Envy...

With all the attention that Judy's car's have been getting, my little Nissan was apparently feeling neglected. So, on my way home Friday night it demanded my attention in the form of a broken clutch cable. Thinking that I had a very good relationship with the Nissan, I was surprised to find myself having to coax her home in second gear. Some TLC and a new cable has us purring down the road. Relationships do take time and maintenance to work well. It runs faster and jumps higher too...

Cars...

A form of transportation. They get us from point to point. In our culture, we have, at some level, a relationship with our cars. Is your car reliable? If you are in a relationship, it should be one you can count on. Judy's old Mercury developed a rather odd attraction to a large rock that was rolling across I-215 a few weeks ago. It was a very, very short relationship. The Merc. was broken hearted. Well, the transmission case was cracked. The Merc. was left feeling awful. It also caused a major rift in our relationship with the car, as leaky transmissions are very messy and tend not to be reliable. So we have started a new association with the 2000 Mazda 626 pictured. We will let you know how this new connection progresses.

Weather
This past January had 3 consecutive weeks of below freezing temperatures. The second coldest on record. As cold as January was, the first two weeks of February was warm. We had days that got to 50°'s. The picture of Judy and her Mazda is from February 17th. We woke up to six inches of snow this morning. For those keeping track, Winter is back.

Frivolity

Sometimes I run across interesting things on the way to other things.

Everybody has or has had shoes. They do so much for us and unless they wear out or go out of fashion, we don't really think about them too much. We think about shoe laces even less, unless they break or come undone at the most in opportune time. That brings us to Ian's Shoelace Site. Some things I didn't know about shoe laces:

1. On an average shoe with six pairs of eyelets there are almost 2 trillion ways to feed a shoelace through those 12 eyelets.
2. The plastic tip in the end of your shoelace is called an "aglet". You can also learn how to repair them.
3. There are more than one way to tie a shoe. Ian lists at least seventeen shoelace knots, including a "Halloween" knot that looks like a small hangman's noose. The different knots are rated on a scale of 1 to 5 stars.

So, have some fun, learn something and visit "Ian's Shoe Lace Site" - http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/index.htm

EKC

There have been many changes in photography and imaging over the years. Kodak, the former 900 pound gorilla in the US photography market has been downsizing and selling off divisions. In the 80's and 90's I used to wonder why the premier Photo Manipulating software was made by Adobe and Aldus and not by Kodak. They have moved far too slowly trying to figure out how to make a profit in the digital world.

This month Kodak announced some new inkjet printers that just might enable them to make up some of it's lost photographic revenue. The standard practice in the printer industry is to sell the printers for little or no profit and make money on the ink cartridges. What makes Kodak's printers different from the printers currently on the market? The print head is built in to the printer instead of the ink cartridge. This means that the ink cartridges will be about ½ the cost of current cartridges with the same amount of ink. The printers will cost about $50 more than current models with the same features, but you won't feel like you're being robbed when you need to buy more ink. I may buy one when they come out this spring and will let you know what I think. You can find out a bit more here if you're interested:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128730-c,inkjet/article.html
and
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0702/07020601kodakallinoneprinters.asp

Says You!

A few weeks ago the Public Radio program "Says You!" came to town to record a couple of shows for later broadcast. So Judy, Rachel and I went downtown to the Public Library Auditorium to see the shows. While we were waiting for the show to start a fellow started talking to Judy. He identified himself as Phil Solkin a writer with the show. Phil said that they like to have young people help keep score on stage... That's about as far as he got as Rachel said "YES!". So not only did we get to see a very funny radio program, we had the added pleasure of watching Rachel on stage keeping score for her team. I must say that she was much better than the other team's score keeper. She added a certain panache to her performance.

The show should be broadcast on NPR this Saturday February 10th. Check your with your local NPR for Broadcast times and perhaps you can "hear" us on the radio.