weekend review...June 28-29

My weekend was a lot shorter this week, thanks to having this coming Saturday off (4-day weekends rule!). Even so, Sunday was a busy day, and I felt like I accomplished quite a bit.

- I finally bought an external hard-drive to back up my laptop. I've been toying around with this for a few months now, fearful of losing everything--including hundreds of pictures we've accumulated--to a crash. It's happened something like 3 times in the past 5 years, so you'd think I'd have done this a long time ago. Experience is the best teacher, I guess. Anyway, got a pretty sweet deal on a Seagate 500GB drive at Circuit City--only $100--and had a blast moving stuff over Sunday afternoon. After all was said and done, I cleared out more than half of my laptop and optimized it pretty nicely. Next project: burn all of our music CD's onto it, and get rid of the actual discs themselves in a garage sale we're having this weekend. After that, we plan on taking all of the magazine articles we've saved through the years--interesting pieces, recipes, etc.--scanning them, and saving them in PDF form. Not only will this help with physical space around the house, it will help us be far more organized. I'm really looking forward to it, and I'll let you know how it goes.

- As a follow-up for our DISH problems...well, I did it again. Last year (probably right around this time, I believe) we were having the same issues we were having lately--intermittent signal outages at odd times. I expected it when the weather was nasty, but it seemed it was happening on sunny, clear days, too. So, as I explained last week, I finally booked a service call. The guys came out on Thursday evening (in drizzly weather, no less) to check things out and weren't here 10 minutes before they found the problem. It was familiar to me, because it was the same thing as it was the last time: our palm tree simply needed to be cut back. So, we did. And, as expected, the signal is fine. I remember looking at the dish, measuring it against the tree, thinking there was no way a branch could be getting in the way...but, of course, I was wrong. Only cost me $29 to find that out, though. I've asked my wife to beat me across the head next time I mention this problem. And then hand me the clippers.

- You can eat a pretty good meal at Sam's Club. I finally got my membership from work (which was a saga in and of itself), so we went to look around and get a couple of things. Turns out it was "Demo Day" and there were at least 10 different booths with some pretty good food items. All for free. Not having to buy lunch was a nice addition to our Sunday.

- Does anyone else think it's nuts that it's July already? July 4th weekend is at our doorstep (and, as I mentioned, I've wrangled it into a 4-day weekend!), and our California vacation, which seemed an eternity away, kicks off in just 3 weeks. Next thing you know football season will be there...not that that's a bad thing, at all!