Gary Has Arrived in California

Gary left yesterday afternoon for Stanford, where he will hang out with his friend Steven Bird until his workshop starts on Friday. He is giving the opening address, and he hasn't got it finished yet, so he'd better get busy.

I haven't yet had a chance to hear how his arrival went, but he was suposed to be picked up at SFO by Larry Wall, the guy who invented a programming language called Perl, whom Gary knew from SPU. Larry nearly joined Wycliffe back in the day, but ended up not doing so for health reasons.

Gary did phone me today in a grumpy mood because he had a rough morning getting set up on the Stanford. First of all, the phones in the dorm only make incoming calls. And he had to walk two blocks to even find a pay phone. Wow, what does that tell you about cell phone usage? Then the pay phone used up nearly all his prepaid calling card minutes for instate calls. Then he couldn't get his computer to hook up to their wireless network. He had the password, but it won't work in the dorm, so he had to wander around looking for a place it would work. And he hadn't had anything to eat except two oreos for breakfast. Anyway, he finally got ahold of me, and I emailed his friend and finally he was able to get online and finally get some food. His friend gave him an office to work in until Friday and the internet works well. (I need to buy him one of these, made for visually impaired folks.)

Eventually I got him set up with gmail chat, so he can talk to me via instant message anytime at all. For free.

He is also having some neck aches and pains from a bad chair, he thinks, so I've ordered him an expensive new chair which should be here by the time we return. When I told Andrew about it, he said, "You must love him." :-)

In other news, Rachel is helping out every night this week at a Backyard Bible club from our church. She is in charge of teaching the lesson tomorrow night about the apostles. She's got a story, role playing, games and songs organized around that theme.