Today we took the boys down and got new ice-skates for them. We go to a place called Skatesport in West Springfield. The proprietor is a quirky fellow who is sometimes hard to get on the phone, doesn't have an answering machine or voice mail, and when you finally arrive for your hard-won appointment, is usually running behind and will ask you to come back in 15 minutes or half an hour. My wife can't stand this. But he has a great rapport with kids -- truly great. We first got skates for Charlie last spring. The fellow took great care in measuring Charlie's feet and spent half-an-hour to 45 minutes talking to Charlie, explaining to him what kind of skates he would be getting, and generally making Charlie feel like he and his skating were the most important things in the world. When we came back to get the skates, the fellow checked the fit carefully and then took 45 minutes to teach us how to lace them, break them in, and care for them properly. Charlie came away from the experience with a much greater appreciation and sense of importance regarding what he was doing. Today, when George asked Charlie to put on a skate, he watched him carefully to make sure he was doing it right and nodded with satisfaction (shooting me a knowing glance) when he saw that Charlie was still following those directions carefully: your laces should be completed loosened from when the skate was taken off, stand up to put the skate on, then sit and kick back your foot into the heel. Today he valued the care Charlie had lavished on the skates and identified the signs that showed that the skates were well-broken-in and that Charlie had good form in using them. He didn't neglect Daniel either, when it was Daniel's turn. Daniel is getting his first "real" skates. After looking at his old skates and watching how he stood, he said he'd be moving the blade a bit on one of the skates to reduce Daniel's pronating. I can't wait 'till Sunday to see Daniel take lessons with his new skates.
Little by little, I'm figuring out how 
selectedhosting.com works. They have been responsive when I've asked questions and I've got almost everything working. I was able to get phpwiki working very quickly (although I found a bunch of files in phpwiki wouldn't tranfser via ftp -- it said they had illegal characters or something. Mostly files in other languages, but a few others as well.) To use PHPwiki, I had to get the mysql database set up and that went OK. For about a day the site didn't work: it was resolving to the new IP, but the server would respond "not found", but almost everything is working now. The last hurdle is to get pop mail working -- then I'll be ready if attbi goes away.