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February 28, 2000

 

 

 

 

 

 

monday

I guess it was another nice day. I was working. I did not like what I was working on all that much. There were several different things I did. I didn't like any of them. A phone call from a boss unit at the end of the day was helpful, but I still felt dissatisfied...with the work and my progress on it. There are days like that.

But I'm taking vacation tomorrow. It's leap day. Ordinarily, if a year is divisible by 100, it doesn't have one. But if it's divisible by 400, it does. A little something the calendar guys devised to make up for creeping inaccuracy properly. Didn't know that? Why would you? How many of the readers here were around in 1900 to know that it didn't have a February 29? But look on your calendar...tomorrow is still February. So I'm taking vacation. Y2K? Well, what if the programmers forgot this? Just kidding. We didn't. Or, if we did, we fixed it during all that testing.

So, if you found all that fascinating (yawn) and want to find all the calendar lore, there is, of course a web site. I remember my math teacher in high school gave us a gift one year. It was a set of papers with all the basic calendars (they are 14, numbered 0 thorugh 13 on this site) and a correlation of years to calendars. It was a very nice gift, actually, at the time. I didn't appreciate it properly at the time. Norman Bennett became a professional actor and quit teaching. Shame for teaching. He'd always done a little amateur acting, apparently.

It is odd how I discovered that Norman Bennett was an actor. In 1982, Forrest read that a high school buddy of his (Emily Tracy) had written a made-for-TV thing about being a beauty queen. Probably not something we'd have normally watched. But we did because she wrote it. I thought the father in the thing looked remarkably like my high school math teacher. I didn't catch the credits. Later, we saw 'Tender Mercies' and the preacher was this same actor. When the credits rolled, I realized it was him. I also spied him in 'Terms of Endearment' and a 'Dallas' episode. Looks like he's amassed a pretty good list of very small roles. Interesting in that 'small world' kind of way that his career and Emily's crossed over.

I did get in a dog walk tonight. Boring repetition in the neighborhood. We walked in the dark, though, which relieves the boredom somewhat. There's the excitement of almost falling in holes, of losing track of where you are, of not seeing the line coming when a dog breaks. SuRu, FFP and I ate at Fonda before the walk.

The picture takes us back to the weekend and shows the dogs meeting Doak.

The CPA finished our taxes today. They want more! I tell you...it will almost be a relief to earn less this year, which we will surely do. Just to deprive the taxman his share. It's good to get all the figures ready though and know the paperwork is done for another year. Life is just one big never-ending errand. Once one realizes that one never finishes a list of 'to do's but another two lists appear and that once something is fixed it is ready to break again then one can be happy and content. You just do things, do things, do things and one day you die with a list of errands still pending.

A day of vacation will be nice. Probably should take a couple. But I want to save some for a real trip. And when I go back, I'll have a three day week!

Forrest is the social chairman. "So many people are on our backs for so many things," he said just now while he looked for the details of something we'd promised to do. Think maybe we should slow down on the commitments and have some time to ourselves.

 

 
 

"To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A conceited man is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself."

Sir Max Beerbohm, Quia Imperfecta

 
 

 

meeting Doak

 

 

 

 


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