Went out to Barley's Brewhaus last night. It's not new, anyway, just new to me (and whoever it was that told me about it). Karen had a sandwich that was really good... The New Yorker and I had the pork chop special. The pork chop sauce was excellent, and the flavor of the chops was good, but they were right tough. I not only had to use a knife to cut them, I was worried about applying too much force and breaking the plate...

They brew excellent root beer, though. Karen was not impressed with her wheat beer, which was in-line with what I had heard. However, the atmosphere was pleasant, even though we were seated in a non-smoking area... the bar was the smoking area in this place, with little tiny bar tables, not at all suitable for eating on...

No, I don't think we'll go back. Once was enough, and there are many fine eating establishments here in Topeka.

I heard the silent electronic cries of disbelief as I wrote that. We do so have lots of good places to eat! We have Arby's and Applebees' and Sonic and twelve McDonalds and Pizza Hut and Chilis and Olive Garden and... and... a lot of really good local establishments too. Oh yeah I left out Taco Tico...

Food is fuel, unless I'm going out to eat with Karen. Then I like atmosphere. I like to look at her while she's looking at me in a relatively secluded booth and tell her that I love her and that she's the most beautiful woman in the world. The food is definitely secondary... an excuse to be there, as it were. Although sometimes, especially at the North Star, a perfectly prepared steak and french fries with gravy will make me reconsider that statement. Sometimes... sometimes you can have it all. Many times we can create our own atmosphere, in a booth at a crowded McDonalds, with screaming kids all over the place...

If you can't create your own illusions, who will do it for you? And if you can't be married to someone who can share those illusions at least part of the time, you probably shouldn't be married...

Replace illusions with bullshit in the last paragraph, and it works out that way too.

Projects for today:

• Install scanner on Compaq;
• Take van to service station;
• Replace headlight on Saab;
• Fix left turn signal on Saab;
• Check tires on Saab;
• Check fluids on Saab;
• Clean Saab up;
• Work on rental house

OK. Calendar is done. Scanner is next. I'm gonna put this up before I do anything else, though...

My Nemesis...

As you can see, the scanner is now working. It was a bunch of trouble getting the software right. It worked perfectly (albeit slowly) on the 486. I did all of the usual things, then I remembered that I have Mcafee virus scan installed on the compaq. So I uninstalled it, and everything is now working. Go figger...

Actually, the OCR is not working quite right... I have to scan the doc and then save it, the OCR thinks that I'm lying about having a scanner. I really hate it when software disses me. But it works great on saved files. The last time I tried OCR (with a hand-held scanner, operating in DOS) the results were really shitty, and I gave up on it pretty quickly. This program, Wordlinx, runs quickly and accurately. It will do multiple columns with no problems, and the recognition rate is awesome. I was not aware that the software had improved so much. I still have to figger out how to make it read from the scanner, though, so I don't have *.TIF files jamming up my hard disk. I would rather just save the scanned & OCR'ed files. Much more compact. Anyway, it's fun, I like it.

Gotta get packed tonight. I had thought that Lisa was coming home after class because I need to do some work on the Saab (see above) but it's 15:28 and I haven't seen her yet. Hopefully she'll get home soon and I can get that stuff done before dark. It's another warm, beautiful day again, but it get cold really quickly after dark!

18:52: OK, I got everything done, and I also spent a lot of time playing on the computer, scanning and suchlike. Not knowing if Lisa was going to pick up Karen, I went down to BC/BS, and Lisa was waiting for her, so I came back home. I did some changing around of my Family and Friends page, re-doing Dan and Lacee's pages. New pic of Dan and Lynn and Charlie. Well, it's not really new, he sent it to me a couple of months ago, I'm just now getting it up.

Going to try to get to bed early tonight so we can get going early in the AM. I'm not looking forward to this trip; we're (well, somebody) going to have to tell Charlie what's going on, and he's not going to be happy about it. I wish there were a better way... or I wish life wasn't so fucking unfair.

At any rate, I won't be making another entry until I get back on Sunday. So Y'All have a nice weekend!