08:22 – Costco run and dinner with Paul and Mary yesterday. Ordinarily, we do that on a Sunday because it’s so much less crowded at Costco on Sundays, but Paul and Mary had plans for today. They are attending–and I am not making this up–a documentary film on sushi making at River Run.
I’ve said before that when I was a kid most of my friends read Sherlock Holmes and wanted to be Holmes; I wanted to be Moriarty. I suspect Mary would also pick Moriarty. Barbara and Paul, both of whom are inexplicably law-abiding, would definitely choose Holmes.
So, yesterday I told Mary I had an idea for a new book to pitch to O’Reilly and asked if she’d be interested in co-authoring Illustrated Guide to Home Forgery Projects. Mary said there was no way she’d be willing to have her name on that book. When I asked why not, she said because some day we might really want to forge an expensive artifact and put it up for auction, and it wouldn’t do to have our names associated with forging stuff. I like the way Mary thinks.
11:11 – The end of an era. This week is bulky-item pickup, the one time a year when the city will haul off items too large to fit in the trash bin. (Well, except in the ghetto area of East Winston, where the city picks up bulky items every normal trash collection day, including items like televisions that they won’t pick up elsewhere.) So, after Barbara and I hauled out the old propane grill (which some passing scavenger stopped and picked up before we could even get it to the curb), I decided to see if there was anything I could put out for bulky-item pickup. My eye settled on an old 17″ monitor, the last CRT monitor in the house. I was keeping it “just in case”. So I carried it out the front door, but Barbara pointed out that bulky-item pickup doesn’t allow computer equipment and monitors. So we hauled it back down to the garage and put it in the Trooper. Barbara’s going to haul it and a bunch of other stuff to Good Will. Presumably they’ll bundle it with a working PC and some poor family will have a usable computer system.