Nerdlike activities abound.

Sam is still in Houston. I know this for sure because he calls every 27½ minutes to tell me that’s where he is and that he misses me and wants to come home. The coming home part will probably happen tomorrow unless the clients delay their project and he has to stay an extra day. Either way, I’m keeping busy with a pile of design projects, occasional naps and lots of visitors for a quiet Wednesday. My maid service (a team of three Mexican tornadoes armed with mops and Lysol) shows up this morning for an hour and a half, my Schwan’s delivery guy arrives at 12:30 with most of this week’s frozen food order, and at 2:30 a technician from Time Warner Cable drops in to reboot our cable box because we lost some of our high-definition channels last week. Apparently they upgraded their software to accommodate new channels and in the process there was an outage for a whole crowd of customers in Mesquite. And at 4:45, the very moment I decide to watch a movie and take my very first nap of the day, the Schwan’s guy comes back with my missing bag of Buffalo Chicken Egg Rolls.

Hot tip. The most incredible TV show on earth in HD is “Deadliest Catch” on the Discovery Channel. You can see EVERY SINGLE DROP OF WATER in EVERY 30-FOOT WAVE on the Bering Sea. Check it out.

Incidentally, I think Sam is secretly having a good time in Houston. Yesterday he had a chance to explore Galveston Island and today before work he spent a few hours at the Houston Museum of Printing History. Initially I thought I’d poke some fun at this until I checked out their website and realized it’s actually an interesting place for a couple of nerds like Sam and me. He’s got three decades of experience in commercial and financial printing, and I’ve been fascinated with print and type since I was eight years old and my cousin Bobby taught me how to use a manual typewriter. I was hooked for life. In case you’re interested, my top typing speed back in the 1980s was 125 w.p.m. on an IBM Selectric. I even burned out two Selectric motors when I worked at the Chicago Board of Trade and actually made them SMOKE.

See? I told you I was a nerd.