Ups and downs of the week.

 Red Sox – Looking strong.

  Pheasants – A big one flew up from the ditch and bounced off my windshield at speed. Scary, but the windshield is fine. The bird, not so much.

 Weather – Cool fall temps at last.

  Fox sports – I miss TBS already.

  Eastern Illinois Food Bank – Good people doing good work. This is a worthy and efficient place to donate food or money.

  Stephen King – Disses Fox on their own network. That’ll teach the idiots to bother him during a game.

Ups and downs of the week.

Red Sox – Manny can keep on being Manny.

  Back aches – ’nuff said.

 TBS – So far, so good with MLB coverage. Much better than Fox. 

  Cubs – Not looking too good.

  Indians – Finally beat the Yankmees. I think the Bronx Bozos just wanted to get away from the flies.

  Weather – Enough with the heat already.

Ups and downs of the week.

Red Sox – Sox take the division for the first time in years.

 Cubs – Cubbies clinch. I’d love to see a Sox/Cubs series.

 TGIF – I really need a break.

  Harvest Dust – My poor nose.

Water heater – Finally getting repaired (maybe this week finally?).

  Patriots – Best team in the NFL, but still carrying a stigma from a dumb move by management.

  Weather – Looks like a great weekend ahead.

Barolo – No wonder it’s so pricey. It’s goooood.

Ups and downs of the week.

Red Sox – need I say more?

Autumn – favorite time of year.

Twin City Honda – could they really be as bad as the BMW side?

Water heater – finally getting repaired.

Patriots – but will anyone ever think they won fairly?

  Doctor appointments – Showed up on time for my appt this morning, waited an hour to see the doc.

I decided I’d like to have a place to post some larger versions of my many pictures, so I created Random Scenery. It’s a simple site which displays a single image from a directory of many images. Refreshing the page will change the image. There are only a couple dozen images right now, but that number will grow over time. I hope you enjoy your visit.

UPDATE: I added a 10 second auto-refresh, so now you can just sit there and watch.  🙂

It’s that time of year again when the corn and beans are brown and the giant combines are out hauling it all in. It still amazes me how much land can be harvested in a day. Soon it will all be gone and the sense of suddenly being in a much bigger space will stick with me for a few days. Then we’ll have eight months of empty fields until the first green begins to return late next spring.

Trust – This afternoon on the way back from Indy we stopped at Grissom’s Lost Creek Orchard farm stand on Rt 130 just north of I-70. Grissom’s has a great selection of produce and, more importantly, an impressive variety of jams and jellies, many with no sugar added. It is the no-sugar-added types we were after. My folks love them and we prefer them as well. In the image below you can see them all on the shelves. Today we bought $38 worth only to find Grissom’s does not accept credit cards (although I was sure I’d used mine there in the past). We had very little cash on us and no checkbook, but the lady at the counter said, “No problem, you just mail me a check.” And just that easy we were on our way with our goods. Needless to say we’ll have a check in the mail ASAP. That kind of trust, coupled with the superb quality of their produce and jellies, is what keeps people coming back for more.

Vegetarian Chickens – Tonight we hit County Market to pick up a few essentials, including eggs. We notice a carton of a dozen eggs from “Vegetarian Chickens.”

Are there carnivorous chickens? Any chicken farmers out there care to elaborate?

Brouhahas – Chucktown is getting a Starbucks. I guess that means we’re finally on the map, eh? Lots of folks are up in arms about bringing a “big chain” coffee shop to town, although all the other big chain places don’t seem to cause a problem. McDonald’s is the most popular place in town.

Then there’s the infamous neon billboard in Champaign, which I still have yet to see. Oh the calamity! Champaign is beginning to look like downtown Tokyo! The distraction will cause accidents. If I see it tomorrow I’ll get a picture and post it here so you can judge for yourself. Maybe it is that bad.

Great starts – Clay Buchholz of the Boston Red Sox just pitched a no hitter in only his second major league game. Pretty damn impressive. 8)

I’m currently taking a class on Total Quality Management, which is a business practice based on the idea that if you improve the quality of every facet of your business, the end result will be lower costs and higher profits. The class discussions have me thinking a lot lately about the quality of work I see in businesses I frequent. Take for instance, lunch. I’m not as conscientious as I should be about making my own lunch. Even though I usually would rather bring lunch than buy it, I’m most often too lazy to make a lunch at night. I end up buying a sandwich at one of three places near my office. The first is my daily coffee shop, Espresso Royale. I like their coffee. The staff know me and know what I want. And they make good sandwiches. They’ve earned my continued patronage because they achieve quality in all aspects. But they don’t always have sandwiches available. On those days I can either go next door to Subway, or one more door to Silver Mine Subs. I’ve written about Silver Mine Subs before. Of the two, Silver Mine is far better. The staff at Subway (the one near my office, at least) are usually dour and act like it’s such a pain to have to make sandwiches. Their final product reflects that. The sandwiches are usually skimpy and poorly made. On the other hand, the staff at Silver Mine are usually quite friendly and even jovial. They joke around a lot and work quickly, but their sandwiches are always well made and generous. Accordingly, they have earned my repeat business.

This past winter my beloved BMW 740iL blew out its coolant expansion tank. The expansion tanks and radiators in the BMW 4.4 liter engines have a design flaw which causes them to crack every 70k miles or so. Poor quality in an otherwise high quality car. Because my expansion tank blew right down the street from the local BMW dealer, I had the car towed there. I normally have my cars serviced at Isringhausen Imports in Springfield, Il, but that was 80 miles away. So despite my better judgment, I let the local dealer work on my car. I should have paid the extra to have it towed to Springfield. My car was in and out of the local dealer’s shop every day for the next two weeks. In the end I feared they had damaged my engine so badly that I traded the car in on a newer X5. At Isringhausen, of course. Isringhausen has always done quality work, they always find me an almost new loaner car, and they’re quick to address any concerns I have. I always feel I’ve gotten a fair deal from my salesman, Jeff Colman, from whom I’ve bought 3 cars. Isringhausen exudes quality. The local dealer has lost my business forever.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling a $4 sandwich or a $40,000 car; quality will keep people coming back and ensure a continued income. I’m just amazed that so many businesses lacking in quality manage to survive.

Today we stopped by the 2007 Showcase of Homes at the new Lake Falls development at the corner of First and Airport in Savoy. These are some really gorgeous homes. Of course they’re all furnished by professional interior designers and they all have state of the art entertainment systems and very high end kitchens. Several of them had movie theatres with 20′ wide screens, projectors hanging from the ceiling, and superb surround sound systems. These homes are all in the $600k range, which isn’t too bad considering what they’d run in other parts of the country. Any of these homes would run over $1mil if they were in New England. The landscaping around some of these homes was way cool, too. One home had a long series of waterfalls with a deep pool on one end. I can’t see ever owning one of these castles even if we could afford one, though. We wouldn’t know what to do with so many rooms. As it is we spend most of our time in just three rooms in our home (bedroom, kitchen, living room). I guess we could charge admission and show movies.   😉

Another summer is almost gone, although you’d never know it from the weather. Still hot as a sauna. We had a nice break from it this past weekend during our trip to New England where it was drier with temps in the low 70’s. And with the end of summer comes the horde of students descending on both Champaign-Urbana, where I work, and Charleston, where we live. It’s the dichotomy of academia that students, without whom it would not exist, are the primary complaint of those who work there. It’s the old “can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em” issue. It seems those relationships always offer enough benefits to make them worthwhile.   😎

I am myself a student again. I started the Master of Science in Technology program at Eastern Illinois University this summer and I have one class this fall. I had planned on taking three, but I have quite a few major projects at work planned for this fall, so I decided to cut back to one course. The two courses I took this summer were no-brainers, but they did require a lot of reading and that took up more time than I’d expected. I still hope to be able to take at least two courses in the coming semesters so I can finish up this program in less than three years. We’ll see.