July 18, 2009: Relaxing Saturday

I slept in nice and late today.  I did not get up until nine which is awesome since we went to bed around eleven or maybe even earlier!  Dominica and Liesl were up before me and Oreo was up long before them.  He likes to move into Liesl’s room when the sun comes out and he sleeps on his dog bed in there.  We have all of the doors open upstairs all of the time to facilitate hearing Liesl from the other room and also to make it easier for the air conditioning to keep up with the upstairs.  It has a hard time making it really cool up there.

I went right down to the basement to get straight to work.  There is a lot of work for me to do this morning and I need to get right to it.

Tons of work today.  A really long Saturday of upgrades and patching. I ended up working into the afternoon which was much later than I had originally planned. A really busy Saturday.

Once I was done with work we ran out to Pastel’s for a late lunch.  We were late enough that we were practically the only people in the restaurant.  It was nice to get out of the house for lunch.  Liesl likes visiting with new people.

The weather is much nicer today.  Still quite warm and sunny but not so unbearable as it has been for the last week.  A nice change.

Dominica did a lot of work cleaning around the house today.  Mostly she worked on stuff in the upstairs and some in the basement.  Now that her course at the University of Illinois is over she has a lot more energy than she had previously.

I put in a lot of work getting the last of my unedited photos edited and ready to upload to Flickr.  I have another big batch almost ready to go that I expect to get uploaded tomorrow morning.  I think that this will put me over the four thousand photo mark on Flickr.  My collection has been viewed over two hundred thousand times thus far!

I discovered, thanks to Andy, that I could switch to shooting in Nikon RAW format (aka NEF) to get much higher quality from my images.  I did not used to do this back when I first got my camera due to a number of limitations in shooting that way but now I can still do all of my photo editing in Picasa and get much better results so I have switched.  Now I definitely need a larger SD card for my camera as it can only hold about sixty images in NEF format because they are really large.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I spoke to Verizon and managed to finally get my BlackBerry Tour ordered and everything arranged.  Just $49 for my new phone with my standard plan renewal which I do anyway.  I get a new phone every year with them and every year I forget.  By the time that I call again I am way past being eligible for a new phone so I get one every time that I call.  The new Tour should arrive on Wednesday, they think, which will give me Thursday and Friday, we hope, to test it out while we are out of town before I have to rely upon it during the drive to Houston.

We are changing our Houston plans now so next week has become a lot more difficult.  Instead of Francesca and the kids coming down to our place in the middle we are going to go up to Frankfort and stay there.  Most likely on Thursday and staying until Saturday morning when Francesca and I will set off for the drive to Houston.  Dominica will stay at her parents’ house until Sunday and then go back to Peekskill on Sunday night.  My dad is going to go down to Peekskill on Monday.  I will return from Houston, by way of Austin, on Wednesday.  I am really hoping that I can convince Francesca to take the western “I70” route because instead of driving through places that I have been before almost the entire trip will be new to me which, in turn, will keep me much more awake than will driving places that I have been before.

It was nice out this evening and we had our main work for the day completed so at around eight we all went out for a walk around the complex.  It was a nice temperature but the humidity was still something fierce.  Probably no more than seventy-two degrees out but muggy as could be.  We discovered that there was a live concert going on up at the lifestyle center.  We have no idea what that is about.  Perhaps our homeowners association sponsors a summer concert series.  That would be pretty neat.  We never pay attention to these things, but obviously we should.

After our walk Dominica cooked dinner – pan fried tilapia – and I worked for a little longer.  Then we ate dinner and watched the ending of The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow which was a seriously awful film.  It is truly amazing what they would put up with in the 1950s for cinema!  We only had maybe twenty minutes left in the film.

Then we watched Center Stage which, strangely, Dominica has never seen even though we have had it for a very long time.  Likely from before when she and I started dating.  It is a ballet dancing film – right up her alley, which is why I was so surprised that she had never seen it.  It is a pretty good film.

It was late when we finished the movie but neither of us were tired at all. Very strange.  Liesl had gone to bed at normal time so we should have been off to bed but just did not feel like it.  So we put in Charlie’s Angels and watched that.  I have not seen that movie in a very long time.  It is a decade old which really makes me feel old.  I still have that feeling like it is a relatively new movie.  Not new by any stretch but a decade old just doesn’t seem possible.

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