Friday, October 28, 2005

Our kitty continues to improve. She seems to be back to her old self. However, she is not very fond of the pill administration that occurs every morning before we go to work. We decided to give her the pills in the morning in the hopes that she will forget how upset she is with the process by the time that we return home from work.

This weekend is the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the Villa Aurora Foundation for European-American Relations, Claudia’s organization. There will be a performance of Lion Feuchtwanger’s Success by a musical/acting troupe out of Germany

Also this weekend, UCLA takes on Stanford in their continuing pursuit of an undefeated season. Tune in to Fox Sports West tomorrow @ 3:30pm to catch all the action!

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Today continued our trying week. We had to take our wonderful cat, Princess, into the vet. She had to have abunch of tests and be pricked and poked to find out what the problem is. If any of you know our cat, she hates to leave the house and doesn’t play well with others! She was very upset when we took her to the vet this morning. Since Princess was a stray that was rescued from abuse at a factory, we never knew how old she was. The vet told us today that her eyes indicate that she is about 10 years old. A little bit older than we had guessed that she was, but in the ballpark.

So, a few hundred dollars and two prescriptions later, she is back at home and getting over her anger at us for taking here away from home and leaving her at the vet for the few hours that it took to do the tests. We were very relieved to find out that it was something that can be taken care of with a short course of antibiotics. The next task is to get her teeth cleaned within the next month.

Monday, October 24, 2005

Well, the new week begins….with the same dreary weather that we had most of last week and all of the weekend. I don’t mind non-sunny weather ever once in a while but a few weeks at a time is a little much. Some of you will be sitting there saying to yourselves, “What is he complaining about? We have alot worse fall/winter weather on a good day than Southern California has on a bad one!” However, the point that you might be missing is that I don’t live in your hometown and live in Southern California! We expect to have great weather because that is normal here.

On another note, how about those UCLA Bruins? The UCLA football team is now firmly in the top ten, number 8 to be exact. This past saturday saw them put together probably the most balanced game that they have played all year. The offense showed up for both the first and second halves and the defense really stepped up their effort. In contrast to previous games, the defensive line really played well while the secondary seemed to have problems (the exact opposite of the problem in previous games).

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

It was a bit of a sad day in our house this morning. Our friends Kiki and Cashi had to leave this morning at 5:30am to get the the airport to catch their light back to Hannover. We will miss them! They have been in the US for about 3 weeks and had stayed with us for about 1 1/2 weeks. They got to experience LA during brushfires and then rain over the course of their stay. During their trip, they saw many of the sights around LA and then made a trip to Orange County, Yosemite, San Francisco and San Jose before returning to our place. They had a good time here and we really, really enjoyed their visit!!

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

I endured some trauma at the end of last week. Nothing physical, more of the emotional sort….I broke my Tablet PC! Any of you that have listened to me evangelize the Tablet PC platform know what a blow that was to me! I was very upset to say the least. I cracked the LCD screen on my tablet! AAAHHH!!!! However, thanks to the wonderful generousity of my amazing parents I was able to replace by recently departed daytime companion and coworker (I wish that my dayime companion was my wife but unfortunately both of us have to work all day!) at the end of last week. The newest addition to my life is the Gateway CX2610 Tablet PC. The price was right. I got over 20% off and the salesman told me that I was walking out of the store having probably paid less than the company paid for the computer wholesale. It pays to read the fine print on those coupons that you get from Best Buy. This is probably the only 10% off coupon that they have ever printed without a computer exclusion! In fact, the manager didn’t want to believe me and read the fine print at least 5 times before he was willing to give me the 10% off after the $150 instant rebate! Long story even longer, I got the new Gateway tablet for a grand total (out the door) of $1234.00! What a deal!