on seeing your son become a husband

I threw in a paragraph about the Devil Rays the other night just to demonstrate that I'm still on line and my computer hasn't fried itself despite my best efforts. But the Devil Rays are the least significant aspect of my life.

I am remiss in not reporting that our "Numbah One Son" (and only son), Colin, married a beautiful young lady two weeks ago, in Colorado. This is almost too profound to speak of in a blog, but I have to say that his mother and I, and his sisters, are as proud of him as we can be. As the old cliche goes, we have not lost a son but gained a daughter, and her four sisters, and her parents, as part of our extended family. Colin met Sarah after moving from Boston to Boulder two years ago. Four years of college and we never heard a word about any of the gals he dated or made friends with, but when he met Sarah he fell like the proverbial ton of bricks. Sarah is like Colin in many respects - they are motivated, serious minded, hard workers, yet fun loving in an "extreme sports" sort of way - snow boarding, rock climbing, running, kayaking, etc. - and also family oriented. They are the greatest match and they have been inseparable. Megan captured the event and added her own classic captions in a web page she created for the event, and you can see it here: http://www.megangalbraith.org/wedding.html
Thanks, Megan. Pictures are sometimes more eloquent than words, but I can think of one exception. If you will send me your speech I'd like to publish it here.

Devil Rays amaze, daze, in phases

I cannot figure the Rays out this year. They are so consistently inconsistent. The conventional wisdom is, they cannot win on the road but then they go to NY this week and beat the Yankees two of three games. The loss was a horrible blow-out, 13 runs in one inning. True to form, they had a huge lead going into late innings but then the real Rays went back to the hotel and sent their bogus clones out on the field to "close." I hope Lou Piniella is not looking at Yankee Stadium too fondly. If he goes, there goes the franchise. I predict that you will be able to buy the Rays on E-Bay before this year is out. Starting bid will be $100.00. I won't make a bid.

back on line again

I refuse to admit how long it took me to upgrade the operating system on my computer, a task made necessary by the gift of an iPod Mini. I installed Windows 2000 Professional over Win 98, hoping not to lose a few old programs I can't find the installation disks for. They survived the installation. But I can't find the disk for my fairly new HP printer. I've tried to download the drivers from HP's web site without success. The installation goes so far, then fails with no explanation whatever. I also lost my favorite places in Internet Explorer but I'm going to start using Mozilla anyway so they were in jeopardy of being lost.

But the important thing is, I got my iPod functional. That's a different painful story. I think Apple has sabotaged their software for PC users to make it less functional. How, for example, do you delete a song from your iPod? If you have home-made disks, like I have, consisting of songs I bought on line, why is it necessary for me to type the titles and artists' names in manually, and how do you do that efficiently? Ah, well. Tomorrow I'm spending the day on a big jet plane and I'm ready to listen to a little Ray Charles, a lot of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with stellar county performers ("Will the Circle be Unbroken"), a touch of jazz (Weather Report), and a half-ton of oldies. Life could be worse.