V and i spent our Sunday giving Flat Stanley a tour of San Francisco. Flat Stanley is a children's book about a boy who gets squished flat and has adventures because of his new dimensions. Ana's class sent us a copy of him, and asked us to take him on a vacation. So we dressed him up in SF Giants apparel and showed him the city, including Fisherman's Wharf, the Golden Gate bridge, SBC Park, and Ghirardelli Square. Veronica even conceived of him getting brain freeze from eating too much ice cream at Ghirardelli, so we took him to Stanford for me to give him a brain scan. Afterwards, we got some photos of him in front of Hoover tower and the main Stanford gate. Veronica's currently annotating the scrapbook i printed up of our excursions, then it gets sent back to Ana's class.

A man of science? Pshaw. When it comes down to it, i'm as superstitious as a voodoo witch doctor. Today's the day Stevens Creek Honda told me the new Civic hybrids would be arriving. Of course, that was three weeks ago and there's no guarantee the cars will arrive on time. Also, i have meetings all day so even if i do get said call, i can't make it down to San Jo until tomorrow. However, the Tercel seems to be putting me through some sort of karmic test (dammit, My Name is Earl strikes again!). The radio in that car has always been iffy, but this morning it just plain quit. I suspect the connection to the speakers is the culprit, as the deck seems to power up fine, but you hear a slight click from the speakers and then nothing. So no Howard Stern for me this morning. I'm totally addicted to him these days. When the new car arrives, my next purchase (or perhaps Christmas present?) is going to be a Sirius satellite radio so i can hear the uncensored morning show come January 1. Anyhoo, unless i decide to get my hands dirty, it seems the Tercel's radio days are over. Is this some sort of cosmic sign that my new car is coming soon? Ie, i don't need the Tercel's radio anymore? I can only hope.

I spent the last two evenings rewiring the pullstring light in our closet. A while back the cord broke on it, somewhere inside the mechanism, so we've been managing without a light for a few weeks now. On Sunday night i finally decided to tackle the problem, and disassembled the mechanism. I finally succeeded in reconfiguring it (only tripping the circuit breaker twice before deciding this job was best done with the power off), and mounted the repaired unit back in the closet. The next morning, first pull on the cord and it breaks again. The problem wasn't with my fix, it was that the beaded cord was old and brittle. So yesterday evening i stopped by OSH and bought a new pullstring wall mount. After doing some minor wiring, the new unit was installed and working like a charm. Hurray for me.

Chelsea dropped their first points of the English season over the weekend, a come from behind 1-1 draw with last year's surprises and this year's duds Everton at Goodison Park. I have to agree with Frank Lampard, it's almost a relief to get this out of the way so everyone can stop talking about Chelsea going through the season without dropping a point. Totally impossible, so now we can just focus on recapturing our good form of late.