Grandniece Happenings – The Wife’s Niece needed to test for a certification last weekend, so we let the Grandniece sleep over Friday night. The little girl loves running around the house, going into my office to play with some of my less-collectible collectibles, and other activities. Last weekend, we introduced her to Candy Land, which she enjoyed. And which led The Wife and I to look on Amazon for other classic board games in her age range, such as Chutes and Ladders, Sorry, and Trouble. We also took her down to the neighborhood pool. Now, I like swimming. I like swimming in a pool. What I hate is the slathering of sunscreen in hopes I will avoid the dreaded burns. The Grandniece enjoyed the pool, but I was certainly feeling it the next day.

Movie Happenings – I posted my “mildly useful review” yesterday, but this is more ranting. I understand the old part of starting the previews at the movie start time, particularly before assigned seating, online ticket orders, and purchasing snacks on an app. These days, I don’t know why they need to spend a half-hour showing me previews and commercials to the point I almost forget what movie I’m there to see.

Still, this continued my streak of seeing every Star Wars film in the theater in the first run.

Houseguest Happenings – Mom has departed for the Great White North to escape the Florida summer and to visit her family. So, of course, her house decided to give her a going away gift in the form of a blown compressor on the HVAC. They’re borrowing one of the portable AC’s we have, but The Brother decided to decamp from Mom’s place and take up temporary residence at Ward Manor.

Home Office Happenings – The Wife wants to redo her office now that we’ve decompressed a lot of her craft stuff out to the loft space. One of the big items is making it so her personal laptop and her work laptop run on the same set of monitors and peripherals. We also have one of those wide curved monitors we meant to use for another project. The Wife spent some time this week “test driving” the curved monitor to make sure she liked working on it. The Brother was nice enough to do some research on KVM switches. The plan is to give The Wife the full “control room” feel of big monitor in the center flanked by secondary monitors. I’m trying to convince her to use the laptop monitors as additional “low use” monitors, but she’s not convinced. We shall see what the final configuration is.