What a perfect summer evening! Walking home through Boston's North End , we stop for fried calamari so good you wonder why you ever bother to order it anywhere else. Up the street, the road is blocked off in preparation for the weekend feast of the Madonna Della Cava Society, and the Cannoli Girls booth (we fill it fresh for you) is already up. We take a left and walk past Old North Church into the park at the bottom of the hill. The night-lit bocce courts are full for this men's only, and apparently Italian men's only, sport. We stop to watch some very skilled ball handling, where calm and quiet finesse contrast with the more volatile scenes we sometimes encounter in the North End. After watching a bit, we continue along the path at the water's edge, and then turn right across the bridge towards the Bunker Hill Monument and home. Sometime when Meg and Mike come to visit I hope we can share an evening like this with them.

Where will I hang out when I retire? (A closer decision point for me than for some others.) On my early morning walk to get something like my favorite California coffee, I noticed both benches in front of the post office were full of older men, while the bank bench had only a single elderly gentleman. Yet later in the day when I walk to the grocery store, the post office benches are always full of women and the bank bench is empty. It seems that the bank bench location, at the opposite end of the plaza, does not have the same cachet as the post office benches. Is it like high school all over again? Are there certain times and specific places where the cool old folks go? I wonder if it will be as hard to join the right group as it was in high school.

Today I spent the day working on the GUI for an EP B2B POC. Why can't I figure out how to say that in normal language? I hate acronyms.

Oh I had such grand plans this morning after getting back to the 'real' world, but as happens so often, the real world got in the way. Now it's late and I'm frustrated by computer eccentricities so maybe what I need is to act on my recent roadsign epiphany.

Flipping through a magazine, I came upon a slightly altered roadsign reading 'DO NOT PASS JOY' in an Audi ad. Later that day, the illustration for a Metropolitan Home article on the
Tate Modern showed a closeup of a street sign related to the construction work, 'CHANGED PRIORITIES AHEAD'. And the culmination on the following day was seeing a sign/graffiti combination of 'STOP WORKING'. Should I buy the Audi? Should I plan for my sabbatical in London rather than Paris? And should I stay there when it ends? Just imagining the possibilities will probably be enough to get me back to my computer with renewed spirit tomorrow morning.

What I really like about a family weekend on Nantucket is spending time cooking. We work in the narrow kitchen, talking over the low counter to others sitting at the dining room table, where there's always another hand ready to help chop. It's not work for me, but an essential part of getting the family together.

Well if I'd seen this photo before Meg posted it, I might have asked her to keep looking for a photo of me. But it certainly does have a 'momnut' quality to it, doesn't it?

Excuse the technical difficulties. Here's what I meant to say…

Just like Meg, I started the day with a trip to an island, on the ferry to Nantucket . Seeing all the families with young children on the boat left me reminiscing about our first trips there. It's so different these days being able to read quietly on the boat or even nap, without the constant question answering and entertaining necessary for travel with kids on a 2-hour boat ride. Going to such an old favorite family place, I miss having those kids along.

Well I'm off to Hawaii for the week, and I leave you all in the competent hands of my mom, Judy. Welcome to Momnut, enjoy your stay!

My "" key is broke o my keyboard ad I ca't type without it. Crap.

Heavy development gets under my skin in the worst, and best, way. When I used to do a lot of database-driven coding, I'd find that my nights were filled with "web-based nightmares" (mathowie's term). I'd dream of these terribly long and complicated SQL statements, filled with JOINS and sub-queries, I'd wrangle huge record sets and endlessly loop through all the data, For, Next, Ubound, ad finitum. Lately though, it's all about parsing XML. Last night I dreamt of giant strings of XML, and I just kept concatenating and concatenating and everything I looked at got wrapped in tags and added to my giant string. I'd spot a chair, <chair>, a table, <table>, on and on and on. It was exhausting. Sign #327 that it's time for a vacation.