Bowing Out

It's no secret that I have too many hobbies. Today, I realized that I really do have too many, and that I had to drop a couple.

The past couple of years I've been involved in a pair of football pick-em pools, and a football fantasy league. They've been fun, and haven't taken too much effort, but all the deadlines for making picks and such passed today without my ever getting around to making my picks. I've just been too busy and/or preoccupied with my other hobbies that they just fell off the plate.

Since I had a hard time seeing myself getting enthusiastic about them in the foreseeable future (football is, after all, a very distant second to baseball in sports I follow), I decided I need to bail on them for this year. I'm not too happy about it, since I don't like to bail on things in the middle of them, but since it's something I'm just doing for fun, and forcing myself to do it when I don't have the time or energy isn't going to be fun, it's better to cut bait now and move on.

Bought my new scanner today, a Canon LiDE 80, which looks like it should be plenty for my needs (and Consumer Reports likes it, too). It's replacing a 5-year-old UMAX scanner, for which apparently there are no Mac OS X drivers. The LiDE is also smaller and better resolution. Holy cow, scanners and printers are cheap these days (though I guess companies make it up on the ink cartridges for the printers).

I'm always pretty impressed by how busy Apple Retail Stores are when I go there. I have no idea whether they're really bringing new customers to the Mac platform, but I'd like to think that they are.

Deb's back from her trip. They got stuck in horrible, weather-related traffic in Sacramento on the way back, and it took them 7 hours - about twice as long as usual, I understand. Ugh.

I woke up to rain this morning myself. Most of the journallers in the Bay Area wrote "holy shit, it's raining!" entries, since it rarely rains in August or September. However, methinks they should temper their surprise a bit, since we've gotten one rainstorm around this time of year each year I've lived in the area. It's just a question of when the clouds align to make it happen.

In any event, I went out to fold the chair and table on my porch, and Blackjack leapt out as he usually does - right into the rain. After a moment's surprise he decided he didn't really care, though. He was outdoors! And that's all that matters to him.

Talk Like A Pirate Day has been brought to you by the letter ARRR!