Jennie's birthday was this past week. Lynn's is this coming week. To celebrate, this evening we're going out to dinner with their families at Old Sturbridge Village. After dinner, we can see the village. The pond is open for ice skating, so about half of us will bring our skates.

Old Sturbridge Village is a replica of an 1830s New England village. providing visitors with an opportunity to experience life in the early 19th century. A few years ago, one of Sandra's co-workers, who had emigrated to here from Ukraine, returned from the village, nearly in tears. "It's just like how we live," she said.

"We live in our expectations, not our experience."

If you had $2.5 trillion, what would you spend it on?

According to an email that I received this morning, I've won €1M in the Royal Spanish Lottery. There might be something suspect about this, so I'll wait before placing my order for my new car.

The week's end has arrived none too soon. Sandra and I will carve out some time for ourselves in this long weekend, a chance to talk and regroup. Yesterday afternoon, when there was a lull in what's become a frenetic pace at work, I started noticing little slip-ups of mine - a missed assignment, a stumble in a conversation. It will be good to find a few moments of quiet.

A few years back, I achieved what I thought was a great insight. I realized that I'd become very self-focused, my world view always circling back around to me. I knew I needed to change. I met up with a friend and discussed my revelation and resolution. We had a good 15 minute talk. It wasn't until later in the day that I realized that I hadn't asked the other person a single question.

Hockey fans, particularly our anguished friends to the north, can blame the Red Sox. The last time a hockey season was canceled, the Red Sox had just won a world championship.

Late yesterday afternoon our bipolar friend visited with Sandra's parents and stayed for two hours. She is adamant that she is not sick, that her problems can be traced to her (almost ex-) husband. Most of us resist treatment for whatever ailment we have, be it a persistent shoulder ache, fading vision, or that bit of blood that shows up when we floss. We see very clearly what the other person needs to do and very dimly what's needed for us. In cases of mental illness, however, the illness often robs the person of the ability to know what's needed or the ability to act on that knowledge.

I've started using del.icio.us, although I can't yet give a succinct definition of what it is or why it's useful. It's something about social bookmarks. Stay tuned.

Microsoft explains how to be cool with teenagers: A parent's primer to computer slang.

Marley was sitting quietly with Sandra's folks in their apartment yesterday. After a while, he got up, came back to our part of the house, and chewed up a pillow from the couch. It might be funny, except that Sandra has put a lot of work into re-covering our pillows. I wonder what's going on in that head of his.

The awards dinner last night was fun. We sat with Sandra's co-workers, a couple of whom were also receiving awards. The presenters pronounced Hakkarainen correctly one of two times. The meal was good and the entertainment was funny and of professional quality. Humor by and about technical writers, however, is something of an acquired taste.

The economy has improved quite a bit, but "Are you working?" is still the standard greeting. A few people made announcements regarding companies with job openings. On the way in to the dinner, I received a cell phone call from a recruiter regarding another job prospect. This morning I will send a couple of resumes and brush up on my 25 difficult questions

It's still an overwhelmingly white profession. About 60% are women. The median age of the attendees was in the upper 40s, somewhat higher than what I see around the office.

The meeting was held a hotel near where I used to work. It was the first time that I've driven those roads in many months and it stirred up all of the feelings that you might expect.

I learned that I needed to work 1040 hours to qualify for holiday pay. I have 1041. So, Monday, Presidents' Day in the U.S., is a paid holiday for me. I'm still not sure about taking the day off or not. Right now, I'm tired enough that a day off seems great. My work is also coming together (or at least has stopped flying apart). It would be nice to defer the day off until the release is complete.

We missed our chances to pick up Fawlty Towers and dogs playing poker paintings (but prints are available).

Belatedly, we send our birthday greetings to Canada's flag. Yesterday, National Flag Day, Canada celebrated the flag's 40th birthday.

Tonight we will attend a Society for Technical Communications dinner where Sandra will receive an award for a technical document that she wrote. Several of Sandra's co-workers will also attend. We'll also likely see colleagues from previous work lives as well. Amid the awkwardness that can intrude on social settings, we can steady ourselves by remembering that the purpose of the night is to recognize Sandra's good work.

Yesterday afternoon, I nearly broke the operating system on my work computer. It's a long and somewhat lame tale with a somewhat happy ending. I learned things to do, not to do, and to do better. Hint: back up your registry. Hint: if you don't want to get any real work done for an afternoon, delete the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe registry key.

I know how serious Repetitive Stress Injury and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome can be. I'm familiar with the burning pain in the wrists. All the same, the idea of spending sixty bucks for a program that tells me when I need to take a break is, um, well, let's just say that Thoreau saw it coming.

Another important thing that my grandmother knew, even though she didn't know it. Every afternoon, I'd get off of the school bus and go next door to my grandparents' house for coffee and pastries.

Although this article features something nice for a couple of very cute cats, the nerdity quotient is off the charts.

Happy Birthday, Jennie
Happy Birthday, Val
Happy Birthday, HSH

The inch of snow that fell yesterday evening is now a thin layer of slush that melts underfoot. The temperature is in the mid-30s, heading for 50. Normal high for mid-February is 34.

It's relatively rare that we get a normal day, a day where the high and low temperature hit the average. Usually, we're higher or lower, averaging out to what we call normal. Normal is an average that we rarely attain. Anyway, yesterday was pretty close to normal.

I don't even have to look out the window anymore. I can find out what the weather is like by looking at this site. I've not met the person who runs this site. His station is a mile and a half from home.

Not a day goes by when I don't say, I work hard, but this isn't hard work.

Resumes are mostly commonly submitted in Microsoft Word format. Some companies even require it. Word files can, however, contain hidden text, material that you deleted and comments that you'd like to keep hidden. There have been many instances, including from Microsoft itself, when hidden data was left in a Word document that was posted on the Web or distributed by email, leading to embarrassment and mirth. This product helps to ensure that you won't distribute a Word document that contains hidden data. Microsoft offers an Office add-in that helps you remove hidden data. I've found that saving as Rich Text Format works just fine. I also usually take a peek at the RTF file to make sure that there isn't any stray licensing information. This is important if, for example, one was to be updating one's resume at work. One wouldn't want the licensing information from work to be included in the resume that one sends to another employer.

I'm fortunate to have a group of readers who pay close attention to these notes, checking my facts, checking my words. Yesterday, C. asked if levitation was a Hakkarainen family trait. Yesterday I wrote that we record the kids' heights on a beam in our kitchen. I should have used the word post.

We had a good party for Michael Francis. (Note to self: a six-foot Subway party sub is too big, even for our large extended family.) Michael is a great kid, thoughtful, funny, interested, hard-working. We're having a great time watching him grow up. We have a beam in our kitchen where we've recorded kids' heights. Michael's is very close to, if not a bit ahead of, his father's height at that age.

Around the dinner table, we talked about the popularity of poker among high school students. Some kids are betting $100 in a game, a lot for a high school freshman. Michael doesn't play, but many of his friends do. This being Massachusetts, there was a bit of confusion until we all understood that we were talking about poker, the card game ("pokah") , and not the Polish dance ("polkah").

Matt gave me his new AIM screen name and I learned that he likes a few songs from the band G-Unit.

Theirs is a very busy family. Tess and Krista came for a short while and then were picked up by the mother of a friend to take them to another birthday party. Matt had a basketball game at 2:00, Joe at 4:00. We all know that this will only get worse over time. The children in a nuclear family become the cloud of probabilty circling around it.

In a follow-up email regarding my discussion of the taxes on my mother's estate, a friend related his similar experiences. It's about numbers on a page and it's about more. I don't know that I could have understood it at the time, but it would have been good to learn about money, relationships, and money and relationships when I was much younger. The teachers then kept saying, "This is important," but it's rare that it was. What has had a greater impact on my life - trigonometric functions and their inverses or knowing how money, and the lack of it, would shape my life. Money is certainly not the only or even the primary force in my life, but it would be foolish to ignore it.

We visited with my father on Saturday. What's a good gift for a 91-year-old? A new cart for hauling firewood, of course.

In case we ever need to find out the phone number that someone had in 1971 in north central Massachusetts, we're all set. A 1971 phone book is setting on my father's kitchen counter.

The travelers returned from PEI in good order. I won the 75¢ pool, my guess coming closest to their arrival time of 5:45PM. They reported that it was a good day for traveling, even though the Airline Route was still snow-covered. They talked with a woman at a gas staion in Brewer who reported that the highway was impassable the day before.

An aside: There's a Airline Road sign at the intersection of Route 9 and U.S. Route 1 near Calais. I've known Route 9 as the Airline Route, which I learned from the locals even before I joined this family of travelers. What fun is it if something has just one name.

The fares on the Maine Turnpike have gone up a bit. One of the best bargains on the trip is the Harbour Bridge in Saint John, New Brunswick. The toll is still a quarter and hasn't increased in at least 25 years.

There's been a good deal of discussion around our table about the sale of the Abby 3 on eBay. It looks to be a very good deal. The Abby 3 is replica of the Abegweit (Abby) 2, the ferry that crossed the Northumberland Strait before the Confederation Bridge was built in the late 90s. The Abby 2, BTW, was sold to a Houston company and renamed the Accrued Mariner. Last year, sadly, she headed east to Alang, India for scrapping, a fate that's befallen other ferries.

We've moved the furniture back to the quarto com nenhum nome. Sandra has readied the tables. All we need now are the people and the food.

Happy 15th Birthday, Michael Francis.