Home again
All weekend, I kept thinking, "I need to remember to post that as a journal entry" and "Good joke, must remember for journal." Sadly, here it is Monday night and I'm home and I don't remember any of those things I wanted to post.
Saturday evening I hung out with Ellie and Dana, and Debby (whom I hadn't seen in a ridiculously long time, possibly not in a couple years) and baby Rose (whom I hadn't previously met at all), and we ate Vietnamese food and looked at photos and played with the baby and chatted. Sunday I went to my grandmother's party, which turned out to be smaller than I expected, mostly just immediate family. Was nice to see everyone.
Monday morning, got up too early and drove to SeaTac in the rain, returned my rental car, got to the gate way before my flight. Nice to have extra time for once. Really, both flights were uneventful (except for some turbulence on the way home that reminded me that when it comes right down to it, I don't actually like flying all that much, I just like how fast it gets me places), which is all I really ask of an airplane flight. And I found that Monday morning is actually a pretty good time to fly out of SeaTac.
Before I went up, I did something new. It occurred to me that I'd be renting a car, and that these days even the smallest subcompact rental cars (the ones I always rent, because really, how much space do I actually need for me and my backpack?) often have CD players, and that it would therefore be nice to have some CDs with me. But I didn't want to carry a bunch of CDs, especially after losing many of my favorites while traveling last summer. PowerBook to the rescue! I spent maybe twenty minutes going through my favorite songs and picking ones that I like singing along to in the car; chose 18 of those, a total of about 70 minutes of music; spent another fifteen minutes putting them in a reasonable order and listening to ends and beginnings to see if transitions seemed reasonable; then clicked the Burn button and ten minutes later I had me a music CD. It was really nice to have. The selection and order of songs could probably use some work (I was going to list them here, but that'll have to wait 'til sometime when it isn't the middle of the night), but the great thing about doing it this way is that I can test this set for a while, and decide which songs I do and don't want and which emotional transitions don't work and so on, and tweak it and burn a new CD with the modified set. Way cool.
I was a bit worried that the CD might not play in the rental-car CD player (I'd heard that sometimes home-burned music CDs don't work in all players, but maybe that's no longer true), so I took along A Dancing World (which I've bought multiple copies of, the better to hand them out to friends) just in case. Turned out that my home-burned disc played just fine, except that in some places it skipped. When I backed up past a skip and played through it again, the skip either went away or happened in a different place, so maybe it was just the CD player. Haven't had a chance to listen to the CD on any other player yet.
Anyway, I think that's about enough out of me for tonight. Oh, except to say that as predicted, we've surpassed our previous record number of submissions in one month. By the end of the month, we should be more than 10% higher than the previous record.