life on the wand

I had the opportunity to make a presentation about our project to some folks from La Poste on Thursday night last week. Later that evening I showed them around the facility while we were sorting mail. Got home about 1 AM. It would be nice if more mail were sorted during the day, but I guess that would delay your mail delivery by a day. Completely unacceptable.

The bit of exciting news I got this week was that the lease is up on my 500 pound (so, I exaggerate, but it feels that heavy when I am lugging it through airports all the time) work laptop. Since I was back in the US this week we were able to transfer all the files and I now am using a brand new, shiny, Dell Latitude D800. It is a little bit thinner, and definitely a pound or two lighter, but still quite the behemoth compared to Joyce's 15" Apple Powerbook. My son made a comparison of the two computers here -- look halfway down the post.
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A friend from work was able to get three extra tickets to the football (soccer) match between Fulham and Aston Villa last night in Fulham. Since there was no even way to distribute the three tickets to the five of us, we decided the boys would go to the football match and the girls to the cinema. Highlights from the match:

• Fulham missed a penalty shot,


• Aston Villa scored the first goal early in the second half,


• Aston Villa had two penalty shot attempts -- both blocked by Fulham,


• Fulham tied the game in the last two minutes.

Since Aston Villa was expected to win, and since Fulham fans had pretty much given up hope at the end of the game and were starting to leave, the final goal was pretty exciting, and the crowd went home happy.
We got back to the train station two minutes after our train left, so we had a 30 minute wait for the next train. We took the opportunity to walk to a Tesco Express and buy some sandwiches and crisps (chips) for dinner. We got home before the girls, who went to Reading to see their movie.
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Hmm, looking at that last post, I notice that my picture in the side bar has a goatee, and now I do, again, too. Over Christmas in 2001 I grew a little beard. When I shaved it off, Joyce told me that she really liked it. I interpreted that as a request to grow it back. So, I started growing another beard Easter 2002. That beard lasted until Easter 2003. After Christmas this year I let the beard grow back. I shaved it into a fu manchu for the pantomime because I was supposed to be a Chinese townie. I have since let it grow back into a goatee. I don't think I have a picture of the fu manchu. Sorry. I did find a picture of one of the rehearsals that John took that shows the size of the stage, the number in the cast, and at the top of the image you can see the ceiling truss. A truss like that is what Philip sat in to adjust curtain locations the first night.
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Okay, I admit it: I have been cheating on the dates of my last month of posts. I'm sorry. I got a little bit behind on posting, and, well, you know, just had to make it look right. I hope you will forgive me. I had to get all that out of the way so I could post about having six-month-long hair! Yes, today is the day! I know the excitement has been building, and you are anxiously awaiting the photos. Okay, probably not. Still, if you click one of the images you will go to the hair project page. The other image will show you what my hair looks like in the morning (shudders). Good thing I usually get up before Joyce -- if she saw this disaster she would cut it off! (No, not really, she took the picture. Give a guy a little poetic license, will ya?). I also think I will reverse the direction of images on my hair page. I think the newest ones should be at the top.
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