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I work on hotel reservations for my business travel. (Sensibly, I think, I've taken care of the pleasure days in Paris first.) I scan ebay and torture some other traders bidding for stuff I can really do without that comes up when typing 'Eiffel'. I don't bid on the 78 RPM record shown here. But it is quite cool, isn't it? Bid up to 50 or 60 dollars as I recall.

These kinds of days just go.

I try to learn to use my new phone. (Every new gadget requires learning a paradigm, entering data, buying accessories!) I read in a book my buddy gave me for my birthday about Weird museums in Paris. I watch a few shots here and there of the U.S. Open tennis. I watch FFP learning QuarkExpress and make a CD of images for him to play with.

"I'm pumped up," he says, or something very like that, indicating he is excited to learn the new software.

I actually back some stuff up. ("Make Backups" is always an item on the ToDo list, but rarely, oh rarely, done.)

I sort through old travel books: good to review for the Paris trip, here's some for Deb who is going to the south of France. (Have I mentioned that daydreaming about a couple of days in Paris has me jazzed?)

In the process of this cleaning out and sorting in my every more messy office, I find a Wall Street Journal article in a six-week-old paper about children giving parents trips, cars, etc. The role reversal. Some of these children are quite young. Dot-com rich. Their parents are my age. (Did I make a mistake not having children?)

I also find one of my favorite used book store purchases of all time. It is a self-published account of a trip abroad by Texas oilman Stanley Marsh and his wife Ida in 1936. This is one you won't find on alibris.com. Claim inside is that 100 were printed for 'family and friends.' Mine is inscribed, "To my good friends, Dr. and Mrs. George Alvis---and Miss Winnie. Ida Marsh." I paid $10 for this at Brock's Books in San Antonio. Brock's has been gone for some years now although it lasted longer than it might have been expected to given that the (alleged) million books inside often were threatened by the river in downtown San Antonio leaking into the downstairs and by each other (aisles collapsed inward and the staff sometimes simply closed them until safety could be restored). I suspect they had something more like tens of thousands of books. It wasn't that big, really, though crammed. But the finds! There were leather-bound books in old German script...sometimes in the middle of a collapse. And my little find was just shoved in among the travel books with penciled notations '$10' and 'Autographed.'

We have a nice family gathering at the parents. We take FFP's parental units. I invite SuRu along as well. Beef roast, potatoes and carrots, gravy, green salad with tomatoes, green beans, spinach casserole, two fruit salads (one from each Mom). We watch "King of the Hill" and I wash all the china and glasses and silver and pots and pans.

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