Scene on the River Walk
time in San Antonio, Texas, spread out in a Marriott Residence Inn with all of our computers and papers and stuff occupying the area in our suite where normal people eat lunch.
After shuttling back and forth across the country, and experiencing the burglary of the truck, we needed some time to relax. So we have been spending
Scene on the River Walk
time in San Antonio, Texas, spread out in a Marriott Residence Inn with all of our computers and papers and stuff occupying the area in our suite where normal people eat lunch.
San Antonio was a good choice for us. It's so familiar to us now that we feel like residents rather than tourists. We know our supermarket and office supply store and several book stores. We have dazzled our mail forwarding service by appearing several times in person to pick up our mail before it overflows its box. When we feel like exploring, we've generally been visiting the areas we've enjoyed in the past.
Much of our time has been spent with our genealogy software. We have been transferring our genealogy information from our Macintosh to our PCs. Our new program, The Master Genealogist, is sufficiently complex to be challenging, but also enjoyable as we learn how to use its many features. After 
Excited ducks
thirty years of Macintoshes, we're finally learning to speak Windows, at least in short sentences. It has, to be sure, its ups and downs. But so far it has remained elusively difficult to write programs easily for both platforms -- and there are lots more programs for Windows machines than for Macs.
The biggest silver lining to our burglary cloud was the unexpected discovery that we had cleverly backed up our computer files before we went to England. We had copied them to CD-ROM disks, which we stored in a disk package that we forgot about. So Bob's Big Job right now is to move them into the new archive drives. It's not just moving the files, it's renaming them and converting them to some universal format that can easily be read by both Macs and PCs. And moving them is slow, too, because the Macintosh icons generate extra and unnecessary files on the PCs. It took most of December to convert these files the first time, so it will probably take another month now. But we're going to spray some extra copies far and wide to protect us from mean old burglars!
Infante karate school?
Another silver lining is the fact that we have received -- after somewhat of a struggle -- replacement disks for our Dell PC from Dell computing.
And we have found another treat for travelers -- did you know that Blockbuster Video cards can be used at any Blockbuster store? This makes movies on DVD cost-effective for travelers like us; up till now, we've bought the few DVDs we've watched.
After a spell of rainy and cold (for San Antonio) weather, we are enjoying warm sunny days. We're trying to get out and take walks at lunchtime. We enclose some photos of things we've noted: a Day Care bus, Mariachis on the River Walk, and interesting behavior of ducks. The sign on the bus says, "Free karate lessons with enrollment; infant thru 12 years." As for the ducks -- it's spring, but if those ducks were people they'd go to jail -- all those males and one poor female!