So Much Stuff I Can't Recall

Pre-school was cancelled yesterday due to the holiday (technically it was never scheduled), so after sleeping late Phil and I headed in to town. Phil's first school holiday.

We got to Gateway Mall (the "green mall" in Philspeak) and bought movie supplies at Target (Jelly Bellies and Bottle Caps). The Rated-E-for-Everyone version of the Incredibles Mac/PC game had dropped $10, so we got that too.

Candy stashed in the various pockets of my jacket we headed down the mall to the dollar theaters (technically, $1.50). Just outside of Target is a market research place where people with clipboards ask if you want to take surveys. Usually I avoid making eye-contact and say no, but this time the girl asked if I wanted to make $23 taking a survey. I said, sure - 23 bucks is 23 bucks. So the deal is they pay you $3 to answer questions regarding snackfood consumption (a topic on which I have plenty of experience), then they send you away with a bag of "new" snackfood ("new" as in yet-to-come-to-market, not as in "not used," although it wasn't that, either) and at the end of the week you call in your opinions and they send you a check for $20. Good deal, and since the new snackfood is put out by Sun Chips I'm thinking theres a better-than-fair chance it won't suck.

So, Phil and I continued down to the theater, bought tickets to The Polar Express (with our newly-acquired $3) and had Mongolian BBQ in the food court. We would have had hot dogs, but the independent vendor that operated out of the food court had gone out of business (along with an independent cookie vendor). As we sat and ate, I noticed that the independents were all having a hard time, even the hippy-dippy smoothie place. Meanwhile the Subway and Carl's Jr. had huge lines (Taco Time and Sbarro were doing well, also). Nice diversity, Eugene. The Mongolian BBQ was good and got Phil to eat some veggies.

Lunch over, we went in to get situated at the theater. Unlike the Heffalump theater, there were maybe 20 people there when we arrived (the place would eventually fill up well over half). About five minutes after we arrived a couple teenagers came in, moved all the way up to the front and started groping. Phil's comment: "This is not a love scene; they shouldn't be doing that." Now that I have blogged this, it'll be online in another dozen years when he's the kid in the front row playing smootchieface.

The Polar Express was good, better than I had expected it to be. I'm not thrilled with the animation, particularly lip/voice syncing, but hopefully as time goes by the technique will improve. Tom Hanks' train-riding hobo was the best; I also liked the conductor's surprise hairstyle.

Movie over, we moved on to Fred Meyer for an hour of unsupervised playtime ... I mean an hour of Phil being supervised by someone other than myself, while I roam free tipping 20 oz. Diet Pepsi bottles to find the winning iTunes caps. I moseyed over to the furniture department where I've been speculating on the notion of an idea of buying a computer workstation for the past month or so. For the past month my laptop has been on a catch-all card table in the computer room. It's worked okay, except for the fact that everything got piled on the table and staking claim to two square feet of it was a daily chore. When the purpose of the table is to catch everything, you can hardly fault it for doing its job; still it wasn't a very good working relationship. That arrangement also meant that I had to do my proofreading over on the couch, balancing loose pages and notebooks in my lap, and then clear another square foot of space to key the changes in. So, in the spirit of new adventures, I bought the table and managed to set it up last night without expressing myself with colorful metaphors (although I'm going to be keeping an eye out for an allen-wrench attachment for my socket set).

Here are a couple pictures:

• Laptop View
  
  
• Editing View
  (the laptop and mouse are below the desktop on the keyboard tray)
  
  

As the second photo shows, the keyboard tray makes a handy space for the laptop when I'm dealing with paper. There are two small shelves on the outside of the the desk legs that are designed for CPU and printer storage, but I've got books and magazines on them. I'm thinking of rigging some hooks to the metal honeycomb grid on the legs and back of the desk store camera and PDA cables when they're not in use. The only disadvantages I've seen so far are that a) the glass desktop was not sprayed with a fingerprint/smudge resistant chemical before it left the warehouse (note to self: buy stock in Windex) and b) the optical mouse doesn't track on glass, so I'm using an old Dell mousepad which clashes with the Apple Powerbook. The glass does dissapate the heat generated by the laptop, so I suppose that's a good tradeoff.

The desk was only half finished when Phil went to bed last night (he went to bed so I could finish the desk without using any colorful metaphors -- he doesn't get the whole "you can help me by not helping me" Zen koan; good thing we're not Buddhists). But he did get one more adventure in before bedtime; I read him An Adventure With Oscar Otter, a favorite pop-up book.

How was your Presidents' Day?

BTW the blog title comes from this Daniel Amos song