"Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depends on simplicity."
--Plato Greek philosopher 427 BC - 347 BC

Togo's Sandwich shop for lunch for Gail and I last Thursday. Made a picnic out of the meal at a park in Gold River, down Sacramento way. Hot Pastrami with all but onions and peppers on a white roll... yum. Pricey, but we've earned a treat.

Coming up the grade on US Highway 50 the view of the Sierra's from the town of Shingle Springs is spectacular: white with snow. Although Gail and I live closer to the Sierra's than Shingle Springs, we're too close to the higher foothills and our view of the Sierra's is obscured.

Last month our Kilowatt usage doubled with the 'Kids' living with us. This month we managed to add another 400 Kilowatt hours from last month... with the really cold weather not even here yet. Gail and I are snug with lots of blankets, while the 'kids' use an area heater cranked up to 80° plus Fahrenheit.

I've set up Gail's internet with Earthlink with just one bug... our main telephone line works to dial out but the new line is buggered somehow. Pretty sure it's something I did... just need to figger out the solution. Update... yup I did it... added *70, to the dialing properties that was not needed ( used only if we use call waiting which I assumed she had ordered, since I use it... oh well... live and learn ). Gail found a telephone operator that knew their s*** and could actually hear the extraneous modem tones and told her to tell me what to look for.

Also added ZoneAlarm freeware version along with: Belarc, AdAware, and AVG anti-virus ( all freeware ) to get some protection from the 'bad guys' on the net. First AdAware scan netted (7) bugs, and we'd only been on the net for an hour ! The 'puter came bundled with Semantec's Norton anti-virus, but seems I've read on the boards that it can be buggy, though I could be wrong. Will check Da Boards with a search to nail down that concern.

Total steps up to 9400. Friday's end of day pedometer tally about 2000 steps ( let's see... about a ( 0.667 ) meter stride times ( 2000 ) = ( 1334 ) meters or ( 1.334 ) kilometers or ( 0.83 ) miles ). Need to improve a bit on that.

" NoteTab Light " utility I'm using has been weirding out. If I went back to fix a typo it would erase a character as I typed in its place rather than just advance the subsequent characters in a string. " Fixed " the bug by saving the document and then exiting " NoteTab Light "... and then re-opening the document in " NoteTab Light "... strange !

Gave Gail a quick lesson in cut and paste techniques. I'll have her start a document and play a bit later on. I tried to instruct my Mom when I was visiting during American Thanksgiving Holiday. Mom seemed to pick up the concept easily enough... have to check to see if she has been able to practice.

Speaking of Mom... we played a bit of phone tag the other day... finally got to visit on the phone a bit. She's having some problem connecting to the internet on her Mac...

E-mailed Debi... and received a Hallmark eCard from her as well as my brother Robin

Friday: TV viewing of " Lord of the Ring " marathon of part one and two... cool !

Saturday: Gail and I went to see " Lord of the Ring, Return of the King "... simply put: AWESOME !!!

6.5 Richter magnitude quake near San Simion, California... [ a link ! ]... with (2) 4.0+ aftershocks this Monday afternoon... more to follow certainly. Luckily the area is fairly sparse in population with low mortality and moderate damage reported so far.