This was a busy day. I went to Home Depot to get a plaster knife. I can't find mine but I think I gave it to Joe for his spackle job. I got a nice 4 inch knife with a taper on the tip for $7. I also bought more lights for under the counter. Put another coat on the seam on the outside wall in the playroom with the new knife. Started installing the under the counter light over the breadmaker. This meant taking all the glasses out of the cabinet. We ended up throwing out quite a few glasses that we no longer use, or never use such as my whiskey sour glasses from my apartment 40 years ago! Next I went upstairs and started rollering the wall along the stairs where the bookcases used to be. Libbie had painted the edges and was now ready for the roller job. When done I went downstairs and finished the light installation. This involved soldering a track light power tap onto the lighting wire. Still need to put the cover back on. All of this work was done while Don Carlo was playing live from the Met. It was the first Saturday broadcast. We were pretty tired from working so we ordered Szechuan from the Chinese place next to Krogers. Libbie picked up the takeout while I went next door and got a bottle of Ravenwood Zinfandel. Lots of mail today. A box of postcards came from Rich Follett for the convention, my VB 2010 book from Amazon and a bunch of Christmas cards.

Spoke with Citibank again today since the furniture statement still had not come. This is like speaking with Peggy in the commercials. I got nowhere. She said the statement was mailed the 13th. I had lots of luck running the XML sample from the VB 2010 book today. We left for the theater at 4:50. We're going to see Black Swan which opens today in theaters everywhere. After the very intense movie we went to Lonestar Steakhouse in the same parking lot. I had half rack of ribs, baked potato, salad and 2 glasses of Malbac wine. The service was outstanding and the food was good. We will return.

We woke to a white dusting on everything including the road surfaces which are too cold for melting. The snow eventually changed over to freezing rain before all rain. Some of the trees bent over under the freezing rain, especially the skinny pines down the driveway. Libbie had a doctors appointment but it was postponed due to slippery roads. I spent almost the whole day working on XML databases and am pretty happy with the results. Dinner was turkey vegetable soup.

I worked a little more on the Studio 2008 VB program doing the tutorial i printed from the book. Went to Home Depot to look at heatilators and ended up buying a new LED spotlight over the garbage can. I'm happy with how bright it is. Libbie and I went out after dark and evaluated it. It's only 7 watts but very bright. I like it. This afternoon we went to the Rockwell exhibit at the NC Museum of Art. The large oil paintings that were used for the Saturday Evening Post covers were pretty interesting. I enjoyed seeing them close up. A few surprises were that the black and white pics were actually painted with shades of black, gray and white paint. The art critic painting actually had large lumps of oil paint on the pallet of the guy in the pic. The civil rights painting had large oil paint blobs for the fruit thrown at the little girl. We met the Tully's in the museum. Traffic coming home was very heavy, stop and go but it was 5 PM in the afternoon. I fell asleep in the chair at home while surfing the web.
Dinner was turkey pieces over toast with gravy.

Did a quick grocery run then at 11:30 we left for JoAnn Raymer's house for the party. Very nice little Christmas party. JoAnn's house is nicely decorated. It's a very cold day. For dinner I went back to Krogers and bought pasta. I had a coupon but I left it home. They said if I bring it back to the service desk I'll get the dollar for the coupon.

I called Haverty's and then called Citibank about my bill. I have not received one to date. They had the wrong address which is what I suspected. I'm getting to dislike Citibank very much. I had a hard time understanding the foreigner I was talking to. He said I will get new billing info. I'm making good headway with visual Studio. so far I like what I see. I really need more reading material covering XML functions built into the Visual Studio product. Lots of comments about Libbie's Lemon Squares on Facebook. I brought the garbage cans to the street loaded with our discarded books from upstairs. Hopefully they will take them tomorrow despite the weight. Dinner was leftover squash, cranberry and turkey on sandwiches. Very nice.

Downloaded Visual Studio 2010 Express to rewrite Great Violets and also for my Chumby project. No newspaper today. After the morning shows I started making the truffle cookies with peanut butter and bacon. The cookies came OK. The bacon was not crisp enough but all else went well. It's not bad out today, temp in the 40's. We did the tree lights today and Libbie decorated the downstairs. I'm overly full of cookies and candy. Libbie made her homemade pizza from scratch which was excellent as usual.

Worked on getting VB6 to run on Windows 7. No luck. Left at 11:00 for a 12:30 Met HD performance of Don Carlo. Loved it. It was quite long on a cold rainy miserable day. We drove to North Hills for the opera. There was some awful fantom.com preshow which was pure noise. Libbie fixed our turkey again for dinner. We had Butternut squash, cranberry, stuffing and Shiraz for dinner.

worked on streaming for Manon to the Atom machine which I'm calling Cosi. I also did some Norton scans and cleanup of the machine. Dinner was a turkey that Libbie cooked with all the trimmings. We had it with Shiraz. The Kodak album came today for the Nicholas's. It's not bad but certainly not a professional photo album. I put a coat of spackle on the wall in the playroom where the shelves used ot be. We went to the library as well today. Libbie had a reserved book to pick up, I found a new author on the new release shelf.

Emptied some more of the bookshelves today. Did the first coat of spackle. Went to Graingers for fan belts. Stopped by Tiger direct for blank CD's. It's hard buying something there. Burned a Xmas CD for Libbie. Dinner was sausage, onions and pepper casserole from TJ's. It was yummy.

Went to the greenhouse and met Christine, our handicapped person. While there I stuffed the pipe insulation between the building and the greenhouse gutter. It's another cold day, it went down to 19 overnight. Moved the bookshelves from the playroom into the workshop. this job went well but I created quite a pile of throw away books. A lot of them were old travel books and pictorial books. Much stuff, not touched very much. If I haven't looked at it in the past 10 years it was time to pitch it out. I studied the Chumby literature somewhat trying to make the photoframe work. No luck so far. Dinner was Briyani. We listened to Boheme tonight live from the met on Sirius.

Did the grocery run this morning. Picked up food for making the turkey this weekend and also the ingredients for my peanut butter bacon truffles. Libbie wanted insulation for the greenhouse to shed gap. I went to Lowes and picked up a couple of pipe insulation tubes that I tried then went back to Home Depot and got a bunch more only cheaper because they didn't have a glue strip. I worked with the Chumby today, learning the apps and strategy. Got the bill for Stoneybrook today. $521 . I was initially shocked but then found it included the $162 Palmer Ranch payment. Next month the Stoneybrook streets bill will come. Our food minimum is down to $95 remaining. It's very cold out - overnight was 19, high for the day was only 36. They are stripping the trees from our neighbors lot across the street. I hope they don't clear cut. Dinner was pasta. After dinner we listened to the Met on Sirius broadcast of Don Carlo. We see Don Carlo this Saturday on HD.

Dentist appt this morning at 8:30. All went well. Talked to Dr Paul about Christmas lights. He sat down and chatted for a while about Disney lights and the back stage tour. He said he and his wife spend 10 days putting all their lights up, the boys then come over and wire everything together. He also mentioned Judy Howells huge house and the lighting on Olive Chapel. After the dentist I went to Jerry's for notecards and then Best Buy for an infocast. I like the infocast screen very much. My Chumby is due today as well. In the PM Libbie and I took a light tour of the Howells and then up to Dr Beavers on High House Rd. Next stop was La Cocina where we had a couple of Margaritas and Quasadilla L Cocina. It was cold and the greenhouse was reporting 52 so we went over to check it out. Inflation was low and the Fan Jet belt was thin. I decided to replace the belt which involved a trip home to get the belt and tools. I'll deal with inflation issues tomorrow. The belt was cracked and would likely not have made it through the night. The Walgreens prints I submitted today were a mixed bag. The Violets seem dark to me. The family picture came out OK. Temps are predicted to be 19 tonight but I think we got the heating situation under control.

After reading the paper this morning I configured Gallery 3 on the new server software. Started loading a few albums and a black theme. I like it. Next up was painting. Started with ceiling white but eventually found the correct white and painted the area behind where the shelves will be located. When done Libbie took our Sourdough baguette and sliced it like a Hoagy bun and put the BBQ chicken leftovers on with BBQ sauce. I found a movie on Usenet called Ghost Hunters, Amaragosa Opera House. It was terrible and laughable but I enjoyed the background photos of Death Valley Junction. Libbie made her outstanding pizza once again this evening. She's really good at this. Gallery 3 keeps crashing PHP when loading some albums all at once.

Finally got Gallery 3 running on a new version of Uniform Server on my desktop. The problem is that the extract program needs to find the real target drive since it hard codes the drive in the conf file. It's starting to snow today when we went to Fresh market to forage for food. We got chicken, squash and sourdough baguette. stopped at Foodlion and cleaned them out of Progresso 10/$1 soup. Libbie got 10 cans earlier and we bought 8 more which is all they had. Dinner was BBQ chicken, Chardonnay, butternut squash. For desert I had a thawed Canolli. I tried unpacking a new Uniform Server on Traviata and had success. I also successfully moved all my apps to the new server, including this one. It did snow this evening, we got dusted on the grassy areas. The ground is too warm to stick there.

This is First Friday but we chose not to go out tonight. Went to Home Depot for trim paint, white. On the way home stopped at Goodwill with extra bedding then the Credit union for Libbie. It's cold today. I'm not used to this. Tried all day to get Gallery 3 running and/or a new version of Uniform Server. My old version uses Apache 2.0, I need to upgrade to Apache 2.2
Dinner was Salmon with broccoli and steam fresh green beans and Shiraz.

I'm getting confused spending IRA money for taxes. My spending so far: 2173.40 to Wake from Scott, 3256.40 to Wake from Scott, 936.34 to FIA from Scott, $1100 to CU from Scott. In addition, I purchased 200 shares of BAC-W on Scott for 4877. Total Scott spending = 11406.80. On the CU I took 1030 from savings for total deposits of 2130 which includes the previously mentioned 1100 from Scott. I spent 2374.33 on Sarasota taxes from CU. Transferred 1500 of pension from CU to FIA. Total FIA payments so far = 936.34 + 1500 = 2436.34 Still need 1000 to FIA for payoff. Today I went online to figure all this out. For Scott the IRA deposit was 12000, 2 divvys of 546.88 and 241.67, spending of 11406. Net is 1382 left. The Kodak album came today. Not bad, lesser than photo quality. Some pics are chopped at the edge. Dinner was bean burger and salad.

I went to Tiger Direct today and looked at laptops. Nothing grabbed me. Bought a case for my 1T porno drive. Best Buy had a Dell for 399 which is the same as mine except it only has 2 gigs of memory. I went home and then back to Best Buy with Libbie to buy the thing. I spent several hours setting it up. Win 7 doesn't network well for file sharing. It takes a few tricks to get to the goal. The new Onkyo came while fooling with the computer. The old Onkyo doesn't appear to be bad, it was the speakers which have crumbling woofers. I'll get the Cerwin's from upstairs and swap them for down. Tried the Sirius boombox with the antenna laying on the floor in the porch. It works. We listened to Don Pasquale tonight.

I spent some time online with stocks. My purchase of EPD in the IRA and BAC-W in personal accounts both executed this morning. In the meantime, I need to use the money in Scott from the IRA to pay taxes and crdit card bill. Lots of juggling. Went to Trader Joes and Kroger's today then came home surfed some websites. Paid the property taxes this afternoon using routing numbers to my Scottrade personal account. Lets see if this works. Dinner tonight was pasta in Marinara sauce. It's been a while.

Went to Scottrade with my IRA withdrawal form prepared. I may be able to get away with no withholding. This afternoon the money was in the account so I took a check and went to the Credit Union and deposited 1100.00 This was the amount I used from the personal checking to cover some of the Sarasota tax bill. The rest came from savings which contained the microwave project money. I paid the Sarasota tax bill online today debiting the amount from the checking account. Lots of juggling of funds to get all this done. Dinner was chicken tenders and veggies. Very good. Libbie is trying to get us to eat less. She also called Sue and called off the New Years invite. Thank you Libbie, it is really appreciated.

Woke up at 5 but didn't get out of bed until 6. We're at the comfort Suites on Rt 17 in Richmond Hill, exit 87 of I-95 just south of Savannah. Had the hotel breakfast which was just cereal and hard boiled eggs. I had the waffle which I didn't like and also a plain refrigerated bagel with cream cheese. We tried to get going at 7 but the car was frosted over. Libbie used a credit card to scrape the windows and we waited 5 minutes with the motor running to get some visibility. withing 10 minutes of cruising down I-95 everything cleared. Traffic was heavy. One McDonald's we stopped at was so busy there were lines for food at 8 AM. We went another half hour down the road and got coffee in McDonald's and topped off the tank at 2.71. Made it home by 12:30. Hard to believe but there were also lines of trucks on I-95 which clogged up the traffic as well. Libbie decided to ask Sue and Bruce not to come on New Years. This is good and bad. I'm glad they're not coming to watch football. I really don't want to see Bruce at all anyway.

I didn't get up till 6:43. Wow, that's amazing. We got up and started cleaning and packing. Libbie did most of the cleaning, I carried our stuff to the car. We got going at 11:53. Traffic was very heavy on I-75 and finally it was stopped at Leesburg where the Turnpike cuts in. We used the detour function of the GPS to get off at exit 329 and go parallel to 75. We decided not to get back on because 10 miles later we could see it was still stop and go. Made our way through Ocala to 301 and took 301 all the way to 10. Had a Wendy's Baja salad in Ocala and needed gas in Baldwin. We kept moving on a very heavily trafficked 301 and nice i-10 and i-295. Had no problems until the 2 lane section in Darian, GA then it was stop and go for a while. Got off at exit 87 in Savannah at our Comfort Inn. Found the Italian place, Gianna's, that we were in a few years ago. They had a sign on the door that they moved down a few doors "next to the cleaner". We found them and ordered a Margherita pizza. It was OK.

I didn't get up till 6:43. Wow, that's amazing. We got up and started cleaning and packing. Libbie did most of the cleaning, I carried our stuff to the car. We got going at 11:53. Traffic was very heavy on I-75 and finally it was stopped at Leesburg where the Turnpike cuts in. We used the detour function of the GPS to get off at exit 329 and go parallel to 75. We decided not to get back on because 10 miles later we could see it was still stop and go. Made our way through Ocala to 301 and took 301 all the way to 10. Had a Wendy's Baja salad in Ocala and needed gas in Baldwin. We kept moving on a very heavily trafficked 301 and nice i-10 and i-295. Had no problems until the 2 lane section in Darian, GA then it was stop and go for a while. Got off at exit 87 in Savannah at our Comfort Inn. Found the Italian place, Gianna's, that we were in a few years ago. They had a sign on the door that they moved down a few doors "next to the cleaner". We found them and ordered a Margherita pizza. It was OK.

I chose not to get Jan 1 theater tickets. I'm not going to Sarasota for New Years. I refuse to watch any football that day and would feel bad if they didn't watch it because I was there so my solution is to not go. I submitted a Kodak album for the Black Friday special and also bought an Onkyo Receiver which was a good price but not a Black Friday special. Our old receiver is dead. Took a short neighborhood bike ride then put the bike in the car and returned it to Venice. After Venice we went to the beach to watch the sunset. They were all Families with no bikinis. Disappointment but I enjoyed the sunset. Went to the club for Osso Bucco which to me was like a chuck steak stew with veggies. It was very tender and good. I finished the meal with a Canolli and berry sauce. Wow, was that good.

Thanksgiving. The paper was 1.50 and I didn't have enough quarters so I went to Dunkin Donuts and also picked up 4 donuts. Afterward we went for a bike ride through all the neighborhoods in the other side of Stoneybrook. At 4:30 we went for the Thanksgiving dinner. I had turkey and prime rib with potatoes, gravy nad 3 pies for desert. The pies were cocunut creme, chocolate tropical and pumpkin cheesecake.