February 13, 2007

I forgot to mention yesterday that our check for the damage to the BMW finally arrived last night. Several months late but it did arrive and we are much relieved. Speaking of cars – the Mazda PR5 is heading to the shop this morning. That car is no longer saving us any money but with all of the money that we are putting into it it seems like it would be foolish to get rid of it anytime soon! Argh.

I worked from home for two hours or so this morning before rushing into the office to get the PR5 into the shop. I dropped the car off and got a loaner – a new Toyota Corolla S. This works out well as I have been wondering whether or not I would like a Corolla S. It is a small, sporty looking economy car. And my rental is even a colour that I like for this car. So it is like an extended test drive – not that we are looking for another car at this point. We really need to sell three cars as it is. Let me know if you are interested in one of them.

The PR5 is going to end up costing around $1,500! Both front bearings are toast and very dangerous and so they and their hubs have to be replaced which, in turn, requires a front end alignment and, while it is there, it is getting an oil change as well. It is things like this that make me REALLY want to get transferred up to Jersey City so that I don’t have to drive any more and we can go down to a single car. That would be awesome.

Work wasn’t too bad today. A lot of “recovering” still from yesterday’s emergency and a few incidences for today as well but not bad. A good day, I would say.

We are expecting some real snow tonight. Our first real snow of the year with driving problems and everything. But it isn’t expected to hit until this evening so the morning commute is the first that we will really see any driving issues. Everyone at the office is making contingency plans to deal with a lot of people needing to work remotely. Oreo would be very happy if I didn’t have to leave the house tomorrow. As it is he is planning on losing this week’s “Doggie / Daddy Day” and he will be SO exhausted come the weekend. At least it is a long, three day weekend so he will have a lot of time to rest up and recover from five solid days of daycare.

Barry Leiba from IBM expanding on Raymond Chen of Microsoft’s email subject etiquette article and I thought that I should copy it here: Guide to Email Subjects. It is a good read for everyone. I know you all are like me and poor at choosing useful email subjects. In the article he talks about how some people may only get a few emails a day but some of us get dozens or even hundreds but I want you to know that, not including SPAM, I am getting several thousand a day and can top ten thousand on rare occasion and I know that there are a lot of people like me out there and for us it is VERY important to have meaningful email subjects. It isn’t a long read and it would be good for us all – so go read it.

I had to leave the office a little early this evening because I have night work that has to be done, well, late.  So I had to get home early enough to have time to get the work done.

Today is the first day of our valet service working from Commerce instead of Raymond so now we are getting our cars on the south side of the building instead of the north side like we have been.  In the long run we think that this will probably be the better solution as Raymond just wasn’t working but with all of the parking and construction that go on on Commerce and the total disaster that that road is every evening I have no idea how this is going to work.  It is all that we can do to drive down Commerce in the evenings let along actually get in and out of our cars there!

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