My nephew is back from Iraq, safe and sound!

Heard from my bro-in-law tonight. My nephew, who is in the Air Force, was told the other day that he's to be sent to Iraq in September.

I've never been more proud and more scared in my life.

Thank you all for your thoughts regarding my grandmother. She is still in the hospital and on Plavix, which is a blood thinner. She is expected to be released from the hospital tomorrow.

We're also finding out my batty old grandmother has had symptoms for some time now, especially with the slurring of her words. She has just chosen to ignore them and not mention them to anyone, including her doctors. So help me, my father has the same kind of mentality. Grr.

So now I need to take my mind off things. Neil Patrick Harris announced he was gay. Yawn. Tomorrow Saddam hears his fate. There will be people upset tomorrow. Elections are Tuesday, and apart from one special race in Mountain View, CA, I really just want this to be over.

Finally watched the first episode of "The Nine", and that will be all I see. The only compelling character to me was the guy who tried to take his own life.

There was a forty-something woman on the train Thursday night, who was trying to act late twenty-something in dress and attitude -- and failing miserably at it. The only reason I bring this up is that she was reading a book on the train in public that was pretty amazing... I'm including this lilnk to the book, and while the link goes to amazon.com and is, in and of itself, okay, the book title and content is what had me amazed.

I talked to one of my friends today, and he mentioned that Jen's ex-husband has a MySpace page. I won't link to it, but it's really quite sad. Jen's out scrapbooking tonight, and playing with her new toy which is her Christmas present given to her early -- a Cricut personal cutting system. Happy wife, happy life.

Leon, in this case, is Nestle SA, which just bought Jenny Craig for $600 million.

Now, for the introspective part of our program, I present to you that I am a very boring person. Jen and I went to party this weekend celebrating the newly acquired PhD of one of our friends. There were people there we hadn't seen for almost a year. The most common question, of course, was "So, what's new?" Sadly, I really didn't have an answer. Jen and I just *are*. We don't have major changes to our lives. We work and we putz around. We don't have kids, and aren't ever planning to have kids. So year in and year out, we seem ... stagnant. Dull. Boring. Makes me wonder how I even have friends sometimes.

And now, for something completely different. My sister, oh joy, is in the state for my nephew's high school graduation. This will make for a fun two weeks...

Just received an email from my father that might be of interest to a few of you...

They had the "Great American Road Trip of Historic Route 66" through AAA and along the way they hid geocaches. For those who don't have any idea about geocaches, one gets the coordinates of the caches from the web site and uses a GPS unit to seek the caches out. I have been involved with geocaching for almost two months now. Anyway, I have been following Route 66 trek and the day that the cache in Cajon Pass was listed, it took me a mere 40 minutes to print out the cache information from the website, load the coordinates into my GPS receiver, put on my boots, and race to the destination to only find that someone else had already found the cache and he got there 10 minutes before I did. I had to drive through city traffic and stop lights, etc. He was from Victorville and only had to drive the freeway to get there. So I got the second to find braggin' rights.

I sent my log information into AAA along with a self-timer picture. The log is at:
http://www.aaa-calif.com/travel/promo/campaign/caches/cache-19.asp
and my picture is on :
http://www.aaa-calif.com/travel/promo/campaign/r66_end.asp
I am standing in front of my Heep and it will enlarge if you click on it. They not only edited my log but the picture as well. But that's okay with me. Not everyday my picture shows up on the Internet.

Losel 2 is the handle I use for geocaching by the way.

Specifically, his picture is here. Woo-hoo! Go Dad!