The unsure, wrong decision; waiting to rotate; just-in-time watermelon facts; & out-of-town dancers

~Wednesday~  I was awake before my alarm this morning and ready early enough to have a debate as to whether to potentially wait a bit longer for the sure thing (the Wolfline bus, which I could see on GPS) or possibly an earlier ride, but with a bigger schedule variation (the city bus).

In the end, I chose the latter, which is the option with the additional advantage of not driving my car at all, and which turned out to be the much more time-consuming option, since the city bus was running way late, and the Wolfline bus I could have caught would have already had me to work by the time the city one even arrived. Oh well.

Speaking of not driving my car, I have been regularly moving out my “Rotate Tires” entry on my Google calendar, because I just haven’t yet reached 6,000 miles since the last rotation. Long-time readers may recall my schedule:

Google calendar entries showing rotation schedule since Jan 2008. Last rotation was on 12/30/10.

The last time I posted the schedule, I also graphed the average number of months between rotations, which came out to 5.5 months. I’m well over that average with this rotation, as it’s already been almost seven months.

I still have 2,000 more miles to go before getting to 100,494, which is when I’ll rotate them next. Let’s see, I’ve done two-thirds of the 6,000 miles in seven months, so a little extrapolation says, it’ll take another 3.5 months to do the remaining one-third, which puts me at about October. Sweet.

Whew, have I digressedwhich I’m wont to do. Where was I? Oh yes, back on the bus…

A lady sat across from me holding a black, round cylindrical container that had “Water Drummer Rod Works” stamped on it. I thought it was going to be an easy Google search to see what that was, but various combination of those words (and a look at “Images”) doesn’t yield anything that resembles what I saw. My initial thought was that it was a folding cane or a pool stick case.

Library Man was aboard, and as is his M.O., he was reading. I didn’t look long enough to remember if it was a newspaper (usually his hometown newspaper or the N&O) or a magazine (usually something in his trade, which I believe is Library Science).

The bus was so crowded this morning that in a rare occurrence, someone took a seat with me—a young Hispanic kid, not unattractive.


I had a glorious meeting-less work day today.

My two big accomplishments, if you can call them that, were working on soliciting agenda items and subcommittee and topical reports for the upcoming university-wide UITC meeting, and writing up some FAQs for our Google website: one on Delegating your mail and calendar and the other on How to transfer a file that exceeds the Gmail 25 MB limit. Fascinating stuff.


With my recent purchase of over-ripe watermelon, a John TeshIntelligence for Your Life” item that came on the radio on the way to Flex for dancing last night caught my attention. I found these facts about watermelons so interesting that I jotted them down in my phone in the Memo Pad section.

  1. The less variation in the color of the stripes, the riper it is.
  2. Inspect the bottom of the melon where it sits on the ground. This part of the watermelon should be yellow. If the spot is green or white, the melon is likely not fully ripe. If picking a watermelon from the supermarket, the melon should have a yellow spot somewhere on the body. Don’t buy a melon without one.
  3. To preserve its nutrients, keep it at room temperature until you cut it.
  4. One slice of watermelon contains about 10 oz. of water (more than a cup of water!), it contains more lycopene than a tomato, and has about 89 calories.
  5. Watermelon is the lowest-carb fruit there is.
  6. Wash the melon before cutting it to avoid getting pesticides that might be on the rind into the meat.

Dancing was a lot of fun tonight, although Michael, Phil, and Joe weren’t there. There were two guys—whom I assumed were from out of town—watching until we did the first two-step, at which time they hopped up and danced.

After a while, and since no one else did, I went over and introduced myself to them. Turns out they were here on business from Atlanta, so a conversation about the HoedownsThree-Legged CowboyHoedowns drama ensued. I asked them what line dances they knew—Tush Push and Mambo Shuffle were two—and I asked Van to put those in the queue.

I left there at a little after 11:00, and I stopped by the grocery store on the way home, where I was annoyed at having to use a self-checkout kiosk. Felt like it should have given me a discount on my grocery order, or a least a little badge to put on or sign to hold that said, “Will work for my own groceries.

Leave a Comment