I Suck At Hanging Out With Karlene And Tommy

saturday was quite the eventful day.

the day started off bright and early as my brother-in-law's (pj) brother (michael) stopped by for a quick visit. awhile ago, karen and i were talking to michael about air conditioning. in particular, we were asking if michael and his family would be interested in taking our old central air unit.

when the second floor was added to our house, karen and i asked the contractors to see if they could integrate the new duct work with our exisiting central air unit on the first floor. unfortunately, to have an efficient system the answer was no. thus, karen and i had a new central air unit installed to control both floors of the house.

as a result, the old original central air unit has been sitting in the garage ever since the second floor was added. and truth be told, the original central air unit was not even that old. it might have only been used one year. money well spent...

needless to say, karen and i were ecstatic when michael said he could use it. we were happy because 1) we did not have to throw a perfectly good central air unit away, which as fans of recycling were music to our ears; and 2) we have more room in the garage again.

anyway, michael and pj came bright and early to pick up the central air unit. (michael lives in the neighboring town of pembroke, so the transporting of the central air unit was not that far.) to our surprise, michael brought us blueberry bushes in return. it was a very nice gesture that he did not have to do.

following the central air unit pickup, karen and i went to get our big merchandise ticket for the day: a vacuum. for awhile, karen and i have been talking about getting a new vacuum. our old vacuum... aside from putting out a lot of heat... has not been picking up dirt that well.

i am guessing one of the reasons why the vacuum has not been picking up dirt that well is because the filter needs to be changed. every year around memorial day, karen and i would order a new filter for the vacuum. unfortunately, for the past few years, we have neglected to get a new filter. (that is how long we have talked about getting a new vacuum.)

the new filters were rather costly for the vacuum. in doing the math, we figured that it made no sense to continually purchase new filters because eventually the costs accrued for the filters would exceed purchasing a new vacuum altogether. hence, we had stopped buying filters for our old vacuum.

unfortunately, we kept talking about getting a new vacumm and never did... for years. we had even researched and looked into a specific vacuum. so one day, as i was browsing through the weekly ad for best buy, i noticed that the vacuum that we had looked into was on sale.

and thus, karen and i decided that enough was enough... and we made the executive decision to just purchase the new vacuum... before it would be another few years. anyway, we bought the new vacuum. it's a dyson. (for anyone curious, we love the vacuum. it's awesome!)

anyway, following our excursion to best buy, karen and i headed to lowell. (insert "there is a lot to like about lowell" tagline.) karen's cousins (karlene and tommy) live in lowell. i am not exactly sure how the "tradition" started... and karlene is big on traditions... but for some reason karen and i apparently head up to lowell on memorial day weekend. and this year was no different.

now, i suck at hanging out with karlene and tommy. the tradition generally includes visiting a garden store known as gath's and kimball's ice cream. in addition, this year's festivities would include the cleaning of karlene's craft room, and the fixing of their computer.

(pictured below is the sign for the garden store... and wally.)


as far as garden places go, gath's is great. the place is run by the gaths out of their home in dunstable. mr. gath is very helpful... and funny. he does a great job with his plants. karen... and apparently karlene... enjoy going to gath's to find plants for their respective gardens. (karen and i also picked up some things for the cemetery for our son.)

after gath's, we enjoyed kimball's ice cream in westford. as far as ice cream goes... kimball's is by far the best. for anyone curious, kimball's is another family run business. their home-made ice cream is simply delicious. (cue rachael ray's "yum-o" sound.) with their gigantic portion sizes, i would recommend kimball's ice cream to any ice cream connoisseur.

from there, karen, karlene, tommy and i went back to their place in lowell for a little cookout dinner. (yes, we had ice cream before dinner.) and then... the fun started.

karlene is a little sentimental. she keeps practically everything that is given to her. in addition, she purchases things to hold on to for future use. as admirable as those qualities may be, the result is a room full of stuff... lots and lots of stuff. as of late, karlene has been trying to de-clutter her craft room. i would guess that her wanting to de-clutter her room is somewhat related to the recent cleaning of her grandmother's place.

nevertheless, karlene asked for karen's help. and as weird as this sounds, karen loves helping to organize things... especially other people's things. so while karen and karlene tackled karlene's craft room, i got the enviable task of fixing their computer.

naturally, i get the computer-related task. that is my "thing" in the family... perhaps due to my genetics. just kidding. for some time, karlene and tommy's computer has been unable to read data from the disc drive. in fact, the disc drive does not even show up as an accessible drive.

before i started of course, tommy and i reviewed some of the applications on the computer. after my little schpiel about microsoft's internet explorer browser, i convinced tommy to forego internet explorer and use mozilla's web standard-compliant firefox browser. (go firefox!)

browsers aside, it took me awhile to diagnose the problem of the inaccessible disc drive. at first, i thought the problem was due to the installed driver for the piece of hardware. sadly, i was mistaken. after some tinkering... and a brief moment where i had rendered the computer completely inoperable... tommy and i discovered the problem: an older version of itunes.

truth be told, i never would have guessed there was a connection between itunes and an inaccessible disc drive. my guess is that because itunes has a disc burning feature, that somehow the older version of the application caused the disc drive to be inoperable. nevertheless, the easy solution turned out to be updating itunes to the current version offered by apple. once itunes was updated, the disc drive appeared. unfortunately, we did not discover this possible solution until the wee hours of night... and by wee hours... i mean 4 in the morning.