Chasing the Wind

It turns out blogging is hard when you don’t have access to a computer. Oh sure, there’s the carrier pigeon, but that can be messy. I skipped many, many days.

I was away for much of the last two months. Since July, I’ve been to France, Italy, Poland, France, Germany, Poland, France, Germany, France, San Diego, France, and Germany. It sounds exciting except mostly I just see the insides of conference rooms. They look just like American conference rooms except the coffee is stronger.

Christmas has come and gone, and we’re still smiling. Mrs. Wind got a brand new leather sofa and loveseat, some silk pj’s and a universal remote. I had no idea universal remotes could be so technical and competent – I bought the Logitech Harmony 550, the lower end of the programmable controllers. After 30 minutes plugged into my computer for programming, Mrs. Wind can now click the “Play DVD” button and all the right home theater components turn on, tune, adjust screen modes, and set the volume. It’ll even open the DVD drive if you want it to. One button.

Our biggest excitement was finding out Christmas Eve that the oven wasn’t going to participate in the Christmas feast the next day. Instead of cooking the ham, the oven decided to say “F7”. Turns out that’s an error code that means “Don’t even think of using me to cook a ham.” And trying to find parts or service on 4pm on Christmas Eve is like asking the herald angels to stop all that harking and singing. Fortunately our neighbor who would be visiting family that day gave us her key, so we cooked next door. Odd, though, that the wonderful smells associated with Christmas mostly occurred next door.

For me, I got a new gizmo to listen to music and sermons while I exercise. I got the new iPod shuffle. Here’s a picture of it:

That’s actual size so you’ll have to click on it to see the whole thing. It’s about the size of a matchbook and holds 240 songs, more than enough for a week’s worth at the gym.

Anyway, I’m back, and thankfully done traveling for a few months, so perhaps this space will have some activity once again.