Brain Cells on Parade

Yes, I know I recently ran a photo of Osiris, but he posed for me so very patiently tonight that I had to run this.

This was my first post-TnT weekend, and I tried to keep myself occupied. It turned out to be not so very difficult a task. Friday night, I took in the brand-spanking-new Four Winds Casino & Resort in New Buffalo, Michigan. New Buffalo is just barely in Michigan, situated in the extreme southwest corner of the state, so it took only an hour and a half to get there from the Loop. The place had its grand opening only last month and it is a lovely facility. The casino is huge and the adjoining hotel and resort appear, at least from a distance, to be everything you’d want them to be. So that was fun, especially since I was able to get out of there with a net loss of less than a C note. By the way, I brought along my camera, only to find that the batteries did not have enough juice left in them to take even a single photo. Ah well… that one’s on me – never take the camera anywhere without bringing extra batteries!

On Sunday, I attended a dual celebration – one of the guests of honor had arrived to live in Chicago literally three hours earlier, and the other guest of honor is leaving on Tuesday to spend six weeks in China, Japan, Nepal, Thailand, and anywhere in between that she can bribe the rickshaw drivers to take her to. That would be my dear friend CL, who has spent years dreaming of, researching, and planning this grand tour. I have to say that the only way I could be more delighted about this trip would be if I were coming along!

Also today, I got to spend many hours upgrading the system software on my eMac. I won’t get into all the dreary details, but the story has a happy ending – there are now various things that will run on this computer that wouldn’t run before, and overall speed has clearly increased. In fact, that’s precisely why I took the photos that accompany this posting – the software that came with my new camera wouldn’t run on the old system, but it runs now. Yay! Heretofore, I had to take the memory card out of the new camera and stick it into the old camera in order to download pictures. That’s an electric litter box on the right, by the way. It has a pressure-sensitive base so it knows when a cat has come calling. Several minutes after the cat departs, the pan begins to rotate and the scooper sifts through the litter, picking up anything of size and depositing it into a secret compartment (which we must remember to empty about once a week). I know it all sounds quite wonderful and high-tech, but the truth of the matter is this – it’s a noisy, cheaply made contraption that does not seem capable of lasting more than a year without wearing out. But the basic concept is a good one, so when this one goes, we’ll probably invest in a more durable model.

So those were the highlights of my weekend, as I move onward to The Next Thing.