Tag: car

I had trouble in getting to Solla Sollew

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I went to deposit some checks at the local branch of our bank and it turned out the branch was closed because it had been robbed. This is a mall branch. Go figure.

After work, Casey took me over to Saturn to pick up my car. When I called earlier in the afternoon, I was told it would be ready at 5 PM. I arrived at Saturn at 4:45 and the car wasn’t ready. I was told 30 minutes. I waited patiently. To make a long story short, the car was finally ready at 6 PM. This is remarkable for several reasons. In the 12+ years that I’ve regularly gone to Saturn dealers for service on my car, this was the first negative experience. But, to make up for it, the service manager, without my prompting, cut the price I paid. I was quoted $704 and I paid $589. When I mentioned this, the cashier, said, “Shhh! What are you doing?” as though I wasn’t supposed to be honest and fess up that it seemed they’d undercharged me. I was told, however that it was all good.

I got lost on the way home, which to someone with my almost unfailing sense of direction, was a bitter embarrassment. I ended up at Reagan/National airport to avoid crossing the bridge into D.C., and then swung around to Route 1 to get oriented again. Don’t ask how it happened. It just did.

Watched Entourage and True Blood last night. We practiced dancing for the wedding. Then I vacuumed the house. It took an hour because I did the stairs, too, and there are a lot of stairs in the house.

Out-of-towner’s begin to arrive tomorrow…

GTD, day 1

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I was up at 7:30 AM in order to take my car into Saturn. I was scheduled to have the door check link replaced on the driver’s side door. I also asked them to check my brakes, which were squeaking. They fixed my door and brakes (only the front brakes needed fixing), resurfaced the rotors, rotated the tired and balanced the wheels. All is well. I got out of there around 10:30 AM, and then headed over to Staples to run some errands.

I set aside this weekend to begin full implementation of GTD. For those of you who don’t know what GTD is, you can read all about it here. It’s based on a book by David Allen called, Getting Things Done and I’ve read the book twice. I found the theory interesting, but as always, I’m a bit skeptical. Still, it seems worth giving it a shot. A few years back, I gave it a half-hearted attempt, but in order to be fair, I’m going full-out. I’ve got the weekend blocked out to do my initial collecting, processing, organizing and reviewing. We’ll see how it goes.

William Gibson will be signing books at Bailey’s Crossroads this evening at 7:30 PM and I’m thinking that might be a nice break. I’m not certain I’ll head over to the signing yet; it will depend on my progress and energy level, but the bookstore is only 18 miles away so it’s not a long trip.

The weather is beautiful today. I’ve got just about every window in the house open. There’s a nice breeze and its about 76 degrees out.

Errands and toys

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I was up at 8 AM this morning and headed up to IHOP for a quick breakfast. From there, I headed to Saturn to have my car services (it was time for it’s 108,000 mile service, but since I’m driving up to Albany tomorrow, I wanted to make sure everything was in good working order anyway). My appointment was for 9 AM and I brought the car in at precisely 9 AM. I was very surprised when the car was returned and ready for me to take (having been washed and everything) by 9:25 AM!

From there, I headed to Circuit City. It’s been 2 years since my car has had a radio, the last one being stolen while the car sat in my driveway. I figured enough time had passed for my frustration to subside, and I caved in and bought the cheapest Pioneer radio I could find. It’s got a removable face plate, CD player, but best of all, has an AUX plug for my iPod so I can plug that right into my car stereo. It’s also nice that there is no longer a gaping hole in my dashboard.

While there, I also bought myself a little present and had that installed in the car as well: a Garmin StreetPilot C550 navigation unit. It’s pretty cool. It’s got a great color display, detailed maps of the entire U.S. and Canada, it’s voice activated, has BlueTooth built in so that I can make phone calls through it while I am driving, and has traffic alerts as well. I’ve wanted one of these for a while, ever since I got my handheld GPS unit for my birthday a year and a half ago, from vickyandnorm. This compliments that one. This one is perfect for the car. That one I can take with me when I travel. Of course, I can test the new one out driving up to Albany tomorrow to visit strausmouse and rmstraus.

After that, I headed over to the Hair Cuttery to get a haircut, which I desperately needed. And now, I am back home, going through the instruction book for the new nav unit. I still have a few more errands to run, but the major ones are done.

Friday night/Saturday morning

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I went to happy hour after work last night with several people from work. We went to Chammps and we were there until just about 8 PM. I was home just before 9 PM and I tried to read for a little while but I was pretty tired and I went to bed soon after.

I was up at about 8:30 this morning and headed up to IHOP in College Park for a big breakfast. The place was packed. A tour bus had arrived just before I got there and it was chaos. Fortunately, because I was a party of one, I got seated quickly, and had my scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, and pancakes post haste.

When I got back home, I worked on the book collection database for a few hours and did a little laundry. I’m eating lunch now and plan to head over to the gym for my arm and shoulder workout at about 2 PM or so. I’m in desperate need of a haircut so I may try to get my hair cut after the gym.

I plan on getting some writing done today at some point, but I’m not sure which story I am going to work on yet. I think I need a little more planning on both and that will give me a chance to test some of the features of Scrivner.

Last night my car ignition was getting stuck when I put the key in. It wouldn’t turn. This has happened before and I think it is a known problem with older Saturn’s but last night was the first time it happened in a while and it took some jiggling before I could get the key to turn. I’ve been careful about it since then and so far so good. But it’s another thing to keep an eye on.

Wrap up

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I spent about 6-7 hours today working on interfaces for my book collection/reading list databases. It’s possible that by tomorrow I will have enough in place to make some of this more public so that people who are curious can take a look.

I’m quitting for the night on this, and I’m just going to relax for the rest of the evening.

The driver side door on my car has a problem. When I opened it the other morning, I heard a pop. The cable that attaches from the car to the door to help the door open slowly and keep it in place snapped. I vaguely recall this happened to me once before many years ago (or maybe it was Tawnya’s car?). It’s not a problem, I just have to be careful when I open the door that it doesn’t fly open. But at some point, I should get it fixed.

I got my T-Mobile bill today and sure enough, I completely forgot to pay it last month; the new bill was exactly twice as much as usual. Oops.

A few minutes ago, I received email from Norm (of vickyandnorm fame). He emailed me from his flight from London to New York asking if it was unusual that the outside temperature at 38,000 feet was -75 C. For some reason, I found that amusing.

In the course of the last 3 hours that I have been writing code, I have listened to 46 songs in iTunes “party shuffle” mode. That’s an average of just under 4 minutes per song. I don’t know what made me think of checking that, but I think it means it’s time to go.

Free day tomorrow!

Everybody’s working on the weekend

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I was up at 8 AM this morning and took my car into Saturn for my 9 AM service appointment. Last night, while in the shower, I had the strong urge to seriously consider buying a new car today, but the urge passed and sanity returned, and instead, I had my car serviced and never even looked at another car while I was there. I had the service people take an extra good look at the car since I’m driving up to New York on Friday. Everything was in good order, except the brake fluid, which they drained and replaced. They washed the car and it’s looking shiny now. It only took an hour and I was out of there at 10 AM.

I made pretty good progress this week on the software project on which I am working. I hit most of my milestones for the week and felt pretty good when I left work yesterday. Sometime between leaving work yesterday and this morning, I had an idea that would avoid some minor problems that I had been running into and make the code a little more elegant. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head and so I decided to head into the office on a Saturday and get some work done. I got to the office around 11 AM and I worked until about 4 PM and I was quite pleased by the results. I even got a little ahead of where I should be in my effort which will help to make next week a bit easier.

I stopped at Best Buy on the way home and picked up a couple of DVDs: the special edition of Memento and the Star Trek “Time Travel” episodes box set. On the train ride home, I watched an episode of Battlestar Galactica on the video iPod.

I decided to take the rest of the evening off and chill. Earlier in the week, I’d had my TiVo record Beverly Hills Cop and Beverly Hills Cop II, both of which I hadn’t seen in a long time. I settled down to watch them this evening. No reading today, but that’s okay.

A near photographic memory for headlights?

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When I got on the train this morning, I realized that I might have left my headlights on, and rather than worry about it all day, I figured I’d write about it and forget it until I get back to the train station this afternoon.

I have 2 things in my favor:

1. Muscle memory. It seems to me that I always try and turn my lights off, even when they are not on, as if the movement is some kind of conditioned muscle memory.

2. I always glance at my car once I get out, and it seems to me that I would have noticed the lights were still on, and I don’t remember noticing anything. Yet for some reason, the idea that I might have left them on got into my head somehow.

I have 1 thing against me:

1. I was listening to my iPod as I got out of the car and so I might not have heard the warning bell if, indeed, I had left my lights on.

Too late now to do anything about it. I’ll find out when I get back to the metro station this afternoon. But maybe now I can stop worrying about it until that time.