Glad I Went to the Pool Today
The hunky lifeguard wasn't wearing a shirt of any sort.

Hooray!
The Mad Scientists' Club is back in print! With the long-lost sequels (which I never knew about when I was a kid).
There was a beat-up copy of the original book in one of my last elementary classrooms. I borrowed it and read it and badgered the teacher until she said I could keep it.

Buyer's Remorse
The other night I reading the owners' manual of my new car and I found out it doesn't have anti-lock brakes. The salesman told me it did. That's the second thing he told me the car has that it in fact does not have and I don't like the pattern I see emerging here. Part of me wishes I had just bought another $500 car.

Life's A Beach and Then you Come Home
I took Friday off and Rob and I went to the beach. It was fun. Yesterday I had strong regrets about leaving, but I was also looking forward to being at home again.
Saturday we went into Wilmington. I'd never been before. It's pretty neat, like a smaller, less-stylish Savannah. It was the biggest city in North Carolina at the time of the Civil War and it was the only Southern port which managed to stay open from the Union naval blockade.
We took a bus tour which was a pretty good way to see the town, but the driver was full of shit. He said Wilmington was the oldest city in North Carolina. It's not. He got stuff mixed up about the houses, too. I knew because I was reading a guide brochure about the houses as he spoke. He said the Bellamy Mansion was built on a stone foundation that was started to be a jail. It wasn't. It was the Burgin-Wright House.
He did tell one good story. He said that when William Howard Taft was president he came to Wilmington. He'd heard of the Bellamy Mansion and wanted to see it. At that time a little old lady Bellamy was still living there. Taft just showed up at her door, which she slammed in his face. Taft knocked again, and when the lady came back, he said who he was and that he wanted to see her house. She said, "I'll be damned if I let a Republican in my house." Supposedly she would also never ride in a Lincoln because it's named after a Republican president.
The driver was from New England. As you may know there is a little film industry in Wilmington. I saw a whole lot of border-line homeless hanging around town and the place was too small to have that many street people. When the driver said he had been an extra in a movie I was reminded of the filming there and I wondered if all those bums were really out-of-work "actors."
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I have discovered that my Chevrolet Aveo is actually a Daewoo Kalos built in South Korea. They were sold in Australia until a year ago. I have written to my friend there to ask if he has any idea if people thought they were crap.