Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Breakfast: a banana, a half slice of walnut streusel. Did Windows updates. Telecommute day. Prepped graphics for new XHTML e-mail templates for the office. Stylesheet tweaking for the website. Updated the computer security guide. Lunch at home with Patrick: cow burgers, fries. Dessert: popsicles. Updated e-mail support pages. Linkchecking. Updated admissions pages for James. Chatted online with Sneeper. Shopping at Costco with Joel. Patrick and I hadn't been to Costco in years, but it hasn't changed much. It seemed to me there was more furniture now than before. Cafe 150 as I knew it is gone. Before I remember you could get a slice of pizza for $1.50 and it included a free soda. (Or maybe the soda was extra?) Pizza slices now cost $1.99, and sodas are 55 cents which includes 1 refill. We bought nothing terribly significant. Some of the things I was looking for I found but wasn't happy with the quality or style (socks, cutting boards, hair cutting kit [Conair], frying pans [Circulon and some brands I'd never heard of]). Other things I was looking for I couldn't find: answering machine that didn't have a phone system attached to it, data or document safe that didn't require batteries, non-stick spatulas. Joel was looking for beef jerky or maybe it was turkey jerky, but I think he said they were out. The best deal I saw was 3 pounds of bananas for 99 cents (but we had just gotten bananas from TJ on Tuesday, so we didn't need any). Not organic, but that's a lot of inorganic bananas for under a buck. We ate pizza before leaving, then dropped Joel off at home. We visited for a while, seeing his place for the first time, meeting his housemate Anthony and playing catch with Anthony's dog, Coda. I got to see the cabinet he snagged from James, the couch he found on craigslist which—by way of incredible luck—exactly matched the loveseat he had bought a long time beforehand. Joel showed us his DirecTV TiVo and we watched Rock Star INXS and bits of other shows for a while. When we got home I was parking the car and almost had it in the space when the car stalled (my fault) and wouldn't start again. I was worried that I'd somehow flooded the engine, but we waited 30 minutes and tried again. After some research on Google, I determined that the battery is dead. The starter won't even turn, the headlights won't come on, and I realized now that I'd never replaced the battery since getting the car in 1998—a 6.5-year-old battery! I suppose I'm lucky it has lasted this long. The car is mostly in the space so I decided I'll deal with this tomorrow when the gas station and auto supply shop are open.