15 September 1997: A Quickie

Monday, 15 September 1997:

A Quickie

No, not that kind of quickie; get your heads out of the gutter! (Yeah, like I should be so lucky!)

I woke up this morning with bad heartburn. Not sure why; I didn't eat anything last night that should cause this reaction so much later. I took some Tums and felt better.

Work seemed to blow by before I even had time to do anything but answer e-mail and put out some minor fires. At least I got to get Tracy, our QA lead, up to speed on the big project I'm working on. It simplifies some very nasty parts of our system, which made her very happy.

After work I went grocery shopping. I felt like I was buying for an ark, since I bought either two or six of almost everything (two toothbrushes, two jars of peanut butter, two loaves of garlic bread, six yogurts, etc. etc.).

For years I've been buying groceries at Woodman's, one of several huge supermarkets in town. They do have the best selection, but they have labor troubles (they tried to break their local union), and they don't accept credit cards. When I decided to start buying nearly everything on credit (since I always pay my bills immediately, and get 1% cash back on purchases) I decided to look elsewhere.

I first tried Cub Foods, but I decided they were a kind of gloomy place to shop (poor lighting) and smelled kind of funny for some reason. So I started going to Copps Food Center, which has the advantage of being a block from where I work. They're pretty nice, all-in-all, but they annoy me in two ways: They only carry Smucker's creamy peanut butter, not chunky, and they carry hardly any lamb at all. Lamb is my favorite meat, so I will definitely find a different source for it (I use it when I cook Indian food, for instance), but it's annoying.

Aren't you enjoying my liberal use of <hr> tags?

This evening I sold my old Macintosh computer to my friends Hope and Karl. Said Mac is a Centris 610, which technically speaking means it's a 25 MHz 68040 with 8 Mb RAM and a 230 Mb disk. Pretty wimpy, but they really want it for their 5-year-old son to play computer games so they can use their PowerMac for other things. With a little more memory it actually should be pretty decent.

I met Hope and Karl through SF3 a year or so ago; they're good folks. They have two kids, and it's been kind of interesting watching them be parents; it cements my feeling that the experience would drive me up the wall.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)