Weather: sunny and warm

Dear Gentle Reader,
I was too busy to be outside much but did don a pair of shorts so I could soak up the sun’s rays for 10 minutes and rev up my supply of Vitamin D.

For several days we have been "moving." Moving books, bric-a-brac, plants, sound system, etc. Basically, we have been moving everything in our dining-living areas that is not too heavy for us to lift. Mostly books. As you can imagine, a retired professor and a retired librarian love books and accumulate them profligately. (He likes to order his favorites from half.com, where you can buy used books at reduced prices.)

But to clarify, we aren’t moving out of our comfy condo. Rather, we had to empty our dining-living rooms so that workers could stretch out our carpet. Last summer we returned home from a 3-month vacation to Iowa , and we discovered this ripple running the length of the two rooms. As Yogi Berra would say, it was déjà vu all over again. The same inexplicable ripple had appeared 18 months earlier in a room that we use as an office. The carpet store had sent a workman who stretched it out (for a price) because the installation warranty was for only 1 year.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED: The company where you buy your carpet should warrant the installation for a least three years. That’s what the carpet-stretchers told me today. They’ve been cleaning/stretching carpets for 25 years in this locality, and they were very surprised that the company would not stand behind its installation longer than a year.

Well, these fellows worked really hard and stretched it all out. Sorry to say, however, there is still a reduced but visible ripple. Maybe after it’s shampooed next week, it will be less noticeable. My husband asked, "Would you do it all over again, knowing that this is the best they could do?" That’s a tough question! It was a lot of work to move everything, and we still need to reshelve all the books. (My spell-checker says that word should be "reshelf," but it doesn’t look right to me. And my dictionary is in one of the stacks of books, inaccessible.)

Okay, changing the subject, here’s a question for you: when was the last time you had a whooping cough vaccination? In today’s paper was an article about adults catching whooping cough and how everyone should get a vaccination for it, according to the American College of Chest Physicians. I didn’t even know there was such an organization, but I phoned Kaiser, my HMO, and arranged to get such a vaccination. The Kaiser scheduler said she’d read that article today also, and her teenage daughter had caught whooping cough last year. Two weeks later, the scheduler came down with it. She said it was a pretty terrible experience, and she thought the medical community had slipped up by letting it spread without encouraging people earlier to get shots for it. The Chest Physicians also said that most over-the-counter cough syrups are a waste of money. You can read the article at http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060110/news_1n10cough.html

Finally, I need to confess that the advice I passed on about disabling one's ActiveX programs for greater computer security can have unintended consequences. I discovered that I couldn’t even open my Hotmail account without the Javascript (Jscript). In fact, I had to enable various ActiveX programs in order to get certain other sites to work as well. Sigh. So if they’re an open door to computer-snooping, so be it. Hope it didn't cause you a problem.