When I arrived, I was a little late for some excitement in the neighborhood. Our street was closed just before I arrived due to a police action in the next block to arrest a guy accused of a murder that occurred in Fremont. Two good things about that. They caught him and the murder wasn't here in Palo Alto, the town of little violence and crime. And then, I heard that earlier today, a guy was found with two hand grenades a few blocks down the main street near our house. So there! See what happens when I'm away! The place goes to pieces. This isn't a typical day, or even a typical decade in Palo Alto.
The clouds tried to ruin our view of the lunar eclipse, but didn't, totally. We took our evening walk and stopped by a neighbor who had his telescope out and a hole appeared in the cloud to let the moon shine through, giving everyone a chance to see the moon through the telescope.
Thursday: Lou fixed French toast and sausage for breakfast.
I started work on the sump pump. Lou replaced it a week or so ago when she returned. Handy girl. Unfortunately, the float switch didn't work correctly so she operated it manually since. The problem is the wagging float switch supplied with the pump won't work in our sump. Not enough depth. I needed to get a diaphragm switch like was in before. The old diaphragm switch is probably what failed and destroyed the old pump so we need a new switch as well. Lou wants me to get a TV for my study. The room needs cleaning out and she hopes if I replace the TV there, I'll hang around in there and clean it up. Foolish girl. The last TV left the room a couple of years ago. I thought that maybe I can use the same one both in there and in the RV. I broke the in dash TV just before our last trip. The trip was quite nice without it but it needs replacing anyway. I wanted a cheap and full featured TV. As it happens, the TV's need replacing anyway due to the disappearance of analog TV next year, so something would need to be done anyway.
We visited all the office supply stores, Best Buy, Frys, Sears, Target and Walmart. No decision. Not much out there. Lunch at Costco. Dawn had a hot dog, Lou had a polish dog and I had a chicken bake. I also stopped at OSH hardware to look for the float switch. Nothing there. Next stop was Barron Park Plumbing. They had just what I needed but it was expensive. Since it was needed, and they had it, we got it. When we got home I installed the switch and adjusted it. All is now well in the well, I mean sump.
We just relaxed the rest of the evening. Dinner was grilled cheese sandwiches and soup for Lou and I. Dawn had some leftover liver and onions and sweet potato.
Friday: An easy morning. Lou fixed biscuits and gravy for breakfast.
We headed out about noon. Dawn had a class at 2pm at San Jose State. We shopped our way there.
There aren't many small LCD TV's around and even fewer with a VGA input. I eventually decided on one from Target.
Just before Dawn needed to get to her class, we stopped at Chili's restaurant for a bowl of soup. We each had a different soup. Lou had tortilla, Dawn had potato and I had broccoli.
After class we headed back home. About 8:30, we went over to the Fish Market restaurant for dinner. We shared a fish and chips and a clam linguine but started with a Cream Bruele desert. There's always room for desert if you start with it, as we did.
Saturday: Lou fixed one of here omlettes for breakfast.
Not much happening today. A big storm eased it's way into town. Nice steady drip starting about noon and continuing the rest of the day.
I baked a couple of nice apple pies. Pretty good. As you can see, it didn't last for a picture before it was sampled.
Lou fixed a roast for dinner with fresh asparagus and baked potatoes.
I finally posted the pictures from the past couple of weeks.
Sunday: (02/24) Pie for breakfast.
I looked for a wall mount for the new LCD TV. I'd seen a good one somewhere but didn't find it again untill the last place i looked. Sear's.
I installed the TV in the study. I got a second mount to allow installation in the RV with a common mount. The mount has a simple release for easy relocation.
I then worked on cleaning up the study. This will take a while.
I worked on Dawn;s desktop computer. It ran out of memory on it's drive C and also her logon profile crashed. I cleared out a lot of junk files and used Partition Magic to resize the drive C for more room. It seems to run better now.
Lou fixed a nice stew for dinner from the left over roast from yesterday.
Lou has a bit of a cold.
It rained pretty good all day.
Monday: (02/25) We enjoyed breakfast in the front yard watching the neighbors tree being trimmed by the city. I`wish San Jose wasn't so cheap that they require the residents to maintain the street trees. Here in Palo Alto the city does it as a city should. Same with the sidewalks. Last year the tree maintenance and unnecessary sidewalk repairs for our house in San Jose cost us about $4k. So how much does it cost to move a house 25 miles from San Jose to Palo Alto?
While we were having breakfast a friend that lives down the street stopped by and filled us in on the big police action last week. The SWAT team responded to make an arrest related to a murder that occurred in Fremont across the bay. The house that they raided was that of a police officer and the person they wanted to arrest was a friend of his son. Numerous police cars responded and two paramedic units along with the CHP helicopter. It might have been really exciting to watch but I didn't arrive until they were just about ready to open the street. In the process they also raided this friends house. Turns out the result is, they arrested the wrong man and inconvenienced two households for apparently no justifiable reason. The only injury turned out to be a police dog handler bitten by his own dog. Cute!
I had occasion to work with the Palo Alto Police a number of years ago and these kinds of antics are typical of what I observed in their methods of preparing for the World Cup Soccer Games here. Palo Alto used to have one of the best police departments as recently as when we moved here 18 years ago but more and more officers have been hired from San Jose and it shows in the way they do their job. I worked with the SJPD for years and they scared me. Seems like the PAPD now are more interested in exerting their police powers rather than using there minds to arrive at the appropriate result. Now the kids aren't angels, possibly not even close, but I'm not sure this action was at all necessary. Think and investigate first? I hope this blunder doesn't cost us too much or I may have to start paying to trim the trees and replace the sidewalks here in Palo Alto as well.
My project for the day was continuing to clean my study. I can now report that I can now enter the room and turn around without bumping into anything. Unfortunately much of the gin in room is by neater stacking. The real challenge is to rid the room of most of the junk, which is actually most of the contents. I'm proceeding one step at a time.
Dawn had to work on her project at Stanford so Lou and I went to lunch at Marie Calendars. We each had the lunch special soup and half a sandwich. Lou had potato and cheese soup with a roast beef sandwich. i had the vegetable soup with a ham sandwich. It's been a long time since I've been to Marie's for lunch. it was very good but, unfortunately, there was no room for pie.
We all went over to the Ikea store for our evening walk.
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