Well as usual I spoke too soon. Mother Nature won. Her drops of doom and gloom made the softball field unplayable on Friday. On the bright side, I got to head to down to my Grandma’s house sooner. This was a really cool weekend. It was very relaxing until last night but I’ll get to that in a sec. Thanks to problems with Blogger and my cable Internet connection, I’ve been out of touch for a little longer that I had hoped. Even as I type this, I can’ t publish anything but I’m gonna go ahead and write cause I’ve got stuff on my mind. (That and the fact that I’m sitting here waiting for a training class to start which means I have nothing better to do.) If I ever do get the ability to publish back you’ll get to read this in addition to several postings I made on Friday. I think I’m suffering from Blogger separation. (Update Added Monday Evening) My Grandma doesn’t have a computer much less an internet connection. Then when I got home yesterday afternoon, our Road Runner connection was down. And even if it was up, Blogger.com has been having all kinds of miscellaneous errors since Thursday afternoon. All in all, that adds up to a serious case of web withdrawal and a newly discovered case of blogger withdrawal syndrome. Have no worries though. Both ailments are in remission thanks to a healthy dose of web surfing and blogging this evening.

(Quick Note: I’ve never been a Mac person BUT I’ve always had a healthy respect for them. Especially since I started working in Tech Support. The things rarely crash, they’re much more straight forward than Windows, and blah, blah…. I’m starting to sound like those stupid apple.com/switch commercials. Let me just put it this way. MACS are cool. Our class this morning is about MAC OS X (That’s 10 fan you non techies. Or people who don’t know their Roman Numerals) OS X is nice. And I’m getting ready to learn everything thing there is to know about it. It might be the final reason I need to get a MAC. Not any time soon. But eventually. :End Note)

Update

That Apple class today was boring, boring, boring. I should have taken a pillow and some pieces of wood to prop my eyes open. (Like in those old Tom and Jerry episodes.) I will not allow this class to cloud my judgement of of MAC OS X though. Still beautiful. A MAC will definitely be in my future. Of course, in order for me to get one a higher paying job will have to be in my future as well. Those things are expensive. I could build two Windows PCs and buy all the software for them for the cost of a MAC. Oh well. They are nice machines.

I ate at P.F. Changs today. If you haven’t eaten there (which is highly likely since there’s only like 3 in the country) just think fancy smancy chinese joint. It’s like the Olive Garden of Chinese restaurants. No, it’s a lot nicer than Olive Garden and it has the prices to prove it. They had a really cute hostess. I mean really cute. I went with a group from my training class. 3 guys and one lady. Being the gentleman that I am I held the door for the lady. But they had a tricky double door configuration at the restaurant. So I held the outer door for her but was unable to get the inner door. Anyway, when I got inside I made eye contact with the hostess. As I’ve stated before, I’m a sucker for eye contact. This little lady rendered me speechless. She asked me how many were in my party and I couldn’t answer. Apparently, she gets this type of reaction often because without skipping a beat she asked one of the other folks in our party how many people we had. Just another chapter in the yet to be written book entitled: Daryl’s Book of Complete Ineptitude Around Girls.

My weekend was going great until I reinjured my knee last night playing soccer. I don’t know how it happened. I was jogging along (practically walking) and this pain shot up through my left knee. This concerns me since we’ve got about a month and a week until the fall soccer season starts. I haven’t had any problems out of my knee in 3 or 4 months but I think this current pain was brought on by a collision I had with a teammate at soccer practice on Thursday. It’s been sore since thin and now it’s more than sore. It’s painful. So I’ll be resting this week and taking the extra strength Motrin my doctor gave me the last time I had an appointment. Anyway, an imperfect end to a near perfect weekend. More later. Ugh!! I’ve actually got to work tomorrow. Suddenly the boring MAC training doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.

It’s funny. You don’t realize how much you rely on your Internet connection until it goes away. In typical Memphis weather fashion, it rained cats and dogs this morning. Real nasty stuff. A bad Thunderstorm rolled through. We took a power hit not too far from our office and it fried our network router. So we were without our network connection for most of the day. It got frustrating. Using the web is just second nature to me now. Even little tasks proved difficult today without web access. To begin with, it was next to impossible to do our jobs. We connect remotely to our customer database in Atlanta via a secure connection (a VPN kinda’, sorta) over our Road Runner business connection. With the router toasted we couldn’t access that. So I’ve spent the last hour entering tickets into the database in an effort to catch up and not have a bunch of angry customers calling first thing Monday. (Though that’s going to happen regardless.) But talking about the little things. I’m a random web surfer. If some topic or song or subject pops in my head, I’ll jump online and search for it. Google is my best friend. I couldn’t do that. I had several ideas for blog topics this morning. I couldn’t do those (and now the inspiration to write those has passed). Even lunch was made more difficult. Our boss offered to buy lunch for us. We decided on Subway but I couldn’t remember what they offered. No problem I’ll jump over to their web site and look at a menu. Couldn’t do that either. Frustrating. Oh well it’s back up. I’ve got my partial blog fix for the day and I’m crossing my fingers with the hope that the Park Commision will let us play softball tonight. After the down pour we had this morning I highly doubt it but tonight’s game is a make up of a rain out earlier in the season. It would bite to have the rain-out rained out. Personally I think God is in cahoots with Mother Nature. They’re conspiring to make the waning years of my amateur sports career unpleasant by causing rain and various other weather phenomena to occur either on the day of one of my sporting events or the day before. Thereby making that event unplayable. That’s one of the worst things for a competitor. You get all pumped up for a game only to have it called off. It’s not easy to channel all that energy and adrenaline elsewhere.

I’ll be out of pocket for a few days. My Mom is in the States for vacation. She got in from Japan Tuesday night. I’m so happy she’s here. I’m driving down to my Grandma’s house tonight (after my softball game if we have it. or in just a little while if there’s no game) to be with her and Grandma for the weekend. I miss my family terribly. So I try to make the most of the time I have to see them in the summer. My Dad and brother fly in separately in the next couple of weeks. It will be so nice to have the whole family back together. I can’t wait. Later.