GPS techno nerdo stuff

I got a sweet little Bluetooth GPS receiver.  It's a little bigger than a Chicken McNugget;  it's clear plastic with blue and orange LEDs which give it an otherworldly glow when it's on.  It lives in my Jeep for now.  It recharges via a USB port or car cigarette lighter.  Google Maps can give turn by turn directions, so, the goal of this thing is to keep me from having to enter addresses into my phone when I'm lost.  So far, so good.  I get to test it out on my trip to Omaha this week.  I grabbed a screen shot, which shows its location in my driveway.  :-)  I can always zoom out and find the nearest freeway.  It's nerdcool!



Saturday, I got to babysit my little niece, Claire, while everyone else was out.  We played soccer in the yard, went to the Sonic for a quick dinner, watched Ice Age: Meltdown, stopped by my house and rode my lawn tractor.  Well, we mowed my yard.  In my big back yard, I just slowed it down to about half speed and gave her the wheel.  The mowing pattern was, uh...interesting.  She zigged and zagged a lot and steered very clear of any tree branches.  Some areas got mowed 4 or 5 times, while a few strips did not get mowed, but she had a blast! (And I laughed until my side was hurting.)  Then we played a game of Sorry.  I didn't know they still made that crazy game.  You can't even get started unless you draw a 1 or 2 card, so I thought I was doomed when we went through the entire deck and I only had one piece out of the Start area, but when I started getting Sorry cards, that turned out to be the best thing.  It was a close game.  It came down to the end where the next person to draw a 1 card would win.  It was me.

Rewind to the 4th of July. . . I saw the craziest stuff on the block where my brother lives.  The folks across the street buy fun fireworks, which are cool to watch.  Like every year, they grilled, played music, and everyone had fun. Then, they swept the street, and it was over.  For the past couple of years my brother's family has had a corresponding party and thrown in some additional fireworks.  Not everyone had legal sized fireworks.  After the kids had gone inside, I saw a mailbox get blown to bits.  I saw a watermelon get vaporized.  Then the neighbors down the way or their guests got way out of hand. I was already worried about their negligence after they set off a couple of artillery rounds outside of the tube, and the sparks were coming over to where we were.  Then, one kid next door got his leg burned by an explosion which dented an entire car door and blew out one of the windows.  They took him to the hospital.  I'm told it was an M-80, but whatever it was had more than the legal 50 milligrams of explosive.  The concussion pulled my hair to one side.  In retrospect I'm surprised that the police were not called.  The party next door was over at that point, anyway.  That kid could have lost his life.