Payday -- yay!

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All in all it's been a pretty good week.

I hosted a small dinner for a few friends last night, and the food was quite good, if I do say so myself. I used up most of the blueberry stash for the dessert, but it was worth it. (Next blueberry season, I need to buy a whole lot more than I did this year.)

Book group was pushed back another week, so I didn't have to go to my third meeting in a row without having finished the book. I'm darn close to the end, and will for sure finish tomorrow. I promise.

Between a sojourn to B&N on the way home from Costco earlier this week and three hours at Borders on Wednesday night, I've pretty much finalized my Christmas giving list and my Christmas presents for myself list. I also picked up a copy of Robin Williams's How To Boss Your Fonts Around, a book I've been looking for for a long time but which is never in stock. The more I see of Peachpit's books, the more I love what they're doing.

I'm finally getting a grip on Filemaker scripting. My big work project lately is to get all the information for one particular journal into a database, so that I don't have to retype titles and authors and addresses and other junk 90 times. I've got it close to what I want it to do, and now am just making the various layouts and writing the scripts to print invoices, generate tables of contents and indexes, and other such stuff. I hope to use the experience to set up a more useful execution of the reunion database at home.

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But, like all weeks, it's had it's down sides, too.

Ceramics studio was a disaster this week -- 0 for 12 thrown. But, the silver lining is that I'm starting to eliminate some of the clunkiness from the bottoms of my pieces. (I'm a firm believer in bisecting pieces that didn't work out to see where I went wrong.)

My home computer is pitching fits, most likely because the hard drive is severely fragged. I had to order a copy of TechTool since no local companies carry it. I was, however, able to take advantage of a special MacZone deal on an upgrade to Photoshop 6.0 and also ordered an upgrade to ATM Deluxe. I think the older version I have of the latter may be causing a few of my problems, too. TechTool is backordered, so it looks like I'm spending my weekend wiping the hard drive, reformatting it, and reinstalling all my software and files. I'm fortunate to have backed up the entire hard drive earlier this week. I'm also fortunate in that I get hit with the exorbinant shipping-to-Hawaii charges only once, even though my stuff will likely come in three separate shipments. (Shipping-to-Hawaii charges are a big fat rant for another time.) Oh, and I found out that my internal speaker is broken. At least that should be covered by AppleCare.

I got my statement from the Social Security Administration, and they're apparently missing a whole bunch of my employment records. So now I have to dig through my files and get that straightened out.

Apple had a bad couple of weeks in the market and is not recovering quickly, and Cheap Tickets dropped even further. Too avoid depression about my Borders stock, I try not to check my standings every day, but it's hard to ignore it when the market is down like this. The only decent bet I've made this year was Safeway, and even it's been volatile.
- posted by Lori @ 4:26:00 PM | permanent link | |