AUSTIN, Texas, October 14, 2005 — Dad has a doctor's appointment. The thing is, we probably made it so I could go with him, so I'd be back from the trip. He could go to this doctor without me. But he doesn't really want to.

I went to the club and did a quick workout before taking him. I was up early anyway. I picked him up and we went in my car. His blood tests looked good. We talked to the nurse and PA, didn't even talk to the doctor. They didn't do anything but schedule another appointment.

I dropped him off and came home to fool around with our phones. Now that Forrest is retired we

are dropping a second voice line and a special fax line. I rigged the fax up to use a voice line when we deign to turn it on. This simple task involved looking through three or four 'parts is parts' boxes for a long enough phone cord. I took the opportunity to separate the stuff into mice and speakers and computer cables, phone stuff and audio/video stuff and electrical stuff. I should probably just toss some of it.

FFP and I have been asked as last minute replacements to a woman's annual birthday brunch at Tarry House. So we go to Menagerie and pick out a present and have lunch at Vin. (Which used to be Zin.)

I handmade a card for the present, too. I mailed my snail mail thank you cards to South Africa.

A friend called today. She is out of work. So...she decided to go to Europe for a few weeks. That's the spirit!

We went to a rally for the NoNonsenseInNovember crowd at the Westgate. FFP told me it was the birthday of our friend who lives in the Westgate. So we located a funny card and put it with a bottle of bubbly in a gift sack. Only it wasn't her birthday. She was just having the rally in her building's party room. It worked out OK, though, because he took the present up to her actual apartment and got a chance to see it. And she was thrilled and said she and her partner would have us over to drink it or something.

The party was sort of boring, though, so we bought a couple of yard signs and took them home. Our neighbors were outside when we came home and put them up. One took one and the other one endorsed it. The other side doesn't seem to have yard signs. [Ed. note: But they do have automated phone things with our attorney-general giving his legal opinion on the constitutional amendment.]

We stopped on the way home at Central Market for things like wine, broccoli, soup, face cream for FFP, new tweezer things for me (I lost my twissors on my trip somewhere), non alcoholic beer, tofu dip and chips.

We cooked up some shark that FFP bought earlier and had some South African wine with it. As I was scrubbing the pan, the lights went off.

A little investigation showed the outage was just on our side. A neighbor across the street had called. Further investigation of a fire truck up the street found a tree on fire, ignited by branches twisting wires together? The firemen were just waiting for utilities to come.

We took our bottle of wine to the neighbors and sat on their deck and caught up on what the kids were doing (oldest is in her first year at Swarthmore with a schedule that included Calculus and Peace Studies, I think.) We need to visit more.

After the lights were on, we had to set clocks, get all the computer gear fixed up. Wasn't long until sleep grabbed me.