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Grace came up to me tonight with watery eyes and sniffling and said that the color green was in her nose.

I had to think about this for a few minutes because she clearly wanted
some help with something.  At first I suspected that she had an
uncomfortable booger stuck up there and she wanted me to fetch it for
her.  But the more we talked the more I got the idea that it
wasn’t normal and she wanted some help.

I poked around and got a flashlight but couldn’t see anything interesting.

So we practiced blowing our noses instead.  In short order a
giant, flourescent green play-doh worm was sticking out of her
nose!  I pulled it the rest of the way out and got a good look at
it.  It was about an inch long and must have been VERY
uncomfortable!

And it was gross.  Gotta keep an eye on that kid!

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I have two gift-related events coming up for which I am rarely
prepared. But this year I have BOTH events take care of. On 2/14 is
Valentine’s day and 3/17 is the little woman’s birthday. The first of
two presents has arrived so I’m at least covered for Valentine’s day.
Its nothing big, but I know she’ll like it.

Just know that come 2/14 my ass will not be in a sling.

Ain’t that nice?

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I think my last two pieces of tax information have arrived, so I should
be able to fire up the old TurboTax and see how much Uncle Sam owes me!

I’ve
been told over and over again that its best to minimize your income tax
return — that is, if you keep letting the government hold on to your
money when you KNOW its too much then its just like giving Uncle Sam an
interest free loan. Its very generous but totally unnecessary.

I
can’t do that. I really like getting a bonus in the beginning of the
year. Besides I’m always nervous that I’m going to wind up owing the
government money and that would be REALLY disappointing. So I let them
hold the money for the emotional charge I get out of my income tax
return.

I can’t argue that its the most financially sound thing to do. Heck, *I* even win that argument with myself.

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Last night I installed that new 802.11G router I got from Staples.com
for only $20. I was afraid that Belkin would cheap out on the
installation process and it would a very arduous task. It wasn’t! It
was easy as pie! They had stickers all over everything telling you to
run the installation software BEFORE plugging in the router. I figured
they probably meant it so I followed their instructions.

The
install process detected that I had a PPOE connection and prompted me
for my login info. Then it handled everything else. Most everything
else. I still have to get the WEP configured so the Macintosh and
Wintel systems both connect correctly. I have to confess I may just
resort to using the MAC-address filtering. I found out that with my
older DLink system it works quite well, even if it doesn’t encrypt the
data it bars anyone else from connecting to the network. And the
macintosh doesn’t seem to handle the decode/encoding process very well
– that is graphics slow the connection down hideously.

In any
case, its running and the installation was flawless! Liz started her
macintosh and said “Hey, did you install that router-thingie alread?”.

Oh
geez. I figured something wasn’t working but I couldn’t understand
what. I’d already tested it and it worked fine. I confirmed that I had
already done that and she said “Because its REALLY fast!”

I was so pleased.

So what do I do with the old one? I should be able to do something useful with it, shouldn’t I? But what?

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