All done again

This is the last day of Nablopomo, as I said earlier I won't be doing this too often anymore, unless I decide I miss it and pick another month to try Nablopomo. December's theme is zeitgeist, I barely have a grasp of the definition, how am I supposed to write about it 31 times? At any rate, you won't be seeing me complain as frequently as you have this month, right?

There are actually things I have wanted to write about here, but I never got around to it. I have to finish my cat blogs, amongst other subjects that may alienate people. But who knows when they will show up. Anyway, thanks for putting up with my endless ranting about work this month, I'll let you know if I win a prize.

Sour apples

Many years ago we visited a friend who had an iMac, one of the older colored ones. My wife was playing with it and fell in love with it and wanted to get one. I did not, I didn't want to change anything and I didn't know anything about working a Mac. A few years later, the same friend got the first iPod, and Sarah fell in love with that too, but I again did not.

In 2007, after years of our disappointing PC from HP which we couldn't update (Windows ME sucks by the way), we decided to get a Mac. Sarah had already gotten an iPod for Christmas the year before, and she loved it. I was still not convinced by the iPod, but I was more than ready to abandon the PC world. The Mac was expensive, but it was a lot easier to use than I originally thought, and we could use most of the programs that we frequently used on the PC. I also found out that you could actually run Windows on the Mac, but I didn't really want to.

After we got the Mac I started to get into the iPod, mainly for podcasts. I had some music on there, but there wasn't much room on it. Sarah had dreams of me putting my thousands of CDs onto the Mac and getting rid of them all, but that will never, ever happen. I have gotten rid of a few, but the vast majority is going to stay. Sorry sweetie.

That struggle was rendered moot in late 2008 when the DVD-ROM in the Mac broke. I was in the midst of starting to put all of my CDs onto the Mac's hard drive when it happened. We brought the Mac to the Apple Store and they said it would cost over $400 to fix it. Of course, it was out of warranty, so we opted not to fix it and get an external DVD-ROM, which has proven difficult. We are currently borrowing my father-in-law's converted internal DVD-ROM drive, which sounds like an airplane taking off, but it works. But if we want to make our own DVDs with the iDVD program on the Mac, we're screwed, because it doesn't recognize external DVD-ROMS. The fact that it broke after a year and a half of not very much use pissed us off, but Apple wanted money that we didn't have, so we had to let it go.

Last year Sarah bought me the 120 GB iPod Classic for my birthday, because my iPod usage far outweighed hers. Besides podcasts, I started putting all of my music onto it so I could listen to it at work, instead of dragging CDs with me everyday. I bought a little radio with a 1/8 inch input jack and I was in business. Until last month, which was almost a year and a half after I got it. It seems that the headphone jack is this cheap plastic piece of crap that just sits inside the iPod (it's not soldered), and if you frequently put headphones in it, it will eventually move and you'll only be able to get one channel. In my case, only the left channel works through the headphones, and I listen to a lot of older music, where the stereo separation is severe. I'm talking vocals in one channel and instruments in the other channel severe, so I get an instrumental or acappella. It was driving me crazy until I realized that I could convert the songs to mono so it wouldn't be so bad, but of course, that takes time and more space on the iPod. It's basically an enormous pain in the ass and is pissing me off.

You would think that something that didn't have external speakers would have a more stable headphone jack, but of course it doesn't. And also of course, they don't don't make my model iPod anymore, and again want an arm and a leg to fix it. Thankfully, there is a market that has risen up to meet this demand, since it is a common problem with iPods. I have ordered the offending headphone jack and iPod pry tools, and my brother in law (who is handy with such things) has offered to replace it for me, since the online tutorials looked really scary. In the meantime, I have discovered that I can get stereo from the dock connector, but there are caveats. You can't adjust the iPod volume, so it tends to distort if you have it up too loud (read:loud enough to hear over the mixers). Also, I need to use the iPod to TV cable, which is a very long cable, made even longer by the RCA to 1/8 inch plug cable I need to plug into the radio. But at least I can enjoy stereo, as long as the dock connector holds out, since I use that everyday to charge the iPod. Hopefully my brother in law will be able to fix it and Apple has this problem fixed in the next iPod I get.

Now Sarah wants an iPad. I think that we will get the extended warranty if we get one of those.

New career is kaput.

When I was young I had designs on being some sort of writer, as I think I have posted before. When I met Sarah, she was a journalist like me, and I told her I wanted to write a book about my grandfather. She gave me some writing instructional stuff that she had from school and encouraged me a lot, but the closest I got to starting that book was last year on this blog. Nothing since then.

I had hopes that blogging would help me become a better writer (or a writer at all), but I don't think it's working. Just doing Nablopomo every day for a month is really annoying, and as a writer I would have to spend a lot more time on it than I do on my blog. True, life/work gets in the way, but even when it doesn't I can't commit, hence my very infrequent posting when I'm not doing Nablopomo.

I don't know if I'll ever finish the book. My friend Adam is a writer, and he writes a lot and enjoys it. He also submits a lot of stuff to publishers and is rejected, but he makes fun of that and keeps going. I don't think I would be able to deal with that. He and Sarah said that I should write things down about my grandfather on my blog, and maybe collate it all into a book later, which is very easy to do these days. That's a good idea that I think I will try, but once November is over, I don't know what will happen.

Another communication thing I've been wanting to do is a podcast. I love listening to them and I want to join in, because I can be anonymous; I don't really like a lot of attention anymore. I'm not very sociable either, so this way I can reach people without actually interacting with them. I know this is sad, and I don't really have any explanation for it, it just developed gradually since my early 20s, I think. As with writing, I've been hemming and hawing about it for 2 years now. I did record a test that came out decent and I have everything in place for it, but I haven't been able to hit the Commit button yet. The same thing with Librivox, I volunteered to read a chapter of a book two months ago and haven't done it yet. That actually has a due date, so I will get that done, but the book and the podcast don't. I can put a mental due date on them, like this month's blogging, but my other mental parts will rationalize not doing it. My main problem is that I have so many things that I want/need to do that I don't know where to start, so I don't start at all. I somehow need to fix that.

bleah

So I went back to work today after 2 days off, which is unusual (we are closed on Sundays, and they won't let me work then, I asked). It was hard, as post-holiday days always are, mentally and physically. There were about 30 bags of rolls left today, but we did sell more than last year. Lots of pies left as well, but we put all that stuff out for half price today, hoping it would sell so there would be less to throw away on Monday. Throwing stuff away is the last resort, we don't throw out very much stuff at all since the economy tanked. It seems like people wait for stuff to go out of date these days. Which is fine, as I'd rather sell something at half price than throw it away.

It was crushingly slow yesterday, so I baked very conservatively this morning, which turned out to be a big mistake. The bread rack was almost empty when I left at 12.30 (we're open till 7 on Saturdays), and the 3 pumpernickel bread I made didn't even make it out to the sales floor. I do like when that happens, but not that early in the day. I suppose I have to leave sometime, right?

Another nice day

I had the day off from work today to make up for the holiday pay yesterday, which was nice. My sister and brother in law stayed the night, and we went to my work so my sister could check out the gluten free stuff we have for sale. Then we went to the health food store and came back here for leftovers. Then Sarah's sister and her family came over and we played the Wii for awhile, which was a lot of fun. Sarah and I are going to have dinner and then I have to go to bed since I have to work tomorrow. It was a really great Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone has a great day today. I have some cooking and cleaning to do, so I need to get off the internet. I will see half of my readers at dinner, yay! :)

All done

I'm home from work now. We went in at 7 last night and left around 9 this morning. Sarah came in and helped again, and we had to run some errands after work. I am surprisingly not tired, I don't know why. I didn't have any real tired stretches at work either, although I did at one point think that I saw a bird overhead. My knee also started to give out at around 7, probably from carting around my fat ass for so long. But the busiest day of the year is now over, yay!

I looked at what we sold yesterday and was a bit disappointed in the amounts, but my co-worker told me to check last year's sales, and sure enough, we sold more this year. Last year we totally sold out of dinner rolls, and we also had more dinner roll orders this year, so I made more than I did last year, 126 dozen in all. I also made 77 loaves of bread and quite a lot of danish, I'm hoping people will pick those up for breakfast tomorrow (they certainly did last year, although the danish numbers have been down lately). In case you don't know, the dinner rolls are all made by me, and I have to roll them into a round shape, 2 rolls at a time, which is why it takes so long. Plus we don't have that much oven space to work with, and my co-worker is also using the ovens to make pies, of which she did about 300 today, again by herself.

Now I am going to clean up the house a bit, since I haven't done that in awhile.My sister and her husband will be here Friday, and we are going to my work so she can check out the gluten free stuff we have, so then I'll find out how much we sold. My fingers are crossed for another sellout.