at the Apple Expo in Paris on August 31, and I've given some serious thought about trying to see the live webcast of the event. It would start at 4:00 AM Houston time, although I have not yet been able to verify that there will be a live webcast available.

I am also steeling myself for the fact that it will be several weeks, if not months, after the new iMac is announced before we will actually take possession of our new computer. There are serious shortages of the new G5 chip that is delaying the new PowerMac models. That does not bode well for the availability of the G5 iMac.

But all I can do is wait. So that's what I'll do.