flying time

It's been two weeks since my last blog post, and two weeks since the day before my last day of vacation. It's hard to believe time has flown that quickly, but I should be used to time flying by now; my senior year of high school whizzed by, and I'm pretty sure that six years ago yesterday (July 21) was the day I started orientation at BG. It's just amazing for me to stop and think that six years ago today, I was sitting in pointless meetings and learning "Ay Ziggy Zoomba" and being told that every class I want is already filled.

In any case, here's what I've accomplished from my vacation to-do list:

• practice organ (playing this Sunday at church; this will be completed Friday)
• Cedar Point July 10
• set up PowerMac 8500

OK, so setting up the 8500 wasn't on my list, but I decided to do it anyway so I could wipe the hard drive in preparation for recycling it. Every year, the Lorain County Commissioners sponsor a comoputer & cell phone recycling day that's free to Lorain County residents. This is how I've gotten rid of most of the crap I bought at BGSU's surplus auction.

Although the 8500 is by no means "crap" (it was a nice step up from the 6115 mom had, but still slow when opening eBay's HTML-ridden e-mails and printing), mom now uses my old iMac and I have no use for the 8500, which is merely taking up space. As mentioned in a previous post, it comes with A/V ports and is deliciously upgradable, if you want to spend $300-400, but at this point I have to look at the reality of how little space is left in my bedroom. I don't have the luxury of an entire house to fill with unused junk like my dad does ;) so I've decided to recycle it.

If I'm not mistaken, what happens is the commissioners give it to the prison system, and inmates learn how to build and fix computers. The ones that are useable/fixable are then used for... something, I'm not sure; the rest is recycled properly so that all those scrumptious chemicals don't end up in our water supply. Normally, disposing of computers properly is a royal pain and somewhat expensive, so I'm glad the commissioners sponsor this recycling day every year for frrrrrrree.

As for the baby books project, the rough draft is done, but I still have some details to fix, and there will probably be some proofreading and edits later. After that, it's just a matter of printing all the pages and taking them to Office Max for spiral binding. This project has taken a lot longer than I originally estimated (and there are various reasons for that). See, this is one of those things I got into when I was only working part-time as a school choir accompanist. By the time the grant was approved, I had a full-time job and was involved in numerous theatre shows. I will certainly be glad when this is done.

I also now have the capability to import analog video to my PowerBook, so finishing the LCHS CD-ROM shouldn't take too much longer. (Yet another project I got into while I was working part-time.)

Maybe THEN! I can start working on my career goal... I HOPE. I think I need a crappier job so I have more motivation to work toward cartooning. :)

vacation!

Well, the first paid vacation of my adult life is almost over. As mentioned a while back, I chose this week because we got Monday, July 5th as a holiday at work, so I took the rest of this week off so as to only use four vacation days. I took a day off for Good Friday, which leaves me with five more to use this year -- not sure when I'll use them exactly, but since Christmas is on a Saturday this year, the 26th will be a day off anyway (I hate working the day after Christmas), so maybe I'll try for the day after Thanksgiving (which is coincidentally also the 26th [of November]).

Last week I made a nice long list of what I hoped to accomplish on my vacation, and so far I've only completed four items, but there's still Friday and Sunday to go yet (Saturday I'll be at Cedar Point all day). Also, I was up at my parents' cottage last weekend including Monday (see my "proof-of-concept" sandcastle here -- I finally found a good way to make onion domes out of sand), so really I wasn't home to work on my list until Tuesday. In any case...

• practice organ (playing this Sunday at church; this will be completed Friday)
  
• update church website
  
• update bryanbird.com
  
• pack up Snoopy collection
  
• read books (1. Copyrights and Copywrongs 2. Never Be Lied To Again 3. The Annotated Hobbit)
  
• read old Macworld magazines (ever since I started getting the digital download instead of a printed copy, I keep forgetting to read it... not really missing it much, to tell the truth)
  
• record tape to CD
  
• set up PowerMac 5500 (why? just "to mac around on" -- that's right, I used Macintosh as a verb)
  
• Cedar Point July 10
  
• finish baby books (freelance design project)
  
• finish LCHS CD-ROM (interactive kiosk for the historical society -- this project has been waiting over a year to be finished, for various reasons out of my control)
  
• update Quicken (I really am anal about entering every receipt and transaction into Quicken, I'm just lazy about keeping up with it)
  
• see Spider-Man 2 (excellent movie, I might say better than the first)
  
• clean car (hasn't had a good thorough cleaning inside for 3 years)

So there you have it. Thus far I've just been working on the small stuff, and seeing as it's 10:15 at night, I'll probably continue that path and skim the old Macworlds tonight, and hopefully finish the baby books tomorrow. As far as I know, I have no other plans (unless something pops up at the last minute), so I should have the whole day to myself. Yay.