quiet day.

I took the kids over to our weekly play date at a friend's house. We usually alternate between indoor playtime and trips to the zoo or the park.

When Quinn was sitting down for lunch with his little pal Greta, they started squealing at each other in turn. One of them started, and then the other responded, and for a few minutes, they had a great time having a squeal conversation and laughing their little heads off at each other.

It's kind of hard to have a bad day after watching a three-and-a-half year old and a two-and-a-half-year old conversing in high-pitched sounds and then sharing belly laughs.

In other news, the magic elf box under my desk is now a Core2Duo system, thanks to the humbling and amazing generosity of my friend Mark. Those new Intel Core 2 chips are something else...half the heat and two thirds the power consumption of the Pentium 4 line, and twice the performance. My old Pentium 4 runs at 2.8GHz, and the new C2D is clocked at 1.86GHz, but the C2D canes the P4 in every conceivable category by a very wide margin, despite running at a gigahertz less. I need to wait a few more days for the new video card to get here, but once that spare PCI-E slot holds some nVidia goodness, I'll be making MS Flight Simulator X my bitch.

(If you didn't understand half of the previous paragraph, you're probably not a computer geek, and you may safely disregard everything past "belly laughs".)