1976 was a year of special pride for a lot of people in the United States. The US Mint and the USPS each celebrated the year with special issues. Your standard bicentennial quarter and the 50 state flags stamp issues. Of course, your parents, and their parents as well, thought they were the only people in the world who would possibly have the foresight to save these things. And so now, we have things like this and like this on E-bay. That’s right. People take your standard bicentennial quarter, plate them in gold, and sell them for 50 cents.

My Aunt Dolly made a homemade album with all 50 state flag bicentennial stamps and included a mint condition sheet of all 50 at the end, carefully wrapped in a produce bag she, I suspect, procured from the produce section of the local Price Chopper and placed into her pocketbook, specifically for the purpose of protecting that mint sheet of stamps. When you have a mint sheet of stamps, of course, you can’t just let them sit out: they must be protected! After completing the homemade bicentennial album (complete with hole reinforcer stickers to prevent the pages from tearing out), my Aunt Dolly placed the album in a folder and then in a brown paper bag, wrote what it was on it as well as some helpful identifying information should it fall into the hands of some distant relative in the year 2376: “Bicentennial Year - 1776 to 1976″ and “1916-1976 - 60 years - by Dolly.”

I find it strangely sweet that my Aunt Dolly took so much effort to make and document what, to most people, is probably an unimpressive homemade bicentennial stamp album.

Ebay tells me that the mint sheet of 50 state flag stamps runs about $10. If it were just a sheet of stamps, by itself, I’d probably sell it but, given this homemade album it is a part of, I think I’ll just put it all back into the box it was in and put it away for another 10 years and see what happens - just because that’s what Aunt Dolly would do.

Yeh, it’s a baby story. If you don’t have a child, you can’t relate and blah blah blah don’t get all pissy.

So, I-belle does this thing now that I call “Interpretive Dance.” She kind of swirls her hand around in front of her face and giggles like crazy. I copied her and now she laughs her arse off when I do it. “Interpretive Dance!” I say, and I swirl my hand about my face and she laughs and laughs and laughs until she sounds like she’s getting sick. Man, I love that girl. I guess I better.

I just changed the oil on our two cars while preparing one of my wife’s favorite corned beef and cabbage dinners. That’s some multitasking for you.

I’ve been using SlimBrowser since the fall and there’s no reason why you aren’t. It’s small (1.45 MB download), it’s quick, it renders Web pages exactly as Internet Explorer, it has tabbed browsing, support for groups (click on a group to open a bunch of sites all at once as separate tabs), and the latest update provides built-in RSS feed support - you can view RSS feeds right in the browser.

Anyway, that’s my plug for SlimBrowser. You won’t go back.

I taught some students about advanced search features on search engines to have them start thinking about better research strategies and it occured to me that a lot of adults don’t know about the following factoid. This will be sort of “well duh” to most people I know but maybe one of my three readers or the ocassional stranger who visits will find it useful:

The “Advanced Search” link on Google contains a lot of helpful features. What people don’t know is that Google doesn’t just crawl Web pages. You can search through other types of documents that people have posted on the Web including PDF, MS Word, MS Excel, and MS Powerpoint. It’s that last one, Powerpoint, that the teacher-types I know might appreciate. Here you have the ability to download a Powerpoint that someone created on a particular subject, tweak it for your needs, and use it to augment a lesson plan. Any modern teacher would rather use a Powerpoint presentation over lecturing from a book anyday. Using Google, I’m sure one could find something with most of the work done for you.

I saw a truck with a sign on the back that said: “Be One Of Our Award Winning Truck Drivers!” and then it had a 1-800 number to call.

Award winning truck drivers? Oh, you mean The Truckies?

If there were a Truckies award show, I would bet it might go something like this over and over again:

Announcer: And the award for Best Use of Jake Braking goes to Donald Evans of Peoria, Illinois!
(camera looks around the crowd for awkward 10 seconds)
Announcer: Looks like Donald is on a long-haul tonight. I’ll have to accept this award on his behalf.

After months of weekly ordering a pound and a half of mac-n-cheese loaf at the local supermarket’s deli counter (a quarter pound of that for actual sandwich making and the rest eaten rolled up as a snack for any hour of day), the woman at the deli counter of our local supermarket finally had to confide in me.

“You know,” she said while leaning over the counter with a hushed voice, “I’ve gotta tell you. This stuff is usually more of a favorite with our older customers.” Why she felt she needed to keep this information on the down low is beyond me.

I didn’t have anything particularly witty to respond with so, instead, my mind thought of the dorkiest thing I could possibly say in response: “Well, errr, I love it!”

So, between my old man winter cardigan and my love for processed meat with “bits” in it, I’m plenty comfortable already, at 28 years of age, with the elderly lifestyle.

While driving back from last week’s Sox game, I had a need to relieve myself of the #1 and so, we stopped at the Kennebunk service stop. I’m standing there, doing what needed to be done, when I notice the song playing in the background:

“…Or is this burn-ing an e-ter-nal flaaaaaaaame…”

I just thought that was an oddly appropriate song for a rest stop bathroom.

Happy Birthday to the Tart! Yay Tart!

Cuteness is when your baby girl is bouncing and babbling in rhythm to Led Zeppelin’s “The Ocean.”