Last week

Since I only had to work Tuesday and Wednesday last week, I decided to invite my father to come stay with me for a few days. Since he doesn't drive any more, I drove to Binghamton a week ago Friday and brought him back with me the following day. I gave him my bedroom and moved to the living room couch. We mostly hung out with the Beasts, although I took my father to some of my favorite walking spots to look for birds. Longfellow Pond was frozen over, but there were some anatids of various species in the Charles River in Waltham near my old workplace, and a vast great gaggle of Canada geese on the lawn of a nearby apartment complex. We also went to the New England Mobile Book Fair and to dinner at Masala Art, an excellent Indian restaurant in Needham.

I had to turn down three work requests, explaining that I wasn't free. I got some work done for my RI client via the Internet in Binghamton on Saturday, but couldn't save the opera, which had a nasty hissing noise on it. The technical guy for the opera wants me to reboot the Comrex box, which can only be done physically (I need to complain to Comrex about that), and the box is on Block Island, which means I'll have to go out there next weekend, weather permitting.

I took my father back home Friday, returning Saturday evening. On my way home I scanned the radio dial looking for coverage of the South Carolina primary. There is scarcely any news on the radio Saturday evenings, when the NPR stations all go to music and most of the AM dial to various basketball or hockey games. I finally found a nice clear signal from WBT in Charlotte, NC, which was doing wall-to-wall coverage of the primary in its neighboring state. The program hosts clearly didn't like Newt Gingrich; they were constantly calling the people around him "clowns" and "blowhards, and talking about how incompetently his campaign event was being managed.

Gingrich is a joke; that the people of South Carolina prefer him to Romney speaks volumes.