TheSwirl.org

Kathryn and her gal pals are headed to the Virgin Islands for a week of sun, snorkeling, reading, napping and relaxing.  They are all packed and head out at 3am in the morning.  Eric and I will be bachelors for a week.  Most nights are full - we are planning on going out to eat Wed night for our friend Bob’s birthday, Thursday night we will go swimming, Friday is open.  This weekend we are going to Schoharie and got invited to my sisters for a celebration of my nephew’s birthday - a real plus as Eric can play with his cousin Nathan.  Next week we will go swimming on Monday, my other sister is planning a visit for Tuesday night, Wednesday night is guys night out at the diner and Thursday is swim night.  Friday AM K will be home.   Tuesday and Thursdays Eric will be at pre-school and the other days he will be at his buddy Trevor’s or at the baby sitters.  Stay tuned………

My nephew’s daughter has been raising Boer goats, a meat goat, and expecting some young kids.  She has three total new births now and here is a picture of the 1st - Little Miss Snowflake.

How many blogs are too many? I may have crossed over that line. For the past 12-15 years I have been involved in the organization of a group of contractors playing volleyball every Thursday Lunch Time at the Rome Family Y from September - April. Recently one of the participants suggested a blog.

“Hey Jim,
We need a volleyball blog, with a calendar and weekly attendance check-box for each player, so we can cut the e-mail traffic, monitor whose coming, and properly chronicle the highlights of our weekly high jinks!!”

And Voila - http://thursdaylunchtimevolleyball.blogspot.com/ was born with a map to the Y, attendance list, reports and stories. All the current players are invited participants and hopefully will contribute to it’s content. I am sponsoring it as a trial until the end of April, we will see if it flies over the long term.

Of course it is snowing as I write this and the forecast calls for a possible 3″ of snow, but I witnessed two promising signs of spring this week. Earlier this week I heard the plaintive phoe-bee mating call of the chickadee - different than their normal chick-a-dee-dee. Yesterday as the temperatures rose into the mid-30’s I saw a possum crossing a large field. I suspect he ventured from a tree along a hedgerow, but when I saw him he was well out in the middle of this hay field. He was quite the anomaly as he walked on top of 3′ of accumulated snow.

I heard Click and Clack’s Car Talk show and was intrigued by their discussion of Car Practical Jokes.  They discussed one where a co-worker secretly kept filling another co-worker’s gas tank – completely disrupting their car mileage computations.  It prompted me to send in a story. 

Some number of years ago my co-workers and I installed two jacks under the rear end of a co-worker’s car, lifting “Steve’s” car marginally so the rear tires were minutely removed from contact with the ground. 

We faked a call from a customer giving an important demonstration by saying the software program wasn’t working and “Steve” needed to come over right away to fix the problem. 

“Steve” raced to his car, started it, put it in Drive and mashed his foot on the gas pedal only to have the car race in place.  We were watching from an office window as he put the car back into Park and repeated the sequence, abet a more carefully.  After the 2^nd attempt to leave he exited the car and began a walk around finally spotting the elevated tires and co-workers laughing hysterically.