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A nice weekend day

Weekends suck for me. The MDJ publication schedule is Monday through Friday morning, which means I work Sunday through Thursday night. Friday and Saturday are supposed to be my days off, with a brief MWJ production episode Friday night. That's a bit longer since I'm currently editing MWJ as well, but will be shorter if we pick up a new MWJ editor. Of course, it never works this way. If everything hasn't fallen into place by Thursday night, I usually work through Friday, leaving just Saturday afternoon and evening "off." If everything gets really delayed, as it did the past few weeks, I work through Saturday as well, and get almost no time off. Two solid weekend days every week would be a lot nicer. This week I'm on vacation, so Sunday was a real weekend day. I went to church at my new congregation, St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in OKC (I suppose I'll wind up doing something about that domain name not working), and was received as a new member. This was odd, because I transferred by letter. I was told there'd be no liturgy. But I'm flexible, I can reaffirm faith. After that, I went to CompUSA and bought a copy of Scott Kelby's new book, Photoshop 7 Down and Dirty Tricks. I want a book like this for Illustrator, as some of us are more restricted to vector art. Gotta keep them PDF file sizes down. The Apple-badged program has reached Oklahoma City, with a real Apple employee working the store-within-a-store at the city's CompUSA location. However, once I said I was a former Apple employee, he lost all interest in talking to me. He went right back to watching "Harry Potter" on the iMac's DVD player. Then I went up to Sears Auto Center and spent a few hours watching Dad. That's a busy place. He says they do more business in a week than our family tire store used to do in a month, and they seem to sell a lot of batteries. It's an interesting place to people watch. One customer was told by people at her work -- a tire factory -- that she needed new tires, but when Dad measured, she had half the tread left on her existing tires and just regular wear. They had at least 20,000 miles left on it. Another customer bought shocks in 1987 (15 years ago) with a free replacement guarantee and wanted them replaced because they'd finally worn out. Another man had put new tires on his car a year ago, but after only about 30,000 miles, they had worn on the inside so badly that they were unsafe, nearly down to the steel belt. The front end was over a degree out of alignment, meaning that the tires weren't perfectly vertical on the suspension, placing more pressure on the inside. One degree isn't much, but on a 2000-pound vehicle over 30,000 miles at 60 miles per hour, it adds up pretty fast. This is just a reminder to rotate your tires every 5,000 miles so they can catch problems like this. A $55 alignment six months ago would have saved him $300 in new tires today. (Sears Auto Centers do rotation for free.) Then I went to Sam's Club to buy CompactFlash cards, one for me and one for Coach, who bought a digital camera last night. The retail stores all want about $73 for 128MB CompactFlash cards, but DealRAM lists them for $48 (generic), and Sam's regular price on SimpleTech 128MB cards is $50. Not bad to have it locally instead of ordering it. I spent several hours with friends in the city, including a very nice massage from one who knows how to do it well. I really miss getting regular massages -- I sit way too much and don't get enough exercise. We also had a nice italian dinner, with a spicy Thai peanut pasta for me. I drove home on old Route 66, stopped for a cherry limeade, and dealt with infantile name-calling on a mailing list I run (a bummer in an otherwise fine day). If all the weekend days were this nice, the weeks would be much nicer. I almost bought the Mac DVD version of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, too, until I realized I never look things up in encyclopedias. Maybe I should start.

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