Air Spared, But Not as much as planned

Plan A was cach up on 2 nights of lost sleep, only make one short trip to Lowe's, and spend most of the day at home in air conditioned comfort (aided by all-around double-pane windows and curtains) being ignored by my cat, and maybe watching some football.

But an online search showed Lowe's did not have what I was looking for, and Home Despot carried more stuff along that line.
What I was looking for was a way to let the neighbor who keeps bringing my garbage bins back to the carport on Mondays not to put them up on the raised section which used to hold a storage shed. Because it's a PIA to get it down to ground level and parked next to the back steps. Even when I was storing them at the end of the driveway, it was never up on the platform.

And then I saw an ad for a massage place near the car wash, so before HD,  I went there and was pleasantly surprised with an outstanding massage by a very cute masseuse. HD had a lot of options, but there was a cheap simple one, a stake for holding a "keep off the grass" sign, which I could put into one of the planters I have near the shed. The planters are easily moved to the front of the platform.

And on the way home from there, I remembered I was out of lasagna and pot pie frozen dinner, almost out of bananas and watermelon, so I stopped at Lucky's. As I was wheeling stuff to the car it dawned on me that I should have first hung out for a while at Starbucks in that complex. Oh well.

Home, printed a sign on card stock, inserted it into the holder, pulled the frog planter to the front of the platform and stuck the stake in it.

Watched some football, and some mindless TV shows. Fired up the RC car and played with it with Spook. She seems to be a little bit scared of it, but she yells at me when I put down the controller. And she lies right next to it for half a hour before giving up.

Downloaded the free trial of a program called sync2, which purports to sync Outlook calendars to Google calendars. I put it on my home PC which uses Outlook for all my personal mail (including spook@howeird.com and my gmail address) and also installed it on my work PC via VPN/Remote Desktop. It worked pretty well, allowing me to nuke all the recurring work meetings I had manually entered into my Google calendar (because that's what I use for calendar alarms - I won't put my work email on my personal phone). I chose not to sync contacts, because I don't want my entire corporate phone list on Google or my phone. And I don't do Tasks on Outlook, so that check box is unchecked. 

It costs $35 one-time fee, $20 if I want to share a post from their site to my FB timeline. I'll do that if the trial works.

BTW I did get a lot of sleep, till almost 11 am. And also reset and re-synced my SleepNumber remote because 100 was starting to feel like 80. And going from 55 to 100 on the right side took only an eyeblink, but on the left side took a minute. Yesterday as I was driving to MV, SleepNumber rep called to check up, but I told her not today, she said how about tomorrow at 11 am? I said yes, but she didn't call back.

In hummingbird feeder news, I took down the one which the birds like, and doesn't leak, and ordered two more on amazon, since no one carries them locally anymore.

And on my to-do list was to make an MP3 from the CD I made years ago of the production of Beyond The Fringe I directed and starred in during college. 1970. But there doesn't seem to be a CD. I remember making a copy of the tape and sending it to one of the cast members a long long time ago, and thought I sent a CD, but I guess I sent a cassette tape. Anyhow, a quick peek at the handful of cassette tapes on my CD rack showed one labeled Beyond The Fringe on side 2 and High Windows & Hebrew patriotic on side 1. That tape was probably a re-recording made after I returned from Israel in 1978 or thereabouts. High Windows is a legendary Israeli pop group similar to Peter, Paul & Mary, made up of  Arik Einstein, Shmulik Kraus and Josey Katz. One of the patriotic recordings is probably Namoi Shemer in a rare recording, singing her own Jerusalem of Gold. It has a beautiful and unique instrumental intro fore and aft, which I learned on the piano, though she sounds much better playing it on guitar. My Israeli sister was gobsmacked when she heard me play it, she did not know it had ever been recorded, or that Shemer ever sang it herself. It's a very beautiful melody, poetic lyrics, and pretty much Israel's second National Anthem.

But I digress.

So I went online, and found a cassette deck on eBay which was going for a reasonable price/shipping. Maybe I should have gone to Goodwill, which is where my several old decks went years ago.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
No BASFA because it will be almost unattended, and sweltering.

Unrequited obsession

Interesting weekly team meeting this morning, Boss spent a lot of time pointing out that the current timeline for the next product is bent.

We're supposed to test the untested test cases, but they are all owned by other people, and so far I have been unable to find any which can be done on my under-powered machine.

Lunchtime I stayed in, had cup-o-noodles in the break room as many people played pool & ping pong. It was very hot & hazy outside. It took more than a year, but we now have a working air conditioning plant.

Late afternoon I sat in on a demo of a video analyzer which is amazing in two ways. The good way is it does analyses which we have been needing, such as comparing closed captioning to what was actually spoken, but more importantly matching the text input to the output. The other amazing was not so good - it is amazing that such a useful tool has such an ugly user interface. And no real API.

A theater friend posted that she needed a photographer and a porta-potty to be in an ad for a web site. I volunteered to do the photo, and suggested a mutual friend can help us, who is a dispatcher for a porta potty rental place. I'm sure he can point us to a customer who will let us use their site. Or maybe a park, which would be even better. Plan is for shooting Saturday. 

After work was the search for a cassette tape player. Goodwill had nothing, Radio shack across the street had nothing, Fry's had a couple of boom boxes but they did not have outputs, just speakers. There was a combination turntable/cassette player with USB out, but it cost more than the deck I ordered on eBay, and the turntable doesn't do 78s. But I may go back and get one if the eBay machine is a FAIL. I did buy a memorex walkman wanna be, but when I got it home and put a tape in, it was clearly a piece of junk, and played the tape double speed on one side, and not at all the other side. Not worth taking back.

The more I post on FB, the more I have to read. LJ not so much.

Dinner was lasagna, watermelon for dessert. And I whipped up some caramel walnuts to munch on sparingly.

So sad to hear about the terrorist bomb in Bangkok which killed about 20 and injured almost 100. In front of the Erewan statue, which started out as a PR thing for the 12-star Erewan Hotel in the 70s, but has become a major tourist magnet, for both foreign and Thais. From the photos I've seen, the statue is unharmed, but the wrought iron fence around it is twisted and some gold elephant statues are now gold & black.


Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Leave at 5:30 for a seminar at the CU down the block.