Good Weekend

Connections
Well Maria's school took precedence over her watching Connections and answering more questions, but that's not for lack of trying on her part: her mother told her to wait for summer. She asked me if I would promise to work with her on it after school.

How many kids ask for that? Connections was made in the late 70's, right?

Maria's Weekend Out
My mom and dad kept Maria for most of the weekend and they had a fabulous time. Dulce got a chance to be the biggest daughter and boy did she have work to do, but she enjoyed it. Still, at the end of it all, when Sunday at 3pm came and Maria came home, Dulce was the first to run up and hug her sister, followed closely by me, then Alejandrita. Jose Francisco, who had been napping, stirred, and Maria ran off to greet him with as much enthusiasm as we greeted her with.

Mom took her to see a retired horse ranch in Alachua. The ranch isn't retired, the horses are... former Police horses, race horses... all kinds of horses and ponies.

Disk Space!
Jock gave me a SATA cable for my new 400GB Western Digital Hard Drive because frickingFrys.com / Outpost.com didn't label the item as OEM - Original Equipment Manufacturer, which often means "You get nothing but the bare unit, no cables, no box, no software." I couldn't use it. For three days it was very pretty, and utterly useless. Jock solved all that by bringing a SATA power adapter and controller cable.

2nd Hard Drive Cures Ills
Having my SWAP file on the 2ndary drive has made Supreme Commander imminently more playable, but far from smooth. I can now complete my 1v1 games with 500 units apiece without much problem, and a disastrous 4v4 game that was simply too stuttery to control on my $3,600 behemoth (PureXS) became choppy, but playable. I can't stand choppy, so I refuse to face more than 2 AI (no 2v2) which severely cripples the game still.

Armed Assault also runs a lot better in this configuration, and I have a feeling Oblivion would a well, if I could but run it - there's the Oblivion official patch, the new unofficial patch, and all the MODs that I needed to find new versions of, or find if the old ones worked with the newest patch(es). By the time I got all of that sorted out, I'd lost my motivation to play.

Marguerite
Billy came over with his son, Zach, and his daughter, Marguerite, who is Dulce's friend. They spent an hour here, which was all Billy had - poor guy has been so busy with the migration to Outlook (e-mail) at work. It was good of him to take what time he had and let us know he hadn't fallen off the face of the planet, his children screaming as he hurtles away at 1,700 kilometers per hour, being left in space a burnt husk as the planet careens away on it's orbit.

Betcha don't usually get that visual.