After a bad day couple of days at the end of last week–wrecking the pickup, puncturing the tire in the riding mower, and then providing my children with a monumentally bad example of how to act when such annoyances occur–some unexpected good has come out of it all. The pickup is in the shop, so Lorena had to get up this morning to drive me to work so she could have the mini-van to take Kelly to her piano lesson, pick up the new mower tire, and do some other errands. It seemed like it was going to be a royal pain to have to go through that exercise, but it wasn’t. In fact, it was very, very nice. The kids stayed at home in bed while Lorena drove me to work. It was a nice quiet drive where we had nothing else to do in all the busyness but to talk. We do not get to that as often as in the past and we both enjoyed it very much. I am actually looking forward to that drive for the next couple of weeks while the car is getting fixed.

The little computer we are putting together to go into the volcano was waiting for me last night when I got home. It looks exactly as advertised. I cannot wait to get the thing booted to Linux and start getting the cameras hooked up. This is going to be way, way fun. I talked to the volcanologist last night and asked him about the earthquake swarms that are occurring off the cost of Oregon. He had just heard about them himself and was wondering what kind of impact they might have on the interior. We need to hurry up and get this thing done. It would be great to have these devices in place if anything happened.

Weight loss death match note: I missed my workout yesterday because of some firefighting at work, but I also missed lunch for the same reason, so I finally got past the 10 lbs. mark to 12 lbs. this morning. It would be great if Bryan could keep us posted on his folks progress, too.