Today was Awesome
I had an entirely productive day today. Things got rolling with work-from-home work today. I was busting-through things left and right and it was good. I got some development work finished, did a little bit of analysis, and got a lot of catch-up reading accomplished. During lunch, I went over to Arnold Feed and asked for some mulch recommendations. We have our front flower beds that haven’t been mulched in a few years, and they were badly in need of it. Last year, the constant weed and grass pulling was irritating, and they simply didn’t look good. The friendly folks at Arnold Feed recommended cocoa shell mulch. Four bags later (well, three and a third), and the front beds look awesome. Bonus: The porch now smells like chocolate. Supposedly, this stuff is good at keeping down bugs and is healthy for the soil. As long as our tulips and daffodils don’t die-off, I’ll be happy. It looks great. I was thrilled. I also had time to spray-off the truck and subaru to get some of the salt and winter grime off of them. I didn’t go crazy with a wash, but I wanted to get them a little cleaner.
Lunch was consumed down at the fire station, where I ran into two of the guys. It turns out that one of them was a broadcast engineer in the Pittsburgh era at about the same time my dad was doing the same stuff up in Franklin. Crazy. Good to find good people like that, though.
Back at home, I busted through more work. Yay work. While waiting for a few things to finish, I also got both of the deposit checks ready for our vacation houses in Michigan. That’s right, we’re going to Michigan again this summer. We can’t wait. This year, Jenny’s family is coming along, too. It should be a blast!
After work stuff was finished, I had to run back down to the fire station to let a member into one of the back rooms. Our Cash Bash fundraiser is coming up on April 11th, and everyone is busy preparing something. In this case, a member needed to retrieve some of the tear-off tickets so that they could be numbered. Fun times. While there, we found an unclaimed “spouse” workshirt. One of them was a little larger than Jenny’s normal size, but I brought it home for her to try. It worked well, so now she’s going to have her own NKFD work shirt. Woot.
After arriving at home again, I jumped at the chance to do more stuff around the house. I generally cleaned-up all kinds of stuff and got started on the spring yard cleaning. There’s still a lot of stuff to do, but it’s at least started. One of the big cleaning deals was getting this old, empty 1950’s-esque radio cabinet off of our porch. It came with the house and was used as hall table for a while, before being pressed into service as a buffet for Christmas Eve 2008. Well, it really didn’t fit anywhere anymore, and it was time for it to move on. Having no sentimental value to us and no real value on the market, we decided to give it to our local Habitat for Humanity ReStore. It was a little too much for me to move off of the porch by myself, though, so I called over our friendly neighbor Bill. He helped me to get it into the back of the truck. We tied it up and will be taking it to the ReStore on Friday morning.
Jenny came home while I was getting ready to move the cabinet. After it was loaded onto the truck, Jenny and I took a walk up to Stellas for dinner. She had the calzone, and I had some wings. Everything was awesome. We walked our left-overs back to the house, and then took a walk around downtown. I stopped at the station again, this time to take out the trash. We continued back home and had a great time. I even managed to sell a few Cash Bash tickets while we were out walking!
Tonight, I got started on the new website for Dryrose Photography. It’s going to be a workflow and job management tool for me on the back-end, and an informational site with links to galleries and images on the front-end. The idea here is to provide a place where potential and existing customers can submit booking requests, and I can have a calendar system that gets updated, invoice reminders, etc. There is actually a service available that does this now, but at $40/month, it is probably more than I want at the moment. If I had a bunch of clients already, it might make sense. I made the decision to build my own, mostly for cost-savings reasons, and also to help me to keep my development skills relevant and updated. I’m excited about this. I’m using Mercurial with BitBucket for version control. I’ve used Mercurial on a few projects in different places, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. It is probably one of the better distributed version control systems that I’ve used. BitBucket is pretty cool, too, because they automatically provide a wiki and bug tracking site, which should help me to keep things organized. I was a git and github user for a while, but I’ve been won-over by mercurial’s more intuitive ways of doing things, so it wins.
Tomorrow is a photo day for me, getting out with my new camera bag and a few gadgets to see how things work. When I get home, I’ll be giving a new Firewire800 CompactFlash reader a spin to see how much of an improvement it is over the USB reader.
It’s been a busy night. I’m going to spend about 15 minutes getting the new camera bag ready with the stuff I’m taking tomorrow. Yay!
