a


jimsjournal

Oh Danny Boy -- 08/29/09



Hurricane Danny Tropical Storm Danny Tropical Depression Danny (soon to become "heavy rainstorm Danny"?) should be right off our coast just after midnight tonight.

Rain, although not too heavy, began late yesterday afternoon and will continue all day today and probably until sometime tomorrow morning. I suppose there could be some heavy rain overnight, but so far it has not been too bad.

Yes, my brother and his son are still going to be riding a hundred miles up and down hill today in Vermont (although I guess a better description would be down and up and down and up and down and up... lather, rinse, repeat). Well, at least it will be a change from their usual 105 mile out and back ride across Death Valley. (And, of course, this is a fund-raising ride by Team Chad and Dad for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and pledges can still be made for either Chad or Dad.)

Thursday night Nancy and I went up to East Greenwich to the Harborside Restaurant overlooking Greenwich Cove on Narragansett Bay to join with some of my co-workers (there were probably about forty or so of us) for an evening of food and drink. It is always good to get together with people in person rather than always dealing with them via e-mail and instant message and telephone conference calls. This also gave us a chance to say congratulations and goodbye to the woman who had been our company's senior corporate executive in Rhode Island; she is now off on a two year executive assignment in Switzerland. And it also gave us a chance to make some pitches about upcoming events: about a month from now we are planing to get a group of us together to spend a Saturday morning helping Save the Bay to clean up a beach (already have more than two dozen signed up for that) and I'm organizing a team to take part in the annual Making Strides walk to raise money to fight Breast Cancer.


Nancy and I grabbed one of the tables on the outdoor deck overlooking the boats in the marina and enjoyed a long conversation with my colleague Hamid with whom I had visited various interesting places (such as Oslo and Nice) back when we were both teaching. (Now I keep busy doing quality assurance reviews of courses and Hamid spends most of his time as a curriculum architect.)

The "heat wave" we had been experiencing for most of August broke this week and Thursday seemed pleasantly cool. In fact, I wore long pants (instead of shorts) and a sports jacket on Thursday night and felt comfortable. I put the quotation marks around "heat wave" because our high temperatures were mostly in the low to mid eighties (with a few days in the middle of the month that hit ninety or so) and those of you who live in places where the daily high passes 100 degrees for day after day in the summer must be wondering how I can say that such pleasantly mild weather was hot.

We had thought that we were over that summer cold or whatever it was that I was complaining about a few days ago -- that's not a royal we, whatever it was, Nancy had it also -- but by Wednesday we thought it was gone and, indeed, we had both felt fine on Thursday. But we both woke up on Friday feeling exhausted for no reason... and then, while I was eating breakfast, I had a tooth fall out. Well, not a real tooth, it was a crown. Apparently the steel rod that holds it in place had snapped in two. I got in to see my dentist and he worked at it but was having trouble removing the half of the rod that was still in my mouth, so he sent me off to see an endodontist to do that. They were able to successfully remove the rod and also fix up the hole where it had been so that a new rod could be cemented in place, but by then more than half the day was shot. And I have to wait until Monday to get the crown fastened back in place.

Oh... and I was taking Friday off as a vacation day to get in one last long weekend before summer ended.

Feeling better today but it is too wet outside to do any of the outdoor jobs I would like to do. (I guess I'll have to do indoor stuff.) Ah well, at least I'm not on a hundred mile long bike ride in the mountains of Vermont in the rain. I think I'll FTP this entry, do some quick grocery shopping, fix lunch, and then go with Nancy to help her get her room set up for school. (Monday is the first day of school for teachers; the kids start on Tuesday.)




previous entry

next entry

To list of entries for 2009

To Home (Index) page


|

Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com