Nilknarf News

I had decided not to take my CPAP machine to KC... it's pretty unromantic. Unfortunately, so is snoring. So I woke up with a dry, dry mouth after a very restless night's sleep. Karen said that I snored, but I didn't keep her awake, just me.

Well, there's a free breakfast buffet at the hotel, and it was open until 10:00, so we hurried up and got dressed and went down and had breakfast and a coupla cups of coffee, and then back up to the room to get ready for the day.

There was a 4-cup coffeemaker in our room, but the damned thing didn't work, so Karen called them. They said that they'd bring another one right up, and they showed up in about five minutes. In the meantime, I'd traced the problem down to either a bad wall socket or a bad cord. I plugged the new one in, and it was the socket, so I wiggled it around until it worked.

And I discovered that the carafe was moldy... so I used the one from the first one and got it working and we had some more coffee.

We left about 11:00, the museum that I wanted to go to opened at 11:00, so we were OK timewise. Unfortunately, the whole area was covered with construction, and we had a helluva time finding parking, but we finally did.

The Nelson Art Gallery... I'd gone there on a field trip when I was in junior high, and I'd been there several times since then. Neat place. And in 1989 they'd opened up the sculpture garden, with the famous shuttlecocks.

It was a beautiful day, with the temp about 65F, and Karen and I wandered about the sculpture garden for a while, then we decided not to go in, but to find another gallery, the KC Museum of Modern Art. Well, we couldn't, but we didn't get discouraged. I really wanted to see the giant spider sculpture, but it was not to be, at least on this trip.

But since I didn't get to see it, or take a picture, I pulled the one from JD's pictures from his DC trip... different spider, of course, but still pretty neat.

So... we did the next best thing... pulled into a Dairy Queen for a large chocolate malt. My second one in two days... imagine that.

Then we decided to come home, we were both pretty tired out from our long walks yesterday and home just seemed particularly appealing right then. We stopped by Sams on the way, though, and got some items, we went there especially to get the Oil of Olay bath stuff that we've been using for the last coupla years... my mother got me hooked on it.

While we were there, I picked up the three-pound bag of peanut M&Ms that I used to get all of the time... picked them up, and put them down. I was fleetingly proud of myself.

The cold front is just now passing through... it got up to about 70F with a strong wind from the south, now it's a cold wind from the north, dropped about 30F in an hour. Supposed to snow a little bit tomorrow, they say.... on the other hand, could be a blizzard, what do they know, anyway?

O'well, I knew that winter wasn't over, even though this whole month has been fairly spring-like. In fact, all of the maple trees have started their budding. Which means that there will be a dearth of helicopters this year maybe, which would be fine with me.

Anyway, some unfinished business: Andy has been living here for the past few weeks, since he quit his job at Whelans. He's now working for Dale Sharp, a Honda dealership, in their parts department, and he moved into an apartment this weekend. He and Karla are kinda split up, but I'm not really sure about that, it seems to depend on the day. Karen is fuming, wanting Karla to leave him alone, but I'm advising her to keep her nose out of it. They need to work things out themselves, and her meddling in it certainly won't help things any. She means well, of course, and will do anything to protect her kids... but she can't protect them from themselves, unfortunately.

One more thing of note, vaguely remembered from Thursday morning early... Karen had come into the bedroom, looking through my pants pockets. I woke enough to ask her what she was doing, and she said, "looking for my keys" and I told her that they were laying on the table... about that time, I heard Andy saying, "Mom, your car in running in the driveway!" She had started the car to warm it up and then forgot that she had, I guess....

O'yeah, yesterday's entry is here!