Be amazed at the friends you have here on your trip

How about a couple of updates? I suppose the first is my car, which you may recall had to my considerable surprise decided to jump from a fuel economy of about twenty miles per gallon to one of about twenty-five, when I hadn't made any noticeable changes in driving patterns or conditions. Quite naturally I was forced to conclude the car was buttering me up for some catastrophic failure in the near future, and was bracing myself for when the disaster came. But with a fresh round of driving in, I can report that after another 101.3 miles I had to put in 5.03 gallons. Certainly I'd like to claim that I'm satisfied to have the car behaving normally again, although it's hard not to wonder what was going on that it had such a good week and what changed that it stopped. Maybe I was just going downhill more than I realized.

With the car out of the way naturally my next consideration is the state of my shower tiles. They'd accrued altogether too much soap scum and a few spots where mildew grew in, and the Scrubbing Bubbles were not doing the work of cleaning it, so I would presumably have to. At bunny_hugger's suggestion, I got a spray bottle of Tilex and I've been spraying bits daily, just before my shower. (She suggested a generic Tilex equivalent, but then I've always been wasteful of my funds and I didn't see the store-name equivalent anyway.) And that's proving quite successful: pretty near all the mold or mildew grown in is gone, and the soap scum in the region I've been concentrating my attention on has shrunk considerably. Let it not be said that I don't learn things here, since I certainly want to.

Trivia: The signing of the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812, was briefly disrupted when it noted the United States's copy referred to the previous treaty having been signed in the year ``seventeen hundred and eighty-three'' while the British version identified the year as ``one thousand seven hundred and eighty-three''. It was ultimately decided the difference did not warrant delaying the signing. Source: Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence,A J Langguth.

Currently Reading: The Rules of Baseball, David Nemec.