Sky Camp

Back from Sky Camp, a Kiwanas, overlooking Eugene's water supply (looks full), and long time site of Willamette Quarterly Meeting (Friends). I assisted as emcee for community night, doing an "ice breaker" five minute math lecture on polyhedra, with Joe Snyder's PowerPoint projector showing my hypertoon in the background (until the laptop power saver kicked in).

Dawn made her connection in Chicago, outbound to the UK, leaving around the same time Laura Bush's bizmo showed up on the PDX tarmac (Boeing?). That was last Thursday. Tara and I drove down to Sky Camp, by way of Fry's Electronics, Friday PM, skirting a jam-up on I-5 by using Barbur Blvd, then discovering a very low pressure front tire situation upon exiting said store. A Les Schwab outlet, adjacent, fixed the problem in no time flat. Glad we caught the problem in a lot, instead of at 65 mph. Tara used a cabin for the two nights. I pitched my tent.

While Dawn is on pilrimmage I'm upgrading her workstation from WinME to XP Pro (purchased at Office Depot, upgrade edition), plus replacing her two obsolete hard drives, with barely 6 gig between them, with a 120 gigger from Maxtor. All her previous files are but a drop in the bucket, somewhere on her E partition. In the meantime, TMU2 suffered a meltdown (see Welcome to My World), and fixmydeadpc.com (local shop) had to work hard on a diagnosis. I thought it was the AGP video card, but turns out the mobo itself had fried, and the CPU, so we upgraded to a newer DDR board, and he swapped the CPU for my old SDRAM (very fair deal). Much better outcome than had it been the video card, which I get to keep and works fine.

Lots of faxing and phoning today to quick certify me with Portland Public to drive Tara and some classmates to OMSI tomorrow, for a school field trip. Signed on to a big meeting at Sisters projected to last up to five hours around the upgrade to GE in the cath labs. I represent Regional Heart and Vascular Institute concerns.

Derek took on Sarah, Moon and the fish (our pets) while we were at Sky Camp, in exchange for Jennifer (just kidding -- dinner), plus I snagged him the requested sale items at Fry's.

I thought of a good poster about our Wanderers CEO: "Don: Better'n OnStar." That's because he sometimes anticipates crises and solves them before they occur. It's hard to find a road service that'll do that, not even AAA.