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| Sunday, November 28, 1999
Tuesday, November 30, 1999 If you've been checking here for me for almost a week, sorry I have been absent.We took off last Friday for a Thanksgiving weekend trip to my mother's house. It coincided with a house full of kin folks, so the Tucker family found the best refuge was for us to shack up in one of the local motels. Actually we just slept there. We spent most of the daylight and quite a few of the dark hours at my mother's house, which was quite full with the three of us (two of my sisters and yours truly), five grandchildren and one great-grandchild. In total there were about 10 of us coming and going. I wouldn't have been surprised if my mother, who is now 78 and exceptionally healthy, didn't sneak off to pop a couple valium tablets. While she loves to have her family visit I am sure by Sunday she was thinking...."having company is like fish...they both start to stink after three days." While I was there one of my buddies that I attended high school with dropped by. He told me he had been reading these pages and that he enjoyed keeping up with our comings and goings. He mentioned that he had received his private pilot's license in the last year or so and had probably flown over our house in Winston-Salem, NC. He had done some cross-country flying from the municipal airport in Farmville to one of the smaller airports in our area -- Twin Lakes, which is in Advance, NC, just outside Winston-Salem. He accesses the internet through a locally owned ISP, Moonstar. Moonstar was started by a fellow schoolmate of ours and included a few pages on our hometown of Farmville. We assume Moonstar may have started out as a hobby, but has progressed into a full-time occupation. I hope he's able to survive and compete with the impending broadband access that us surely destined to hit Farmville one of these days. When we returned to Winston-Salem on Sunday evening, with the kids safely tucked into bed, Suzy and I decided to place a Christmas order via Land's End web site. We were ordering about 10 items and the experience was painful. It was painful in the amount of time it took to search for the items and place them into our shopping basket. I bet the entire process took better than one and one-half hours. Hopefully it was because they are being deluged with orders and their servers are having a hard time keeping up with all of the real time accesses to their database. On the positive side, never once during the process did it kick me out make me start over because of slow response times, which I was worried about and I received immediate emails confirming my order. I received another email today saying the order had been shipped. One more shopping trip to the mall avoided. THE TEMPERATURES HERE IN Central North Carolina has been very moderate this fall. Only now has it started to change. We are getting our first real cold snap. The temperature today was in the lower 30's F. The added wind was giving us a wind chill factor somewhere around 17 degrees F. It was a beautiful crisp fall day. The cooler weather should be a welcome relief to my overheating office/computer room. With all of the machines and monitors and printers I have running in there it almost becomes a sauna in the summertime. Additional cooling should be on my short list. On Wednesday before I left on Friday for Farmville it was like spring with the temperatures in the mid-60's F. In fact, I decided to give our grass one more trim before winter and actually broke a sweat as I trailed behind the mower. The grass trim was more to chop up the remaining leaves than it was to cut the grass, but the grass did need a haircut. I mention all of the grass cutting and weather stuff because it appears Mother Nature us getting fooled a bit. Our grass has turned a beautiful shade of emerald and not the usual winter brown. And then after a rainy week and warm temperatures it looks like the blades have grown about three inches since their trim of last week. My grass actually needs cutting again, but I bet the impending cold snap takes care of the problem and sends the lawn back into winter hibernation. Let's hope so. I SHOULD POST A photo of the current condition of my home office/computer room. I have computer equipment laying around everywhere. The place is in more disrepair than usual. It all started when I was having trouble with my intended Linux box last week. Since the motherboard in Barney died I am still scratching my head as to how to rearrange the computers in my network. It's going to take a bit of work, so for once I think I should devise a plan versus just starting to rip machines apart. This plan will be written on the same pad with my change log in all likelihood. AND I SHOULDN'T TELL THIS ON MYSELF. We spend a bit of time shuttling the kids around to their various activities. On Monday it's Andrew to Tae Kwon Do lessons and while he is there, it's time to take Katie to Girl Scouts. Just about the time you return home from taking Katie to Scouts it's time to pick up Andrew from Tae Kwon Do and then when you get him home it's about time to go back to the Girl Scout meeting to fetch Katie. This all starts at around 6 PM on Monday. And then on Tuesday Andrew goes back to Tae Kwon Do and about the time he is coming home from Tae Kwon Do it's time to take Katie to band/lessons (she is learning to play the flute). The band session is about 20 minutes from our house, so we usually wait for her there, taking a book or magazines to read during the one hour of quiet. However, today I told Suzy I would take Katie to the band lesson if she would pick her up. I had received an invitation to a book signing of Brave in Life with Winston Cup legend Junior Johnson at the local Barnes and Noble bookstore. I've known Junior for the better part of 20 years, so I wanted to make sure to stop by to see him and support him in the most recent literay offering on the man who the movie Last American Hero was based. Now comes the part I shouldn't tell. When I arrived at the store I didn't see Junior or his co-authors around anywhere (I've also known Steve Waid and Tom Higgins an equal amount of time). It was then that I noticed an advertising placard that the signing was not today, Tuesday, but on Thursday, and not this Thursday, but next Thursday. I must be stressing out.
Friday, December 3, 1999 NOTICE: My web Host is moving. This site will not be available on Monday, December 6, 1999
My web host pair Networks is moving to a new state of the art location on Monday and this site will be down. Hopefully they will be able to get their 100+ servers moved in one day and we'll be back up Monday evening. I personally think it's quite an undertaking on their part, but the honchos at pair claim they are up to it. In fact, they say the reason for moving during the week versus over a weekend is the backup services they require for this move would not be available over the weekend. I hope they have a good moving plan. THE WEATHER HAS TURNED COOLER and sure enough Christmas is just around the corner. Katie and I spent the evening shopping for some presents for mom last night. Suzy and Andrew were off to some program with Andrew's Junior Group, which allowed Katie and Dad to have a father/daughter evening. The second sure sign was the request from Suzy to pull the Christmas tree out of the closet so she can begin her decorating. At her request, my only involvement is to get the tree out of its storage box, check the lights and sit back. She is very perculiar about decorating the tree and wishes NO help. Suits me just fine. When telling some people this story, they seem amazed that she doesn't have me place the lights and then take over with the decorating. She would rather place the 700+ lights on the tree. The other sign that Christmas is coming is the tree decorating is beginning while we are watching the NASCAR Winston Cup Awards Banquet on the tube. Suzy and I attended the first banquet when the champion started traveling to New York. That was back in 1981. The banquet started out in the Waldorf-Astoria's Starlight Roof and quickly moved to the Grand Ballroom. It was also funny how New York changed from knowing nothing about the sport of Winston Cup racing to today when the city welcomes the sport. I would say with welcome arms, but we are talking about New York. Today the Winston Cup champ is featured at Times Square and Dale Jarrett, along with RJR's Andy Schindler and NASCAR's Bill France rang the closing bell at the New York stock exchange yesterday. The market was up, so the Winston Cup gang might just get invited back! We have attended about half of the New York affairs and really got to enjoy the Big Apple. It's easier to enjoy America's largest city on someone else's nickel. Anyway, the past several years we have taken in New York from afar. I think a weekend in New York is in store for us in the near future. It will not be during the Christmas season, however. New York is a packed zoo in December. And finally I would like to congratulate both Dale Jarrett and his car owner Robert Yates on the Winston Cup Championship. Dale are Robert are two of the nicest people in the sport and their championship will be very popular. Dale will represent Winston Cup racing with class. He'll be a great champion for the sport.
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