It's 8:30am, and here's my Monday so far:

• My insurance deductible reset, so I am gonna get hit by new dentist bills in a week or so.
• Woke up this morning to discover the house was freezing. My heating system has died. This is an expense I neither expected nor can afford.
• Hit every single light on the way to work.
• Proofs of a printing project were sitting on my desk for the last 10 days or so unnoticed; the printing project is suddenly going to be 10 days delayed.

And this is before our staff meeting in a half hour. Happy 2009! ...

Sticky Petals This past weekend, with my mom, stepfather and aunt, was devoted to the Rose Parade. First, we spent a little time volunteering to build a Rose float — or rather, they did the volunteering and I did the picture taking. But we had to cut it short because the overpowering fumes from the glue were rapidly eating away at our brain tissue. The glue is used to adhere plant material to the float, which is mostly made of a sort of styrofoam and plaster. Mom and Susie were applying pieces of moss to the float, even though they ...

Looking for a good dentist in San Jose? I recommend Patricia Vielbig, off Bascom in Rose Garden. (In that weird little triangle of Naglee, Bascom and Forest, across from Mountain Mike's pizza.) Love her. And I hate dentists. You know what amazes me? I spent decades in DC not going to doctors or dentists because they were unpleasant. But here in San Jose, I've had extraordinary good luck with doctors, even the ones I either picked at random (dentist) or were assigned (cardiologist). Evidence that people are nicer here in California? That's been my experience, but people who are from here ...

I dunno, maybe it was one of those bugs that will never be reproduced. But it was spectacular: I resized a pane in a Finder window, and was suddenly presented with a window that, if printed out, would stretch 20.34 feet in length. Don't take my word for it — have a gander at the screenshot [176K]. ...