Lump Day was fun!

So, did anyone do the math and figure out how often leap year falls on a Wednesday, resulting in a Lump Day? Maybe someone did and the answer can be found on the internet. Wait a sec...nope, couldn't find the answer there. I have some smart friends, maybe one of them (or one of you) will come up with the answer for us...

Lump Day was pleasant for me.

Got a good bit done on programming studying. It actually began to feel like it was a doable thing for me. Yippee! I am almost done with the big book on Beginning iOS 5 Development - and am starting to read through the Learn Objective-C on the Mac book. Maybe by the end of April I will have a couple of prototype apps ready for people to look at. That would be nifty. Maybe even a goal...Speaking of the first book, I think I am going to skip a couple of the chapters (for now) and move onto the last two chapters for the time being. The ones I am skipping are the one on gestures - I don't anticipate using a lot of arcane gestures in any of my apps - geo-location - none of my apps are going to care where in the world someone is - I might at some point look into - Wheel Gyro and the Accelerometer - but not just yet. And since I haven't forked over the $99 to Apple yet, I can't get the apps on my phone to try them out in any case. The two last chapters - on talking to the image database and localization, just look like good things to know.

It was also beer day at the lovely Beef and Brew. No Lorraine and no Tiffany. Poop. But Steve was pleasant enough. And Kaitlin showed up, which always makes me happy. She is still working her way through her second semester of an Associates in Business from FLCC. And started to learn how to tend bar! Good for her! I had my three beers - Widmer's Drifter Pale Ale was a pretty tasty American Pale Ale - not as hoppy as a Sierra Nevada - Stevens Point Belgian White - which was not very wheaty or very belgiany - I think it was supposed to be a competitor to Blue Moon - but didn't succeed - lastly, Redbridge - which was made by Anheuser Busch - gluten free - made from sorghum I think - and sweeter for that. If I can avoid them, I don't drink "free" beers - gluten-free, alcohol-free etc. But since I am drinking through a list of beers, I can't avoid them. This one wasn't bad at all, actually. Despite being made by A-B. :)

Then it was dinner time! I had a notion in the back of my mind, to make Sweet and Sour pork for dinner. Don't know where it came from, but there it was. So I bought a few ingredients at Wegman's (not too many a-t-m's there last night) and came back to the house and whipped up dinner. Which turned out deliciously! I cut the pork into pieces that were big enough for two bites - and everything was just dandy! Yay!

We had a weird DVD problem that I haven't had before. The disk refused to let us choose an episode to watch. Not sure what that was about. NetFlix is sending us two "we're sorry" disks and a replacement for the one that didn't work. Yippee! Squeaky wheels rule! :)

Yay sweet and sour pork!

Success!

The answer is - frying the eggrolls right from the freezer is the way to go! The outside was crisp and the insides were hot. Life is good! And that makes my life a lot easier! Now, I just need to restock on eggrolls. Not tonight, though. I haven't figured out what we are having for dinner yet. I am leaning towards something with the left over chicken. My sister gave me a great cookbook and I think I will look in there and see if anything related to chicken jumps out at me! Yay! I also added some feta cheese to the spinach and mom loved it! Ok, I liked it too...

We need to have an errands day today. Mom wants another pair of nail scissors. I don't know what she does with the ones that we have bought her in the past. Eat them perhaps? I doubt that, but still, they must be somewhere. And we need some of her medicine. And there was something else, oh, yes, she wants to go mail a package. Yippee!

At least last night wasn't as boring as the Thursday before. I tried a newish place (at least to me). Ok, not new, I just don't go there too frequently. The bar at the Ramada. And boy was that not exciting. They were out of draft beer. They didn't have the Ithaca Apricot. The bartender had called in so the managers were running the bar. One beer (Saranac Pale Ale) and then I headed to Red Dove. Yay! Joe was tending bar and actually seemed happy to see me. And Laura and Erin were also personable. That is a good thing. I only had one beer there too, because time was running short, but it was a tasty Named Dove Porter. Chatted with two nice people from the University of Buffalo - one of whom is moving near to Nashville! So I extolled the virtues of The Nashville Flying Saucer to him! He had been six times and hadn't gotten a membership. Just think, even if he had had only one beer each time towards his plate, he would only have 194 to go! Yay math!

I got two of the three books that I have ordered, These two are the game development books. Still waiting on the book on programming itself. God, I am doing this bass-akwards. Oh well. Life is that way frequently. I did have some ideas about a third game, though. I am sure there are versions of these games already out there and then Apple will probably reject them. Yay, self defeatism! No matter, I will keep plugging along anyway. I can't stop me! :)

See the eggroll at the top of the picture! Yay! Much better than the other one...

Yay books and learning! Book learning even! :)

Stymied

Not majorly, but minorly. I started reading my books - well, two of them - one is the government book - interesting and easy (ok, maybe a bit too easy) so far. The next chapter is "The Constitution." Eeek! I had a really good American History class in high school and I think that is also where I had my -isms class - that or at Ithaca College - where I learned about the different political options - like Fascism, Socialism, etc. Those two sentences are just to say that this book is more of a review than all new-to-me information.

The other book I started was Objective-C for Absolute Beginners. I am very glad to have gotten this book. One of the things it does is suggest you work with a program called Alice from Carnegie Melon, which teaches object oriented programming design through a 3d graphical world building application. Fun stuff. In parallel, you start to write programs using Apple's xCode environment. Sadly, my xCode 3 download didn't work. And since the time I downloaded it, the system software has gone up a version and xCode 4 is now the norm. I don't want to upgrade this computer - too little memory to be happy with Lion. Yet I can't download xCode 4 without the new system on my machine. Hence, minorly stymied.

On the mom front - she had a good day Friday and a bad day Saturday. And I am thinking of looking into hearing aids for her (and maybe me - though I think I really just need to get my ears cleaned out...) She opted to not go to the movies yesterday. She wants to see the Daniel Radcliffe movie - even though it is a horror film. Maybe we will go tomorrow. It is inexpensive popcorn Mondays at our local movie theatre!

And it is superbowl Sunday! Woo hoo! Who is playing? When? As you can tell, I am deeply invested in the game...

Welcome Follower 29!

Hi Becky! How exciting is that? I hope you find enough to keep you interested, here in Augustus' blog space. Please know that I just plain enjoy writing it (except for those times that I don't enjoy writing it...) :)

It was another day of travel yesterday. But in the morning, I had an epiphany - we could, with every reason in the world, stop in a brewpub in Portland! Yippee! I had been thinking that we would just drive all the way through without much in the way of stopping. Boo. So I looked at the web and found that there were several different places in Portland that looked promising. I ended up picking Sebago Brewing Co. and am glad that I did. The Old Port Location is anything but old! It is done in a very modern, clean style. Gorgeous space.

The drive to Portland was all highway and though long, went past pretty quickly. Downtown, old Portland was very difficult to get around in - parking was hard, traffic moved slowly. Mom and I ended up walking several blocks to get back to the brewpub. Not too difficult for me, but turned out to be quite a challenge for her. Sigh. - Quick aside - I am thinking of signing us both up for the YMCA so that she can get some exercise - any thoughts? - We sat in the bar area and had Kelley for our server. Matt, a manager came out and chatted a bit - both about the possible book and the beer game I am turning over in my mind. We shared a Reuben (mom and I, that is) and I had the taster of beer. They were all quite good - mom drank the Hefeweizen! I joined one of the two loyalty programs they have - not that I will ever accomplish the goal of spending $100 there - but you never know...

Then on to Belfast - the GPS sent us a longer way than I thought we needed to go, but we went that way anyway. And followed some really slow, lame drivers. Poop on them! It hurts my motor to go so slow. :) But we arrived in a timely fashion, wished Juliet luck with her book group/class thing and started to unwind. I was exhausted! Even though I had had lots of sleep the night before, driving is getting really enervating. I need a chauffeur! We had a dinner of shrimp risotto and beet salad. And Juliet put out a puzzle for us to work on. I am, sadly, a bit compulsive when it comes to puzzles. This is a 2000 piece one which I hope to finish before leaving. It already feels like we are running out of time here. :(

Pictures from July 26, 2011: (By the way - there will be a whole album of pictures from this trip up on Facebook eventually...)


The Sebago Brewing Company Old Port location.


The view from Juliet and Paul's house in Maine.


2000 pieces in a pile - out of chaos emerges pattern - eventually...