I could have gone outside. De Lijn is on strike and instead of shutting down the trams (like last week) they simply keep the transportation going and you just don't have to pay. I could have literally gone all the way to the coast (by bus) and all the way to the Netherlands or Germany. But I didn't.

I puttered around and started working on a new project, a daily journal spoken with text to speech. I've been looking for something to automate this process, instead of a weekly spoken journal by myself, and I think I just might have landed on it.

During my search, I landed on: VoxWorx. It's deadly cool, and though it takes awhile to get used to the computerized voice, it's great. I actually listened to the most current journal entry, and when the computerized voice said, "Scooter come home, we miss you" it could have made me cry! I'm running a little late on the period, so I suppose I'm just typically hormonally-induced emotional.

Eva and I wanted to go out to dinner tonight and so we headed into town with no particular place to go. We ended up at a building built in 1596 (wow!) and eating another good meal. (I'll try to post the specifics about the restaurant later)

I tried my dutch out on the waitress and the cook, and when Eva went to the bathroom, I went down to pay. Eva came down and I was chatting away with her, promising that if we had time, when Nichole and Jennifer get here we'll try to stop by.

On the way home we rented The Man Who Wasn't There.

We didn't actually view it, we simply had it in the case that we wanted to watch it. Ah the pleasures of having a DVD player!

IN THE NEWS:
On a more lighthearted note, A haywire ATM machine in Fargo, North Dakota, spit out extra cash but three honest bank customers ignored temptation and returned the free money. "All I wanted was $20 to go to the movie," said Mary Davidson. "Then $20 bills just started shooting out of the machine." In total the machine spit out $125 to Davidson. And consequently, the people who received more money than they had bargained for, returned it to the bank.

On a more serious but promising note, Federal officials said that life expectancy for Americans reached an all-time high of 77.2 years in 2001.