John and I were watching a show on the Discovery channel the other night about Kim Peek, the savant on whom Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man was based. Peek can read and memorize two pages of a book at a time, in a matter of seconds (his left eye reads the left page while his right eye reads the right page). To prove Peek's incredible memory, the interviewer was asking him a number of questions about the Civil War, all of which Peek answered immediately and flawlessly. At one point, though, the interviewer asked him what Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was. Peek answered, without hesitation, "227 North West Front Street. But he only stayed there one night since he gave the talk the next day." His laughter afterwards indicated how proud he was of that joke. I, in turn, laughed for several minutes afterwards, while John shook his head at me.

Halloween is tomorrow and I have to admit that I'm very much not looking forward to it. Last year, if you'll recall, our humble household was able to endure the onslaught with relative ease because Luke kept the little buggers in line. (And note that I have no issue with small children who trick-or-treat. It's the nineteen-year-olds who come around with grocery carts-- GROCERY CARTS-- demanding candy that piss me off.) This year, I just don't know if I'm up to it. Truth be told, we haven't even bought pumpkins to carve, though we reluctantly bought candy (unopened and returnable). I'm honestly thinking about calling up some friends and asking if we can hang out at their place for the evening. We'll provide candy!

After much struggling, we've got two new albums out on our galleria. One is a sample of photos from our trip to Portland and the other is just some random photos taken this fall. Enjoy!

For the last several days, I've had the misfortune of having "Jingle Bell Rock" running through my head. If I'm doing something mundane, it doesn't really bother me, but when I sit down to concentrate, say on nineteenth-century adoption law, it's damn near impossible. Instead of hearing my own thoughts, I hear, "Giddy-up jingle horse, pick up your feet, jingle around the clock...". Having endured this long enough, I'm now taking drastic action. I'm trying to expel the wretched song from my head by listening to "I Will Survive" over and over again on my iPod. So far Gloria Gaynor hasn't made enough of an impact; when I paused her just a moment ago, that damn horse was still jingling around the clock. Somehow, though, I will survive. I've got all my life to live...

So, Luke knows the word "Starbucks" now. Every now and again, John and I go to Starbucks at night and lately we've taken to loading up the dog and taking him with us. He loves to hang his head out the back window and sniff the night air. We started out by saying, "Do you want to go to Starbucks?" and he'd give us this totally confused look, but then once he was in the car he seemed to forget having been confused just moments earlier. Now, when we say, "Do you want to go to Starbucks?" or even just "Starbucks?" he starts wagging his tail furiously and he bounds for the front door. We're way past fetching the paper at this point, I'm thinking about starting him on Latin language tapes.

This has not been a good week for me with regard to customer service. I finally got someone on the phone to help me with SunTrust's online banking. After a series of wildly frustrating basic questions ("Is your computer connected to the internet?"-type questions), she finally diagnosed the problem: my software is too updated for them. She then assured me that if I downloaded Netscape Navigator for Mac, I'd be able to get to their online banking. So, I downloaded Netscape Navigator for Mac. I'm sure it will come as no surprise when I tell you that after doing so, I was still unable to logon to online banking. I'm now on hold (again) to speak with a customer service rep. "Please continue to hold. Your estimated wait time is greater than ten minutes."

It can't be this difficult. It honestly cannot be this f*%$ing hard to get a book from the library. And yet, somehow, here I sit, completely frustrated. There is a book I need that our library owns. It is not in the stacks and it is not listed as being lost, checked out, or on vacation. The record says, "See Circulation Desk, Library West for retrieval or access." So I went to the Circulation Desk at Library West, whereupon the young man behind said desk told me to fill out the "alternate request form" to have someone retrieve it for me from its current location (presumably Bermuda). I filled out the form. I indicated that the record noted, in effect, that it wasn't located in the normal stacks. And then I got this email: "Dear Patron, We received your request(s) for material(s) from the Library West collection. Our retrieval service is only for items housed in the off-campus storage facility. Items with call numbers A-Z in Library West are accessible and are not retrieved by staff. If you have problems locating an item listed as "not checked out," please see staff at the Library West Circulation Desk." Honestly, it can't be this difficult.

Lots of people have dreams in which they have the ability to fly. Not fly a plane, mind you, but fly the way Superman flies. I have these dreams, too, and as cool as I find them, I have to say that even in these dreams I manage to be stressed out and more than a little clumsy with regard to landing. The way I land in my flying dreams is that I consciously transfer all my weight into my butt and then I let gravity do the rest. It's not the most graceful landing, but it's the only one I know. (If anyone reading this has flying dreams and can detail how they go about landing, I'd be very interested to know.)

John and I are having a new heating and cooling system put in and in order to pay for it, we opened a home equity line of credit. It's through the bank where we have our mortgage. Along with the line of credit, the bank gave us a checking account, which comes with free online banking. In theory. In practice, when I tried to sign up for online banking, I kept getting possibly the world's most frustrating error message: "An error has occurred while processing your request. Please try again later." When I tried again later, and then again even later, I kept getting the same error message. So I sent them an email and described the problem. Their first line of defense, a flunkie, came back to me and suggested that I clear my cookies from my browser and try again. No such luck. The message I got then was that a server error had occurred. When I emailed them to tell them this, the next line of defense (another flunkie) told me that they only supported AOL, Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Safari. The thing is, I used Safari (and Internet Explorer and Firefox, for that matter) and none of them worked. So at this point, I either give up on online banking or I email them again, whereupon another flunkie will email me back and suggest that it's not them, it's my operating system. Or it's what I'm wearing that's screwing things up. Or the fact that I don't speak Tagalog.

When John and I were in Portland last month, we bought a new digital camera. It's an Olympus Stylus 720sw and comes with all kinds of nifty features like being waterproof to 10 feet and shockproof to 5 feet. It's small enough to put in your pocket, it has a large LCD screen, and boasts 7.1 megapixels. The folks at Olympus would have you believe that this little camera all but does your laundry. Unfortunately, the image quality is somewhere between ass-like and horribly ass-like. It has image stabilization, but you have to use the blinding flash to really get that to work and without the flash the image quality is horrible in indoor settings. So now we've got a very fancy, very expensive camera that we can't stand. Why did we buy it, you ask? Well, we wanted a digital camera with more megapixels than our older Canon and the fact that the Olympus is shockproof to 5 feet was pretty hard to pass up. To make matters worse, there are about a million of these babies for sale on eBay and elsewhere, going for about half what we paid for it. *sigh*

I had the great pleasure of being in a wedding this past weekend, and the Friday night prior to the big day I took place in a wedding rehearsal. It was held in a Catholic church, and so followed Catholic protocol. As my escort (get your minds out of the gutter) and I approached the altar, the wedding planner told us to bow. Neither one of us is Catholic, so we both turned to her, completely confused, and said "Bow"? She then shot us the nastiest look and snapped, "You are in the house of the lord, you BOW!" I don't think I made any great inroads with her that night. I made a joke later on in the rehearsal and she turned to me and said, "That's FUNNY," with a less-than-amused look on her face.

For John and I, coming back to Kansas is like a drug. In Florida, we learn to live without it and we convince ourselves that it's not all that we thought it was. And then we come back, even for just a moment, and suddenly we're hooked once more. Each time we visit, we enjoy ourselves. And each night before our flight leaves the next day, our hearts break again. I can't decide which is worse: the knowledge that we're not here now or the thought that we may never live here again.

While going over our finances this weekend, I decided it was time to look at our credit reports. As of September of last year, everyone in the US became entitled to one free credit report per year, from each of the three major rating agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). I went to annualcreditreport.com, typed in some basic information, and within minutes was printing off three credit reports for myself and three for John. What I found was nothing short of eye-opening. Accounts that had been closed for years appeared to still be open, companies with whom we no longer do business (and with whom we haven't done business for quite some time) were still making credit-affecting inquiries, and more. It was alarming! So, I highly recommend that everyone take advantage of their free credit reports. Make sure you get one from each of the three big reporting agencies, because each report is slightly different.