This morning I called the engine shop to get an update on the repairs to my truck. The news was by no means good. This morning they arre pulling the head. He told me they had received some of the needed parts but were still waiting for some of them and the truck would be in the shop at least until the early part of next week. Wonderful.

I'll be spending the weekend in this motel room. As I've already been here for two days, that's going to pretty much make a week of down time by the time my truck is ready to roll once again. This is going to seriously hurt my poor wallet's feelings.

I am glad that I thought to bring along several of my pipes as well as a good supply of pipe tobacco, along with my knitting and ebook reader. That will make the stay a little more tolerable.  Having some extra money in my pocket would help too as I could take a cab somewhere, but cash is pretty tight right now. Motel rooms are very boring you know.

I am going to have to call the office shortly and have some more cash transferred to me to cover the motel bill for the next few days. This place isn't exactly the Ritz but even a cheap motel runs into some real money if one has to stay for several days.

I had been thinking about shaving off my beard for several days now. It's not yet warm weather of course, but I was growing tired of having all that grey hanging on my face. Yesterday, perhaps out of sheer boredom, I bit the bullet and shaved it off. It does make me look less like I qualify for the senior citizen discount at Dennys. It's kind of funny, the hair on my head has very few grey hairs in it at all, but my beard grows more grey by the day.

Now I just have to get back into the habit of setting aside some exgtra time in the mornings to shave.

I noticed this morning that my testing copy of Windows 7 expires in 11 days so I am currently in the process of transferring what files I need from that partition over to my main partition, Slackware Linux, and setting up an API that will allow me to run the one Windows program that I need for work under Linux. It's a 32 bit program and I am running a 64 bit version of Linux. Until now I haven't needed to run any 32 bit programs in Linux and so haven't set it up as a multilib system. It's a bit of work but what the hell, it's not like I don't have the time at the moment.

When money allows I may spring for a copy of Windows 7. Most of what I do is in Linux but I have to admit there are a couple of Windows applications that do come in handy once in a while that simply won't run correctly in an emulator under Linux. Not many, but a couple.  And I also have to admit that Windows 7 is a great stride forward for Windows. There are still some things I dislike about it, but all in all I think it's the best Micro$oft has yet produced.

*******

I've just returned to my room after going down to the front desk to extend my stay through the weekend. Despite the shortage of funds I've called a taxi to take me to a nearby mall so I can wander around and kill some time. The only restaurant close to the motel is an IHOP and there is only so much of that I can take. I'll kill some time at the mall, grab a bite to eat, and then return here later. Beats sitting around the room all day.