From there to the pet store to get treats and litterbox refills, then to Best Buy for a long firewire cable which they did not have, but I did get a lovely protective case for the iPhone.
Home, such a nice day I went out onto the balcony to enjoy it, notice the hummingbird feeder was 1/4 low, which means something has been drinking from it, though I have not seen any hummers yet. Maybe if I came home before dark after work...
Anyhow, the balcony was littered with stuff which I had parked there until the weather got nice enough to haul them to the dumpster. It's a block and a half from my door, which is a long slog in the rain and wind. So I got off my butt, and brought it all downstairs in several trips, put them into the HUGE box in which the printer had been shipped, put that on my hand cart and in three trips got it all thrown away.
Took some time in the recliner to recover, and was soon covered in cats. Next chore was a trip to the grocery store, replenished the depleted ice cream and was outraged to see they have screwed us yet again. Sometime last year I remember ranting that while all the ice cream at Safeway was on special, all the major brands, including the house brand, had shrunk their largest packages from 2 quarts to 1.75 quarts, while keeping the prices the same. Yesterday they were shrunken again, to 1.5 quarts! With higher sale prices. I was so upset I bought a house brand frozen "self-rising crust" pizza, which I made for dinner. It didn't have enough cheese, and I was out of mozzarella, so I added some Swiss. The crust, surprisingly, was excellent; the toppings not so much. Coffee with fudge bits ice cream for dessert.
While eating I watched Channel 4's interview with Jerry Brown, who is running for Governor again. He governor when I first moved to CA, and was perhaps the most ineffective and non-charismatic governor I had ever seen. He kept being compared unfavorably to his much stronger father, who had been governor from 1959-1967. Technically his dad was Edmund Gerald Brown, Sr. and he is Edmund Gerald Brown, Jr. but his dad called himself Pat and he calls himself Jerry. Jerry was governor until 1983. Since then he has been ineffective mayor of Oakland and is currently the ineffective CA Atty General. He will probably win the Democratic primary on name recognition alone, since no one famous is running against him. Anyhow, he is still the mild-mannered, milktoast, characterless personality he was when he was governor, only now he's almost 3 decades older, and looks it.
Meanwhile Meg Whitman, who turned eBay from an honest peer-to-peer marketplace into a mega collection of megastores, has switched from reasonable, positive campaign ads to a vicious smear campaign against her Republican opponent, Silicon Valley CEO turned Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner. Interesting that both are Bay Area peeps, considering how most of the conservatives are in SoCal.
After dinner I finally got around to the projects for which I'd had the new printer drop-shipped, and the CPU cooler installed at great pains: Did some editing on a video from a friend, made a couple of DVDs from that, and printed them (I use inkjet-printable DVD blanks, and the Epson Artisan 50, like the old Stylus Photo R280, has a DVD tray). Next was organizing all the required material and writing the cover letter to get my $1300 back from the travel insurance company. And then printing out rebate forms, cutting out UPCs for the rebates on the new computer memory and one of the CPU coolers I'd bought. It's not the one I ended up using, but I'd assembled it and applied thermal paste so it wasn't returnable, and it was too cheaply made to sell or donate. May as well get $10 back.
Plans for today:
Take out the garbage
Do laundry
maybe go swimming (renewed my club membership last week)
Meet a friend for coffee & to give her the camcorder & DVDs.
Maybe get the car washed
