Emily, to me, a minute ago: “It’s hard to breathe around you.  You’re so awesome.”

Emily walks into the room.

Em: “Woo-hoo! I’m a girl! Look at me!”

Me: “You just pretty much summed up the feminine gender right there.”

Em: “What? What are you talking about?”

Me: “And you just summed up the rest right there. Now let me sum up the other sex.”

I grab…something…that my wife has two of.

Em: “Mean male!”

Paris, the desktop I built in December of 2003, has been giving me random freeze issues for the last year. Given that I only use her sparingly thanks to the laptop (”Chuck”) and the fact that she only seems to freeze up when idle (and I’m out of the room) I wasn’t too motivated to do much about it. Emily wants to use it for some of the programs she needs for her Master’s research, though, so suspecting the issue was with the RAM I jumped on Crucial to upgrade.

Four years ago I put a pair of dual channel PC3200 DDR sticks in the machine totaling 512 MB; at the time it ran me just north of $100. Yesterday at 1:30 PM I found a pair totaling 2 GB for $91. Not bad. I tossed $7 on top of it to get “two day delivery” and was given an estimated arrival of April 28.

At 2:30 this afternoon the FedEx guy knocked on the door. Hello, RAM.

I love Crucial. And so far no freezing.

We’re in Litchfield. I had to check my own website to remember if I’d actually talked about this, but then I remembered that I mentioned the radio station and Wal-Mart and several other things so I most certainly let the world know where we now reside. And I did. So yay me.

Perhaps my confusion results from the fact that I haven’t written anything in almost two weeks after I went through the painstaking kind of rough task of redesigning the whole shebang. Chalk the absence up to a combination of being busy and being lazy if that makes any sense. Doesn’t really to me, but there it is.

• I’ve been a member of the Route 66 Association of Illinois for a few years now but never got involved until January when Emily and I attended their quarterly meeting in Pontiac.  Now we’re involved in a big way, as after this last Sunday’s meeting in Hamel we’ve become the Montgomery County representatives for the Association.  It’ll be a good opportunity for us to promote the road and the Association at several festivals in the area, and it got me motivated to work on DigitalRoute66.com again - enough so that it may relaunch as early as Monday.  Shocking, yes. I’ll probably head out tomorrow to take pictures along the Carlinville Alignment as well and give Macoupin County some more love on the website before long.

• Being back on the radio is not as exciting as I thought it would be. It’s far more so.

• I picked the Cardinals to finish third this year behind the Cubs (1) and Brewers (2). I stand by my prediction.

I’m a big fan of navy blue and tan. Anyone who saw this website’s old color scheme can testify to this. As can anyone who’s ever seen me.

Jeans aren’t really my thing, so, except in the summer when I wear khaki shorts, I almost always wear khaki slacks. Comfy. Good looking. Me like. And one of my favorite shirts has always been a navy polo, a perfect combination of my favorite color shirt (navy) and my favorite type of shirt (polo). Riveting? Yes.

In other news, Wal-Mart last year implemented a formal dress code in lieu of their old blue-vest format. Three guesses what the dress code entails. The first two don’t count.

Three out of the last four times I’ve gone to Wal-Mart (an activity I try to avoid, but moving from the Giant Truck Stop to The Oasis several weeks ago complicated things) I’ve found myself happening to wear my favorite combination. On one occasion I was just there to kill a few minutes before an appointment, so upon realization I was able to book it out of there (and boy did I walk fast). But the other times I had to find merchandise and stand in line, all the time hoping - praying - that no member of the Walton masses emerged to try to get me to help them.

I got lucky.

This seems to be a pattern with me, though. Twice in the last five months I’ve gone to Best Buy wearing a long sleeve dress shirt colored primary blue, giving me a variation on the store’s uniform that made me happy I was wearing a jacket that I could cinch tightly. I half expect to walk into a Circuit City two months from now and found I accidentally wore one of my red work shirts from there that I shunned even in my last eighteen months of employment there (black polos are your friend). Though that could be fun.

I’ve always been a magnet for those seeking assistance. Once in a K-Mart back in 2003 I was stopped by two different people in separate areas of the store asking for help even though I was wearing (yup) a navy polo; K-Mart’s color is bright red. Late last year I was stopped in the Wal-Mart electronics department, as well, where a very embarrassed lady apologized to no end for interrupting my shopping experience. Oddly enough, that day I wasn’t rocking the navy and tan, though I doubt very few people if quizzed could actually tell you what the Wal-Mart dress code really is. They just track down anyone young and apathetic, a thought which saddens me after re-reading the earlier sentences of this paragraph.

Passing Lincoln in the car late last night on the way back from Laura’s Wedding:
Emily: “Lincoln’s really big.”
Peter: “That’s what Mary Todd said.”

Emily, randomly, later on: “Sometimes you don’t realize just how awesome you are.”

Didn’t even make that last one up.