Could have been quieter

Slept well, but was up an hour early. Predictably. Emailed my doctor the latest about my ear. Auto-reply said she was out till Thursday.

11 am was at NOVA, the mature worker session was about networking, conducted by someone who thinks cold calls are the way to network. Cold calls to people who don't know you. She was willing to bend it to include email. And she used the NOVA Stupid Standard of having each of us read passages from the handout. Several of the attendees do not speak English well enough for this to be a brilliant idea. Plus, what she had us read was mostly wrong, written by someone who never heard the word netiquette.

At the end of the session she announced that for the next one she was going to try to get a visit from the manager of Trader Joe's. WTF? Most of their employees are under 25. I'll be missing that one.

Downtown, Ingressed a little, Starbucksed a little, then went home. Thought about getting a haircut but by then I was halfway in the opposite direction from Great Clips, and it dawned on me that my manicure place does hair. I'm due to get my nails done this week, I'll get a 2-fer. Maybe I'll get a dye job too.

Baby sister sent me a list of places she would like to go to, mostly gardens, when she & hubby visit for my birthday. I really didn't want them to come. It's not a good time.

Got the bill for my next year's home insurance in the mail, but it's a copy, the bill apparently is going to the mortgage company. I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to pay it this year. I guess I'll find out soon enough.

Sent about an hour with the photograph. There are several tracks for which I do not have 78s. Some of them are Hungarian dances, I may be able to figure them out on youtube. There was one listing on the spreadsheet which looked like a single record, but it is actually a single work on a 4-disc set. Only the first record was in the wav file. To add to the adventure, the set was designed to use an auto-loader, so disc 1 has sides 1 and 4, disc 2 has 2 and 3. You played 1 & 2, flip them over and play 3 & 4. The phonograph has line out via RCA jacks, just like my cassette player, so I moved those connections and was able to record to the PC without the hassle of a USB cable & drivers. Of course I discovered the 1-4-2-3 thing after I recorded 1 & 4 and 2 was obviously out of order. There were two sets of records like this. The second set I created separate tracks for each side.

One set which was in the intuitive order was music from a show called Csardas, and those each matched to a wav file, and a spreadsheet entry.

Put that aside, and ran my standard batch routine on the 300 wedding reception photos, which puts the massaged photos into their own folder. Opened Photoshop and cropped the first 100 photos before breaking to playback the in-progress Seahawks game. At the 4th quarter I paused that, because it was almost catching up to the live game, and did another 100. Back to the game, and Xfinity effed up again. It was set to record "auto extend" if the game ran long, but it quit with 8 minutes of playing time left in a very close game. Seahawks won, somehow, but I didn't get to see it.

Back to the photos, the last 100 were easier, since many of them only needed a splash of dodge where my flash didn't reach. Some needed nothing at all. Note to self: don't point the flash up 45°, even if you see the pros do it. Nikon's geniuses decided to disable the flash's auto-TTL setting if you pull down the diffuser lens. Stupido mucho. Most of the cropping was to compensate for the subjects not understanding they need to center themselves in front of the backdrop, and if there are more than 5 of you, that doesn't work. And there was a videographer I had to shoot around.

Way too many shots have people with their eyes closed or evil expressions, but I did get a lot of good ones.

Transferred them to a DVD, but it doesn't seem to want to load, so I put them on a USB drive instead. Just under 4GB. Now I just need to get them to Automation Guy.

Dinner was breaded fish fillets and creamed spinach. And a popsicle. Maybe tomorrow I'll go shopping. Need more frozen dinners.

Email from my doctor's stand-in saying stay the course. Her reasoning was exactly the reason I thought a specialist was in order. Sigh.

Plans for tomorrow:
Vote. As of this writing I am not planning on connecting the arrows for President/VP or my US Representative. None of the choices appeal to me. There is no lesser evil, just differently evilled, as they might say in the disabled community.
Shopping
Manicure/Haircut a day early?
Chase down those last Hungarian dances.

Pizza night

Good night's sleep, Spook was in her tree bed when I started reading in bed. No early plans so I took my time. Went on FB as usual, but there was such a flood of electioneering I stuck to replies to my posts and some Onion stories. I am not listening to the radio, and am only watching DVR on the TV. Lots of electioneering commercials, but fast forward is my friend.

Walked to the polling place at about 11, on my way I met the real estate women who are going to try to sell a house across the street which spent the last two weeks being gutted and remodeled. It's still ugly on the outside, and one of the smaller units. The more I see turnover here, the more I need to find a different neighborhood. If only Thailand wasn't such a mess, I had plans to retire there next year. Not happening.

Maybe I'll look up my realtor.

No line at the polling place, which is not a surprise because a lot of my neighbors only live here in the summer, and the nearby condos are mostly non-citizens. It was a massive ballot, three legal sized sheets, both sides. I had my sample ballot pre-marked, except for one local $$ measure which was For A Good Cause™ but the bonds were worse than my mortgage - $950 mil loan for $1.9 billion and it would cost me about $30 a year in taxes.

I left two candidate races blank. Never done that before, always had at least a minor party candidate or a write-in. CA doesn't allow write-ins as such, they allow people to register up to a certain date, but it can't be someone who lost in the primaries. So no Bernie. And we had only two Democrats for my Congressional district who ran misleading attack ads for the last two weeks. They had started out talking about the issues, but then they got stupid. And since all the other parties' candidates lost the primary, they could not be write-ins. I do not like this system.

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Lunch was an all-American one. Corn dogs with brown mustard, baked beans and for dessert - oreos.

Watched another episode of People of Earth It's a TBS special project, which means if you don't have cable you can't get it. The same way I can't get Netflix, or Game Of Throwns or SlowTime. The jury is still out, but I still love the production values, and they took my advice and found new and different flashbacks.

2:30 or so I got a hankering for a manicure a day early and a haircut. Guess what? They are closed Tuesdays. Harumph. So I went to Safeway instead, intent on stocking up on ice cream sandwiches and popsicles. And guess what I forgot to get? I did get the rest of my list, fruit bowls, bananas, grapes, frozen dinners. Somehow pizza came under that category, which is what I had for dinner.

Watched two episodes of Elementary and PTI.

Spent some time on the porch as it was in the 70s all day. And ran an experiment. There is one almost empty hummingbird feeder with red food coloring, and one almost full one which is clear. As I watched, three different birds approached them both, and went for the red. So I switched them. And two of them returned, and settled on the clear one. Location, not color seems to be the decider.

Finished the wedding photos and put them on a DVD and a thumb drive. And another DVD. I did a bonehead thing with the first DVD and made it read-write, which means it takes forever to load. The second one was made as read-only and is almost as quick as the thumb drive, and a lot more permanent. So I texted Automation Guy and suggested he drop by after work and pick it up. No answer. Poked him again, still no answer. Either he forgot his phone, or Something Else. He'll probably call tomorrow morning on his way to work.

Another stealth package delivery. A box big enough for a microwave, all it had in it was a wall calendar. Mail was way late, only one election flyer, for a city council seat.

Plans for tomorrow:
Youtube the last of the unidentified Hungarian dances
Manicure and haircut
Maybe finally go to Boardwalk in that mall-ette for a shake.
Look at election results late in the day
Take the "Giant Meteor" bumper sticker off the car

Car wash?