I had the sniffles all day, and I couldn't tell if another cold or flu was coming on or if my allergies were acting up, so after church I came home and slept most of the day. When I sleep, my immune system kicks up and can kill any bug that's invading my system.

I took the bus on Saturday and spent alot of time outdoors, since I was going to three different places and didn't want to deal with the hassle of parking. It was a nice sunny day, although the temperature was in the 60's and it was quite chilly if you weren't in the sunshine. So, either I got too cold and picked up a chill, or being outdoors in the Presidio kicked up my allergies, or I was around too many people who might have been carrying cold germs and didn't know it.

I spent some time on Sunday, installing McAfee Virus Scan 7.0 on my computer. My Norton Anti-Virus software wasn't compatible with windows 2000. I'd also been getting way too many trojans on my computer, so I figured I'd better get a win2000 compatible virus software program right away and since McAfee was on sale at Costco for about $20 with a rebate, I bought it.

Right before I installed McAfee, Norton said I had another trojan virus on computer. I typed the virus name on the web, and I found out I had a variant of a worm virus called YAHA. It's a nasty little trojan virus that somehow attaches itself to your virus software. I tried to delete it, but every time I rebooted my system the YAHA worm virus would reinstall itself. The YAHA virus creates a directory on your system that says \microsoft\tcpsvs32, and had a program in there called die.exe. I ended up hacking into my registry and deleting the Norton virus line in my startup. Once I did that, I was able to delete and directory and the worm. What a pain!

When I installed McAfee and ran the virus scan, the program additionally picked up nine infected files with the virus trojan. So scary. The McAfee virus scan included a Firewall program, so I installed it as well. Hopefully, the new programs will keep trojans away. I got rid of the preview pane in my mail program too.

I don't know how I picked up the trojan either, but most likely it was from an email with an exe file or scr file attached to it.

The Arts of Pacific Asia was a well heeled event, with exhibitors showing museum quality pieces. I saw a beautiful gold Buddha from Kashmir from the 9th/10th century CE for $120,000. The I saw chinese Han dynasty vases from 200 BCE, but there was no price. There was also an exibitor from New York who had some great Mughal Empire paintings, which I think are so beautiful, selling for $3,000 and up.

You could also purchse Meiji era Japanese prints, a favorite of mine, from a UK exhibitor for $1,100 and up. There were chinese snuff bottles galore, as well as those strange tiny chinese shoes going for $400 and up. There were also beautiful clothing and rugs, as well as ceramics, furniture and jewelry.

I think the most inexpensive thing I saw there, was a small but very pretty century japanese woodblock print from the early 1900's for $65. I was tempted to buy it, just to have something from the event, but settled on a book of Mount Fuji paintings and woodblock prints for $20.

It would so great to have money to collect beautiful art objects. There were several things I saw there that I would love to have, including the $120,000 gold Buddha, which was the best looking Buddha there. I mean it had to be right? It cost enough. I saw a beautiful japanese gold screen with cranes, price not shown, which probably meant it was unbelievably expensive. I would love to own it, but it's huge.

If I had money to spare to buy museum quality art, I'd probably have a big house to display all my art objects, because that's the other thing you need to collect art, the space to display it. There's a couple at church who collect museum quality christian/religous artwork, but they also own a 4-floor Queen Anne house in the Haight where they can display their collection proudly. Lucky people!

The American Flag exhibit at the Presidio was great. It was so fun to see all the different flags, and see how the flag evolved as our country evolved. I loved how the first flags had handsewn stars.

The curators made the exhibit so interesting by adding the history of each flag. In the 1800's, there was a big controversy about whether to add states that were "slave" states. Henry Clay's Missouri compromise of 1820 tried to settle this issue by having the government add one free state and a slave state at the same time. This compromise also established the 36° 30´ parallel as a dividing line in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase territory. Below it, new states would allow slavery; above it, slavery would be banned.

I'm sure this issue was covered in my American history classes, but I'd forgotten how contentious the slavery issue was and how long it had been brewing. Clay's Missouri compromise of 1820 postponed the outbreak of the Civil War.

In 1850, California entered the union as a free state, yeah Cali, which upset the balance of free and slave states since the western territory was not covered by the 1820 compromise. Henry Clay again helped to broker a compromise, whereby any state entering the union would decide on its own to be a free or a slave state. Kansas apparently went through a bloody fight over the slavery issue, but eventually entered the union as a free state.

The exhibit showed some flags from the North that left out the fifteeen slave states, called "exclusionary flags". Between 1860 and 1861, seven slave states withdrew from the Union because of slavery and started the confederacy. These slave states were South Carolina (Jesse Helms' state), Mississippi (home of Trent Lott) , Florida, Alabama (George Wallace's home state), Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. An additional 6 more slave states would join eventually join them.

Since I had the classic left wing liberal education, I started to speculate that those states that had entered the Union as slave states most likely voted for Bush in the 2000 election. I'm bad huh? You can blame that left wing liberal education of mine.

The exhibit also had some George Custer memorabilia, and I saw George Custer's belt buckle and one of his diaries. Custer graduated from West Point, and fought in the Civil War for the Union.

Othe items of interest was the arrangement of the stars and over the years and the stripes. There were some interesting star arrangements over the years. There was also an issue about the number of stripes for awhile too. The exhibit also noted that the practice of carrying the flag into battle started during the civil war, to tell the two sides apart.

I went to the gym today, and I decided to see how I felt running on the treadmill. I haven't run in so long. When was I was heavy, runnig was really painful and then there was the freaky feeling of having body parts like my butt jiggle that never jiggled before. Talk about your body moving without you.

I ran at the 4.5 speed for 15 minutes, then upped it to 5.0 for five minutes, and then upped it again to 5.5 minutes (about an 11 minute mile) for the final five minutes. I couldn't believe it! 25 minutes of solid running, and I wasn't sore and the only thing jiggling was my tummy. YEAH!

God, I would love to run a 10k again or at least train for one. The Far Side 10K is in December, and that would be a good race to shoot for. They always give out cool tshirts too.

I used to love to run, and logged about 15-25 miles a week. I ran two miles every day, and every weekend a long run of 5-10 miles. Running always made me feel strong and healthy, and I'd like to get that feeling back. I'm not sure if I'm ready for outdoor running, but just being able to run without stopping for 25 minutes on the treadmill is good enough for me right now. I wonder if I'll ever get back to the point where I can do do trail running, and have no fear of big hills. That would be a miracle.