October 23, 2002
Dear Everyone:
Autumn has officially begun.
I know what you’re thinking: “Didn’t that happen back in September, like on the 23rd?” Well, technically, yes. But Autumn doesn’t officially begin until the first evening that I get home from work and the temperature inside the house is below 70 degrees. That happened, for the first time, last night.
So I dragged the little heater out of the closet; and used the can of forced-air that’s really meant for cleaning your computer’s mouse and keyboard to blow as much accumulated dust out of the heater as possible. Then I set it out on the patio and let it go for about 20 minutes to burn all the residual dust off the coils. I don’t know how long I’ve had that heater, but it still worked just fine this morning.
Not that it’s that chilly in the mornings yet. But it will be, soon enough.
Another sign that it’s officially Autumn: The Half Moon Bay Pumpkin (& Art) Festival. Last Saturday, “Jeannie” and I drove down to our old stomping grounds. We had a remarkably uneventful drive down and arrived early enough to get prime parking at the High School. Then we wandered around the various booths until it was time to meet “Marshall” at the Library.
We would have gotten there earlier, but “Jeannie”
lost her bearings and took us a few blocks out of our way.
Nevertheless, we arrived at the steps 10 minutes before
It’s been about 10 years since I made the trek down
to Half Moon Bay for the Festival.
Many of the booths offered the same homemade art(?) objects as
then. But you can find a lot
of them closer to home these days.
In fact, several artisans are scheduled to appear in
What interested me were the less-than-traditional booths. Like Champion Mortgage. A mortgage company? Just in case you impulsively decide to refinance your home? Or maybe you’ll decide to “buy” a mortgage, then look for a place to spend it on.
Actually, they were giving away free bottles of water and those squirt bottles that are so popular, and handy plastic carry-sacks, all with their logo, 800 Number, and Web address. Likewise several banks and a kitchen redecorating firm. Not to mention Uncle Ben’s Rice. I guess they see the price of a booth as cheap advertising. Reminds me of the time a computer company showed up at a Sci-Fi convention we attended some years ago.
As for shopping, per se, I was on the lookout for a possible replacement for the painting on my living room wall. “Jeannie” has always disliked it, for some reason, and I’m ready to move on to something new. But we didn’t see anything that would fit the bill. So we’ll keep looking, in a desultory way. There’s no rush.
Once we’d checked out all the offerings along
After careful discussion, and reviewing all the
pros and cons, we decided to officially blow off Thanksgiving.
The turkey growers will have to do without us this year.
As for Christmas, the tentative plan is to spend it in
So I have an action item to find out about flights
and hotels in
Then we’ll flip a coin for who stays at the hotel and who stays in Mother’s one-bedroom apartment at Mary’s Woods.
As for work, I’m still reformatting data, when I’m not working on ARMA stuff (I’m 3-4 months behind on financial reports). With just around 31,000 pages, at the (extremely optimistic) rate of one minute per page, it looks like it will take over 516 hours to complete. However, I started playing with some alternative ways to “wash” the data, using “edit-and-replace” features in a couple of applications. And I was able to convert close to 300 pages in far less time today. So there’s hope.
Love, as always,
Pete
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