Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

I used to see people brag about their weight loss and say "nothing tastes as good as... " followed by some weight loss goal.  I still like food, but I'm down aalmost 40 pounds so far.  It's not a lot, at least not where I'm going, but I do like the numbers when I get on the scale.  It's going to be a long slow journey, I guess.  Then again, it did take years to get here, and I can look back and see all of the mistakes. My first out-of-college job was a continuation of the job I had held there - Wendy's.  I started out as a grill closer.  I busted my butt to learn the job, kept learning more positions and roles.  When the opportunity came along to run the closing shifts every night, I took it.  I learned how to do the dreaded "Saturday Night Books".  Every week we did a full food inventory.  Every other week was a full check on all of the consumables, down to the ounce.  And once a month were the Saturdays that the managers did - the...

As with every winter here in the tundra, we get those "oh, hey, you think winter's done?" storms.  They usually fall on weekends during March, and so for some reason Minnesota state high school tournaments tend to get, well clobbered.  This weekend was the Girl's State High School tournament, and while we had athletes and their families from every corner of the state coming to Minneapolis, where, of course, this blizzard took it's square aim on the metro area and south - because most storms tended to go north or otherwise just miss us this year.   So Saturday morning we had sun and the yard was almost completely cleared of snow.  The few remaining spots were in the shade on north sides of trees and down slopes that do not get a lot of direct sunlight this time of year.  Across the street is an elementary school, and the snow piles on the edge the lot had fallen from sixteen feet to about three feet tall.  By about nine Saturday night, when we took the ...

More than a few years ago, my wife and I were living in our first two-bedroom apartment.  I got a call from my old Campus Computing superviosr who was in the process of upgrading the St. John's University student computing environment to a new VAX system.  He wanted to know if I wanted the old VAX 11/785 computer they had.  Yes, the VAX which was about the size of two side-slide file cabinets, needed an external cabinet about the size of a two-drawer file cabinet for the operating system disk and the storage disk, the big free-standing tape drive, and the nearly-as-big max-bus cabinet.  Yup, the one I helped to connect to the then-new TOMUS system that networked the library card-catalog systems between my university and the others in the MIAC conference that St. John's belonged to - all of which were small private colleges in the upper midwest, most in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois, at the time. And my wife said I had to say NO.  Talk about disapp...