The Monday Roundup

I've been spending a lot of my blog time lately playing around with a new layout, but that does nothing to generate content. So I am taking a break from style sheets to bring you these updates.

Thursday night on the way home from work I saw a shooting star. I wasn't sure how newsworthy an item this was but some of my coworkers - a jaded bunch to be sure - seemed pretty excited about it when I mentioned it Friday. It was quite bright and streaked across at least a quarter of the sky.

Saturday we took the kids to a birthday party. It was a princess-themed party and the cake featured one of Disney's better known heroines. It took all my self control to keep quiet when the birthday girl's father asked loudly "Ok, who wants a piece of Cinderella?"

Sunday morning I was pressed into service at church. The guy who normally sets up the sound equipment had to leave town suddenly, so I got a call to come help out. This week was the annual meeting, which meant that three microphones and a video projector had to be set up. It took me a few minutes to figure out to hook everything up. They should have some drawings.

Anyway, everybody was grateful for my help, although it was not a difficult assignment by any stretch. "Plug in four cables. Ride the faders. Go home." One guy was telling me how difficult it all seemed, so I asked if he wanted me to show him how it worked. "You plug the microphone into the connector down here. Make a note of the number next to the connector. Then go to the audio board and push the slider above that number - up is louder, down is softer. Don't touch any of the other knobs. End of lesson." We're not talking about putting people on the moon here, folks.

I had today off so we thought we'd go to the zoo. When we got there the line to buy tickets was at least a hundred people deep. We decided that maybe the zoo wasn't the right place for us. We ended up down the road a bit at Travel Town. Pretty neat place, actually. There are quite a few steam locomotives and old railroad cars set up - Claire and Cameron were both quite excited to find a caboose with an intact cupola that you could climb up into. "Just like the brakeman, daddy." Cameron is pretty sure that my job has something to do with trains because I'm an engineer.