Month: December 2008

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3 Buck Chuck

My lady friend has a childhood friend that is an opera singer and lives mostly in Milan, Italy and spends some time in New York City. 

Recently for health reasons she was in St. Louis for an extended stay.  Her Maestro was flying from California to New York, and decided to stop in St. Louis to visit one of his sopranos and a friend.  My girlfriend opened her house to them and had a small dinner party with the Maestro cooking.

I had asked about one of the wines that was brought that I especially liked.  It turned out it was an inexpensive wine from one of the local Italian grocery stores.  The Maestro then told how he bought 3 Buck Chuck aka Charles Shaw wines from Trader Joes 3 cases at a time.  Continue reading “3 Buck Chuck”

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Papa Deo / Papa Day-o?

Back in the day when I was married, my wife “bedopted” a little girl, Lindsey, almost from birth.  We really did not have custody of her, but her mother had issues she was working through.  The child was in our home nearly as much as she was in her mother’s for several years.

We also had a cassette tape (remember those) of children’s songs by Raffi.  Lindsey loved Raffi and we would play it for her whenever we were in the car.  Me being who I am loved to sing along on the Banana Boat song, probably because I could bellow “day-o” at the top of my voice.  Lindsey began to call be Papa Deo.  Continue reading “Papa Deo / Papa Day-o?”

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Press 1 for English – a little progress

If you read my early post “Press 1 for English, NO Thanks” you might remember my frustration at calling to activate my credit card and being forced to select 1 for English or 2 for Spanish.  I did neither and called the Customer Service number to get my card activated.  While I had them on the phone I gave them an earful about the activation line not defaulting to English after a set period of time.

Well the card expired and they sent me a new one.  Again I had to have the card activated.  I was prepared to go through the whole scenario once more.    When the automated process picked up it told me to “Press 1 for English or Prensa dos a continuar en espanol.”    I did neither again, but much to my delight after a short pause the automated process continued in ENGLISH.

I do not know if my complaint was the impetus, or maybe several complaints, but I do know it is changed.

Sometimes the little man does win a small victory.

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I miss Windows 98

I’m running XP Professional and recently defragmented my hard drive.

It had me thinking about Windows 98 that seemed to need defragmenting about every other day. Watching the defrag process run under Windows 98 was my introduction to meditation!