TGIT

The morning started with my JC Penney order for another set of curtains showing up as back-ordered until January. Which was good news, because I really wanted to get wider ones. So I called and canceled, then went online and ordered in-stock wide panels for about the same price. It was quite a wait on hold, so getting to work on time did not quite happen, but only by a few minutes.

Work was busy, I got to watch a lot of TV, thanks to the nature of many of the tests. Lunch was at the Korean buffet called China China. Home after work, in the mailbox was a used rare CD I'd been waiting for for a couple of weeks. Debra Byrne, New Ways To Dream. She's an Australian stage star, and when I heard her singing melodies from Sunset Blvd I had to look her up. This was the album I wanted, but it apparently is the only CD of hers available. I'll listen to it in the car tomorrow. Earlier in the week I played both CDs of Alaskan Marian Call's new double album, something fierce. I saw her at a con concert a while back, have been following her on FB as she played all 50 states last year. In person she is magnetic with a touch of flamethrower. She has a wide vocal range, and can skip a couple of octaves seamlessly. Unfortunately, the majority of her tunes showcase this feature, and it gets annoying after a while. I was more about supporting a talented, determined artist than about the music. Not that there isn't some good music on the CDs.

On the whiteboard by the door it said "turkey legs". I had bought a pack of three, and the last couple of times I have done this I had put them in the fridge, intending to cook them but forgot and ended up throwing out "Viking meat". Viking food is any food which looks like it was left by the Vikings around the time of Eric The Red.

I also had a bag of Pepperidge Farms stuffing. And an onion. Usually I bake turkey legs in some white wine, with sliced onions, garlic, and maybe a carrot or two. Out of carrots, and the onion was going to be chopped and added to the stuffing. There was a bag of frozen apple slices in the freezer, and behind the cheap white wine in the cupboard was a flagon of cheap sangria, so I marinated the turkey in sangria with the apple slices on top, and eventually baked it that way. The stuffing needed celery, which I didn't have, so I chopped up an apple, added the chopped onion, and butter, and I also added some chopped walnuts. And that got mixed with a couple of cups of chicken broth and baked in a Pyrex bowl for half an hour. After the stuffing was done I heated up a can of turkey gravy (left over from the failed experiment called "what would a cat eat on a liquid diet?") and poured that over the gravy, and had that as an appetizer. I ate the smallest turkey leg when the three of them came out of the oven an hour later.

All this while half-watching the Steelers and Browns do some amazing things on defense and nothing special on offense. 14-3.

One of my Round Tuit list items was to see what is out there for fixing the problem iTunes has with titles, artist names and album art. I use an iPod in the car for music, and my in-dash system will display by artist or album and will show the album cover if it's there and tagged correctly, but 80% at least of the tunes are missing the album art or show the wrong album, and/or have the composer listed as the artist, or some other database glitch. This is pretty annoying as a customer, but much more annoying for me, since I have worked at several companies testing that the data they received from what is now called Gracenote (it used to be CDDB) was stored correctly locally and all the elements displayed correctly. This technology has been solid for at least 15 years. Apple is supposed to be better than that.

So I found a program for the PC which is currently massaging the 5,000 or so titles in my iTunes collection, and seems to be doing a decent job so far of analyzing the audio, finding it on Gracenote, and re-cataloging. Too soon to tell, but if it does well enough for the $50, I'll review it later.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Maybe see a show.
Maybe set up the telescope for Saturday morning's lunar eclipse.