The Useful Duck!

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Sunday, February 1, 2009

My brain Hurts!

I woke up this morning not feeling my best. We did have plans for the day. The goal was to attend an early church service and then head to Portland for dim sum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dim_sum Our child, who is 7 likes Chinese food and was looking forward to it. Not to mention the lovely and gracious Mrs. who loves dim sum at the House of Louie in Northwest portland. So I put a pillow over my head and went back to sleep, putting an end to the whole early church service idea. Eventually I did drag myself out of bed and decided I really did not want to let down the family as we haven't done much together lately. Plus, I just got the Dale Carnegie course on MP3, "How to stop worrying and start living" and I was determined to make the most of a bad situation. I tried a breakfast of coffee and bread with butter and homemade raspberry jam. A few minutes later I had not only a splitting headache but was slightly dizzy. I kept the dizziness to myself and I made Mrs. drive.
Mrs. loves to shop at GoodWill. She sells tupperware and other treasures that she finds there on eBay. Kind of her hobby. Sort of like getting egg money in the old days, I guess.
So, we make our first stop at Beaverton Goodwill. I found a lovely velvet painting of cactus against an orange desert sunset. Unfortuantly it was past my budget of $2.99. I tried to talk wife and daughter into supporting me as I pointed out if that piture were hanging in our house we would always feel like we were on vacation and staying in a very cheap motel. So we would be happy ever
y day. Daughter was not impressed, wife had heard it all before.
Dim sum was quite tasty. Of course getting there was a bit of a frustration. The geniuses who run Portland have installed wide pedestrian islands and trees along the streets thereby limiting an already pathetic parking situation even further. Sam Adams and the rest of his "smarter than we are" crowd know that cars are of course the root of all evil and public transit is our salvation. What is it about buses? Is it that Rosa Parks was on one? Did the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Blvd. or any of the other members of our new pantheon of saints ride light rail? Perhaps Che invented light rail, who knows... Anyway you can't drive into downtown Portland and count on a parking space without about 20 trips around the block. Perhaps if Sam Adams spent less time on the dirt road and more time real road he would figure out there are other people using his fair city than underage pages an
d fellow greenies.
But, I digress.
Dim Sum was delicious. Don't have a clue what I was eating. The waitress wheels a little cart around and you point to what you want. We started with spring rolls, and shu mai (meat dumplings) and moved on to ha gow (white rice flower dough with shrimp inside), steamed broccoli, and then calimari (squid). There were a couple other experiments but I don't remember what. My wife likes to make a dipping sauce from the wine vinegar and hot oil on the table. This really adds a bit of spice to the shrimp and calamari. She handed daughter a bit of calamari on her fork and she got a bit of pepper off the fork. Her whole face turned red! We did have some very good noodles as well. And lots and lots of tea. Was really quite good. I want to try the chicken feet some time just to say I did, but didn't see any today. (Mad magazine always pictured chicken feet when people were eating chinese food.)

On the way home we hit a few more GoodWill stores. I just about said no as I really started feeling bad once the car was moving. In the end I suppose it was for the best that I agreed to continue. At the last Goodwill we found Legos. I spotted two Lego boxes, a fireboat and an airplane. The boxes felt kind of light so I opened them. There were the instructions and some odds and ends so I put them back. A lady quickly grabbed them when I put the boxes back on the shelf but soon saw they were empty. Daughter and I were ready to head for the car when wife comes by with two big bags of legos she spotted in the cart of stuff to be put on the shelves. There were the parts for the boat! So we brought home two pretty cool lego sets, plus we found an almost complete race track set in the bulk bags.
Once home I helped wife
on a sears metal shed which we have been working on assembling on for two months. Felt so ill I didn't have time to feel guilty about working on Sunday. Finally gave up and went in the house to lay down. This was what daughter had been waiting for. Out came the legos! They washed them and I laid down on the floor and closed my eyes for a while.
Then we sorted legos and I put the lego fire boat together while daughter worked on racetrack. Found instructions for racetrack on ebay. Strangely, I feel much better now.
Tomorrow I go back to planting. Did 20 acres Saturday afternoon.
Rewired all the additions to the monitor and gps on my drill. I finally got my farmergps program to work. I wired in a relay to put the acre counter/guidance on hold when I raise the drill. Now my calc an acre sensor doesn't work...
To0 many gadgets...

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