Halfway through swim practice this morning, in the middle of a set, my cap broke. Luckily I had an extra cap in my locker so I went upstairs, retrieved it, and headed back to the pool. About 100 yards after I got back in, the strap for my goggles broke. The lifeguard checked the lost and found and came up with a pair that looked semi-functional, but after a lap with them, I realized that being able to open the left eye might be nice, especially since it seemed to be cutting into flesh below my left eye mighty tightly. I checked my locker to no avail, but remembered that Sam had an extra pair in his bag. Sam got them for me and I proceeded to replace the strap of my goggles with the strap from his spare, since the sockets were a bit moldy. And then when I put them over my head, the nose piece broke. At that point, I figured it was best to just leave well enough alone and kick for the rest of practice. Some higher authority really didn't want me to swim today...

Last weekend we went up to Massachusetts to relax up at my parents' weekend house. The weather wasn't too nice on Saturday so we headed up to Mass MoCA. We've never been up there, and I'm glad we finally made it. It was a great space and there were some really interesting exhibits there. We were lucky to catch the Spencer Finch exhibit, which from what I read about it afterwards was supposed to have closed the week earlier. Some of the stuff was a bit contrived, but it definitely made me think about things in a different way. My favorite may have been the series "Odor of the Gowanus Canal". They really did evoke the odor of the canal!

For those five of you out there who still read the site, you've probably heard about our troubles with our deck. A few weeks ago, the engineering company finally installed the base material we needed to have before we could install the deck, so we decided to get some quotes for how much it would cost to reinstall our deck. When our neighbors put their deck back in themselves, we decided to give it a go at building it ourselves. The previous owner had done something really wacky with the deck so we had to completely rebuild the frame of the deck, but with a little help from my brother, we had the whole frame done in an afternoon and almost all the old wood for the top of the deck can be reused, so once we get rid of the old junk wood from the old frame, our deck saga is over!

My office building is next door to Jack's 99 Cent Store, the magical haven of unwanted goods that end up being sold of for 99 cents apiece (or less depending on the item). My coworkers mine the place for snacks like pretzels and popcorn, or the occasional Haribo gummys, and I'll usually check there first if we need something like Crazy Glue or some other household product. But when I see anything "fresh", I tend to get scared. But maybe I shouldn't, since the former Le Bernadin chef put his faith in Jack's frozen salmon.

A few weeks ago, the IT department at work did a check on my computer and deleted a bunch of programs (including Bubbles!) that were always online since there was some worm going around. Turns out it was some email thing, not one of those programs, that was causing the problems (not just my computer but a whole bunch of them), but to be on the safe side, the IT department wouldn't let me reinstall Bubbles to be on the safe side. So I was just keeping Google Calender open, but the pop-up reminders weren't as nice since I couldn't leave them open if I wanted to look at anything online.

But now, Google has made my day and made a sync for Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook! The only thing I prefer about Outlook is that you can snooze the pop-ups, so now I get that when I'm at work, but still have the nice Google Calendar functions of seeing multiple calendars and being able to text my agenda to me. Yipee!

P.S. I'd like to bring this blog back to life at some point, but I just seem to keep forgetting about it. Like I had intended on writing about our nice walk to Chinatown last Sunday, but who knows if I'll ever end up getting the photos off my camera. Or the photos of the nice pizza and sweet potato soup I made last weekend. I suck. Oh well, life goes on.