When I woke up this morning at 6am, it was still 70°F outside. That’s not typical Minnesota October, and it’s got me down a bit. I’m ready for cooler weather, not something that feels like mid-August. The weekend didn’t especially help either. Friday, tried to work, but mostly just ran errands for a lunch-hour that turned into a three-hour excursion. Got the checks into the bank to cover payroll, which is a good thing, then bought some food, some reloading supplies, and a programmable thermostat that I’m going to install one of these days. Then heard some interesting news from one of the neighbors that I’ll have more on below.
Saturday was a trip up to mom’s. She’s got a cold, and we needed to get her some cough-syrup after eating lunch. She was talkative with the cute waitress at the restaurant, which was fun. But I’d been hoping that the trees up there would be colorful and worth taking pictures of. As it was, it was only the sumac that had changed color. I thought about maybe heading north, but instead just took the long way home and ended up hating traffic.
Sunday? I got up early, read the morning news, ate breakfast, and then went back to bed and slept past noon. Spent the rest of the day watching TV and not doing much anything useful. Some weekends that feels relaxing. This was not one of those weekends. Never did get out to see Serenity, either. I don’t especially like going to movies in theaters by myself, and didn’t find anyone who wanted to go. I might have had better luck if I’d actually looked, I guess.
Today, I’m going to take another shot at the map I need to do for a client, but if I don’t make progress pretty quickly, I think I’ll just need to build the rest of the website for them, and have a clickable list of states instead. The most important thing is finishing the website for them at this point. It’s been too long, and even though they don’t seem to be in much of a hurry, I need to cross it off my list. Add in the normal Monday administrivia, plus the first of the month stuff, and it looks like a pretty busy day.
- The St. Paul Saints are out of their league, leaving the Northern League with Lincoln and Sioux Falls. The Strib story St. Paul Saints to join new league has more details. The Saints press release doesn’t have much more. Mike Stone, commissioner of the Northern League wishes the departing teams well, after having received notification on Thursday (and having reworked the website header with just nine logos). I completely missed this on Thursday, since when I do watch the news, I shut it off after the weather. And apparently it wasn’t big enough news to make the “front page” of either local paper online. Good thing I have neighbors who pay attention to things like that. [press-patch and strib]
- In some news that was surprising to me, Fiscal responsibility takes first steps in Washington. Is there actually party of fiscal responsibility there? [instapundit]
- Maybe the PorkBusters idea is starting to work: Hurricanes endanger pork-barrel projects, and Gil Gutknecht is one of the Republicans working on Operation Offset, which is targeting about $500 billion in pork. [strib]
- I’ve been watching Natural gas prices skyrocket and trying to figure just how bad it’s going to be this winter. Gas up 75% over last year, and the heating bill then was no picnic. I did make it through the chilly days last week without turning on the furnace at all, and with the warm weather today, it doesn’t seem like there’s any hurry, but it’s time to add “hook up programmable thermostat” to the to-do list. [strib]
- Oh crap. USPTO upholds Eolas’s embedded Web app patent. I’m pretty sure that’s not a good thing. [jr]
- Bad news: Smoking seems to increase brain damage in alcoholics. [jwz]