Felt like Sunday

Started the morning walking to the apartment office, they said yes, the rent cleared. I wonder why it is not showing in Quicken or on the TechCU web site.  From there I walked to the nails place, she redid them entirely.

Walking back, I noticed the pretty path with fountains and ducks and trees behind Faultline Brewery was open to the public. I followed it, and it was a lot longer than I expected - it is designed to only be able to see about 100 feet in front, and each time you reach a jog point, there's more. It goes clear behind the Residence Inn maybe half a mile away.

Near the end of the path

Back home, sat out on the patio with Domino for a while, finishing Ruth Rendell's Road Rage, which I am sure I have read before but didn't remember the plot or the ending. Now that I finished, I know why. The last chapter was about the worst series of pulling rabbits out of hats ever. There was a lot of WTF in the story.  Reading became more enjoyable when the carpet cleaner truck parked in front of the patio finished its job.

Hauled my butt out to Walmart. Only one thing on the "must" list, which I did get, but there were a bunch of other things which were in the line of "if you see it on sale, buy it". I totally forgot to put corn cob handles

and toilet tank cleaner thingies on my list.

Got to the parking lot, my car was not all that close to the store, there were a few open spots closer, but some parking vulture decided he was going to wait for me, blocking traffic. So I put the stuff in the car, brought the cart back to the cart dump (he was still waiting) then went back toward the store, out of sight, and checked my email on my phone. He was gone by the time I went back.

Thought about having lunch out there, or going to Ranch 99, but it was already 3 pm and I have no room in my freezer for stuff. In fact. the plan was to steamer some frozen dim sum tonight.

Home, decided what I needed was a massage, and I found a coupon online for a place not far from work. Made a 6 pm appointment. Excellent massage, when I got out there was voicemail that my prints were ready to pick up, so I went to the art store, and we found a couple which had the mounting tab on the wrong edge, this despite the fact that I told them all of them were signed in the lower right corner. They fixed that quickly, and I drove the very heavy package home.

Did a mailmerge to print labels for the backs of the prints, stuck them on and put the prints in order, and found one more with the wrongly mounted tab, and one which had started to separate from the board. I will bring them both back tomorrow to be fixed. If they want to do the separated one off-site, I'll say no thanks and use my spray adhesive.

Plans for tomorrow:
Back to the art shop
Car wash
Friends' anniversary party
Home by 10-is for the 10:30 pm mars rover landing on NASA TV on the web, because effing Comcast doesn't carry that (free to them) channel.

I'm Late

All day ran late. For the first time in years, for no apparent reason, I slept from my usual 3 am pit stop time clear to 8:30 am, without the usual wake-ups at 5 and 6 and 7-ish. To celebrate I stayed in bed till 10:30.

Did some stuff online with credit unions which turned out the be useless (it being Sunday). By the time I had lunch it was after 1, I took the prints to the art store to be fixed, which I was planning on doing at 10. I explained that if it didn't get done in the next hour I'd have to fix it myself, they told me 15 minutes, they had to heat up the press. So that was 15-20 minutes I had not planned on.

Went next door to Toys R Us and had to excavate in the gift wrap department to find a shirt box for the gift I was bringing to the party tonight. Also got wrapping paper and a ribbon. I would make a card on the PC.

On the way home got caught in traffic - a big accident which two fire trucks and three police cars managed to block the intersection completely, instead of directing traffic. That wasted 10 minutes, plus another 5 to get back to the expressway after detouring.

Making the card took way longer than it needed to, because I couldn't find the last card I'd made, to use as a template.

By now it is clear I am not going to get the car washed before going to Janice's to car pool to the dinner.

So, off to Janice's to chat for half an hour, then a friend of hers joined us and we drove to Palo Alto for a friend's 40th anniversary dinner. Which was excellent. Big problem, though, the acoustics in the room were horrible, and I couldn't hear any of the conversations unless people shouted. Met some wonderful people, ate some delicious food. Service was very slow, we were not out of there until after 9:30.

I got home just in time (at about 10) to find that Comcast did indeed have the NASA channel up on channel 27, and watched the last bit of Mars Curiosity rover landing. Pretty exciting for all those folks who had worked on this for years. I am not a huge fanatic about unmanned space exploration, but it's better than nothing. And I would rather see us doing stuff on the Moon. I don't buy the argument that Mars is a more likely place for humans to live. With a working space station (not the fragile science lab we have now) the moon could be supplied with what they can't grow themselves. Not so Mars.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Keypoint, get my ATM card PIN
UPS, ship my photos to Chicon7
AG rehearsals, I have to bring the shoes & sox I'll be wearing in the show because they put a fancy tap dance floor down in the rehearsal hall. Boo hiss. HATE wearing leather shoes.