More Olio

Again, it's not grease or a misspelled cookie.

I had lunch with a person I knew from Amdahl, over 20 years ago. She is planning on going to Guatemala this summer with her significant other to work with people who are HIV infected. We spent about three hours catching up and never did go for the walk she was ready for with a spare set of walking shoes in her car and I wasn't. I had on my polished pair of Florsheim's with the leather soles, not even my concrete ready Ecco Shoes with the rubber soles. Her mother and mother's husband are traveling to Mongolia. (He is eighty.) Her daughter is doing a business project on sustainable farming for her senior project.

Of course, I talked about my children and my own plans to ride my motorcycle and RV to Alaska. She may have a networking contact for my son, the son of her Godmother, a contractor in Marin.

The cats have been needy this morning for some reason. I think it is a combination of a cool outdoors, the diet my daughter insists that I put them on, and the fact that I am sitting down at my computer trying to get something done, this blog posting. I have taken a few more pictures of them but I'll only include one of them here. Napoleon is literally on the fence. At least this doesn't look like a snake hunting position.

It's graduation season. I finally broke down and bought a card. I almost bought a packet of them as I imagine I'll receive a few more announcements before it is over. But then, who do I know that is graduating?

I went out for a latte again today. It's a ritual that I will soon stop, not only because I will be traveling but also because I won't feel nearly so rich. My severance package ends in another month. While out for the latte, I did the puzzles in the paper, including the two crossword puzzles. While I was able to get them all without cheating, the Chronicle has the solutions in the same paper, I wasn't able to do just the downs like I had done on the two previous days. Either the puzzles became sufficiently more difficult or I became sufficiently denser. I do them in ink because, if I make enough mistakes, I stop doing them. It's far better than erasing. I do them primarily as a mental exercise anyway.

My youngest daughter and her husband ended up after a whole day of walking yesterday in a position west and a little bit south of where they were the night before. According to the Google map, they must have walked even further to the south to get around Silverwood Lake. I guess they could have taken a boat across. I can't wait to read about it in their journal (http://www.trailjournals.com/entry.cfm?trailname=9044) when this day's entry is posted. I can only imagine what they think about going away from their much further north destination. It is really dramatic when you see all of their Spot locations on the same Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=114519601591229133288.00046988bde89eb7ea868&ll=33.408517,-116.559448&spn=2.842849,3.878174&z=8. I believe they are walking on some ridge line in the San Gabriel Mountains and will until they are picked up for a day's RR&S by my oldest daughter and her husband who live in Pasadena. (Rest, Recuperation, and Stuffing.)

I've completed Unit 1 of my 16 lesson Conversational Spanish. Since it doesn't have any written accompaniment, I won't attempt to write the words that I may have learned although rightly or wrongly I was visualizing them as I was saying them.

Well, I'm headed back to the written and mental list of things I must get done before I have guests, and an even longer list before I can leave on my motorcycle ride.