It has been a nice, quiet evening at home. These don’t happen very often lately it seems. I’ve been able to catch up on a few things that needed to get done, such as mail off some dues and donations, fix a nagging boot-up problem on my Windows PC, get the second hard drive for my iMac cleaned up, and package up the eStarling digital picture frame to be returned. That last was a purchase that I hoped would work for mother and dad for folks to email pictures to them. Well, it just doesn’t quite work. First, it had to be within about 20 feet of the wireless access point. eStarling thought that the power supply shipped with the device might be the problem, but that turned out not to fix the issue. Secondly, it would quite often hang while displaying a picture. Then from that point onward, it would hang on that picture until the picture was deleted. Unfortunately, there’s no way to delete the picture directly on the digital picture frame! It has to be deleted on the web site and then wait until the update has been sent to the frame. Only then can it be turned off and back on again and start working. Finally, the screen resolution was pretty poor. My iPod has better resolution! It was just too high-maintenance for it to be anything that mother and dad would be able to use. The final straw was that Kodak announced a new line of digital picture frames at the Consumer Electronics Show which seems to be pretty state of the art. I think that Kodak might get this right. The Kodak device will ship sometime in March or so, and I’ll buy one of those to check it out. I still think that being able to set up a wireless display device that can receive email pictures would be pretty cool! Further, the Kodak device is supposed to also be able to play short videos. So, the eStarling devices goes back and I’ll try to trade up.

Dad continues to make progress, but not nearly as fast as mother would like! He goes to bed pretty early (around 7:30 or so) and wakes up pretty early (around 5:00 or so). Sometimes he’ll call mother at that hour of the morning because he’s lonely. Yesterday it was because he was lonely and he was out of Diet Caffeine Free Coke…. He moves around quite well with his walker but hasn’t yet been able to tackle going up and down steps. That’s pretty important as he has to go up and down steps to go in and out of the house. Until he can easily find his center of balance, steps will have to wait. He’s getting pretty vigorous physical therapy twice a day and that’s working quite well.

I watched about 5 minutes of American Idol tonight and had all of that I could stand. Out came the iPod, the Bose Quiet Comfort 2 noise cancelling headsets, and I’ve been listening to the music I want to hear tonight. First it was a delightful album titled Chilling With Beethoven and then a big switch to Jewel’s Goodbye Alice In Wonderland which I also enjoy. One of my recent favorite quotes comes from this album: “Everything’s temporary, given enough time.” Only problem is, the bed will call me much sooner than I’ll be done listening to music. Maybe another night!