The weekend is almost upon us, and we have nothing planned. Yay! Well, we may go to the farmer’s market again tomorrow. Hopefully it won’t be too hot in the morning. Last time we went, we met our friend there by complete accident. It was pretty fun that day because they had a watermelon contest.

artist unknown to me

[via Chris>

I returned my library books a few days late. I had to pay $1.50. The lame thing was that I was going to renew them online on the due date (Sunday) but their website was closed until Tuesday because of the holiday. When I worked at the library in high school, there was a grace period for holidays. Anyways, I put the new due dates into my Pocket PC (which is named R2D2) so hopefully I can get the books back in time.

We have a houseplant by the window that we use to guage when we need to water all the houseplants. After watering this one, the leaves will perk up in about an hour. I set up the tripod and captured an image every minute, then took the series of pictures and made this movie.

So I have been using my Dell Axim for a few days now, and I gotta say I love it! With the wireless card attached, I can browse the Internet and check email from the comfort of my bed and not bother Mariko and Bay. It powers on instantly and is almost as light as a paperback. I have a bunch of eBooks to read on it now, and because of the backlight, I don’t have to turn on the bedside lamp.

I used to have a Palm III which I loved, but I ended up not using it. The problem was the batteries. It used 2 AAA batteries, but it was a hassle to recharge. When you needed to change batteries, you had switch them out really quick. If you didn’t, all your data would be wiped and you would have to sync with the desktop to restore it. This was a huge pain in the butt. I guess the new Palms (starting with the Palm V and up) have charging cradles which rectified the problem. My Axim also has the cradle which recharges the battery inside the unit, as well as a spare battery. The cradle is also attached to my desktop computer for syncing my contacts, inbox, and calendar, among other things.

I downloaded a couple cool backgrounds for the today page. I haven’t even started to search for games… Tonight I am going to load the demo of Pocket Quicken so I can keep track of our budget and hopefully curb my spending.

Last week I got a Dell Axim pocket pc. It is very cool. It came with a wireless card so I can be on the web and check my email from anywhere in the house. The best thing about it is that it turns on instantly. It also has media player on it so I can listen to mp3’s on it too.

Last weekend we went down to Houston and then Galveston for a mini-vacation. It was a lot of fun, except I had a really bad cold which lasted until yesterday… Galveston was very nice! I always thought that it was just an industral town on the gulf coast, but it is really pretty cool! It definitely feels tropical down there, with palm trees and salt air. We stayed at the Moody Gardens Hotel, which is right next to… Moody Gardens! The hotel was pretty empty which made it odd when we saw a Japanese family vacationing there. In the morning we ate at the hotel restaurant breakfast buffet and there were three other families there, and one of them was Japanese. They were kind of weird, the mother was really mean looking and the father was wearing a Tijuana Mexico t-shirt. Very odd… Anyways, we spent Monday morning at the Rainforest Pyramid which had lots of tropical plants, parrots, butterflies, native fish and birds, etc. That was nice, but it was humid as heck! After that we went to the Aquarium Pyramid. I enjoyed that more because it was air-conditioned and the fish were beautiful. They had a few sharks, penguins, rays, sea lions and of course “Nemo”.

On the way home we stopped by Houston to eat some sushi. We wanted to go to a restaurant that was recommended by a friend, but we forgot the address at home. It was about 2pm when we arrived in Houston, so we were worried about missing lunch and having the place closed. We ended up going to another Japanese restaurant named Sasaki. It closed at 2:30 so we just made it in time. They were really nice! It was a small Japanese-owned place, and they gave us free sushi for Bay, plus a nice shrimp appetizer. We ate lots of sushi, which was yummy. After that we went to Ikea and picked up a few things, then headed back to Austin. I will post some pictures later. We only took a few, but a couple at Galveston turned out really good.

By the way, in Galveston we ate at a restaurant called Willie-G’s which was great! Mariko had a blackened red snapper with crab, and I had some fried shrimp and oysters. Oh, when we were walking on the beach, Bay stepped in some doggie doo-doo and I didn’t know until after I carried him around for a bit. I ended up having it on my shorts… yuck.

Yesterday I was a the car dealership wandering around the lot, and it was cold! It was a rainy day, and windy too. Just a couple days before, it was sunny and around 109°F. Today is also wet and rainy, and the high is only supposed to get up to 88°F. It’s just freaky here. Lightning and thunderstorms. On Monday night the wind peeled up some shingles on my neighbor’s roof. The next day I noticed that a lot of fences were blown over too.

My friend Chris and I went to the Nissan dealership to go pick up Mariko’s car which was getting some work done on it. The work took longer than expected, but that gave us plenty of time to check out the new Nissans. I really wanted to see the new Quest, and they had five or six of them in the lot. One of the salespeople unlocked one so we could check out the interior. Man, was I impressed! It is an awesome car! I have always wanted a minivan, starting from the Toyota van that preceeded the Previa, and this new Quest is the best I have seen. The interior is amazing. The design is totally stylized and clean. It is definitely not like anything else in a car. The center console is super! It will be interesting to see how this advanced design will age, whether it will still be great, or just cheesy. Anyways, the back passenger seats were nice too, with tons of room, a roof-mounted dvd screen and a/c controls. The rear lift-gate was nice too, you just lift the handle, and it pops up, power-assisted. They didn’t have any with the sky-view windows, which I think are a must!

I am writing this entry from Mariko’s laptop. It is very very cool! The network connection is wireless. I am actually in bed and Bay is asleep next to me.