Buddy's Birthday

14

Buddy turned 14 last Friday, September 24th.

I changed out the window gels, also known as the sticky things hanging on the door to keep the birds from flying into it.

Hubby took Buddy to a Tigers' baseball game.

We had Dairy Queen ice cream cake per Buddy's request. His favorite is the Oreo Blizzard cake.

When I went to pick it up, the lady wasn't happy with how it was done. She wanted to redo it and asked if I could come back in a few hours to pick it up. We weren't in a hurry since it was still before noon, so I said sure.

When we went back to pick it up, the replacement cake wasn't the Blizzard cake. She realized that, and she wasn't going to sell the first one because she was unhappy with the decorating, so she gave us both of them for the price of the one.

My family who thinks ice cream is a food group was extremely excited!

Buddy has seen all six Star Wars' movies in the last couple of months. His friends at our church here have gone on and on (incessantly) about Star Wars and how they couldn't believe he hadn't seen them. I saw the original three many years ago. Hubby fell asleep during the original movie when I tried to get him to watch it just so he knew what Star Wars was all about. That's been since we had kids, but before they were old enough to watch. He's not a sci-fi guy.

So our kids had never seen Star Wars. They know a lot about sports though.

Buddy and Caboose are hooked on Star Wars now. So I picked this DQ cake. I picked up the little rings at the local cake decorating store.

We teased him that we got a Caillou cake. He was glad we were kidding. Hubby and I are just goofy enough to do it.

Trivia time!

On September 24, 1996, Buddy's actual birth day, according to the Chicago Tribune "the average price for a gallon of gasoline at the nation's pumps rose in the last two weeks to $1.2918, up 0.17 cents since Sept. 6, according to a Lundberg Survey of 10,000 gas stations nationwide. Consumers are now paying just over 9 cents a gallon more than this time last year."

What we wouldn't give to be paying that again!

The Chicago Tribune also published an article on this date regarding the Internet, the rapid increase in the number of users, and dial-up networks/internet service providers. It stated, "the country's largest commercial dialup computer service, America Online, has won one battle but lost ground in another over recent days in the ever-running battle to keep growing as Americans continue to flock onto the Internet.

The victory came late Friday afternoon in Philadelphia, when the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals canceled an order by a lower court that barred America Online executives from blocking junk e-mail in the face of widespread customer complaints."

I'm wondering what happened there?

Later in the article, this is what it said about internet service providers: "The service was winning in the courts, but a reversal came when a major industry survey was released Monday, showing that Americans appear to be moving away from using big commercial services like America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy and the Microsoft Network in favor of smaller, often local, companies called Internet service providers.

The Odyssey study found that even as all four of the big on-line services were losing potential customers to the small service providers, America Online did much better than the others.

Between January and July, America Online grew from a 14 percent share of all households with PCs to 18 percent, while CompuServe dropped from 6 percent to 5 percent and Prodigy dropped from 5 percent to 4 percent. Microsoft Network remained at 1 percent."

I haven't heard a couple of those names in a while.

Tomorrow, spacers. Next Monday, braces. He's growing up so fast. And he is so totally taller than me.

Love ya, Bud!