Bill Roper's Journal

jeff_duntemann and Carol joined us at the pool this morning. Jeff had to head off to an interment, but Carol joined us for lunch before heading home to retrieve the dogs. I went shopping for the rest of dinner at three different stores -- Sam's Club, Jewel, and Meijer (the last because it was the only place I can find Red Heron wine locally) -- while Jeff and Carol came over with the dogs and ran around the yard playing with Katie and Julie who were very, very happy.

I grilled burgers for dinner. Then we had a preemptive cheesecake for Jeff's upcoming 60th birthday, complete with six candles (you don't want to incinerate the cheesecake, Murphy's Romance notwithstanding), the singing of "Happy Birthday", and the ceremonial blowing out of the candles.

Jeff and Carol have headed home.

Katie wants more cheesecake. :)

My brother-in-law, Jeff, just posted on his long-standing weblog a list of features that would make up the ideal blogging environment. Since his blog doesn't yet allow permalinks, I'm going to copy that text here:
( Jeff Duntemann's blogging wish list )

I talked to Judy and she's reasonably convinced that there shouldn't be anything up there but junk. She also says that Connie will try to get someone to get the boxes down and check them out. Good.

My dad's widow, Connie, called today. She has sold the house in Belleville and is closing on it tomorrow, although she seems to have through the end of the week to finish getting her stuff out of it. She just looked in the attic above the garage and found a bunch of papers and toys and stuff that I had no idea was there. Nor do I know what they are without looking at them.

Belleville is six hours away by car. This is too far. It really is.

Jeff and Carol have picked up QBit and the cats are much calmer now.

We have custody of QBit (short for Quantum Bit), my brother and sister-in-law's (Jeff and Carol) new Bichon Frise, while they're down in Champaign-Urbana at their nephew's graduation. This has greatly disconcerted the cats, who are wondering what this small ball of excited white fur is exactly.

More than you ever wanted to know about QBit is here starting on May 5th. (Apparently, Jeff hasn't yet set up a way to link to individual posts. Bad techie!)

Jeff and Carol are coming by to join us for dinner tonight. This should be fun.

Of course, I actually have to leave work and go home or something like that. But maybe this bug will be easier to deal with in the morning.

My father died in December, 1999 and left his three children as trustees (with me the lead steer) for his living trust. The will basically locked up all of the money (and the house) to be used to support his widow, Connie, for as long as she lives and doesn't remarry. Whatever is left over when she dies goes to the kids and the grandkids. (Of course, Connie's only about seven years older than I am, so that's likely to be a while.)
( The money goes round and round... )

It's about 9 degrees outside (and that's Fahrenheit, which makes it a pretty cold number -- Kelvin, of course, would be right out). daisy_knotwise and I have finally finished wrapping all of the Christmas presents, we've been to the stores to grab the final supplies for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and now we're cleaning up the place so it'll be fit for guest habitation tomorrow.

Gretchen's brother, Jeff, and his wife, Carol, will be joining us for Christmas dinner, along with our friends, Sam and Bonnie, and Bonnie's sister, Holly, and Holly's roommate, Kirstie.

Fortunately, pecan pie divides nicely into eight pieces. And I keep assuring Sam, who recently embarked on the Atkins diet, that the sheer number of pecans that we put into our pie will push out all of the carbs. He seems skeptical, though.

If Christmas is your thing, I wish you a Merry Christmas. And if not, have a good time anyway.

My grandmother's funeral went well and I saw many of my relatives and my grandma's friends who came.

My brother, Mitch, drove up from Dallas by himself on Saturday while Gretchen and I were driving down from Chicago. We'd swapped cellphone numbers so we could keep track of each other on the road and see when we'd be arriving in Marion.

He left a bit before we did to head back to Dallas, since he had the longer drive -- Gretchen and I went by the old farm with my sister Judy and her husband, Gary, to look around.

Since we were going through Champaign on the way north, I negotiated with Gretchen to stop and have dinner at Papa Del's, my old favorite college pizzeria. When I got there, I noticed that Mitch had called, so I called him back, found out he was about 30 miles outside of Little Rock and let him get back to driving.

Later, we were on the Tri-State, almost home, and I decided to give Mitch a ring to find out how he was doing.
( How he was doing )