Writing Wrongs

This morning started with a wee bit of WFH, just enough to download ffmpeg from the company-blocked site, try it out, read enough of the html docs to know I wasn't going to master it in my lifetime. Took it and my photos from SBA to work on a thumb drive, was unsuccessful making it work with our box.

Lunch at Carl's because it's the closest eatery, and it was 95° outside. At work the aircon is cranking well, and I have a desk fan to help it out. Many of the places I usually go for lunch are not cooled.

Back at work, the guy who foisted ffmpeg on us came by to show me how to use his scripts, which did not work for me when I tried them on the command line (ffmpeg is a command line app). Turns out it works well with drag & drop.

Got it to convert one of my jpegs into a movie which our box could play.

To do this right, now I need to make movies from 50 different photos, in three different sizes. Which means batch converting them to those sizes. Easy to do in Photoshop (I ran a quick test on 720x480 which worked). Then those 150 files plus the 50 originals go onto a thumb drive, and get uploaded to the box, but not all at once. First test will be 30 at the smallest size. Final test will be 50 at the largest size, if none of the tests break the box first.

I may get it done tomorrow, but maybe not.

Because it was so hot, I decided it was shopping day, because I was running low on things I usually get at Costco and on Breyers ice cream, which I had a coupon for at Safeway. Electronic coupon, added to my card by their app.

Home, decided not to water the plants. Still too hot. I don't think the strawberries are going to make it, and one of the mint plants is shriveling up. The iceplant seems to be thriving. some of them are even flowering.

Lots of junk in the mailbox today, including stuff for the former owner who obviously did not submit a change of address to the USPS. Also a couple of pieces for people who have never lived here.

Put away the grocs, opened some windows and turned on the fans, but it's still in the 80s in here.

Watched the last two episodes of Shark Tank, and had a very expensive dinner. Meant to only eat half the 3-flavors lox package, but killed off all but a few pieces. And about a dozen olives. Three glasses of lime juice in Sodastream soda water with lots of ice. Finished off the two Breyers containers, which was about 4 scoops. Had to make room for the two new ones.

Updated Windows and Evernote.

Plans for tomorrow:
WFH
To work after lunch
YOTB rehearsal will be very warm

Well, that's what I was expecting, but work was easy and for once the choreographer didn't mess with my Big Number, we just fine tuned what was already there, and practiced. She doesn't Get It™ that dancing in a musical is not about counting beats. it's about matching the steps to the music and the words. But at least she is a nice person, and doesn't turn rehearsals into 20-minute aerobics warmups. I showed up 15 minutes late, which turned out to only be 2 minutes late in actual rehearsal time.

And I continue to be amazed at how good the music director/accompanist is, and how he plays LOUDEST all the time. That won't even be okay when we have mikes on. Which I hate - this theater is designed for musicals, but we're not using the orchestra pit, and the whole band is amped. Grrr. I've done two shows there without mikes, with a real orchestra in the pit and nobody had trouble hearing me.

Stopped off for gas at Shell during lunch hour, but it wouldn't accept my Safeway discount card, so I got gas at World Oil on my way home instead. $4.16 vs. $3.89.

I am pretty sure Domino has gone mostly deaf. She doesn't hear me come in, and yesterday I had to tap on her head to wake her up after I got home.

Shirts are in the dryer, done, but they will probably stay there till tomorrow because they need to be fluffed some and I don't have time.

Medical stuff is good. Blood sugar levels are back to being reasonable, making my targets most of the time. Blood pressure is a little low, but that's what they want over at Kaiser. The down side of that is when I stand up after being at my desk for a couple of hours, I have to not walk anywhere because I'll be dizzy in about 10 seconds, and if I just stay in place it will pass in half a minute.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Costco shopping (My annual Amex refund arrived a couple of weeks ago)
Maybe I'll have time to take the old V and hose off the front of the house and attach the hose I bought two months ago.

Rehearsals are great for getting a good night's sleep. Slept till the alarm went off, only woke once during the night.

Work on time, barely. Some work on the specs and tests. 68° at lunchtime, which was also dentist time. They did X-rays and a cleaning, no cavities, and the dentist didn't mention the insurance company slam dunking her request to re-do two of my crowns the right way.

Went next door to see if the little nail place could repair a broken nail, but the person who does acrylic left early. SO I went to the other next door for a light dim sum lunch. Light, because they were out of half the things I wanted (it was late).

Drove straight to the rehearsal hall, which tonight was a park clubhouse which I've been in many times before, for auditions and rehearsals, and because a LONG time ago I lived in the apartments across the street. King George apartments was a run-down, poorly built and even more poorly maintained place - my first night there the sewer backed up into the livingroom, they had to wet vac it and replace the carpet - owned by a Chinese family named King. I lived there from 1995-97, when they gave us all 8 months' notice, paid us about 3 months rent and the promise of first dibs on the new apartments they were going to build there. They bulldozed it right down to below the sewer pipes, and in about 3 years opened the Renaissance apartments, a 3-story affair (King George was 2 stories), high end. When we left, a 1-BR cost $300/month, when they re-opened it was $1600. Looking at the apartments from the park, they have about 1/3 vacant.

Rehearsal added some cast members who had conflicts, but the leading man was not there (he's in the show now onstage). Director filled in for him, sort of. About an hour of my time was wasted. This director doesn't have the concept of only calling people whose scenes he is blocking, he want to do it in chronological order, which in this case is very inconsiderate. The scenes are modular and it would have been easy to schedule nights off. I have no nights off during the entire Sunday-Thursday schedule, even though I'm not in half the scenes.

Home, by way of two 7-11s, I needed $300 cash from the ATMs, but those give $100 bills for anything over $200. I don't like to carry hundreds.

Had a light dinner. Caught up on FB. Downloaded all my financials on Quicken and both my state and fed refunds had come in, so I paid off a couple of credit cards.

And now to sleep.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Manicure
Consonance. I will probably miss Kathleen's concert, but really want to hear Mark's Toastmaster concert.

Watched some of the woman's skeleton finals. The Aussie motormouth color bozo was way annoying so I muted the sound. The checkpoints were chosen for the convenience of the programmer and did not make much sense. Show me speed at every checkpoint, not just one. Show me the curve numbers in real time. Most important, show me the neat artwork on the helmets. One of the Canadians' was awesome, one was awful and the neon-haired American had a great idea but it was poorly executed. A bald eagle can look so much more real and 3D-ish.

Watched some women's speed skating short course, but those gals are huge, or at least they look like Amazons, even the Japanese. When I left it the tiny Chinese gal was still the fastest.

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Boss was not at work, so the time I crashed the database will have to wait till Monday. Silly Cold Fusion setting, methinks. Very tedious data entry now that the one-liners are mostly done. Entering all the steps to test, including EVERYTHING so that people who speak Indglish as a 12th language can automate them. Gah!

Lunch with the gang, we went to Lillie Mae's chicken & waffles, which she just took over now that the soul food house next door is overflowing. Very beautiful waitress but they needed two of her and six more chefs. Our food came an hour after we ordered it.

The joke de jour was we should stop at Costco on the way back so the married guys (everyone in the car except me) could pick up flowers for V-Day.

Left early for a nail appointment. Manager does my nails, she says she can find me a woman, especially if I like Koreans. Which I do. She said she will call me and take me to one of the Coffee Shops Of Ill Repute in south San Jose and hook me up. She said the girls all are born in the US and speak English, but I doubt it. She can guide me with her Viet skills.

Home, stopped at the community center to drop off my $$ for the community Chinese New Year dinner a week from Saturday. They have some sort of dinner every month, I think. I skipped Xmas, because the community is very Christian.

Glad I took that moon photo last night, it's all clouded over tonight and probably will continue that way for a few days. Got a ton of compliments on FB. Also lots of views on Flickr. Boss sent a message asking how it was taken.  Just adjusted it to fit in 11x14 frame and ordered a posterboard print from Costco.

Anyhow, the overcast and threatening rain meant deleting from my calendar tomorrow morning's Capitola photo walk. Too early in the morning for me, and Hwy 17 in the rain is a white knuckle death trap.

Sat down with all the telescope pieces I have, and sort of figured out a way to insert a lens into the extension tube, but not how to attach the tube to the scope. After I finish this I'll look at Orion's web site and figure it out. It will probably be a while before there are clear skies.

Plans for tomorrow:
Michael's and/or Aaron's for poster hangers, slide archive boxes and shoebox-sized boxes for my old B&W negative collection.
3 pm Little Shop first rehearsal
6:30 annual meeting of San Jose Astronomicals.

One of my FB theater friends posted a photo of a field of young pineapples, from the "Unbelievable sights" page with the caption "That awkward moment when you thought Pineapples grew on trees." He thought they did.

And this set me to looking for photos I'd taken in Thailand, where one of my jobs was to help rubber plantation farmers learn how to grow cash crops like pineapple in between the rows of rubber tree saplings. Malaysia and the FAO had developed a strain of rubber tree which yielded 10x what the Thai trees did, and were more insect and disease resistant. But it takes a rubber tree 7 years from seedling to producing, so the farmers needed to do two things: not pull up all their trees at once (we recommended 1/8 of the plantation each year) and find crops which could make them some money during those first 6 years.

I found photos on my randomly shuffled slide collection on Flicker, but they showed the pineapple bushes before the fruit had started growing. Looked like lemongrass. And that got me to remembering that I had three binders of slides which are on my "when I get around to it" list to have scanned and put on discs. So I turned the 3rd bedroom where they reside into a workshop and have filled 5 50-slide Costco boxes so far. Took a break for dinner, after I post this I'll do another 50 and call it a batch. There are more than 500 slides, but it's better to just do 500 at a time.

Dinner was Marie Calendar's amazing roast chicken frozen thing, with F&E ice cream for dessert.

Work today was all keyboard work. I started by taking some steps which had been sloppily cut and pasted into email messages, dumped them into Word and re-formatted everything into the same font and style and tweaked it for the next software release.

Next was a major cut and paste job, writing test case 1-liner summaries from the specs into Excel until boss cleared the database, and then pasted those into the database. Finished all I could with what I have on hand for specs (which are still under construction).

Lunch was going to be at impossible parking Starbucks. I wasn't hungry because I had somehow managed to go low blood sugar at 11, and ate glucose until I was back to normal. There was no parking, so I went to the next one on El Camino, which happened to be by Santa Clara Caltrain and I used to hang out there when I worked at Roxio at the other end of that lot. Set up my laptop because it needed some updates, and enjoyed the parade of co-ed eye candy. Today everyone was dressed to show of their fine little butts. Quite enjoyable.

Straight home from work, put the whites in the dryer and the shirts in the washer. The whites are now in the laundry basket waiting to be topped by shirts.

Now, back to putting slides in boxes.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
???

Starting at the middle and working my way outward.

Tonight's adventure was going to the home of a Sunnyvale Community Players board member to audition for Little Shop of Horrors. Apparently the person they cast as Mushnik either said no, dropped out, or they didn't find a match through the audition process. The director found me on Facebook, messaged me an invitation to audition, and tonight was it.

I had brought music, but the music director was already in callbacks mode, meaning teaching me one of Mushnik's songs from the score. He did a good job of breaking it down into bite-sized pieces, and I did a good job of breaking it and leaving pieces scattered on the floor by the piano. It's a patter song, which is bad enough, but on top of that the words and they lyrics don't quite jive, and even when they do the syntax is not natural to me. Funny thing is when he switched from playing the melody to just the accompaniment, I got it a lot better. It's a really cute tango. The fellow playing Seymour showed up in time for me to yell at him. Nice guy, cute as a button with a Velcro top.

After many many run-throughs of the 32 bars or so we rehearsed, the director and production staff were called in to hear me totally not nail it, and then Seymour and I read a couple of pages from the script. That I nailed. But it's going to be a challenge learning lines because the script puts both stage directions and yelled lines in the same font & size italics.

Director kept a poker face, thanked me for coming all the way out for just a few minutes of audition (it was actually almost half an hour), and said he would message me on Facebook tonight.

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Thai Pepper is a cleverly hidden restaurant on the way home, also happens to be across the street from Michelle's Nails. I'd been meaning to try it, and as it was only 8 and they are open till 9, I did. The place is huge and the decor is nice, with some gorgeous pieces of Thai temples which are probably illegal to export from there. The location sucks and the prices are high, even for a Thai place, and even though there were about a dozen customers, the place looked empty. The waitress spoke un-accented English, I asked in English if she spoke Thai, and she said "what?" So I asked in Thai, and from then on it was all in Bangkok Thai. I ordered chicken satay, basil seafood and white rice and Thai Iced tea. The satay was very American, thick pieces of chicken, cut enough halfway down the stickto fork off easily. The peanut sauce was bland, soupy and without actual peanut bits. Cuke and onion bits in vinegar were just right, though. The irony here is those are to cut the spiciness of the peanut sauce, of which there was none. The main dish came out while I was still working on the second satay stick (out of 5? 6?). I had asked for not spicy and that's what I got, but I had not asked for not tasty. The calamari rings were way too chewy, but the scallops and fish bits were good, and so was the shrimp once I pulled off the tails. WTF is it with tail-on shrimp in Thai sauté? The iced tea was very good, authentic. $28 was a bit too much, but I took home half of each dish, so maybe not.

It took a while to flag down my waitress because I was way at one end of the place and the kitchen was way at the other end. I should have sat closer so I could hear the kitchen conversation, which is usually amusing and at my vocabulary level.

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Work was a summer festival. Boss figured out what was wrong with the database, but he needed to reset it, which didn't happen today. Instead he assigned me a test of an undocumented feature which I could not get to work because it didn't. The directions were screwy. And somewhere in there our network went down, which set me back to square 1 transferring a boatload of files.

Attended a meeting on another feature I own and the good news is they are adopting an industry standard way to implement it, the bad news is this means we have to re-write all the test cases and automation scripts, which were written for our home-made implementation.

The file transfer thing kept me in the office till after 6, but there wasn't enough time to go home and get to the auditions by 7:30, so Plan A was to stop in the Starbucks on the way, but I got trapped by rush hour traffic in the wrong lane and ended up parking in the Thai Pepper lot, walking around that little strip mall and then listening to the car radio for 15 minutes.

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Home after dinner, Domino got her usual half can of Fancy Feast, and yelled at me to feed her. Looked in her bowl and for the first time in ages she had completely finished it. So I gave her the other half. While she was munching I changed the litterbox and plopped the old one into the bif new! improved! garbage container. Much better than the old small one.

Box on the porch was a new Pocket Wizard, which I installed batteries in, put it on Channel 1 which is what everyone in the studio uses, and plugged in the USB to download updated firmware, but there was none. Put a new battery in the mini PW which had crapped out on me last weekend, but it wouldn't fire up. I'll have to check if it's under warranty.

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Nothing on Facebook when I got home. But the director sent email inviting me to the show. And he had found my photo album of programs/cast lists from shows I've been in and emailed that we had been in one together - Annie in Palo Alto, 1984. That's the 80s show I have the most FB friends from. He's using a different last name, which is part of the reason I didn't click on the connection earlier, but also his name is the same as the student body president when I was a Junior in college, and the author of the novel on my Kindle right now. James Gunn is a pretty common name in my life. So is Tom and Thom Gunn. Anyhow, I accepted the part, and am now in "What have I done?" mode. It's a bigger part and the music is more difficult than I usually attempt. But I guess if I can sing similar roles in Gilbert & Sullivan, I can handle this too. First read-through is on the 15th,  then  the grind begins Sunday through Thursday on the 23rd. The show opens April 4, runs Thurs-Sun till the 27th. Very long run, IMHO too many performances for the small audiences they get. 

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Costco
Maybe do some laundry

 

Got up a little before 6 for no apparent reason, took my blood sugar and it was an all time low of 53. Dr. howeird prescribed ice cream with sprinkles. Followed by an egg cream.

Usually those hit me at 3 or 4 am, so going back to bed I slept through the alarm at 9:30, woke at about 10, and it was a chore to get out of the house by 12:30 to be in time for the library 1 pm presentation.

At 12:30 the room wasn't open yet, I had my laptop so I went online and ordered two pairs of briefs, which was on my list. Later I realized I had ordered a pair on Amazon while under the influence of sprinkles. It's okay, I can wear them all.

Also later remembered there were shirts in the washer to switch to the dryer.

The library presentation was on the care and feeding of fruit trees in this neck of the woods, by a master gardener who loved the subject and was a very engaging speaker. At the start of the show she ditched the lavalier mike for the hand-held one, under the mistaken impression that the latter was louder. It bit her constantly because she did a lot of gesturing and used her body to show what parts of a tree to prune. Can't hold the mike your mouth and do that at the same time. There was a lot of good info, and even though I didn't get a chance to ask about my lime tree, she gave all the hints I needed.

As I usually do when in the library, I looked at the books on CD section. Decided it was time, and checked out the Basic Vietnamese set. I ripped it to the PC and it's now on the iPod for car listening.

Inspired by the talk, I went to OSH and bought some stuff. It took a lot of walking around and weighing pros and cons, but finally settled on a 14" heavy tecate pot, not one of the tapered one, but one which is 14" diameter from top to bottom. Also got a stand-off to keep it above the clay dish I also bought, and also got the 14" wooden platform on rollers which was on the original list. And generic potting soil.

The hints I got were this:
- I had gotten the roots too wet
- The plastic bucket which the tree is in needs to be replaced by a clay one which breathes, evaporates water and drains better
- No fertilizer is needed, but soil which drains well should replace the moisture-holding stuff now in the pot
- Lime trees are drought-resistant and can stand temps as low as 30°. They survive frost
A huge part of the talk was about the fruit itself, but in the case of my lime tree, those lime are horrible, it is the leaves which are aromatic and yummy in Thai food.

And from the stuff on the ultimate Kaffir Lime web site:
- Find a way to make the air around the tree more humid
- Don't put it in a bigger pot

I was sort of also looking for a bigger tree, but they just had one smaller than mine.
And from another list, looked for a bird feeder, but their prices were ridiculous. $40 for the one I liked best. Did Amazon's scan thing, and found it online for half that. Almost bought bird seed, but will wait till I have the feeder.

Next stop, Northwinds nursery. They had a 3-year-old Kaffir which was rife with diseased and/or insect-chewed leaves, and they wanted $100 for it. Not a big selection of feeders, nothing to buy here.

Final stop, Home Depot. They had 3 trees, all the same as mine. I picked up some better potting soil marked as "quick drainage" and "for citrus". And also bought a plastic deep dish big enough to put under the pot and hold water to create a humidity field.

Home, unloaded everything, found a spot on the end of the driveway which I think gets enough sun, and staged the new stuff there. It was getting chilly and dark so I made a note to do the re-potting tomorrow before football.

And I wasted the rest of the day online, in front of the tube, and making dinner. Twice. Ravioli from frozen in Alfredo from a jar mixed with string cheese. And 2 hours later a grilled cheese sandwich on Health Nut bread with American Singles and very sharp cheddar. Made in an omelet pan with lots of margarine. Nailed it. Crispy golden brown bread, melty cheese.

Rescued the shirts from the dryer and hung them up. Decided to be OCD this time and arrange them from darkest to lightest, all the ones of the same color together, with the Hawaiian styled ones between the solids and the stripeds. I usually just hang them up in whatever random order they came out of the basket.

Thanks to some FB postings from scendan, went online to see if the Tech Museum is open Monday, it is, so I think I will hobble the three blocks to the light rail station and take the train there to celebrate MLK's massive contributions to the world of technology, especially his influence on Star Wars. They allow non-flash photography, so I'll bring my 50mm f 1.1 and/or my 35mm f 1.8.

Plans for tomorrow:
Take the lime tree outside, shake the dirt off and re-pot it
Watch the Patriots play the Broncos
Maybe tweet rude remarks about it
Watch the Seahawks play the 49ers. Either way I win, but I have to say that I lean toward Seattle because they have the most beautiful logo in the NFL, and I love their colors. SF has, hands-down, the ugliest logo in the league, and the only place Red and Gold belong is in Chinese New Year parades.

In early to work, most of my team was there early except for the two who were out sick. Short team meeting, because we're in a major lull right now. I woulkd have nothing to do except Automation Guy asked me to test some new SNMP scripts, since I'm the expert on that. Took a lot of setup because the engineer who wrote the scripts designed them to only work on the automation server. When I finally got a test run, the results were unreadable because engineer didn't specify the machine which we were collecting SNMP data from, so it made a file merging all data from all machines. I'll have to read up on the command line commands to see if I can fix that.

Bottom line, this should keep me busy all week.

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Yesterday's having a guest over for the game meant moving my recliner to the side and the sofa into the center of the livingroom. And the sofa is too low for me. One of the ads during the game was for a Lay-z-Boy clearance sale, and since that's where I bought my recliner about 3 years ago, not on sale, for too much $$, lunchtime I went there in search of a second, similar recliner, but at sale prices.

Every item in the place had a clearance sale tag on it, but prices were $800-$1200. I told the salescreature I expected a sale price on a good-looking push-button recliner to be $400 or so. He had nothing. He showed me two totally gruesome things for $450 (tags said $650). Bailed quickly, went to China China buffet next door for lunch.

Straight home from work, wheeled the garbage and recycle cans back to the end of the driveway and moved the car up a bit. In the mail was a flyer from Allstate encouraging me to get insurance from them. Already have it, thanks. Also in the mail was an envelope inside an envelope. One of my Peace Corps buddies and his wife had tried to mail me a Christmas card on 12/12, and it was returned to sender "unable to forward". I'll be bringing that to the PO to find out why my 12/4 change of address was not honored. I've gotten some stuff forwarded, like from Allstate, sent to the old address. Anyhow, the bounce allowed them to add a thank you note for the calendar. This is the volunteer who was my "next door" neighbor during my second year. We had trained together, ad he had been sent south to a teacher's college which was on the other side of the wall way at the end of the research rubber plantation I worked at. He married his boss, the ceremony was at the local US consulate, and I was there taking photos. We totally lost track of each other until last year, when he did a web search and found my photos.

Came straight home to watch the BCS championship. It was an exciting game, but the redheads gave it away to the redskins in the second half. They had it won, and just stopped tackling.

A Seminoles joke my youngest sister showed me en route to her house.
https://goo.gl/maps/l2Ox0

Dinner was a Marie Callendar country chicken TV dinner. Also been making a dent in the gallon of egg nog left over from NYE. Maybe I'll cook up another batch of pigs in blankets. My Israeli sister calls them cocktail franks. Pigs are not kosher.

She's slowly recovering from her husband's death. It was very sudden, cancer which was caught after it was way too late. Israel has free national health, but it's no good if you don't use it. Anyhow, she is answering all our individual email in one reply-all, which I suppose saves time, but there are only four of us. After her 5 children and 27 grandchildren (it might only be 23, I lost count) went their separate ways after the funeral,  neighbors' teenage daughters have slept over (one a night) so the house wouldn't feel empty. I really don't think she needs that, but she's the psychologist, so...

Anyhow she's about done with that, and is back at work which she supposedly semi-retired from a year ago, but it's good work for her, she translates Hebrew into English for a non-profit educational group. There was a time when she was also fluent in French, German, Yiddish and had a working knowledge of Arabic, I think.

Guilt by association dept: A theater friend posted a birthday note and youtube clip of famous country picker Earl Scruggs. I thought he was on the last Steve Goodman appearance of Austin City Limits which is on Goodman's DVD. So I plugged their names into Youtube, but discovered it was Jethro Burns, of Homer and Jethro who was on that DVD. But it also found a memorial montage of clips of John Prine, Arlo Guthrie, Kris Kristopherson, Goodman's widow, his agent and someone who knew him through Johnny Cash's band. Half an hour, low production values, but very touching and interesting. I've heard many times Arlo's bit about how Goodman's City of New Orleans found its way to him, but Prine says it was originally pitched to Johnny Cash, who said no because he didn't want to be stereotyped as a train singer (Folsom Prison Blues had already established him as one).

I have the DVD, but am not up to meganostalgia right now.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Mancini's is supposed to call with an ETA for the new bed Wednesday
Maybe watch another episode of Breaking Bad - Just to see what chemistry lessons they have in store.

This morning's adventures started with gassing up the car, expecting price gouging on this travel-fest of a weekend, but it was the same price as last fill-up. Onward to the new place, with an automotive dolly (the 4-wheeled thing which mechanics lie on to slide under a car). I used my super-human strength to lift the 6-foot-tall pressboard cabinet onto it, and started to wheel it through the archway into the kitchen, which is when I discovered it is taller than the archway. Even without being on a dolly. So I walked it down to the floor, pushed it through and then walked it up against the kitchen wall, shoving it into place, making sure it cleared the archway on the right and the kitchen light switch was still accessible on the left.

The space which it occupied was originally the place to hang clothing as it came out of the dryer. It will soon be the place where the litter box goes.

Then I measured the width of the spring-loaded window shade which I thought I needed two of. 45".  Took a look at the blue patch which I painted on top of the Affirmation, in full light I could no longer see the lettering. I guess those extra two coats did the trick. No need to buy thicker paint. Tossed the roller and pan and put the small paint can in one of the laundry room cabinets. 

Jotted down the model number of the TV Which Must Go Away. Looked it up online and it's a 43-inch rear-projection HD-ready TV with the matching "stand not included". 

End of Round 1 for today

Next, the hunt for window shades and other stuff.

Lowe's, returned 2 of the 3 keypad locks, and the two dummy door knobs. They had brought in a series of those lane-marker ribbon stands which made one line perpendicular to the registers, but there were not nearly enough customers or cashiers to justify it. All it did was obstruct.

Next stop, Home Despot. They had the door knobs I wanted, and a re-keying kit which was supposed to work with the brand of locks in the house. Also got four Scripto BBQ lighters on sale, they did not have the kind of window shades I wanted. On impulse I walked the cart through the outdoor plants section, and found a little Kiffir lime tree, just the right size. The leaves are a very strong and delicious spice. The fruit not so much.

Then Target. They didn't have any window shades either. Nor did OSH.

Somewhere in there the movers called to confirm the date & time, and let me know I had 3 days to cancel or change without a penalty.

Back to the apartment for some relax time with Domino.

And then to the house, armed with a page from the furnace service guide which has a better picture of the pilot light location than is on the furnace. The Scripto lighter got it first try, and the heater kicked in about 3 minutes after I tweaked the thermostat. The fan is NOISY.  While I was having a gas, I tested the oven, and it works. Pilot light was on, or electric spark-lit. The burners have the sparker.

Set the temps on the fridge and its freezer, they were a bit low. Discovered the unit has an ice maker section, but it doesn't have the mechanism, just the plastic piece. Two ice cube trays can fit into the pull-out tray, I think.

Next chore was re-mounting the window shade. Turns out it just needed to be wound up. Put the left side into the holder and rolled up the shade with the right side loose, then inserted the right side into the holder. Tedious, but it worked.

The livingroom door was the next victim. Turns out the re-key device only works on a certain model of Kwikset locks, which these were not.
So...

Removed the knobs with the keyhole/lock and replaced it with a pair of keyless knobs. Easy, because they made it so the screws stay attached. The kitchen door was more of a challenge because the deadbolt was set too high for the hole in the door frame, so first I had to remove the keyed knob/lock and move the deadbolt to its place. Lining up the screw holes was a summer festival. Took about an hour. But putting in the dummy knobs was easy, having done it once, and not caring that it doesn't latch all the way as long as the deadbolt works.

Whew!

Looked for a place to put the lime tree. We're not allowed to plant anything in the ground, and the most obvious place was on the wide cement strip on the left side of the house, but the two water hoses are at the opposite corners. So it's next to the driveway, on the right, where there is a narrow strip which used to have shrubbery but now just has square spaces filled with bark. One of these days I will get a large wooden tub or some such and some mulch and transplant the tree, but for now it's fine the way it is.

Done for the nonce, time for a Starbucks visit. The place was almost deserted. Everyone must be out shopping. Or just out. Checked online and found Ender's Game was playing at the local AMC in an hour. I figured there would be crowds for Hunger Games and a blockbuster Bollywood film, and Frozen and I would have the theater to myself. Almost. Movie start is listed for 5:55, at 10 minutes before it was about 10% full, I got a good seat in the back row center. But by the time the trailers were done half an hour later, we were up to about 80%.

Title Mash-ups:
Ender's Hunger Game of Thrones
Frozen Thor
Philomena The Book Thief

Mini-review with possible spoilers under the cut:

Technically it is one of the best films I have seen in a long time. Superior camera work all around. The most amazing thing about most of the special effects is they did not look special. They looked real. Makeup followed the first rule of makeup - make it look like no one is wearing any. Ben Kingsley's Maori face tattoo looked real. Same comment about audio. And about the acting. In the whole movie I missed maybe 2 words. The only gripe I have about the audio is they pushed the bass a bit too much when the rockets blasted off, but it wasn't distorted, just loud. Costumes are mostly jumpsuits, no challenge there but well done. The battle suits were also understated but made sense.

This was not the Ender's Game I read in college. They changed the name of the enemy. I don't remember as much happening on Earth in the book as there is in the movie. I don't remember as much bullying of Ender. And they left out his real name, and how he really came to be called Ender. One thing they did get right was they didn't telegraph that the final simulation was the for real war.

And I don't remember the final scenes being on a former Bad Guys planet. And I'm pretty sure the final scene in the movie is actually the the start of the sequel, Speaker For The Dead. Which I hope to Hugo is not made into a movie, because the rest of the series is a self-deprecation suckfest.  

But despite any changes, it worked as well as or better than the original.

Home, dinner was a pair of sausages, a can of corn with lotsa spices plus margarine, sauerkraut and grey poop-on. While watching Restaurant Stakeout. 

Plans for tomorrow:
Try on my suit jackets, and the ones which don't fit go to Goodwill. Also cull my costumes. I'll keep the train engineer and one set of scrubs, but Elvis is leaving the building. That one will be dumpstered because I made the mistake of gluing on some very fine gold glitter, and it gets everywhere.
Pull out all my suitcases, keep my favorite one and the rest go to Goodwill
If I am feeling energetic, box up my camping equipment and my dishes and coffee cup collection.
It's about time to start boxing up my files. Need to hit an office supply store for boxes. U-Haul's are horrible. Also need some packing paper.