2004 came and went with no notice. Just sound and fury signifying nothing.
No vacation..no money, no nada. Tapped out after the Solomons. Sue splurged however and joined the PDA set. She has one which does everything but cook dinner. Phone, PC, camera etc. She can synchronize it with both our home and her office computer. These things communicate with each other better than most married couples. At the hospital when they have a meeting, at the end of the meeting one person in the room will schedule a follow up meeting at zap it to everyone else’s PDA at the speed of light. Bang it goes into everyone’s calendar and then when they get back to their offices it jumps to their PC automatically!
Her new interest is Goldfish. FANCY goldfish. Neal
has goldfish too; they live in the fountain in the back yard and eat
mosquito larva, bugs, worms and what ever falls into the fountain. They cost 25 cents and thrive. He doesn’t change the water, treat the
water or even feed them. They not only
survive, they persevere.
Sue’s gold fish cost like gold. She deals with an importer who brings them in from China. Their water needs to be checked every day for excess nitrate, nitrites, ammonia, and pH. We have the ability to measure these things down to the PPM (parts per million) and woe betides if they go out of spec. If a fish scratches itself on a plant, out comes the oil immersion microscope, the little beggar gets jerked out, scraped and the slime is analyzed for parasites. If something wiggles under magnification they get dumped in the “quarantine tank” and salted like lox.
Yeah, we have FOUR tanks. The 90 gal was about all Sue and I could carry in from the truck and are lucky we didn’t kill ourselves doing it. The quarantine tank is smaller; it is only 30 gallons. Both tanks have water treatment plants that rival those in small towns. They are multi stage affairs which have dry filters, semi wet filters, “bio balls”, activated carbon, foam filters, and last but not least Ultraviolet “C” sterilizers.
Then we have two 10 gallon tanks on the kitchen counter where she raises goldfish eggs. Beyond that we have a very small tank were she raises brine shrimp to feed the fry.
The Chinese have breed virtually everything useful out of these Goldfish. They have bulbous bodies which sprout glorious fins in every direction. They can’t swim, float, sink, see or eat. Drop a food pellet right in front of their mouths and three times out of 5 they will miss it as it goes by. However, the one thing that they seem to excel at is eating the more expensive aquarium plants. Those they can find.
Sue also spends a lot of time on the gold fish forum web site chatting to web buddies about how to raise goldfish: http://www.goldfishparadise.com/forum/phpBB2/index.php
Neal has been taking more pictures and collecting more junk cameras. He is active in the local photography club which has about 125 members. This year he entered the monthly competitions and got an award for the year. It is last of the last. Third of group three but considering the talent in the club that isn’t all bad. Group one is mainly professionals or ex-professionals, group two are very advanced amateurs and group three is “class b”.
This is a picture Neal took of his camera club at the Christmas banquet. He planed it for months and used two cameras, and 8 flash attachments with bulbs, no less.. Nothing was used in taking the picture that couldn’t have been used before 1940.
It didn’t work out as planned but there is always next year, and Ebay has plenty of flashbulbs.
The Camera Club’s web site is: http://www.fortworthcameraclub.com/
One place the money went this year was when Sue decided that she wanted the outside trim on the house painted; “right”. This pronouncement seemed to mean that Neal wasn’t going to do it in his spare time to his standard of painting. So savings, tax return and all the spare money went to hire it out. It took a crew of 3 six weeks to do it! Sue had them sand down to bare wood, chip away old caulk and go back with several coats of different colors. Not a project for the faint of heart. The even fixed some rotten wood, and repaired the roof on the garage and above the front porch. Sue, thinks that the paint pealing off the brick gives the house a certain patina so we left the outside walls untouched.
With the outside looking a bit more shipshape, we couldn’t help but notice that the clutter inside was reaching crisis proportions. Culls from Sue’s rug collection were stacked and rolled in every corner. $3 thrift shop cameras from Neal’s camera collection was taking up every flat surface. Books were obviously doing the dirty deed in the middle of the night and multiplying like maggots because we just couldn’t have carried that many home from the books stores.
Lear said: Reason not the need… but we don’t have several castles to store things in so it was decided that some things would have to be organized and other things would have to GO! Neal always says that as soon as he throws something away he needs it immediately, but what is the likelihood of needing a “Wordperfect for idiots” book?
Therefore, after the first of the year, the projects are throwing away books, building bookshelves, treating rugs with moth proof, wrapping them in plastic and storing them in the garage.
Neal actually threw away some “parts” cameras and is packing and storing the plastic thrift shop cameras. His camera collection is approaching completion so using and playing with them is becoming a higher priority than accruing more.
The one thing that we did splurge on this year was Opera tickets. Neal can’t tell the difference between a VW horn and a Peterbuilt but likes the spectacle and Sue enjoys the music. So this gives her somewhere to vent her interest in music besides the church choir.
Sue enjoys her job and continues to get more responsibility. Neal’s still falls under the category of “that’s why that call it work”. SCS/Frigette has been a zoo as it is the only supplier of AC units for armored hummers. The government ramped up purchases almost instantly from about 50 units a month to 600, that really put a load on everyone but especially the QA manager.
For one week this year both Sue and Neal were experiencing the joy of outside quality audits which, even when you like the auditor, can set your teeth on edge like fingernails on a blackboard.
Every year Neal says that: “next year we aren’t going to let Christmas sneak up on us”.
The best laid plans of mice and men….
This year just about prime getting ready for Christmas time, a business trip to Kuwait came up. It took out two prime weekends and even the week before was almost totally spent on getting ready for the trip. SCS/Frigette builds the air conditioners for the armored HumVees and contrary to what the press says, they were very busy trying to increase production even before the soldier asked Rumsfeld the famous question.
While Neal was there they increased security at the base and it turns out it was because Rumsfeld was there at the same time.
Everyone thought going to Kuwait was vary daring but in reality downtown Dallas is statistically more dangerous. And when you’re a quality manager you can’t ignore statistics. However, the guards at the hotel carried 1911 45 automatics in shoulder holsters and took a dim view of guests photographing the outside of the hotel. However, sometimes the shutter is quicker than the trigger and Neal got a few.
The one thing you don’t see in Kuwait is Kuwaities. There are 1.2 million of them but they have the money to live elsewhere. What you do see is immigrant workers of which there are 1.4 million. They live in purpose built towns about 4 miles square. They build the whole town before they let anybody move in. Kuwait is so bleak, (how bleak is it?) that they import mesquite trees so they will have something green that grows without irrigation.
Kuwait city is one big oil refinery and the air is so bad
that they told Neal that everyone that is assigned there gets the “Kuwait Crud”
about 2 weeks after arriving and it takes a month to as long as you are there
to get rid of.
The house next door came up for sale so anyone that wants to live next door to us better hurry. It seems like a lot of money to spend to live next door to us but there is no accounting for taste. As you can see there is a great range of economic status in our neighborhood.
If you have gotten this far and still are interested in the doings at our house, we have made significant additions to our personal web page this year and they can be found at: http://sueandneal.com/