Today so far

This morning I woke up feeling better than I have since Tuesday. I still am sick, but the most annoying symptoms have morphed into less annoying symptoms. I'm still hoping to stave off an upper respiratory infection and, by the looks of things today, I am on the mark.

I sat down at my desk at 7:00 am not sure when I'd get the call from the chimney guys to let me know they were on their way to our house. Until I got the call around 11:00 am, I was able to get a fair amount of work done. I figured out a problem that has been frustrating me and determined that my lone PHP application is good to go with the latest version releases. Phew, that's a weight off my back, although it was an addition to my To Do list, so getting it figured out hasn't helped my workload all that much.

I also kept up-to-date with today's Tour de France stage. I read that Lance Armstrong was moving ahead with an attacking rider, Filippo Simeoni, who was 2 hours and 42 minutes (!!) behind Lance in the overall standings. Lance had no tactical reason in the race to be matching Simeoni's breakaway, so I emailed a friend who has been taping the TV coverage for me and asked what the commentators were saying about Lance's reason for bridging to the escape group. I didn't get any answers until I read this article at VeloNews after today's race. It turns out that Armstrong had a non-Tour-related beef with Simeoni and he was, in fact, thanked by other members of the peleton for making a stand. After Armstrong and Simeoni returned to the peloton, Simeoni remained at the back of the field for the majority of the race.

So, back to the chimney work... I received the call and headed home to find a couple of guys standing on our roof. They checked some things out and pondered the removal of our wood stove (which wasn't installed properly and is way out of code for various reasons.) They had to wait for the other two guys and then it took all 4 of them about 45 minutes to get the gosh-darned heavy stove out of our house and into the back of one of their pickup trucks. Phew!! I won't detail all of the issues remaining with our chimneys, but I will say that the crew will be back more than 1 day to take care of things. It's all in the name of fire safety, though, so it's worth it to us.

I'm about to head out to run errands. Tomorrow is my brother's birthday and we're getting together with my family to celebrate his, my dad's, and my birthdays, which all fall within a week of each other. I need to get my brother's and dad's gifts and some ingredients to help with the food preparation. I also will stop by my aforementioned friend's house to pick up a couple of Tour de France videos and I'll drop off their portion of our CSA veggies from this week's pickup.

This evening I will either work on some crafts or continue putting our house "back together" since our relatives left.